Adenium from Saudi Arabia
While preparing a talk for a conference in October on camels, I came across a very useful website maintained by Professor Jacob Thomas of the Herbarium in the Department of Botany & Microbiology at King Saud University in Riyadh. This is Plant Diversity in Saudi Arabia, with sections on topography, vegetation, flora, the history of botanical studies, conservation, and a major bibliography. There is also a checklist of species recorded.
In a previous post I discussed two lithographs from the 1873 edition of Warren’s geography. One of the more fascinating illustrations is one explaining the desert mirage. Here is the discussion and image from the text.
to be continued …
An Elementary Treatise on Physical Geography at the start of the civil war. While rummaging through old books and pictures of my late grandmother I found a copy of the 1873 edition of Warrens’ basic geography text which belonged to my great, great aunt, Ida Hoyt. There are several interesting lithographs in the text on Middle Eastern themes, which I show here.
Continue reading Warren’s Geography #1
The newly built presidential mosque, which cost an estimated $60 million; photography by Karim Ben Khelifa
Much of the reporting on recent events in Yemen is pathetic. A rare exception is the work of photojournalist Karim Ben Khelifa, who is currently on assignment in Yemen. Thus far he has posted two sets of photographs, one on the Wall Street Journal, and the other for the New York Times. Check out these websites for superb photographs, two of which I reprint here with the permission of the photographer.
Qât market in Sanaa, Yemen; photography by Karim Ben Khelifa
by Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Middle East Report Online, December 17, 2009
The on-camera martyrdom of Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year old philosophy student shot dead during the protests after the fraudulent presidential election in Iran in June, caught the imagination of the world. But the post-election crackdown has two other victims whose fates better capture the radical shift in the country’s political culture. One victim was the protester Taraneh Mousavi, detained, reportedly raped and murdered in prison, and her body burned and discarded. The other is Majid Tavakoli, the student leader arrested on December 8, after a fiery speech denouncing dictatorship during the demonstrations on National Student Day.
Following his arrest, pro-government news agencies claimed Tavakoli had been caught trying to escape dressed as a woman and published a series of photographs showing him wearing a headscarf and chador — a common version of the “modest†garb (hejab) mandated for women by the Islamic Republic. Attempts at flight in such gender-bending disguises are a classic trope in Iranian political history. The best-known instance was when the first president of the Islamic Republic, Abol-Hasan Bani-Sadr, after his deposition in 1981, allegedly fled the country in women’s dress — the Fars News Agency put a photo of him in a scarf next to that of Tavakoli. But in pre-revolutionary Iran clerics, too, such as Ayatollah Bayat, are said to have evaded the Shah’s authorities by concealing themselves beneath chadors, which pro-government media outlets now choose to ignore. Continue reading Broken Taboos in Post-Election Iran
MEMO FROM ALEXANDRIA
Harnessing Darwin to Push an Ancient Intellectual Center to Evolve
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN, The New York Times, November 26, 2009
ALEXANDRIA, Egypt — It is not that Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution are unknown here. But even among those who profess to know something about the subject, the common understanding is that Darwin said man came from monkeys.
Darwin, of course, did not say man came from monkeys. He said the two share a common ancestor. But to discuss Darwin anywhere is not just to explore the origin of man. It is inevitably to engage in a debate between religion and science. That is why, 150 years after Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,†the British Council, the cultural arm of the British government, decided to hold an international conference on Darwin in this conservative, Sunni Muslim nation.
It was a first.
“A lot of people say his theories are wrong, or go against religion,†said Martin Davidson, chief executive of the British Council. “His ideas provoke, but if we are going to understand each other, we have to discuss things that divide us.†Continue reading Darwin, Egyptian Style
Selling qât in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital. Photo: Bryan Denton
These days if you run across an article on Yemen, it will no doubt feature a scenario of gun-toting tribesmen swearing allegiance to Al-Qaeda, the latest German tourist hijackings or feigned shock at the terrible, terrible addictive drug called qât. At least this was the case in Sunday’s New York Times in another piece of mixed journalistic pablum by roving reporter Robert Worth. Entitling the article “Thirsty Plant Dries Out Yemen,”, the author seems unaware that the site of his posting (Jahiliya) is in fact the Arabic term for the time of “Ignorance” before the rise of Islam. I doubt this reporter stepped out of a Queen-of-Sheba-era time machine and interviewed Abraha about his recent defeat at the “Battle of the Elephant” before Mecca. So where exactly is the fabled posting site of Jahiliya? Ironically, it is part of a World Bank irrigation project. I will leave the irony about IMF money being poured into Jahiliya in the strict sense to the imagination of the reader. And I strongly suspect the posting was made from a fancy hotel in the capital Sanaa and not from a rural internet cafe, while sipping qishr. But for a front page article on a major newspaper, ignorance is no excuse. Continue reading Ignorance is no Excuse
Here is an old photograph entitled “Donkey Man with Trick Monkey,” taken in Aden during the days of the British protectorate. It is not just any kind of “monkey,” of course. Sitting on the donkey is Papio hamadryas, the baboon, usually called rubâh in Yemen. It appears, in deference to the British colonial presence, that the monk is wearing britches.