book on the ricin terror plot "that never was"

Ricin! The Terror Plot that Never Was
by
Susannah Tarbush

[original of article published in Arabic translation in Al-Hayat newspaper on 30 October 2010]

Ricin! The Inside Story of the Terror Plot that Never Was
by Lawrence Archer & Fiona Bawdon
published by Pluto Press of London and New York
206 pages, 2010

The so-called “ricin plot” is a major terrorism case that came to trial in Britain in 2005, during the “war on terror” era that followed the September 11 2001 terror attacks in the USA. Ricin is a poison that is extracted from the beans of the castor oil [zeit al-khirwa’] plant. Anti-terror police uncovered an alleged “ricin factory” when, on 5 January 2003, they raided a flat above a pharmacy in the Wood Green area of North London after a tip-off from the Algerian authorities.

On 8 January 2003 the media reported that the anti-terror police had found ricin in the flat and that Britain was under threat of a poison attack. The front page of the tabloid Daily Mirror newspaper consisted of a picture of a skull and crossbones superimposed on a map of Britain, with the headline: “Deadly Poison Found in Britain: It’s Here! ” No fewer than six inside pages of the newspaper were devoted to coverage of the “ricin plot”.

And yet, as would be shown during the “ricin trial”, there never was any ricin in the flat.

Both the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US Secretary of State Colin Powell used the uncovering of an alleged Al-Qaeda “ricin cell”, and the finding of ricin, to strengthen their case for the necessity of military action against Iraq which began on 20 March.

In his 5 February 2003 speech on Iraq before the UN Security Council, Colin Powell said the “ricin cell” was part of an international network linking Al-Qaeda, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi and Iraq. He said information on the “UK poison cell” had come from a “detained Al-Qaeda operative”.

Powell did not name the detained operative, but he is assumed to be an Algerian named Mohammed Meguerba who had been arrested and released on bail in Britain in September 2002. He had fled Britain and ended up in Algeria where he was captured, interrogated, and probably tortured. The Algerian secret police warned Britain on 31 December 2002 that a poison gas attack was to happen in the next few days.

As well as being used to strengthen the case for military action against Iraqi, the ricin case was also used as part of arguments for tougher anti-terror legislation which reduced civil liberties.

In the “ricin trial” that began in September 2004 five Algerians were each accused of “conspiracy to murder”, and “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”. It was planned that this first ricin trial would be followed by a second trial of a further four Algerians.

The trial by jury lasted seven months, and cost £20 million Sterling. Evidence from the government military research establishment Porton Down during the trial showed that there had in fact been no ricin in the flat.

Expectations were high among the British government, police and security services that the trial would result in all five defendants being convicted, and that this would be seen as a major success in the “war on terror”.

There was therefore shock when on 8 April 2005, after the jury had deliberated for 17 days, the foreman of the jury Laurence Archer [pictured] rose in court and announced “not guilty” verdicts on four of the five accused: Mouloud Sihali, David Khalef, Sidali Feddag and Mustapha Taleb.

The jury did find the fifth defendant, Kamel Bourgass, guilty of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance by using explosives or poisons to spread fear or disruption. The judge sentenced him to 17 years in prison.

But on the other, more serious, charge facing Bourgass – that of conspiracy to murder – the jury was unable to reach a verdict. Plans for the second trial of four further Algerians were abandoned, as were plans to retry Bourgass on the conspiracy to murder charge.

After the trial ended, Lawrence Archer and some other members of the trial jury remained deeply concerned by various aspects of the trial and by the inaccurate and exaggerated media coverage. They realised that the British authorities were treating the four Algerians men the jury had acquitted as if they were still terror suspects. It was as if the authorities considered that the jury had reached the “wrong” verdicts.

The jury members came to know of things of which they had been ignorant during the trial. For example they had not known that Bourgass was already serving a 22-year prison sentence for stabbing to death a policeman, Stephen Oake, and wounding three other policemen, during their attempt to arrest him in the northern English city of Manchester on 14 January 2003. Bourgass’s trial and conviction for this murder had taken place in 2004, but it had not been reported in the media so as not to prejudice the ricin trial.

