All posts by tabsir

Who Owns the Holy Land?

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Bible and Holy Land, Books You Should Read, Ethics, Humor and Satire, Israel, Palestine, Travel

As another year draws to a close, it is hard not to think in larger terms of the course of the last century. The world has seen two world wars and far too many atrocities to think of our technological and commercially driven age as golden. But in it all there has been humor. The American writer Mark Twain was a humorist with political insight. His greatest books belong to the century before, from the mother of all Holy Land travelogues, Innocents Abroad, to Huckleberry Finn and his adventurous friend Tom Sawyer. Surely one of the greatest humorists ever, Mark Twain did more than tell funny stories. His work survives in part because it uses humor to remind us of the unfairness and unwavering mundaneness of life.

In Tom Sawyer Abroad Twain offers a vivid critique of the kind of Orientalism that Edward Said rightly views as a style for dominating the Orient. Tom is not the ugly American abroad but the naive traveler finding out that the world has problems beyond flooding of the Mississippi. One of the more poignant passages goes straight to the core of the contemporary political crisis over Palestine. Who owns the Holy Land? The dialogue, as is often the case in Twain’s homespun rendering, speaks for itself:

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Loti on Palestine

Bible and Holy Land, Books You Should Read, Lebanon, Orientalism, Palestine, Photography, Syria, Travel

First English translation of ‘La Galilée’, an account of Pierre Loti’s travels in the Holy Land from Jerusalem to Beirut, via Damascus and many other interesting places, in 1894.  

Pierre Loti (1850-1923) was born Louis-Marie-Julien Viaud into a Protestant family in Rochefort in Saintonge, South-West France (now Charente Maritime). He was an officer of the French Navy and a prolific author of considerable note in 19th-/early-20th-century France, publishing many novels and numerous accounts of his travels around the world. He was a member of the French Academy. Apart from his literary talents, Loti was a pioneer photographer and this translation of his journey from Jerusalem to Beirut in 1894 is greatly enhanced by the reproduction of some of the photographs he took at the time.  

Volume includes 12 historic photos taken by Pierre Loti and 1 map.

For details. click here:

With Pierre Loti in Persia

Animals, Archaeology and Antiquities, Architecture, Books You Should Read, camels, Iran, Literature, Music and Dance, Orientalism, Photography, Plants, Shi'a, Travel

My friend, the historian G. Rex Smith, has recently translated into English a marvelous travel diary by the French military official and traveller Pierre Loti (1850-1923). It is also available on Amazon as a Kindle Book. This day-by-day diary details Loti’s trip along the caravan trail of 1900 from the coast at Bushire to Shiraz and his ultimate goal of Isfahan in order to visit the area during the season of roses. One might expect such an account to be dry, but Loti comments on what he saw, including the people, along the way and one gets a first-hand sense of what it was like to travel a treacherous route that was at times over pure desert and at other times up or down seemingly impenetrable mountain heights. There is also a brief account of his stop at Muscat on the way to Persia. Smith, with the aid of his son, has done an admirable job in reflecting the flavor of the original French and includes 24 photographs taken by Loti. This is a book well worth reading, whether you are interested in Persia at the time or not.

The original French version is available as a pdf here. Archive.org has quite a few of his works.

For information about Loti online, check out https://biography.yourdictionary.com/pierre-loti and https://museeprotestant.org/en/notice/pierre-loti-1850-1923-2/.