The Star of the 300: Eapen Abrams Or "An Ode to Stationary"

Eapen Abrams, who is the accountant/book keeper where I work, won't appear on any cast lists for the new ahistorical shit-flick, The 300, but, sitting down in my cousin's basement and watching a bunch of guys in loin cloths kill Persians who look like monsters, I must admit I thought of him. Actually my first thought was: "I wonder if the British marines picked up by Iran would've liked this film..." but then I thought of Eapen Abrams. You see, the Western hang-up on the Greco-Persian wars provides the backdrop to Edward Said's Orientalism, which is where Said decided to start off. Unfortunately, it becomes very hard to read anything by Said without keeping in the back of your mind his memoir, Out of Place; now, the late Said's enchanting daughter once told me (yes, I have met her--just thought I could add that for gravitas and kudos) that "of course, a memoir is partially a work of fiction", but I don't think that extends as far as what was putting bread on the table of the young Said in Alexandria, Egypt.

One aspect of the Young Said's life which you feel comes through strongly in Out of Place is his obsessive interest in his fathers stationary business, and how the same little place could sell pencils, sharpeners and erasers and also large binding machines, copiers and printing presses.
Of course, we Arabs are more likely than most to appreciate such things since the Ottomans forbade printing in our part of the world some years ago, but that's another story. Said makes truly wonderful the world of spiral notebooks, bound ledger sheets, the smell of hot print and glue keeping volumes together and paper by the ton.

The moral of the story: Despite the Persian hordes falling on Spartan shields (I will leave discussion of the historical fallacy of this film to those with more time and patience), the real heroes of the world are the Mar Thomas Keralans who make the offices in Kuwait productive!!

Enjoy the photos, a dedication to stationary...Eapen can use the multi-purpose machine to bind and perforate entire booklets at once.



The products of the binding are universally appreciated...




Eapen loves the machine...

The 4th Avenue Blues...

This is just a quick note to draw your attention to a newly added link. I came across Jonathan Andrew's "4th Avenue Blues" quite randomly on the internet. Jonathan writes regularly on his life after being diagnosed with Schizophrenia. Mental well-being is something not regularly appreciated by the general public; it's almost a kind of fear born of an uneasy realisation that we are all hovering close to the edge on the inside (what percentage of the general population do you imagine experiences some of the symptoms of Schizophrenia?). Mental health has been an issue for me in the past, and some of my family members have been seriously affected by various clinical disorders...the tragic thing is when you can see great intellect and potential in someone, and then see it hindered by a problem which the rest of the world finds it difficult to put a finger on.

So, here's hoping you pay Jonathan's blog a visit and come out a little more considerate of others...

Some notes...

It used to be that I dismissed all conspiracy theories as intellectual laziness, but time has taught me to be a little less dismissive. An Israeli newspaper has reported that the French President, Jacques Chirac, encouraged Israel to topple the Syrian regime instead of attacking Lebanon in July of 2006 (read article in Arabic here). This gives us all pause for thought; contemporary wisdom says that Chirac is a "friend" to the Arabs, and he did indeed do the unthinkable by giving Arafat a state funeral; he also seems to find it convenient his De Gaullist roots when trying to find sweet deals for French companies in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Yet this is all preceded by a less than rosy relationship with Syria, one of Frances former mandates. One of the earliest communiques of the Syrian Ba'ath Party (the ruling party now) stated: "Syria should aim to have friendly relations with all countries except Britain, France and Turkey". Back to the future?

I would love to know what you readers can find on this... esp those of you who are French nationals (hint, hint) or even EU Nationals (ehmmm...). It's also time you responded to comments on your comments.

Oil Paintings on Sand, and Other Stories from These Parts

Preamble: Please see the latest comments for my putting both Najeeb and the Ayatollah in their respective places.


The minute I heard about this idea while playing a game of chess with an old friend, I knew it was a bad idea; when my friend, who I haven't seen in years, showed his enthusiasm, I could feel I was going to win the match soon, which I did, in 7 moves (not that this has anything to do with it, of course).

