All posts by dvarisco

Wavell in Mecca: On Javan Muslims

Indonesia, Islamic Rituals, Saudi Arabia


[Note: Arthur John Byng Wavell (1882-1916) was a British soldier and adventurer who traveled in disguise to Mecca in 1908 and went on to Yemen in 1911 to witness fighting between the Zaydi imam’s troops and the Ottoman Turks. This account was originally published in 1912.]

Among all the pilgrims of different races daily pouring in [to Mecca on the hajj], I was most struck by the Javanese. In appearance and manners they seem not unlike the Japanese. They have the same acquisitive and imitative temperament, are intensely curious regarding everything new to them, and quick to adopt any fresh idea that may seem to them an improvement on what has gone before. In this they stand in strong contrast to the Arabs, and in fact to most Eastern peoples, whose extreme conservatism is what really hinders their progress. But while the Japanese have seemingly agreed to take England as their model, the Javanese endeavor to turn themselves into Arabs. The first thing they do on arriving is to attire themselves in the local costume – which, by the way, does not suit them at all. I am told that there are so many people wearing Arab dress in Java that a stranger might fancy himself in the Hedjaz. Continue reading Wavell in Mecca: On Javan Muslims →

The Gates of Gaza

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Bible and Holy Land, Palestine, Poetry


Illustration: left: “Samson carries gates” by Johann Christoph Weigel, 1695; right, Large mural of Palestinian presidential candidate Mahmoud Abbas in Gaza city, December 26, 2004, Reuters

The fragile and it seems futile political engagement of Fatah and Hamas has run into a veritable brick wall in Gaza, not surprising given all the mud slinging that has been going on. Hamas supporters have stormed what they see as the Bastille of President Mahmoud Abbas and in biblical terms carried away the gates. In reading the news reports today and looking at the pictures, especially the Hamas fighters gloating in Abbas’s former presidential office, it is as the baseball sage said “déjà vu all over again.” With fighting still continuing in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, the agony of Palestinian suffering endures. Of course, this is not the first time that havoc has raged in Gaza. Since so little is held sacred in the “Holy Land,’ we might as well raid scripture and summon up an ancient moral tale that ended with a blind man’s suicide in which the temple walls came tumbling down. Today it is obvious there is no Samson in the heroic sense, and recent events confirm that the the blind still lead the blind, while much of the rest of the world simply turns a blind eye. In such times perhaps the only antidote to unstoppable tears is poetry… Continue reading The Gates of Gaza →

An Iraqi Diplomat

Iraq

Who signed the United Nations Charter in 1945 for Iraq? Before giving the answer, here are a few details from an Iraqi diplomat’s life.

He was born in Baghdad in 1903 when the population of the city was only 140,000. His father, Sheikh Abbas was a shi’a religious leader; his mother the daughter of a famous female mullah from Hilla. The family lived near the Kadhimain mosque, the keeping of which had been entrusted in an Ottoman firman of 1611 to an ancestor of this diplomat. When he was accepted by the Christian American University of Beirut in 1921, it took a fatwa by a local mufti to allow him to go there. In 1929 he received a scholarship to take his Ph.D. in education from Columbia University. The title of his thesis was “The New Iraq: Its Problem of Bedouin Education.” While in America he met Ms. Sarah Powell, who became his wife in 1933. Continue reading An Iraqi Diplomat →

Fat Chance Fatwas

Egypt, Islam and Christianity, Islamic Law, Journalism and Media

Breastmilk and urine: two unlikely bodily fluids to be news fit to print in the New York Times. But an article by Michael Slackman in Tuesday’s edition pours it on, the kind of hook that tabloids feed on, and then it gets milked for less than it is worth. Here is the hook at the front:

First came the breast-feeding fatwa. It declared that the Islamic restriction on unmarried men and women being together could be lifted at work if the woman breast-fed her male colleagues five times, to establish family ties. Then came the urine fatwa. It said that drinking the urine of the Prophet Muhammad was deemed a blessing.

For the past few weeks, the breast-feeding and urine fatwas have proved a source of national embarrassment in Egypt, not least because they were issued by representatives of the highest religious authorities in the land.

