For some inexplicable reason, I am drawn to repeatedly watch the point-blank range shooting of Ashraf Abu Rahme, an unarmed protester objecting to the construction of the wall on his village's lands. While I want to take solace from the fact that this episode was captured through the efforts of an Israeli human rights organisations, I am also reminded by the dozens of very similar videos which were broadcast from the West Bank and Gaza during the 1987-1992 intifada. While the 87 intifada did lead to a new political reality--albeit an imperfect one--for the Palestinians, it is not widely thought that the infractions against Palestinian human rights, and the attention this garnered on the world stage, had much to do with it.
Nevertheless, there is this sense of indestructibility of the Palestinian resistance which I get from watching the video. As in the same videos from 2 decades ago, a lone Palestinian man was taken away from a group surrounding him in order for him to be brutalised in front of the others; to emasculate, humiliate and dehumanise the victim, and to make a show of tearing apart the Palestinians as a people...and yet, yet, we survive, not just as individuals, but as a group.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Living in the Future: Why London Will be Like the Gulf Very Soon
Last week I played host, albeit for only an hour or so, to two visitors from London coming to Kuwait City. The differences between these two conurbations are clear enough for anybody to see, and feel, at a glance; but I want to use this slot to put out a warning to people living in my newfound hometown on the Thames, and tell them how they're quickly catching up with the energy-consuming, waistline-expanding, concrete building-dwelling denizens of the Gulf.
Wimbledon Village, despite its growing population of moneyed Arabs, is probably one of the last parts of London one would expect to resemble Kuwait or the Gulf in general. But an idyllic stroll around the very English common on a Sunday is a good place to witness the worrying convergence between the Gulf and the south of England. It's not uncommon, in 2008, to watch as English couples leave their children of imported maids and nannies from East Asia, typically, as is the case in the Gulf, from the Phillipines. The fact that these families, who demonstrably have ample time which they could spend their children are hiring foreign help will not be without its consequences. As at least one Kuwaiti sociologist points out, leaving your children with a underpaid foreign help is bad enough for the underpaid foreign help--but it also means, as the nannies concerned are likely to only speak pidgin English, that the children are growing up with a sever linguistic and social handicap. With their first experiences of many Asian nationalities coming through the person of domestic help, children in this part of the world quickly pick up a form of racism which is obstinate in its presence. The rapid economic rise in places like India has been greeted with something approaching disbelief here--if they were doing so well, how is it they have to send legions of labourers here?
Like the Gulf, and completely unlike India, the UK is also going about it non-industrially; there is almost a religious belief in the media and "creative" industries being able to drive the economy as a whole. If thousands of Islington-dwelling arty farty film types can make enough money to buy DVD players for £15, then why worry about trying to put people in back-breaking jobs where they physically have to make the machines? This ability to live off the cream of the land without having to do any of the milking has earned the Gulf states the admiration of even former heads of the WTO . Surprisingly, nobody has considered the fact that having absolutely no manufacturing base whatsoever has meant that both the UK and the GCC have uncontrollable inflation problems--if all the goods available in a given market are produced and priced abroad, simply twiddling interest rates at Central Bank level will do no good for anybody. The ultimate result of all this is in fact making itself in the increasingly similar ways in which the UK and the Gulf are treating their workers: Witness suggestions that new immigrants to Britain should expect fewer economic advantages, later, a result of growing unease at the sheer numbers of foreigners contributing to the British economy. Like the Gulf states before, one of the first casualties will be syndicated labour within the British economy.
So I'm going to end this long-overdue blog post like so many others in the past, with little glue to hold the bits together, and just a nod to some things which have been bothering me.
Wimbledon Village, despite its growing population of moneyed Arabs, is probably one of the last parts of London one would expect to resemble Kuwait or the Gulf in general. But an idyllic stroll around the very English common on a Sunday is a good place to witness the worrying convergence between the Gulf and the south of England. It's not uncommon, in 2008, to watch as English couples leave their children of imported maids and nannies from East Asia, typically, as is the case in the Gulf, from the Phillipines. The fact that these families, who demonstrably have ample time which they could spend their children are hiring foreign help will not be without its consequences. As at least one Kuwaiti sociologist points out, leaving your children with a underpaid foreign help is bad enough for the underpaid foreign help--but it also means, as the nannies concerned are likely to only speak pidgin English, that the children are growing up with a sever linguistic and social handicap. With their first experiences of many Asian nationalities coming through the person of domestic help, children in this part of the world quickly pick up a form of racism which is obstinate in its presence. The rapid economic rise in places like India has been greeted with something approaching disbelief here--if they were doing so well, how is it they have to send legions of labourers here?
