Illustration: “Red Anemone,” by Diana Cornelissen
By George N. El-Hage
Columbia University
As the leaves of October,
I scatter myself over your blazing inferno;
Your divine and succulent body
From its forbidden summits
Down to its ravenous depth and fertile valleys.
As a summer cloud bearing spring,
I shower gentle kisses upon your flushed lips
Whose color gives the rose its crimson
Whose benevolent banks are a bed of red anemones. Continue reading You, Beirut and the Children
Illustration: left: “Samson carries gates” by Johann Christoph Weigel, 1695; right, Large mural of Palestinian presidential candidate Mahmoud Abbas in Gaza city, December 26, 2004, Reuters
The fragile and it seems futile political engagement of Fatah and Hamas has run into a veritable brick wall in Gaza, not surprising given all the mud slinging that has been going on. Hamas supporters have stormed what they see as the Bastille of President Mahmoud Abbas and in biblical terms carried away the gates. In reading the news reports today and looking at the pictures, especially the Hamas fighters gloating in Abbas’s former presidential office, it is as the baseball sage said “déjà vu all over again.” With fighting still continuing in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, the agony of Palestinian suffering endures. Of course, this is not the first time that havoc has raged in Gaza. Since so little is held sacred in the “Holy Land,’ we might as well raid scripture and summon up an ancient moral tale that ended with a blind man’s suicide in which the temple walls came tumbling down. Today it is obvious there is no Samson in the heroic sense, and recent events confirm that the the blind still lead the blind, while much of the rest of the world simply turns a blind eye. In such times perhaps the only antidote to unstoppable tears is poetry… Continue reading The Gates of Gaza
Who signed the United Nations Charter in 1945 for Iraq? Before giving the answer, here are a few details from an Iraqi diplomat’s life.
He was born in Baghdad in 1903 when the population of the city was only 140,000. His father, Sheikh Abbas was a shi’a religious leader; his mother the daughter of a famous female mullah from Hilla. The family lived near the Kadhimain mosque, the keeping of which had been entrusted in an Ottoman firman of 1611 to an ancestor of this diplomat. When he was accepted by the Christian American University of Beirut in 1921, it took a fatwa by a local mufti to allow him to go there. In 1929 he received a scholarship to take his Ph.D. in education from Columbia University. The title of his thesis was “The New Iraq: Its Problem of Bedouin Education.†While in America he met Ms. Sarah Powell, who became his wife in 1933. Continue reading An Iraqi Diplomat
Breastmilk and urine: two unlikely bodily fluids to be news fit to print in the New York Times. But an article by Michael Slackman in Tuesday’s edition pours it on, the kind of hook that tabloids feed on, and then it gets milked for less than it is worth. Here is the hook at the front:
First came the breast-feeding fatwa. It declared that the Islamic restriction on unmarried men and women being together could be lifted at work if the woman breast-fed her male colleagues five times, to establish family ties. Then came the urine fatwa. It said that drinking the urine of the Prophet Muhammad was deemed a blessing.
For the past few weeks, the breast-feeding and urine fatwas have proved a source of national embarrassment in Egypt, not least because they were issued by representatives of the highest religious authorities in the land.
The honor of being the greatest writer in Arabic prose, at least in the eyes of numerous Arab literati for the last millennium, belongs to the Iraqi Abu ‘Uthman ‘Amr ibn Bahr al-Jahiz. Born in Basra in 776 C.E., a full millennium before our own nation was founded, Jahiz lived most of his life between the recently founded Baghdad and Samarra. He is the acknowledged master of Arabic adab literature, an eclectic form both entertaining and instructive. The elegance of his writing is matched by the grounding of his reflections on the ordinary and the lowest parts of the social order.
One of his most entertaining works that survives is a satirical look at misers and the nature of avarice. In a culture that idealized hospitality from the poor Bedouin’s goat-hair tent to the sumptuous silk cushions of the sultan’s palace, this is a telling admission that not everyone abides by the social norms. Continue reading Laughter that Lasts 12 Centuries
In the late 1890s a certain Elizabeth Butler, accompanying her British military husband, made one of those Protestant-style visits to Anglican nirvana, the Holy Land made somewhat less holy for her at the time by Ottoman Turkish troops. “The time of year chosen by my husband for our visit was one in which no religious festivals were being celebrated, so that we should be spared the sight of that distressing warring of creeds that one regrets at Jerusalem more than anywhere else,” she notes in the preface to her Letters from the Holy Land. Better to go in the off season, it seems, than face the reality of the individual Palestinian Arabs and Jews cluttering the biblical landscape. Her letters, written to her mother “lay no claim to literary worth,” as she humbly and astutely admits. The chief value of the work is, in her own ranking, her 16 color sketches, mostly pastoral pastiche, with the exception of an anonymous Arab attendant, shown here. Continue reading The Butler Did it in Hebron
In his post-World War II visit to the Kurdish highlands of Iran, Justice William O. Douglas was clearly thrilled by the resilience of his hosts in the face of threatened Soviet dominance. His comments on the Kurds here are worth remembering more than half a century of political change later:
I learned three things from my visit among the Kurds. ‘First’: Kurdish nationalism is in the marrow of these tribesmen – deeper than any creed or dogma. They want a state of their own, one in which they have a degree of self-government. But their basic loyalty is to Persia. There it will remain. They have pride in the tradition that they are Medes. They have pride in their historic role – border patrol. Neither their misery and poverty nor Communist propaganda have altered those articles of their faith. Continue reading Always a Kurd
[Illustration, Guests in Turkey, from John Clark Ridpath, Ridpath’s History of the World (Cincinnati: The Jones Brothers Publishing Company, 1899), vol IV.]
[Note: Arthur John Byng Wavell (1882-1916) was a British soldier and adventurer who traveled in disguise to Mecca in 1908 and went on to Yemen in 1911 to witness fighting between the Zaydi imam’s troops and the Ottoman Turks. This account was originally published in 1912.]
The hour was late and the smoking room almost deserted when the conversation about to be reported took place. My companion the Pasha was a tall, heavy man, on whose sunburned and lined countenance a long life in the open air and many hard-fought campaigns in tropical countries had left their traces. He had been a field marshal once, but that was in the days of Abdul Hamid, when as some one said after the American civil war, “you could not spit out the window without hitting a major-general.” It was to this latter rank that the reshuffle which followed hard on the constitution had reduced him… Continue reading Wavell in Arabia: Face to Face with a Pasha