All posts by tabsir

Playing Games with Iran

Anthropology/Sociology, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Election 2008, Iran, Iraq War, Journalism and Media, Terrorism Issue


Clergymen watched a missile during war games Thursday near Qum, Iran. The exercise was conducted by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Fars News Agency, via Agence France-Presse

by William O. Beeman, Foreign Policy In Focus, July 21, 2008

By now the structure of the U.S. game with Iran is clear. In the first move, the United States and Iran make some small progress toward improved relations. In the counter move, hardliners in the United States and Israel launch attacks against Iran in order to sabotage these improving relations.

In the latest iteration of this game, the U.S. State Department has made an interesting gambit. It announced that Undersecretary of State William Burns would sit at the table on July 20 as members of the European Union entered into talks with Iran over its nuclear program. At the same time, the United States has been reported to be considering opening a formal American Interests Section in Tehran. These two actions will be the first serious public diplomatic activities between the two nations in nearly three decades. (Three earlier meetings in Baghdad between U.S. Iraqi Envoy Ryan Crocker and Iranian Ambassador to Iraq Hassan Kazemi-Qomi focused on security in Iraq). Continue reading Playing Games with Iran →

Animal House in the 15th Century: Part 1

Animals, Books You Should Read, camels, Folklore and Proverbs, Literature

One of the most entertaining Arabic compendia on animal life, taken in the loose sense of the term for things that breathe or are thought to breathe, is the Hayât al-Hayawân (Life of Animals) of the Egyptian savant Kamâl al-Dîn Muhammad ibn Mûsâ al-Damîrî. Writing a century before Columbus discovered America, al-Damiri spins stories about animals with a variety of folklore about uses of animal products and parts. A scientist would no doubt shudder at the magical and literary focus of the text, only occasionally finding description useful today. A partial English translation was made by a British officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Jayakar, and published in two volumes in 1906 and 1908 in India. Unfortunately, this text is virtually inaccessible. I have looked at two copies, one in the New York Public Library and the other at the Library of Congress, and only with trepidation have I turned the fragile pages in this poorly bound volume. So far there is no digital version, which is a shame, since it is a delight to read.

Our author was a prolific copyist, quoting from over 800 other authors and providing a thousand entries, some simply an animal’s name and its more common synonym. Ironically, Jayakar’s Victorian sensitivity makes the translation as much an oddity as the primary work. Continue reading Animal House in the 15th Century: Part 1 →

Brain Drain

Immigration Issues, Islamic Sciences

by Michael Woods

The United Nations Development Program, in a report published last year, described in often painful detail some of the factors that have contributed to the decline of science and the rise of extremism in Arab societies. Among them are:

Increases in average income have been lower in the Arab world than anywhere else for 20 years, except for the poorest African countries. “If such trends continue…it will take the average Arab citizen 140 years to double his or her income, whole other regions are set to achieve that level in a matter of less than 10 years,” the report noted. One in 5 Arabs lives on less than $2 a day.

Arab unemployment is the highest in the developing world.

Surveys show more than half of young Arabs want to leave their countries and live in the United States or other industrialized countries where opportunities are better. Continue reading Brain Drain →

Move Over, You Tube

Film and Video, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Islam: Introduction, Qur'an, YouTube Watch

You Tube boasts one of the largest audiences on the web. There are plenty of videos put up by Muslims and many of these are in languages other than English. On July 11 there were 643,000 hits for the search “Islam” on You Tube. But move over, You Tube, and make room for Islamic tube, which has carefully selected videos on Islamic themes. You can find Quranic recitation, debates, numerous sermons and lectures and some rather raw anti-Zionist (and decidedly anti-Semitic) diatribes. This is a significant resource, but like all websites, should be consulted with caution.

