patrick cockburn's book on muqtada al-sadr, the 'man riding a tiger'

The Western media often refer to Muqtada al-Sadr as a “firebrand”, “renegade”, “maverick” or “thug”. But the Irish journalist Patrick Cockburn gives a different and more complex picture of al-Sadr in his book “Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival and the Struggle for Iraq” published recently in the US by Scribner. (In the UK, the book is published by Faber and Faber under the title “Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq”.)

Cockburn describes Muqtada as “the most important and surprising figure to emerge in Iraq since the US invasion. He is the messianic leader of the religious and political movement of the impoverished Shia underclass whose lives were ruined by a quarter of a century of war, repression and sanctions”. He has been the one Shia leader to openly oppose the US-led occupation since Saddam Hussein was overthrown.

Far from being a “firebrand cleric”, al-Sadr has frequently proved astute and cautious. He generally sought compromise rather than confrontation, and learned from his mistakes. Since his battles with US forces in 2004 for control of Najaf, he has “always sought to avoid struggles he did not control and could not win.”

Cockburn considers that “one of the grossest of US errors in Iraq was to try to marginalise him and his movement. Had he been part of the political process from the beginning, the chances of creating a peaceful, prosperous Iraq would have been greater.”

But Cockburn also highlights the dark side of the Sadrist movement and the Mehdi Army. He examines the circumstances around the killing of Abdel-Majid al-Khoei in Najaf in April 2003 by supporters of Sadr. Abdel-Majid, son of the late Grand Ayatollah Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei, had returned to Iraq from London where he had been living in exile.

Cockburn writes: “If Muqtada did not know that al-Khoei was being done to death it may well have been because he did not choose to know”. An Iraqi judge Raad Juhi, issued a warrant for Muqtada’s arrest, saying two eyewitnesses had said they heard him order the killing, and the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority Paul Bremer hovered for months on the edge of ordering Sadr’s arrest.

In the years that followed, it would be a “convenient excuse for the Sadrists... that they were not responsible for much of the violence carried out in their name”. Muqtada was always “a man riding a tiger, sometimes presiding, sometimes controlling the mass movement he nominally led. His words and actions were often far apart.”

Cockburn himself experienced the volatility and violence of the Mehdi Army in April 2004 when he and his Iraqi driver and translator were temporarily taken hostage by members of the militia at a roadblock near Kufa. One of the militiamen screamed that Cockburn was an American spy, and Cockburn is convinced that if he was not Irish, but had been carrying an American or British passport, he and his two Iraqi companions would have been killed.

Cockburn has covered Iraq for more than 30 years, and has since 2003 reported from Iraq for the London-based Independent newspaper. He is one of the few Western journalists to report from places far beyond the relative safety of Baghdad’s Green Zone. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2005 and the James Cameron Memorial Award in 2006.

Since the 2003 invasion, a considerable number of books on Iraq have appeared in English. But Cockburn says: “Many of them, when you actually read them, are really about the Americans in Iraq, and the Iraqis they knew or the Iraqis they dealt with. They are not really about Iraqis.” The footnotes of such books typically cite American authorities and American documents.

“This does not make them bad books, but it means they give a very particular, peculiar view of Iraq which is very different from the Iraq I have experienced or the sort of things that Iraqis really think about.”

In his book Cockburn wanted to write “not just about Muqtada al-Sadr, but about the Shia of Iraq, and the people who now came to power in Iraq, and their extraordinary history over the past 30 to 40 years – and indeed their history of the past 1400 years in Iraq.” He thinks that few people outside Iraq know much about the history of the Iraqi Shia.

Cockburn also wanted to quote directly from Iraqi eyewitnesses of the events depicted in his book. But it was difficult for him to carry out interviews himself, as many of the eyewitnesses lived in districts of Baghdad or provincial cities that he dared not visit. He was helped by intermediaries to whom he gave the questions he wished to ask. They would bring him back the answers from those interviewed. The numerous quotations from eyewitnesses add greatly to the vividness and insights of his narrative.

Muqtada was only 29 at the time of the 2003 invasion. But far from being the inexperienced young man whom his critics portrayed, he was “a highly experienced political operator who had worked in his father’s office in Najaf since he was a teenager.” His grasp of what ordinary Iraqis felt “was to prove far more sure than that of the politicians isolated in the ‘Green Zone’ in Baghdad.”

Muqtada stresses that he is heir to legacy of his father in law, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (“Sadr I”), and of Muqtada’s father Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (“Sadr II”), both of whom were killed by Saddam’s regime. Muhammad Baqir and his sister Amina Sadr Bint al-Huda, were tortured and hung in 1980.

Muhammad Baqir had been among the young clerics who created the Da’wa Party in 1957. Many of the founder members of the Da’wa were executed, assassinated or tortured to death, but “half a century later the Iraqi government was dominated by the relatives and descendants of the men who had established the Da’wa Party”. Cockburn examines the rivalry among the great Iraqi Shia religious families. The al-Sadr rivalry with the Hakim family continues, as shown by the often violent power struggle between Sadrists and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (the SIIC - formerly known as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI).

After the Shia intifada of 1991, Saddam cultivated Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Between 1992 and 1996 Muhammad Sadiq appeared to cooperate with the regime, but he started a mass popular movement which blended Islamic revivalism with populism and Iraqi nationalism. In 1997 the regime allowed Sadrites to publish the magazine al-Huda edited by Muqtada, Muhammad Sadiq’s youngest son.

Saddam eventually realised his plan “to install his own candidate as religious leader of the Shia had spectacularly backfired.” On 19 February 1999 security agents ambushed and killed Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr and his two elder sons Mustafa and Muammal at a roundabout in Najaf. Up to that time, Muhammad Sadiq was still being denounced as a collaborator with the regime by many of his Shia opponents.

The sanctions imposed after the 1991 Gulf war had led to a mass impoverishment of Iraqis, which hit the poorer Shia particularly hard. Cockburn says the failure or inability of the government to do anything about this was the essential precondition for the rapid rise of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr in the early 1990s, and Muqtada after 2003.

In the four years between the killing of his father and two brothers and the 2003 invasion, Muqtada kept a very low profile and was under constant surveillance by the security services. This may have marked his personality and made him wary and suspicious of those around him.

Muqtada’s opponents have “criticised him for his lowly place in the Shia religious hierarchy, implying that he lacked intelligence or academic ability.” Cockburn thinks Muqtada wished not to be the head of a huge, ill-disciplined militia, but to be a religious and political leader. In 2005 he replaced military with political action, and he took part in the elections of that year.

Muqtada has been keen to improve his religious credentials, and is currently studying in the Iranian city of Qom. In an interview with Al-Jazeera in late March this year, he said he had dedicated five years to society, and now wants to dedicate a few years to his studies so as to be of more benefit to society, and to progress in his knowledge and faith.

Cockburn examines the twists and turns in Muqtada’s relations with Iran. He writes: “It was bizarre that President Bush was to claim repeatedly over the next four years that Muqtada and the Mehdi Army were Iranian pawns when SCIRI and Badr, but now allied to the US, were demonstrably Iranian creations.”

The Sadrist movement was historically anti-Iranian. Cockburn said Muqtada could have gone on playing the anti-Iranian card, but “it was a measure of his growing skill as a politician that he did not.” In June 2003 returning from the hajj to Mecca he visited Iraq and met the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and reportedly the commander of the Qods Brigade, Qasim Suleimani.

Four years later President George W Bush would denounce the Mehdi army as an arm of the Iranian Qods Brigade in Iraq. Cockburn thinks much of this was paranoia. “Allegations of significant Iranian involvement in Iraq were seldom backed up by evidence, but Iran did provide a useful safe haven and potential source of supplies and money for the nascent Mehdi Army.”

Of course, the Iranians wanted to have influence within every Iraqi Shia organisation, religious or political. In 2005 Iranian intelligence did start to increase its influence within the Sadrist movement and Mehdi army. Muqtada strongly opposed this, but was unable to do so effectively.

In the waves of sectarian killings in 2005-07, “How far did the Mehdi army foster the Shia death squads?” asks Cockburn. “Muqtada decried sectarian killings and declared that the priority was to end the US occupation of Iraq, but did he covertly allow his movement to take the lead in sectarian cleansing as all Sunni were convinced he did?” Many of the militiamen who formally acknowledged his leadership had no intention of accepting his orders. Muqtada complained that “death squads that say they kill on behalf of the Mehdi Army are trying to destroy us and divide us and prevent us from raising arms against the forces of occupation.”

Muqtada saw that the surge in US troops announced in January 2007 was partly aimed at him, and announced that his militiamen would not resist US forces. He even supported negotiations aimed at easing US deployment in Sadrist strongholds. In August 2007 he declared a ceasefire after fighting between his followers and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC). Sadr froze all actions of the Mehdi army for six months, and closed all Sadrist offices. His continuing ceasefire is seen as a major reason for the marked reduction in violence in Iraq during the surge.

