In 1917 the British government issued a handbook on Yemen with details on the geography. local tribes and important individuals. It is especially useful for discussion of travel routes in Yemen at the start of the last century. This is a treasure trove of information now available for viewing or download at the Qatar Digital Library (QDL). I attach examples of the information.
Yesterday there was an extravaganza parade in Cairo parading the embalmed remains of 22 ancient Egyptian pharaohs to their new “eternal” resting place in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization. You can and should watch the entire show, which you can do here. It featured a major musical composition of Mahleresque length, at times rivaling the soundtrack of Star Wars, but with a lot of drumming to match the pace of the parade. The parade included Egyptian women, shown above, and men dressed in “pharaonic” costume (with a Hollywoodish make-over), men in chariots and coffinesque vehicles carrying the pharaohs and their consorts. On the screen in the auditorium for the elite guests of President el-Sisi, there were scenes of several monuments and dance routines that might best be called an Orient Side Story. You can read all about it here.
The star of the show was the modern day would-be Ramses, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who was front and center before the staged event. He sat like a stoic behind a Covid mask for well over an hour; then as the caravan of his ancestral rulers neared the new museum, there is a scene of several minutes as he walks through the corridors, a smile on his face, to greet the mummies. The reason for spending a large amount of government funds on such a show is obvious: Egypt is desperate to revive the tourism industry. The choreographed show happened at night, with what appear to be few spectators, but the real audience was for those abroad. As one of the speakers said, the heritage of Egypt is the heritage of the entire world.
Presenting Egypt to the world of potential tourists is at the same time sending a message that Egypt is not a dangerous Islamic haven for terrorists, certainly not for the Muslim Brothers after el-Sisi took power. The heritage celebrated in the show was not Islamic, although the theme of ancient Egyptian faith and justice harmonizes with the positive view of Islam the tourism industry must push. The orchestra looked like any classical music orchestra in the world. The close-ups of the players showed most women performers without hijab, as was also the case for the main singers on stage. The only dress visible in the show was what would be seen as modern Western attire, elaborate stage dresses for the singers and supposedly ancient Egyptian costume.
I enjoyed the pomp and pop-cultured kitsch, and the music was enthusiastic in the best way. It was indeed a celebration of Egypt, with an echo of the extravaganza of 1912, when the opera Aida was performed at the foot of the Pyramid of Cheops. I do not know of a recording from that performance, but here is Caruso’s rendition of “Celeste Aida” from 1908. I have no idea how many people watched that performance, but I suspect it was the better-off beys and not the peasant farmers. By the way, Verdi’s Aida was was commissioned by the Khedivial Opera House in Cairo and had its premiere on 24 December 1871.
The idea of the ruler overseeing a parade is a remake of ancient Egyptian rituals, where it was important to renew the divinity of the ruler, a historic note that perhaps made el-Sisi smile in the corridor. After all, wouldn’t all Egyptian peasants have adored their pharaoh, so happy to spend years lugging stone after stone to erect a monstrous resting place for their master? It’s a wonder why the Hebrews didn’t stay and keep making mudbricks instead of almost drowning in the Red Sea and ending up in the desert for 40 years…
Autocrats, no matter whether they are benevolent or not, love nationalistic parades. In 1971 the Shah of Iran celebrated the founding of the Achaemened by Cyrus the Great 2,500 years earlier. The Soviet Union and China love their military parades and Donald Trump tried to pull one off for Washington DC off when he was in power.
As someone who grew up wanting to be a Biblical Archaeologist and who started a graduate career planning to be a Near Eastern archaeologist, I have long been under the spell of the ancient Egyptians. My visit to the Cheops Pyramid when it was still possible to shimmy up the narrow passage to an empty tomb room and my walk around the ruins of Luxor left memories that continue to this day. If you have not seen these wonders, you should plan to visit Egypt at some point. But Egypt also hosts incredible monuments and historical objects from the Islamic era, especially the early Mamluk period. The entire history of Egypt is worthy of a parade, but only as long as we remember that poverty is still endemic in the country, the ills that led to the Arab Spring have not disappeared, and democracy has taken a back seat.
My friend Karim Ben Khelifa, an award-winning photographic journalist who I met over a decade ago, has produced an extraordinary film (“The Enemy”) on his experience as a photographer of war and violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo and El Salvador, as well as 80 countries overall. On Youtube there is a talk he gave in 2019 about his work. including a number of his photographs. His amazing skill as a photographer is matched by his passion to show the reality of treating other human beings as enemies.
Karim has also taken photographs in Yemen over a decade ago. Some of these are archived on the New York Times blog. One of my favorites is the image of the mammoth mosque built in Sanaa by the late President Ali Abdullah Salih.
My friend, the historian G. Rex Smith, has co-edited a translation of the travel narrative of Pierre Loti, who visited the Middle East in 1900.
One of the most famous Arab navigators is the Omani Ahmad b. Majid, who flourished in the latter half of the 15th century. If you google his name on Youtube you will find a variety of videos, cartoons and films. Above is a brief sample.
