Category Archives: Animals

A Swede and a camel in Yemen

"Arab Spring", Animals, camels, Photography, Travel, Yemen


by Iona Craig, The National, January 9, 2012

A Swedish adventurer crossing Yemen by camel hopes his journey will encourage tourists to see beyond the political turmoil and violence that has engulfed the country for nearly a year.

Mikael Strandberg set out on December 7 on a 380-kilometre trek across the treacherous highlands, the first leg of his Yemen venture, to disprove the purveyors of pessimism.

“I don’t know what they [the tourists] are waiting for … it is such a wonderful country with great potential,” he said, after arriving in Sanaa after a two-week march through the toughest terrain in the Arabian Peninsula.
Along with two Yemeni companions, Mr Strandberg is in the initial phase of a journey that will cross the country from the western coastal plains of Hodeida to the edge of the world’s largest sand desert, the Rub’ Al Khali, or Empty Quarter, and beyond to Oman.

The explorer, 48, who fell in love with both the country and his wife Pamela, an American, during a visit to
Yemen three years ago, holds fond memories of Sanaa and the Yemeni people.

“We decided to go and try to make a difference and give a different perspective from the one portrayed by the media,” said Mr Strandberg. Continue reading A Swede and a camel in Yemen →

South Arabia and the Berber Imaginary

Algeria, Animals, Anthropology/Sociology, Languages, Libya, Yemen


Mahri camels at the International Festival of the Sahara in Douz, Tunisia,
December 24, 2012. Photo by Sam Liebhaber.

by Sam Liebhaber

One of the long-standing myths of Berber ancestry places their origins in Yemen from whence they were dispatched to North Africa in the service of ancient Ḥimyarite kings. Although this chapter in the mythological prehistory of the Arab world can be refuted on the grounds that the Berber are indisputably indigenous to North Africa, the offhand dismissal of the South Arabian-Berber imaginary overlooks an important sociolinguistic kinship between the Berber of North Africa and one of the last indigenous linguistic communities of the Arabian Peninsula: the Mahra of Yemen and Oman.

A number of socio-cultural parallels distinguish the Berber and Mahra from the other minority language communities of the Middle East. For one, the Mahra and Berber are members of the Islamic ʾummah, unlike many of the other minority language communities of the Arab world where linguistic boundaries are frequently coterminous with religious divisions. Further, the Berber and the Mahra did not inherit a written tradition that includes religious and literary texts. As a consequence, the Mahri and Berber languages are frequently consigned to the category of “lahja,” an Arabic term that signifies any non-prestigious, vernacular idiom that lacks of historical or social value.

Without their own written history or affiliation to a prestigious, non-Arab civilization, the Mahra and Berber are more easily “willed” into historical narratives of “Arabness” (ʿurūba) than the other language minority communities of the Arab world. This motif is the mainstay of modern Arabic scholarship on Berber and Mahri genealogical and language origins. A sample of a few recent titles demonstrates this point: The Berber: Ancient Arabs (al-Barbar: ʿArab qudāmā, al-ʿArbāwī, Tunis: 2000), The Arabness of the Berber: The Hidden Truth (ʿUrūbat al-Barbar: al-Ḥaqīqa al-Maghmūra, Mādūn, Damascus: 1992), Comprehension of Arabic and the Secret of the Mahri Language (Fiqh al-ʿArabiyya wa-sirr al-lugha al-mahriyya, al-Ways, Sana’a: 2004) and Ancient Arabic and its Dialects (ie, Mahri, al-ʿArabiyya al-qadīma wa-lahajātuhā, Mārīkh, Abu Dhabi: 2000).

Even if contemporary scholarship on Mahri and Berber origins is problematic, it is conceivable that historical intersections between the Berber and the Mahra gave medieval Arab historians a justifiable basis to propose their common ancestry. Continue reading South Arabia and the Berber Imaginary →

Falconry and Chicanery

Animals, Folklore and Proverbs, Qatar


The hunting trip is a time when falconers night spend up to six weeks away from their homes, families and business in the desert. These days the trip need no longer be frugal and it is possible to provide every comfort.

So writes the Qatari veterinarian Faris al-Timimi in his 1987 book Falcons & Falconry in Qatar (Doha: Ali bin Ali Press). I met Dr. al-Timimi in 1988, when I was conducting research in Qatar on the seasonal almanac knowledge of the Gulf. He showed me some of his prized falcons and explained the long established practice of hunting with falcons in Qatar. At that time a superb falcon might be worth $30,000, so I can only imagine what a prize falcon would sell for in today’s commercially enhanced Qatar. Unlike many other sports, where the animals are domesticated and, in Darwinian terms, bred for the task, the best hunting birds are said to be those captured young in the wild. Those that are captured and kept for a future hunting season are those who excel at catching the bustard (Chlamydotis undulata), known in Arabic as the houbara.