The situation for Muqtada and his followers has changed dramatically this year as a result of the fighting and ceasefires in Basra and in Sadr City. The onslaught against Sadr’s militia by government troops backed by US forces was seen as an attempt to boost the SIIC and weaken the Sadrist movement ahead of the provincial elections, which had been due to be held in October. However, the provincial elections may not be held this year, given the dispute over the draft provincial elections law as it relates to Kirkuk.

Media reports from Iraq state that the Sadrists’ power has been greatly reduced. But some commentators think the Sadr Trend still has many supporters, and that the Mehdi Army has the ability to take back much of the area it previously controlled.

In a statement issued at the end of July, Muqtada offered to give the government his popular and political support if it did not sign the security agreement with the US. Much of his statement seemed designed to curb sectarian warfare, and it set limits to resistance operations against the occupation, saying civilians and government services should not be targeted and that such operations should take place outside cities.

It is difficult to forecast what lies ahead for Muqtada al-Sadr and his movement during the next crucial phases of Iraq’s political development. Cockburn’s book is of course controversial, and not all will agree with his assessment of Muqtada, but it is a valuable study of the Shia of Iraq and of a man who, to much of the West at least, has been shrouded in mystery.

Susannah Tarbush

london magazine's anglo-arab issue

The London Magazine, which can trace its roots back to 1732, is famed as a publication that has featured many of the greatest names in English literature as well as encouraging new writers and breaking boundaries. Now, with the publication of an “Anglo-Arab” issue, it brings to its readers the work of Arab writers and artists.

The issue’s cover illustration is Gaza-born Palestinian artist Laila Shawa’s watercolor “Mirage”, a colorful array of geometric patterns. The freshness and vibrancy of the cover continues into the content of the magazine, which is a lively mix of poetry, pictures, stories, essays and reviews by Arabs and non-Arabs.

Some of the Arab writers featured in the issue are long-established names such as the late Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus and his compatriot Adnan Al-Sayegh, Jordanian poet Amjad Nasser, Palestinian novelist and short story writer Mahmoud Shukair, and Moroccan writer Leila Abouzeid. The distinguished Palestinian critic Fakhri Saleh, the author of many books on Arabic literature, has contributed a feature on “The Arabic Novel at the Beginning of the 21st Century: the thematic thread of history”.

The Lebanese poet and journalist Joumana Haddad is particularly known for her sensual poetry of the body. “Cadaver”, translated by Marilyn Hacker, is a meditation by a woman gazing at her own corpse. The Jordanian medical doctor Fathieh Saudi, two of whose poems appear in the issue, has established herself as a poet and critic since her arrival in London. Her work has a questing, spiritual quality. In “Searching for a Language”, she writes: “Languageless I became / My paralysed feelings go on hurting me!” The witty and wise “Timeless” features a cancer patient, bald as a result of treatment, being fitted with a wig.

From the younger generation, there is 23-year-old French-Algerian novelist Faiza Guène (pictured), author of two bestsellers articulating the experience of Arab and African youth in combustible Paris suburbs. Guène’s innovative use of language is evident in an extract from the English translation of her second novel, “Dreams from the Endz”, published recently by Chatto and Windus.


The novel’s translator Sarah Ardizzone describes the challenges in translating the novel’s “backslang” or “verlan” in which words are spliced and reversed. Ardizzone enlisted the help of “slangsta” Cleo Soazandry, from LIVE! magazine of Brixton, south London, who is bilingual in the urban slangs of Paris and London. Ardizzone writes that in Guènes’ writing, “Maghrebi dialogue jostles with Mexican soap-operas, French rap and the couture of Agnes B.”

The Arab writers’ work often bears the legacy of oppression, war, exile and survival. Al-Sayegh’s (pictured) poem “Passage to Exile” begins: “The moaning of the train kindles the sorrow of the tunnels / Roaring along the rails of everlasting memories / While I am nailed to the window / With one half of my heart...”



Amjad Nassser’s writing is suffused with a wry melancholy. The brief story “An Ordinary Conversation about Cancer” is dedicated to the Saudi photographer and journalist Salih al-Azzaz, who died of a brain tumor in 2002. Nasser, managing editor and cultural editor of the London-based Arabic daily Al-Quds al-Arabi, predicts: “I will die in London on a rainy day. (A rainy day in London, what a far-fetched prophecy!) And I decree at this very moment that I will be buried in Mafraq next to my mother who was convinced that no space will ever contain us both. Of course, she may be right, since as everyone knows, she is going to heaven.” Nassser’s second story, “Neighbours”, tells of “the only Englishwoman in our neighbourhood” of London.

Academic and writer Barbara Bridger gives an appreciative review to exiled Syrian writer Zakaria Tamer’s story collection “Breaking Knees”, translated by Ibrahim Muhawi and published by Garnet Publishing. Tamer “uses satire to critique religious hypocrisy and sexual repression. His tough message is underscored by a style which is consistently direct, economical and unsentimental.”

The issue includes exciting new work from non-Arab writers. Anglo-Irish-Indian poet John Siddiqui’s touching poem “Unintended Loyalty” imagines his parents asleep in 1969. “They have put their holy war / on to their nightstands, Islam on one table, / Catholicism across the room on the other.” James Wilkes’ poem “From ‘4096 Poems’” has an intriguing structure of repeated and shuffled images, including the line “Of tessellated squares the colours of North Africa”. Tim Cummings’ poems “Giza”, and “Mango” from his “Cairo Sonnets”, reflects his responses to Egypt.

Another poet inspired by the Arab world is Agnes Meadows, who has lived in the West Bank and Gaza. Novelist and editor Jenny Newman gives her “fine impassioned” collection “At Damascus Gate on Good Friday” a generally positive verdict, writing of Meadows’ “warmly reciprocal world”.

The Anglo-Arab issue pays attention to the Arab visual arts. There are reproductions of works by Laila Shawa, Tunisian Nja Mahdaoui, and Iraqis Maysaloun Faraj and Satta Hashem (all of whom have works in the British Museum’s collections). Two members of the London Magazine’s staff contribute probing essays on art. Sub-editor Nicki Seth-Smith writes with verve of her encounters with four Arab women artists in London: Shawa, Faraj, Yara El-Sherbini and Jananne Al-Ani. “If we are to fulfill Maysaloun Faraj’s dream of a world at peace, or approach Laila Shawa and Yara El-Sherbini’s vision of a public that questions and self-criticises, we would do well to pay attention to the creative minds speaking out from a part of the world that is so routinely and grotesquely misrepresented by the West,” Seth-Smith comments.

Editorial assistant Oliver J Dimsdale discusses Tate Britain’s exhibition of British Orientalist art, The Lure of the East, with the exhibition’s curator Nicholas Tromans and scholar and writer Robert Irwin, a critic of the late Palestinian professor Edward Said’s book “Orientalism”.

The London Magazine has been through several upheavals in its 276-year history. It closed down in 2001 after the death of Alan Ross, for 40 years its editor, but was bought and relaunched by Christopher Arkell with the poet Sebastian Barker as editor.

Barker resigned last year in protest at the cutting off by Arts Council England of the £30,000-a-year grant on which the magazine heavily depended. The Arts Council, financed by the government and the National Lottery, withdrew its funding as part of swingeing government cuts to the arts so as to divert funding to the ever-soaring cost of the 2012 London Olympics.

There was consternation in the arts world at the prospect of the magazine’s demise. Harold Pinter, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Melvyn Bragg and poet laureate Andrew Motion were among those who signed a letter published in the Times Literary Supplement deploring the cutting off of funding, but to no avail.

Christopher Arkell is seeking a new editor to replace Sebastian Barker. In the meantime, Sara-Mae Tuson, assisted by her enthusiastic team, is the acting editor. The high quality of the Anglo-Arab issue is testimony to the flair she and her colleagues are bringing to their task, and one can only hope that the magazine will before long find a way of putting its finances on a more secure footing.


Susannah Tarbush

henrietta rose-innes wins the caine prize

South African writer Henrietta Rose-Innes’s powerful short story “Poison”, for which she has won the £10,000 Sterling (nearly $US 20,000) Caine Prize for African Writing, gives a vivid and disquieting portrayal of people fleeing Cape Town in the aftermath of a chemical disaster.

The story’s protagonist Lynn, driving her old Toyota away from the city, runs out of petrol and is marooned with other drivers at a petrol station that has no fuel left. The huge black oily cloud over Cape Town “boiled up taller and taller into the sky, a plume twice as high as the mountain, leaning towards them like an evil genie.” Other drivers and passengers use their initiative to find ways of moving on from the danger, but Lynn remains strangely passive.

In an interview with Saudi Gazette in London the day after the prize was announced last week, Rose-Innes said laughingly: “What has taken me by surprise is how just about everyone seems to have found the main character really aggravating”. She added: “She is based on large parts of myself.”