"They're doing a great thing in Abu Dhabi..." (or something to that effect) said Omar. "They're bringing some culture to their country, they're going to build a Louvre in their Emirate." They what? Of course, the BBC story here explains why the French, predictably, are angered. Let me make an effort to explain why Arabs are, or, at least, should be, a little peeved. The short answer: This is an insult to our cultural heritage. If you spend $700 Million to buy a few pretty pictures from Europe, the obvious implication is that your own heritage contains nothing worthy of investing in. This is all the more strange coming from Abu Dhabi, which previously kept a reputation for being an authentic, true-to-itself beacon of Arabness sitting next to the Whore-magnet on the Creek (read: Dubai). The romantic figures cut by the Emirate's former leaders carrying falcons while holding on to the back of a camel's hump are one of the few genuinely positive images of the Arab world which they West received for a long time (see Wilfred Thesiger). Looking to the future, what's to be expected of Abu Dhabi's fledgling art community? Is the Louvre now going to be something for them to live up to? It was never to that Muslims disapproved of "craven images", at least not during more enlightened times, but now I can feel myself actually welcoming a fatwa preventing this from coming about.

On another note, I see that democratic pressure has done the unthinkable and forced the Hamas government to take a more sensible, civilised approach to the protection of Palestinian heritage. Good. I feel quietly vindicated about my strong faith in us, the Palestinians, as a people to, you know, move on with things.

The same could not be said of some cocky shit, dressed in a turban, who thinks he can sit in a cave in Afghanistan (I have nothing against troglodytes--I point out that some Palestinians in the village of Yatta spend part of the year in caves) and tell Hamas what to do. Of course, we never asked this bugger and his crew to go at the USSR like rabid dogs, in fact we actually liked those Commie fellows, and they liked us...but then nobody asked our opinion at the time.

Update on The Simpsons

The old-timers here (isn't that all of us?) will remember our discussion, late in 2006 about the exact location of the The Simpsons' hometown of Springfield. Well, it does seem like any certain answers are wrong, as the article here shows quite nicely. Incidentally, this idea of getting public/civic institutions to come together and bid competitively for the largesse of a private enterprise... how very American. Surely, this is just the kind of thing our friends Bart, Homer, Marge, Maggy and Lisa would be expected to poke fun at? Too much chutzpah by a mile, methinks.

Also, while I'm at it, Ayatollah still needs to point out my English fault.... do it, damn it, I'm waiting.

On Science and Religion

Now that my brother has done the honourable thing and apologised, I feel free to move on to another, more meaningful post. Exhibit A:

An article explaining how "Muslim" scientists/mathematicians were well ahead of the game in terms of creating and, presumably, understanding complex geometric patterns.

The actual information revealed is fascinating and unoffensive; centuries ago, in a place far, far away, a bunch of guys got together and discovered how to use non-repeating patterns to make beautiful designs. In the meantime, it can only be assumed that the artisans had some appreciation for the underlying mathematical properties of the shapes they were making. After all, it was the great polymath Omar Khayyam--very influential in the area of Central Asia mentioned in the above article (read Samarkand by Amin Maalouf)--who was one of the first people to work on studying geometry through mathematical functions (there are translated versions of Khayyam's mathematics available today in at least French and modern Arabic--actually the modern Arabic version, published by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies is useless, much less clear than the medieval Arabic kept as an appendix). Ultimately, however, this in itself is not why the story received so much attention, even being listed on the BBC website. When was the last time you heard the BBC World News anchorwoman mention a story based on mathematics research?

The reason last month's story received the attention it did--outside the corridors of math departments--was the way it could be used to "bridge the cultural divide" in our post-Huntington world. Muslims are bad; they are terrorists... but wait, no, they're not bad because a few hundred years ago some of them did some cool mathematics. Personally, I have no time for the idea that Muslims are bad because I kind of used to be a one in the strict sense, and probably still am one in the vague definition of the word, depending on how fine a line you want to put on it. What I want to gripe with, however, is the idea that any science can be linked to a religion; when was the last time you heard of "Euler, the Christian mathematician" or "Einstein, the Jewish physicist" or even "Heisenberg, that Nazi scientist"?

