by George El-Hage
I am Beirut
Look at me
DonÂ’t you remember?
I am Beirut
The Jewel of eternity
A boat of emeralds and rubies
A lighthouse built in marble
DonÂ’t you remember?
I am the bride of all cities
Mother of ships and alphabets
And home for those
Who are homeless
DonÂ’’t you remember?
Sole daughter of the East
Sun-colored daughter
Of the brown Levant.
Continue reading Beirut Speaks
Reflections on Fieldwork in Yemen: The Genealogy of a Diary in Response to Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco
by Daniel Martin Varisco
[Anthropologist at rest with cat, al-Ahjur, Yemen, 1978]
[The following excerpt is from an article recently published in Anthropology of the Middle East (Volume 1(2):35-62, 2006).]
Abstract: In preparation for writing an ethnographic monograph on fieldwork in Yemen, I compare and contrast my field diary, written in 1978–9, with Paul Rabinow’s ‘Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco’ (1977). The underlying question is what post-fieldwork reflections reflect meaningfully about the immediacy of ethnographic fieldwork. I criticize the reflexivist trope of privileging ‘writing culture’ over the significance of ‘being there’ in the field. Point by point, I examine the implications of graduate training in anthropology, culture shock, health problems, language skills, the unreflective male voice, visual ethnography and the rhetoric of narrative writing.
Keywords: culture shock, ethnography, fieldwork, reflexivity, Visual Anthropology
Muslim women search the beaches of Sagar Island for coins thrown into the waters of the Ganges by Hindu pilgrims. Heathcliff O’Malley/Telegraph Media Group © 2007
This morning’s news is predictable deja vu: another car bomb explodes in Iraq killing at least 20 people, the Taliban are poppying up again in Afghanistan, children are still starving in Darfur as their mothers get raped, Somalia is summarily consigned to old news since no new soldier bodies have been paraded in the streets. Page two… So much killing, so much religious faith spread around the ever warming globe, and seemingly so little dialogue for God’s children. But here’s a story from where the river bends, the Ganges of India that is, at the last bend it makes into the sea. Here is a river so holy to Hindus that it is viewed as alive, if not life itself, prompting both the devout and the just-following-the-nabob-mob to toss rupees into the polluted current. As Philip Reeves reports for NPR today, this all results in real change (if you dig hard enough in the sand) for a few of the poorest of India’s 150 million plus Muslims.
The news this morning after Christmas is more bad news, especially for the Horn of Africa. As if the Darfur debacle in Sudan is not bad enough, the civil war in Somalia has escalated beyond the borders. Yesterday Ethiopia dispatched a fighter plane to briefly strafe the international airport in Mogadishu. This was not exactly shock-and-awe, but then Mogadishu is not Baghdad and the self-styled “Islamists†in more-or-less control of the capital are not a trained and disciplined army.
The Critics
by Ceyhun Atuf Kansu (1919-78)
They know their English:
The Victorian Age,
Eliot schmeliot
Are complete on their shelves.
They know their French:
From its origins to the present
The grasshopper and the ant
From La Fontaine to our day.
I am not even mentioning
Those who know Italian or German
The erudite scholars
Those who did it the American way.
[Donny George at Iraqi exhibition of pre-Islamic antiquties.]
Muslims Need to be Sensitised to their Own Material Past
By Alastair Northedge, The Art Newspaper, November 2006
At the end of August, The Art Newspaper revealed the stunning news that Donny George, president of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage in Iraq, had been forced to flee the country in fear of his life and take refuge in Damascus. In recent months, Dr George sealed up the treasures of the National Museum in Baghdad behind concrete walls, as it was too dangerous to leave them exposed. He was replaced by a relation of the Minister of Tourism, who comes from the party of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia cleric and leader of the resistance movement. Continue reading Among the Earlier Ruins
[â€Traffic sign in Saudi Arabia. The man-without-a-head symbol indicates a pedestrian sidewalk.â€]
I recently came across a rather plebian junior high school level text on The Middle East: History, Culture, People (by Thomas G. Kavunedos and Harold E. Hammond, Bronxville, New York, Cambridge Book Company, Inc, 1968). The book is quite forgetable, but some of the illustrations bring you to a full stop. My favorite is the illustration above. If indeed this was once the sign for a crosswalk, no wonder everyone seems to drive Mercedes in the kingdom.
Daniel Martin Varisco
This month’s National Geographic Magazine has an extended interview with the Egyptian author (and dentist) Alaa Al Aswany, whose recent Arabic novel, The Yacoubian Building, is a major bestseller.
“Just who is the Arab world listening to? Not only radical sheikhs and militant politicians. The man whose voice has captivated the Arab public is a Cairo dentist by day and a novelist by dawn. Alaa Al Aswany’s novel The Yacoubian Building is a phenomenon—the best-selling novel in the Middle East for two years and the inspiration for the biggest budget movie ever produced in Egypt. The novel paints a poignant and uncompromising picture of life in modern Cairo, as seen through the eyes of a carnival of characters—from the richest and most powerful to the poorest. An outspoken critic of the Mubarak regime and a friendly, self-effacing man, Dr. Al Aswany studied dentistry, and the American way of life, in the U.S. He has a humanist’s love of pondering what makes people do what they do.â€
To read the interview online, click here.