All posts by tabsir

Poetry out of Arabia

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Folklore and Proverbs, Languages, Literature, Poetry, Saudi Arabia

[Webshaykh’s note: Dr. Saad Sowayan, as the post below will explain, has been collecting, analyzing and documenting the oral poetic traditions of the Arabian Peninsula, especially his native Saudi Arabia, since his graduate research. He has now completed two major works, available for reading on the internet, but still in search of an appropriate publisher. I invite readers to look over his impressive documentation and analysis and communicate with Dr. Sowayan any ideas that may help forward his project.]

by Dr. Saad Sowayan, King Saud University

After 10 years of continuous hard work, I managed to finish the two books, which, taking the size and importance of each, I consider to be my lifetime projects.
A) Legends & Oral Historical Narrative from Northern Arabia (1131 pages)
B) The Arabian Desert: Its Poetry & Culture Across the Ages: An Anthropological Approach (820 pages).

The first work, as its title says, is a collection of Bedouin narratives and poems relating to tribal genealogies, camel marks, tribal territories, water wells, sheikhs, warriors, tribal judges, tribal poets, personal histories, as well as narratives relating to raids and counter raids amongst tribes and other events. All of these are told by competent narrators & reciters in the various tribal dialects and all go back to pre and early 20th century. I have been engaged in taping this voluminous material during the span of the 4 years extending from 1982 up to 1985. Since 1995 I have been engaged in archiving, indexing, transcribing and editing this taped material which came to a total of several hundred hours of recorded interviews. Legends & Oral Historical Narratives from Northern Arabia (1131 pages) is the result of this effort very carefully transcribed and edited in Arabic script with full voweling tashkeel. The work comes with a very detailed table of contents and an introduction explaining the nature of the material along with some linguistic remarks and explanation of the transcription method I used. All in all, the work is a primary source on Arabian nomadic tribal culture, oral literature and vernacular language. This work constitutes a compliment to the works of P. Marcel Kurpershoek published in English by Brill in Leiden. Continue reading Poetry out of Arabia →

Broken Taboos in Post-Election Iran

Anthropology/Sociology, Environment, Ethics, Gender and Sexuality, Iran, Journalism and Media, Shi'a

by Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Middle East Report Online, December 17, 2009

The on-camera martyrdom of Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year old philosophy student shot dead during the protests after the fraudulent presidential election in Iran in June, caught the imagination of the world. But the post-election crackdown has two other victims whose fates better capture the radical shift in the country’s political culture. One victim was the protester Taraneh Mousavi, detained, reportedly raped and murdered in prison, and her body burned and discarded. The other is Majid Tavakoli, the student leader arrested on December 8, after a fiery speech denouncing dictatorship during the demonstrations on National Student Day.

Following his arrest, pro-government news agencies claimed Tavakoli had been caught trying to escape dressed as a woman and published a series of photographs showing him wearing a headscarf and chador — a common version of the “modest” garb (hejab) mandated for women by the Islamic Republic. Attempts at flight in such gender-bending disguises are a classic trope in Iranian political history. The best-known instance was when the first president of the Islamic Republic, Abol-Hasan Bani-Sadr, after his deposition in 1981, allegedly fled the country in women’s dress — the Fars News Agency put a photo of him in a scarf next to that of Tavakoli. But in pre-revolutionary Iran clerics, too, such as Ayatollah Bayat, are said to have evaded the Shah’s authorities by concealing themselves beneath chadors, which pro-government media outlets now choose to ignore. Continue reading Broken Taboos in Post-Election Iran →

Mr. Peabody and Sherman Rewrite Middle East Policy

Film and Video, Iran, Iraq, Iraq War, Terrorism Issue, YouTube Watch

For those of us who grew up on the Rocky and Bullwinkle show, Mr. Peabody and his not-so-bright sidekick Sherman taught us the “real” story behind history. Mr Peabody has long since retired and I suspect Sherman is still working on his B.A. somewhere, but a new episode has appeared that explains how we got into the mess in Iraq. If, as Napoleon is credited with saying, history is a pack of lies agreed upon, one might as well agree with this as with the multiple official versions.

Check it out on Youtube.

