Category Archives: Countries

كنّا ابتدأنا

Ethics, Gender and Sexuality, Lebanon, Poetry


Lebanese House by J. Matar

Poem by George El-Hage

كنّا ابتدأنا

عادتْ لنا الرؤيا وأبكانا اللقاءْ
طفلان لا يشفيهما غير البكاءْ

عادت لنا الأيامُ مزهرةً
ما همّنا الحسّادُ إنْ حسدوا.. سواء

فأبكي.. ولا تخشَي.. على كتفي
أشتاقُ أن تبكي على كتفي سماء

ما أروعَ اللحظاتِ تجمعنا
طيران عن أشواقنا ضاق الفضاء

هذي يدي ذوبي براحتها
عطراً ولوناً بعض بهجته الضياء

وتساقطي سحباً على عطشي
السيف تواقٌ إلى لون الدماء

يا ديمتي يا الآه من وتري
يا البالَ مرسوما بأنفاس الصفاء

إني لأشعر إذ أضاجعكِ
أني أضاجع كل أجناس النساء

أشياؤك الكانت تراودني
ظلّت وعوداً دونها غصص اشتهاء
Continue reading كنّا ابتدأنا →

Thought Police: What were they thinking?

CyberOrient, Ethics, Islamic Law, Qur'an, Saudi Arabia, Wahhabi


Celebrating Saudi Arabia’s National Day

In case you missed it, September 23 was Saudi Arabia’s National Day, the oil-driven nation’s 4th of July. Not surprisingly many people, proud of their country, took to the streets to celebrate. But what is good for the state is not necessarily seen as good for the faith, especially in the conservative Wahhabi/Salafi variety that weds tribal origin with a dogmatic theology. The tension between a strict form of Islamic practice and the diversity that instills cultural practices has always been a problem, perhaps even more so with the wealth economy that the current generation of Saudi youth has grown up in. In 1927 King Abdul Aziz established the Committee for Promotion of Virtue and The Prevention of Vice. In short this is known as the “religious police.” For those less familiar with Islamic doctrine, this relates back to the classic Quranic principle of al-amr bi- al-maÊ¿ruf wa-al-nahy Ê¿an al-munkar, generally translated as commanding right and and forbidding wrong. There is a long history about the use of this penchant phrase, analyzed in detail by Michael Cook in his Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2010), a work of over 700 pages.

Abdullah Hamidaddin has written an interesting commentary on a recent tragedy on the Saudi National Day in which a car of religious police chased a vehicle that apparently was thought to contain two drunken men. In the chase the car careened off the road, killing the driver and his brother. The religious police fled the scene, but the chase was captured on a cell phone video. When the video was posted to social media, there was an outcry to rein in the zealous religious police. In this case it turned out the men had not been drinking.

What were these “thought police” thinking? I say “thought” rather than “religious” police, because the very nature of the committee leads to a kind of witchcraft mentality. Continue reading Thought Police: What were they thinking? →

Moroccan Photography Museum

Architecture, Gender and Sexuality, Morocco, Photography


اما المراكشي داود ولد سيد، المتأثر بالمصورين هنري كارتييه بريسو وروبرت فرانك وريتشارد افيدون، فقد تخصص بتصوير الرحلات المنفردة التي قام بها في ارجاء المغرب. في هذه الصورة، ينقل رجل جهاز تلفاز في الرباط.

The Arabic BBC website has presented several photographs for a proposed Moroccan Photography Museum in Marrakesh. Here are two of the photographs.


حسن حجاج الذي ولد في المغرب عام 1961 غادر بلاده الى لندن في سن مبكرة. تجمع اعمال حجاج العناصر المرئية لفن تصوير الازياء المعاصر مع فن البوب.

The Boon in Yemen’s Bun

Coffee, Food and Drink, Gender and Sexuality, Qat (Catha edulis), Yemen


Men smoke shisha water pipes in a cafe in Sanaa, Oct. 1, 2011. (photo by REUTERS/Ahmed Jadallah)

Yemen’s Modern Coffee Shops: Progressive, Yet Exclusive
by Farea al-Muslimi, Al-Monitor, September 5 2013

SANAA, Yemen — Over the past few decades, Yemen has been known to conjure images of serious conservatism, isolation between men and women and male dominance over issues pertaining to daily life.

However, things look different here: A group of boys, girls, men and women are having discussions in modern coffee shops, which have become popular in the past 10 years and have significantly become more common across Sanaa in the past few years, including the historical part of the old city. The coffee shops, however, are more concentrated in the southwest of the city, where the richest and most open neighborhood, al-Siyasi Hadda, is located. They have become posh meeting spots for the privileged classes that can afford it.

