Abdulhadi's World

War on Gaza: Douchebags Show Their True Colours

2011-08-21T15:38:00.005+03:00

Just when we thought that the Arab Spring would be blowing change through the region, the wonderful people known as Israelis remind us that the self-same attitudes which they displayed in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza during the winter of 2008 can be brought back to vogue. Not long after thousands of Israelis took to the streets of Tel Aviv demanding that their government provide them with cheaper housing (known as the J14 Movement; notice that the rights of Palestinian Israelis, whose lands have systematically been appropriated by the state, are never addressed), Israel retaliated against a shooting attack by bombing civilians in Gaza--although there is absolutely no evidence that anybody in Gaza shot anybody in Eilat.

Now, a feisty young Israeli has associated these two phenomena: he is using his presence on facebook to demand that Gaza be "flattened" to make way for cheap housing for immigrants from the Ukraine, Poland and Moldova (eg, Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Leibermann). Thank you, Shlomi Cohen, for proving to us that the ugliness that is Zionist thuggery has survived the Arab Spring.

Breivik: Radical pro-Israeli gunman (UPDATED)

2011-07-24T14:14:00.008+03:00

UPDATE: I have since been told by more than one source that Breivik and Fjordman, his putative internet persona, are not the same person; my understanding is that the jury is still out, and that, at any rate, Fjordman is possibly an ensemble of writers. What is beyond doubt, however, is Breivik's association with the rabidly pro-Israeli/anti-Palestinian trend on the fringe of European politics. I insist that it is still valid to ask what connection these beliefs had on his actions.

Like countless others in the Middle East, I was glued to a TV screen with a group of friends as news of the Norway attacks came in. To be fair, many of us were relieved to learn that the ostensible culprit was not "one of us"--given the massive efforts Norway makes to contribute to a better life to people in the region, it would have been an understandable attack on a very friendly country.

What remains worrying, however, is that some in the mainstream media continue to insist that blaming Muslims for the attack was perfectly reasonable. Of course this was nothing as compared to the way in which some of the media jumped the gun and pontificated wildly about the prescriptions to "fix the Muslims". Muslim terrorists have done stupid things; I'm not going to suggest a new discussion about how representative they are of Islam, save to say that, unfortunately, Muslims are a bit lacking when it comes to introspection of their religious beliefs. What is absolutely bizarre, however, is that nobody is paying attention to how a man who was been spewing virulently racist and violent views for over five years might have actually put his money where his mouth has been all this time.

That last link is to a source so valuable I am going to repeat it:

http://chromatism.net/fjordman/fjordmanfiles.htm

Fjordman, the online alter ego of Breivik, contributed to rabidly anti-Palestinian blogs like Gates of Vienna and Jihad Watch. To be sure, Fjordman's musings on the matters of the day were indicative of his break with reality and kind of absurd mis-reading of philosophy, part of which includes his identification of Maimonedes as a Muslim (well, that kind of makes sense ...). Yet the important questions remain to be asked:

Many organizations have freely partaken in a kind of hysterical smear campaign against Muslims: not just the violent ones, not even just those with beards, but basically anybody with a name like "Mohammed". What responsibility do they now carry for breeding this violent of paranoid violence?

Why is nobody making the Israel connection with Fjordman? If a pro-Palestinian had taken up arms in a country which was as avowedly pro-Israeli as Norway is pro-Palestinian, there would be hell to pay for it (possibly reasonably so ...). If a man with attitudes towards Palestinians can buy 6 tonnes of fertilizer, surely some needs to ask what risk there is to Palestinians and their supporters around the word. Non? How likely are groups like the Jewish Defense League to follow suit?

I leave you with those!!

ماذا حل بنا؟

2011-06-15T10:16:00.002+03:00

كنت قبل ايام في احدى البلاد العربية المترامية الاطراف، و التي تنعم بمناخ معتدل و متنوع في اشكاله من

منطقة إلى اخرى، دون ان يكون لذلك البلد الكثير من احتياطي النفط او اي مصادر للثروة السريعة الاخرى. كنت بالتحديد باقصى اطراف ذلك البلد و كنت، انا و رفيقتي انذاك، اتجه نحو العاصمة الموجودة في الطرف الاقصى المقابل للطرف الذي كنا فيه، فوقفنا ننتظر الحافلة التي ستقلنا خلال الرحلة التي تطول بضعة ساعات. و يبذل شعب ذلك البلد قصارى جهدهم كي يحيوا حياة صالحة تتماشى مع ارثهم، و لا يبالون كثيراً إلى التحولات من حولهم. فهم، و برغم قدرتهم على استعمال التقنية الحديثة، و سكنهم في بيوت كبيرة و مكيفة، يعيشون بتناغم مع تقاليد ثقافة تم اشتقاقها عن ما هو، ربما، اخلص نموذج للبداوة يعرفه التاريخ و يمكن لاي زائر ان يلمسه.

كنت قد رايت في كل زياراتي السابقة إلى ذلك البلد اثار و اصحة للعادات و الثقافة العربية الاصيلة و المحتشمة: فلا يسمح الرجال للنساء ان تحمل حقائب ثقيلة في الشارع، و تفرض عليهم شهامتهم غير المرئية صرامة في التعامل مع المظاهر غير اللائقة. كما اتذكر كيف ان قبل سنوات قليلة مضت، ذهبت إلى منزل احد الاقارب الساكن في هذا البلد لاجد ان سكان الحي الذي يسكن فيه في العاصمة قد خرجوا بحثاً عن ابنة احدى الاسر القاطنة هناك التي اختفت قبل دقائق، بحثاُ على الاقدام و بالسيارات و حتى ان احد الاسر طوعت كلبها الحراسي، قبل ان تصل الشرطة. مثل هذه التصرفات تبرهن كيف ان تشبثهم بقناعة جادة بما هو صالح، ينير لهم الطريق في ظروف قد حيرت تعقيداتها مجتمعات اخرى اكثر ثراء و اكثر تقنية. و لكن الحدث الذي شاهدناه في ذلك اليوم جعلني اتساءل : ماذا حل بالنشامة المعهودة؟

جلسنا، انا و رفيقتي، على دكة موقف الحافلة. كان ملحوظاً في هذا البلد العربي ان نجد في محل واحد صورة تعبر عن كل شرائح البلد الاقتصادية، فكان هناك الشباب ممن ذهبوا إلى المنتجع لقضاء عطلة اسبوعية، و كان عدم تعودهم على ركوب وسائل النقل العامة واضحاً على وجوهم، بينما تجد الكثير من الاخرين من راكبي الباص رضاءهم التام عن وضع المركبة التي ستنقلهم، و هي مكيفة و مرفهة قياساً على وسائل النقل العامة في الوطن العربي. و بينما كان بعض الركاب يرى في سعر تعرفة الرحلة مبلغاً بسيطاً و سخي، كان بعضهم الاخر يقارن هذا المبلغ بدخله اليومي، و هو مبلغ قد يعتبر محرزاً مقارنةً مع متوسط الدخل للفرد في بلدنا هذا. و مع ذلك، لم تكن هناك سمات للحرمان باينة على وجوههم، ربما لانهم عائدون من اجازات استحقوها، او لانهم عائدون إلى بيوتهم محملين بمكاسب عملهم في منتجعات هي مقصد الكثير من سواح العالم.

في هذه الاثناء، دخل رجل طالق شعر ذقنه دون ان تكون له لحية، و كان يدخن سيجارة بخلاف تعليمات . اللافتات الواضحة في كل انحاء قاعة الانتظار، و امتنع عن مناشدته اي من الموظفين، دون ان يحترموه. كان هذا الرجل ماسكاً بيد امراءة اسيوية قصيرة القامة، ترتدي ثياب مزرية لا تصلح بان تكون ثياب عمل. كانت تنوح بشيء يقترب من البكاء، بينما لم ينفك الرجل عن سحبها من معصمها بطريقة يصعب علي التعبير عن الاهانة الموجودة فيها. سرعان ما بداء الاخرون يتهامسون بين بعضهم البعض، ((هي لا تريد ان تذهب)) و ((تخشى ما ينتظرها على الجانب الاخر حين تنزل عن الباص)). و همست صديقتي غير المتقنة للغة العربية و((هل هو عشيقها ربما؟)) فكانت الاجابة على هذا السؤال سهلة: لا اعتقد ذلك، و دارت تلك المراءة الاسيوية ذات الملامح الحزينة و الملابس الرديئة بوجها على الجالسين بقاعة الانتظار، تتوسل شفقة الجالسين. .

لم تنجح المراءة في توسلها. صمت الجالسون و كنت صامتاً إلى جانبهم، لم يحرك احدنا ساكناً لمساعدة انسان قد طلب منا النجدة بالوسيلة الوحيدة التي استطاع منها، و لم نفعل شيء. استرد الرجل طليق شعر ، ذقنه مبلغ التذكرة، و بداءات الامراءة الاسيوية تتالم من قبضته المتحكمة على معصمها، دون ان يلتفت اليها موظفو بيع التذاكر، مجرد معاملة مقايضة بسيطة، سواء ان قال احدهم، بعد مغادرة الرجل و الاسيوية التي يصطحبها عنوة عن قاعة الانتظار ((كنت شاكك بهذا الموضوع من زمان)). هذا و حسب.

و هنا ادركت و ايقنت ان ثمة تغييرات حقيقية قد اثرت في مجتمعنا. فالشعب الذي كان يعرف عنه الشهامة الفروسية قد وقف محايداً امام منظر من الرق المستحدث و الاتجار بالبشر. و الشعب الذي كان يقف مستعداً دوماً للدفاع عن اعراض و شرف و كرامة الاخرين قبل ان يدافعوا عن انفسهم، قد اعلن استسلامه، و لو في هذه المعركة المحدودة. صحيح ان وجود اعداد كبيرة من العمالة الاسيوية الوافدة اتى على حساب العمال العرب و نقاباتهم، و لكن لا احد يحمل الافراد العابرين للبحار المسؤولية عن ذلك. صحيح اننا لم يعلم ا احدنا ما ستؤول اليه الامور اذ حاول احدنا التدخل، و لكن كان بالامكان ان نجتمع على الحق و ان ندحض عملاً باطلاً. ان بقينا نخرس امام الاتجار بالبشر، غرباء كانوا علينا ام لا، فاننا قد فشلنا في الامر بالمعروف و النهي عن المنكر، بالمعنى الحقيقي لهذا المصطلح--لا اقصد هنا كف النساء عن قيادة السيارات او منع رجال الاطفاء من دخول مدرسة للفتيات و هي تحترق و تحرق معها التلميذات. .

و اكون انا اول المعترفين بانني اخفقت في واجبي اثناء الحادثة التي رويتها انفاً، و لكن كتبت هذه الاسطر لانني لا استطيع ان اتوقف عن مساءلة نفسي: هل بقي لنا اية قيم؟

Notes from the Unemployed Fringe, No. 349: Sudoku in Al Qabas

2011-05-24T16:40:00.002+03:00

For the past two months or so I have been a member of that unfortunate mass of humanity: unemployed, Arab and male, living in the Middle East. It's a sad existence, to be sure, living at my mother's home while the horrible number 30 fast approaches, and my beard gets longer by the hour, but, hey, it gives me the time I need to play Sudoku.

I'd earlier promised a friend I would provide a full review of Sudoku puzzles as they appear in Kuwaiti newspapers. A full review is indeed in the works, but for now, I will stick to this: the puzzles in Al Qabas need to be seriously looked at. People, seriously, sudoku is meant to be something you solve on a coffee break, not an all-day activity. I can't claim to be a sudoku guru, but I'm not bad either, and the higher 2 puzzles in Al Qabas are a bit too difficult.

The "easy" level is fine, a bit too easy, in fact but, really, the jump from "easy" to "medium" is unjustified. If they had printed one which was titled "killer" or something, and meant to be very different from the others, that would be fine, but, honestly, the "medium" and "difficult" levels do not follow on from "easy".

If anybody here knows how to get in touch with the relevant editors at Al Qabas, please pass on the note.

Sign the Petition, asking the Coen Bros not to go to Tel Aviv

2011-04-14T11:57:00.001+03:00

It's a long story; I'm not asking the Coen Bros to abandon their Zionism--which would be unrealistic--but I am suggesting they think about the wider implications of receiving the Dan David Prize at Tel Aviv University.

If you care about civility in public dialogue, you might want to sign it, here.

Do spread!!

Saudi Arabia: Defending Arab skies

2011-01-04T15:48:00.003+03:00

It's been the better part of a calendar year; and do I really wish I had something kind of useful and original to contribute. Instead, I want to pilfer and poach this story about how the brave men of the Saudi armed forces are stepping up to the plate to be counted for Palestine. I'll quote two stories:

From Haaretz ("the good Zionists" as many Palestinians insist)

and also from Maan, my favourite Palestinian news source.

Happy New Year; I'm looking forward to a bit more blogging in 2011, especially as I am likely to leave the UNRWA job and might have some more spare time on my hands.

Table Tennis at Cold River

2010-01-28T02:43:00.000+03:00

I pointed out to Jamal that he and I had the same Palestine map necklace—not too shocking, given that we were sitting opposite each other in the Nahr Al Bared camp (a place name which also translates into “Cold River”) near Tripoli—and that we smoked the same flavour of Gauloises cigarettes. Still a little in my London mode, I was a bit shocked when this prompted him to come out with “have one”, and we sat and smoked.

Jamal had been fortunate enough, through luck and determination, to leave the aid-dependent camps and find a home Beirut—albeit in another camp, this time Mar Elias—where he was studying mathematics at university.

“Ah! A man even more after my own heart! I did physics!”

Like the others gathered at the Nahr Al Bared youth centre that day, Jamal had come to participate in one of their frequent and irregular (“sometimes every month, sometimes for special occasions like Ramadan, whenever we feel like it really”) table tennis tournaments. The trip from Beirut to the North was an easy 2 to 3 hours, so was it really worth it for a few games of ping-pong?

“I'm good you know, and I think I might get one of the cups this time around.”

Although far from the most painful, this was the one sentence I heard in the camps I would want to broadcast to the world in Tripoli and beyond: The Palestinians, long-time, inter-generational dwellers—dwellers only and not citizens—of Nahr Al Bared went for the same silly pastimes as everybody else. We play table tennis and study mathematics and sneak away for fag breaks while our friends are practising bouncing balls. Since Jamal's friend Zaki had trounced me like a bad joke earlier in the afternoon, I wasn't in a position to offer Jamal a pre-tournament warm-up, but I thought to ask him about chess.

“Oh, I've given up on chess, stopped playing since I was 13; you see, people stick to really silly plans, and it becomes hard to beat them if you want to be creative like me.”

Yes, of course. I'd heard that before. So it hit me, Jamal and I were not just two similar people staring at each other in the face: We were twin brothers who'd ended up on differing sides of a rather small political coin. I knew how to evade saying “I'm afraid I'll lose” in more ways than one myself.

I might have been born in Kuwait, and Jamal in this camp here, but putting a brave face on what could be a personal tragedy was a national habit shared by both of us. In Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun, an absent-minded Palestinian nurse trained deep behind the Eastern bounds of the Iron Curtain was transformed into a Daktor in the blighted life of the camps; and just today, Zaki of table tennis fame had referred to a Daktora Vivian, in fact an MA-holding American researcher well-known and liked in these parts. Although maybe a way to make it easier for a woman collecting data on the health of the camp-dwellers, it was also a way of signifying their own significance: The world has not totally abandoned the Palestinians so long as the medics will continue to visit. It is better to live in a world where doctors care about your health than in a camp where even your existence is of questionable legality; it is better to be a freedom fighter than a hopeless refugee, and better to be tired of unimaginative tactical manoeuvres than a bad chess player.

If the escapism seemed a bit desperate, there was enough cause for as much. When I arrived, Zaki took me around to see what had become of Nahr Al Bared since the Lebanese military had carried out its “operations” there to wipe out the Fateh al Islam group—which even the Lebanese state acknowledged was not made up primarily of Palestinians—bulldozing everything which stood between the new, post-Syrian departure Lebanon and a Muslim fundamentalist. Here, the delusions of grandeur indulged in by Palestinian refugees seemed to have their place. Where the Lebanese Army spoke of “operations”, they spoke of a “war”. A war which, in the words of Zaki,

“Was against the trees and the stones of the houses as much and the people in the camp. This used to be a little orchard I planted: Were my orange trees terrorists?”

Where Zaki's trees had once stood, there was no only a pile of rubble and iron bars. To make matters worse, Zaki could have owned the land, just on the fringes of the camp hiumself. Instead, it was held in trust for him by a distant cousin, who had managed to make a living, and gain citizenship, for himself in the US, where there were no refugee camps save for the Indian reservations. A little in the distance, Zaki showed me the “resort” where the Nahr Al Bared dwellers would go to smoke hookah and look out at the Mediterranean.

Being on the shoreline brought this conflict, found throughout all the camps where the Palestinians lived, screeching to the front. In Nahr Al Bared, you may have to worry about tanks uprooting your trees or the fact that you are not legally entitled to be a citizen anywhere; but you still want to smoke argeela with the boys and have a good time. After all, even Palestinians want to play ping-pong.

Me and the One State Solution

2009-11-22T00:36:00.003+03:00

I used this appearance on Press TV to explain why I think the idea of a "One State Solution" to resolve the Palestinian cause is bunkum. I would be happy to hear/read your thoughts on this one.

Meandering Thoughts from Hamra

2009-10-13T15:37:00.001+03:00

The dust kicked up by the crowds of refugees and the buses that brought them in from Nahr el Bared in the North and Ain el Helweh in the South makes an ugly combination with the Mediterranean humidity of Beirut. It is a kind of unwelcome mud-buth, fully clothed. I haven't showered for a day because I've found myself sleeping in places I hadn't expected, and this isn't the greatest sensation on the skin. Around me, young Palestinian men from these camps, improbably dressed in suffocating nylon football tops and tight-fitting black trousers are standing around and waiting for the protest to begin.

A day after trying to tell a crowd in Dubai about the non-joy of science, I have come to a sit-in at Beirut's Martyrs' Square to stand in solidarity with fellow Palestinians whose homes in the Nahr el Bared camp, never very palatial or welcoming in the first place, became collateral damage in the battle between Islamist fighters and the Lebanese government in 2007. Nahr el Bared means “Cold River”, and the posters for today's event have called it “Fi al Bared Beiti”, a witty pun, I think, which translates to “my house is in the cold”, and also “my house is in the Cold River Camp”.

