A Quiet Revolution in Algeria?

Algeria, Gender and Sexuality


[left to right: Djamila Bourhiredf; Women waiting for bus at University of Algiers, photo by Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times; scene from “The Battle of Algiers”; “Algerian Women in Their Apartments” by Eugene Delacroix, 1834

One of the lead articles in yesterday’s New York Times was titled “A Quiet Revolution in Algeria: Gains by Women” by Michael Slackman. Revolutions, no matter where they erupt, tend to be noisy, even when they are not successful. The French stormed the Bastille; America had its Boston Tea Party; the Russians knocked off the Czar and his family. The Algerian Revolution, which took eight years from 1954-1962, claimed an estimated one to one-and-a-half million lives, not to mention the French military casualties of some 18,000. In the past decade or so more than 100,000 Algerians have died as a direct result of partisan extremist religious fighting. So if Algeria is now having a quiet revolution, where did all the noise go? Continue reading A Quiet Revolution in Algeria? →

Book of Curiosities

Art, Islamic Sciences, Islamic Texts, Maps

The Bodleian Library in collaboration with The Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, announces the electronic publication of The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes, a newly discovered medieval Arabic treatise on the depiction of the Heavens and the Earth. The treatise is one of the most important recent finds in the history of Islamic cartography in particular, and for the history of pre-modern cartography in general. The publication of the treatise is mounted on a dedicated website employing a new method for publishing medieval maps. Continue reading Book of Curiosities →

Lebanese Hymns of Love and War

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Lebanon, Poetry

By George N. El-Hage

1-
Thirty years of prosperity, patriotism, harmony and florescence, ruined in one year, it is true that destroying is easier than building, but it is also true that a year in which the masks fell and the buffoons stepped from their disguises into the shadows, was more real to them and to us than the thirty years they masked themselves in falsehood, hypocrisy and exploitation.

2 –
There were those who sold Lebanon and lost their families, their children and their villages. Then the strangers spit in their faces and cursed them. Their shekels were plundered, the price of treason. Do not ask those of their honor and patriotism. How can they give you what they do not possess?

3 –
The youth of Lebanon who abandoned their books and embraced rifles, know that they will triumph, because those who know how to live life, know how to live death and resurrection. Continue reading Lebanese Hymns of Love and War →

The Reach of War

Iraq War, Photography


[Photograph by Michael Kamber for the New York Times.]

While the news media feed on the battle between congressional democrats and the Bush administration over the war budget, the war continues day by day with no congressionally prodded end in sight. The war in Iraq also dominates the field of political play for the next presidential election, with Bill Richardson declaring his candidancy yesterday and in no uncertain terms blasting the current war policy. But in all of this the war does not really reach us. Yet it is possible to reach out and feel some of the pain of the war. In today’s online New York Times, Michael Kamber, a photographer, provides a slide show of an attack on an army unit in which an American soldier was killed. I suggest you ignore the talking heads of politicians today and see for yourself the agony of loss on a battlefield with no visible enemy. Don’t wait to see the name in the paper; absorb the context that took a life needlessly to satiate the ideological appetite of the current lame duck (pun intended) administration.

Daniel Martin Varisco

Bury Me Not on the Lonesome Yemeni Plain

Travel, Yemen

There are not as many travel accounts by Western authors visiting the Middle East as sand particles in the great Arabian desert, but the number is considerable just the same. One of the younger visitors, arriving in the British held port of Aden in 1896, at the age of 22 was G. Wyman Bury, whose intrigues and failed attempt to navigate the so-called “Empty Quarter” left him a broken man and brought him to an early death at age 46. It did not start out that way. Spending a year in Morocco, the young English lad described himself there as a “callous youth just out of his teens dropping in haphazard on a real tribe accompanied by a mission-taught Moor and a large liver-coloured pointer who had more sense than his master.” Continue reading Bury Me Not on the Lonesome Yemeni Plain →

A Voice in the Wilderness that is Gaza

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Journalism and Media, Palestine, Terrorism Issue


[Illustration: Khalil Yaziji found two bodies outside his shop, al-Jazeera.]

