Monthly Archives: December 2007

Twain on the New Year

Humor and Satire, Literature

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Mark Twain did not say that, but consider his greeting from the 19th to the 20th century, published in the New York Herald on December 30, 1900:

I bring you the stately nation named Christendom, returning, bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking glass.

Muhammad the Profit: Commerce, Play, and Entertainment in the Neoliberal Imperium

Animals, Danish Cartoon Controversy, Islamophobia, Muhammad, Sudan

Following a link on the website www.korans.com can take you to the website www.teddybearmuhammad.com, which hawks the cute and cuddly namesake of Islam’s prophet. As the site explains, the bear commemorates the Sudanese government recently accusing 54-year old British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons of blasphemy for “allowing” her class of 7-year old students at Khartoum’s Unity High School to choose what some considered the wrong name for the class stuffed animal. (The children named the bear after a popular classmate, not directly for the Prophet). The incident provided Sudanese politicians with an opportunity for local pandering, geopolitical bluster and a demonstration of sovereignty in reaction to international condemnation of the genocide in Darfur.

Cultural sensitivities about divine names and images are real, even when in particular instances they are feigned, exaggerated, or used as weapons in military or political conflicts. This reality is what gives their manipulation its potential power, although it also lays such manipulations open to exposure, derision, and failure. Continue reading Muhammad the Profit: Commerce, Play, and Entertainment in the Neoliberal Imperium →

Who Owns the Holy Land?

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Bible and Holy Land, Humor and Satire, Literature, Palestine

As another year draws to a close, it is hard not to think in larger terms of the course of the last century. The world has seen two world wars and far too many atrocities since 1908 to think of our technological and commercially driven age as golden. But in it all there has been humor. Believe it or not, the American writer Mark Twain was still alive one hundred years ago. His greatest books belong to the century before, from the mother of all Holy Land travelogues, Innocents Abroad, to Huckleberry Finn and his adventurous friend Tom Sawyer. Surely one of the greatest humorists ever, Mark Twain did more than tell funny stories. His work survives in part because it uses humor to remind us of the unfairness and unwavering mundaneness of life.

In Tom Sawyer Abroad Twain offers a vivid critique of the kind of Orientalism that Edward Said rightly views as a style for dominating the Orient. Continue reading Who Owns the Holy Land? →

Inscribing The Body

Art, Egypt


1. John MacIntyre Tattooing in Los Angeles

Inscribing The Body: Tattoos in Traditional and Modern Cultures

by el-Sayed el-Aswad
University of Bahrain

From ancient Egyptian culture, whence comes early evidence of tattooing, to contemporary art, the body has been employed as a living canvas for inscriptions and designs such as those of tattoos embodying symbols, icons, archetypes and mythological or folkloric themes. Tattoos, especially those consisting of lines and dots, have been found on preserved mummies, including that of Amunet, a priestess of the goddess Hathor at Thebes dating back to the XI Dynasty, 2000 B.C.E. Although amulets are widely used for protective, magical and ascetic purposes (and were predominantly used in ancient Egypt), they are replaceable or not permanent. Notions related to authenticity, ethnicity, gender, identity, sanctity, fertility, femininity, masculinity, class, and aestheticism, to mention a few, are inscribed permanently in various forms on the body.

Though tattooing is prohibited in Islam, because it is viewed as a factor in mutilating, maiming or altering the body’s physical features, local or traditional practices are still existent among the folk in various Muslim societies. Continue reading Inscribing The Body →

The Seller of Sweet Words

Books You Should Read, Egypt, Literature

[Note: The most notable, at least in the Nobel laureate sense, Arab writer of literature is the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, who passed away in 2006 . Among his many novels, several of which are available in English translation by Doubleday Press, is the classic “Midaq Alley”, written more than six decades ago, but still a vibrant testament to the universality of human foibles in a literary mirror. Below is one of my favorite character descriptions in the novel. If you have not yet read “Midaq Alley”, then do so as soon as you can, and taste the sweet words (even in translation) for yourself.]

Many things combine to show that Midaq Alley is one of the gems of times gone by and that it once shone forth like a flashing star in the history of Cairo. Which Cairo do I mean? That of the Fatimids, the Mamlukes, or the Sultans? Only God and the archaeologists know the answer to that, but in any case, the alley is certainly an ancient relic and a precious one. How could it be otherwise with its stone-paved surface leading directly to the historic Sanadiqiyya Street. And then there is its café known as Kirsha’s. Its walls decorated with multicolored arabesques, now crumbling, give off strong odors from the medicines of olden times, smells which have now become the spices and folk cures of today and tomorrow…

Although Midaq Alley lives in almost complete isolation from all surrounding activity, it clamors with a distinctive and personal life of its own. Fundamentally, and basically, its roots connect with life as a whole and yet, at the same time, it retains a number of the secrets of a world now past. Continue reading The Seller of Sweet Words →

While in the Other Manger …

Bible and Holy Land, Food and Drink, Islam and Christianity, Orientalism


Date Stick Cradle, from Zwemer’s book.

Christmas Eve is the time for reflecting on a baby in a manger in Bethlehem, three kings bringing spices and shepherds blinded by angel light. Christians around the world celebrate this scene, but what do they think of all those other babies who were not destined to become religious icons? Back in 1902 the Christian missionary Samuel Zwemer and his wife Amy teamed up to write a children’s book about Topsy-Turvy Land. For more information on this apologetic diatribe against Islam and Arabs, click here. As the authors claim, “In Topsy-turvy Land all the habits and customs are exactly opposite to those in America or England.” And where is this mythical garden of play for good Christian children? Arabia, specifically an Arabia in which the Ottoman Empire still had steam. For a good-old-boy, old-fashioned religion view of the “Arab” child as a topsy-turvy other, this is as prime a piece of apologetic and Orientalist dismissal as you can find. So take a look in the other manger, as the evangelistic Zwemers did a mere century ago…

ARAB BABIES AND THEIR MOTHERS

An Arab baby is such a funny little creature! In Christian lands babies, as soon as possible, are given a warm bath and dressed with comfortable clothing. But in Arabia the babies are not washed for many days, only rubbed over with a brown powder and their tiny eyelids painted round with collyrium. They are wound up in a piece of calico and tied up with a string, just like a package of sugar. Continue reading While in the Other Manger … →

The Kaaba’s New Kiswah

Architecture, Art, Islamic Rituals, Saudi Arabia, YouTube Watch


[Note: For a Youtube documentary on the Saudi Kiswah Factory, click here.]

By Manal Homeidan, Asharq Alawsat, December 17, 2007

Jeddah, Asharq Al-Awsat – Following their departure from Mecca, millions of pilgrims have started to make their way to Mount Arafat. Coinciding with this unchanged ritual is the tradition of changing of the Kaaba’s ‘kiswah’, the cloth that adorns the Kaaba made of black silk and embroidered with gold calligraphy.

This event is customarily attended by the gate-keepers of the Kaaba and technicians from the Kiswah Factory, which has been manufacturing the fabric that adorns the Kaaba for the past six decades. These technicians employ a special mobile escalator so as to remove the old cloth and cover it with the new kiswah, one day before the first day of Eid ul-Adha. Continue reading The Kaaba’s New Kiswah →