The sloganeering, always emphatic, is also somewhat confused at this demonstration. Are they chanting for a right to return? Are they here because they are Palestinians who were dispossessed from their homes? Or for the right to live in homes other than the temporary dwellings, usually automobile garages and corrogated iron shacks, to which they have been reduced now? Yet everywhere, at every turn, the protestors want to remind you that their destroyed homes in Nahr el Bared were also “temporary”, and have been for something like 3 generations. An unmelodic, slightly frightening and out-dated musical group wearing berets stands to military attention and sings both the Lebanese and Palestinian national anthems. Nobody seems particularly moved, not even the military-clad—and armed—Lebanese soldiers and gendermarie standing around the Square, but it needs to be made clear that this is a protest of Palestinians living inside Lebanon; there are two separate nations working things out here. Not a human rights or civil rights dispute from people who have nowhere else to conceivably call home. Maybe this will be political suicide, but let's face it: There is no space in RamAllah for these people. Israel will not let them return. We can not defeat Israel. They need to live somewhere. Nobody wants to connect dots so obvious they are screaming. Instead, we listen to speeches delivered by the incredibly optimistic Nawal Najdi.

I don't know Nawal but I do know the type—the type of person who shames me for not being more capable and willing to actually fight the good fight. In a sea of veiled, silent and marginalised women from the camps, Nawal has come, head uncovered and with a personality to talk down an army of men, she is the kind of woman who just instinctively knows that somebody needs to do something about Palestine, and she steps up to the plate. It's brave, but I think also depressing. Her voice fights against the heavy air around us, and can be heard in the surrounding shopping centres of the Solidaire, with their Virgin Megastores and Dunkin' Donuts outlets. I begin to wonder if there is any point to this; I spot a young Lebanese woman passing out flyers to passing cars, and I finally have a chance to think “there's a productive idea”; so I borrow flyers from Rana.

The passing cars do their thing. Some are disgusted and frightened to see Palestinian flags in this city which was crucified in the past for its attachment to the cause; others honk their approval. At least one driver tried to run over Rana later on. We are committed. In the ridiculous dust, between the faces of slightly appalled security guards protecting the Beirut's centre-piece Dunkin' Donuts, I have a chat with—no, I am spoken to by—a feeble-minded Lebanese man in a cap. “I live in Nahr el Bared!” he tells me. I'm from Abu Dis. “Ah, you bring the fragrance of Jerusalem on your body”; I can only smell my own sweat. The chap takes me by the arm and tells me to come visit. I say that I might, but know I won't be given a permit to visit. Besides, I am slightly taken aback by this man who smells holiness in my bodily fluids.

There are many like him, Lebanese so poor they have become camp-dwellers. In bed the next morning, I am told how the Lebanese in the surrounding towns have nowhere to shop now—Nahr el Bared gave them a cheap market where the merchants would give them credit facilities. I look at the ceiling and think of the obvious: That the Palestinians are now the Jews to Lebanon's Belarussia, living in Ghettoes and reduced to scratching out a living from the cracks between stones and destroyed tower blocks, with only their wits to plow.

Today the camp-dwellers who came to Beirut continue to live in the legal loopholes of concrete which are still temporary camps. I'd like to think some Beiruti motorists have read some flyers and might now think that the Palestinians from Nahr el Bared might do with roofs over their heads. I have a passport which will let me out of the airport and so I can go away, but maybe a conscience which will rest a little easier because I can say I took some time off from my holidays to go to a protest and make noise. I think of the wretchedness of the Palestinian who told me he can't even get a permit to go back to where his temporary home used to stand. I think of Abu Mazen on the West Bank and Hamas in Damascus agreeing to disagree in Cairo, and hear the whispers suggesting that's the way the US wants it. I think these thoughts and two beautiful Palestinians sitting in front of me talk about their new film project for the camps, and compare their mobile phones in their West Coast US accented English. I also like my mobile phone. I think about where to find the chess sets at Ta-marbouta, and need to make plans to catch a film in the evening. Just like the campers from Nahr el Bared, I have a home in the cold, but unsimilar to them, it is in far-away London.

I really have to think about re-working my Dubai talk.

Waiting for a Visa: Epilogue

2009-05-26T09:57:00.004+03:00

This is the epilogue to my Waiting for a Visa Story. You can read Part I here, and Part II here.

Just outside the Turkish Consulate in London, a small and tranquil English garden is orientalised by the Middle Eastern vibrancy of the visitors. Groups of young men with gelled-back hair in black leather jackets and tight-fitting jeans jostle for attention outside their cars, while an audience of women of all ages sit on ornate metal garden chairs, like only the English would ever buy for outdoors use, and spit out the husks of dried seeds and talk on mobile phones. Just beyond the gate that leads to the cul-de-sac where the Consulate lay, the deafeningly quiet pace of Knightsbridge and England kept the contrast sharp.

I wondered then what Ghassan was doing at that moment. If he had been given the chance to be here today, how soon would he have waited to go back to the Middle East? Ten weeks and more, a full seventy-three days, I had waited and planned to get back to London. One week after getting there I was booking flights and getting ready to go back to an imperial capital we had known even before Britain planted its presence on our shores and changed our mental orientations forever.

He might have not been able to file his own papers, but the old boy spoke the truth when he said,

“if your envelope comes back full, it’s because they’ve given you the rejection letters … if you get a thin envelope, they’ve just given you the passport back.”

How strange it felt to get only my passports back; I almost wanted to throw them away, to hand the opportunity to Ghassan and many others like him who deserved the opportunity every bit as much as I did. The mocking grass seemed insignificant and I couldn’t care when the young woman next to me laughed at the way I jumped in the air. Then I could feel the Sun’s glow on my forehead, and the bitterness of a visa odyssey hit me.

While London had been in throes of a blistering dry cold, Amman was drenched in much-awaited torrential, freezing rain. Just a day before I had come to Jordan the first time around, to make my initial application, Tamara had seen me off at Heathrow, and our scarves and jackets could scarcely hold us apart. She had waited for me for two hours on a train platform before I arrived to catch a flight neither one of us wanted me to be on. The summer Sun and Mediterranean air already seemed so very different from the cold breezes of those days; and the only achievement I could show for the time it took the weather to change was a piece of paper giving me the right to work in London, and it came a month late.

Waiting For a Visa--Part II

2009-05-22T18:50:00.005+03:00

This is the continuation of the previous post, as the name suggests. Although it's kind of self-contained, you may wish to read the build-up here.

Waiting for a Visa: Part II

“So what are the English like once you have a chance to meet them? Are the people on the street as uncouth as these guys at the Consulate?”

How to explain? Hearing his question, it was impossible not to remember one of the later conversations I had had with Tamara. Beautifully enough, as she always was, she mentioned after a week in a secluded English village in Dorset—the sort of place which otherwise exists only in some vague cultural memory and is, therefore, as English as can be—remarking,

“It's not like they say … the English are really quite nice.”

I remember feeling slightly taken aback; as if I had wished to have been there to help her discover the kindness of English strangers; but it was true. So like a mathematician re-treading older ground, I had his question's answer ready. It made me feel awkward to have to tell this man that the place he had been planning to see was worth the while, for the people if definitely not for the food or the weather. How strange it was to tell him that for the most part, the English didn't care much for ID cards and unscrupulous attention to formality. It would do him no good to know that the villagers in Dorset had no appetite for these spiders' webs of paperwork. I told him regardless.

“It's not as if you see the police everywhere you go there … it's not like here”

We both looked around to make sure of exactly where it was we were. Finding the only place in the neighbourhood that was going to serve us a beer meant sitting on the best outdoor garden furniture of the Venice cafe. The name didn't seem particularly promising; the towns of Greater Syria are littered with cafes and bars and restaurants named for Italian cities. Just on the other side of a relatively small sea, Europe, and then for us London, would begin. Just like the grass earlier, it was as if even the local surroundings told you it was better to go abroad. In Jordan, even the beer they served was Dutch, instead of, as Ghassan and I had wishfully hoped for, brought over from Taybeh near RamAllah. Just in case we had a doubt, Amman was there to remind us that the grass was greener—and more abundant to begin with—to the North and West from here. Except that at the moment we couldn't go.

So we clinked bottles of Dutch beer and shared white cheese and cucumbers, and thought of the banality of it all. Ghassan found it difficult to form a complete sentence without expletives uncalled for on the table, and so I tried to help by asking about where he would be in RamAllah; RamAllah always brought smiles to the faces of those who knew her.

By the sounds of things, Ghassan had spent many an-hour sipping Taybeh beer and chewing on nuts under fig tree-shaded coffee shops in that hilly West Bank town. There he would sit and watch as others played backgammon--”I don't play, my brothers and I just never learned, I just kind of watch people do it...”--and observe as the world continued to braid an ever-tighter knot out of the Palestinians. The crooks amongst us found it easier to rob the innocent this way, and the innocent found that they could console themselves. For most of us, it meant just sitting on the sidelines and enjoying backgammon.

Tamara's father had been sitting there whiling away the tedium of his days by playing cards and backgammon at the same coffee shops as Ghassan would go to watch. With all the guilt of my former life of writing horoscopes, I would carry the gospel to anybody who would listen that coincidences meant nothing, that a lucky rabbit's foot or a fortuitous date of birth was going to help you as much as a penguin was going to be helped by a TV remote control; but then I didn't want to believe this now. I wanted to believe that there was a benevolent hand making me just the right strand in just the right strand of the braid; and I needed to know more about Tamara's father.

In better days I'd seen his face in photos and heard his voice echoing through a mobile phone; I'd heard of how Jamal Najih had overcome the loss of his hearing to as a youth to become a character on the West Bank. He would read the stories from people's lips and would tell jokes to follow up on them. As if proving he had a musicality with its own inaudible rhythm he would even, for the very lucky, write lyrical poems that would appear in Palestine's newspapers. It was good to know Jamal was well and that he was famous that Tamara had inherited. All this I wanted to believe over beer and cheese and cigarettes in Amman.

Ghassan had his own problems to worry and believe about. Through the years of NGO workers and diplomats and visiting scholars, and a now-former lover, he'd come to think that he had a home in England, with RamAllah being choked into a pale reflection of its former self. Now he didn't know if that home was ever going to be real to him.

“RamAllah isn't so bad now that I think about it ...”

“I've actually wanted to move there myself” I told him.

It was true once; whether it was true any more is another matter. Would I actually belong there? At one point I had imagined myself sitting on a table and playing Tarneeb with Tamara's father. At an earlier time, I had dreamed of teaching and working at Bir Zeit, making something of being a physicist in a country filled with scientists and poets and broken dreams. Yet here I now was, within driving distance of a gaze over Jerusalem and I was going, not to cross the Bridge—we all know which one it is when we mention it—but to apply for a work visa to go and live in London, and over the years of being a Kuwait-born Palestinian exile living in London, London became home and the Homeland became a memory to be consumed over the dinner-table. I wasn't rushing to help the homeland; I was rushing towards another self-imposed exile.

“I think you'll get your visa by the way ...” Ghassan offered without encouragement.

“You've been waiting for 3 working days now? Yeah, they would have rejected you on the first day. It takes them time just to print out the stuff; something tells me you're going to get yours tomorrow.”

Here was a man I had met only about 2 hours and several beers ago, and now I was prepared to hang on to his words like they were gold dust. He was speaking with all the authority of a scholar who didn't know how to fill out visa forms, and I needed to believe he was right, and I knew I was going to come back the next day and wait again throughout the same fiasco and ask the same questions at the window and maybe get another response that would allow me to continue hoping.

Epilogue … to be continued.

Waiting For a Visa--Part I

2009-05-20T11:07:00.002+03:00

Waiting for a Visa

It comes as something of a shock to one recently arrived from Kuwait to realise just how un-green Amman truly is. To those of us who are regular visitors from the Gulf, the name of Jordan’s capital city brings to mind the aroma of citrus and mulberry trees wafting down on hill-inclined residential boulevards. Coming into the town from the outlying airport, the pine forests are like a diminutive Yosemite, the difference being more donkey-pulled carts bringing the early watermelons to road-side stalls. Then grass changes everything.

While you wait outside the awning-covered entrance to the WorldBridge Visa Center in Amman—British connections notwithstanding, it’s the American spelling which carries the day in today’s Middle East—you come across that rarest of luxuries in the Levant, a grass lawn. Between the awnings and the pavement in the smart Shmeisani neighbourhood, in an area not much more than 10 meters squared, the blades of grass insult your senses, telling you that the cedar trees were a mirage, you have been in a desert all along. In a country where drought is a perennial menace to drinking water in homes, the grass screams to be sent to another, more green, perhaps even more pleasant, little piece of land tucked away in the North Sea and off the coast of Europe. Here, on this patch of grass, eagerly anticipating crowds gather to get news of their visa applications to England, to Britain, the United Kingdom; usually London.

Here, over the English lawn in the desert city of Amman, the wealthy villa-dwellers of Abdoun, collecting visit visas for their annual shopping trips, stand next to Iraqi refugees—Amman being deemed a safer destination than Baghdad to apply for a visa—seeking to join family members in Kensal Green. Here too stand young academics from BirZeit, having crossed the River Jordan, who now wait for their student visas to complete PhDs in archaeology at the University of London. Together with them are Damascene merchants, and a motley crew of young and old, some assuredly wealthy, others self-consciously middle class and still others desperately aspiring to escape some perilous non-existence in Jordan and the surrounding countries.

For those waiting to find out if they have been granted a visa, the doors open at 4:00; we began arriving at 3:00. By 3:30, the first numbers are assigned to the grass-stomping crowd. The signs all over the visa centre let you know that “WorldBridge… a business operation in association with the UK Border Agency… our employees … not involved in the decision-making process …” Maybe it’s the mild sun-induced delirium, or maybe just the pure chaos of humanity, but neither the security guards outside the centre nor the waiting crowds paid any attention to the meaning of this sign; instead, a sort of theatrical exchange played itself out.

“You can’t stand on the grass … do you want to get your number? Want your visa today? Get off that square, that’s being monitored by CCTV!...I don’t care, just shut up!”

After some abuse from the security guards, a chorus of replies comes back from some of the older men gathered outside.

“What good are you anyway? You can’t even tell me if my application has been processed or not! I’ve been coming here every day for 2 weeks and you can’t tell me a thing! Who do you think you are?”

The thought of standing outside, every day for 2 weeks in the dusty and hot Amman summer came over the people waiting outside. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. Called in by number, one-by-one, we were searched and passed through the revolving gates, reminders of prison dramas, to the seating area indoors. A security guard, clearly a man whose passion to work in airport customs was thwarted, but never crushed, a long time ago, goes through your pockets with sadistic completeness. Quite why any of this was necessary was beyond me. A television screen elevated in the top corner of the room lets out the BBC World Service. Posters on the walls urge you to visit Edinburgh, and another reminds any curious applicant that lying on your visa application will “bring shame onto you and your family”. The whole place has the sanitised and unwelcoming feel of an airport waiting lounge, before people thought of making those a bit more comfortable. Now again the sadism of the security guards forces its way onto us.

“Sit there … don’t leave that chair empty, sit right next to that man over there if you could …no, no, you can’t take that jumper off… do you have to fill a cup from the water cooler right now?”

The spectacle having been carried out to the guards’ pleasure—they always win in the end—we are left alone to sit and wait for a few moments and, some nervous conversation grows out of nowhere. Ghassan, sitting next to me in remarkably casual polo shirt and jeans, was a new face to me.

Despite his choice of t-shirt, Ghassan, who would normally have been in RamAllah, was clearly not in the best of moods. Over a period of 2 months, he’d been rejected 3 times for a student visa, and didn’t seem too hopeful that his fourth attempt, about which he was enquiring today, would come back positively. Like so many in the Middle East, his attitude was characterised by one of total fatalism: By sheer force of will, he would either get the visa, or would not. How he had expected to get anywhere in the past was slightly mysterious as, he explained, “I didn’t even bother giving them anything other than the application form the first 2 times—how was I supposed to know they really wanted the stuff?”

Ghassan was a good guy, and, given his credentials, a lot more clever than he had given the British Consulate in Amman reason to believe. His thesis at BirZeit had been supervised by a cousin of mine, the sort of relative one likes to boast about, on account of his stature amongst Palestinian historians, but who in reality I met only once, at a stilted gathering. The Palestinian diaspora being what it is, we instantly found our ways from one mutual friend to another. Soon enough, my number was called and I waited to see what the envelope on the other side of the screen might hold for me.

“Ayyad? Serial number? Nope, not here…come back tomorrow”.

So it was. The suspense had been suspended hardly after I knew it had built up to begin with.

Back outside, Amman had cooled down slightly in between the time it took to arrive and wait and the moment it took them to tell me there was nothing to be known. A little meandering stroll, cigarette in hand, usually solves all problems, or so I told myself.

What was one other day when I had been stuck in Kuwait for 2 months waiting to make this application? When exactly did the days turn into weeks and the weeks into months? At what point did it make sense to wait for 2 months for a 24-month visa? Just how much had I lost through all of this? Was it worth it?

It was impossible not to bring these questions to the stress of the affair, and I wondered if it reflected itself on my completed forms. In fact, none of the really important stuff could be put down on the form. I could let them know that I was most definitely not a supporter of terrorism, nor had I committed any acts either in collaboration with the Nazis or the Red Army. I could—and did—undertake legally that none of those awful things were true about me. Yet there was no real place to let them know that I have been known to be the life and soul of many parties in London. That in fact my knowledge of some bits of English history rivalled most of the natives'. That I was the kind of guy who loved London every bit as much as she loved me. There was to be no place to tell them that I'd already suffered enough as a result of the last 2 months; on no question on the form was I asked if I had unduly placed my life in suspended animation as a result of this. There was no room for me to tell them that there had been once, not too long ago, a lovely young woman in London who loved me very much; and that all the waiting and frustration finally doused out a flame which once burnt brightly and warmly. Where was the compensation for this bureaucratic smouldering of human mystery?

Ghassan was probably thinking the same thing. With his palm to his forehead, he looked over the rejection letter and tried to make sense of his prospects. Adding insult to injury, Ghassan was told that he was, presumably, a cheat and a liar, and a negligent one at that: “You have submitted copies of purported bank statements… you did not submit original copies of these statements…” Purported. The cruelty lied in the way that a foreign speaker would not pick up on the hint, would not know how to purport in the first place, but was told all the same that it was not going to be good.