Like the Gulf, and completely unlike India, the UK is also going about it non-industrially; there is almost a religious belief in the media and "creative" industries being able to drive the economy as a whole. If thousands of Islington-dwelling arty farty film types can make enough money to buy DVD players for £15, then why worry about trying to put people in back-breaking jobs where they physically have to make the machines? This ability to live off the cream of the land without having to do any of the milking has earned the Gulf states the admiration of even former heads of the WTO . Surprisingly, nobody has considered the fact that having absolutely no manufacturing base whatsoever has meant that both the UK and the GCC have uncontrollable inflation problems--if all the goods available in a given market are produced and priced abroad, simply twiddling interest rates at Central Bank level will do no good for anybody. The ultimate result of all this is in fact making itself in the increasingly similar ways in which the UK and the Gulf are treating their workers: Witness suggestions that new immigrants to Britain should expect fewer economic advantages, later, a result of growing unease at the sheer numbers of foreigners contributing to the British economy. Like the Gulf states before, one of the first casualties will be syndicated labour within the British economy.
So I'm going to end this long-overdue blog post like so many others in the past, with little glue to hold the bits together, and just a nod to some things which have been bothering me.
Friday, February 29, 2008
This time it's for real: Facebook has "deleted" Palestine
Facebook is probably the number one reason why I don't blog here so often any more. If blogging is akin to flipping through the last edition of The Economist, facebook is the web 2.0 equivalent of slouching in front of the television while drinking a coke. It's not that I think facebook will bring an end to civilisation as we know it, nor do I deny the fact that I enjoy catching up with old friends. It's not even the advertising revenues I mind: everybody knows that they never really follow an individual, but just trends averaged over and between networks as a whole.
What is driving me mad this morning, however, is that the administrators of facebook have taken it upon themselves to decide that Palestine is not a country. In the past, facebookers could use their profile to display or conceal any information they felt was important--hometown, educational info, etc. So, naturally for a Palestine, I typed into a text box that my hometown was "Abu Dis, Palestine".
This state of affairs kept everybody happy for some time--until, that is, some time earlier this month, when facebook changed the functionality of the site so that the hometown line of the profile had to be selected from a pre-determined list, instead of just filling in a text box. Bizarrely, given that there is a Palestine network, they have decided to dis-include Palestine from the list of available countries from which one can select a hometown.
If anybody knows how to contact the facebook site administrators, it'd be useful knowledge. I remain, for now, a Palestinian with a Palestinian hometown.
What is driving me mad this morning, however, is that the administrators of facebook have taken it upon themselves to decide that Palestine is not a country. In the past, facebookers could use their profile to display or conceal any information they felt was important--hometown, educational info, etc. So, naturally for a Palestine, I typed into a text box that my hometown was "Abu Dis, Palestine".
This state of affairs kept everybody happy for some time--until, that is, some time earlier this month, when facebook changed the functionality of the site so that the hometown line of the profile had to be selected from a pre-determined list, instead of just filling in a text box. Bizarrely, given that there is a Palestine network, they have decided to dis-include Palestine from the list of available countries from which one can select a hometown.
If anybody knows how to contact the facebook site administrators, it'd be useful knowledge. I remain, for now, a Palestinian with a Palestinian hometown.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
The Mughniya Affair: Who they Didn't Kill
With the perenially elusive Imad Mughniya now killed by a car bomb in Damascus (English news story here, with Arabic story here and here), Israel has one more bee to plant in its intelligence service bonnet; people in the Middle East now have further proof, if proof be needed, that Israel has deeply penetrated the security services of their countries.
What surprises me almost as much as the fact that Israel actually managed to track Mughniya down, is the fact that they decided to go after a character who was relatively old hat, in comparison with, say, Khaled Meshal. This would suggest to me that the Israelis are keeping open the option of dealing with Hamas pragmatists at the moment, including Meshal, who would have been much, much easier to track down in Damascus than Mughniya.
