'beirut i love you' and 'the devil you don't know'

Baghdad, Beirut, and the literature of return
by Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette 20 April 2009

In his acclaimed memoir “I Saw Ramallah”, narrating his return to the West Bank after an absence of nearly 30 years, the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes, “But I do know that the stranger can never go back to what he was. Even if he returns. It is over. A person gets ‘displacement’ as he gets asthma, and there is no cure for either.”

Barghouti’s memoir - the English translation of which was published in 2003 - is an example of what might be termed the Arab literature of return. Wars and political turmoil in the Arab world have, over the decades, inspired many literary works along the themes of displacement and exile. This literature is now being complemented by a growing body of works by those who have been courageous enough to return.

Iraqi journalist Zuhair Al-Jezairy’s “The Devil You Don’t Know” and Lebanese artist Zena Al-Khalil’s “Beirut, I Love You: A Memoir” are two books published recently by Saqi, a London and Beirut based publisher. Both illustrate the theme of displacement on return to Baghdad and Beirut, respectably.

Like Barghouti, Al-Jezairy and Al-Khalil both experienced a sense of displacement when they returned to their home countries. Though the feeling of being out of place was a painful experience at certain times, it enabled both writers to provide particularly acute accounts of their societies.

Al-Jezairy was an oppositionist and journalist when he fled Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1979. He first went to Beirut, and eventually found refuge in London. In “The Devil You Don’t Know” - a work that is ably translated from the Arabic version by John West - he depicts what he found when he returned to Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion. His impressions are juxtaposed with the memories of people and places of Iraq that he retains from his youth.

Zena Al-Khalil was born in London in 1976 to parents who hailed from Lebanon. She grew up in Nigeria and England, but at the age of 18 she decided to attend college in Beirut. Her book is a tribute not only to a city but also to her best friend and soul mate Maya, who died of cancer. “This was the woman who would share her version of Beirut with me,” she writes.


Al-Jezairy is the author of nine books, including two novels. “The Devil You Don’t Know” is endlessly illuminating, written in precise, poetic prose. The author lays bare often contradictory feelings. During the invasion he joined other Iraqis gathering in London “like frightened birds”. They were divided ideologically into those who supported and those who opposed the war, but he found himself personally internally divided.

Al-Jezairy conveys the surreal texture of life following the overthrowing of Saddam. People who had been silenced for years had to relearn narrative skills while others emerged from cellars where they had hidden for long periods. The invasion’s darker side, however, soon revealed itself when a horrific chain of violence consequently unleashed itself.

Al-Jezairy has been keen to help establish journalistic standards in Iraq. This is no mean task, especially as he admits that the “assassination of journalists has taken the place of censorship.” For some time, he was the editor of the newly-established newspaper, Al Mada, and is now editor-in-chief of the independent news agency Aswat al-Iraq (Iraqi Voices).

Al-Jezairy writes, “Books have defined my whole personal evolution and history.” Many of his memories of Iraq revolve around his friendships with fellow intellectuals, and clandestine meetings with girls. Both Iraq and the author have changed. He has had to get used to young men in the street respectfully calling him “hajji” or “uncle”, while at work budding journalists call him “doctor” or “teacher”. He professes a certain fondness for this new identity, writing “being over sixty, it is true that I loved being the teacher of these young journalists.”

He notes the tension between those who had stayed in Iraq and the “returnees”, who were often rewarded by the occupation. In journalism, insiders felt a sense of injustice because “the cocky outsiders arrived with their dollars to scoop up all the important staff jobs, while they, who had lived through the wars and endured the privations of the sanctions, ended up working as freelancers for peanuts.”

Zena Al-Khalil is from a younger generation of Arabs, born and raised abroad. During the Israeli attacks during the war of summer 2006, she became known for her blog “Beirut Update”. It was quoted by the BBC and CNN, and was published in newspapers including Der Spiegel in Germany and the Guardian in the UK.

Al-Khalil has also experienced growing success as a painter and installation artist, and one of her collages was sold at London auction house Sotheby’s last October. Indeed “Beirut, I Love You”, which is written in a fragmentary form, itself often resembles a collage. Al-Khalil completed a Masters in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2002, and she writes of the predicament of Arabs in the city after the 9/11 attacks. In a whimsical start to her book she imagines herself to have been reincarnated, starting as a Lebanese boy who drowned in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 and was then reborn as the Druze singer Asmahan.

Al-Khalil conveys the hedonism of Beirut and recounts her adventures in the company of the equally rebellious Maya. She had difficulties with the expectations of Lebanese society. “No one knew how to deal with my tomboyish personality. My aunt would sigh every time I walked in with dirty sandals. My grandmother would shrug her shoulders when she saw me in torn-up jeans. And my cousins believed I was a hopeless case and that no one would ever marry me. How could anyone marry someone who only wore white baggy T-shirts?” she narrates.

Lebanon and Iraq have both been the subject of numerous books written by Westerners, but there are far fewer books available in English written by insiders of those two countries. Both memoirs are therefore valuable as they portray these war-inflicted societies as seen through the sharp eyes of two ‘returnees’.

arabian nights in translation and on the stage

Theater and new translation revive ‘The Arabian Nights’
by Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette 6 April 2009

The fact that two major theatrical projects related to “The Arabian Nights” are storming ahead, is proof of the enduring vitality of this great treasure-chest of tales as a source of creative inspiration. Director Tim Supple [pictured] of London-based Dash Arts has recently announced his plan to embark on a tour of North Africa, Syria, Jordan, the Gulf, Iran, India (and possibly Iraq) this month to prepare for a new production of “The Arabian Nights.”

At the same time, the Royal Shakespeare Company has announced that over Christmas, it is to stage a reworked version of the acclaimed production of “Arabian Nights” first devised by Dominic Cooke at the Young Vic theater in 1998. That production subsequently toured the prestigious Edinburgh Festival, Dublin and New York.

During his forthcoming tour of the Arab world, India and Iran, Supple will sample the work of local performers from storytellers, actors, and dancers to singers and acrobats. They will eventually be brought together in a production of no set length or form. “We are trying to create a theatrical version of ‘The Arabian Nights’ which will do justice to the scale, depth and richness of the stories,” Supple told the Guardian newspaper.

Dominic Cooke too will draw on the skills of artists from a variety of disciplines. His production of “Arabian Nights” will include song, dance, puppetry and illusion. The RSC promises that the cast of 18 “will paint a dazzling array of stories and characters.”

Cooke is the artistic director of the Royal Court Theater in London. In his commission for the RSC, he will expand and develop his original version of “Arabian Nights” for the RSC’s Courtyard Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon. Performances will run from Dec. 5 this year until the end of January in 2010.

Tim Supple brings to “The Arabian Nights” project the experience he acquired when devising a stunning Indian version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which harnessed the talent of actors, dancers, martial arts experts, musicians and acrobats from across India and Sri Lanka. Rehearsals of “The Arabian Nights” will start next year, and the premiere is due to be held at the Luminato festival in Toronto in June 2011. The production will come to the UK the following autumn as part of the Dash Arts Arabic series. In planning the production, Supple is collaborating with the London-based Lebanese novelist Hanan Al-Shaykh, who spent last summer reading all the tales in Arabic.

News of the two theatrical projects comes at a time when interest in this compendium of stories is running particularly high, thanks to Penguin’s recent publication of a new translation. The translation, titled “The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights”, was undertaken by Malcolm C. Lyons with Ursula Lyons. Malcolm Lyons is a former Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge, while Ursula Lyons is an Emeritus Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, specializing in modern Arabic literature.
“The Arabian Nights: tales of 1,001 Nights” is the first translation of the full version of the stories in Arabic – which was published in Calcutta between 1839 and 1842 – since that undertaken by the explorer and adventurer Sir Richard Burton, published in ten volumes in the 1880s. The editor and annotator of the new translation, Robert Irwin, says the new rendering “corrects Burton’s errors in translation, as well as superseding his archaic and ugly prose style.”



