All posts by tabsir

Amish Camels

Animals, camels, Egypt, Food and Drink, Orientalism, Orientalist Art, Orientalist Images

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.

Pythagorus in Egypt

Egypt, Poetry

The Greek mathematician Pythagorus, considered the founder of mathematics, left his home in Samos for Egypt in 535 BCE. A decade later he was captured and taken prisoner to Babylon. In 520 he was able to return to Samos and started a school there and later in southern Italy. While looking over some texts in the megasite archive.org, I came across an oddly titled 1839 book of essays on past “worthies” from the biblical patriarchs to Lord Nelson. A poem on Pythagorus caught my eye…

Muslim Women Hadith Scholars

Books You Should Read, Gender and Sexuality, Islamic Texts, Muhammad, Traditions (hadith literature)

The image of an Islamic scholar engaged in memorization, collection or engagement with the many traditions (hadith, singular) of the Prophet Muhammad is invariably that of a male. After all, one of the most important collections is that of the Persian Muhammad b. Ismail al-Bukhari (d. 870 CE). But over the centuries there have been thousands of Muslim women who studied these traditions. For example, one of these scholars, Zaynab bint al-Kamal, is reported to have taught some 400 hadith works in 13th century Damascus. Many of these women are known, but most have not been recognized outside biographical sources.

Earlier this year Dr. Mohammed Akram Nadwi from the Cambridge Islamic College published a 43-volume work, al-Wafa’ bi-asma’ al-nisa’ (Biographical Dictionary of Women Narrators of Hadith) on over 10,000 female hadith transmitters and scholars. The text is currently in Arabic, but there is an English translation of the first volume available on Amazon.

For a talk in Arabic on Youtube about his book, click here.

More Maps of the Middle East

Uncategorized, Yemen

More and more maps of Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula are appearing in digital resources on the Internet. One of these is the David Rumsey Map Collection, housed at Stanford University. This overall collection with downloadable images in high resolution contains over 150,000 images, including some on Yemen, as well as other parts of the Middle East. The search function is easy to use. The maps are available under the Creative Commons License but not for commercial use.

Below are two closeups of maps that include Yemen.

Coloring Persia

Contemporary Art, Iran, Orientalist Art

In 1928 my mother, who was 6 years old at the time, received a coloring book from a neighbour. It was called “Big Circus Painting and Crayoning Book” and published in Cleveland, Ohio. On most of the pages there was a color image with the same image below it meant to be colored or crayoned in. The image above seems rather distant from the idea of a circus, but other non-circus images are of the military, a grizzly bear and Scotland.

Joseph Osgood in Aden: 2

Aden, Books You Should Read, Travel, Yemen

Joseph Osgood was a Black American sailor who visited the Yemeni port of Aden about a dozen years before the start of the American Civil War. He offers a rich, descriptive account, including information on the coffee cargo that may have brought his ship to this Red Sea port in the first place. You can read the book online here. I attach excerpts on his visit to Aden. This is part 2. For Part 1, click here.

Joseph Osgood in Aden: 1

Aden, Travel, Yemen

Joseph Osgood was a Black American sailor who visited the Yemeni port of Aden about a dozen years before the start of the American Civil War. He offers a rich, descriptive account, including information on the coffee cargo that may have brought his ship to this Red Sea port in the first place. You can read the book online here. I attach excerpts on his visit to Aden.

more to come