There are coffee shops with foreign names that largely resemble any coffee shop in Amman, Cairo or Beirut, but the difference here is that the stone buildings are more elegant and posh.

Waitresses — hailing from Ethiopia and East Asia, alongside a few Yemenis — wear uniforms and serve you with a gentle smile that you cannot find elsewhere in the city. In fact, you usually cannot so much as look at a woman’s body, even if she were covered from head to toe. One can typically see little more than the standard black abaya, or a niqab for the more conservative.

You can order hot or cold beverages and Western snacks, the names of which are unknown to many people. Moreover, you can spot the most modern and cleanest coffee shops if you do not smoke shisha [sweetened tobacco smoked with a water pipe]. Some coffee shops offer it for high prices, while others do not find it suitable to be served in their establishment. Continue reading The Boon in Yemen’s Bun →

T. S. Eliot’s Influence Upon Salah Abdel-Sabour, #3

Egypt, Languages, Literature, Poetry


Abdel Sabour

By George Nicolas El-Hage, Ph.D.

[For Part 1 of this essay, click here. For Part 2, click here.]

7. Sabour’s Departure from Traditional Arabic Poetry

Up until now, I tried to demonstrate Eliot’s influence on Abdel Sabour’s poetry, especially with regard to his themes and techniques. Because of the vast gulf that separates the two poets culturally, spiritually, and educationally, it seems a vain effort to look for absolute similarities. On the other hand, it is easier for the critic with an adequate knowledge of the traditional models of Arabic poetry to notice that Sabour’s modern poetry departed almost completely from the classical tradition.

Prior to his exposure to the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Sabour wrote traditional poetry using the classical meters. After reading Eliot, the Egyptian poet adopted new themes, techniques, and structures. He no longer used traditional meters with the long, heavy lines, built on two hemistiches and rhyming with each other throughout the poem. This new type of poetry was able to come into existence and flourish after a long struggle led by contemporary poets like Abdel Sabour. (19)

Starting in the late 1950s, the experience of writing in free verse became a familiar occurrence. In the poetry of Sabour, not only the mood, style, use of myth and illusion, and the interior monologue resemble Eliot’s, but “we have a sense of aimlessness and isolation, of memory and futility, it is definitely the mood of The Wasteland and the Hollow Men.” (20) Moreover, there are clear-cut images in Sabour’s poetry which demonstrate Eliot’s great influence on the Arab poet’s attitude toward life and death. Sabour also makes use of Eliot’s theme of alienation and of his description of empty rooms. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, Eliot says:
“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes.
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes.”

Sabour says, echoing Eliot in his “My Peerless Star”:

“Fingers of an eastern wind
Rub the window-panes.” Continue reading T. S. Eliot’s Influence Upon Salah Abdel-Sabour, #3 →

T. S. Eliot’s Influence Upon Salah Abdel-Sabour, #2

Egypt, Languages, Literature, Poetry


T. S. Eliot

By George Nicolas El-Hage, Ph.D.

[For Part 1 of this essay, click here.]

4. A Brief Summary of Eliot’s Background

T.S. Eliot, the Anglo-American poet, was born in 1888 in Saint Louis, Missouri. He studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford. Despite the fact that Eliot was brought up in a conservative Christian atmosphere, he exposed himself later to a completely different culture when he went to live in England. It is obvious that the political and spiritual world in which Eliot lived bestowed upon him its own distinguishing characteristics.

Eliot was lucky in his education. Harvard offered him a thorough introduction to Dante and to Romance literature. Since his earlier poetry, Eliot was influenced by Dante. Dante held a central position in Europe and linked the Roman past with the modern age. In Dante, Eliot found the spiritual identity of Europe. This allowed him to try to make Europe more conscious of itself. Eliot also allowed the French culture to influence him. Originally an American without the inherited English rigidity, he accepted the characteristics of the French civilization. His views of criticism were those of Remy de Gourmont’s school, and Charles Maurras influenced him politically.

Although it is always possible to argue that Eliot is, after all, an American, no one can deny that his exposure to different cultures gave him a unique political and literary background. Of course, it was his genius and talent which contributed most to the production of his great works of poetry and criticism.

5. A Brief Summary of Salah Abdel Sabour’s Background

Salah Abdel Sabour was not only a major poet, but also the literary editor of a wide spread newspaper, Al-Ahram. He was born in 1931 in the provincial district of Zaqaziq, Egypt, in a conservative Islamic house. When he was twenty, he graduated from Cairo University with a degree in Arabic Language and Literature. Continue reading T. S. Eliot’s Influence Upon Salah Abdel-Sabour, #2 →