Divided We Stand

Gender and Sexuality, Iran, Literature

Divided We Stand: A Woman’s Word about the Iranian-American Experience

by Dagmar Riedel

Gertrude Stein is alleged to have advised young Ernest Hemingway that he’d better stick to writing postcards if he had messages for his readers. It is understandable that Iranian-Americans want to reach American-American audiences with their stories about men and women with legs astride in two different cultures. But who is authorized to question a novel with a message, if its content is certified by the author’s traditional upbringing in Iran before the Islamic Revolution?

The fourth novel of Nahid Rachlin, Jumping over Fire (City Lights Books, 2005; cf. www nahidrachlin.com), has an intriguing black cover. Above the title a pair of blue eyes are staring intently at the viewer through the eye slit of a head scarf, while the bottom half merges a floral Arabesque with the yellow-red flames of a Nowruz bonfire. The title’s reference to the Nowruz purification ritual of jumping over fire is explained in the course of the novel. But on the cover the Zoroastrian tradition is presented as a variant of Western stereotypes of both the Oriental harem and Shia fanaticism because the collage promises a peek in the otherwise hidden world of a secluded Iranian woman and her burning desires. The reader has just to turn to the back cover to receive from Andre Dubus III, the son of the famous short-story author Andre Dubus, the confirmation that this is indeed a novel about a forbidden desire. The interpretation is further reinforced by the one-page biographical sketch in the back, written in the third person singular and designed to highlight in an objective language the author’s lifelong personal experience with displacement and gender-based social restrictions. Continue reading Divided We Stand →

Not your Daily Bread

Afghanistan, Food and Drink, Iran, Orientalism, Photography


Baking bread in Seyistan on the Afghan Border

[It is hard to find a society in the Middle East without a thriving history of bread preparation. Before the modern loaf and bleached flour assaulted our tastebuds, a variety of flat breads were baked, either in clay overs or other makeshift ovens. Here is a description of both Afghan and Turcoman bread making from a century ago, as reported by Ellsworth Huntington in the National Geographic Magazine in 1909. Webshaykh.]

The method of cooking it was very different from that employed in the oases, where ovens of mud shaped like beehives, with a hole in the top, are heated with a fire of weeds, and the dough is stuck against the inside of the hot oven, where it hangs until it is so far cooked that it falls down into the ashes. The bread of the Afghan caravan was cooked by heating small, round cobblestones in the fire and then poking them out and wrapping dough an inch thick about them. The balls thus formed were again thrown into the fire to be poked out again when cooked. The bread tasted well there in the desert, although in civilized communities the grit and ashes would have seemed unendurable. Continue reading Not your Daily Bread →

A Timely Lesson from Ibn Yaqzan

Ethics, Islam: Introduction, Sufism

[In a recent and provocatively stimulating book. Bill Chittick examines the relevance of centuries of intellectual pursuit of Islamic cosmology for Muslims in the modern world. This is a fascinating book that is worth reading by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. It is a welcome relief from the constant drumbeat of Islam and politics. Order a copy today… Webshaykh.]

by William C. Chittick

It is commonly imagined that if our ancestors could be brought from the past in a time machine, they would be amazed and dumbfounded by the feats of modern science and civilization. But how would a Muslim intellectual of the past react to the modern world, and in particular to its intellectual ambiance? What would an al-Farabi, or an Avicenna, or a Mulla Sadra think of contemporary science and scholarship?

For the purpose of this experiment, I will borrow the name of our time-traveler from the famous philosophical novel of Ibn Tufayl, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, “Alive, son of Awake.” The name refers to the soul that has been reborn by actualizing the intellect. I will simply call him Ibn Yaqzan.

No doubt Ibn Yaqzan would be astonished by the ready availability of an enormous amount of information. However, he would be much more astonished by the fact that people have no idea that all this information is irrelevant to the goals of human life. He would see that people’s understanding of their true situation has decreased roughly in proportion to the amount of information they have gathered. The more “facts” they know, the less they grasp the significance of the facts and the nature of their own selves and the world around them. Continue reading A Timely Lesson from Ibn Yaqzan →