So what is today’s top story of violence in the Middle East? Take your pick: the Lebanese army vs. Fatah al-Islam in the camps of Tripoli, a Taliban-ignited bomb exploding in a market and killing civilians in Afghanistan, an assassination attempt on the mayor of Mogadishu, six U.S. soldiers and an interpretor killed in Diwaniya in southern Iraq, more deaths in Gaza. Reading the news (I almost made the anachronistic slip of “picking up” a newspaper) today is a time warp back to the revelationary isle John of Patmos and his prophetic vials of plagues. I am not referring to an incendiary end of the world scenario spun by the late Jerry Falwell (may he rest in Baptist solitude), but the continuing hell on earth. If you think this is about religion (or democracy), think again. Remove the politics (and American involvement or influence) from each of the stories above and the religion is reduced to a drizzle.

So here is my pick of the day, one from the little guy. Al-Jazeera, which has the resources and access that Western journalists can only dream about, published a piece by reporter Laila Haddad, who interviewed a variety of ordinary Palestinians living through the nightmare of Gaza these days. It is worthwhile looking at the violence from the ground-up, a welcome break from the bird’s-dropping view usually spun in the media. Here is what Khalil Yaziji, 26 years old, a shopkeeper and banker thinks of his present and future: Continue reading A Voice in the Wilderness that is Gaza →

What Went Wrong: A Top-Ten Review

Iraq War, Luke R. E. Publican

What went wrong in Iraq? It seems as though it might make more sense to ask why didn’t anything go right. When Operation Iraqi Freedom began, the good news was that a brutal tyrant named Saddam Hussein had been ousted from power. For the billions of dollars thrown at modern Mesopotamia, the result is now in painful hindsight a bloody (and I do not simply mean the British expletive) mess with no good in realistic sight. The litany of bad news has morphed into a politically untenable tsunami, destroying all good intentions in its wake. One of the top stories in today’s news is the alarming rate of deaths among contractors working alongside the American military in Iraq. In the first three months of 2007 almost 150 were killed, often because they tend to be “soft targets,” but increasingly because U.S. troops are stretched thin outside the surge-happy capital. Even Chatham House, hardly a left-leaning lean-to in British politics, has neon-lighted the handwriting on the Babylonian wall with a recent report by Gareth Stansfield, who argues in a paper released Thursday that “Iraq is on the verge of being a failed state which faces the distinct possibility of collapse and fragmentation.” You know things are really bad when the U.S. military creates its own shared channel on You-Tube.

The reasons are so obvious four years after the patriotic fever orchestrated by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz gang of neocons that it almost seems trivial to keep repeating them, so perhaps the best thing is a Letterman-like line-up of the top ten real stupid mistakes made so far (it ain’t over until the fatuous voter sings) by recent U.S. foreign policy in Iraq: Continue reading What Went Wrong: A Top-Ten Review →

Tableaux Manners Egyptian Style

Egypt, Orientalism

The year was 1875. As reported in The Cosmopolitan (for January, 1898), the governor of New York proposed a fund raiser for the expected visitors in the upcoming American centennial celebrations. New York City’s high society was mobilized under the direction of Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton Cullen, granddauther of Alexander Hamilton and wife of General G. W. Cullen. Mrs. John Jacob Astor and Mrs. Belmont assisted in gathering 230 elite ladies and gentlemen to pose in various tableaux from “The Puritan Family at Prayer” to “Miss Egypt” shown here. Here is a nostalgic tidbit of vintage American Orientalism when the digs in Egypt were still very fresh. But for a nation that had only abolished slavery slightly over a decade before, it is clear that the race to end racism had only just begun. Continue reading Tableaux Manners Egyptian Style →