“Well, I really don’t understand, I gave them exactly the papers I got from the Arab Bank in RamAllah … these are the only sort of statements the bank can give me.” Kafka had written Jackals and Arabs about themes not too far away from this piece of land, and now his wit had returned to the region in the shape of a visa rejection letter.

It would be malicious, but nonetheless true, to admit that I took comfort from the fact that I wasn’t the only person to suffer with bureaucracy. It was reassuring that this was nothing personal; at least, there were other perfectly decent young Palestinian men who were slapped around in exactly the same way. I instinctively offered Ghassan a cigarette; even life in London, and longing to live in London anew, the habit of gifting cigarettes, in the sure knowledge that they will be appreciated, is only good manners in the Arab Middle East. So we smoked and talked.

Just as had happened with me, Ghassan’s last romance had fizzled in the midst of a bureaucratic to-and-fro. Standing between him and English pastures, between pints of warm beer at the pub with classmates who would quickly become friends, overturning the stereotypes most had of the English; all of these culture shocks would remain unreal by Ghassan. The exasperation was enough to bring out raw honesty; maybe everybody in Jordan smoked, and shared cigarettes, but sharing a drink was a sign of intimacy reserved for those who were truly special.

So time it was to find a beer.

Is there any hope to be found here?

2008-07-30T15:43:00.002+03:00

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.

Living in the Future: Why London Will be Like the Gulf Very Soon

2008-04-13T15:27:00.003+03:00

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.

This time it's for real: Facebook has "deleted" Palestine

2008-02-29T15:10:00.002+03:00

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.

The Mughniya Affair: Who they Didn't Kill

2008-02-13T16:54:00.003+03:00

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.

Where to spot me next...

2008-02-12T18:23:00.000+03:00

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.

Nick Broomfield’s Bad Film Trying to be Good

2008-02-02T14:29:00.000+03:00

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 Twelve Months of Ramadan

2007-12-27T16:11:00.000+03:00

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

My Letter in The Observer

2007-11-15T21:38:00.000+03:00

Not many people are keen on Saudi Arabia, but when they get bashed for doing this that they actually didn't, then that's just stupid. So follow the link below to read my letter which the Observer published last Sunday:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,2209155,00.html

(You have to follow the link and scroll well down ....)

In London, but ...

2007-10-22T17:46:00.000+03:00

... leaving Kuwait has meant that the amount of nail-bitingly frustrating time I have at hand to write blog posts has decreased exponentially. Of course, this doesn't mean I love anybody any less (and then again, nobody has bothered commenting in the mean time, any way). SO I will hold off on telling you all about how I'm back in the swing of things doing physics nowadays, but I will instead post this link:

http://www.jerusalem-in-exile.net/

If you're a fellow Palesto living outside of the homeland, then visit the site and fill in the blanks. Share your experience of exile.

Do take care ....

Deodorising Karl Popper

2007-09-04T14:23:00.001+03:00

On those occasions when I make an attempt to not appear like such a pitiful depressive, I point out to correspondents and friends, over here and abroad alike that Kuwait is the kind of place where you can read...and read, and read. The lack of a nightlife might make itself felt in other ways not so nice, but generally, when I pick up a book and find the bookmark, I can rest assured that no friend is going to ring out of the blue to suggest we go get a pint, watch a film or attend a concert--of course, this is ultimately because Kuwait is a dry country where all the films are insipid pop-flicks and the only concerts which ever happen are never publicised (an entire season of world music this summer was sponsored by the Youth & Arts Council, a publicly funded body, where international guests played to empty auditoria because, I gather, nobody could be bothered to advertise anything more than 24 hours in advance, if they advertised them at all).

If you've read anything, you know that books come in different flavours... sure, they all have something in common, and what they have in common is always debatable, but there are books which you read from cover to cover only to forget the characters mid-way (anything written by the Brontes of this world for me) or feel like maybe if one more author died it wouldn't be such a bad thing (see Thomas Friedman, or Peter Singer). Then there are the books which you make you wish you knew people who were more like them: Insightful, funny, poignant, thought-provoking, sexually thrilling, even if sometimes, tragically, flawed (maybe not all at the same time). While it may not be everybody's idea of a piece of vaudeville titillation, Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery definitely belongs in the latter category.

Aside from anything else, the book should be read to remind one of two oft-neglected truths in the modern world, at least by those hooked on American television and its trappings. Firstly, philosophy did not die out with the Stoic school, but is instead an active field of enquiry that stretched well into the Twentieth Century (I once wanted to hit a man who sat next to me at the dinner table and told me that he read Philosophy "but only the good old stuff, like Plato and Aristotle"). Secondly, there are some real questions about what does, and what does not, make science.

Take for example the biggest imprint the book left on this reviewer anyway. To qualify as a theory, says Popper and everybody else, an idea should be able to make future predictions about what will happen in a way that can be disproved, or "falsifiable". To borrow an example from Carl Sagan, if you want to posit the statement that a large pink elephant is in the room, you must be able to show in some way that said elephant has an effect. Maybe you can not see the elephant, but even so, one must be able to smell, feel, hear or otherwise feel the influence of the elephant: At this stage, you must be able to design a way of testing your idea which could conceivably go wrong. If it is impossible for your idea to be proven wrong in any way, then you have gone into the realms of the un-scientific. In short, if it's inconceivable that the suggestion you're putting forward could be disproved, then it just isn't science.

Of course, the fact that the above statement is so well-known, to the point of being a mantra amongst some, makes Popper's books difficult to approach with fresh eyes: You're not really going to disagree with what you're about to read, but the development of the argument which Popper puts forward leaves you with the kind of passionate commitment worthy of--wait for it--a religious initiate. Instead of mildly disliking evolutionary psychologists ("evo pscyhs" as the dimwits call themselves), you feel like wanting to tear all their writings to shreds and burn them in a pile. Like his ideas on falsifiability, Popper also expresses in The Logic of Scientific Discovery some ideas on the interpretation of probabilities, particularly as it applies to quantum theory, also building here on the contributions of those who went before. This is probably the part of the (episodic) book which I most want to read anew, partially for the polemic value of not having to hear someone say that quantum physics "allows you to be two places at once".

On a slightly more disturbing note, Popper also goes to great lengths to suggest that inductive reasoning doesn't count as science. Well, if you can show that n is true, and later that n-1 is true, soon enough you will have mathematicians believing things, so why Popper doesn't like it I don't know. The use of empirical evidence to work towards something also has an air of appealing utilitarianism about it. It's certainly true that some studies of this type go past the peer-review machine and into the media, like the link between deodorant and breast cancer. It might not be easy to find a falsifiable experiment for this one, but do we really want to take risks? Sure, if you're living in the rarefied world of Noether's theorem and Einstein's Relativity, then empirical law science is a little something for the kiddies, but I have in the past wandered away from physics, and seen the ugly world of analytical chemistry, where they use the Beer-Lambert Law, and I have seen that while it is grubby, workmen's science, it is good.

Almost as good, in fact, as Popper's book, which has come out at me through the decades to relieve me of my boredom in Kuwait.

I AM the Guns of August

2007-09-03T16:04:00.000+03:00

It seems that I am a human incarnation of this book I have yet to read by an author who I understand to be one of the high-brow greats...or so this overly pretentious smarmy online psychometric test would have me believe. Just click a few buttons on a website and see how you measure up...

You're The Guns of August!

by Barbara Tuchman

Though you're interested in war, what you really want to know is what
causes war. You're out to expose imperialism, militarism, and nationalism for what they
really are. Nevertheless, you're always living in the past and have a hard time dealing
with what's going on today. You're also far more focused on Europe than anywhere else in
the world. A fitting motto for you might be "Guns do kill, but so can
diplomats."

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Proof that Democracy is Alive and Well

2007-08-27T21:08:00.000+03:00

As if in response to the fiasco with the Kuwaiti weekends, we now have proof from England, the teet from which all parliaments suckled, that people, indeed, are capable of ruling themselves.

Shortly before leaving to make way for his fiscally sound Chancellor, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair outdid himself and set up a website to allow Brits the right to petition their Prime Minister directly in a coordinated way. After the drama surrounding the former British Prime Minister's refusal to listen to protestors opposed to the Iraq war, this was his way to show that he was "listening" to the people in England and, had it succeeded, it would have in fact been the complete opposite to how it was billed--it would have been the end of democracy. When people petition a leader instead of working to effect change themselves over time, what they are doing is recognising the petitioned's power over them, and acquiescing in the system which grants it. The Abbasid Caliphs and their contamperaneous European counterparts received petitioners; a modern Prime Minister should be no different from the citizens... and so, it was with great relish and joy that I discovered the "rejected petitions" lists.

Being inherently sensible, the e-petitioners knew exactly how to catch Central Government out: Demand that the UK invade France; Cancel Tuesdays and replace them with Fridays; lock Jade Goody inside the Big Brother House for good and best of all "make Pete's mom a national resource". There is usually a very pithy explanation for why the said petitiions were rejected, because they were "outside the remit or powers of the Prime Minister and Government", and this is it how it should be. They can impose taxation, fight wars abroad and build roads, but on the really important issues--locking up Jade Goody, changing the order of the days in the week and making friends' mothers available--governments are powerless. It is with the people that power lies. Enjoy reading: Great Ideas from the British Electorate.

Just an update...

2007-08-26T20:02:00.000+03:00

... with regards to the last post: Kuwait will be enjoying a 3-day weekend this Thursday, Friday and Saturday, after which the country is meant to switch to the Friday and Saturday weekend. Momentous stuff indeed.

Today is also the day I turned 26... some times I feel like I've had the weight of the world on my shoulders and grown decades before my time, and others I just want to hang on to any shred of youth and try to tell myself that I am not that old. It struck me in a conversation today that I have only 14 years left before turning 40, and whence middle aged. My what a waste it's been, but some of it has been fun no doubt.

Well, until I figure out something a little bit more light-hearted to blog ...and, oh, in case you guys have missed it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKsoXHYICqU

It almost makes me want to be a Democrat... pity about the Middle East policies.

In a Month of Saturdays...

2007-08-08T11:49:00.000+03:00

Picking out of a hat any number of Kuwait-related topics to blog on, I have chosen to write, my good friends, on the defiance of the Kuwaiti legislature (the link is in Arabic by the way) in the face of an executive decree to move the countryto a Friday/Saturday weekend as opposed to the current Thursday/Friday arrangement. Now, I believe that it's good to get a sense of perspective for these things. In this day and age, it might be useful for many of us to remember that there still exist many ways to count a year--Jewish, Hijri, even Bengali and Russian--slightly skewed from the normal Gregorian 3-6-5 full rotation about the Sun business, so I don't necessarily start off from a point of opposition to the Thursday/Friday weekend.

The thinking goes, that by having our weekends on the Thursday/Friday, we allow ourselves the same days of rest as the rest of the world and yet keep a vestige of Islam by ensuring that "our" holy day, conveniently a Friday, is kept sacred. You can see that things can get easily complicated if you're planning a bank transfer, parcel delivery or even an overseas phone call to a country anywhere else in the world, since even in the UAE and Qatar the state bureaucracies have adopted a Friday/Saturday weekend. On the other hand, it might be an idea to think of why we of have a weekend in the first place.

A "weekend" is itself is a patently Western idea, and the fact that the weekend came from Europe says much not only about differing patterns of industrialisation, but also about variations in hermeneutics between Islam and Christianity. The Western Sabbath has its justification in Genesis, where God creates a universe in six days and rests on the Seventh; somehow, this was interpreted very early on to mean that people, too, should rest on a seventh day. Remarkably, the line in Genesis is found nearly verbatim--translations permitting--in the Koran's Story of the Hefer, where:

"God created the Universe in Six Days, and rested on His throne on the Seventh"

(my translation)

but historically, the interpretation of this verse focused only on the anthropomorphism of God in this part of the Koran, and never on the number of days or hours it took God to create the world . It's only trite here to point out that a 7-day week in Genesis and in the Koran fits nicely into the Babylonian precedent to both of them, but I've just done it any way. Never in the history of Islam has a significant personage read the above verse and gone about insisting that we all not work on Friday--that people are now insisting we keep Friday holy is a sign of our self-orientalisation as it were, something which you all know I love to pick on. For the record, the debate between different Muslim attitudes to the anthropomorphism in the Koran is dealt with quite well in Nasr Abu Zaid's
الاتجاه العقلي في التفسير
(this book is not yet availale in English, I think, but I don't mind plugging Nasr Abu Zaid, one of the writers who restored my faith in Arab civilisation).

Indeed, in these days where the "Islamic finance" and the archaic codes of practice for Islamic banking are being promoted as the new elixir of life, we might choose to remember that in the very early days of Islam, the re-opening of markets after prayers were over on Friday was considered an imperative. In the very mercentile belief system of my ancestors--almost all of the great early Muslims were merchants at one point or another in their lives, including the Prophet Mohammed--money is not filthy, nor does dealing with it on the hallowed day involve make one less worthy in the eyes of God.

Ergo, the weekend itself is an example of that most vile of intellectual contraband in the Middle East, the بدعة, the innovation, the corrupting alien concept brought in to un-do the majestic purity of the religion of the desert. Never, in a month of Saturdays must this transgression on my faith be allowed to pass. My suggestion is: Drop the weekends altogether. Let us work like coolies under the sun. In order to amend for previous trespasses on the holy law, I suggest each parliamentarian in Kuwait gets 10 lashes for every Friday he shirked from work at the Assembly.

Just a funny video...

2007-07-25T10:05:00.000+03:00

Politically incorrect in the absolutely funniest way ... I'm waiting till I get some more comments before posting again. I know you guys are reading it, why isn't anybody posting?

Naji El Ali: 20 Years On

2007-07-22T06:35:00.000+03:00

Today, 22 July 2007 marks two decades since Palestinian caricaturist Naji El Ali was shot--and eventually killed--by mysterious gunmen in London. El Ali had been forced into exile in the UK after the PLO leadership pressured Kuwait (that would be the Kuwait I live in now) to discontinue their protection of the artist, who had gained Pan Arab fame through his cartoons which appeared in Kuwait's quality Al Qabas (which I notice did not run a front-page story on this one today...).

El Ali's assassination was another of Palestine's multi-layered tragedies: Some are convinced that Arafat himself ordered the shooting (the reasons given vary from the somewhat plausible political motivations to the simply silly). Regardless, Yasser Arafat does of course carry some of the blame for El Ali's killing with him in the grave for having insisted that Kuwait (where he would have been reasonably safe) force the man out. In London, city of international espionage, nobody could be safe with a situation where the government tolerated a modest level of terrorism in order to better keep an eye on all the spooks.

I was reminded of this event, and the debate surrounding who to blame, in a discussion I had on Facebook and thought that it might be a good idea to bring it up on the blog...Despite all the different groups who try to claim him, Naji El Ali was most importantly an artist, whose work can not be commandeered for one cause or the other. So I'm going to remain quiet about what I think and instead post a site in honour of Handala, El Ali's emblematic character who became the poster boy for Palestinian refugees: http://www.handala.org

Where my Limits Stop

2007-07-13T10:51:00.000+03:00

It's good to test one's limits. So after I've been blogging ceaselessly about the shortcomings of my religion of birth and my co-religionists (such as it were), it is quite relieving, in a way, to be offended by some crass type of assault on Islam. It almost makes me realise I still have some religious bones in my body; or perhaps I still have some concept of good taste.

The latest viral video to be doing the rounds in this part of the world, which will completely not help the "dialogue of civilisations", a recording of a young American woman soldier describing how a mosque on her base in the Middle East is regularly used for sexual liasons or, as our friend here from (what I believe is) Camp Doha in Kuwait puts it "a fuck". So when we learn that not only the rank-and-file but that Commissioned Officers are going into a "Hajji Church" to escape the heat of the desert and the monotony of barracks life, I was surprised to find myself in a mad rage. This type of thing should not be treated lightly, which is why I'm hoping this video gets a wide circulation--it is building steadily in Kuwait--and that somebody finds a way of doing something about it.

Now I'm wise enough to know that this sort of thing does and will happen--in an almost reciprocal way, I knew of Arab immigrants abusing the hospitality of churches in Europe (I remember having to explain to some fellows who I was helping with assylum applications that they shouldn't be putting out their cigarettes in a church garden), and amongst Europeans themselves there is the regular use of churchyards by the downtrodden to shoot heroin and sleep rough. The difference is, these people were not the downtrodden of the world; they were armed, trained members of a foreign army for which the host country has been ludicrously welcoming. What's more, and I suspect this will be the biggest factor in the dessemination of this video and its contents, our lovely GI Jane here saw fit to publicise her act through an oh-so-Yankee game of Truth or Dare, as if it were a flippant indiscretion, on the same level as kissing your married boss on the lips after one too many drinks at the Christmas party. Maybe this is how we deserve to be treated: We've gone and allowed this foreign army to come down and take out another Arab leader. This is what you get.

Two Eagles Saved: Spun Gold for the Apologists of Israel

2007-07-10T11:35:00.000+03:00

With a strategic victory downright impossible for either side, it is now a cliche that the war over television audiences' perception of the Palestine conflict is as important as any short-term military gains. At the beginning of the intifada, spokesmen of the Israeli state did not shirk from appearing, speaking Arabic, on Arab television screens to present their "case" (that Al Jazeera bent over backwards and made this possible, through a brave show of professionalism, is a long-overlooked fact in the Western media). Palestinians meanwhile learned a few tricks in the early days of battle: Michael Tarazi and Diana Buttu--a face it was hard to argue with--were brought out to Anglophone television viewers, instead of the regular bald, moustached party apparatchiks who were previously tasked with these missions (the re-appearance of this stereotype, in the person of Sufyan Abu Zaida, on Al Jazeera International recently, is a sad reminder of those Bad Old Days of the Palestinian image). So when an Israeli park ranger finds out that 2 endangered Golden Eagles were being "held" in Hebron, in what he later described as "cramped conditions", the mis-named Israel Defense Forces jumped at the opportunity for a media coup.