Rose-Innes’s prose style is precise, yet subtle and mysterious. Lynn’s observations of the interactions between the people waiting at the petrol stations, and of alliances unexpected to her, reveal shifts within contemporary South African society.

“Poison” won first prize in the 2007 HSBC/SA PEN Literary Award. The story’s new success, with the Caine Prize, is further recognition of the literary gifts of Rose-Innes, who was first shortlisted for the Caine Prize last year with the story “Bad Places”.

Asked whether she thinks “Poison” taps into the wider anxiety pervading the globe, while having a specific South African context, Rose-Innes replies: “I think it’s in the zeitgeist. There’s a trend towards apocalyptic images in popular culture at the moment...The world is a pretty anxiety-ridden place, although at the time of writing the story it felt like it was very much embedded in the South African situation specifically”.

Apocalyptic stories have “a weird attraction; part of me is drawn to the idea of everything being wiped away and starting again anew.” She was a fan of science fiction when she was younger and “it’s interesting for me that a lot of those classic science fiction scenarios seem to have been discovered anew by mainstream literary authors.”

The Caine Prize was awarded at a dinner in the medieval Divinity School at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. The award was announced by the chairman of the Caine judges Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre in London, and Chair of Culture, Ceremonies and Education at the London Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games.

Kelly’s fellow judges were Libyan novelist Hisham Matar, Eritrean-born Guardian newspaper journalist Hannah Pool, South African poet, novelist and lecturer Jonty Driver, and Jamaican-born poet and critic Professor Mark McMorris of Georgetown University, Washington DC.


Kelly described Rose-Innes’s story as “a strange disorienting metaphor for leaving it too late...something is coming towards you and will destroy you. The narrative employed imagery that pushed the story forwards, and it showed a very sharp and rare maturity.”

This is the ninth year of the Caine Prize, established in memory of Sir Michael Caine who was Chairman of Booker plc, and Chairman of the Booker Prize management committee for nearly 25 years. The prize is awarded for a short story by an African writer of 3,000 to 10,000 words. The African winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature – Nigerian Wole Soyinka, and South Africans Nadine Gordimer and J M Coetzee – are patrons of the prize, as was the late Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz.

This year’s shortlist of five stories included three from the anthology, “African Pens” published last year by Spearhead, an imprint of New Africa Books, Cape Town. The anthology contains the prizewinning stories from the 2007 HSBC/SA PEN Literary Award, among them “Poison”. Malawian writer Stanley Onjezaeni Kenani was shortlisted for the Caine Prize with “For Honour”, and South African Gill Schierhout for “The Day of the Surgical Colloquium”.

The other two shortlisted stories were “Mallam Sile” from Ghanaian writer Mohammed Naseehu Ali’s anthology “The Prophet of Zongo”, and Nigerian Uzor Maxim Uzoatu’s “Cemetery of Life”,
published in Wasafiri magazine.

Rose-Innes was born in Cape Town in 1971. Although she wrote stories as a schoolgirl, it took her “quite a long time to come round to the idea of being a writer. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do for a long time, and in a way I think writing kind of solved that dilemma for me. If you write, you can dip into anything that interests you, and don’t have to commit to one sphere of interest.”

At university Rose-Innes did a year of English Literature and she then did various courses before obtaining a BSc Honors in archaeology and anthropology. She then completed an MA in Creative Writing at Cape Town University under the supervision of J M Coetzee. Her first novel “Shark’s Egg” was published in 2000 (and nominated for the M-Net Book prize), and the second, “The Rock Alphabet” appeared in 2004 (the book was a Publishers Choice). The latter novel has also been published in Romanian translation. Rose-Innes is now working on her third novel, provisionally titled “Making Worlds”.

Summing up the experience of the being shortlisted for, and then winning, the Caine Prize, Rose-Innes says: “It’s been very valuable for me in term of discovering other African writers, and starting to access what for me are new networks of writers and publishers throughout Africa, as opposed to within South Africa.”



Although South Africa currently has a very vibrant publishing scene, “it’s not a huge reading market and it’s very difficult to make a living from writing. But if you want to do that, it’s almost essential that you access international markets.” Rose-Innes has an agent in London, Isobel Dixon of the literary agency Blake Friedman, who handles her international sales and non-fiction. Winning the Caine Prize should boost her chances of publication outside South Africa.

The Caine Prize will also give Rose-Innes a chance to devote more time to her writing. However, she plans to continue with certain commitments including her involvement in the University of Cape Town’s Creative Writing MA.

At the same time she is teaching a relatively new online writing course, for the South African Writers College (at sawriterscollege.co.za) which also has a New Zealand branch, and plans to expand into Australia. Rose-Innes was asked by the college to construct the “Write a Novel” course, for which she is tutor. “And it’s actually really fun.”

The burgeoning of Rose-Innes’s writing career has led to her being invited increasingly to literary events and writing residencies abroad. Last year she spent time on a scholarship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, in Stuttgart, Germany, which promotes and funds young artists. She will be returning there later this year. Also this year, as part of the Caine Prize, she is due to spend a month at Georgetown, with the position of Caine Prize/Georgetown University Writer in Residence.

Rose-Innes’s short stories have appeared in several anthologies, most recently “Jambula Tree and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 8th Annual Collection”. The anthology includes “Poison”, “Bad Places” and also “The Boulder” which was written for a Caine workshop held earlier this year in Noordhoek near Cape Town.

Rose-Innes edited the book “Nice Times! A book of South African pleasures and delights”, published in 2006. And for some time she has been working on a collaborative novel, set in a shopping mall, with three other Cape Town women writers: Mary Watson (winner of the Caine Prize in 2006), Diane Awerbuck and Lauren Beukes.

One aspect of South African literary life of which Rose-Innes speaks with particular enthusiasm is the springing up of websites such as book.co.za, on which she has a page, and litnet.co.za, which hosts lively discussions among its members. “On these sites I get a sense of real community of writers,” she says.

Saudi Gazette 14 July 2008

London as an Arab literary capital

London is sometimes described as an Arab capital - or at least an Arab cultural capital. Certainly it is one of the most important capitals for Arabs outside the Arab world: the Palestinian author and journalist Saudi Aburish, in his book 'A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite', dubs it "Beirut on Thames".

The increase in the Arab presence over the past four decades, to several hundred thousand, has been accompanied by a growth in Arab-related cultural activities. Yet much Arab cultural life in London takes place within a largely Arab milieu, without many links to wider British culture.

With the flying around of buzzphrases such as "cultural cooperation", "soft power" and "winning hearts and minds in the post 9/11 era", Arab-British cultural exchanges are often portrayed as if they were something new - when in fact they have been going on for decades, if largely untrumpeted.

The Arab communities that have descended on the British capital at different times have included traders and tourists, bankers and businessmen, priests and imams, restaurateurs and plumbers – and along with them they brought journalists, novelists, playwrights, cartoonists, poets, broadcasters, musicians and artists.

The pan-Arab media was born in London when Saudi-owned Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, distinctive on news stands with its green front page, was launched in 1978. It was the first Arabic newspaper to use satellite transmission to print in several cities around the world simulataneously. Ten years later the Lebanese newspaper Al-Hayat moved from Beirut to be relaunched from London as a pan-Arab daily.

London was also midwife to Arab satellite TV when Middle East Broadcasting Centre (MBC) started broadcasting from the city in September 1991.

In a three-page memoir published in the Economist in 2003, the legendary Middle East journalist Barbara Smith, then on the verge of retirement, recalls her nearly half a century career at the magazine which she joined shortly before the Suez War of 1956. She writes of her “exasperated affection” for the Arab world - a phrase with which many will surely identify.

Over the years, the work of some Arab writers has resonated with a wider British audience. One Arab author to command attention in London in the 1960s was the Egyptian Waguih Ghali, an exiled communist whose acclaimed novel Beer in the Snooker Club is set between Cairo and London.

In her 1986 memoir After a Funeral, the publisher Diana Athill tells with unflinching clarity of her difficult five-year friendship (they were only occasionally lovers) with the complex and troubled Ghali. He committed suicide in 1968 through taking an overdose in Athill’s flat. Athill’s book is a sharp observation of an Arab-British lived relationship.

Towards the end of the 1960s the pioneering Sudanese novelist Tayib Salih, who worked for years at the BBC Arabic Service in London, attracted much acclaim for his novel Season of Migration to the North. The novel, which moves between Sudan and London, is regarded as a landmark work of Arabic and post-colonial literature. It was translated into English by Denys Johnson-Davies and published in Heinemann’s African Writers Series in 1969. Its enduring reputation led to its being republished in the Penguin Classics Series in 2003.

Johnson-Davies, whose career spans 60 years, is the doyen of translators of Arabic fiction. He studied Arabic at Cambridge University, but told the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram: “I really learnt Arabic at the BBC Arabic Service, where I started working in 1940. It had started in 1938 and they were looking for anyone who knew Arabic to work there. So many Arabs who lived in London worked there, including many Egyptians.” During his five and a half years at the BBC he learnt from his colleagues how to speak Arabic, and about Arabic literature.


