Postcard from about 1911
Category Archives: Environment
Where’s the Beef?
Camel Burger Newest “Healthy” Option on Dubai Menu
DUBAI (Reuters), February 2, 2010
A traditional Emirati restaurant in Dubai has added a new entree to its menu billed as a fat-free choice for carnivorous but health-conscious diners: the Camel Burger.
For 20 UAE dirhams ($5.45), the Local House restaurant offers a quarter pound camel burger, loaded with cheese and smothered in burger sauce, the Xpress weekly newspaper reported on Thursday.
Ali Ahmad Esmail, Local House assistant manager, told the paper that the burger patties were fat- and cholesterol-free. But he declined to say how the outlet tenderized the tough camel meat. Continue reading Where’s the Beef?
Plant Diversity in Saudi Arabia
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.
Warren’s Geography #2: Mirage in the Desert
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 …
Warren’s Geography #1
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
Karim Ben Khelifa in Yemen
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
Broken Taboos in Post-Election Iran
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
Darwin, Egyptian Style
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