Surely, it must be a source of some consternation, not to say confusion, for the family of Gilad Shalit: If the Israeli military was willing to search the homes of innocent Palestinians in Hebron for the sake of two feathered friends, why not go look for Shalit in Gaza? Of course, the so-called Defense Forces might have taken the time to investigate what their settlers are doing to the defense-less people of Hebron (warning: You really need to prepare youself before watching this video), but about this I have not received any advice. Could it be, and in a way I hate to suggest this, that the Israeli authorities are actually more interested in scoring media points than might be healthy for a state? Or perhaps, that Israel is in need of proving, to itself for a start, what makes Israel, Israel?

The recent release of Alan Johnston paved the way for what will become EU acceptance of the Palestinian government (I have discussed this before)--the earlier one...or the emergency one... the Hamas cabinet, you know what I mean--and this left Israel badly in need of proving something to the world, at least to the Western world, and maybe the best step was to show, once again, just how "Western" Israel is in relation to the surrounding barbarians, i.e. me, my family and my mates. Now, with an ever-changing, dynamic Palestinian society, this is becoming difficult. Palestinian feminists would claim that the situation for women in Palestine is not quite equitous but, as our elections process, and the very existence of feminists suggest, we are not Saudi Arabia. Even the Alan Johnston debacle brought out the very best of Palestine: it displayed our "civil society" of trades unions and associations and school boards, where it became clear just how "modern" Palestinian society could be.

On the other hand, few issues show the differing world views of East and West as much as the treatment of animals, or animal "rights" as some would have it. In my new-old home on the Arabian Peninsula, there is much adoration for the beasts of Bedouin lore: the horse, the bird of prey and, garden space permitting, the Seluki hound, but even these here are now a novelty in the homes of the rich or trophies, with little appreciation of our relation, as humans, to these creatures. To be sure, these eagles, had they reached market, would have been the cherished living room ornaments of a harmless, pot-bellied "Lt Colonel" in the Palestinian armed services, who would have called himself "Abu Nisrain" (or "Father of the Two Eagles" in Modern Arabic--the word Nisr is actually "vulture" in Medieaval Arabic, but I digress), because our Lt Colonel friend is embarrassingly childless as of this writing, and wanted to use the eagles them to remind himself, and bemused guests working for European aid agencies, of his once-famous masculinity, which reached its peak back in the pay-as-you-go days of the Beirut Corniche.

For the now-dejected Abu Nisrain, his eagles have left his man-fantasy and gone to live in a theme-park world of Israeli nature enthusiasts, for whom nature, feathered, four-legged and scaly-skinned (and I'm not just talking about Netanyahu) fits into their Western model of nationalism. For us this is not so.

I was recently a guest--prisoner?--at the Kuwait Imax cinema where I saw the Siegfried and Roy flick. It struck me that it could have passed for a Nazi propaganda film paid for by the Las Vegas tourist board. Then I was taken back to an even more disturbing thought that has recurred to me over the years: If the European nationalists can weave a love of their surrounding "nature" into the story of their nationalism, why not us? We have no alps to worship, but there are some amazing pine forests in Greater Syria and Oman is blessed with mountain ranges, waterfalls, sand dunes, beaches... (OK, just get out of these parentheses and go to Oman). We do have our own instance of nature and natural beauty, and perhaps our lack of nationalistic pride in who we are and where we come from--literally--has resulted in a complete absence of any environmentalist movement to speak of within the Arab Homeland (I hate the phrase "Arab World" I mean, when did that one come about?). Going back in time, we can see there must have been some sense of pride in the surrounding Old Country. Everybody, or at least everybody who can still read Arabic, knows of the Taghreebit Bani Hilal and the love the refugees who were scattered to Palestine and Morocco had for the old country of Najd. Many air-conditioned shopping malls and American fast food restaurants later, the attachments with the old country are under threat, and the vast piles of rubbish left in the desert by picnicers never elicit a word of serious protest. We have hastily decided that the desert is a place of itchy sand and kept only the paternalistic politics of Bedouin life, abandoning the environment to fend for itself.

So all in all this episode has been for me, as so many others have, a multi-layered disaster. While our in-house rifts prevent us from capitalising on the safe release of Johnston, the Israelis take two golden eagles all the way to the bank. A further two of my own countrymen, however dim and misguided for trying to sell two eagles, are now to be detained in conditions which will probably make an eagle's cage seem luxurious. Lt Colonel Abu Nisrain will now be staring ever more vacuously into his child-less existence, and will probably beat his wife, who will accept her fate as a desperate soul in an increasingly lawless realm run by men with guns. Ergo, we are now less modern, and this sucks.

Just in case...

2007-06-27T14:49:00.000+03:00

When I was a kid, my parents used to tell me that if I never achieved in school, that I could look forward to a life on the streets. I'm not sure the evidence has held up their opinions. I never really did "well" at school, and so far I have not gone wanting; but then again I do now have an advanced degree in the physical sciences, and well, life is not THAT great for me. So this story from the usually wealth-friendly telegraph just serves to make the point that one can be both wealthy beyond need and stupid beyond feasability.

If you can't find a way express your thoughts, ask a poet

2007-06-20T15:58:00.000+03:00

It's been a while since I've posted anything. I must admit that the attention I get from people emailing demanding "post, post!" is flattering, but the main reason I haven't written anything is sheer dumbfoundedness at how my countrymen have found increasingly inventive ways of killing each other. It's quite maddening.

So, a few days when a friend of mine, a staunch Fathawi sent me the following poem by Mahmoud Darwish, printed in the Palestine daily Al Ayyam, I thought it would be cathartic to trnalsate it. Those of you on Facebook can read the note; this slightly more polished version has taken on some of the suggestions of the meticulous Najeeb--our very own--and for this he gets much thanks.

I also noticed that a quite similar translation was posted on http://conflictblotter.com by C Levinson on the same day as my Facebook note; I want to point out that any similarities are probably due to the very direct style Darwish uses here. In short, this poem translates reasonably well but is just not a good poem.

(Apologies, of course, for the messiness of the formatting.)

أنت منذ الآن غيرك!
"يوميـات"
محمود درويش

You are, from now, Different

Mahmoud Darwish

هل كان علينا أن نسقط من عُلُوّ شاهق، ونرى دمنا على أيدينا... لنُدْرك أننا لسنا ملائكة.. كما كنا نظن؟
Did we have to fall from our great heights, to see our own blood on our own hands, to learn that we are not the angels we thought we were?

وهل كان علينا أيضاً أن نكشف عن عوراتنا أمام الملأ، كي لا تبقى حقيقتنا عذراء؟
Did we have to expose ourselves shamelessly, so that our own reality would lose its innocence?
كم كَذَبنا حين قلنا: نحن استثناء!
How deceitful it was for us to exclaim: "We are an exception!"

أن تصدِّق نفسك أسوأُ من أن تكذب على غيرك!
To believe your own lies is worse than to lie to others!

أن نكون ودودين مع مَنْ يكرهوننا، وقساةً مع مَنْ يحبّونَنا - تلك هي دُونيّة المُتعالي، وغطرسة الوضيع!
To be gentle with those who hate us, and vicious with those who love us[1]—that is the proud man's secret vice, and the gall of the weak.

أيها الماضي! لا تغيِّرنا... كلما ابتعدنا عنك!
To the Past I say, do not change us just because we move away from you.

أيها المستقبل: لا تسألنا: مَنْ أنتم؟
وماذا تريدون مني؟ فنحن أيضاً لا نعرف.

The future I beg: Do not ask us: "Who are you? What do you want of me?"
We also do not know.

أَيها الحاضر! تحمَّلنا قليلاً، فلسنا سوى عابري سبيلٍ ثقلاءِ الظل!
Of the Present, I request: Bear with us a little, we are but uncouth vagabonds!

الهوية هي: ما نُورث لا ما نَرِث. ما نخترع لا ما نتذكر. الهوية هي فَسادُ المرآة التي يجب أن نكسرها كُلَّما أعجبتنا الصورة!
Identity is: What we pass on. Not what was passed on to us. It is something we invent, not something for us to recollect. Identity is the mirror to be broken every time we like what we see.

تَقَنَّع وتَشَجَّع، وقتل أمَّه.. لأنها هي ما تيسَّر له من الطرائد.. ولأنَّ جنديَّةً أوقفته وكشفتْ له عن نهديها قائلة: هل لأمِّك، مثلهما؟

He donned a mask and borrowed courage, and killed his own mother; because that is who he could kill…and because a woman-soldier stopped him at a checkpoint, revealed her breasts to him and asked: "Does your mother too, not have these?"

لولا الحياء والظلام، لزرتُ غزة، دون أن أعرف الطريق إلى بيت أبي سفيان الجديد، ولا اسم النبي الجديد!
Were it not for the shame, I would have visited Gaza, without knowing the way to the house of the new Abu Suffyan, nor of the new Prophet.

ولولا أن محمداً هو خاتم الأنبياء، لصار لكل عصابةٍ نبيّ، ولكل صحابيّ ميليشيا!
Were it not that Mohammed was the Final Prophet, each gang would have as its leader a Prophet, and for each of his Apostles, a militia.

أعجبنا حزيران في ذكراه الأربعين: إن لم نجد مَنْ يهزمنا ثانيةً هزمنا أنفسنا بأيدينا لئلا ننسى!
This June brought with it a surprise with its fortieth remembrance: There was nobody to defeat us a second time, and so we defeated ourselves.

مهما نظرتَ في عينيّ.. فلن تجد نظرتي هناك. خَطَفَتْها فضيحة!
No matter how much you look into my eyes, my gaze will not be there. It was kidnapped by this scandal.

قلبي ليس لي... ولا لأحد. لقد استقلَّ عني، دون أن يصبح حجراً.
My heart is no longer mine, nor does it belong to another. It has broken free of me, without turning into stone.

هل يعرفُ مَنْ يهتفُ على جثة ضحيّته - أخيه: >الله أكبر< أنه كافر إذ يرى الله على صورته هو: أصغرَ من كائنٍ بشريٍّ سويِّ التكوين؟
Does the one who chants "God is Great!" over the body of his brother-victim that he is an apostate in the eyes of God: For God sees that he has taken a perfect human life?

أخفى السجينُ، الطامحُ إلى وراثة السجن، ابتسامةَ النصر عن الكاميرا. لكنه لم يفلح في كبح السعادة السائلة من عينيه.
رُبَّما لأن النصّ المتعجِّل كان أَقوى من المُمثِّل.
The prisoner, so desperate to inherit his jail, hid the smile of victory from the cameras but he could not hide the joy in his eyes.
Maybe the script written for him was better than his acting skills.

ما حاجتنا للنرجس، ما دمنا فلسطينيين.
What need have we for Narcissus[2], since we are Palestinian?

وما دمنا لا نعرف الفرق بين الجامع والجامعة، لأنهما من جذر لغوي واحد، فما حاجتنا للدولة... ما دامت هي والأيام إلى مصير واحد؟.
Since we can not tell the difference between a Mosque and a University, what need have we of a state…so long as its fate is sealed?

لافتة كبيرة على باب نادٍ ليليٍّ: نرحب بالفلسطينيين العائدين من المعركة. الدخول مجاناً! وخمرتنا... لا تُسْكِر!.
A sign on the entrance to a nightclub: "We welcome the Palestinians returning from battle. Entrance is free. Our wine…does not inebriate![3]"

لا أستطيع الدفاع عن حقي في العمل، ماسحَ أحذيةٍ على الأرصفة.
لأن من حقّ زبائني أن يعتبروني لصَّ أحذية ـ هكذا قال لي أستاذ جامعة!.
"I can not defend my right to work," said a shiner of shoes on the pavement.
"My customers, they have the right to look at me as a thief of shoes—this is what a Professor told me!"

>أنا والغريب على ابن عمِّي. وأنا وابن عمِّي على أَخي. وأَنا وشيخي عليَّ<. هذا هو الدرس الأول في التربية الوطنية الجديدة، في أقبية الظلام.
"I take the side of the foreigner against my cousin, and the side of my cousin against my brother. I take the side of my Sheikh against myself"
Day One in Civics class, under the new Domes of Darkness.

من يدخل الجنة أولاً؟ مَنْ مات برصاص العدو، أم مَنْ مات برصاص الأخ؟
بعض الفقهاء يقول: رُبَّ عَدُوٍّ لك ولدته أمّك!.
Who shall enter Heaven: The one killed at the hands of the enemy, or the one killed by his brother?
Some of the Scholars will say: "Your worst enemy was born of your mother!"

لا يغيظني الأصوليون، فهم مؤمنون على طريقتهم الخاصة. ولكن، يغيظني أنصارهم العلمانيون، وأَنصارهم الملحدون الذين لا يؤمنون إلاّ بدين وحيد: صورهم في التلفزيون!.
سألني: هل يدافع حارس جائع عن دارٍ سافر صاحبها، لقضاء إجازته الصيفية في الريفيرا الفرنسية أو الايطالية.. لا فرق؟
قُلْتُ: لا يدافع!.
I am not enraged by the Fundamentalists, they are believers in their own way; their secular defenders, their atheist proponents, they anger me. They have but one sacred wish: To see their faces on television screens.
I was asked: Would the hungry security guard work for the absentee lord of the house, who is abroad on the Riveria, in France or Italy?
I replied: He will not defend!

وسألني: هل أنا + أنا = اثنين؟
قلت: أنت وأنت أقلُّ من واحد!.
..and he asked me: Do me and myself make two of us?
I said: You and yourself are less than one!

لا أَخجل من هويتي، فهي ما زالت قيد التأليف. ولكني أخجل من بعض ما جاء في مقدمة ابن خلدون.
I am not ashamed of my identity; its story is still being written[4], but I am ashamed of some things recorded in Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddama.

أنت، منذ الآن، غيرك!.

You are, from now, different.
[1] You will notice the allusion to a famous saying by Omar Ibn Al Khattab, although it is not verbatim in the Arabic
[2] Also the name of a flower in Arabic, نرجس If people know of something similar in English, please point it out.
[3] As in, the Muslim description of Heaven, hint hint. There is a tradition of this going back to Abu Ala Maari in case you're wondering…
[4] You will notice that the Arabic word هوية can mean both "identity" and "identity documents"

Saudi Surprise

2007-06-07T19:47:00.000+03:00

So it seems that a Saudi Prince has been receiving payments from a quasi-public UK arms firm. Of course, we've been reporting on this developing story on Abdulhadi's World for some time now, but the fact that the BBC is reporting on it again just goes to show you how difficult for these real stains to be washed off. In a later development, the Prince's American lawyers have admitted that he used this money to finance the building and refurbishment of his palace.

In the end, life sucks for the honest: A Saudi Prince will almost certainly get off scott-free for his actions; in the meantime, British mandarins, executives and elected officials might be facing the music because of a deal which was going to benefit the export industry of their country. Look, we all know that the Sterling couldn't keep ridiculous exchange rates without Britain importing something. As an Arab, I say to Britain: We understand and forgive you.

Tidying things up...

2007-05-31T17:56:00.000+03:00

Since I've last blogged, people have been asking if I might have made up the story about the Mufti and the nipple-sucking. Sadly, I had not, I only wish I had that kind of sharp rhetorical wit. Unfortunately, the said Mufti has been forced to swallow his words and recant; no religion-sanctioned sessions with the Sec for me, but I *did* have a conversation with her. That's right, two days ago we exchanged 1.5 paragraphs worth of words. It went like this:

Me: "Uhm, hi... so, uh, you do modelling work in your spare time, right?"

Sec: "Yeah, maybe, sure... how did you know?"

Me: Mummbles (what the fuck was I supposed to say? That I worship her from across the office but haven't had the courage to say 2 words?)

Sec: "Well, yeah I do"

Me: "You know there are these people in Kuwait looking for some models for a catalogue shoot..."

Sec: "A what?"

Me: "A catalogue shoot you know... with, uhm, traditional Arabic clothes on and that kind of thing."

Silence. I turn my gaze to the corner of the room, where the bathroom is. It's only a minute before somebody walks through that door, I think, and then they're going to want to know why I'm not at my desk. They'll be wondering why I'm standing at Sec's desk, how I know she's a model. Maybe THE BOSS is a jealous freak who has his eyes on her and will kill me for even trying to make contact... SHIT!!

OK, things are good. She wants to know more...

Me: "Well, have you heard of Facebook, you see it's this thing, kind of like hi5, which I saw your photos on, but it's less smutty, you see" ....SHIT, I've just told her I think she's a smutty whore for being on hi5. FUCK. NICE ONE.

Sec: "Yeah I know, I'm on Facebook already, see here it is"

She clears off some tabbed windows of solitaire, some Arab music download portals and a few MSN instant messaging conversations. Who needs to work when you look so good?

This is not what I was hoping for. In my mind's eye, she would have come to MY desk, and I could've showed off my 40 wpm typing skills (that kind of shit impresses secretaries, right?), and my ability to distinguish social networking sites.
"Oh, you type so fast..."
"Yes, yes I do..." I say as I look into her eyes from the seat, touch-typing while melting her heart with a few twitches of my nose...and then we kiss and embrace, and get fired. SHIT! End of fantasy.

Sec: "So, yeah, where do I go now?"

Me: Long list of meaningless instructions... can't really grab her mouse and move the Facebook screen for her, can I? Who's going to understand what I just said? But she does!!

She's got it!

Sec: "Hmmm... haven't heard that name...but here's a number, thanks".

Gets back to playing solitaire.

Me:"OK, take care"

Sec: SMILES.

Ah, all in a good day's work. Yes, yes and I confirm I spoke to her 2 days later, and I asked her if she called. She said no. OK.

Why I haven't been blogging... Why I will not blog about the Syria Trip

2007-05-17T08:59:00.000+03:00

Hello chaps and chapettes... if anybody is left reading this, after my horribly slothful lack of blogging, some of you may have wondered if I was ever going to blog again. What, you were asking yourselves, were you going to do without my gentle, guiding hand in the shape of prose giving you all the insights you needed on history, the Middle East, science and new-and-upcoming technologies?

Well, since my trip to Syria, the denouement of my Syrian adventure accelerated to an end when Kay and I decided to call it off, for good. Oddly enough, we both just decided amicably enough that this was the best way to go the day after I put up my Syria Notes blog. Of course, it might seem natural to post up on exactly what happened and why, but, out of respect for Kay's privacy and my own dignity, and I'm going to limit my statements to say: I'm now single. Not quite on the pull yet, but, hey who knows?