Penguin has published the new translation as a handsome boxed set of three volumes - each of some 1,000 pages - at a princely price tag of £125. Each volume has an introduction by Robert Irwin, the author of several key works related to the Arab world including “The Arabian Nights: A Companion.”

Penguin has also published a £9.99 “taster” in the form of a small 169-page hardback which contains the Prologue to the “Arabian Nights” and three of the stories: “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Killed by a Slave Girl”, “Judar and his Brothers,” and “Ma’ruf the Cobbler.”

The prologue tells the famous story of how King Shahrivar takes revenge for his wife’s adultery on all women by deflowering a virgin each night and killing her next day. This continues for three years until the vizier is unable to find another virgin for the king and fears the king’s wrath. The vizier’s extremely well-read daughter Shahrazad insists - against her father’s wishes - on marrying the king herself. She gets her sister Dunyazad, positioned beneath the marital bed, to ask her to tell a story. Night after night Shahrazad will use her gift for storytelling to keep the king hooked until the next night, thereby postponing her death. Ultimately, the king will spare her.

The core of the Arabic stories probably originated in ancient India. They were translated from Sanskrit to Persian some time before the ninth century, and it is likely that some Persian tales were added.
An Arabic version of the stories was in circulation by the ninth century, although it seems that the earliest surviving manuscript of the “Thousand and One Nights” dates from the 15th century.

In the early 18th century the French Orientalist Antoine Galland translated into French the oldest existing manuscript, and added a translation of a manuscript of the Sindbad stories. Some other stories (including “Ali Baba”) were relayed to him by a Lebanese Christian. The translations were very popular with French courtiers and intellectuals, and Galland’s translation was in turn translated into English and other languages.

Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, the Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford University, Greet Jan van Gelder praises the quality of the new Penguin translation and says it “ought to become the standard one for the present century.” He finds it fitting that it appears in time for the 1,200th anniversary of the death of the fifth Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid, whose fictional persona appears in so many of the “Arabian Nights” stories.

The Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif is not as keen on the translation as some reviewers, describing it in the Times newspaper as “a workable and honest translation, but not a sparkling one. And it makes me wish that the reader could access the original material.” She suggests that perhaps the “Arabian Nights” were never meant to be read, and are best suited to sessions with a storyteller.

It is likely that the forthcoming “Arabian Nights” theatrical productions of Dominic Cooke and Tim Supple will capture something of the flavor of the oral storytelling traditions that first nurtured the stories, punctuated by music and other diversions.


below, Tim Supple's Indian production of A Midsummer Night's Dream

two ceremonies bestow awards on british muslims

Awards balance media’s distorted view of Britain’s Muslims
by Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette 13 April 2009
Events in Britain over the past week have highlighted once again, the difficulties facing British Muslims as a result of the terror threat to Britain. The arrest of 12 men – 11 of them Pakistanis who are overwhelmingly on student visas – and Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s statement on a “very big” terror plot, have revived suspicions about the UK’s Muslim community.

Some tabloid newspapers these days only have to place the word ‘Muslim’ in a headline for the reader to know the story will be sensational and mostly negative. The media tend to give prominence to the threatening statements of extremist loudmouths, while largely ignoring the realities and diversity of the bulk of Britain’s approximately two million Muslims.

Two recent awards ceremonies have helped put British Muslims in a positive perspective. They were antidotes to the clichés peddled in some sections of the press, and by certain politicians, of British Muslims failing to integrate and of contributing little to society.

The Muslim News Awards ceremony, held in London and attended by some 800 guests, provided evidence-galore of the productive role Britain’s Muslims are playing across the board in cultural, scientific and community life.

At the same time, a separate contest to find the most powerful Muslim woman in Britain was won by the feisty Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, the Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion and Social Action. The contest was organized by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), in association with the Times newspaper and Emel Muslim lifestyle magazine. The organizers published Britain’s first-ever annual Muslim Women Power List, naming a shortlist of 13 people. The judges announced their choice of Baroness Warsi at a dinner in Manchester in the North of England.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of The Muslim News, which launched the annual Muslim News Awards for Excellence nine years ago. In his speech at the awards ceremony, the monthly newspaper’s editor Ahmed J. Versi warned against the criminalization of a whole community because of terror attacks “carried out by a minute number of people”. He indicated that such criminalization risks marginalizing and increasing the alienation of young Muslims, and there is a danger that violent extremists will use this “to lure them in”.

Versi’s message was addressed to an audience that included Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, Communities Secretary Hazel Blears, Communities Minister Sadiq Khan, and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg.
The Guest of Honor, outgoing head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, said: “The dazzling array of nominees gives a humbling but heart-warming picture of so many remarkable initiatives, some of which show tremendous skill in fields as varied as music and medicine, and others that prove how hard so many people are working to build hope in communities around Britain and further afield.”

picture below, courtesy of The Muslim News, shows L to R Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, editor of The Muslim News Ahmed J Versi and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith

Nominations for the awards were submitted by readers of The Muslim News. A panel of seven judges drew up the shortlists and chose the final winners. Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor [pictured below, courtesy of The Muslim News] presented the Alhambra Award for Excellence in the Arts to the Baghdad-born master of the oud Ahmed Mukhtar who since 1990 has performed, toured and taught throughout the Middle East and Europe. He has composed music for theatre, film and TV, and four CDs of his performances have been released.

The graffiti artist Mohammed Ali [pictured top with one of his works] was shortlisted for the Alhambra Award and won the Iman wa Amal Judges’ Special Award. His “aerosol Arabic” style fuses classical Islamic calligraphy and urban street graffiti.

The Allama Iqbal Award for Creativity in Islamic Thought, sponsored by the Foreign Office, was presented by Sadiq Khan to Professor Muhammad A. S. Abdel Haleem of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University. Abdel Haleem’s latest work, “The Qur’an: A New Translation” published by Penguin, has become a bestseller.

The Sankore University Award for Excellence in Education, sponsored by the charity Muslim Hands, went to Zafar Shah Iqbal. Iqbal helped found the Southwark Muslim Women’s Association, focusing on education as a means of empowering Muslim women. Professor Mohamed El-Gomati of University of York won the Fazlur Rahman Khan Award for Excellence in Engineering, Science or Technology. Some of the awards are designed to encourage the young. Fifteen-year-old freestyle karate and kickboxing expert Imran Sidat won the Imams Hasan and Husayn Children’s Award for Excellence.

The Malcolm X Young Person’s Award for Excellence, went to Faizaan Ahmed. As an 18-year-old A-level student, Ahmed was moved by the murder of his 19-year-old sister in November 2007 to found The Halimah Trust (THT). The trust aims to raise £108,000 by the end of the year to build a secondary school for orphan girls in Pakistan.

In the field of entrepreneurship, shadow justice secretary Dominic Grieve awarded the Ummul Mu’minin Khadijah Award for Excellence in Enterprise to the Muslim Enterprise Development Service (MEDS).