What surprises me almost as much as the fact that Israel actually managed to track Mughniya down, is the fact that they decided to go after a character who was relatively old hat, in comparison with, say, Khaled Meshal. This would suggest to me that the Israelis are keeping open the option of dealing with Hamas pragmatists at the moment, including Meshal, who would have been much, much easier to track down in Damascus than Mughniya.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Where to spot me next...
If y'all missed the chance to meet up at the 18th Battersea Beer Festival (excellent, no hangover!!), then you might be able to catch a glimpse of me at the Platts IP Methodology Forum, on the 18th February at the Hyde Park Hilton.
See link above. Take care and good luck.
See link above. Take care and good luck.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Nick Broomfield’s Bad Film Trying to be Good
A lovely old friend who I used to know from a past life called me up recently to suggest attending The Battle of Haditha, a film made by Nick Broomfield, complete with a Q&A session with the Director at the Russell Square Renoir. Of course, yours truly can’t resist a good bust-up with a Director after a film, and Nick Broomfield has always been on the recommended list. Back in the good old days, Broomfield had set out to visit the besieged Yasser Arafat in his RamAllah compound, and was famously served an unfinished ear of corn from Abu Ammar’s plate. More famously, the filmmaker had made the amazingly challenging and intelligent documentary film Aileen, later immortalised by Hollywood through Charlize Theron in Monster. In nearly perfect symmetry, Broomfield, whose documentaries once found their way into Hollywood, was now leading himself down the reverse journey: Instead of his usual forte of documentaries, Broomfield was this time de-documentarising his subject matter, the much-publicised massacre of innocent Iraqis by US Marines in Haditha in March of 2006.
The major problem here is that Broomfield took the fact that The Battle of Haditha was not a documentary as license not only to dramatise the events and breathe into life characters who became known to the world through the affidavits of witnesses, but, astonishingly for a man of Broomfield’s liberal credentials, to find a way to create a moral equivalence from the Iraqis of Haditha and the Marines who butchered them. Oddly enough, this humanisation of the US Marine Core was the only theme on which Broomfield chose to depart from the strict re-enactment of events which came to light thanks to investigative journalism, after an attempted cover-up by the US military.
The disappointing thing was that the film started off well enough, with the audience being shown the passionate sex life of Rashied, who was shot dead by the Americans in Haditha, and his wife Hiba. “Arabs having sex!” as my friend pointed out in a hushed tone. “But we’re like amoebas” I retorted to her. While it could easily have been misinterpreted by a Middle Eastern audience, the intimacy within the marriage is probably a much needed wake-up call for film goers in Bloomsbury: Arabs, like them, are sexual beings and, when we’re lucky, we can express that in a relationship. That alone went a long way towards humanising the other. Unfortunately, Battle of Haditha went downhill from there to re-hash some seriously dubious Orientalisms.
Where the film fell down irredeemably for me was towards the closing, when Broomfield allows the character of Cpl. Ramirez, the most senior Marine on the ground over 2 hours of killing in Haditha, to re-imagine in a dream-like sequence what he would have done differently, had he been given the chance. Ramirez is shown going into a room full of sleeping children and decides to leave them in peace, later helping a frightened young girl out of a bath she has climbed into while clothed out of fear. In the actual sequence of events, which astonishingly Broomfield had depicted just shortly before, Ramirez had shot the innocents dead, not one of them having ever posed a threat. Why the need to absolve Ramirez of sin? And why am I so worked up about it?
As Nick Broomfield pointed out when I angrily put this to him from the audience, he never wants to stop humanising Ramirez and people like him, even going so far as to claim—wait for it—that the Marines were also “victims” of the war in Iraq. I have no problem understanding that, as my companion pointed out several times, the enlisted men in the US armed forces are drawn from the bottom of the US demographic barrel, with “kids” using military service as a means of avoiding a life of grime and crime. But this can hardly account for the events which took place in March of 2006. Well-armed, trained soldiers fighting for the world’s most powerful country were in charge of a large civilian population and choose to mercilessly slaughter them. While the individual persons might have done things differently before they joined the army, the wearing of a uniform does not, I fear, give them carte blanche when in warmer climes. Instead, what Broomfield did, whether intentionally or otherwise, was to produce a film which fits into a long pedigree of American crappers, designed to make them feel warm about their boys in uniform when abroad.