In the meantime, there is some good news which actually comes close to making up for this personal end of era; Otto has a job. John Otto Pohl, absolutely one of the greatest guys in the blogosphere, will become a lecturer at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, the Capital of Kyrgyzstan.

Kyrgyzstan is the Central Asian country I know least about, and what I know about the others is little enough as it is, so here's to Otto teaching us all a little something...Otto, this is the point that I really regret not going with you to Beirut a few years back. Too bad you can't turn back the clock of time...

I will be blogging again just as soon as I find a topic other than my on-the-backburner love life; I need to get over this emotional grief before I believe I have anything worth writing about. I did finally buy a copy of Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery though, and quickly found out I was a bit too familiar with the arguments to not be biased. Still, it's refreshing to read a philosopher's perspective on how to tackle problems I already feel comfortable with. There is a dust storm outside right now and so visibility is about 2 m, and breathing is hard enough without going for a jog. If the weather keeps it up, you can pretty much guarantee that I will be putting something up here some time.

Still working Syria Part II, air raid sirens in the background

2007-05-07T10:23:00.000+03:00

OK, I've been pretty much swamped with work since coming back--now I have more than report to worry about, because I might end up covering public utilities as well as oil and gas--but as of 10:00 AM this morning the air raid sirens went off in parts of Kuwait City. This is, I hope, just a test of the alarm system...but, God forbid, might be one big story into which we all sink.

PS: Thanks to all of you who sent in emails asking for updates, and the people who posted! It's heartening, I wish I could respond more quickly... but I'm also waiting on Kay for some photos she took with her camera.

Notes on the Syrian Arab Republic: Part I, the Airport

2007-04-25T10:10:00.000+03:00

So I arrive in Damascus International Airport where there are queues for "Arabs" and "others" and I think to myself "this is how things should work". Most people I come across are quite cynical about the overt Arabism of Syria, but, when one considers the numbers--for example, the fact that Kuwaiti investments in Syria have doubled since the signing of the Arab free trade agreement--you can see how inter-Arab integration can be not just a slogan, but a tangible reality. Still, the horror stories relayed to me of the Syrian military left a big mark in my mind, and I can feel myself get more anxious as my turn comes to speak to the airport police officer whose job it is to stamp my passport. (The last time I went to Syria, this process was accelerated by the taxi driver who drove me from Amman; he was a cigarette smuggler who just walked into the office where all the big-timer cops were seated and had everything taken care of.)

At the Syrian Consulate in Kuwait, where I had hoped to obtain a letter to help me visit the Cinema Institute in Damascus so I could see their archive of films, things turned sour when the Consul said she could not give me a letter because I might be--wait for it--an Israeli spy. "How can I know?" she stupidly said. "How stupid can you be?" I thought then. This memory did not make it easier to hand my passport over. The Consul was rotund and oval-like, with a blouse buttoned up to the top so hard it must have been suffocating her, and a dress sense picked up in the worst days of the Soviet Empire, probaly studying in Bulgaria or something like that, nothing like the policeman sitting before me. The cop is more friendly than intimidating, and I feel bad for taking on board so much of a Western stereotype: I mean, what the hell were they going to do? Turn away a tourist, an Arab one at that? Torture me at the airport's backroom cells for wanting to see a few Syrian films?

After customs, the state security people might as well walk around with tattoos on their foreheads. It's dry and 22 degrees Celsius outside, but a 2 m-tall man, who looks very much like Husam Zumlot of the Palestinian Embassy in London, is in a trench coat staring at everybody sitting in the cafe. All I can think is "wow, if he had a hat and a clean-shaven face, he'd be just like Inspector Gadget". Sadly, he did not hover off from a propellor attached to his head, but otherwise he was the epitome of a great spy. I sat down and tried to think what to order at the coffee shop.

A long time ago, I might have come to Damascus to enjoy the splendour of the mosques and Sufi corners, so I feel a strange sense of guilt when I ask what the local brew is. Disappointed by the fact that there is none of the Syrian stuff, nor even Lebanese Almaza, I settle for a Carlsberg, from the brewery which sponsored the scientific work of Niels Bohr and brought the orbital model of the atom to the world. There is here some small consolation; not a bad lager, if that's your kind of thing.

In the city of Ibn Taymia, I sip a Danish beer and look around at people toing and froing. The women serving at the cafe in the airport--waitresses are a rather alien concept in the Middle East--could have been models and I feel bad for even noticing. I mean, coming off a plane from Kuwait, ordering a beer and then oggling the ladies at the cafe? Probably the kind of behaviour which would make the Syrians wish they'd never put up the signs for "Arabs" at their airport. Shame, shame.

There's a sort of cosmopolitanism to the place: Damascus is the former Umayyad capital, and you feel that it is some kind of dream destination for people coming from Yemen, the Gulf, Iraq and North Africa. Somehow I feel bad for the Americanised existence of Kuwait, where there was a Godiva before a Ghroui (a Syrian chocolatier dating back to the 1920s); I can see no signs for a McDonald's, KFC, Starbucks, or Caribou. Even the cola drinks are the local variety, Mandarin, which I think is state-owned; the local equivalent of Seven Up is called Cheer Up, which makes more sense as a name anyway. All this brings back memories of Iraq's Kufa Cola, which was so sweet you could use it as an antiseptic, and then I notice how the nicer bits of the airport are like the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. The same influence of Stalin-like architecture planted in the desert is unmistakable; is it a coincidence that the world's first air-conditioned bus was intended for the Baghdad-Damascus route? There are either Iraqi voices somewhere around or I am imagining them, but strongly enough to make me want to cry. Back in the day, the Mongols sacked Baghdad but could not make it past Hatteen to destroy the Arab World's earlier capital in Damascus, but since George Bush is more stupid, zealous and irrefutably more dangerous than the earlier sackers there is no telling where he will stop.

Never mind, I am just a bit jittery from getting an early morning plane and so I order another beer...6,7 or maybe 8 Carlsbergs later and the plane I am waiting for, from London, is just coming in. Not sure whether the people at the cafe are relieved that I could stand, happy to get me out of the place, or if I'm just paranoid, but I go and wait for Kay to show up.

Slightly drunk, and a little tired, I begin to think of how weird it is to look at the people coming off, and waiting for, the planes. The old man, with a ram-rod straight back and nice linen jacket, is waiting for his brother's family from London. Half of a village from the mountainside, wearing sharaweel and moustaches that the Turks left behind, is standing waiting for the plane from Saudi Arabia to land. The Syrians waiting for, and coming off of, the plane from Milan are definitely the most stylish. Then a rather darker Syrian, unshaven--no Arab gets onto a plane unshaven--wearing a brown suit comes off sobbing and is held at both sides and consoled by two men, probably his brother and cousin. A funeral visit. Definitely a trip made in haste for the burial. Great. I came to Syria to watch the jems of Raymond Boutros and instead I get scenes of Egyptian cinema. DJ Firas, the London rapper who does his lyrics in classical Arabic, comes off and I act like I'm a big fan--actually, he's a cool guy, and we had some mutual friends but his music, clever as it was, never really did it for me. Well, at least I know the London plane has landed. The dignified old man finds his brother's family, they kiss hollowly and drive off with arms around each other; sweet, but also the Arab version of a Ralph Lauren commercial. I wonder if the brother from London is thinking about getting out a bigger share of the family's olive groves; perhaps the brother who stayed behind in Syria thinks he could've done better had he been able to leave. Maybe they just really missed each other and wanted to have a good time. Who knows?

Kay finally arrives, and I have my own ambiguous moment. You're an item with someone; you're attached at the hip for 2 years and then you don't see each other for 6 months. What do you do at the airport? Smoke a cigarette outside, negotiate with a cab driver and drive into Damascus, obviously.

Back, leaving again

2007-04-14T11:27:00.000+03:00

Salutes all,

Well, I hope somebody out there continues to read this blog. I certainly hope to continue posting.

I got back the day from Qatar, a somewhat confusing place, the day before yesterday and should be leaving to Damascus, Syria in a few hours. Damascus competes with Jericho, Palestine for the title of "World's Oldest Inhabited City". The last time I was there, nearly 2 years ago now, it seemed to wear its age with grace, but that was also when they opened the first KFC in Syria (wtf?) so that could have been a harbringer of things which have now taken over.

Not too sure about net access in Syria, definitely it'll be more limited than Kuwait; but I will hopefully get some photos from Kay's camera (Kay's presence there is the reason for the trip). In the meantime, do give me your comments and let's make this a more interactive blog!

Finkelstein

2007-04-07T15:37:00.000+03:00

Dear all,

Otto has pointed out that I have yet to post anything on Finkelstein... Since the man is, in my opinion, very much worthy of defense, I will put up links to the websties I know of where people can find ways to show their support:

http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/

Mark Elf, an old friend of mine

www.normanfinkelstein.com

The man himself: If you don't know him, read it, find out.

Finkelstein, the child of bona-fide holocaust survivors--ie, his parents were camp inmates-- is the author of The Holocaust Industry, Israel and Palestine, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, The Rise and Fall of Palestine and other great books. I specifically recommend Image and Reality for anybody who wants a deep, historical understanding of the Palestinian conflict and also The Holocaust Industry if you really want to read how Zionist lunatics have completely distorted public debate in the English-speaking world.

Any suggestions of how we can help take this forward are welcome.

Thanks Otto (jpohl.blogspot.com) for reminding me.

You heard it here FIRST

2007-04-05T15:17:00.001+03:00

If you've been following the news, you would've heard the remarkably surprising story that the British government has decided to make contact with the elected Palestinian Cabinet:
The story on BBC News

Of course, if you read my blog regularly, it would have come as no surprise at all, as I had foretold the end of the diplomatic seige would come this way:

My perhaps ill-judged rebuke to Najeeb

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

2007-03-29T19:18:00.000+03:00

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...

2007-03-19T09:58:00.000+03:00

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...

2007-03-19T09:46:00.000+03:00

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

2007-03-14T18:22:00.000+03:00

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

2007-03-10T10:40:00.000+03:00

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

2007-03-05T14:43:00.000+03:00

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

2007-03-02T13:13:00.000+03:00

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.

By special request....Could this be YOU?

2007-02-26T15:06:00.000+03:00

Well, Samer did ask. In February, Samer became the second reader of the blog to visit Kuwait. Do you know what was on the top of his list of things to do? That's right, see some goats. Samer did, of course, get some action:

At the beginning, the goat was quite happy to make Samer's acquaintance. Unfortunately, he was later distracted and showed his preference for hanging out with other goats:

In the end though, the animals in Kuwait did their best to please Samer, especially the bear he met at the airport:

Samer tells me that he misses the goats and bears of Kuwait very much, and he writes to them regularly from Dubai, inviting them to visit. So, the next time you come to Kuwait, bring a camera, and get ready to get some goat on your finger tips! This could be you!!

Samer: you're losing hair my man, do something about it.

Free Kareem

2007-02-24T14:28:00.000+03:00

Sometimes it seems I live in a cave...then again, every time I leave that cave, it seems thing are much, much worse in the outside world:

http://www.freekareem.org

It's hard to imagine Egypt becoming any worse than it is now, but if the situation highlighted above is not rectified, it will be.

Miscellany

2007-02-23T09:09:00.000+03:00

Sometimes the background to what shapes my life and thoughts doesn't follow a structured pattern, so here is a completely uncollated assortment of notes about what, I reckon, deserves some attention:

A US officer has commented that "a miscalculation by Iran could lead to war in the Gulf". As my friend Majed put it "a miscalculation by the US could lead to war in the Gulf". Well said Majed, well said.

Al Qabas brings to mind again the fallacy of the obsession over "orientalism". Al Qabas is currently printing a series of fawning book passages about the "great Gertrude Bell" who, we are told "loved the Arabs".

Yet another pundit gets it all wrong about the Middle East. How seriously can people take the claim that rich Arab kids listening to 50 Cent has some kind of political significance to it?

Finally, observe, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Kuwait Oil Company, the State-owned organisation which oversees the production of a commodity for all citizens: see photo here
Meet, as well, Farouk Al Zanki, a member of the Board of the Kuwait Project, which is looking to find the right foreign investors to suck this country dry of its oil: see photo here

See the difference? Coincidence? Conflict of interest? You decide!!

A Baboon, a Caliph and and the War on Iran

2007-02-13T21:21:00.000+03:00

OK, so back to the photo-essay format:

You should be able to see here the full, pathetic and rather disturbing spectacle of a baboon, chained, smoking a pipe and being displayed for sale. In fact, the scene pictured above is not too far away from the spot where Adam had his life-changing encounter with the goat, which was mentioned in another blog post. Animal welfare is not a subject I pretend to either know much about, or care too much for, but this kind of treatment of a high-order primate is in another league; to better deal with the rage in my mind, I allowed myself to think to another, more leisurely baboon who lived in my region of the world.

The story is told, my good friends, that Yezid ben Muawiya, the King of Syria and Caliph to all Muslims, a man of opulence remembered for his drinking binges more than anything else, kept a baboon with him at all times while receiving visitors at his Diwan. Ambassadors from the Byzantine Empire, local notables of the tribesmen of the Syrian desert and cityfolk of the Levantine Mediterranean coast, Quraishites from the Arabian peninsula and Shi'ite petitioners would seek the Caliph out for his wisdom only to be met by a baboon wearing layers of silk robes and throwing about pieces of monkey feaces at the astonished guests of the Successor to the Prophet of God, the Prince of the Faithful.

Yezid, who was Muslim in name only, would protest that the ape was, in fact, a Prince of the tribe of Israel, but that God had turned him into a baboon as a punishment for the sins of his people, as had been put down in the now-famous passages of the Koran. The hapless ape, mindless to the storms about to engulf his Umayyad sponsors and caretakers, became a hate figure of the oppressed, conquered non-Arab peoples in the newly Muslim realm, particularly the Persians. In short, we can call him, for the purposes of this post, "the Sunni Arab Baboon". My thesis is that the Sunni Arab Baboon is alive and well today, and is in fact exerting an influence on international affairs.

Now, let's suppose the Sunni Arab Baboon lives on one side of a pond. On the other side of the pond, divided by natural geography but united by a common ancestry and sharing a future, is a rather more inventive chimpanzee. The baboon and the chimpanzee have had a bad time sharing the area; the chimp was enslaved by the baboon, so then it tried to cunningly get all the baboon's tribe to be more chimp than the chimps themselves. All of this confusion led to trouble to no end in the division of shiny rocks between the chimps and baboons, which they use mostly to throw at each other but also to sell to tourists who take the shape of Neandertaals, a much larger, smellier and more brutish class of ape.

Let's suppose that the chimps decide that they're better off selling all their shiny igenous stones and using a new kind of fire-power they get from other materials for all the things they used to use the rocks for at home (firing the stoves, make cosmetics, etc). The Neandertaals know this, and they themselves have found the fire-power very useful in myriad ways, for example the way studying the fire-power improves their educational systems, makes them more productive, frees them up for other things, etc. They just don't want the chimps to get it, because they fear it will allow them to move up in the world and begin to challenge all the other apes, even the baboons, whom the Neandertaals never liked but--since the baboons are good for the neandertaals' business--need to keep happy.

Deep down inside, the baboons know that the chimps having fire-power is no skin off their noses, but then the chimps always looked down their noses at the baboons. Just find a chimp and tell him he looks like a baboon, and you'll see what I mean. The baboons, far more clever than outside appearances or even past behaviour suggest, know, in fact that the chimps might one day be persuaded to share the fire-power's gains, helping them, too, evolve and grow. The baboons are narrow-minded and short-sighted however, especially the big Chief Baboons, and so they will side with the neandertaals attacking the chimps on the other side of the pond, and possibly do some of the attacking themselves, given half the chance.

The moral of the story: We might not like Iran too much, but we'll be bloody baboons if we're not on their side.

It's official: I am NOT a terrorist

2007-02-08T16:57:00.000+03:00

OK, I am at least not on the "terrorist black list". Let me revise that one more time: As far as I am aware, the nice lady who works at the Mishref branch of the National Bank of Kuwait did not bother to see if I was a terrorist because, as far as I understand, I did not ask for a cheque book.
She did, however, oblige to let me use the stamp on her desk on my own paperwork:

I am now fantasizing about all the additional security clearance I will get through this. Perhaps the ability to go and visit relatives on the West Bank; maybe I could be let in to meetings of Congress. Who knows?, maybe some day I will use my little stamp-on-chit to get me into some concerts for free.

Please do answer the following questions if you do indeed know the answer:

--If a terrorist were to walk into a bank branch, declare himself to be a terrorist, but was not subsequently found on the black list seen by the teller staff, would you take his word for it?

--If someone were to come in asking for a chequeing account, but was found to be a terrorist "on the black list", is it expected of the branch's security guards to wrestle said terrorist to the ground, even if the suspect is believed to be armed and dangerous?

--Would a bank allow a terrorist to walk out with a cheque book, but perhaps with a precautionary stamp on the cheques, notifying any businesses who might receive said cheques, that a terrorist is giving them custom? This way, we could ensure that terrorists are able to live/eat/clothe themselves, but denied the ability to buy goods which they could use to harm others.

Does your local bank have one of these?

I have to agree

2007-01-30T21:52:00.000+03:00

I have to agree with ayatollah's (when can I use your real name, big guy?) comment on my last post. Until I feel ready to post something meaty--inshallah tomorrow--I will post the URL he suggested, because it is absolutely brilliant:

Rob Newman's History of Oil

You really must watch this video.....If I were a teacher, and this blog my class room, the video at the above link would be homework. Please note that I retain the right to use this video as a reference for any future posts, and that it is very funny. See you guys soon.

Welcome to the New Egypt....A lot like the Old Egypt!

2007-01-24T09:09:00.000+03:00

OK, so last night I came home after a frustrating day at work and plonked down opposite the television to watch a few rowdy music videos--there are something like 12 TV stations broadcast by satellite which carry nothing but music videos, about the only thing I have energy enough to do these days. The obscenity Arab music video-makers can get away with is a matter for another post, but I would doff my cap at the ingenuity and story lines they weave into them. What jumped out at me from the screen was Huda Haddad's El Wad Hassanein Ibn il Umda, loosely translated as "Hassanein, the village chieftan's son".