Perhaps there are benign, even benevolent reasons for using such language: telling Western school children after 9/11 that a few Muslims were intelligent is like telling Nazis that Jews are good for the cultural life of the nation, meant to fight irrational hatred; but then what do you do with the religious jingoists, who want to use these factoids to peddle their tripe? What do you say to the bearded imam who attacks co-educational schooling, proclaiming that a "return to the roots of Islam" would heal our developmental failure-to-launch? What do you say to the Israeli who wants to wipe out the West Bank's university while the Hebrew University of Jerusalem--the recipient of much care from Einstein in its early days--can build on illegally occupied territory?

One of the great ironies of all of this is how it would have jarred with the actual personalities concerned. There is a growing trend in these parts to have "Islamic" hospitals; these, doubtlessly, have some remedial features in that they extend health care to sections of society which otherwise could not afford them (in places like Egypt and Jordan) and allow female patients in particular to feel more relieved about where they will stay while receiving treatment. What makes me chuckle is the way they're usually named after personages who were anything but Islamic at the time; Mohammed ben Abi Bakr Al Razi is one popular choice for the name of an Islamic hospital, yet the man was known for his non-conformity as a Muslim as much as for his medical work back in the day. Another might be Jabr ibn Hayyan, whose work on the use of furnaces--kitab al afran--still merits a mention in textbooks on thermogravimetry. None of these people were particularly pious, and linking their achievements with some kind of religious spirit is quite misleading and disingenuous, and serves nobody in the quest to improve the status of Muslim countries.

You might ask why make such a big deal out of it; surely, it couldn't hurt any young budding Muslim scientist, sitting on a desk in his under-funded public school in his disastrously mismanaged home country, to feel a certain pride in his forebears? Except that it's wrong. If we convince people that the reasons for the past greatness of Islamic civilisation(s) was based on doctrinal faithfulness, instead of the on the ingenuity of individuals, coupled with the economic prosperity and political stability and patronage which allowed them to function, we will have limited to a great extent our ability to plan for the future. The absurd becomes dangerous when wealthy governments in the region sponsor conferences on "the science of the Koran" instead of investing in better lab kits and more modern textbooks. Some times it seems that there is some kind of conspiracy to keep school kids here stupid.

Such diversions from reality also lead us astray from interesting questions about the nature of the differences between religion and science; how confident should Muslims be in applying the diktats of their religion if none of it can be made falsifiable? How certain can anybody be that Islam is a divine religion if it can be shown that there arithmetic inconsistencies in the way wealth is divided?
Nor do these claims of an Islamic science actually help an already confused group of people. Why on Earth should an Uzbekh care that Jabr ibn Hayyan, an Arab, was their co-religionist, when the Persians have their own army of thinkers and now, it seems, the Uzbekhs did too?

People of all religions can find, I'm sure, ways of justifying their superstitious beliefs with science of the past or the future (one fad in the 1990s was to link Hinduism to string theory). Given the disastrous situation Muslims are in at present, however, we can little afford to waste time trying to find the solutions to equations in the metaphysics of the past.

Taxonomy correction

Allow me to relieve any undue fright amongst my readership due to my brother's baseless identification of a breed of goat. A specimen of the Syrain Awassi sheep is presented below:



Obviously, this is completely unlike the goats seen previously in this blog in photos together with Adam and Samer. Please accept my apologies; I expect my brother to issue a prompt explanation. This whole episode does remind me of something which happened in The Good Soldier Svejk where one of the characters works as an editor for a breeder's journal and intentionally misleads people about the value of the dogs, the photos of which they send in. My brother, like the charter in Svejk, should certainly face a military tribunal for his actions.

Enjoy your kebabs, folks.