All posts by tabsir

Bury Me Not on the Lonesome Yemeni Plain

Travel, Yemen

There are not as many travel accounts by Western authors visiting the Middle East as sand particles in the great Arabian desert, but the number is considerable just the same. One of the younger visitors, arriving in the British held port of Aden in 1896, at the age of 22 was G. Wyman Bury, whose intrigues and failed attempt to navigate the so-called “Empty Quarter” left him a broken man and brought him to an early death at age 46. It did not start out that way. Spending a year in Morocco, the young English lad described himself there as a “callous youth just out of his teens dropping in haphazard on a real tribe accompanied by a mission-taught Moor and a large liver-coloured pointer who had more sense than his master.” Continue reading Bury Me Not on the Lonesome Yemeni Plain →

Tableaux Manners Egyptian Style

Egypt, Orientalism

The year was 1875. As reported in The Cosmopolitan (for January, 1898), the governor of New York proposed a fund raiser for the expected visitors in the upcoming American centennial celebrations. New York City’s high society was mobilized under the direction of Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton Cullen, granddauther of Alexander Hamilton and wife of General G. W. Cullen. Mrs. John Jacob Astor and Mrs. Belmont assisted in gathering 230 elite ladies and gentlemen to pose in various tableaux from “The Puritan Family at Prayer” to “Miss Egypt” shown here. Here is a nostalgic tidbit of vintage American Orientalism when the digs in Egypt were still very fresh. But for a nation that had only abolished slavery slightly over a decade before, it is clear that the race to end racism had only just begun. Continue reading Tableaux Manners Egyptian Style →

Islam by the Numbers

Islamic Sciences

[Illustration: An astronomer calculates the position of a star with an armillary sphere and a quadrant in this illustration from a 16th-century Ottoman manuscript, ART ARCHIVE /UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ISTANBUL /DAGLI ORTI]

[Note: The current issue of “ARAMCO World” has a long and well illustrated article on the history of the sciences in the islamic World. This is written by Richard Covington, an author based in Paris.]

Like astronomy, which evolved from the practical necessities of finding the directions and hours for prayers, Islamic mathematics was very much a hands-on affair at the beginning, a product of the marketplace and of the need for pragmatic legal precedents. Both algebra and the use of zero had the same end in mind—streamlining computations for business deals. Al-Khwarizmi had a hand in the development of both.

In his Kitab al-jabr (Book of Algebra)— the word comes from the Arabic word jabara, “to restore”—the Baghdad mathematician spells out his no-nonsense intent: “It’s a summary encompassing the finest and most noble operations for calculations which men may require for inheritances and donations, for shares and judgments, for commerce and all sorts of transactions that they have among them such as surveying tracts of land, digging canals and other aspects and techniques.” Continue reading Islam by the Numbers →

Mocha, Port of Coffee

Food and Drink, Tihama, 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. The following is his rendition of a popular origin tale for the popular brew.]

Any communicative Arab will tell the following story about the early history of Mocha, with more or less modification.

A little over two centuries ago, there dwelt near the beach, enclosed by two sandspits forming the harbor, a worthy fisherman, whose learning, wisdom, and pious observance of all the tenets of the Moslem faith, had collected around his humble hut the dwellings of a band of devoted pupils to be instructed in the religion of their great Arabian legislator and prophet. One day a ship from India, and bound to Jiddah, was driven by adverse winds into the cove, and, while there detained, the crew visited the settlement near the beach, and were entertained by the holy Sheik, who regaled them with coffee, a beverage till then unknown to his guests. The Sheik, learning that the captain was ill on board his vessel, extolled the sanative virtues of coffee, and sent some as a present to the captain, by the returning crew. The prescribed medicine was taken, the captain recovered his health, visited the shore, made confidence with the people, bartered his cargo for coffee and sailed for home, where the worth of the rare and newly discovered product was quickly acknowledged, and successive voyages soon established a lucrative commerce, and thus founded and gave a world wide repute to the city of Mocha and many of the neighboring inland towns. Continue reading Mocha, Port of Coffee →

A Taylor Made Bath in Damascus

Architecture, Orientalism, Syria, Travel

The American man of letters Bayard Taylor (1825-1878) was one of many travelers to the Near East of his time. His tour in 1853 resulted in a travel account above the common lot of Holy Land roller overs. Of particular interest is his frank account of a Turkish bath in Damascus.