In countless films on Viet Nam, we see American soldiers needlessly killing civilians, but, through some cathartic mechanism, we come to realise that they are not the villains: Instead, it is men in grey suits who operate in Washington, DC or perhaps commissioned officers giving orders. Hell, it was the Communists who started it anyway, right? As Broomfield stated while he was trying to shut me up, it’s the “Bushes, Blairs and Rumsfelds” of the world who should carry the blame. While I don’t disagree with that, I don’t see how letting Kilo Company of USMC off the hook is going to help the cause of justice.
Many of us have had jobs in which we are told to do things which go against our better judgement, sometimes against our very humanity. Yet most of us know that there are limits which are not to be crossed. Bus drivers in London are told not to wait long for commuters running after them, no matter how close. Recently, I witnessed one bus driver who, against the protests of everybody who was on board, refused to wait for a man on crutches to catch up. I also know of another bus driver who would never dream of such a thing. Can these two bus drivers really be equal? One of them accepts the banality of evil implicit in his job, another refuses to bend, insisting on being human. The Marines in Haditha, armed to the teeth and backed-up by enormous fire power could have chosen to the latter, but instead followed the path of cowardice, and shot dead the occupants of a small car, for no good reason other than being bystanders when an IED went off near their Hummer. (Again: Broomfield was largely true to the facts of the case on these parts.) Can anything Cpl Ramirez have said, thought or felt make up for that? Through the looking glass of Broomfield’s incomprehensible Absolution of the Sins of Ramirez—who is in fact a defendant in an ongoing court martial—other aspects of the film begin to take on a more sinister meaning.
Ramirez, who was a friend of the one Marine killed in Haditha in the IED explosion which forms the denouement of the film, grieves in a dignified, noble way for the slain man, tormenting himself while shaving and protesting that he, poor soul, “will live forever with his guilt”; while Hiba, who lost the father of her unborn child in the rampage led by Ramirez is seen to do nothing more than dumbly beat her chest and attack mindlessly, savagely at the Earth. It was here that Broomfield could have lent some humanity where humanity was due: to explore, perhaps, how Hiba would feel as a newly widowed young woman in Iraq, to think perhaps about how the child would grow and with what kind of bitterness.
Of course, as Broomfield did point out, “the Iraqis, particularly in the area around Haditha, are very tribal”. This of course means that they will “never forget” the massacre and, in one full swoop, it is the Americans who really need to start worrying about Iraqi violence.
Moral relativism has to have its limits somewhere, and trying to depict Ramirez and Co. in a way which justifies the killing of innocents crosses one boundary too many for this reviewer, and so I will urge you all to save your ticket money for something more fulfilling. I can recommend Maison Bertaux, the world’s greatest cake shop, in Soho, which is also holding an exhibition of Noel Fielding’s art work.
The major problem here is that Broomfield took the fact that The Battle of Haditha was not a documentary as license not only to dramatise the events and breathe into life characters who became known to the world through the affidavits of witnesses, but, astonishingly for a man of Broomfield’s liberal credentials, to find a way to create a moral equivalence from the Iraqis of Haditha and the Marines who butchered them. Oddly enough, this humanisation of the US Marine Core was the only theme on which Broomfield chose to depart from the strict re-enactment of events which came to light thanks to investigative journalism, after an attempted cover-up by the US military.
The disappointing thing was that the film started off well enough, with the audience being shown the passionate sex life of Rashied, who was shot dead by the Americans in Haditha, and his wife Hiba. “Arabs having sex!” as my friend pointed out in a hushed tone. “But we’re like amoebas” I retorted to her. While it could easily have been misinterpreted by a Middle Eastern audience, the intimacy within the marriage is probably a much needed wake-up call for film goers in Bloomsbury: Arabs, like them, are sexual beings and, when we’re lucky, we can express that in a relationship. That alone went a long way towards humanising the other. Unfortunately, Battle of Haditha went downhill from there to re-hash some seriously dubious Orientalisms.