When Archer and some of his fellow jurors found that the men they had acquitted were threatened with deportation to Algeria, they spoke out in newspaper interviews and TV documentaries under conditions of anonymity.

And in an amazing extending of the hand of friendship towards the men they had acquitted, they even decided to try and meet them. Around a year after the trial ended Archer and other two jurors succeeded in meeting Mustapha Taleb, at his asylum hearing, and some days later they had lunch with Sihali [pictured below] and Khalef and discussed the case. Since then Archer and another juror have regularly visited Sihali and have become warm friends with him as he fights British government plans to deport him to Algeria.

Now Lawrence Archer has co-written a book with legal journalist Fiona Bawdon, newly published by the London publisher Pluto Press under the title “Ricin! The Inside Story of the Terror Plot That Never Was”. The famous human rights lawyer, Queen’s Counsel Michael Mansfield, who defended Sihali during the trial, wrote the foreword to the book.

The book claims to tell for the first time the full story of the so-called “ricin plot” and trial, and of what has become of the four defendants since the jury acquitted them. It is thought to be the first-ever book on a British court case written by a former juror (although stringent legal rules control the confidentiality of juries, and Archer was not permitted to write any details of the jury’s discussions in the jury room during the trial).

Archer is a 56-year-old telecommunications engineer with no previous history of political activism. He told Al-Hayat that the trial had been a life-changing experience. Before the trial he had not been particularly interested in politics, apart from voting in elections. “The trial process made me query a lot more things, and I am definitely more politically aware.”

At the launch of the book at a reception in central London, Fiona Bawdon told the guests: “I don’t think anyone who knows the story of the Ricin plot trial can fail to be shocked at the way this case was hijacked by politicians, by the police, by the security services, and at the impact this continues to have on the lives of the acquitted defendants.”

Among the guests at the launch were some of Britain’s most prominent human rights lawyers. In addition to Mansfield they included Mrs Gareth Pierce, Imran Khan, Louise Christian, Matthew Ryder, and the Palestinian Queen’s Counsel Michel Abdel Massih who defended Bourgass. Among the other guests was Mouloud Sihali.

The previous Labour government took steps to reduce the right to trial by jury, and to allow for certain trials to be heard by judges only. Bawdon said the positive aspect of the ricin case it that it was “the most powerful riposte to those who seek to chisel away at the jury system, or who argue that juries are somehow a luxury we can’t afford any more, particularly in the current environment, or that jurors somehow are not equipped to really understand complex cases or to deal with highly politically charged issues.”

Bawdon said the jurors were just about the only ones who did actually understand the case while everybody else got swept away with the hysteria around the “Factory of Death” and the newspaper headlines. “The jury looked at the evidence and came up with the conclusions that they did and I think that that is something we should be very proud of, and that we should celebrate and also should be prepared to defend.”

In his foreword Mansfield raises eight “disturbing” unanswered questions of public importance around the case, which have “serious implications for the integrity of our political and judicial systems.”

For example why did Tony Blair and Colin Powell fail to correct their misrepresentations about the existence of “ricin” in the build-up to the Iraq war? And on what basis did the Metropolitan Police and the then Home Secretary Charles come to use the ricin case as part of the justification for calling for the 90-day detention of terror suspects without charge?

The media had been excluded from most of the ricin trial so as not to prejudice the trial of four other Algerians in the planned (but later abandoned) second ricin trial. Archer and his fellow jurors found that much of the press reporting after the trial ended was inaccurate and exaggerated. The media described Bourgass as an Al-Qaeda operative. In the words of the tabloid Sun, Bourgass was “Osma Bin-laden’s master poisoner – with a mission to murder as many Britons as possible.” But in fact a link between the accused men and Al-Qaeda had never been made in court during the trial.

As was confirmed during the trial, ricin was not found in the Wood Green flat. So where did the reports of ricin originate? It is true that when the Wood Green flat was raided, an initial test by a scientist from Porton Down found a weak positive indication for ricin in a pestle and mortar. But further tests for ricin carried out two days later at Porton Down came out negative. There was no ricin in the flat.