The awards place much emphasis on community work. Hazel Blears presented the Uthman Dan Fodio Award for Excellence in Community Development, sponsored by her department, to two joint winners: Black and Asian Service in Alcohol and Narcotics (BASIAN), and Shereen Williams, Director of the Council of Ethnic Minority Voluntary Sector Organisations.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith handed the Home Office-sponsored Al Biruni Award for Excellence in Community Relations to Ikram Malik, a founding member of Building Bridges Pendle and the Lancashire Forum of Faiths.
Faezeh Hashemi, President of the Islamic Federation of Women Sport, had travelled from Iran to present the Faezeh Hashemi Award for Excellence in Sport to the Muslim Women’s Sport Foundation.
The Ibn Battuta Award for fair, accurate and balanced reporting on an issue involving Muslims went jointly to 29-year-old Mehdi Hasan, the youngest commissioning editor at Channel 4 TV, and British journalist and famous convert to Islam: Yvonne Ridley.

Not every recipient of a prize was a Muslim. Reverend Gilleasbuig MacMillan, Minister of St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, won the Annemarie Schimmel Award for Championing a Muslim Cause in recognition of his determined initiatives over many years to welcome Muslims to his cathedral.

The Muslim News Awards revealed the vital part that Muslims are playing in many fields of activity across the UK. The near-simultaneous choice of Baroness Warsi as the most powerful Muslim woman in Britain illustrates the increasing Muslim presence at high political level.

below, Baroness Warsi with Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission

new issue of arab world books

The online Arab World Books has e-mailed a newsletter to subscribers informing them of the publication of its latest issue, which includes a length review by playwright Tony Kushner, and Alisa Solomon - who teaches at Columbia University's School of Journalism and is the author of 'Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender' - of Caryl Churchill's controversial play on Gaza 'Seven Jewish Children'. The review was first published in The Nation.

Arab World Books, which contains both Arabic and English content, is "about the ideas, the books and the women and men who created them.Founded in Geneva in July 1998, it is the first Arab cultural online club.We are an independent non-profit entity staffed by volunteers. We welcome all contributions and encourage interaction. Our club is dedicated to enhance understanding between different cultures.If this interests you, we welcome you as a member of this club."

The newsletter states:
1- Join the discussion on "Tree Talk". Our Readers' Club selection for this month is the last published book for the late Iraqi author Fouad Altakarli. More details about the book, its author and links to discussion can be found on our Readers Club Map at:http://www.arabworldbooks.com/Readers/main.htm

2- Six new members join our Authors' Home.
We would like to extend a warm welcome to our new member authors: Darweesh Alasuty,Elsayed Hafez and Ahmed Elserwy from Egypt, Saleh Alqasim from Jordan ,Rana Jaafer from Iraq and Kamar Aljasm from Syria. D.R. Khashaba and Monir Oteiba's pages have also been updated.
Visit their new homepages on our Authors' Home.http://www.arabworldbooks.com/authors/default.html

3- What's new in our Literature and Essay Corners?
Multilingual PoetryFour Poems from Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Syria by Hocine Atrouce, Mohamed Masoud, Mounir Idrissi and Kamar Aljasm.Two poems in French by Renia Aouadene and Mohamed Khraief.Poetry in Greek and English by Dimitris P. Kraniotis. In ArabicNew free e-books to download offered by Said Salem, Abdelkarim Nahari, Hazem Khairy, Abdelnabi Elekri, Ali Tal, Fouad Nasredin and Abdallah Alfaifi. In English"Seven Jewish Children - A Play for Gaza" a review by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon - The Nation."The Death of Many Birthdays" a new addition to our Palestine file by Janelle Dance.Find them on our main page.http://www.arabworldbooks.com/

4- What's new on our Debate Corner?
In Arabic, browse a variety of new writings by Nada Emam and Jamil Salhut and others. In English "The Message from Gaza in Japanese". Professor Said Abdelwahed's Messages from Gaza which started on December 27 have now been published into a book in Japanese.Read them on our Debate Corner and participate with your own views and comments: Read them on our Debate Corner and participate with your own views and comments http://forum.arabworldbooks.com/

alastair crooke's 'resistance: the essence of the islamist revolution'

“One of the most radical and provocative books of the year so far”. This is how the leading BBC political journalist and presenter Andrew Mar described Alastair Crooke’s book “Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution” when Crooke [pictured above] was a guest recently on the BBC radio weekly Monday programme Start the Week, which Marr presents.

Crooke, a former British spy who turns 60 this year, is an extraordinary character who has devoted the past five years of his life to bringing about dialogue and engagement between Westerners and Islamist groups such as Hamas and Hizbollah.

After leaving his job with Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, generally known as MI6, in 2004 Crooke founded the organisation Conflicts Forum. The slogan on the website of the Forum is “listening to political Islam, recognizing resistance”. The aim is “to open a new relationship between the West and the Muslim world”. As part of his efforts, Crooke has organised a series of little-publicised meetings in Beirut between Islamists and Westerners including former politicians and diplomats.

Crooke’s 300-page book is published by the London-based publisher Pluto Books. His appearance on Start the Week was one of several appearances in London to publicise the launch of the book. Crooke travelled for the launch to London from Beirut where he has lived for the past few years.

Inevitably Crooke is a controversial figure, with some accusing him of being an apologist for Islamists and for in effect justifying terrorism. Others see him as providing a vital “back channel” to facilitate meetings between the West and Islamists, and as helping dispel some unnecessary Western fears and misconceptions of Islamism.

On Start the Week, Andrew Marr said that Crooke “urges us to sympathise with the struggles of Hamas, Hizbollah and other Islamist groups, but he goes a lot further, accusing Western civilisation of having badly lost its way, leaving people isolated, bereft and endangered. It’s time, Crooke says, to listen to the message of the Muslim world.”

Crooke writes in the introductory chapter to his book that his objective is “to try to explain further the essence of the Islamist revolution. To go to the heart of it to convey some sense of the power of the ideas as they have evolved; the excitement and the power of events and movements that are able to mobilise and energise millions.”

Crooke highlights the negative ways in which Western ideas have affected others in the past few centuries. He writes: “It is to this dark side to history – the complex strands of western thinking that stand behind the last 200 years of events – that I look for an explanation of why Muslims, suddenly, at a particular moment in history, began to feel the need to mobilise and to embrace resistance and revolution.”

Andrew Marr suggested that Crooke has in his book paid too little attention to the “dark side” of the Islamists. Marr said: “You will be accused of putting too easily to one side what these [Islamist] organisations would say about the position of women, about homosexuals, about lots of liberal freedoms that we take for granted outside that world. Perhaps if we have seen them too one-sidedly in a negative way, you’ve pushed too much of the dark side away.”

Crooke admitted that there is a dark side to the Islamist revolution. “There is not just a revolution of philosophers, there is a part that is dangerous and ugly, part of the counterrevolution... There is an element that has been deeply involved in literalism and dogmatism, and that is a part we tend to associate with Islamist radicals, but that is largely something in fact the West has created itself.”

Crooke says that he has not attempted in his book to provide “balance”, and that he is instead presenting his personal view. He had no wish to repeat “the torrent of scepticism and hostility towards Islamism – which seeks to brand it as nothing more than a violent, reactionary and transitory kick against the inevitable advance of modernity.”


Some readers will be disappointed that he omits all discussion of gender, given that the treatment of women is a focus of attacks on Islamism. Crooke knows he will be criticised for this omission, writing that whenever Islamism is discussed, gender is a key theme for criticism of Islamism. “But it is a fascinating area: feminism flourishes within Islamism; but not in the way usually understood in the West.” It is a pity that Crooke does not elaborate on this.

Crooke has had 30 years of direct experience of conflict in Ireland, South Africa, Namibia, Afghanistan, Cambodia and Colombia, and has been a co-ordinator in hostage negotiations in various countries. In 1997-2003, he served as advisor to EU High Representative, Javier Solana, in the Middle East, and he was security advisor to special EU envoy to the Middle East Peace Process, Miguel Moratinos.