“The Bath is the ‘peculiar institution’ of the East. Coffee has become colonized in France and America; the Pipe is a cosmopolite, and his blue, joyous breath congeals under the Arctic Circle, or melts languidly into the soft airs of the Polynesian Isles; but the Bath, that sensuous elysium which cradled the dreams of Plato, and the visions of Zoroaster, and the solemn meditations of Mahomet, is only to be found under an Oriental sky. The naked natives of the Torrid Zone are amphibious; they do not bathe, they live in the water. The European and Anglo-American wash themselves and think they have bathed; they shudder under cold showers and perform laborious antics with coarse towels. As for the Hydropathist, the Genius of the Bath, whose dwelling is in Damascus, would be convulsed with scornful laughter, could he behold that aqueous Diogenes sitting in his tub, or stretched out in his wet wrappings, like a sodden mummy, in a catacomb of blankets and feather beds. As the rose in the East has a rarer perfume than in other lands, so does the Bath bestow a superior purification and impart a more profound enjoyment… Continue reading A Taylor Made Bath in Damascus →

In and Out of Aden

Aden, Archaeology and Antiquities, Books You Should Read, Islamic Economics, Islamic Texts, Rasulids, Travel, Yemen

[The following is an excerpt from a recently published historical analysis of the Yemeni port of Aden in the 13th and 14th centuries by Roxani Margariti (Emory University), who reconstructs port life vividly through archival records in the Cairo Genizeh, relevant Arabic texts and archaeological research. This is a fascinating look at one of the most important medieval ports in the Red Sea/Indian Ocean trading network that ultimately linked Europe with the Far East before Portuguese galleons changed the complex equation of global trade.]

by Roxani Eleni Margariti

In the current era of giant container ships, GPS, and e-commerce, a single vessel can carry forty-eight hundred trailer-sized containers of merchandize from Bremen, Germany, to Elizabeth, New Jersey, in a single voyage. The exact position of a ship is knowable at the push of a button and the blink of any eye, and one can place an order one minute and have confirmation of its receipt in the next. It is therefore difficult to grasp the medieval dimensions of dimensions and time. A respectably sized medieval Arab ship held the equivalent of about two trailer-sized containers. Continue reading In and Out of Aden →

The Wisdom of Chewing Fish Eyes

Humor and Satire

[The following is an excerpt from Gregor von Rezzori’s Tales from Maghrebinia with clever stories about the famous Turkish wit, Nasr al-Din Khoja.]

“Once, so they say, when the poverty in the country became so great that no one gave anything to the wise Hodscha any more, he went to the Gospodor, the king’s representative, and threatened, ‘Sir give me a bag of gold or I shall do what I have never done before.’ The magnaminous Gospodor, at that time a member of the House of Kantakukuruz, was frightened by the threat, and let him have the bag of gold. ‘Verily,’ said the Hodscha, ‘if you had not listened to me, oh administrator of the king’s domain, I would have been compelled to work.’… Continue reading The Wisdom of Chewing Fish Eyes →

An Iraqi Rhapsody

Iraq, Literature, Terrorism Issue

[The following is an excerpt from Sinan Antoon’s recently published translation of his earlier Arabic novel about life in Saddam’s Iraq.]

Two clouds kissed silently in the Baghdad sky. I watched them flee westward, perhaps out of shyness, leaving me alone on the bench beneath the French palm tree (so called because it stood in the courtyard in front of the French department) to wait for Areej. I looked for something worth reading in that morning’s al-Jumhuriyya, and found a good translation of a Neruda poem in the culture section, besieged [beside?] on all sides by doggerel barking praises of the Party and the Revolution. The breeze nudged the palm fronds above my head to applaud. It was April, “the month of fecundity, the birth of the Ba’th and the Leader,” as one of the posters on the college walls announced. Continue reading An Iraqi Rhapsody →