Bizarrely, Porton Down failed to inform the police or government ministers of the negative result for ricin until more than two months later, on 20 March 2003. Why this long delay? And even then the government and police did not publicly correct the previous reports that ricin had been found.

Even though the anti-terror police did not find ricin in the flat they did find suspicious material including handwritten recipes for poison and explosives, in Bourgass’s handwriting. They also found 22 castor beans, a small number of cherry stones and apple seeds, acetone and equipment to weigh and measure and thermometers. There was also more than £4,000 in cash.

Bourgass had written out recipes not only for ricin but for cyanide (from fruit seeds), botulinum (from rotting meat), nicotine poison (“cigarette poison”) and solanine (“potato poison”). Police also found a Nivea skin cream pot containing a brown sludge which may have been the product of an attempt to make nicotine poison.

Meguerba had “confessed” to the Algerians under interrogation that he and Bourgass had trained as poison experts in terror camps in Afghanistan. It was alleged that the recipes Bourgass had copied came from a Al-Qaeda website or manual, but the recipes were crude and investigative journalist Duncan Campbell presented evidence during the trial that they came from right-wing and survivalist websites in America. Though clearly Bourgass and Meguerba had been up to no good, they were amateurs rather than skilled operatives.

During the trial Bourgass tried to shift all blame to Meguerba. Meguerba’s fingerprints were all over the poison recipes, and Bourgass said during the trial that the suspicious items in the Wood Green flat had belonged to Meguerba. Bourgass claimed he had copied the recipes only at the request of Meguerba who wanted villagers in the Setif region of Algeria to use them to protect themselves.

In their book Archer and Bawdon describe Meguerba (in a reference to the Shakespeare play “Macbeth”) as the “ghost at the feast” at the trial. Although he was physically not at the trial, but held in Algeria, even in his absence he overshadowed the proceedings “with the prosecution portraying him as the shadowy and dangerous mastermind behind the plot.”

When police had arrested and then released Meguerba on bail in September 2002 they had found Sihali’s address in his wallet and had subsequently arrested Sihali and Khalef who were found to have false passports. Sihali and Khalef were both charged under the Terrorism Act and held in Belmarsh high security prison awaiting trial. Sihali received 15 months sentences for each of his false passports.

Khalef also had photocopies of poison recipes and explosives handwritten in Arabic, which would later be found to be photocopies of what Bourgass had copied.

Meguerba’s “confession” in Algeria was the basis on which arrests that led to the ricin trial were made. But how reliable was his “evidence” under interrogation, and quite possibly under torture? The jury was often been sent out of court for long periods during the trial while the judge and lawyers held legal arguments on what evidence was allowed to be used in court. In the end Meguerba’s evidence was not used in court after the judge decided it was inadmissible. The prosecution lawyer Nigel Sweeney said Meguerba was a liar and his evidence unreliable.

Archer and Bawdon do not paint the Algerian defendants as angels. Only one of them (Mustapha Taleb, who had been given political asylum in 2000) was in Britain legally. The book places the men in the context of the savage Algerian civil war, during which many young Algerians left their country. Many of them had false passports and forged identity documents and multiple identities – which especially after 9/11 would be seen as very suspicious.

The book repeatedly gives example of misleading and inaccurate media coverage. Overblown media coverage in relation to Sihali and Khalef started before the ricin “factory” find, after Sihali and Khalef were arrested in September 2002 and charged with possessing false identity documents.

On 17 November 2002, the day before Sihali and Khalef were due to make a court appearance in relation to the false identity documents, newspapers described the two as suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists who planned to gas an underground train, release cyanide or plant a dirty bomb on a ferry.

It is still not clear where these lurid stories came from.

The then Home Secretary David Blunkett dismissed the reports of gas attacks as “nonsense” but added that the police had picked up those who “were planning to set up a cell to threaten our country”. In fact they were only charged with having false passports. It was unwise for a Home Secretary to make such comments, as they could have compromised a future trial.

The book examines the fate of each of the four men the jury acquitted. Of the four it is Sidali Feddag – who was only 17 at the time of the trial – who has most successfully rebuilt his life. He has married a British-born Algerian woman and is studying for a law degree while working in a pizza parlour and waiting for the outcome of his asylum application.