Where the film fell down irredeemably for me was towards the closing, when Broomfield allows the character of Cpl. Ramirez, the most senior Marine on the ground over 2 hours of killing in Haditha, to re-imagine in a dream-like sequence what he would have done differently, had he been given the chance. Ramirez is shown going into a room full of sleeping children and decides to leave them in peace, later helping a frightened young girl out of a bath she has climbed into while clothed out of fear. In the actual sequence of events, which astonishingly Broomfield had depicted just shortly before, Ramirez had shot the innocents dead, not one of them having ever posed a threat. Why the need to absolve Ramirez of sin? And why am I so worked up about it?
As Nick Broomfield pointed out when I angrily put this to him from the audience, he never wants to stop humanising Ramirez and people like him, even going so far as to claim—wait for it—that the Marines were also “victims” of the war in Iraq. I have no problem understanding that, as my companion pointed out several times, the enlisted men in the US armed forces are drawn from the bottom of the US demographic barrel, with “kids” using military service as a means of avoiding a life of grime and crime. But this can hardly account for the events which took place in March of 2006. Well-armed, trained soldiers fighting for the world’s most powerful country were in charge of a large civilian population and choose to mercilessly slaughter them. While the individual persons might have done things differently before they joined the army, the wearing of a uniform does not, I fear, give them carte blanche when in warmer climes. Instead, what Broomfield did, whether intentionally or otherwise, was to produce a film which fits into a long pedigree of American crappers, designed to make them feel warm about their boys in uniform when abroad.
In countless films on Viet Nam, we see American soldiers needlessly killing civilians, but, through some cathartic mechanism, we come to realise that they are not the villains: Instead, it is men in grey suits who operate in Washington, DC or perhaps commissioned officers giving orders. Hell, it was the Communists who started it anyway, right? As Broomfield stated while he was trying to shut me up, it’s the “Bushes, Blairs and Rumsfelds” of the world who should carry the blame. While I don’t disagree with that, I don’t see how letting Kilo Company of USMC off the hook is going to help the cause of justice.
Many of us have had jobs in which we are told to do things which go against our better judgement, sometimes against our very humanity. Yet most of us know that there are limits which are not to be crossed. Bus drivers in London are told not to wait long for commuters running after them, no matter how close. Recently, I witnessed one bus driver who, against the protests of everybody who was on board, refused to wait for a man on crutches to catch up. I also know of another bus driver who would never dream of such a thing. Can these two bus drivers really be equal? One of them accepts the banality of evil implicit in his job, another refuses to bend, insisting on being human. The Marines in Haditha, armed to the teeth and backed-up by enormous fire power could have chosen to the latter, but instead followed the path of cowardice, and shot dead the occupants of a small car, for no good reason other than being bystanders when an IED went off near their Hummer. (Again: Broomfield was largely true to the facts of the case on these parts.) Can anything Cpl Ramirez have said, thought or felt make up for that? Through the looking glass of Broomfield’s incomprehensible Absolution of the Sins of Ramirez—who is in fact a defendant in an ongoing court martial—other aspects of the film begin to take on a more sinister meaning.
Ramirez, who was a friend of the one Marine killed in Haditha in the IED explosion which forms the denouement of the film, grieves in a dignified, noble way for the slain man, tormenting himself while shaving and protesting that he, poor soul, “will live forever with his guilt”; while Hiba, who lost the father of her unborn child in the rampage led by Ramirez is seen to do nothing more than dumbly beat her chest and attack mindlessly, savagely at the Earth. It was here that Broomfield could have lent some humanity where humanity was due: to explore, perhaps, how Hiba would feel as a newly widowed young woman in Iraq, to think perhaps about how the child would grow and with what kind of bitterness.
Of course, as Broomfield did point out, “the Iraqis, particularly in the area around Haditha, are very tribal”. This of course means that they will “never forget” the massacre and, in one full swoop, it is the Americans who really need to start worrying about Iraqi violence.