There is a rich literature on Arab falconry,known as bayzara in Arabic. In his 10th century bibliographic survey of Arabic books, Ibn al-Nadīm listed ten books on the subject, in addition to the numerous references that would have been found in other kinds of texts. Today both texts and videos are only a click away in cyberspace, including sites devoted specifically to falcon hunting in Qatar. Al-Jazeera recently posted a photographic montage on the most recent hunting expeditions in Qatar. In addition to the use of falcons, followed by high-speed cars rather than racing camels, there is the use of hunting dogs. While the trajectory of a falcon on its prey is purely natural, the sport of hunting dogs has reached a true dog-days syndrome, as an contraption-bound gazelle along a mechanical path substitutes for the open range, the host of SUVs spurting up dust. I do not doubt that Abbasid princes or Mamluk sultans would have adopted the same vehicular superiority, if they had known it, but there is something pitiful about an animal trapped in a mechanical game that does not give the prey a sporting chance.

For a set of extraordinary pictures by photographer Matthew Cassel on falcon hunting in Qatar al-Jazeera, click here.

Daniel Martin Varisco

Cool as a Camel

Animals, camels, Photography, Yemen

How the camel kept its cool: Dromedary in the desert finds shade under rare tree that does the job of a parasol

By Chris Parsons, Daily Mail, January 4. 2012

When the temperature soars around the sweltering 40C mark, you’ll take anywhere as respite from the scorching rays no matter how unusual it looks.

This camel sought refuge in the baking heat on the Island of Soqotra in Yemen by sheltering in the shade under an unusual tree which looks like a giant mushroom. Continue reading Cool as a Camel →

A Madventure in Yemen

Animals, Film and Video, Food and Drink, Humor and Satire, Orientalism, Terrorism Issue, Travel, YouTube Watch


Take two rather weird Finns, a camera and a mountain of jocularity. The result is one of the stranger travelogues you will ever encounter: Madventures YEMEN. This film was made shortly after the attack on the U.S. Embassy in 2008. The two travelers are hardly experts on Yemen and much of what they say (about tribes and geography, for example) should be taken with a grain (at times a pillar worthy of Lot’s wife) of salt. But I love this film, once you get by the Ali-G-ness of the two f-ing (a word they use to the hilt) Finns. First, the cinematography is fantastic and you hear from a number of Yemenis, who often make far more sense than their guests. Second, it does not treat qat as a drug and the Yemenis come across as anything but the “terrorists” portrayed in the media. Indeed, at one point, the traveler Rika notes that despite the number of weapons in Yemen it probably has less crime than the country you are watching the film from.

Check it out and enjoy…

There are three parts to the film available on Youtube: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Picturing Aden a Century Ago

Aden, Animals, Orientalism, Photography, Travel, Yemen


“Water carts used at Aden to bring water from the wells to the city.”

In a previous post I published a chapter from the 1911 book Zigzag Journeys in the Camel Country by Samuel and Amy Zwemer. The book has several photographs of Aden and the surrounding area, which are well worth a look a century later.


“The Big Camel market in the crater at Aden where we preached our first sermon in 1891.”

Continue reading Picturing Aden a Century Ago →

Tabsir Redux: A Sailor and his Camel Ride

Animals, camels, Travel


[Illustration: Arabian Camel from George Shaw, Zoology (1801)]

[Tabsir Redux is a reposting of earlier posts on the blog, since memories are fickle and some things deserve a second viewing.]

[Joseph Osgood was a Black American sailor who visited the Yemeni port of Mocha about a dozen years before the start of the American Civil War. He offers a rich, descriptive account of his visit to the Yemeni coast, including a sailor’s view of the ship of the desert.]

No wheel carriages are used here, the most general mode of transportation being by camels, for which the males along are serviceable. The flesh of the camel forms a staple article of food, the head and neck being excepted, because one of the race unwittingly rendered these parts unholy by obtrusively poking his head and neck into Mahomet’s tomb. Wellsted says that a camel is welcomed at its birth, by the Arab, with “another child is born unto us.” Continue reading Tabsir Redux: A Sailor and his Camel Ride →