Several of Johnson-Davies’ translations of Egyptian writers were published by the African Writers Series. He was appointed as the consultant to Heinemann’s Arab Authors series, and translated much of its output, but the series did not take off in the way the African series had and it was discontinued in the late 1980s. Since then, translations by Johnson-Davies, who has lived in Cairo for many years, have been published by publishers such as Quartet, the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press and Saqi Books.

Arab migration to London increased in the 1970s as a result of two main factors: new wealth in the oil states from the rise in oil prices, and the Lebanese civil war. The influx of Arabs included writers, journalists and publishers. In the 30 years since, there have been further waves of migration of Arab exiles, refugees and asylum seekers from Iraq, Sudan and other countries.

A landmark for the development of Arab culture in London was the establishment in 1979 of Al Saqi bookshop in Westbourne Grove by the late Lebanese writer, artist and publisher Mai Ghoussoub and her friend Andre Gaspard. The shop’s stock included books censored by certain Arab countries, and Arab visitors to London would make pilgrimages to Saqi to get their hands on these banned titles. In 1983 Saqi launched a publishing arm, Saqi Books, and in 1990 it set up the sister Dar Al-Saqi publishing house in Beirut.

Next door to Saqi the Iraqi architect Dr Mohamed Makiya established the Kufa Gallery, which became a centre for Arab culture in London, hosting art exhibitions and book launches. Makiya sold the Kufa to Saqi in 2006 and it closed down when Saqi were unable to find a tenant who would keep it as a gallery.

The colourful Palestinian Naim Attallah [here in a portrait by Emma Sergeant], proprietor of Quartet Books, brought fun and panache to Arab publishing as recounted in his fourth volume of memoirs, Fulfilment and Betrayal 1975-1995, published last year.

Zelfa Hourani built up the Arab fiction list at Quartet, and in 1986 Quartet published in English translation Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh’s taboo-breaking novel The Story of Zahra. Al-Shaykh has lived in London since the early 1980s, and her first London novel, Only in London, was published by Bloomsbury in 2002.

After a hiatus of several years, Quartet has recently been revived. Its new titles include “By the Rivers of Babylon”, the new novel of Iraqi satirist, writer and artist Khalid Kishtaini, a long-time resident of London. The novel is set in the 1940s and focuses on Iraqi Jews in Iraq and Israel.

Increasing numbers of Arab authors in Britain write in English rather than Arabic, and some have received wide recognition. The Egyptian novelist and short story writer Ahdaf Soueif was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1999 for The Map of Love.
The Libyan Hisham Matar was shortlisted for Man Booker with his debut novel, In the Country of Men, in 2006. The work of both authors explores the impact of the history and politics of their countries on individuals.

Leila Aboulela, the Sudanese-Egyptian writer whose short story The Museum won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000, the prize’s first year, deals in her fiction with themes that are more overtly Muslim than most Arab novelists in Britain.
Her first two novels The Translator (Polygon) and Minaret (Bloomsbury) were longlisted for the Orange Prize.

Palestinian-British Tony Hanania wrote three well-reviewed novels in quick succession between 1997 and 2000 - Homesick, Unreal City and Eros Island, all published by Bloomsbury - but has since disappeared from British literary circles. The Palestinian Samir El Youssef stirred controversy with the book of short stories, Gaza Blues (David Paul), he co-authored with Israeli writer Etgar Keret, and with his novel The Illusion of Return (Halban Publishers). The Jordanian Fadia Faqir’s novel My Name is Salma was published last year in London by Doubleday/Random House and in the US (under the title The Cry of the Dove) by Grove/Atlantic.

The prospects for Arab literature in Britain and beyond were boosted in 1997 when Banipal, the magazine of modern Arab literature in translation, was launched in London by publisher and editor Margaret Obank and her Iraqi journalist and writer husband Samuel (author of An Iraqi in Paris). The magazine has showcased hundreds of Arab authors whose work had never before been translated into English. Banipal also has a book publishing arm, Banipal Books, and in 2006 it launched the Saif Ghobash – Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, administered by the Society of Authors.

Arabic literature was brought into the Booker fold last year with the launch of the annual International Prize for Arabic Fiction, worth a total of $60,000 to the winner, in association with the Booker Prize Foundation of London and with financial support from the Emirates Foundation of Abu Dhabi. The prize was awarded in March to Egyptian Bahaa Taher for his novel Sunset Oasis.

The Arab World Market Focus at the London Book Fair in April showed that Arab literature in London has entered a dynamic new phase, at least as far as publishers are concerned. Some 100 Arab publishers and organisations took part, and more than 60 Arab writers, publishers and academics appeared in a programme of seminars organised jointly by the Fair and the British Council. The participating writers included some of the hottest names in Arab fiction: Faiza Guene born in France to Algerian parents, Egyptian Alaa al-Aswany - author of the extraordinarily successful “The Yacoubian Building” - and Saudi Raja Alsanea, whose debut novel “Girls of Riyadh” was this month published in English translation as a Penguin paperback.

During the Fair it was announced that a new publishing venture, Arabia Books, has been set up by London-based publishers Arcadia Books and Haus Publishing, focussing on the publication of titles from the American University in Cairo Press. The first ten titles are scheduled for publication in the late summer. They include Al-Aswany's 'Friendly Fire - Ten Stories of Today's Cairo', Hoda Barakat's 'Tiller of Water' and Alia Mamdouh's 'The Loved Ones'.

Susannah Tarbush

palestine festival of literature

In the latest issue of the London Review of Books, Scottish novelist and essayist Andrew O’Hagan reflects on the inaugural Palestine Festival of Literature held recently in the West Bank and Jerusalem. “Thousands of people turned out: they wanted to believe that Palestine is not just a cause but also a culture and a country, a place not simply for stone-throwing but for ideas and for modernity” writes O’Hagan, whose latest book “The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America” has just been published by Faber.

O’Hagan was one of around 15 writers - British, Irish, American, Indian and Arab - who travelled to the festival from abroad to give public talks and readings, network with Palestinian writers, and hold workshops at universities.

During their travels between festival venues in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem the writers constantly came up against the harsh realities of the Israeli occupation and the “separation wall”. O’Hagan writes: “Everywhere we went the wall seemed a shadow, a heavy ornament of Israeli aggression and a horrible reminder to those us who grew to see the wall come down in Berlin and the end of apartheid in South Africa.”

In Hebron, the writers found that most of the shops had been closed down and “the general atmosphere is of a people being harassed, obscured, denied and cancelled.” But O’Hagan ends his piece on an upbeat note. He observes students at Birzeit University engaging in discussion under the olive trees, and comments: “They seemed to agree that too much talk about one’s suffering is a kind of provincialism and more than anything wanted to see themselves as a generation that could inhabit the world.”


The five-day festival, which took place at the same time as Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations, embodied the call of the late Palestinian scholar and activist Edward Said for the “reaffirmation of the power of culture over the culture of power.” The festival met with an enthusiastic response from those attending its events, which were often filled to bursting. There were repeated declarations of appreciation that the writers had come to Palestine.

The Palestinian festival coincided with the first Jerusalem International Writers Festival, organized by Israelis. Inevitably, some journalists and commentators drew attention to the total lack of interaction between the two festivals. In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, the Egyptian-British novelist Ahdaf Soueif was asked about the absence of Israel participants. She said this was not deliberate, but “I’m resistant to this idea of always having to twin, that every time you talk about Palestine you have to invite an Israeli, or vice versa. They aren’t twinned.”

The festival had a distinguished list of patrons: Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, British critic, writer and novelist John Berger, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, and two Nobel prizewinners – Irish poet Seamus Heaney and British playwright Harold Pinter.

There were seven local and international partners including the British Council and the AM Qattan Foundation, and support also came from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, UNESCO, the Ford Foundation and the Sigrid Rausing Charitable Fund.

The delegation of writers included four Palestinians. Two of them - poets Nathalie Handel and Suheir Hammad - live in the USA, where they have built up substantial fan bases. Handel is editor of “The Poetry of Arab Women”, while Hammad is known for her brand of rap poetry.

The writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh, who lives in Ramallah, is author of the acclaimed memoir “Strangers in the House”. His most recent work, “Palestinian Walks: Notes on the Vanishing Landscape”, has won the Orwell prize for political literature. Poet and author Mourid Barghouti has many published collections to his name. His book “I Saw Ramallah”, written after he returned to that city after an absence of 30 years, won the Naguib Mahfouz prize for literature and has been translated into several languages.


The delegation also included two of the best-known Arab novelists living in Britain: Ahdaf Soueif [below] (shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 1999 for “The Map of Love”) and the Lebanese Hanan Al-Shaykh [above] (whose highly-praised novels include “Only in London”). Novelist Jamal Mahjoub [right] , born to a Sudanese father and English mother, grew up in Khartoum and has lived in Denmark and Spain. He is the author of several novels that explore dislocations.