Moral relativism has to have its limits somewhere, and trying to depict Ramirez and Co. in a way which justifies the killing of innocents crosses one boundary too many for this reviewer, and so I will urge you all to save your ticket money for something more fulfilling. I can recommend Maison Bertaux, the world’s greatest cake shop, in Soho, which is also holding an exhibition of Noel Fielding’s art work.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
The Twelve Months of Ramadan
On a particularly damp Christmas Eve in London, I found myself nursing a pint of Mr Young’s (are we now to call it Mr Wells’?) finest at an over-lit, over-priced and rather less-than-sexy wooden pub in Wimbledon Village. Into pint number more-than-two, my weary companion finally cottoned on that I wasn’t going to move on quickly to the restaurant, and so remarked, why for I don’t understand, on the juxtaposition of Eid Al Adha so close to Christmas this year.
Islamic history can be a touchy subject at the best of times, and the slightly tipsy state I was in wasn’t going to make things any easier, but, like a dutiful faqih educating the benighted infidels of this piss-drenched city, I began to explain how this was well and truly a coincidence; no, like a coincidence that could only happen every three and a half decades or so. While in my current state of existential indecisiveness about the big questions in life means it is unlikely that I will appreciate this cosmic coming about at anything other than face value, the very fact of the constant change in the Islamic months—making Ramadan appear during the long summer days one year, and the bitter cold of winter in another—is worth studying in its own right.
It was on the Prophet Mohammed’s fateful last trip to Mecca, better known for the injunction to treat Arab and non-Arab alike as they were in the eyes of God, that the good man of Quraysh declared that there should be only 12 months. In fact, Islam goes one further: “For God”, the Koran tells us, “there can only be 12 months”. If the injunction had remained within the more contestable hadith tradition, then, like many others, it might have found itself on the dusty shelf of unused Islamic rules. Finding its way into the canonical Othmani text, however, its finality has been sealed.
But wait! I can hear you think, what has the number of months got to do with the way they’re arranged? Well, as I explained to my by now more confused friend at the pub, the pre-Islamic Arabs used the same type of calendar then in use throughout the region, counting months by lunar cycles, but substituting a thirteenth month every seventh year in order to bring the 12-month cycles in line with the rotations about the Sun. While the months did of course fall on different points in the solar cycle, they stayed in the same season of the year, at least. By doing away with the crucial thirteenth month, we are now in the rather bizarre pickle of wherea month called Rabi’ (in the “Islamic” calendar), meaning Spring, could be in August, or December, and only rarely during the actual Spring. This is a rather difficult thing to explain to an 11-year-old.
Of course, the obvious motivation behind the calendar shift, or so it seems to me, is to do away with the then-important class of oracles, magicians astrologers and sooth-sayers, who monopolised the understanding of celestial affairs in those times and posed a serious threat to the burgeoning new religion. Shaker Nabulsi has written about how many of this group shaped Islam from its earliest and can be credited with some of Islam’s tenets; the curious reader is invited to make enquiries.
The problem with undermining the magicians and learned astronomers is that their role had to be taken by a whole cast of completely questionable freaks. How could you synchronise a harvest cycle to your calendar, when the month named under the photo of the busty beauty tells you nothing about whether or not you should sow, harvest or feast? Given Islam’s mercantile bent, it is also hard to square this with the thought of multi-year commercial contracts, surely something of a headache. Of course, while the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia continues, uniquely, to insist on printing official documents and observing official anniversaries according to the Hejri dates, nobody else really bothers. When asked for their birthday, nobody ever says “oh, 25 Ramadan”. You might choose to call it innocuous, another word for a completely useless way to keep dates.
Epilogue:
We ate at the new Limon Shish restaurant closer to Wimbledon station. A satisfactory one course meal—well-seasoned skewer of chicken, very well considered mezze, with some individual character—can be had for around £10. Not quite as good as Patogh, which boasts similar prices, but in the Middle Eastern desert that is the London Borough of Merton, it is a new gem.
As for the calendars, the more attentive of my readers will probably now point out that the Jewish calendar, which, of course, was inspired by the same Babylonian/Assyrian/Chaldean sources as the pre-Islamic Arabic calendar, has continued to thrive to this day. Well I already knew that. Some, perhaps fewer, will point out the funny story about what happened when a Saudi man stuck in Kuwait had his ID card checked by an Iraqi soldier at a checkpoint during the 1990 conflict (“What the hell do you think you are telling me you’re that old?”). I’ve heard it already.