In Huda's music video, a village peasant girl--who looks remarkably well-fed, buxom, agile and has skin rarely seen on Arab agricultural workers--prances around and appreciates the attention she gets from Hassanein, the son of the village strong man/petit aristocrat. At the end of the acted-out music video, Huda's character lures Hassanein into an impromptu marriage, and the happy love story is completed. The agreeable resolution of this story jars with a previous Egyptian cinematic classic, Shafika wa Metwali, which tells a far more believable--and documented-- story of the Turco-Albanian gentry taking advantage of the Egyptian people in every way. Huda Haddad's efforts are not an individual anomaly...

"Melody Arabia Hits", the ludicrously named TV station which I was watching at the time (nothing Arab-melodic about their music) then anounced that Miss Deutchland 2007 was to be held in Egypt, "for the first time since 1909". The implication was clear: Nationalisation, socialist dreams of social justic and Arabness were a nightmare for Egypt, and people are jumping back on board to the Egypt they want to recreate from scratchy memories: Gin and Tonics with foreign visitors at plush hotels, Nile cruises with Francophone archaeologists, visits to the Cairo Opera House... but wait a minute, who mixed that gin & tonic? Oh yes, the former Egyptian agricultural worker. The absurd self-delusion some Egyptians I know engage in ("before Nasser, my family used to own half of the Delta!!") goes some way to explaining why Egyptians have now embraced not Sadat's liberalization programme--which in theory had some things to recommend it--but a crazy form political nostalgia.

Sadly enough, "high culture", at least that bit of it which reaches the publishing world, reflects this trend as much as music videos do. Alaa Aswani's "Yacoubian Building" has echoes of Mahfouz's Children of Gabalawy in it, save that it glorifies Egypt's dynastic age without ever alluding to the fact that most Egyptians were victimised, impoverished and miserable during those years. I wonder if we'll all be seeing another coup some time....

In closing, I would like to thank Najeeb for prodding me into publishing a political post, although it might well have remained a half-baked potato in my brain.

A week away....

2007-01-22T09:57:00.000+03:00

So it's been a week since I've posted... my how time flies. Just to disappoint you some more, this first post is going to be a rather minimalist post to direct you to a site that has really captured my heard of late:

http://www.techonthenet.com

Do enjoy it... more to come soon, I hope

So what have I been doing?

2007-01-15T22:41:00.000+03:00

Last weekend Adam stopped by in Kuwait for an unexpected 3 days (try explaining to airport functionaries why an tall, lanky English guy is carrying carpentry tools in his carry on luggage) on his way to India, making him the first contributor to the blog to actually come out and see me in corporeal form (OK, it helps that I've known the guy for some years now, but....). Adam was also kind enough to bring me a copy of Arthur Lesk's Introduction to Bioinformatics (I wonder why there is NOT A SINGLE BOOK ON BIOINFORMATICS IN KUWAIT, when you can get perhaps 30 different books on astrology, ESP, etc.). This means I can read/try to learn/be stumped by the creation of Perl programmes for bioinformatics when I want to avoid conflicts with my bone-headed colleagues....and I leave you now with a photo of Adam with a goat he wanted to take with him to India.

I've been quite pleased recently that we Palestinians have learned a thing or two, as evidenced by Abu Mazen knowing when to play hard to get by turning down Condoleeza Rice, and some protesters in RamAllah (where else, really?) dressing up as Native Americans (disastrously rendered "Red Indians" in some Arabic newspapers) with placards reading "we are still here... this will not happen to us" (see admittedly low-quality image above; this image was taken from Al Qabas, and edited using the Windows' distribution of The Gimp).

Hats off to Abu Mazen, I knew he would pull through in the end....

In other news, I have been discovering the wonderful world of Web 2.0 and all it has to offer in the shape of tiddly wiki.

The site is described as "a reusable non-linear personal web notebook", which is a way, I suppose, of saying you can use it to jot down notes, create files and so on and then share them with people. Except there's more to it than that... you really must visit the site.

...and finally!!

2007-01-09T15:44:00.000+03:00

It seems that some things which seem to defy logica forever DO eventually get dealt with. I know this is probably old news for most of you by now--not for me, I've been stuck in a ditch in Kuwait--but, at least, Apple Computers is going to get what it deserves. I can't remember how long I've had a grudge against this company, probably since the days of the old IIc, but I'm sure many others also thought it absurd that one company could get away with selling a vertical monopoly on computer hardware, operating systems, accessories and software for such a long time.

You're going down Mr Jobs, and it's going to make a loud noise.

Mauritania joins the club....and other notes on Africa

2007-01-08T09:53:00.000+03:00

Things in Africa are picking up. Mauritania is now finally in the same shitty situation Levantine Arab countries were in in the 1950s: with politicans seeking to interact with the military. Al Jazeera reports that one of the front-running presidential candidates in the upcoming elections, Mohammed Walad-Mawlood (taken together, this means "Mohammed Son of the Born"; wth?) is demanding a "discussion" between "opposition political parties" and the ruling junta. I had my doubts about Mauritania's status as a member of the Arab League, but with this completely nonchalant suggestion that politicians deal with military officers to forge a new future, Mauritania has shown that they are well and truly Arab. Welcome to the club Mauritania, you're in good company.

On the other side of the African continent, Ethiopia has proven to the world that the US can indeed adjust to a post-Cold War situation. Observe, the wars of the future-past: US naval ships will observe from a distance as an insignificant proxy deals with "terrorists" in the shape of the United Islamic Courts. People are ridiculously claiming that the UIC were East Africa's equivalent of the Taleban, when the fellows readily produced television images (which were forbidden by the Taleban) of chanting female supporters (whoa!). Nobody took the time to ask the Somalis running the telephone shops in East London--or even the Somalis of Somalia, for that matter--how they felt about their streets finally being safe. Instead, the US has effortlessly, without the loss of US lives this time, done under Bush Jnr what it could never have done under Clinton: Install a new government in Somalia and secure the Horn. The last time the US got involved in securing a shipping lane with similar vitality, it cost the host region around 1 million lives (the Iran-Iraq war), so this is a comparative victory. How the hell Ethiopia, with one of the world's lowest GDPs per capita, can see fit to fight a war on a neighbour's turf is beyond me.

Ethiopia, like Iran, also has its own imperial past to look back on in the region. Halie Selasie, Emperor/Slave-driver of renown, made no secret of his dreams to subdue Muslim communities in East Africa, so the battle lines of the past apply here, too. I might be overturning a nearly decade-old personal boycott of Starbucks--because of the pro-Israel stance of its board, its shitty treatment of workers and coffee growers and even shittier coffee--as Starbucks is now battling Ethiopia for the rights to trademark Ethiopian coffee, which could've produced a pacific way for that country to lift itself out of poverty. Now it seems Ethiopia's government is the enemy. It remains to be seen whether the Bush administration will be supporting one of their country's greatest/worst exporters and (worst) employers, or their new allies in that ubiquitous war on terror....

Back into the scheme of things...winding up 2006

2006-12-30T00:41:00.000+03:00

This has been my longest absence since I re-invigorated my blogging in November of 2006; we're now knocking on the doors of a new year. I think I could have hoped for no better comment than Saud's to wind-up 2006; well thought-out, discursive and completely over-analytical of a snapshot I took with a camera phone, in the best academic tradition.

At the outset of 2007, I have been offered a job paying about the same amount that I turned down from an employer round about this time 12 months ago; fear is a strong, powerful emotion some times, and I don't want to be unemployed much longer. As I expected, there is a cloud of secrecy shrouding my new role, but some details will seep through as time goes on, or so I hope, and that should be fun for all of us.

This past week, I have also been consumed by my brother's recreational use/addiction to anasthetics, and its effects on the family unit as a whole.

Finally, I want to make a point from out here in Kuwait. The local press here has been filled with Islamic rulings ("fatwas" as they are sensationally known) ordering the Muslim faithful not to commemorate in any way "Christian" holidays like New Year, Christmas, etc. As my family has been through a serious bereavement recently, it would have been inappropriate to wish any body any merriment and, besides, Christmas falls on 7 January for Eastern Orthodox Christians (the majority of Christian Arabs). To make a point, however, I will say: Merry Christmas (whenever you celebrate it) and a Happy New (Julian) Year. If you are celebrating the Eid al Adha/Feast of the Sacrifice, I hope you enjoy that, too.

Turkey and the EU....and Kuwait

2006-12-20T10:25:00.000+03:00

It's not good when some company you don't remember applying to wakes you up at 10:30 with a phone call to book an interview. It's even worse if you haven't got the foggiest idea about what they do, and can't seem to find anything on the internet. To make matters worse, if you want to go meet somebody in Tunisia and that person doesn't respond to her text messages, you're screwed.

Anyways, when that kind of weird stuff gets combined and begins to wind me up, I think of completely pointless political things. How about: Turkish membership of the EU? I have mixed feelings about this issue... I'm sure it would probably help to keep Turkey and the EU more secular, but then it would also give the US/NATO a stronger voice in Europe. Besides, I'm an Arab, and everybody knows that Arabs are bitter towards Turkey, until they started opposing the formation of a Kurdish state in Iraq......OK, none of this mattered to the barber shop in Salmiya, Kuwait.

At last....

2006-12-15T01:47:00.000+03:00

Finally, the Arabs have learned to export something to the West. Not too long ago, the uppity elected officials of Britain thought they could investigate the financial goings about of princes of the Al Saud family. Whoa boy, were they wrong. Britain has now succumbed to pressure and is stopping the investigation into how BAE systems bribed Saudi officials in order to win procurement contracts for fighter planes.

Now, you in the West will learn what it means to live with corruption in the most luxurious Arab style. Welcome to the club. After all, what the hell were the Brits doing getting their panties in a knot, anyway? It's not like their officials were being bribed...when the army of 20,000 diabetic, delusional Kuwaitis runs across the border to conquer the date plantations of the Hejaz, it's the Saudi citizens who will be let down by any faults in the hardware.

Since you asked...

2006-12-11T13:25:00.000+03:00

I realise most of you didn't get the chance to properly see the cartoon I posted last time, and for some reason I can't manage to fix it on that post. I will try to post it one more time, so, here goes:

Najeeb asked what my political beliefs were, and, given that he asked all the way from New Delhi, and I'm sitting here in Kuwait, I figured I'd better take that question seriously. Now I realise just how isolated I am, politically. In a sense I'm a libertarian, completely devoid of trust in other people or, even worse, committees or organisations of other people, to oversee public provision of anything. In another sense, I would think that it's important that government goes at least some way to alleviating the effects of the lottery of birth. This puts me in a real pickle, as most Arab political ideologies come in sharp hues: Islamists; Communists; Authoritarian Nationalists. Ibn Khaldoun, that great Arab social scientist, was actually something of a liberal before his time, arguing against high taxation and governmental interference in people's lives/choices/religious practices. Unfortunately, nobody in the contemporary Arab Homeland seems to pay any heed to his ideas. Competing "opposition" ideologies seem to want to outdo themselves in authoritarianism/governmental intervention. In the recent Kuwaiti elections, many people demanded that the elected parliamentarians pass legislation to solve the "crisis" of a growing number of single young women (eg, make it illegal for Kuwaiti men to marry foreigners...). Laws in almost every Arab country would, technically, allow the government to intervene in personal affairs; so, for example, the religious authorities have the right to impose an involuntary divorce on a couple if they feel that the man has apostasied.

Even non-overtly religious organisations, to the extent that they exist, fall short of pushing for increased liberalism in either the personal or economic realm. The reasons for this are, I think, obvious...and I leave it to future posts to discuss.

Caricatures

2006-12-08T13:32:00.000+03:00

I really liked the following cartoon by Abdulwahab Alawadi found in Kuwait's ultra-progressive Taleea (meaning "Vanguard") newspaper:

Of course, a little bit of explanation is necessary, especially for those of you out there who don't read Arabic. The top bit of the comic reads "extremism", and the man with the big stick and long beard is, of course, a religious extremist. The bottom panel translates, roughly, "moderation"; notice the relatively shorter beard; the longer arm is also an allusion to a widely-used metaphor in Arabic, "having long arms", as in, being able to attack your enemies with impunity.

Who are the "moderate" Islamists? Do they really enjoy greater license than other Islamists? Basically, after 9/11, the governments of many Arab countries realised they would no longer be able to let the Islamists run amok, and so, a lot of these anti-American Islamists had to be reined in. Of course, the idea of letting society develop without religious oversight was out of the question, and so a modified agenda was born. This time around, the Islamists can make whatever claims they want in the strictly social sphere, even being encouraged by American-friendly dictators in the region (no co-educational schooling; legally enforced payment of religious taxes; more regressive family legislation; narrow-minded sectarianism) while circumscribing their ability to discuss the real bread & butter issues (American forces in the Gulf; Israeli agression; redistribution of wealth and natural resources). Basically, an emasculated Islamist was born; but one with even more power now to decide how people in this part of the world go about their everyday lives.

The above cartoon might also ring a few bells... do you guys remember a caricature run in Newsweek shortly after Khatami was elected in Iran? Similar idea: In that one, there was a turbaned Iranian fellow getting ready to chop off a blind-folded prisoner's hands in both panels. The caption in the top panel read "Death to the enemies of Islam!" while the bottom one read "This is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you".

I suppose you could say that this cartoon is an example of constructive interaction between orientalism and Arab thinking....

A scary incident of life imitating art....

2006-12-06T20:49:00.001+03:00

Please observe:
Priscilla's Dunstan's baby language school
I want to point out that the fact she's Australian is a complete coincidence...

Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Somebody has realised that you can fleece impressionable parents by telling them that there is one way to understand "baby talk". Given the conceited nature of the pushchair crowd, it's no surprise to find that they are prepared to believe their babies are actually saying something intelligible; with the level of critical thinking amongst the world's public being what it is, it's also not at all surprising that these guys will part with their cash to hear it. "Oh, my baby said the most beautiful thing yesterday...except it wasn't in [insert language here], it was in grunts and moans".

Of course, the idea behind Priscilla Dunstan's school is by no means original. The first thing which came to my mind was an insipid little feel-good Hollywood flick:Baby Geniuses 2

This, of course, shines a light on my path to wealth. I will be reviewing a long list of romantic comedies, thrillers and action-dramas to think of ways I can make stupid people part with their cash. Perhaps I could become a dating adviser, or sell security systems to protect people from terrorists or aliens or something...except I'm sure that's been tried before. Well, this is an interactive blog, or so I claim, so what ideas do you guys have to fleece people's money? Something for which they're primed by watching Hollywood films...

The Kangaroo's Story...(2)

2006-12-02T15:59:00.000+03:00

Where would I be without my North American correspondents? Not very far. As it stands, this leaves me in no place to throw stones at the people behind ACK. To Otto, I would suggest you look up AUK, the American University here. I know a young Kuwaiti PhD student at SOAS who will be teaching history there... I will send you further notes by email.

To Saud, while I have not seen Young Einstein, and hate all things to do with crocodiles and their American cousins, the alligators, I have seen Muriel's Wedding, which is a fine film. Of course, I don't doubt that Australia is a great place; but I also know it's a place of many problems (e.g., John Howard) and that it's no pancea, and I'm not sure what the point of having an "Australian" education institute here is given that what is needed is greater research, more public participation and better labour rights well before something like this happens. Of course, one of the best research institutes in the region is the place now known as the American University of Beirut, but let's not forget that when it started as the Syrian Protestant College, it had a clear mandate of promoting a critical approach to life and of creating an environment conducive to research and medical care. There was also, of course, the role of proseltysing amongst the Arabs, particularl Eastern Orthodox Arabs. I would recommend people read the writings of Khalil Sakakini to see how this reflected itself on Arab thinking of the time. What purpose does ACK serve?

To Chelsea of Sacramento, if you have any ideas of what a camel-kangaroo cross would like, please send your artistic renditions. Not sure I would agree with the name, but I imagine it would be something like a lama with a pouch. It's amazing what genetic technology can do these days.

Well, I do need to get back to translating this piece for some people... Does anybody know what they're going to be doing for Christmas?

The Kangaroo's Story...(1)

2006-11-29T22:59:00.000+03:00

How do I explain how a single, insentient kangaroo left me flabbergasted? In a way, this is another post that could be told through a photo essay...Exhibit A is a notice I found in Chilli's, one of the many Americanesque eating holes that dot the Gulf Road in Kuwait:

In case you can't read the jpeg (this probably depends on a number of factors) the letter states, and I quote:
"PLEASE BE REMINDED THAT BRINGING OF FOOD FROM THE OUTSIDE AND IS CONSUMED INSIDE THE RESTAURANT IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED."

Sure, you can go anywhere and find a complete trashing of the English language; when I lived at Kay's place in Bethnal Green, I would normally count 15 massacres of the apostrophe within a quarter-mile of each other. Nevertheless, the point stands that the person who wrote this letter doesn't think in English; to be absolutely honest, I'm not sure how many of the people who read it do think in English (whether they'd be able to think at all after trying to read it is another question...). So, why put up such a letter in English? More importantly, you're probably asking, wtf does this have to do with the bloody kangaroo?

Well, the kangaroo represents our --Arabs'--continuous attempts at ridiculous re-invention, in the most lazy way possible. So, we want to educate our children. Our school systems suck. What do we do? Import a university, of course! Where from? Can't import a British university... they don't do that kind of thing. Can't import an American university, it's too expensive. Let's go Australian!! They speak English (of sorts); they're white; their flag is just about as close as you can get to a Union Jack without copyright infringement.

The point behind the Australian college is this: Send your children here, and we'll make them act, think and, if possible, walk like Australians. Now, with all due respect to both Alex and Nick, whose thinking power I would never doubt, I can't for the life of me think why Australians can just be assumed to be brainboxes. The question is, are we importing Germaine Greer here? Ernest Rutherford (For the record, Rutherford was from New Zealand but I seem to remember that he had some connection to Australia, and I'm not sure I can distinguish one Antipodean from the other...hey, here's another idea for a college in Kuwait!)? As it happens both these characters and Nick and Alex, sought intellectual salvation in England, and so I can't really see any anecdotal evidence of Australian educational establishments nurturing and projecting outwards the resources they do have. Why the importing here?

Maybe more to the point, when is it a good time to build a university? Past experience would indicate an established research community, with a clear committment to the community it intends to serve is a good premise before beginning work on the actual buildings and insignia...as for the insignia, isn't it a widely held opinion that marsupials in general are stupid animals? I mean, does the sight of a kangaroo really make you want to rip out the test tubes, thermogravimeters, books and particle accelerators? Or, like me, did it make you feel like getting a new pair of trainers? Maybe, like Chelsea suggested, they should've found a way to incorporate Kuwait into this, something like the graphical description of a camel-kangaroo cross-breeding programme.