Crooke was involved in facilitating a series of de-escalations of violence and military withdrawals in Palestine with Islamist movements from 2000 to 2003, and in helping arrange some six ceasefire efforts between Palestinians and Israel. He was a staff member of the Mitchell Commission into the causes of the intifada in 2000.

Crooke had a role in negotiating an end to the 39-day Israeli siege of Palestinian militants in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in April and May 2002. Three months later the Israeli newspaper Maariv unmasked him as an MI6 agent.

In his book, Crooke aims “to bring out and trace the essence and spirit of the ideas that lie behind this rising resistance to the West rather than attempting a historical survey of Islamism in all its diversity.” He says “there is no one Islam or Islamism – there are many.”

He writes that at bottom the dispute is between two opposing views on what constitutes the “essence of man”. Underlying the conflict are differing religious insights – but this is not a straight confrontation between Christianity and Islam. The Anglo-Saxon tradition, which America embodies, emerged from the long-running struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism.

Since the days of Oliver Cromwell, in the mid-17th century, the mainly English speaking world has come to regard its enemies as “haters of liberty and God” who possess no morality and will do anything to win. “These same originally Protestant themes can now be observed reflected in western language towards Islam,” Crooke observes.

Islamist resistance was “jolted into existence by the trauma of social engineering, ethnic cleansing, political disruption, repression and massacres that were the direct consequence of the western experiment in exporting to Muslim societies its vision of economic market-based life, freed from social and political control.”

According to Crooke, the “enforced westernisation and secularisation of Turkey in the early 20th century, and the brutality of its nation-state building have come to symbolise the worst aspects of secular modernism.”

Crooke condemns the “western myth” of the free market and the “invisible hand”. He goes as far as saying “the western nation-state, human rights doctrine and the institutions of western democracy are all derived from these same myths.”

In evolving an Islamist ideology, “something important happened”. Along with most people in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Islamists had been constrained by western instrumentalist “scientific” thinking, but they suddenly broke free. This was the crucial importance of the Iranian revolution: “It freed Islamists from self-imposed constraints resulting from a hegemony of instrumentalist thought.”

Crooke says the Islamist ideology that evolved is “dynamic and substantive” and that Islamism is gaining the characteristics of an “open” society whereas the West is acquiring some of the characteristics of a “closed” society. Islamism believes that behaviour is influenced by the experience of “living in a just and compassionate community, and by humans behaving with each other, as God directed”.

On the question of Islamist violence, Crooke argues that mainstream Islamist resistance is “a means to facilitate political solutions through helping to correct asymmetrical imbalances and by forcing the West to acknowledge the importance of key principles as necessary to any solution”.

He distinguishes the “emancipator resistance” of movements such as Hamas and Hizbollah from the “burn-the-system-to-build-anew philosophy of Al-Qaeda and the eschatological [ie concerned with End Times] leanings of some Salafi groups. “The failure of the West to make this distinction empowers the more extreme movements at the expense of the mainstream.”

Crooke argues that Islamist resistance is no more “divine caprice” than the systematic violence that western states use as “legitimate force”. He adds that the “demonization” of Islam is a deliberate ideological operation, with the twin objectives of strengthening America’s scope to take “decisive action” and justifying greater American intervention in the Middle East in pursuit of the neo-liberal agenda.

The pursuit of these objectives has been a failure that is ascribed to a way of thinking that has strewn its wreckage across 300 years of history “and which in recent years has added another astonishing mound of debris in the Muslim world – a legacy that will haunt the West for years to come.”

It is clear that Crooke intended his book to be challenging. During his visit to Britain, he appeared on a lively and at times heated hour-long roundtable discussion on Islamism and violence on the Iranian government-funded English language channel Press TV. The discussion was chaired by Tariq Ramadan. The other two guests were the director of the anti-Islamist Quilliam Foundation, Maajid Nawaz, and the scholar and cultural critic Ziauddin Sardar.

Both Nawaz and Sardar expressed reservations about Crooke’s book. Nawaz told Crooke he thought he had “slightly romanticised Islamism.” Sardar strongly criticised the behaviour of Hamas after the Gaza war, in killing alleged collaborators and reportedly seizing some international aid. Sardar also said that suicide bombings against civilians in Israel should be criticised as much as suicide bombings anywhere else.

In an interview conducted by Sir David Frost on the satellite TV channel Al-Jazeera English, to mark the 30th anniversary of the Iranian revolution, Crooke acknowledged the gap between the theory and practice of Islamist revolution. He said that many of the Iranians who took to the streets at the time of the revolution “still feel that the revolution didn’t achieve its ends.”

Crooke added: “The Iran that they have today is not either as free nor as equal nor as just as they sought and so many of them want to see a new revolution or at least a further stage of the existing revolution actually to bring about a better society, to make a society that really is just, and compassionate and equitable. And this is part of the Islamist revolution.”
Susannah Tarbush

(Published in Al-Hayat newspaper in Arabic translation, 9 April 2009)

get cookin' with 'cardamom & lime' and 'the settler's cookbook'

above: Machbous from "Cardamom and Lime"

Bridging cultures through food
Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette 30March 2009
So many cookery books have been published in the past few years on the cuisines of different countries and regions that one might wonder whether much fresh culinary territory remains uncharted.

Two recently published books, “Cardamom and Lime: Recipes from the Arabian Gulf” and “The Settler’s Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food”, show that writing about personal food experiences can still open up new vistas and introduce readers to unfamiliar cultures.

Sarah Al-Hamad [pictured above], author of “Cardamom and Lime”, is of Kuwaiti origin and divides her time between London and Kuwait. Her book is published in the UK by New Holland Publishers and in the US by Interlink Books of Northampton, Massachusetts.

The beautifully-designed book is illustrated by numerous dazzling photographs taken by Al-Hamad of the food markets and shops in the Gulf, and of the dishes for which she provides recipes.

Traditional Gulf cuisine is little known outside the Gulf. Al-Hamad identifies the region’s food as a mixture of Indian, Persian and Turkish cuisine overlying the traditional Bedouin diet of dates and dairy products.
The Gulf’s strategic position on the ancient spice routes between Africa and India introduced a range of spices into its food. Taste combinations of sweet and savory are characteristic in its cuisine, as is the use of dried limes.

Al-Hamad collected most of the recipes in her book from family members and friends, who in turn introduced her to their friends.
“One cook led me to another, and wherever I went there was great generosity in discussions about food and the sharing of culinary tidbits and recipes,” she writes.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown [pictured below], author of “The Settler’s Cookbook”, is a writer and commentator on race, politics and human rights, and the first British Muslim to become a regular newspaper columnist, in the Independent. Published in London by Portobello Books, her book is an autobiography in which recipes are inserted at key points.

Alibhai-Brown was born in Uganda to a family of Indian origin which, like other Ugandan Asians, had been taken to work there under the British Empire.
The interaction between Indian settlers and native Africans led to the creation of some fusion dishes, such as matoke (plantains) with peanut curry.


In 1972 Alibhai-Brown followed her true love (abbreviated to TL) from Uganda to pursue postgraduate studies at Oxford University, just months before President Idi Amin announced that Ugandan Asians must leave the country.

Yasmin married TL and had a son, but TL found a new love and the marriage broke up in 1987 when their son was only 10. Alibhai-Brown subsequently married an Englishman and had a daughter.

A number of Alibhai-Brown’s recipes originated from her late mother Jena. When she first got married she could not cook, and had to ask her mother over the phone for recipes such as a dozen ways to make spicy potatoes.