Among the British participants in the festival was Brigid Keenan, the journalist and author who is married to a British diplomat and whose books include “Damascus: Hidden Treasures of the Old City” and “Diplomatic Baggage: The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse”. William Dalrymple is a prolific author of books on themes related to Islam and to Middle Eastern and Indian history, among them “White Mughals” and “The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1957”. From Ireland, there was Man Booker prizewinning novelist Roddy Doyle, whose humor during festival performances was much appreciated.

The Indian member of the writers’ party was essayist and writer Pankaj Mishra, author of “Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond” and “Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India”. The actor Khalid Abdulla, the star of the film “The Kite Runner” who was born in Britain to parents of Egyptian origin, took part in some of the festival events.

The festival began in Jerusalem with an evening of readings in Dar el-Tifl al-Arabi, chaired by the Palestinian politician, human rights activist and English literature scholar Hanan Ashrawi. The theme of the first session was journeys. Dalrymple spoke of the travels he undertook in Palestine while preparing his book “From the Holy Mountain”. British novelist Esther Freud [bottom] told of her childhood in Morocco (the basis of her novel “Hideous Kinky”), and Keenan recounted incidents from her life as the EU ambassador’s wife in Kazakhstan.

The writers travelled to Birzeit University, Ramallah, the next day. Among those who gave readings was British journalist and author Victoria Brittain, who read from “Enemy Combatant: The Terrifying Story of a Briton in Guantanamo”, the book she wrote jointly with former Guantanamo prisoner Moazzam Begg. The readings were followed by workshops with students, and a meeting at the A M Qattan Foundation with 20 leading Palestinian authors. During an evening at the Al-Kasaba Theatre, Roddy Doyle read from his Irish historical novel “A Star Called Henry” and drew parallels between the history of Ireland and Palestine.


Travelling from Ramallah to Bethlehem, the writers chose not to go by the easier tourist route, but to experience the way a Palestinian would have to go. They passed through the notorious Qalandia checkpoint, which the daily blog of the festival recorded as being “deeply unpleasant”. In Hebron, “we walked through nightmare wires, tunnels and metal detectors, saw groups of settlers out jogging with AK-47s round their necks.” To get to Abraham’s mosque, the writers were made to pass through another metal detector. “Once inside some people had to take themselves away to cry. All very very rough.”

The events in Bethlehem included an evening at the new Dar an-Nadwa cultural centre where Suheir Hammad’s rap poetry captivated a full house of several hundred. The main entertainment came from El Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe dressed in brightly colored costumes. The festival blog records that the writers were told how they had energized the city. “Bethlehem, they told us, is being slowly strangled to death, but this Festival has really given people a kick.”

The festival finale was an evening in the Palestinian National Theatre, Jerusalem. The writers took it in turn to read from their choice of works by other authors including James Joyce and Charles Dickens. There were performances by the group Yasmeen from the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music. But the realities of the situation on the ground intruded even into this. “Although their oud player and vocalist had been held at a checkpoint, the remaining four musicians played beautifully,” the festival blog said.

Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette, June 2 2008

'about larkin' on penelope scott stokes

The new issue of About Larkin, the magazine of the Larkin Society, has as its seven-page cover story the first part of an article about Penelope Scott Stokes, Philip Larkin's early muse.

page 1:
The georgiasam blog has an entry, with some reader comments, on the story.

hugh miles plays winning cards in cairo

While working in Cairo as a freelance journalist, the British writer Hugh Miles (pictured below) fell for an Egyptian woman doctor he met at the leaving party of a mutual American lawyer friend. The party was held at a Thai restaurant in a five-star hotel. “There, at the back of the restaurant, silhouetted against a tank of slowly circulating black koi carp, was a group of extraordinarily beautiful Egyptian girls.

“With her coal-black hair and coppery skin, Roda reminded me of a Nefertiti statue I had seen in the Egyptian Museum when I had first come to Cairo as a teenager. Her beauty and grace stunned me: I did not know that such an exquisite combination of looks and intelligence could exist in a single woman, except perhaps the odd gorgeous physicist in a James Bond movie.”

Miles took Roda’s telephone number, but had no time to see her again before he returned to London. Back in England he could not get the doctor out of his mind. “Where could I find a girl like that in London? I asked myself.” The handful of single girls he knew in London were “highly-paid professionals, too focused on their ball-breaking careers to hang out with out-of-work writers like me, or suffered from untreatable personality disorders.”

He found himself sending Roda a text message: “Bck in Ldn. Cnt stop thinking abt u.” She phoned him back, and he decided on the spot to return to Cairo.

Miles’s book “Playing Cards in Cairo: Mint Tea, Tarneeb and Tales of the City”, published recently by Abacus, is the story of his adventures after he returned to Cairo. In particular it tells of his courting of a woman from a culture very different from his own. He had no blueprint for the relationship: none of his Western friends had dated an Egyptian girl.
The card game tarneeb, a type of bridge popular in the Middle East, provided an opportunity for Hugh to get to know Roda through spending long hours socializing in her home with her and her sisters and their female friends. Roda’s family apartment was in Muwazafeen, a relatively affluent middle class area of Cairo. Her mother was dead, her father was working in Kuwait, and she and her sisters lived with no male guardian, unlike most of their female contemporaries. Their girl friends constantly fabricated stories on where they were and who they were with so as to placate their brothers and fathers. They were adept at living double lives.

Over the card table Miles heard about the lives of Roda’s sisters and friends and gained insights into Egyptian society. Men generally come out badly in his book. “We played cards all summer long. Through long hot nights, over cigarettes and endless cups of syrupy tea, I listened to tale after tale of bullying husbands, overprotective brothers and a litany of sexual harassment by strangers.”

One of Roda’s sisters, Nadia, is a doctor married to a gynecologist from upper Egypt, and the prejudice against upper Egyptians expressed by the women is disconcerting. Nadia tells Miles her husband is from Qena, and asks him: “Do you know Qena? It is in upper Egypt and its men are famous for being stupid and macho.” Nadia’s husband regularly beats her, but she has a small daughter and finds the prospect of divorce difficult to contemplate.

The only Egyptian man Miles seems to have spent much time with is Dwayne (not his original name), a relative of one of the girls and a heavy user of hashish whose civil servant father has a second job trafficking women into the Gulf. Dwayne matures after he goes to work for a telecoms company in Iraq.

Miles played his cards right on the personal level, and eventually he and Dina al-Shafie, the psychiatrist on whom the Roda of his book is based, got engaged and married and are now expecting their first child. One of the book’s final chapters describes Hugh’s visit to Al Azhar to convert to Islam, and his adoption of the name Sami Hussein.

Hugh Miles is the son of Oliver Miles, a retired British diplomat who served as ambassador to Libya in the 1980s and as ambassador to Greece. Hugh was born in Saudi Arabia in 1977, and studied Arabic at Oxford University and English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin. He first went to Cairo at the age of 17 to work as an au pair for a wealthy family. His first book, the award-winning “Al-Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World”, was published in 2005.

In “Playing Cards in Cairo” Miles puts the stories of his card-playing female friends into the wider context of Egyptian society. He examines issues such as the pressures on women to have plastic surgery, honor killings, veiling, violence against women, the unofficial temporary form of marriage known as urfi, and the search for “good husband material”.

The statistics he cites are daunting. At present, some 700,000 graduates a year chase 200,000 jobs. By 2025 the population of Egypt will be 90 million and the country will have to find 450,000 new jobs a year to keep pace with the number of young people entering work.


For single women there is the pressure to find a husband before it is too late. And for young men, high unemployment and economic pressures make it difficult to get married. Roda’s friend Yosra is 33 and knows the clock is “winding down on her marriage prospects.” Her state of mind is not helped by her being hooked on prescription drugs supplied by friends working in pharmacies. After various efforts to get engaged fail, despite her sessions with a mystic healer to try and help her love life, Yosra departs for the hope of better prospects in Dubai.

Miles is observant and inquisitive, and relates with relish a succession of tragi-comic scenes involving the women in his tarneeb-playing circle. Doubtless some Egyptians will resent his negative portrayal of their society, and especially its male component, and one can ask how fair his account is and whether it is over-sensationalized. Although Miles describes the group of women he meets as highly educated, Roda comes across in his narrative as standing above the others in her intelligence, independence and strength of character. Otherwise, the women seem over-preoccupied with superficial concerns and show scant interest in politics and the wider world. There is little evidence in the book of the progressive and enlightened elements in Egyptian society, male or female.

Miles is fascinated by Cairo, but writes that it has become “a cruel and neglectful mother, as if the grinding poverty and the weight of millions of people and cars had worn down her benevolence and her will to go on.” He thinks that “everyone clings to memories of better times, the days before Cairo became a monster to her people and a slave to foreign powers. They remember their beloved city when she was great: when Cairo was the cradle of Arab nationalism and Egyptians were the proud leaders of the Arab world.”


Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, 14 April 2008

lady evelyn cobbold's 'pilgrimage to mecca' republished

In 1934 the London publisher John Murray issued “Pilgrimage to Mecca”, an account by Anglo-Scottish convert to Islam Lady Evelyn Cobbold of the Hajj she had undertaken the previous year, at the age of 65. Lady Evelyn was the first British-born Muslim woman on record as having made the pilgrimage.

“Pilgrimage to Mecca” takes the form of a diary, and the writing is fresh, immediate, and rich in description. As a woman, Evelyn was able to give a rare depiction of female life in Mecca and Medina. At the same time the book contains substantial digressions on the history and merits of Islam. The foreword was contributed by Sheikh Hafiz Wahba, the Saudi Arabian Minister in London.

Lady Evelyn’s pilgrimage attracted much media attention, and her book was widely reviewed. The Manchester Guardian newspaper said: “If she may be thought to be a little prejudiced in favour of her adopted faith, we have been accustomed to hear in its disfavour so much which is based upon pure ignorance and antipathy that a little over praise, if such it be, comes as a welcome relief.”

It might have been expected that Lady Evelyn would have entered the ranks of those legendary women travelers to the Middle East who are still celebrated today. They include Lady Evelyn’s great-aunt Lady Jane Digby el-Mezrab who married a Syrian sheikh, lived in the desert and was buried in Damascus.

One might also have thought that in the climate of recent years, when ”British Muslim” has become a troubled term and the subject of much debate, there would be renewed interest in this British convert who tried through her travels and writing to increase understanding between two religions and cultures. And yet Lady Evelyn Cobbold and her book seemed to remain largely out of sight.

Now London-based Arabian Publishing has rescued the book from relative obscurity through publication of a handsome new edition which includes a lively and illuminating 80-page introduction, “From Mayfair to Mecca”, by William Facey and Miranda Taylor.

Facey is a museum consultant, writer and publisher specializing in the Arabian Peninsula. Taylor is a freelance writer (under her maiden name Miranda Haines) who first became interested in Lady Evelyn when she was editor of Geographical, the monthly magazine of the Royal Geographical Society. She discovered that Lady Evelyn was her great-great-great-aunt, and since then she has collated archives, photographs and family stories related to her.

The new edition also has detailed notes on Evelyn’s original text by Dr Ahmad S Turkistani, Professor of Islamic Orientation and Mass Media at Al-Imam Muhammad bin Saud University, Riyadh. Dr Turkistani, who was born in the Asir region, has been director of the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences at Fairfax, Virginia. He has performed the Hajj numerous times and has covered it for local and international media including CNN International TV.

The book includes 30 pages of black and white photographs. There is a picture of the flat slab on the grave of Lady Evelyn, who died in 1963 aged 95, at her Scottish Highlands estate in Wester Ross. On it is inscribed an English translation of verse 35 of the Qu’ranic sura “Light”.

Facey and Taylor give a thorough account of the life of this extraordinary aristocratic Anglo-Scottish Muslim woman, a socialite who combined a love of Islam and the Middle East with a passion for Scotland and outdoor pursuits. She was a gardener and a first-class angler, rifle shot and deerstalker; the first British woman to shoot a 14-point stag.

One section of the introduction, ‘Lady Evelyn as a British Muslim’, places her in the context of the still little-known history of Islam in Britain. She was friends with convert Marmaduke Pickthall, the gifted linguist and writer whose 1930 translation of the Qur’an, “The Meaning of the Glorious Koran”, is still highly regarded. But there was little sign that she was much aware of the public implications of her faith. This was in contrast to Pickthall, and solicitor William Henry Quilliam, known as Abdullah Quilliam, who established a mosque in Liverpool in 1889-91. The Ottoman Sultan proclaimed him Shaikh al-Islam of the United Kingdom in 1894. Evelyn emphasized the private belief side of her religion, which Facey and Taylor see as a very European model of religious faith.

Evelyn was born in 1867 in Edinburgh to the Earl and Countess of Dunmore. Her father, Charles Adolphus Murray, was a renowned Scottish explorer. He traveled to many parts of the world, and Evelyn sometimes accompanied him. With her English mother Gertrude, she shared a spiritual reflectiveness.

Evelyn wrote in “Pilgrimage to Mecca” that she was often asked when and why she became a Muslim, but “I do not know the precise moment when the truth of Islam dawned on me. It seems that I have always been a Muslim.”

Evelyn’s affinity with the Arab world originated in her childhood. Her father often took the family to North Africa, and they had a villa in Cairo. They also spent winter months in a villa outside Algiers. “There I learned to speak Arabic and my delight was to escape my governess and visit the Mosques with my Algerian friends, and unconsciously I was a little Moslem at heart.”

Evelyn married John Dupuis Cobbold in a church in Cairo in 1891, and went with him to live in the manor house of Holywells in Suffolk. In 1911 she travelled with a female companion to what she called the Libyan Desert, actually the Western Desert of Egypt. She recorded her experiences in the first of her three books, “Wayfarers in the Libyan Desert”.

The Cobbolds’ marriage ended in 1922. As part of the generous divorce settlement, her husband bought her a house in Mayfair where she entertained her friends, including a number of Arabs. Among the Saudis she met was Amir Saud bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud, and the new edition of her book includes a photograph of him on a visit to England in 1935 or 1936, standing with Hafiz Wahba.

The French couturier Molyneux had his studio at the bottom of Evelyn’s garden and she bought all her clothes from him. Even when travelling in remote parts of Algeria and Morocco, her slender figure would be clad in the fashions of the day.

When she decided to wished to go on the pilgrimage to Makkah she consulted Hafiz Wahba and he wrote to King Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud about the matter, but she left England before receiving an answer and sailed from Suez to Jeddah. Her hosts there were the explorer Harry St John Philby (Hajji Abdullah Philby), who had converted to Islam in 1930, and his wife Dora. Philby also had a house in Mecca given to him by the King.

On the ship from Suez she met Sir Andrew Ryan, Britain’s Minister to Saudi Arabia. Facey and Taylor give examples of his repeated waspishness about her; they think Evelyn suffered from the suspicions of officialdom in the West towards Islam, as shown by Ryan’s attitude and by the Geographical Journal’s scathing review of her book.

Ryan alleged that Evelyn’s book was of very little value, but at least was better written than would have been anticipated. He attributed this to the collaboration of a “distinguished literary personage”. There is evidence that she collaborated with two prominent Muslims in writing her book; she told Pickthall their names but these are now lost.

Evelyn waited two weeks in Jeddah before receiving permission to proceed to Makkah after the King’s son Amir Faisal bin Abd al-Aziz, viceroy of the Hejaz and the future monarch, vetted her together with his assistant in foreign affairs Shaikh Fuad Hamza. Evelyn met Amir Faisal at a tea party, during which his 10-year old son Abdullah “won all our hearts” with his dignity and self-possession.

After permission had been granted, Philby told his mother in a letter that he had arranged for Evelyn to stay with Arab families in Medina and Mecca. “It is obviously better for her not to stay with me at Mecca. It might be misunderstood as she certainly doesn’t look as old as she is! – rather like Gertrude Bell in figure and mannerisms, slim, active, rather snobby and full of quite entertaining chatter.” Philby provided a driver Suleiman and an escort, Mustafa Nadhir, for her travels. They journeyed first to Medina and then returned to Jeddah before leaving for Makkah.

One of the most powerful experiences for Evelyn was the Tawaf circumbulation around the Kaaba in Makkah. “It would require a master pen to describe that scene, poignant in its intensity of that great concourse of humanity of which I was one small unit, completely lost to their surroundings in a fervour of religious enthusiasm. Many of the pilgrims had tears streaming down their cheeks; others raised their faces to the starlit sky that had witnessed this drama so often in the past centuries.”

Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette 19th May 2008

khalid kishtainy's new novel: 'by the rivers of babylon'

In the opening scene of “By the Rivers of Babylon”, the latest novel by the Iraqi author, satirist and columnist Khalid Kishtainy, the aunts, nieces and cousins of a family are gathered in the central courtyard (haush) of a Baghdad house. The year is 1948. The womenfolk plead with the patriarch of the house, Haj Nufal Abu Mamduh, to show mercy and forgiveness towards his unmarried 17-year-old daughter Samira, who is suspected of having fallen pregnant.

But Haj Nufal refuses to be swayed. He tells his two sons, who are armed with pistols, to take their sister to a doctor to establish whether she is pregnant. “If she has disgraced our name by becoming a plaything for some lecherous young man, she will deserve what she gets.”

The brothers take Samira to Dr Abdul Salam Sassoon, a Jewish gynecologist. They tell him that if their sister is pregnant he must cut her open, remove the fetus and show it to them. After that, “we want you to kill her and dispose of her body in your own professional way...We want no trace left of her real identity. We are a respectable family.” When he turns down their financial inducements, they threaten him with their guns. The sons might claim their family is respectable – but their father has made his money from trading in women in India.