Burn those Scofield Bibles, baby

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Bible and Holy Land, Palestine


Cyrus Ingerson Scofield, 1843-1921

[Webshaykh’s Note: As someone who grew up on the Scofield Bible, I offer this critique from the peanut gallery.]

Zionism’s un-Christian Bible
Scofield Bible made uncompromising Zionists out of tens of millions of Americans.
By Maidhc O. Cathail, Middle East Online, November 25, 2009

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions for Palestine campaign should widen its scope to target non-Israeli companies who contribute significantly to the oppression of Palestinians. As part of this broader strategy, priority should be given to one of the most egregious offenders, the prestigious British publisher, Oxford University Press. As unlikely as it may seem, the world’s largest university press is responsible for one of the greatest obstacles to justice for Palestinians – The Scofield Bible.

Since it was first published in 1909, the Scofield Reference Bible has made uncompromising Zionists out of tens of millions of Americans. When John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel, said that “50 million evangelical bible-believing Christians unite with five million American Jews standing together on behalf of Israel,” it was the Scofield Bible that he was talking about.

Although the Scofield Reference Bible contains the text of the King James Authorized Version, it is not the traditional Protestant bible but Cyrus I. Scofield’s annotated commentary that is the problem. More than any other factor, it is Scofield’s notes that induced generations of American evangelicals to believe that God demands their uncritical support for the modern State of Israel. Continue reading Burn those Scofield Bibles, baby →

Lane at your fingertips

Languages, Scholars, Teaching Resources


The Arabist Edward Lane

No Arabist library, for an English speaker, is complete without Edward Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon, despite the fact it was never finished. There are several reprints out there, but now the original is available to read online. If you want to look up a word, go to http://www.tyndalearchive.com/TABS/Lane/. The text is in pdf but can be searched by root, although the server is somewhat slow to respond.

For an interesting article on the travels of Edward Lane, check out the Saudi Aramco World article.

Richard Antoun, 1932-2009

Anthropology/Sociology, Scholars


Richard Antoun

Last Friday, like many of my fellow anthropologists, I was attending the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia. I was excited to be back in Philly, where I went through the graduate program in anthropology in the 1970s. At a session on Saturday I heard the alarming news that emeritus Prof. Richard Antoun had been killed the day before. Following on the continual newsworthy but ethically unworthy chain of killings in the media spotlight, this was all the more a shock since it involved someone whose work I knew and whom I had met at previous professional meetings.

Details are emerging about who did it, but the “why” is no doubt locked away in the mind of the graduate student who committed the crime. I attach information from a memorial presented on EphBlog:

Student Held in Killing of New York Professor

A 46-year-old Binghamton University graduate student from Saudi Arabia was charged on Saturday with killing a retired anthropology professor, a specialist in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, with whom he had worked, the authorities said. Continue reading Richard Antoun, 1932-2009 →

Talal Asad on Anthropological Inquiry

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Conferences and Talks, Scholars

[Note: In preparing for my role to respond to presentations on the work of Talal Asad and the Anthropology of Islam at AAR recently, I reread portions of the edited volume Powers of the Secular Modern (edited by David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, Stanford University Press, 2006, pp. 206-207). In doing so I found a valuable excerpt at the start of Asad’s specific responses to the essays int he volume. Given the interest at the AAR meeting in anthropological and ethnographic approaches to Islam, I think Asad’s general comments below on the role of anthropology are relevant and worth perusing.]

The only point I want to stress at the outset is that for me anthropology is a continuous exploration of received ideas about the way given modes of life hang together. More precisely: What is included or excluded in the concepts that help to organize our collective lives? How? Why? With what probable consequences for behavior and experience? Such an inquiry requires that one be ready to break out of the coercive constraints of Sociological Truth — the axiom that the social is the ground of being. The results, however provisional, can be uncomfortable, and they may sometimes point to politically incorrect conclusions. What we eventually do with them is another matter, because we are not abstract intellectuals. All of us live in particular forms of life that constantly demand decisions and that in general presuppose a variety of commitments. And we all have particular memories, fears, and hopes. Continue reading Talal Asad on Anthropological Inquiry →