On a final note, to those who take issue with my description of London as “piss-drenched”, I invite you to read the thoroughly enjoyable Clerkenwell Tales by my new-found friend Peter Ackroyd. In it, you can find out that your favourite city and mine has in fact quite a good pedigree of being piss-drenched, going back some centuries.
Good night.
18 ذو الحجة 1428 هجري
27 December 2007
Islamic history can be a touchy subject at the best of times, and the slightly tipsy state I was in wasn’t going to make things any easier, but, like a dutiful faqih educating the benighted infidels of this piss-drenched city, I began to explain how this was well and truly a coincidence; no, like a coincidence that could only happen every three and a half decades or so. While in my current state of existential indecisiveness about the big questions in life means it is unlikely that I will appreciate this cosmic coming about at anything other than face value, the very fact of the constant change in the Islamic months—making Ramadan appear during the long summer days one year, and the bitter cold of winter in another—is worth studying in its own right.
It was on the Prophet Mohammed’s fateful last trip to Mecca, better known for the injunction to treat Arab and non-Arab alike as they were in the eyes of God, that the good man of Quraysh declared that there should be only 12 months. In fact, Islam goes one further: “For God”, the Koran tells us, “there can only be 12 months”. If the injunction had remained within the more contestable hadith tradition, then, like many others, it might have found itself on the dusty shelf of unused Islamic rules. Finding its way into the canonical Othmani text, however, its finality has been sealed.
But wait! I can hear you think, what has the number of months got to do with the way they’re arranged? Well, as I explained to my by now more confused friend at the pub, the pre-Islamic Arabs used the same type of calendar then in use throughout the region, counting months by lunar cycles, but substituting a thirteenth month every seventh year in order to bring the 12-month cycles in line with the rotations about the Sun. While the months did of course fall on different points in the solar cycle, they stayed in the same season of the year, at least. By doing away with the crucial thirteenth month, we are now in the rather bizarre pickle of wherea month called Rabi’ (in the “Islamic” calendar), meaning Spring, could be in August, or December, and only rarely during the actual Spring. This is a rather difficult thing to explain to an 11-year-old.
Of course, the obvious motivation behind the calendar shift, or so it seems to me, is to do away with the then-important class of oracles, magicians astrologers and sooth-sayers, who monopolised the understanding of celestial affairs in those times and posed a serious threat to the burgeoning new religion. Shaker Nabulsi has written about how many of this group shaped Islam from its earliest and can be credited with some of Islam’s tenets; the curious reader is invited to make enquiries.
The problem with undermining the magicians and learned astronomers is that their role had to be taken by a whole cast of completely questionable freaks. How could you synchronise a harvest cycle to your calendar, when the month named under the photo of the busty beauty tells you nothing about whether or not you should sow, harvest or feast? Given Islam’s mercantile bent, it is also hard to square this with the thought of multi-year commercial contracts, surely something of a headache. Of course, while the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia continues, uniquely, to insist on printing official documents and observing official anniversaries according to the Hejri dates, nobody else really bothers. When asked for their birthday, nobody ever says “oh, 25 Ramadan”. You might choose to call it innocuous, another word for a completely useless way to keep dates.
Epilogue:
We ate at the new Limon Shish restaurant closer to Wimbledon station. A satisfactory one course meal—well-seasoned skewer of chicken, very well considered mezze, with some individual character—can be had for around £10. Not quite as good as Patogh, which boasts similar prices, but in the Middle Eastern desert that is the London Borough of Merton, it is a new gem.
As for the calendars, the more attentive of my readers will probably now point out that the Jewish calendar, which, of course, was inspired by the same Babylonian/Assyrian/Chaldean sources as the pre-Islamic Arabic calendar, has continued to thrive to this day. Well I already knew that. Some, perhaps fewer, will point out the funny story about what happened when a Saudi man stuck in Kuwait had his ID card checked by an Iraqi soldier at a checkpoint during the 1990 conflict (“What the hell do you think you are telling me you’re that old?”). I’ve heard it already.
On a final note, to those who take issue with my description of London as “piss-drenched”, I invite you to read the thoroughly enjoyable Clerkenwell Tales by my new-found friend Peter Ackroyd. In it, you can find out that your favourite city and mine has in fact quite a good pedigree of being piss-drenched, going back some centuries.
Good night.
18 ذو الحجة 1428 هجري
27 December 2007
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