Continue reading Fat Chance Fatwas →

The Butler Did it in Hebron

Bible and Holy Land, Orientalist Art, Palestine, Travel

In the late 1890s a certain Elizabeth Butler, accompanying her British military husband, made one of those Protestant-style visits to Anglican nirvana, the Holy Land made somewhat less holy for her at the time by Ottoman Turkish troops. “The time of year chosen by my husband for our visit was one in which no religious festivals were being celebrated, so that we should be spared the sight of that distressing warring of creeds that one regrets at Jerusalem more than anywhere else,” she notes in the preface to her Letters from the Holy Land. Better to go in the off season, it seems, than face the reality of the individual Palestinian Arabs and Jews cluttering the biblical landscape. Her letters, written to her mother “lay no claim to literary worth,” as she humbly and astutely admits. The chief value of the work is, in her own ranking, her 16 color sketches, mostly pastoral pastiche, with the exception of an anonymous Arab attendant, shown here. Continue reading The Butler Did it in Hebron →

Wavell in Arabia: Face to Face with a Pasha

Travel, Yemen


[Illustration, Guests in Turkey, from John Clark Ridpath, Ridpath’s History of the World (Cincinnati: The Jones Brothers Publishing Company, 1899), vol IV.]

[Note: Arthur John Byng Wavell (1882-1916) was a British soldier and adventurer who traveled in disguise to Mecca in 1908 and went on to Yemen in 1911 to witness fighting between the Zaydi imam’s troops and the Ottoman Turks. This account was originally published in 1912.]

The hour was late and the smoking room almost deserted when the conversation about to be reported took place. My companion the Pasha was a tall, heavy man, on whose sunburned and lined countenance a long life in the open air and many hard-fought campaigns in tropical countries had left their traces. He had been a field marshal once, but that was in the days of Abdul Hamid, when as some one said after the American civil war, “you could not spit out the window without hitting a major-general.” It was to this latter rank that the reshuffle which followed hard on the constitution had reduced him… Continue reading Wavell in Arabia: Face to Face with a Pasha →

Six Biblical Days of War

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Bible and Holy Land, Israel, Palestine

Quick, here’s a trivia question. How long did it take God to create the world, according to the book of Genesis? Six days, of course. If you miss this one, you may have been brought up in the backwaters of the Amazon, although it would not be the fault of Christian missionary translators who have tried to undo God’s rash Babeling of tongues to get the Bible into every known tongue. But what’s a day? Before the scientific revolution sealed by Darwin, the ordinary 24-hour variety day posed few problems for the devout. Once it seemed that the world must be older than Bishop Ussher’s supposed official date of 9 AM on October 23, 4004 BC, seeds of doubt grew into Enlightenment-nurtured forests. But is nothing sacred? it turns out that poor Bishop Ussher never ordained that God slept in late on Day One; the distinction of 9 AM goes to a certain Dr. John Lightfoot. But there’s still the problem of how to define a day, especially in a creation scenario in which the creation of light precedes the sun, moon and stars. Theologians in retreat (as distinguished from those who remained, and still do so, in denial) resorted to a semantic salvation of the scriptural record, arguing that with God a day is the same as a thousand years.

Tomorrow, June 5, is the 40th anniversary of a modern event on Holy Land soil of biblical proportions: the Six-Day War of 1967 in which Israel expanded its borders, took total control of Jerusalem and embroiled the region in the plight of the Palestinians. It only took six days for the overmatched armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria to be effectively eliminated and since that war there has been little doubt that Israel as Zionist-revived David to a disorganized Arab Goliath lies only in myth. Only six days, but how long is a day? Continue reading Six Biblical Days of War →

The Forbidden Fruit of the Iraq War

Ethics, Gender and Sexuality, Iraq War, Syria

War is mainly a man’s game. Men like Osama Bin Laden send men like Muhammad Atta to bomb a New York building. Men like George Bush and Tony Blair react like, well like men, and take it out on men like Mullah Omar and Saddam Hussein by sending young men to dodge bullets and iuds in a real video-game scenario. Men like Nouri al-Maliki are purple-fingered into a Green Zone political club so that mostly men can wear uniforms or hide bombs in order to kill other men, as well as women and children. Even a pacifist like Jesus predicted no end to war and rumors of war.

Everyone, not just men, suffers in the manly game of war. But while some men think it honorable to kill others, the burden of war probably hits women harder than anyone else. Suicide bombs are as likely to tear apart female bodies as male bodies, as able to cut short the life of a child as trump the survival of the elderly. In Iraq we see the blood smears that mark death and hear the mourning that haunts the grieving of the left behind. But beyond the battlefield and the car-blown open markets the exercise of war bears more fruit, one that harks back to the forbidden fruit in the innocence of Eden. Continue reading The Forbidden Fruit of the Iraq War →