Check out this report in The Guardian on what may be the oldest site for producing beer in the world. Of course it was discovered by archaeologists…
I recently finished reading a fascinating and well-informed account of the role of female Kurdish fighters during the last decade in the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS) in northeastern Syria. This is The Daughters of Kobani by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon. Based on interviews with many individuals involved in the fighting, especially several of the major fighters, a powerful story is woven in a narrative that I find riveting at times. The fighters she describes are genuine heroines, young girls who rose to the occasion. Many of them gave their lives, others were tortured and abused when captured. There is a sub-story here as well, the realization of the horror unleashed by ISIS, including the many Western recruits for whom rape and murder were seen as a right. For Kurds, Yezidis and anyone who did not succumb to the terror-laden evil of ISIS, this was hell on earth.
The history of the region now known as the Middle East and previously styled the Biblical World or the Orient has seen the destruction of many people from the earliest recorded history. Those who believe in the stories of Adam and Eve will remember that Cain, one of the first couple’s two first-born sons killed Abel, his brother. As the story goes, the dispute was over religion because Cain was jealous that God preferred the animal sacrifice of Abel the herder rather than his own vegetable sacrifice as a farmer. But reading behind even these poetic lines the real issue here is about the shedding of blood. The rest of the Bible, Old and New Testaments, is a bloody book with God killing off the whole earth and even its animals with a flood, with the Children of Israel ordered by God to kill Canaanites without mercy, with Assyrians, Babylonians and Romans adding to the overall death toll.
When Islam superceded Judaism and Christianity in much of the region, the killing did not stop because human nature did not change. In truth the many reasons why humans kill each other are only superficially about religion, which is simply used as a justification. On a group level we call the desire to exterminate another group of people “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide.” Beyond this is the attempt to destroy a people’s culture and language. As White Americans flooded into the American West, the natives were either killed, put in reservations or forced to “assimilate” by conversion to Christianity and the White Man’s (and White Women’s as well) ways. The colonial expansion worldwide was almost always one resulting in cultural genocide. When Ataturk rebuilt the idea of Turkey as a modern state out of the ruined Ottoman hopes of World War I, the variety of ethnic groups in this state were redefined as “ethnic Turks.”
One of the longest lasting ethnic groups, saved from extinction in large part because of the highland enclave most have lived in, is the Kurds. Spread out geographically between modern Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, all of these states have marginalized, persecuted and at times indiscriminately killed members of their Kurdish population. But the Kurds have survived, most recently establishing a quasi-homeland in northern Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein. To the extent that Kurdish issues make the world news, most recent discussion has been about the Kurdish fighters, who with outside support were able to wrest control of parts of northeastern Syria that had been overrun by the Islamic State (ISIS) less than a decade ago.
Among the Kurdish fighters were a number of women who took up arms and learned the manly art of war firsthand. This has been widely covered in the media, in part because of the common stereotype that women in the region are stay-at-home pawns of a region-wide patriarchal system that denies them rights. Admittedly, the number of women who are in the military or a local militia throughout the region are few, but when push comes to shove the Kurdish case shows that women are, and indeed have been (as can be seen below), fully capable of fighting for a just cause.
The unanswerable question after reading this book is what the future holds not only for Kurdish women, but for young girls and women throughout the region. The burden of sexism is a worldwide phenomenon that has gained more attention as the world becomes more globalized. Attention, however, demands action beyond the passing of laws that are not followed and ideals that are not approved. Due to this burden it is often forgotten that talking about women’s rights should also involve taking about human rights. Women are not a separate species, nor can achievement of equality ever be achieved without men realizing and advocating for that equality. Nor is the idea of equality the sterile notion of “sameness” any more than cultures having to all be the same. For Kurdish women the future is not just about their rights as women, but what it means to freely live as Kurds. The daughters of Kobani have opened a door; it is up to the sons of Kobani not to close it but keep it open for all.
The image above, a drawing from the 1850s, epitomizes how the camel has been imagined for everyone in America, the West and just about everywhere outside the area where camels were important domestic animals. A turbaned man astride a galloping camel: Orientalism has ruled the day. And when Westerners visited the Middle East, riding a camel became a touristic must-do, as in the image below:
Camels (the one-humped kind) do exist outside the Middle East, including the Old West of the United States and Australia. But take a look at the next picture of two warning signs. One is from Qatar, where camels sometimes cross a rural road, and the other is from the Amish country in Ohio. The Amish are a group who came to America to escape persecution in Europe and maintain an old lifestyle without electricity or automobiles. I used to visit the Amish parts of central Ohio when I was a child and it was always a game to see who could spot the first Amish buggy. So, I would have been quite shocked to see a camel warning in Ohio.
But today it may be necessary, since the Amish are now raising camels for milk, an idea sparked by a Saudi that led to a company, Desert Farms, being formed in 2015. The prices are a bit out of reach at $18 for 16 ounces of fresh camel milk or $72 for 200 grams of powdered camel milk. But as the site exclaims, camel milk is halal and even if not really kosher, it can be at times.
So if you can afford it or find it (and good luck at that), drink up.