Various kinds of daal feature in her recipes. Dee Aunti’s Dhansak (named after a family friend) is a sweet and spicy mix of lamb, several kinds of daal, tamarind and a long list of spices. There are recipes for different varieties of pickle, biryanis and pilaus scattered through the book.
Alibhai-Brown’s ’fierce sense of humor shines through in her creation of certain recipes. She devised ‘Retribution Beef’ after the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher when she said that she sympathized with indigenous British people who were being swamped by people of another culture.
Yasmin invited her white British friends over to meet her baby and to tuck into the curry which she had made so hot, her unsuspecting friends burned their tongues. “Too polite to refuse or too addicted to stop, they ate and cried. I made them cry, paid them back for Thatcher’s words,” she writes.

There are common threads between the two books. In both, travel, trade and the migrations of people and communities have influenced cuisine. Both portray cultures in which food traditionally plays a strong social function.

For Ugandan Asians living in exile, East African-Asian food “expressed both desperate nostalgia and hardship”, writes Alibhai-Brown. But such food could also help in the making of friends. In Oxford student days, “carrot halva was much appreciated by our skint guests, cheap, buttery and wickedly sweet,” she adds.


Sarah Al-Hamad writes that in the Gulf, food “occupies a central position in local life and culture. It is a means of communication and a peace-offering, a way of demonstrating largesse and hospitality to friends and family, a form of one-upmanship, a conversation starter, a boredom buster, and an arena for female competitiveness.”

As with the recipes in “A Settler’s Cookbook”, there is considerable South Asian influence in Al-Hamad’s recipes. Most of the cooks Al-Hamad met while collecting recipes were from India or Bangladesh. Bengalis in the Gulf are famed for their potato “chops”, or batata chab, potato cakes filled with minced meat and fried. Al-Hamad’s recipe for Chicken Biryani came from a South Indian chef who had worked for many years in Bahrain.

Both authors include recipes along a sponge cake theme. Al-Hamad’s is an egg-rich sponge which includes dates, walnuts and sesame seeds and is flavored with cardamom and saffron.

Alibhai-Brown notes that Ugandan Indians would “lift” Victoria sponge cake with lime juice or saffron, and would pep up shortbread with grainy cardamom seeds. In this way they subverted bland English food. Yasmin’s mother transformed English shepherd’s pie – which tasted to Yasmin like “milky newspapers” – into an Indian version through the addition of spices, fresh ginger and garlic.


Al-Hamad regards the famous meat and rice dish Machbous, known as Kabsa in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, as typifying Gulf cuisine. Her book starts with a section on rice dishes such as Mu’adas (rice and lentils), Mumawash (mushy rice with mung beans), and Muhammar (date-sweetened rice).
The meat dishes include kebabs, and Marag Shabzi – a lamb and herb stew she learned from a Kuwaiti friend of Iranian descent. The fish section has splendid-looking dishes such as “ultimate fish on rice” (made with local Zubaidi fish), aromatic fish stew and baked fish with nut stuffing.

There are substantial vegetables dishes such as Shilla (grains and spinach porridge) and Gaboot dumplings with a sweet-sour vegetable stuffing. Desserts range from Balaleet – sweet vermicelli topped with omelet – to date-based ‘Afoosa’, and ‘Aseeda’ and the crunchy dough balls in syrup known as Gaimat.

The intimacy of the writing and attractiveness of the recipes in “The Settler’s Cookbook” and “Cardamom and Lime” lend the books much charm. In these days of economic uncertainty many people are shunning restaurants and cooking more at home. The two books should provide practical inspiration, as well as being splendidly good reads.

guardian supplement on abu dhabi as an arab media hub

The London-based Guardian has today published a four-page supplement which although entitled 'Middle East media' actually focuses on how, in the words of to Kate Bulkley's introduction, "Abu Duabi is positioning itself at the heart of a new multimedia empire in the Middle East, a decade after Dubai pioneered the media hub concept with its Media city project." The supplement is paid for by Abu Dhabi-based twofour54
The supplement reflects the systematic and speedy way in which Abu Dhabi is builidng its position within the Middle East cultural and media field.

lmei conference on the arab media today

A one-day conference on new Arab media held in the Brunei Gallery of London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) last week gave the audience the opportunity of hearing in person from some of the leading bloggers from around the Arab world.

They included the Egyptian human rights activist Wael Abbas, who blogs at Misr Digital; Ali Abdulemam [pictured], described by the New York Times as Bahrain’s “most notorious blogger”, and Tunisian investigative journalist and human rights campaigner Olfa Jami. There were two Jordanian bloggers: Naseem Tarawneh, author of the Black Iris blog, and Mariam Abu Adas who started her Driven by Curiosity blog in 2004 when she was living in Saudi Arabia. Tarawneh was a co-founder of the Jordanian citizen media site 7iber.com which Abu Adas now runs.
The conference, entitled ‘Arab Media Today: new audiences and new technologies’, was organized by the London Middle East Institute (LMEI) at SOAS. It was supported by the Media Outreach Center of the US Embassy in London and the MBI Foundation of Jeddah-based businessman and philanthropist Mohamed Bin Issa Al-Jaber.

LMEI acting director Sarah Stewart noted that this was the third in a series of LMEI conferences on the Arab media. The first was on the pan-Arab media and the Western world, and the second on what drives the Arab media, and with what consequences. “I think it’s fair to say that in contrast to the previous two conferences, this is rather uncharted territory,” she said.

The Arab media revolution began in the early 1990s with the birth of pan-Arab satellite TV, which had a profound impact in breaking down barriers, challenging taboos and bringing rolling 24-hour news. Today there are more than 500 Arab satellite TV channels.

The internet was slow to take off in the Arab world, but it is rapidly making up for lost time. According to Internet World Stats, between 2000 and 2008 the number of internet users in the Middle East (including Iran and Israel, but excluding Egypt and North Africa) grew by 1,296.2 percent, the biggest percentage increase any region of the world. The number of internet users soared from 3.28 million to 45.86 million.

Internet penetration is now 23.3 per cent of the population in the Middle East, almost matching the world average of 23.6 per cent, but far behind the figure in North America (73.1 per cent) or Europe (48.5 per cent).

Arab internet penetration is highest in the UAE at 48.9 percent, and lowest in Iraq at 1 per cent. The Arab countries with the largest number of users are Egypt with 10.53 million, Morocco (6.6 million) and Saudi Arabia (6.38 million).

There are reckoned to be 490,000 Arab blogs, 160,000 of them in Egypt. Blogs are just one element in the mix of new media, which includes websites, discussion forums, video and photograph sharing sites, and social networking sites. There are new developments all the time, including the recent launch by Facebook of an Arabic version.

Syrian expert on new media and technologies Anas Tawileh [pictured], vice president for engineering at Meedan, noted: “The internet came late to the Arab world and it took some time for people to appreciate this new communication media and to start to use it. But once they found what the internet has to offer, the growth was phenomenal.”

Tawileh gave examples of ways in which Web 2.0 – the term for the various forms of online interactive media – is now being manifested in the Arab area. “Arab internet users want to be heard”, he said. “The new media is the perfect opportunity to voice their concerns, express themselves and to a certain degree to feel they are being heard by others. On Facebook there are 2.5 million Arab users.” There are constant launches of new Arabic services intended as equivalents of social media such as YouTube, Twitter and Flickr. He remarked that 56 per cent of Saudis use discussion forums, and said discussion forums play a particularly prominent role in the new media in Arab countries. Mobile phones facilitate the spread of new media, and in the third quarter of 2008 there were 188.2 million of them in Arab countries.

Will Ward, managing editor of the online journal Arab Media & Society published by the American University in Cairo, outlined the vital part played by social media, in particular Facebook, in getting out news during the Gaza war. This was especially important in the face of the Israeli media blackout.