At the end of the day, if, even in a bleached-Anglicised environment like Chilli's (those of you in the Middle East know the type of place: Chilli's, Fuddruckers, Applebees, that kind of thing...) people can't compose a decent sentence, what use is an institute of higher learning teaching in English? If the picture below shows what kind of labour conditions existed on the campus, the total disregard for the safety of construction workers who earn next to nothing in real terms, what hope is there for this place to become a centre of community service?

This guy here earns £200-300 pounds sterling a month. I wonder what the minimum wage in Australia might be for construction workers...

Two Good Films

2006-11-26T02:59:00.000+03:00

So, when the blogging re-started some weeks ago now, I made the prediction that I wouldn't keep it up if I became gainfully employed. It's been rather self-perpetuating, although I'm also now in the dubious position that I am now "behind work". Frustratingly, the name of the game means I can't say too much about what I am doing or who I am doing it for (at the moment; this will change). In the meantime, if you guys are free, you ought to see both "Lord of War" and "Lonesome Jim".

Lonesome Jim, although good, is let down by its predictable ending. It's American indie at its most cheesy predictability. A young man returns with nothing from Manhattan to live in the Middle of Nowhere in Indiana; he discovers his uncle is using his parents' business to sell dope he has stashed in his trailor park home; he thinks his brother's mundane existence is even worse than his failure and is foolhardy enough to tell him so; his old bedroom wall is centred with a poster of Ernest Hemmingway (how about introducing a few other writers?). Still, the one liners are funny and fresh and, hey, Liv Tyler shows us her thighs. Worth watching if you get some spare time.

If you remember the trouble in West Africa some years back, you've just got to see Lord of War; in fact, see it even if you don't remember that Sierra Leone even existed. It's a great flick, very true to life, an account of a nobody who climbs the ladder to become an international arms dealer. Some of the people who read this blog might want to take it as some sort of "what not to do..." kind of guide. At any rate, the commentary is great (the film is told from a first person point of view), the film is insightful and the whole thing is very, very convincing. Possibly it's because it's based on the memoirs of a repenting arms dealer, or so they say.

Beyond that, hope you're all doing well...

A rather worrying deduction....

2006-11-25T19:30:00.000+03:00

I received the following extract from the Al Jazeera website by email... if things are actually working the way suggested, we're in for some serious trouble. Of course, at the time, everybody thought that sending Negroponte to Iraq was mad, but then, at the time, we were all being accused of being Saddam sympathisers. How strange that Saddam's era now seems like an idyllic, quiet and peaceful time.

http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=11542

"Who’s behind the active death squads running in Iraq? ""......From the time of invasion of Iraq in March 2003 till June 2004, ththe phenomenonf death squads was unknown to Iraq and the U.S. soldiers wewere beingilled and injured daily by the Iraqi resistance, something ththe Americansere unprepared for and had not expected. The U.S. response was toto sendohn Negroponte, the former U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to1985 - during the worst of death squads operations there, to Baghdad as‘ambassador’. Negroponte was notorious during his tenure in Honduras for not only failingto admit to existence of death squads there, he was almost universally believed to be directing death squads in both Honduras and Nicaragua.His appointment as ambassador to Iraq by Bush in June 2004 until April 2005marked the development and the formation of the now notorious Iraqi death squads....."

Geoffrey Miller's Unattractive Book

2006-11-23T00:21:00.000+03:00

Hey guys, it's been a whole 72 hours or so since I post...obviously, this is not a cosmic event, but it seems the hiatus has meant you all had the opportunity to post comments more, and very illuminating comments they have been. Thanks for all your input. It has been said that it was amateurish to suggest the Simpsons never holiday outside their own state; well, I can only think of one episode, aired a long time ago, when they visit Duff Gardens which would suggest they ever did. Of course, it is never explicitly suggested that Duff Gardens is outside of their own state, but it is clearly based on Annheiser Busch Gardens, a themepark operated by the US' largest brewery (which I seem to remember had some kind of legal trouble because they were serving beers on their rides). There was Bart's exchange trip to France when the Albanian spy came over, but if we involved ourselves in that I wouldn't get to this post's topic...

I've spent some of the past few days winding myself up reading a truly atrocious book (thanks Tarek), G. Miller's The Mating Mind. As if the insanity of religious fundamentalists wasn't enough, it seems that evolutionary psychologists/psychoanalysts/trekkies and other assorted whackos will stop at nothing to promote pseudo-science which is simply not falsifiable. The basic premise of the book is that human creativity is an outgrowth of the sexual selection, akin to Darwin's natural selection, of mates towards persons who are better at advertising themselves through the human equivalent of the peacock's tail: humour, wittiness and charisma. The argument put forward by Miller is that women select men with these traits.

Now, it goes without that saying that funny, personable guys get laid much more easily; then again, after I went from being an obese monster to merely a somewhat overweight bloke, my pulling power went through the roof, with absolutely no change in my sense of humour, witiness or charisma. So, OK, I realised that was pseudo-science of my own kind, but I digress... Miller incredibly leaves a reference to the shortcoming of his argument within the book. Alfred Wallace was an up-and-coming biologist contemporary to Darwin who pointed out the elephant in the room: Sexual selection by mates is basically unheard of in traditional societies, where marriages and courtships are arranged by families according to completely different criteria: family ties, wealth, etc. As the Prophet Mohammed said (supposedly) "Wives may be worthy by virtue of their beauty, their wealth, their lineage or their piety". The selection of men by women doesn't really figure in this one, which is ironic enough as we all know that the Prophet's first wife selected him more than the other way around.

To make things worse, Miller's theory is also implicitly sexist in that it completely ignores similar traits in women. I always thought of the Guardian columnist Marina Hyde as an incredibly sexy woman, purely based on the humour of her writing (as it happens, she's quite hot). Miller's ideas could not explain such traits in women, in fact it doesn't even seek to explain it. In short, the idea of sexual selection as a mechanism of evolution is reductionist, sexist and Miller's book is poorly written, rendered in a childish American science-journalese. When will these Yankee writers realise that not all of them are as good as Eric Schlosser at this business?

In closing, a clue about the Kangaroo: It's the emblem of the Australian College of Kuwait. Now you guys tell me where the problem there lies....

Where is Springfield?

2006-11-20T01:06:00.000+03:00

Those of you who are aware of the rather insane geography and naming conventions in the US will know that there are many Springfields. Of course, the only one to achieve international prominence is the animated Springfield of the Simpsons. For years, fans have tried to figure out where the Simpsons' Springfield was in reality. Springfield, Illinois? Ohio? Missouri? (OK, I'm not sure if there is a Springfield in Missouri, but I seem to remember it sounding right...)

In a recent episode, broadcast today on Showtime's Paramount network (available in the Middle East through a digital decoder), Homer revealed that he might have lost his wedding ring (OK, now how many of you noticed that one?) while skipping it on Lake Michigan. My guess is that the Simpsons don't often holiday outside their home state, and, looking at the map below, I am prepared to hazard a guess that the true hometown of the Simpsons is in Illinois.

Notice that Springfield is the capital of Illinois; like many states in the federal union, the capital is not what you might expect it to be, the city with the greatest profile. Since visiting the railroad museum and state capital in Sacramento at the tender age of 9, this ludicrous American eccentricity left its mark deep in my fragile psyche. Maybe this was my innate Arab sense of totalitarian centralism shining through, who knows; I'd like to think so.

I also note that this map does not show the location of that other great city of Illinois, Berkeley, which is where they seem to make all the electric hand dryers at any public washroom you may care to visit. So we still don't know where they make those dryers. Does anybody live there?

Petition

2006-11-18T15:23:00.000+03:00

Salutations fellows,

Thanks for the concern, those of you who emailed as well as Samer; but, no, that photo isn't me, although it's my little brother Salama. Now, I want to point out that if you hover your mouse cursor over the photo and look at the browser window, the name of the file is revealed. I'm afraid it's the rather distasteful "chemo gandhi". More than one person has emailed me about this, and I know for sure one of them is rather offended as my brother is not undergoing chemotherapy, nor is he related to the Mahatma. Please just try to see the humorous side....

You're still going to have to wait for me to tell you guys what that freakin' kangaroo is or why it ticked me off so much, BUT, this is one thing which I think deserves everybody's attention:

PLEASE CIRCULATE WIDELY... BEAR IN MIND THAT THE PETITION APPEARS ON AN OFFICIAL BRITISH GOVERNMENT WEBSITE. YOUR VOICE IS GUARANTEED TO BE HEARD.

SIGN THE PETITION ON THE PRIME MINISTER'S NUMBER 10 WEBSITE

Please sign the petition below for the Prime Minister at the Number 10 website at the following
address:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Palestinians/
The petition reads:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to cease using
the so called need for 'constructive engagement' as an excuse
to give impunity to Israel to continue to violate international
humanitarian law.
We deplore the UK's decision to abstain on UN Security Council
draft resolution 2006/878 condemning the attack on Beit Hanoun
on 8th November. Independent UN expert, Mr. Kothari described
this: "The shelling and subsequent killing of civilians
indicates a premeditated military tactic constituting a form of
collective punishment against the Palestinian people." The
resolution also condemns the firing of rockets into Israel and
calls for "an immediate halt to all acts of violence".
This abstention by the British government indicates the British
government's callous disregard for Palestinian lives.

*********************
****************************
LOBBY OF PARLIAMENT
WEDNESDAY 29TH NOVEMBER
House of Commons, London SW1
Please make an appointment with your MP NOW!
Stop Starving the Palestinians - Stop Arming Israel
Restore Aid to the Palestinian Authority
Release Palestinian ParliamentariansRespect Palestinian Democracy
A BRIEFING PACK FOR THE LOBBY CAN NOW BE
DOWNLOADED FROM THE PSC WEBSITE:

http://www.palestinecampaign.org/events.asp?d=y&id=1955

**************
For more information on events, protests and news about Palestine in the UK please visit:
http://www.palestinecampaign.org/
***********************************************
Palestine Solidarity Campaign
info@palestinecampaign.org
www.palestinecampaign.org
Tel: 020 7700 6192

Abed Sees Hope for Iraq in Vietnam

2006-11-18T01:08:00.000+03:00

Today we learn that GW Bush "sees hope for Iraq in Vietnam". How ironic, so do I. In fact, I believe the solution to Iraq's problems lies in these easy steps:

--Formulate an inclusive, non-sectarian resistance movement;

--adopt a programme which preserves the country's wealth of natural resources for its people;

--kick out foreign forces.

...and Bob's your uncle.

The image below is one I took while out jogging the other day in Kuwait. Yes, it is indeed a kangaroo. I will allow you all to ponder it for a while before I explain how and why this damn kangaroo irked me so much I thought I should replicate it on the web.

Ramblings on a Friday....

2006-11-17T13:38:00.000+03:00

So, it seems that there are people who do actually read this blog. My good friend Samer, previously of London, Paris and Tehran, and now in Dubai, fashion capital of the Gulf, just pointed out to me that the last time he tried posting on the blog, the power went out in his office. There you go, if you thought I was writing to satisfy my ego: HUH!!

Just to top things off, I want to relish the fact that I was right and Hazem and Hatem were wrong about the launch of 2 new consoles by each of Sony and Nintendo:
http://www.gwn.com/news/story.php/id/10745/

Well, anyway, I noticed that my last blog was long on text, short o n fun images... so here goes.

Yeah, each of these represent something about my life in the last two weeks... think of it as a photographic essay. Victory to the righteous.

Iran on Palestine Day

2006-11-15T13:07:00.000+03:00

Today is Palestinian national day, and so, of course, in honour of that day, which commemorates the declaration of Palestinian independence at a conference held in Algiers, I thought it would be appropriate to sit here in Kuwait and begin a post on our new sponsor/friend/idol in the region, Iran.

Living in Kuwait City amongst a fairly Anglophone group of people, it's easy enough to think that you're closer to being an extension of the Small World ride at Disney world in Florida than you are to being a small country on the Persian Gulf. Sure, on a good day, you can receive Iranian radio in your car if you're driving the right way in the right places, there are a lot of Iranian day labourers in the country as well as some quite wealthy Kuwaiti merchants of Persian descent, but a lot of that can be wilfully written out of memory, when there's a little political to do so, and that we've had for centuries. Maxime Rodinson's excellent book Muhammad has a section which describes how the Prophet of Islam--who was dependent on a Persian confidante in his day--rejoiced at the mention that a number of Arab tribes had managed to free themselves from Persian rule in the early 6th Century. "This is the first time the Arabs have avenged themselves on the Persians" he supposedly said. In fact, the Persians were pushed out of Oman by Fahr Ben Malik a few years before that, some time around 570 AD. If you think this kind of thing is ancient history, you should attend a football match in this country.

The biggest rivalry between any 2 teams in Kuwait happens between Qadisia and Al Arabi sports clubs. Ironically, Al Arabi has a largely Persian following; Qadisia, you will know, is the name of the famous battle which sealed the Islamic-Arab conquest of Persia after the death of Mohammed, and it was also the name Saddam gave to his attack on revolutionary Iran. Even seemingly agreed upon geographical names are disputed here; since the broadcast of a characteristically bombastic speech made by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s ("from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Gulf...!") you drive down Arabian Gulf Street, when in fact even the great Arab historian from the middle ages refers to it as the "Sea of Persia". In short, we have a serious grudge against the Iranians (over what nobody seems entirely sure), and people here seem uncomfortably aware that they kind of look down their noses at us.

All of this made sense, of course, during the rule of the Safavids, or even during the reign of the last Shah, but Iran's post-revolution, Arab-friendly, anti-Israel outlook doesn't seem to have changed much, either. A nuclear-capable Iran will be a threat to Israel's dominance in the region, but the thought of it is already scaring the dickens out of people in the Arab states. Fortunately, Kuwait has been rather less than provocative in its dealings with Iran. They declined to take part in the recent US-sponsored military maneuvers in the Gulf, which were blatantly set up to make Iran aware of the readiness of the US and her allies to step in and fix that reactor at Bu Shehr. Bahrain, on the other hand--which used to be an Iranin possession not too long ago--did take part, and some commentators in this country would have liked to follow suit.

All of this really makes me think about what it means to be a Palestinian and an Arab. They have, in theory, been almost interchangable; Palestinians played a huge part in creating Arab consciousness and today live off of it. Palestine is irrefutably an "Arab" place, as much as it a place at all, and we all know that Arabs don't like Iranians. Some times, this affects life on a day-t0-day basis in the Gulf, where communities of both Iranians and Palestinians compete in a zero sum game for markets and jobs, and often find national reasons for the success/inverse failure of one side or the other. In Bahrain, for example, the ruling family has sought to enfranchise Palestinian residents of the archipelago--a rather strange thing for an Arab state to do--in order to balance out the demographics of a largely Shi'ite native population, some of whom (but not most) are of Persian descent and even speak Farsi amongst themselves. It gets ugly, and some times shameful. The Iranian side does reciprocate of course, famously in cases such as the Iranian-occupied Arab Ahwaz, the homeland of the famous "Marsh Arabs", over whom Britain went to war against Iraq. Even Arab-haters like Michael Gove seem to have heart when it involves the Iranian regime's readiness to kill Ahwazis (read article in the Guardian).

Nevertheless, Iran seems to me a good bet for Palestine. Unlike Arab societies, Iran has a functioning civil society, a pluralistic democracy; Iran has made huge strides to wipe out illiteracy (amongst the non-wealthy Arab states, only Palestine and Syria have been able to do so) and re-dstribute wealth; Iran is basically the only Middle Eastern country besides Israel to have a research and development infrastructure; Iran is becoming an industrial-economic power in the region. Most of all, they stand up to the Americans, and the Israelis actually bother to hate them. Regardless of the truth of these claims when looked at through a microscope, Iran has at least succeeded in convincing people of these things, in creating that perception. In short, the Arabs might be who we are, but Iran is who we want to be. So which way do we go on this Palestine National Day of 2006?

My Face in a Book

2006-11-14T19:57:00.000+03:00

So, I skipped blogging yesterday in order to do other things, many of them less fulfilling than knocking out these random posts. On the other hand, I did accept the invitation of an old school friend and joined Facebook, which seemingly everybody I went to school with, and a few of the people I went to university with (hey, Brits are far more sceptical about this kind of thing) seem to have done before me. Looking through that site has been nervously confusing...basically, in Facebook, people flock together to join a network, which is linked to an institution in the real world (usually a university or a workplace). Individuals are members (in theory) of more than one network, and also have "friends", to whom you must appeal to acknowledge you, across networks which allow you to build a chain... I suppose the idea goes something like this "Oh, my friend Akanke who I knew while at the American School in Accra is now working at Allen and Overy in London, after studying with Charles, who works with me here at Merrill Lynch in New York, at the LSE".

Since I completely bypassed the yuppy thing, this sort of overtly self-conscious grou back-patting puts me in the pits; would I turn back the clock if I could? Possibly. Just a question which nags me though: Suppose you are on jury duty (OK, not me, I'm talking about people who live in countries where they have juries). Suppose than that the defendant on the case you are hearing is the member of a network on Facebook to which you also belong, perhaps that person has a common friend. You think you might have met this person in corporeal form once before, but aren't too sure, and the connection would have been completely pointless were it not for the unforgiving elephant that is the internet, shining a light on your common troughs. Does this count in the same way as a friend of friend in the corporeal sense? Could you use that to get out of jury duty? Would you even think about it? The Freemasons have actually faced legal action in the past because their fairly irregular friendship/philanthropic network was thought to be affecting legal and political issues. I wonder how seriously my generation takes such considerations.

Anyways, enough of this... today is Palestinian National Day, and so, we must look to Iran! Yes, yes, Iran!!

To Ayatollah (and anybody interested in Farlish)

2006-11-13T15:09:00.000+03:00

So, you think I might have made some mistakes in my English, do you? Let's read through your compatriot's blog...
http://yaserb.blogspot.com

I have to say though, this guy is rather nice... you can find it by Googling "microbiology" and "Palestinian"; which also seems to suggest that he knows how to optimise his blog for search engines, something I guess I'm quite pathetic at.

By the by, if anybody knows anything about the academic papers published by the just-named Palestinian premier, Mohammed Shabir (a microbiologist), please do tell me. I am trying to locate some.

