Yemen’s child brides and beggars fend for themselves

"Arab Spring", Ethics, Gender and Sexuality, Yemen

by Abdullah Hamidaddin, Alarabiya.net, March 28, 2014

Maha is a 10 year old girl. She is the youngest of twelve and is now getting ready for her big day. She is to be married to a man who is thirty seven years old. Her mother is packing her bag. It’s a small bag. The family is so poor that Maha barely has ten pieces of clothes all together. Before she closes the bag, the mother puts in two plastic dolls. Maha found them while foraging for toys with her friends in the trash of an upscale neighborhood in Sanaa. I wonder what the mother is thinking now. She must be happy that Maha will have three meals a day. Before her engagement, Maha would only eat one meal daily and sometimes she had to sleep hungry. Now things seem brighter than before. The father spent part of her dowry on some food to fatten Maha up. Her fiancé remarked that she was getting too thin, and her parents were worried that he would call off the engagement started so they started feeding her more. Maha of course didn’t understand why she was eating alone. Why her mother wouldn’t share her oat meal and fresh cow’s milk. Meat was too expensive; but they would make soup from the fat which butchers usually throw away or feed the stray cats with.

I can’t imagine what Maha is thinking right now. I can’t imagine what she will be thinking when she is in a bedroom with her husband. Continue reading Yemen’s child brides and beggars fend for themselves →

Tabsir Redux: Don’t debate, rehabilitate

Anthropology/Sociology, Ethics, Islam: Introduction, Terrorism Issue

“Don’t debate religion with fundamentalists: what they need is rehabilitation”

by Saad A Sowayan

Fundamentalism is a cultural phenomenon, though it dons religious garbs. It is a mode of consciousness shaped by cultural values, not religious principles. Thus we can understand it only if we examine it in its cultural context as a sociological rather than a theological question.

So, I will begin by taking a close look at the social incubators most likely to hatch fundamentalism.

I understand by fundamentalism strong adherence to an archetypal point of view and a fierce conviction of its fundamental truth, to the exclusion of any other alternate idea. Any alternative is resisted by a fundamentalist and treated not as a legitimate substitute stemming from a rational free choice, but as a detrimental antithesis of the fundamental truth of the archetype. The archetype is a model to be emulated and reproduced, not dissected or scrutinized. Continue reading Tabsir Redux: Don’t debate, rehabilitate →

Distressed Damsels and Chivalrous Caliphs

Ethics, Gender and Sexuality

Damsels in distress, the chivalrous caliph, and the misogynistic scholar: a modern fairy tale

from A Sober Second Look, March 15, 2014

A long time ago, in a galaxy that is unfortunately not nearly as far away from me as I would like, I was taught that the reason for all the problems that women face today—especially in “the West”—is that relations between men and women are seriously out of balance.

Western women have been misled into rejecting their divinely created feminine natures. They don’t value marriage and motherhood, and try to emulate men by cutting their hair short and wearing masculine-style clothes and having careers and being promiscuous. Therefore, men are understandably put off by them, can’t respect them, feel emasculated by them, and don’t want to marry them. As a result, the family is in disarray, single motherhood and juvenile delinquency are on the rise, men feel lost and confused, and women are wondering where all the good men have gone. But (we were told) there is a simple answer to all these problems: Return to Islam. Go back to “the True Teachings of the Qur’aan and the Sunnah” (as the Salafis would phrase it), or to “Sacred Tradition” (as the neo-traditionalists would say). To the fitra—the innate, divinely given nature of every human being, which says that “true” men are hyper-masculine and “real,” god-fearing women are ultra-feminine… and anything that doesn’t fit into that binary view of gender is just laughable. Go back. Nothing else works. Anything else is rebellion against God. Continue reading Distressed Damsels and Chivalrous Caliphs →

Mahan on Aden in 1867

Aden, camels, Judaism, Orientalism, Travel, Yemen


Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914)

The American admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan is often noted as the man who coined the phrase “Middle East.” After he served in the U.S. Navy on the Union side, he sailed to Hong Kong and passed by the port of Aden in 1867. His comments are brief and reflective more of his own biases than anything significant about Aden. He does provide an interesting description of camels. His narrative is available on archive.org, but I attach here the relevant pages on Aden.

MET Conference on Islamic Art, Culture and Politics

Archaeology and Antiquities, Architecture, Art, Conferences and Talks, Miniatures


Prince in a Garden Courtyard. Folio from an illustrated manuscript (detail). 1525-30, Iran. Opaque watercolor, ink, gold, and silver on paper, 8 9/16 x 4 3/4in. (21.7 x 12.1cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers Fund, 1911 (11.39.1)

Islamic Art, Culture, and Politics: The Connections

Tuesday, April 1, 2014, 6 pm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

With Peter Brown, Yasmine El Rashidi, Haleh Esfandiari, Shaul Bakhash, and Navina Najat Haidar, Curator, Department of Islamic Art

The New York Review of Books and Met Museum Presents examine the living traditions of the Islamic world, in the setting of modern conflict and variations in Muslim culture. Editor Robert Silvers brings together a group of contributors for a panel discussion on the interconnectedness of art and ethos.

Save $5 per ticket with code NYRB14 at metmuseum.org. Offer expires March 30.

Arabic Books Online

Books You Should Read, Folklore and Proverbs, Islam: Introduction, Islamic History, Islamic Law, Islamic Sciences, Islamic Texts, Languages, Literature, Scholars, Teaching Resources

In 1981, during a trip to Egypt, I bought the old multi-volume Cairo edition of the mother of all Arabic dictionaries: al-Zabidi’s Taj al-‘Arus. It took up an entire suitcase and was so heavy that I paid the porter extra. As I arrived home, the handle broke and the books spilled in the landing of my home. Those were the days when most Arabic books had to be physically bought in the Middle East and carried home in luggage. Books that used to be accessible only in major libraries are often available online today. If one is patient just about any classic Arabic text from the past is available online. Some are pdf scans, where there is a treasure trove at archive.org and 4.shared.com. It is usually best to search these sites in Arabic. But even a ouja-board Google search in Arabic can yield full texts.

Continue reading Arabic Books Online →