Several speakers at the conference outlined the ways in which the old Arab broadcast and print media is trying to adapt to the internet age through, for example, making their websites as attractive and user-friendly as possible and enhancing user interactivity.

In the session on the blogosphere, bloggers gave compelling accounts of their experiences including skirmishes with the authorities. Some governments in the Arab world have been keen to try and control cyberspace by blocking certain sites and through harassing and even imprisoning bloggers.

It might be assumed that the dramatic growth in blogging in the Arab world would have produced a pan-Arab blogosphere. But in practice each Arab country tends to have its own national blogosphere with its own character and concerns. There are national blog aggregator sites with titles such as Syria Planet, or Tunisie.blogs.

In Egypt, bloggers have played a role in political activism and in helping to organize demonstrations. Wael Abbas has circulated videos showing for example torture at police stations, electoral fraud and the brutality of security forces against demonstrators.

Naseem Tawarneh described Jordan as “the tranquil blogosphere”. But there have been government interventions which in one case led to the closure of the Jordan Planet blog aggregator site two years ago. Tawarneh told of how during the Israeli onslaught on Gaza the 7iber.com site was able to mobilize around 100 young people to sort and organize up to 60 tons of food and clothing donated via Aramex to the people of Gaza.

Marc Lynch [pictured], Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University, chaired the session on the Arab blogosphere. He has written his widely-read Abu Aardvark blog since 2002.

“By virtue of being both a blogger and an academic I’ve managed to see this from both sides of the equation,” he said. Political bloggers have developed a certain sense of shared identity, purpose and vision, but “blogging as blogging is not particularly noteworthy. It’s a means to something and what’s interesting is that ‘something’, the ability of people to find ways to engage in particular ways of public activism and public life in the Arab world in arenas which are quite hostile traditionally to such participation and engagement.


“Blogging and Facebook and so many other things have opened up avenues for political participation in various forms, for personal participation, for the creation and construction of new identifies, and for the ability of people to form new relationships which in the past wouldn’t have been possible.”

Susannah Tarbush, Saudi Gazette 23 March 2009

suicide of nicholas hughes, son of ted

The London-based Times has the very sad news today that Ted Hughes' son Nicholas, an eminent marine biologist, has hanged himself in Alaska at the age of 47. The headline reads 'Sylvia Plath's son commits suicide'. Plath left her two young children, Nicholas and his sister Frieda, in another room when she gassed herself in London in 1963. Ted Hughes' second wife Assia Wevill also gassed herself, with their four-year-old daughter Shura. Nicholas was a fisheries scientist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

Unlike the Times piece, an obituary by columnist and author Dermot Cole in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner does not permit the Sylvia Plath tragedy to completely overshadow an account of the personality and work of a lovely-sounding man who had "made lasting friendships in Fairbanks with those who shared his inventive interests in such varied pursuits as stream ecology, pottery, woodworking, boating, bicycling, gardening and cooking the perfect pecan pie. Nick guided many people in the winter to spots along the Tanana to savor the art of burbot fishing through the ice.

"He spent countless summer hours in his research of grayling and salmon in the Chena River, exhibiting all the patience and wonder that defines a great fisherman. One of his innovations was rigging underwater cameras to get a three-dimensional view of the fish feeding in the passing current. Many of the best days of his life were in the company of his partner Christine Hunter, also a biologist. He resigned from the faculty more than two years ago, but continued his research."

Hughes is reported to have been suffering from depression. The Times simplistically writes: "Although there is acceptance that depression can be inherited, there is no known suicide gene that could connect Dr Hughes's death to his mother’s." On Saturday the Guardian's John Crace had one of his mischievous Digested Reads, of Plath's The Bell Jar.

Ted Hughes' own love of fishing, and his close observations of fish, permeate his work. The first Ted Hughes poem I encountered as a teenager was 'Pike'. The poem 'October Salmon' is one of his most acclaimed.

Nicholas's sister Frieda is a successful artist, poet, children's writer and contributor to the press. Her statement on her brother's death, quoted in the Times, says:“His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father (many of whose poems were about the natural world). He was a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him and, despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence and enthusiasm for the next project or plan.”

Shortly before his death, he had left his post at the university to set up a pottery at home and “advance his not inconsiderable talent at making pots and creatures in clay”.

When Ted Hughes died in October 1998, the journalist and fisherwoman Annalisa Barbieri wrote an obituary for the Independent entitled: 'Fishing: Farewell to a master of rhythm, rhyme and rainbow trout'. She wrote: "The papers will be full of Ted Hughes this weekend. Ted the literary genius; Ted - Poet Laureate; Ted, ex-husband of Sylvia Plath. But I never knew him as any of these things very much. To me, Ted Hughes was much more interesting than just being a poet. Ted was a fisherman."

the 'gentrification' of jaffa

Tel Aviv Rooftop has blogged on the transformation - for the worse - of Jaffa, as witnessed from his regular bicycle rides through a city that is "Tel Aviv's much older and much neglected sister". He writes of "the gentrification (some would say 'Judaisation') of Yaffo that is being fostered by the combination of planning from city hall and market demand for authentic Mediterranean real estate.Yafo - charming old Arab houses, mosques and churches, arches and alleys, shocks of colour and light - fits this bill."

There is an ongoing "battle between the authorities and many Arab residents who received court orders to vacate their properties to make way for new developments, without, they say, proper compensation. Arab and leftist groups claim that the Judaisation of Yaffo is (again) driving out the local residents."

Jaffa, with its large population of Arabs and new immigrants from the FSU, has plenty of problems: "poverty, drugs, crime, schools that lag and social services that sag. From time to time there are minor eruptions of violence: a demonstration by Arabs gets out of hand, Jews throw rocks at a mosque. The sort of Arab-Jewish violence we saw recently in another mixed city - Acco - could reappear in Yaffo."

The cyclist blogger sums up Jaffa as "a beautiful, unkempt time bomb. Already bereft of most of its original Arab population, neglected, ignored riven by tension between Jew and Arab, Moslem and Christian, and now reinvented as a sterile real estate location to satisfy the Mediterranean fantasies of the rich (while ignoring the problems of the poor)."

He notes that according to a Palestinian history of the city:
"Every Palestinian in Jaffa is either directly facing eviction by the municipal authorities, or has a neighbor or relative who faces such eviction, an estimated total of more than 500 families are in this situation. The two main excuses for eviction are lack of licensing -- especially since licenses are almost impossible for Palestinians to obtain -- or that the family is considered illegal squatters in their own home which is registered as state property."
Local committees are fighting the authorities for housing rights.

He concludes with a new addition to the city's architecture: "And into this expolosive mix, slap bang next to the Moslem cemetery, the Peres Peace Centre is arising before our unbelieving eyes. Like the megalomanic fantasy of a Norwegian lumber merchant, it imposes itself on the local environment like an alien from the planet Peres." Looking at his photo one sees what he means.

omar kikili's balcony tale

The imtidad cultural blog of Libyan doctor and writer Ghazi Geblawi, a resident of London, has published a chilling little story by Omar Kikili. The story published by imtidad under the title of "While drinking tea: the incident of the opposite balcony' is from Kikili's collection 'Sana'a Mahaliya' meaning 'Local Product' published in Tripoli in 2000.

Kikili, born in 1953, is described as a renowned Libyan short storyteller who published his early works in the 1970’s. He has published two collections of short stories, and is working on a third collection titled 'Sejnyat' meaning 'Jail tales' ('sijn' is Arabic for jail) on the period when he spent ten years as a political prisoner in Libya.

The translation of the Libyan short story (and presumably this Kikili story has been translated from Arabic) is an area of some interest. It was given a boost by the publication of American scholar and diplomat Ethan Chorin's book Translating Libya: The Modern Libyan Short Story last year.