82nd Veto

2006-11-12T18:48:00.002+03:00

Well, the United States has used its right to veto on the United Nations Security Council to prevent international censure of Israel for the eighty-second time yesterday. John Bolton insisted that Israel not be singled out for punishment by the UN after the Beit Hanoun massacre because, after all, to do so would be "one-sided", as if there really were two sides to this conflict.

The series of events at the UN headquarters in New York should dispel the myth that some on the Left seem to cling on to--that the US is constantly in defence of Israel in protection of its oil interests in the region. As it happens, the US' allies/world's oil suppliers, as represented by Qatar--the sole Arab representative on the Security Council--tried to drive home to the Americans the need to show some condemnation of the crime. Qatar, you all know, is what some people love to call a "moderate" Arab state: They have made great strides towards democratisation; they host a US military base; they sponsor world trade talks; they cooperated in the war against the Taleban and so on. Nevertheless, the US chooses to act in the best interests of its domestic Israeli lobby, which seems to control US policy in the region, against its own interests.

Syriana might be a good film, but it's not the whole story.

On the positive side, I note that US Rep. Hyde, who earned his fame by leading the campaign to have Clinton impeached, tarred and feathered, has made a seismic discovery: There are Christians in Palestine!! Perhaps this is the only political tool left in the hands of pro-Palestine activists in the United States. The use of this tool was actually hinted at, ironically enough, in Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv's journo-trash publication, Friends in Deed. Worth reading despite the authors' best efforts.

So long.

Arafat: Two Years On

2006-11-11T11:35:00.000+03:00

As Mahmoud Darwish said shortly after the death of Arafat, "we miss him, but we're not in need of another one". It's been two years now since the death of Yasser Arafat, and those two years have only served to underline that the Arabs lack leadership of his calibre, and probably will do for a long time.

I am posting from Kuwait, a country where Abu Ammar began his professional career as a mechanical engineer with the Ministry of Public Works. Many people here--including Palestinians in this country who were politically competing with Arafat, in a greedy, ruthless and petty conflict--use Arafat's supposed alliance with Saddam during Desert Storm to attack the man; fewer people mention that Arafat was the only Arab leader who was opposed to Saddam's attack on Iran on point of principle. That was at a time when Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were bankrolling the bombardment of Iran.

(Ayatollah: I hope the edited post meets with your favour)

هنا عالم عبد الهادي

2006-11-10T08:10:00.000+03:00

.....اليكم باول تعليق عربي علئ الموقع
اتمنئ أن يفوز برضائكم

Wiley Coyote, Crying for Humanity

2006-11-10T00:43:00.000+03:00

OK, my brand spanking new LG Chocolate is great. I know, one shouldn't boast, especially about such silly things but, hey, it's all good; those who
know will understand my intentions are good, that I am only hoping some marketing geek from the South Korean company which used to be endearingly called Lucky Goldstar will hop on to my blog and decide to make me some sort of official reviewer or something. Speaking of South Korea, what the hell happened to the North Korean nuclear threat? Has Kim Jong-Il cut a deal yet? Yes, yes, I do know that one does not usually have a blog in order to ask other questions, but some of the small number of people who visit this blog are rather clever, and might just have some answers!!

At any rate, please look at the attached image which I have taken using the Chocolate (I mean, if something is called Chocolate, you know it's nice). Yes, it's a Coyote, stuffed. I know, I know. This is how it happened. I met up with two old friends of mine, Hazem and Nawar and we went out to a restaurant dubiously named Tumbleweed on Kuwait's Gulf Coast. In the past, I have never been too much of an animal rights person, but I can not imagine this pathetic coyote ever did anything to deserve being stuck in that hell hole, short of perhaps eating the favourite pet goat of a nun in Arizona. A blind nun, who is suffering from cancer.

Try to picture it: You walk into an eatery in Kuwait, a Starbucks (boycott!! No more Charles Schultz!!) on one side and a Syrian restaurant, next to a Chocolate shop on the other. The walls are covered with what I believed to be false heads of bucks (as if these animals were native to Kuwait). The feeling of being somewhere in America is driven home by the uninvited free refills and the foul-tasting iced tea (I thought this was a recipe from the southern US, but somehow they tend to screw it up). Felt cowboy hats are nailed to the walls, which the waiting staff told me couldn't be taken off for my friends to model for me. There are high railings with saddles, big, rodeo-like saddles like something out of a Western movie, hanging on them, which the staff told me were too heavy to take off for my friends to ride on. The staff, of course, are the unfailingly happy-to-help-you-sir Filipinos, 2.5 million of whom work in the Middle East, mostly as domestic workers, service workers and electricians. This, of course, is possibly where the imperialism hits you in the face: It's as if the thousands of killed Fillipino freedom fighters, over 50 years of occupation weren't enough; the Americans have turned the Phillipines into a mass exporter of cheap, Hollywood-esque kitsch, always being Asian without the threatening connotations of a Chinese or a Japanese, always smiling and refilling your rinks.

Of course, Kuwait and Eastern Arabia/Nejd does have a culinary tradition of its own, hints of which are discernible in Turki Al Hamad's trilogy, this has been entirely wiped out by a mad, unregulated and overly disastrous cultural and economic invasion.

While American military contractors sat down to eat their steaks ("with two side orders sir... are you from the States?"), only the howling of this unfortunate canid reminds us of the madness of the world around us. What do you think of the camera's resolution?

Closer to Home (Post 2 for Today)

2006-11-09T10:26:00.000+03:00

Just thought I should point out an event closer to home than bloody Ajami... Hundreds of Kuwaitis protested the recent Israeli massacre in the Gaza Strip outside the Kuwaiti parliament. I saw fit to point this out as some of the people who know about my blog are Levantine Arabs, who tend to be ignorant of the political trends and nuances in a place like Kuwait. In fact, I might take this chance to point out a really good Kuwaiti political blog, Safat Square. Safat Square normally posts in Arabic, with occassional English additions. The most recent discussions centre around rumours of an extraordinary dissolution of Kuwait's parilament, and the formation of a bi-cameral legislature within 3 years.

For people living in Kuwait, this is scary stuff. The recent parliamentary elections witnessed some quite serious discontent and near-clashes between the security services and protestors. If there is any kind of serious schism between the Executive (the Royal Family) and the Legislature (elected parliament) of Kuwait, I would love to see whose side the Americans, who control up to 20,000 armed troops at any one time, will take.

Manna from the White House

2006-11-09T09:49:00.000+03:00

From an old Kuwaiti friend, Saud Al Zaid, in Chicago, comes the news that the White House has awarded the National Humanities Medal to both Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis (OK, so I could have found this out on the White House website...but I wanted to tip my hat to Saud). Is that supposed to make the Neocons feel better after the elections?

If you don't know who Fouad Ajami is, a little primer. Let's start with: He's a shit. Fouad Ajami is a Lebanese American who started at some point in the 1980s that he was pro-Israeli and was the "good Arab" cheerleader for Israel within American academia. Of course, it's easy to point to an Arab and say "see, even he thinks so, so it must be true... yeah, let's just listen to what this Arab has to say". Ironically, in person Ajami is adamant about his American-ness, despite his clearly discernible accent and the hilarity of his insistence on wearing a baseball cap indoors (to hide his bald head?). OK, so if you live in Lebanon until the age of 13, you'd have to be pretty stupid to not be able to speak a word of Arabic; nay, it's a pretty sad indictment of American academia that a man can fashion himself as an expert on the Middle East when, allegedly (and somehow I want to doubt this), he does not engage in any serious with Arabic political discourse. I remember his propaganda speaking tour in Kuwait in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, where he spoke for hours on end on the need to end Al Jazeera's coverage of the intifada. So, we have an American academic close to the the US administration agitating for censorship. You couldn't have made it up.

As for Lewis, his academic credentials are rather more difficult to poke holes in, given that he is actually a scholar; better yet, he prides himself on being able to read Arabic. Reading The Multiple Identities of the Middle East the only one of his books I would recommend to people new to the Middle East, it becomes obvious that he is uncomfortable with the idea of Arabs who think. It's a oft-heard complaint: Modern nationalism is not an Arab idea; it's dangerous, take it away from them. Of course, while German nationalism is about as old, in its political manifestations as Arab nationalism, nobody would ever make the same claims about the need to break up the German super-state; Germans are Europeans, and Europeans are credited with a modicum of free will and freedom of choice. Lewis is the kind of guy who, despite his seriously scholarship, gives orientalism the bad name which then paints people like Otto Pohl.

Now, never mind all of this... we all know what's going on. The White House is passing out its political candy bars, and they've got every right to do that, but do the Americans really want to give a medal to a man who might be arrested in France for denying the Armenian Holocaust?

Injustice in the Land of Hammurabi; Saddam wins a Prize

2006-11-07T02:22:00.000+03:00

Following yesterday's farce of a conviction hearing of Saddam, I really had no appetite to post anything on this blog. Most people here in Kuwait are, understandably, rather pleased by the whole affair but for reasons I fear are not quite good enough.

First off, let's just take the matter of a death penalty in a country which is supposedly on the road to becoming a democracy with enshrined respect for human rights. If you truly believe in human rights, then those human rights should be unconditional and not bound by temporal or political constraints. You can not insist that you are opposed to the idea of the death penalty in principle, only to accept it willingly in certain situations. The ridiculous Jalal el Din Talebani, President of the Kurdish federal region, has done just that in his attempts to paint himself as the Kurdistan born love child of Mother Theresa and Mahatma Gandhi.

Secondly, who can actually pretend that the trial was anything other than a stunt of the finest political theatre? Where else on Earth would the Premier of a country shamelessly and unambiguously announce on television that he was aware of the verdict before judgment was passed? Nuri Al Maliki addressed the media a day before the verdict was officially announced, and stated that he expected the Iraqi people to celebrate the death sentence on Saddam. Who is he kidding? What kind of respect for the rule of law will the younger generation of Iraqis, born during Saddam's reign be introduced to in this fashion?

Thirdly, if we are to believe GW Bush, then sometimes, we have to accept that bad things happen in war. Saddam was on trial for the events of Dujail during the heat of the Iran-Iraq war. Surprisingly, the Dujail incident is not very contested. Saddam's life was threatened by a group of citizens, loyal to a state with which Iraq was at war at the time, who wanted to de-stabilise his regime. They were armed and dangerous. They were killed. Several years later, the Branch Davidians posed no conceivable threat to the Federal government in the United States, nor to the life of Bill Clinton. Yet the US authorities in killing roughly the same amount of people (about 150); Clinton will not be facing charges, I think. Fact of life: The state has the monopoly of violence in its territory, and will use it.

At any rate, I couldn't put it better than David Cox from The Guardian:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/david_cox/2006/11/saddam_a_tribute.html

On the plus side, Saddam is the longest-serving ruler of Baghdad since the 9th Century, and for this he deserves a prize. Perhaps it should be that his final wish is granted and that he is exected by firing squad, as is fitting with protocol. After all, Abdelkarim Kassem, who ruled Iraq after the 1958 coup, killed a comparable number of people to Saddam during his short reign and this did not deny him the right to die with dignity. The whole affair makes me sick to the stomach.

The Chinese Dragon in the Jungles of Africa...

2006-11-05T09:55:00.000+03:00

OK, today was supposed to be the day that I added a few digital photos to the blog, trying to give some of you a better idea of what Kuwait is like and all that. So far, it has not happened because I've pretty much remained indoors since coming here, although I did go out for a brisk suburban jog yesterday (Kay, if you're reading, take note). Th upshot is that I get to enjoy Turkish coffee when I want it (one advantage over London) and I also get my pick of, like, 300 television stations, including BBC Food, Turkmenistan and "Ashur", the Aramaic language channel. Think of the dialogue from Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in a documentary and news format. In my hopelessly ambitious dreams, I might try to learn some Aramaic from its coverage, and of course there's always the written course from http://www.assyrianlanguage.com

Anyhows, last night I was flipping through and came across Al Jazeera's coverage of the Sino-African summit. The text on the screen spelled out "The Chinese Dragon in the Jungles of Africa" and was that ever a good chuckle. If a British television station had used the words "the British bulldog in the Heat of the Desert" to describe one of their arms deals conventions, the politically correct brigade at SOAS and other places would have marched in the streets, demanding to be placated with blood. Here, it seems, we are not too laboured with the civilities of political correctness which, if you ask me, is a terribly good thing; but I would very much appreciate it if the Arabistas in London began to grasp this. It seems to me that the real problem of Orientalism in the Arab world is not that it is used by the whiteys to keep us down, but the way in which it has been wholeheartedly accepted, taken on board and given a new lease of life by our semi comatose "intellectuals". Thus, Africa remains in the Arab imagination a "wild jungle" --never mind that the largest and some of the most politically sophisticated Arab states are African--while the Chinese can be a more threatening but essentially exotic "dragon". I don't even want to tell you how India figures in the Arab imagination. Sadek Jalal Al Azem wrote a great a piece of work about the true importance of Orientalism to the Arabs but, as he wrote in Arabic and not a European language like the unassailable Edward Said, none of our "intelligentsia" took the time to read him. I wonder how many people realise that Said is read in Arabic speaking countries for the essentially Orientalist reason that he wrote in English, he was a brown guy who done good by being accepted in the West? This all brings me back to a fairly petty personal swipe I wanted to make against a chap at SOAS.

This gentleman, let's just call him "O.K.", became furious when I suggested to a third person in his presence that Arab employers treated their workers differently for essentially cultural reasons. In other words, the kind of authority you have over an individual when they are in your employ is, in Arab societies, nearly total. We are still a society bound by quasi-feudal honour codes; if you work for someone, they expect you to wait on them on bended knee. Never mind that I was speaking from very relevant personal experience, having worked for more than one Arab employer in my time, as far as "O.K." was concerned, I was the Palestinian reincarnation of Bernard Lewis. This would have been bad enough, had he not then gone on to suggest that he was like a younger Edward Said. Hilariously, this was when I pointed out that he should learn to read Arabic to be able to have the argument, as the differences in attitudes to employment can be seen in the Arabic language and the very words used to describe work (once I get a proper USB keyboard with Arabic stickers for my laptop, I will introduce some more Arabic language discussions... stay posted). Now you all know how petty I can be, or maybe it's just the boredom of being in Kuwait.

Getting back to Lewis, I wonder why nobody mentions that he was prosecuted for denying the Armenian holocaust before the last piece of legislation went through...I also wonder how the arch-Christian neocons in the US failed to notice his failure to condemn the "Muslim" Turks for their massacre of the "Christian" Armenians, he was like their godfather in the run-up to the Iraq war. Anyway, if you want to read more about the Armenians and other genocides in the Caucauses for that matter, visit Otto's blog on http://jpohl.blogspot.com Many of you will also remember Otto for the "grass incident" outside SOAS.

In other news, Saddam will have judgement passed on him today, and it seems that everybody forgot Jalal Talebani's promise to end the death penalty in Iraq if Saddam were toppled. Those people danced like monkeys to get into power, and I can't wait till the Americans abandon them...

Back in Kuwait

2006-11-04T20:48:00.000+03:00

Today's Day 3 of my return to Kuwait, the land of my birth without being my native country, although I have to say I seem to be able to get on in the place better than most expatriates. So, anyways, the news of 4 November:

1) The Grand Duke of Luxembourg is paying a state visit to the country, holding meetings with the Emir and being his guest at a dinner banquet later in the evening. There is some rather nice footage of him being welcomed to the country by the good and the great, including the top brass and numerous cabinet ministers, undersecretaries of state, members of the Kuwaiti royal and family and one stalky unidentifiable black man in a suit. Political corretoids take notice.

2) His Highness the Emir sent a cable of congratulations to the Presidents of both the Dominican Republic and Panama, on the occasion of their national days. An absurdly tenuous connection between Panama and the Middle East: The current president of Panama, Martine Torrejos, is (presumably) the son of one-time Panamanian general, unelected yet popular socialist leader Omar Torrijos, whose rule was immortalised by Graham Greene's Getting to Know the General. Omar was not, like many Latin American rulers, of Middle Eastern extraction nor was he a convert to Islam. Amin Maalouf does point out in Samarkand that Omar became a popular first name in the West after the publication of Medieval Persian poet Omar Khayyam's work in French in the 19th Century.

3) An explosion affected at a refinery affected oil production at the Shuaiba port in the south of Kuwait today.

No prizes for guessing which order these stories appeared in the state broadcaster's news roundup today.

Well, if you've read this, it's probably because I sent you the original get-to-know-the-blog email, so please leave your two cents below. Peace out y'all.

2005-10-10T21:46:00.000+03:00

My contribution to the world of science has been sealed: The Wall Model of the Self-avoiding Random Walk cannot be an accurate description of DNA electrophoresis. There. You heard it here first.

Besides that, it's been quite a while indeed since I've posted anything and hey, I still don't know if anybody's reading it.

What's happened since?

2005-07-12T13:57:00.000+03:00

As those of you interested will know, London has by now returned to its glorious normality. The public transport is (as usual) running behind schedule; the aroma of vinegar wafts through the air from fish and chip shops; and scantilly clad women sunbathe in the parks and along the canals, making cycling trips that much more exciting. This is truly a great city.

To be fair, my brother and I--our appearance definitely belies our Arabness--did get quite a few strange stares when we took the night buses together from a friend's house last weekend. I also found a new way to amuse myself on the tube the other day: Every time I dipped into my bag to get something to read, the man opposite me convulsed. I was quite worried about his health at one point... but that's London for you.

Why another one?

2005-07-08T17:32:00.000+03:00

Why, you might ask, is there now another blog? Why do we need yet another arm-chair philosopher's musings on the world we all live in? Why yet another string of Humble Opinions? Especially as I have yet to change the default font settings!!

All I can say is that in the past I have infuriated many, and plan to do so on a much wider scale now that I can. Yet this blog will not only be a forum for my own pontifications on science, morality, religion and politics; it will also be a vehicle for me to ridicule the views of others, including your own, if you so choose. I believe now, in the aftermath of the horrible attacks which convulsed London, and were likely carried out by people antithetical to myself (i.e., people who visit the mosques), is a good time for a fresh perspective. Now is the time to hear about a new, liberal, radically secular Arab nationalism; with added holiday photos. You might even get some discussion on computer modelling, human evolution and reasons to hate organic farmers.