Dr Sassoon vanishes from his home and clinic, returning after a week in a fragile emotional state. A young man, Hassun Abd al-Ali turns up at his clinic and tearfully tells him he was Samira’s lover, but Sassoon claims not to know what happened to her after he confirmed she was pregnant. The distraught Hassun goes on the run, fearing that Samira’s family will try to kill him.

Kishtainy’s novel, published by Quartet Books, traces the subsequent fates of Dr Sassoon and Hassun. Their personal stories are intertwined with the upheavals of the time, especially the creation of Israel in 1948 and the ensuing Arab-Israeli war. Such is Kishtainy’s economy of style that the novel has the feeling of an epic work, moving between Iraq, Iran and Israel and conveying a wealth of insights and incidents, and yet it is relatively short at just over 200 small pages. Kishtainy’s descriptions of places and people are highly evocative, and he has a gift for irony. He gives a rich portrait of life in Iraq, complete with the inventive, often bawdy, vernacular language.

Sassoon is driven to mental breakdown by his trauma over Samira, and spends time confined in mental hospitals. When Israel is established in May 1948 anti-Jewish feeling in Iraq rises, and Sassoon comes under suspicion from fellow patients who think he is an Israeli spy. He and Hassun both eventually end up in Israel, Sassoon as a reluctant migrant and Hassun as a prisoner of war. The novel leaves the reader guessing until its last paragraph.

At the launch of the novel last week at a reception in the Ark Gallery, West London, Kishtainy revealed that the opening chapter is based on a painful incident in his own family’s history. When he was four or five years old, his 15-year-old brother seduced and impregnated a girl. Kishtainy’s mother hid the girl in the family home, but when her husband discovered this he insisted that the girl leave the house at once. The women of the family beseeched him to save the girl’s life and to give them time to spirit her away to safety, but he refused to change his mind.

“I remember my brother leading this wretched girl, all in black, to the door,” Kishtainy said. “The door slammed behind them, a few seconds passed, the house was absolutely silent and then shots were heard from the street.” The girl’s family had killed her. Kishtainy’s brother ran away and for months the family did not know where he was. “The memory remained with me all my life, and eventually I had to download that incident into this novel.”

Some 60 years after this incident occurred, honor killings are still occurring in Iraq (where they are reportedly on the rise) and in other parts of the Middle East. Kishtainy said: “When you read this first chapter don’t think of it as fiction... it is a reality.“


The scandal over the pregnancy forced the Kishtainy family to move to another area of Baghdad. “Our house was adjacent to a cemetery and as a child I used to go there and watch the burials and lamentation, the crying and dramas. These scenes of death influenced my life and my psychology.” The young Kishtainy got to know the gravediggers, and in blackly humorous scenes in the novel Hassun takes refuge in a graveyard and works with the gravediggers, until his father recognizes him at a funeral and has him conscripted into the army.

“By the Rivers of Babylon” was also shaped by Kishtainy’s many encounters and friendships over the years with Iraqi Jews, some of whom were present at the launch. The novel gives a picture of the Iraqi Jewish community in 1940s Iraq, and of its role in professional, political and cultural life, and the pressures it came under as a result of anger over Zionism and events in Palestine.

Kishtainy describes his novel as “a homage to a wonderful community I have always treasured in my life. I wrote many years ago about them, and said I have met so many communities and minorities in the world but I found the Iraqi Jewish community the most lovable of the whole lot.”

Iraqi Jews often encountered problems when they emigrated to Israel and were for example unable to find jobs commensurate with their high level of education and qualifications. Sassoon is homesick for Iraq and tells his wife one of things he most misses is “the sight of storks on minarets.” A turning point comes when he strikes up a friendship with an American Palestinian who was born in the house in which Sassoon and his wife are living.

Kishtainy was born in Baghdad and moved to live in England after graduating from Baghdad University’s Faculty of Law and the Academy of Fine Arts. He has lived in London for many years, and has for the past 18 years been a columnist on Ash-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper. He is the author of many books in Arabic and English. “The New Statesman and the Middle East (Palestine essays)” was published in 1972 by the Palestine Research Center, and “Arab Political Humour” by Quartet in 1986.

It is only in the past decade that Kishtainy has started to write fiction. “Tales from Old Baghdad: Grandmother and I” was published in 1997 by Kegan Paul International. “Tomorrow is Another Day: A Tale of Getting By in Baghdad”, a picaresque novel set in Saddam’s Iraq, was published five years ago by Elliot and Thompson.

“By the Rivers of Babylon” is likely to find an audience not only among fiction readers, but also among historians and other scholars with an interest in Iraq. Kishtainy has a vivid recall of his childhood and youth, and has also carried out many interviews with Israelis of Iraqi origin. His novel provides much intriguing information on Iraqi society and culture.

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, 12th May 2008

benjamin gilmour's film 'son of a lion'

Australian filmmaker Benjamin Gilmour had to resort to unusual methods to make his film “Son of a Lion” in one of the most inaccessible and hazardous parts of the world to outsiders: the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. He shot the film in and around the gun-making town of Darra Adam Khel, in a tribal area which is out of bounds to foreigners. In order to avoid drawing attention to himself he became a “guerrilla filmmaker”, growing a beard and dressing in shalwar kameez and Pashtun hat so as to blend in with the locals. He had no wish to attract the attention of Pakistani intelligence agencies, or of militants.

Gilmour shot his film on a small Sony mini-DV camera so as to reduce the chances of being detected. This gives his deeply humane 92-minute first film an intimate, documentary feel. The scenery is stunning in its grandeur, with its sweeping mountains, green valleys and rich red soil. Trucks and buses painted with gaudy patterns ply the roads.

The film roles were played not by professional actors but mostly by family and friends of Gilmour’s executive producer and local “fixer” Hayat Khan Shinwari, a land owner and film buff with a particular liking for spaghetti westerns.

The main storyline tells of the clash between the longing of 11-year-old Niaz to go to school, and the insistence of his father Sher Alam Afridi that he should instead learn how to make guns in his father’s workshop. The film explores Pashtun culture and values, and the pressures the people are under. It had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February and is to be screened at several other festivals before being released in cinemas and on DVD. The producer is Carolyn Johnson, and the editor Alison McSkimming Croft

Gilmour, who turns 33 this year, worked for a number of years as a paramedic based in Sydney. He became interested in filmmaking when working as a unit nurse on UK film sets (he was a medic to Sharon Stone at one point).


He set his heart on making a film among the Pashtuns after he fell in love with the North West Frontier Province while travelling there with his girlfriend in August 2001. They went to Darra Adam Khel, famed for its manufacture of weapons. The town’s highly skilled craftsmen can make replicas of virtually any gun. The guns are regularly tested by being fired into the air.


Gilmour‘s imagination was captured by “this wild territory of handsome turbaned warriors, mud-walled fortress compounds, stark dangerous mountains, drug smuggling and vendettas.” He found the Pashtuns wonderfully hospitable.

In making “Son of a Lion”, Gilmour wanted to “try to balance out the tainted perception people in the West have of Muslims as a whole after the events of September 11.” He saw making the film as “an excellent way to carry out my goal of opposing the Islamophobia I saw around me. Islamophobia has infected a great many ordinary people around the world who simply do not have any experience of Muslim people beyond the evening news.”

Gilmour adds: “What particularly fascinated me about these rough Pashtun tribesmen was that although they were always heavily armed, they were actually more obsessed with poetry and music than weaponry. Trying to get my head around the way people of other cultures think without judging them has always been a mission of mine, and the Pashtuns seemed my greatest challenge yet.” He has written a 400-page book, “Warrior Poets”, on his journeys to Pakistan and the making of his film. It is to be published by the Murdoch Books imprint Pier 9 in June.

Before going to Pakistan to make his film, Gilmour wrote a script which ran to 110 pages. However, when his fixer and his colleagues read it they laughed at it so Gilmour ditched it and worked on a new script in close collaboration with his contacts. Much of the dialogue in the film was improvised by the actors themselves, and the writing credit on the film is “Benjamin Gilmour in collaboration with the people of Kohat and Darra Adam Khel”.

The part of Niaz is played by Hayat Khan Shinwari’s son, also called Niaz, who has an appealingly soulful face. He is wistful when he hears schoolboys on a bus talking about trigonometry, and complains to his grandmother that every day he sees children going to school while he has to work.

Niaz’s mother died when he was very young, and he sometimes visits her grave for solace. His father, played by Sher Alam Miskeen Ustad, was a fighter with the mujahedeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets, and he tells his son of the battles he fought against great odds and shows off his battle scars.


Sher Alam has a workshop that makes weapons from small arms to AK47s, and in the opening scene of the film he is giving Niaz a lesson in the countryside on how to fire a Smith and Wesson. “Are you a man or a girl?” he demands of his son. There is considerable emphasis on masculinity in the culture; when Niaz is taunted by the local big bully boy Pite and some other boys, he is teased for his “girly face”.