'assessing italy’s grande gesto to libya'

From the latest issue of Middle East Report Online an interesting analysis of Italy's August 2008 agreement to pay $5 billion payment over 20 years to Libya.

Assessing Italy’s Grande Gesto to Libya
Claudia Gazzini
March 16, 2009
(Claudia Gazzini is a Ph.D. candidate at Oxford University.)
Under a tent in Benghazi on August 30, 2008, Silvio Berlusconi bowed symbolically before the son of ‘Umar al-Mukhtar, hero of the Libyan resistance to Italian colonial rule. “It is my duty to express to you, in the name of the Italian people, our regret and apologies for the deep wounds that we have caused you,” said the Italian premier.[1] Eastern Libya was the site of the bulk of the armed resistance to the Italian occupation, which lasted from 1911 to 1943. More than 100,000 Libyans are believed to have died in the counterinsurgency campaign, many in desert prison camps and in southern Italian penal colonies. Inside the tent, Berlusconi and Libyan leader Mu‘ammar al-Qaddafi signed a historic agreement according to which Italy will pay $5 billion over the next 20 years, nominally to compensate Libya for these “deep wounds.” The treaty was ratified by Italy on February 3 and by Libya on March 1.
Politicians in both Libya and Italy have often presented the $5 billion as reparations for the harm done to Libya by colonial rule. Qaddafi hailed the treaty as an important historical precedent that proves that “compensation entails condemnation of colonialism regardless of the amount paid.”[2] Yet neither the title nor the text of the treaty mentions the word “reparations.” The text alludes to settlement of colonial-era disputes, but officially the accord is called a “treaty of friendship, partnership and cooperation.”
The treaty was certainly not signed because Italy has suddenly come to terms with its colonial past and desires to make amends. Although the premier has made public noises of atonement for Italy’s colonial past, Italians suffer from a general colonial amnesia and know very little about their country’s adventures in Africa -- far less, for instance, than the French know about Algeria. Even the 1981 Anthony Quinn vehicle Lion of the Desert, about Mukhtar’s rebellion, was utterly banned in Italy for many years because, in the government’s words, it was “damaging to the Italian army’s honor.” ..continued

'arab media today' conference in london

Some pictures from the excellent conference 'The Arab Media Today: New Audiences and New Technologies' held yesterday in the Brunei Gallery of London University's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). The event was organised by the SOAS's London Middle East Institute with support from the Media Outreach Center of the US Embassy in London and the MBI Al Jaber Foundation. The day started with a session on assessing Arab audiences, chaired by Dina Matar of the Centre for Film and Media Studies. It then moved to a session on Old and New Media chaired by Dr Naomi Sakr, reader in Communication at the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), University of Westminster, and Director of the CAMRI Arab Media Centre.

Marc Lynch - AKA blogger Abu Aardvark - of George Washington University - chaired the third session, on the Arab Blogosphere. This session brought to London some of the Arab world's best known bloggers - Wael Abbas of Egypt (chief blogger at Misr Digital), Naseem Tarawnah (Black Iris) of Jordan, Olfa Jami of Tunisia and Ali Abdulemam of Bahrain. The Syrian IT and new media researcher and consultant Anas Tawileh of Syria, spoke on the Syrian blogosphere in this session; he had already given an eye-opening presentation on the emergence of Arabic new media in the light of Web 2.0 in the previous session. The conference provided many invaluable notes, pointers and nuggets. The were titters in the audience when Mariam Abu-Adas of 7iber.com, who blogs at Driven by Curiosity, included in her presentation a table on the findings of an ISP on the top 25 web search terms in the Arab world: no prizes for guessing what the terms were. The top search terms also included references to Sex and the City and to the immmensely popular Turkish soap opera Noor which follows the ups and downs of the relationship between Noor and her husband Muhannad.

Speakers gave fascinating and sometimes hair-raising accounts of the price that blogger activists can pay at the hands of Arab governments and security forces, and of the cat-and-mouse games bloggers play with the authorities - over for example the blocking of blogsites and attempts at identity detection or at discrediting bloggers seen as troublesome. Wael Abbas (pictured at the top of the posting) is an example par excellence of an Egyptian activist blogger and gave a full account of the "unique" Egyptian blogosphere which has helped cirulate videos on such practices as sodomisation of a male detainee in a police station, vote rigging, and police brutality against demonstrators. Wael's mention of the fact that he is keen to use Egyptian slang rather than classical Arabic in his blogging, so as to encourage youth participation, led to quite a bit of discussion over the choice of Arabic language in blogs. Wael has his own YouTube channel.

Pictures from top: Wael Abbas; Marc Lynch; Maher Othman (deputy editor-in-chief of al-Quds.com), Ali Abdulemam: Anas Tawileh; Mariam Abu-Adas Below - Maha Taki (PhD scholarshp student University of Westminster, London, currently researching use of the internet, and in particular blogs, in Lebanon and Syria); (L ) Khaled Elshami (presenter of Awraq Misria on al-Hiwar TV) with Faisal Abbas (editor of the weekly media supplement of Asharq al-Awsat); Jihad Fakhreddine (Regional Research Director for the Middle East and North Africa for the Gallup World Poll), with Dina Matar; Will Ward (managing editor of Arab Media & Society); Hosam El Sokkari (head of BBC Arabic).

the myerson affair and issues over memoir west and east

Washing dirty linen in public through memoirs
by
Susannah Tarbush

How far are authors entitled to go in revealing sensitive details about family members, particularly children, in their writing? This question has preoccupied the British “chattering classes” in recent days, following the disclosure by novelist and journalist Julie Myerson that her new book “The Lost Child” tells of how her son Jake’s heavy use of skunk cannabis from the age of 15 almost destroyed her family. Jake is not named in the book, but is referred to as “our boy”.

Myerson claims that her son became addicted to skunk, a particularly strong form of cannabis which has been linked to behavioral and mental health problems. When she started writing “The Lost Child”, she intended it to be the story of the gifted 19th century child artist Mary Yelloly who painted a remarkable series of watercolors and died of tuberculosis in 1838 at the age of 21. But in the process of writing, Myerson found that the story of Jake became interwoven with the story of Mary.

In the book she describes how Jake’s addiction led the previously high-flying schoolboy, who seemed destined for Oxford University, to neglect his studies and to steal from her handbag to fund his drug habit. The scenes between parents and son became so violent that on one occasion he perforated Julie’s eardrum.

In the end she and her playwright husband Jonathan felt they had no alternative but to kick Jake out of the house and change the front door locks, days after his 17th birthday. Jake became homeless and moved between squats and friends’ floors. Now aged 20, and described as “working in the music business”, he has described his mother as naïve and “slightly insane”. He told the Daily Mail: “What she has done has taken the very worst years of my life and cleverly blended it into a work of art, and that to me is obscene.”

Many media commentators have condemned Myerson for in effect betraying her son and possibly blighting his future. She stands to profit from all the publicity, which is expected to boost sales of her book. The book was to have been published in May, but the publisher Bloomsbury has brought it forward by two months.

The accusations of betrayal grew when Julie admitted a few days ago that she had been the author of the anonymously written column ‘Living with Teenagers’ which ran for two years in the Guardian newspaper. The columns, based on real-life events involving her three children, were published in book form last year under the title “Living with Teenagers: 3 Kids, 2 Parents, 1 Hell Of A Bumpy Ride.”

Julie Myerson and her husband justify the publication of “The Lost Child” on the grounds that there is an emergency over the damage skunk is doing to young Britons. They say the book may help other parents.

The Muslim columnist and author Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is one of the few writers to have come to Myerson’s defense. She wrote in the Independent : ”Myerson’s crime is that she is unflinchingly honest.” She added: “I would say that wouldn’t I? I frequently use personal experience in columns and books and even in a one-woman show.”

Alibhai-Brown says that when she wrote her short 1995 autobiography “No Place Like Home”, about growing up as an Asian in East Africa up to the time of Idi Amin, half her family cut her off, “one because I said she had ‘generous hips’ – which she did.” She is apprehensive about possible reactions to her latest book “The Settler’s Cookbook”, a food memoir which is not always flattering about Asians in East Africa and about members of her family.

Alibhai-Brown explains that she writes about her personal experiences “partly out of a passionate opposition to cultural protectionism. Asians are brought up never to expose what goes on behind the closed doors of homes, the secure gates around communities, cultures and faiths.”

In the Arab world too there has been a reluctance to publish revelations that are considered shameful. But this is changing. Speaking as a panelist in a seminar on contemporary Arab memoir during the 2008 London Book Fair, the Egyptian economics professor and writer Galal Amin said he is very fond of George Orwell’s dictum that “an autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.” His autobiography “What Life Has Taught Me” created a stir when it was published in 2007.

Galal is son of the renowned intellectual Ahmad Amin who died in 1954. In his autobiography Galal was unusually frank about his parents and their marriage. For example, he wrote that his mother had fallen in love with her cousin at the age of 17, and although her uncle had refused the marriage she had remained in love with him. Some family members were upset about such disclosures.

Another panelist was Jean Said Makdisi, sister of the late Palestinian scholar and activist Professor Edward Said. She is author of two volumes of memoir: “Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir” and “Teta, Mother and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women”.

Makdisi pointed to the growing number of memoirs by Arab authors written in English. They include Edward Said’s “Out of Place”, Leila Ahmed’s “A Border Passage”, Suad Amiry’s “Sharon and my Mother- in-Law: Ramallah Diaries”, Mai Ghoussoub’s “Leaving Beirut”, Ghada Karmi’s “In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story”, Serene Husseini Shahid’s “Jerusalem Memories” and Raja Shehadeh’s “Strangers in the House”, “When the Bulbul Stopped Singing” and “Palestinian Walks: Forays Into a Vanishing Landscape”.


Makdisi said: “Writing in English means imposing on the world the Arab story, the Arab view of things, which is not necessarily the view the world is keen to hear.” The central theme that unites these memoirs is “war, occupation, revolution, displacement, loss, dispossession.” The perpetual political crises in the Arab world have for long been “the bedrock on which everyone’s life is constructed or destroyed”.

As well as depicting the political upheavals their authors have lived through, such memoirs often candidly depict family relationships. For example Edward Said conveys movingly his troubled relationship with his father, and Ghada Karmi describes the difficulties her depressed mother had in adjusting to London after the family settled there as refugees from Jerusalem.

In both West and East, the trend is for memoirs to be ever more open over personal matters. This trend is accelerated by the spread of new technology, such as blogs and social networking sites, which encourage self disclosure. But it seems unlikely that many memoirists will for the moment follow Julie Myerson in lifting the lid on their traumas with their children.
Saudi Gazette 16 March 2009

17 March 2009: The first reviews of The Lost Child have started rolling in, and are on the whole extremely favourable. In the Guardian Mark Lawson describes it as "honest, affecting and noble". For the Guardian's Sunday sister the Observer Kate Kellaway says that writing the book was "in the most complicated sense a maternal act". At the Telegraph, Jane Shilling maintains that, "despite the flaws of structure noted above, it is not journalism, but a serious, writerly, self-critical account of what it means to feel that, despite love and hope and good intentions, you have failed as a parent, and that the child you bore (while still eerily, painfully familiar) is lost to you."

'in our time' focuses on the library of alexandria

Yesterday's edition of Melvyn Bragg's weekly Thursday morning Radio 4 programme In Our Time was on the Library of Alexandria. It can be listened to or downloaded as a podcast via the programme website.

The blurb on the website says: Had the library at Alexandria not existed, it would have been invented by one of the many stories housed within its walls. It is a building of legendary status, a library built to contain all the knowledge of all the world on rank upon rank of Egyptian papyri. Others were not so impressed. Timon of Phlius evoked the spirit of the place in his remark that ‘in populous Egypt many cloistered bookworms are fed, arguing endlessly in the chicken coop of the Muses’.Whatever your view of it, the legacy of the library is with us today, not just in the ideas it stored and the ideas it seeded but also in the way it organised knowledge and the tools developed for dealing with it. It still influences the things we know and the way we know them to this day.
Contributors
Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge
Matthew Nicholls, Lecturer in Classics at the University of Reading
Serafina Cuomo, Reader in Roman History at Birkbeck College, University of London

In the e-mail circulated to subscribers after the programme, Melvyn Bragg writes:

Hello
Oh dear! I missed out a topic which would have been of the keenest possible interest to In Our Time listeners. The great library at Alexandria was noted for many famous things and lasted for centuries and had no small part in changing the world. But, for many of you, I think that, (the excessive use of commas will be justified in a moment) it was there that Punctuation was invented. Punctuation, accentuation, sentences, paragraphs – the whole box of tricks. I had circled it several times in the notes. I had transferred it to the main body of the questions. I was ready for it. And, for reasons which I cannot understand, I hopped over it. I also hopped over philology, but that, I presume, is more excusable.
The other thing I’d like to point out is that when Simon Goldhill said that without the library of Alexandria we would not have had the Renaissance in Europe, he is right of course, but, as In Our Time has tried to demonstrate on many occasions, the knowledge went through the brilliant translators of the Arab world and in fact, in one sense, the first great inheritors of the library at Alexandria were the scholars of Baghdad.
After the programme I went to the Royal Society for a meeting on the upcoming celebrations to mark 350 years of this most extraordinary institution. The reach of the Royal Society is staggering and celebrations will occur in China, Malaysia, Australia, America, all over Europe, the UK, most intensively in every city of the UK itself.
Martin Rees was in fine form at the Royal Society. By which I mean, specifically, he questioned whether I had really and properly got to the core of the measurement problem last week. He was unstinting in his admiration for the contributors and therefore, without doubt from this mildest mannered of brilliant men, I was the culprit! I’d thought as much and it was bracing to have it so charmingly confirmed.
After the meeting I went for a walk through St James’s Park. The lake has been dredged and various machines are scraping the bottom. It’s a very shallow pond and seems incapable of supporting the immense number and variety of birds that we see there. A few forlorn pelicans bore the brunt of the photography on the little remaining island of water opposite Horse Guards Parade.
The park, yet again, was full of herds of extremely well-behaved French children sitting on benches, eating. There seems to be a perpetual competition for how many young French schoolchildren can occupy one bench in St James’s Park.
There is something so attractive about the names that came up while reading about the library at Alexandria. I remember that Marlowe was seduced by the names that he came across in Tamburlaine and relished them. But what a parade we have here: Philo of Byzantium, Galen of Pergamum, Apollonius of Rhodes, Theocritus of Syracuse, Demetrius of Phaleron and Callimachus of Cyrene. Callimachus wrote ‘mega biblion, mega kakon’, meaning a big book is a big evil, and then proceeded to write 120 volumes cataloguing the collection at Alexandria.
I suppose we have our great names too – Richard the Lionheart, and our Dukes of… and Duchesses of… and Princes of… and perhaps I am taken by the antiquity and the learning involved in these names from the past.
And so to the rest of the day, which always needs to be re-geared after In Our Time. Somehow, there is a part of me that thinks at quarter-to-ten on Thursday morning, quite a bit of the day’s work is done.
Best wishes
Melvyn Bragg

The New Library of Alexandria