Niaz’s grandmother is fond of the boy and towards the end of the film plays a crucial part in mediating between father and son. One area of discord is that, to his father’s disapproval, Niaz loves music. At one point he peeks into a male wedding party where a rubab player is performing and a young man dancing.

There is much talk of politics among the men when they meet in the tea shop, barber, and other gathering places. They discuss 9/11, America, the Iraq war, Afghanistan. One discussion is about Osama Bin Laden and whether they would give him up in exchange for bounty, or extend hospitality. There is plenty of humor in the men’s exchanges. Niaz’s father recalls that the only film he has ever seen, back in Afghanistan, was Rambo III starring Sylvester Stallone. (In this 1988 film, Rambo goes to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahedeen against the Soviets.)


NIaz’s father’s brother Baktiyar (played by Baktiyar Ahmed Afridi) lives in the city of Peshawar, and is a relatively wealthy businessman. He tries to persuade Niaz’s father to enroll him in school, but Sher Alam is adamant: “I didn’t study, why should he?” When Niaz visits Peshawar for a dental appointment (an unexpectedly comic scene) his uncle takes him to a school where he has his first experience of being in a classroom. The uncle points out to Niaz’s father that the boy’s late mother had wanted him to be educated.

The tension between Niaz and the bullying Pite threatens to escalate when Sher Alam tells Niaz that he may have to answer Pite with a gun. He then visits Pite’s father to try and head off a confrontation, warning him it is a “clan issue”. However, when Pite is shot by another person Niaz staunches the flow of blood with his cap and helps to save his life.

Sher Alam Miskeen Usrtad gives an affecting performance as Niaz’s father. At first he seems authoritarian and harsh, but gradually he reveals his fears that his son will abandon him as his wife did when she died. When he finally agrees that Niaz should learn to read and write, he says this should be at a “proper” school. He rules out Niaz’s going to a traditional madrasa as he believes “the USA is all over them”, and says “I don’t want them to take you to Cuba and torture you.”

Music has an important part in the film. The Australian musician and composer Amanda Brown has put together a soundtrack that complements the film’s emotional power. There are also some tracks from the CD “From Cabool to California” featuring Professor John Baily on rubab, Ustadh Asif Mahmoud on tabla and John Harrelson on tanbura.

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, 5 May 2008

'stop the war' benefit

At a Stop the War Coalition benefit evening held at St James’s Church in Piccadilly, central London, last Thursday a succession of people prominent in Britain’s cultural life took to the platform to express their opposition to war through poetry, music and intimate off-the-cuff addresses.


Stop the War was founded in the days after 9/11 to oppose the “war on terror”. It organized the biggest demonstration ever seen in Britain when more than a million people took the streets of London on February 15 2003 to oppose the imminent war on Iraq. The coalition’s chair Andy Murray (pictured), who compered the benefit evening, argues that the need for Stop the War is as great as ever.

During the evening it was striking how strongly the words of poets from previous conflicts, and particularly the First and Second World Wars, still resonate today, as does the poetry of William Blake. The Stop the War convener Lindsey German read Blake’s poem London, from Songs of Experience, which begins: I wandered through each chartered street,/ Near where the chartered Thames does flow/ A mark in every face I meet,/ Marks of weakness, marks of woe.”

The veteran protest poet Adrian Mitchell read Blake’s poem The Price of Experience. He also gave a passionate rendering of one of his own best-known poems To Whom it May Concern each verse of which ends: “Tell me lies about Vietnam”. More than 40 years the poem still has much relevance: Mitchell substituted Iraq for Vietnam in the final line.

Playwright David Edgar read three poems by Berthold Brecht. The Legend of the Dead Soldier conjures up the macabre image of a dead and buried solider being dug up and returned to fight at the front. A poem written in response to a magazine image runs: “Look at the helmets of the vanquished! Yet/Surely the moment we came undone/ Was not when they were smitten from our heads/ But when we first agreed to put them on.”

The novelist A L Kennedy, who won the Costa book prize in January for her novel “Day” set in the Second World War, read from the work of poet Edmund Blunden who survived two years in the trenches of the First World War.

BBC TV journalist and former MP Martin Bell, wearing his trademark white suit, recited Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth and Siegfried Sassoon’s Everyone Sang. He also read two poems from Epitaphs of War by Rudyard Kipling, written after his son was killed at the front. Epitaph for a Dead Statesman includes the lines: “Now all my lies are proved untrue/ And I must face the men I slew”, and Epitaph for the Soldier: “If any ask why we died/ tell them because our fathers lied”. Actor Roger Lloyd-Pack (Trigger in the BBC sitcom “Only Fools and Horses”, and Owen Newitt in the “Vicar of Dibley”) recited Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting”.

Professor Jacqueline Rose, whose books include “The Question of Zion” and “The Last Resistance”, read three poems by the Israeli anti-war poet Dahlia Ravikovitch: You Can’t Kill a Baby Twice (on the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982 in Beirut), On the Attitude Towards Children in Wartime and Hovering at Low Altitude.

The editor of the medical magazine The Lancet, Dr Richard Horton, read a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid that tells of Aeaneas’ descent to the underworld. In October 2006 the Lancet published research from John Hopkins which suggested 650,000 Iraqis had died since 2003, considerably more than other estimates, and despite efforts to undermine the figures some government advisers concluded that the research on which they were based was sound.

The award-winning actress Janie Dee recounted the experience of being driven in a minicab by an Afghan man, and said: “the worst thing is meeting someone from Afghanistan or Iraq and feeling so embarrassed, because you didn’t want this [war] to happen”. She asked: “What can I do to make a difference?”

Iraqi novelist, columnist and activist Haifa Zangana, who was imprisoned under Saddam Hussein but opposed the invasion of Iraq, read a poem by the Iraqi woman poet Nazek Al-Malaika who revolutionized Arabic poetry and was a pioneer of free verse. The poem, Jamila and Us, was dedicated to the Algerian fighter for independence Jamila Bouhired.

The Muslim columnist for the Independent newspaper Yasmin Alibhai Brown said that some Arab friends had e-mailed her that day of the benefit to say “thank you to those who stand with us still.” She lamented the amount of time that has been wasted in not trying to understand the “storms in the heads” of those who carried out the attacks of 9/11 and those in London on 7/7. “That rage has been seen before” she said, reading two excerpts from her favorite writer James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time”.

Stop the War’s media officer the playwright and creative writing teacher David Wilson, who was director of the Pavarotti Music Center in Mostar, Bosnia, read a piece entitled Shadows set in 1995. It is the story “of a young woman about whom I now nothing except that on that day she was singing and wore a red dress.” It begins with the first-person narrator staying on the Croatian island of Hvar which has one of the oldest theatres in Southeast Europe. Engraved over its door are the words “built in the second year of peace 1612”.

The next day he is to return to Mostar “half a day’s drive away and yet a place as far removed from Hvar as the moon is to the earth. Mostar, an Ottoman jewel with stone houses, torturously-hot, but no sea breeze to move the sweltering air.” Mostar had been defined by its famous 16th century bridge, but this now lies “shattered at the bottom of the fast-flowing Neretva River.” In Mostar the narrator notices a young woman behind him the street singing and wearing a red dress. Then a bomb goes off. “Victims of the Hiroshima bombing left their shadows burned on the ground where they fell. Many years later, the shadow of this girl in the dress burns me still.”

The renowned Iraqi oud player Ahmed Mukhtar (pictured above) said: “My music is describing what I feel about the war.” He played a mixture of his own compositions and traditional Iraqi melodies. The composer and pianist Michael Nyman played a medley of music ending with compositions from the film “The Piano”, his most famous score. A performance by the group Peyoti for President (pictured below) provided an upbeat finale to the evening.

The evening provided an opportunity to hear an excerpt from the controversial opera “Manifest Destiny” with music by Keith Burstein and words by Dic Edwards. The opera, which centers around a female would-be suicide bomber, created a storm when it was performed at the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe not long after the four suicide bombings in London. A review in the Evening Standard, which implied that Burstein glorified terrorism, is the subject of a protracted libel case brought by Burstein. The case is soon to go to the European Court of Human Rights.

In the opera a Palestinian poet Leila, who has been living in London with her Jewish music composer partner Daniel, becomes radicalized and joins a suicide bombing cell. She is betrayed to the Americans by a fellow militant who is in love with her and wants to save her from death, and is incarcerated and tortured in Guantanamo Bay.

In the compelling scene performed at the Stop the War benefit, with Burstein on piano, Leila (sung by Janet Shell, left) remembers her mother’s garden in Palestine while her jailer (Christopher Foster) is moved by her reminiscences and washes her feet while he tries to justify US actions, singing: “We are not here to hurt you/but you leave us no choice.”

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, 28th April 2008