In October 2008 Khalef was given the right to stay in the UK for five years, a term which will be extended if he keeps out of trouble.

But things have been more difficult for Sihali and Taleb. On 15 September 2005, two months after the four suicide bombings in London on 7 July in which 52 innocent people were killed, police raided the homes of Sihal and Taleb, told them they were a threat to national security and gave them deportation orders. They were held in Belmarsh high security prison for four months, without charge, and on their release were subjected to the harsh form of house arrest known as “control orders.” Their struggle not to be deported back to Algeria has taken place under the controversial Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) in which intelligence is heard in secret. Over the past five years, Taleb has been held at various times in Long Lartin prison or at home under control orders.

SIAC ruled in May 2007 that Sihali is not a threat to national security, but he still faces a threat of being deported. In May 2010 he lost his appeal against deportation, but he was recently granted the right to appeal against this SIAC decision.

record number of novels submitted for IPAF (the Arabic Booker)

above: Abdo Khal, the Saudi winner of IPAF 2010

International Prize for Arabic Fiction celebrates its fourth year with increase in submissions
The organisers of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF – popularly known as the Arabic Booker) announced on Monday 27 September that a record 123 entries from 17 countries, all but one of them Arab, were received for the 2011 prize. A statement released via IPAF’s PR advisers Colman Getty said: “Submissions have now closed for IPAF 2011 and the organisers are delighted to announce another healthy round of entries for this young but prestigious literary prize”. As before, the identity of the judges is being kept secret until the shortlist for the prize is announced, on 9 December. The winner will be declared on 14 March.

Novels were submitted to the prize from Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Libya, Sudan, Qatar and, for the first time, Afghanistan. Over a quarter of the submissions came from Egypt, home of the first two IPAF winners Bahaa Taher (winner in 2008, for Sunset Oasis) and Youssef Ziedan (2009, for Azazel). This sets the record for the highest number of submissions from one country in the prize’s three year history.

In 2009, there were 118 entries from 17 countries and the eventual winner was Saudi Arabian author Abdo Khal for Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles. There was a growing number of submissions from female writers this year, with works by female writers forming 29% of the overall submissions, up from 16% last year and 14% the year before.

IPAF was launched in Abu Dhabi, capital of the UAE, in April 2007 and it is funded by the Emirates Foundation, a leading UAE philanthropic organisation, and supported by the Booker Prize Foundation. It is open to living authors whose novels are written in the original Arabic. Publishers were requested to submit up to three novels published between August 2009 and July 2010, although only one novel per author is eligible and titles cannot have been submitted in a previous prize year. In addition, if the judging panel – whose names will be revealed at the same time as the shortlist announcement – feel that any book should have been submitted, they have the right to call it in. Any new titles by previous IPAF winning or shortlisted authors may also be submitted.

The longlist for the 2011 Prize will be announced on 10 November 2010, with the shortlist and panel of judges announced on 9 December 2010 and the winner announced on 14 March 2011. The shortlisted finalists for the Prize will each receive $10,000, with the winner receiving an additional $50,000. Both can look forward to reaching wider audiences and potentially securing publishing deals – both within the Arab World and internationally. Previous winners and shortlisted authors have secured English publications of their novels and a number other international translations as a result of the prize.

Jonathan Taylor CBE, Chairman of the IPAF Board of Trustees, and of the Booker Prize Foundation, comments: “Now we are into the fourth year of the Prize, it is good to see its continuing momentum and to celebrate the impact it is having on high quality literary fiction in the Arab World, in terms of profile, book sales and translation.”

Other supporters of the Prize include Etihad Airways, as the official airline of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. An independent Board of Trustees, drawn from across the Arab world and beyond, is responsible for the overall management of the prize.

In addition to the annual prize, the IPAF supports literary initiatives and in 2009 launched its inaugural nadwa (writers’ workshop) for a group of aspiring writers from across the Arab world. The workshop – the first of its kind for Arab writers - took place in Abu Dhabi under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al-Nahyan. It resulted in eight new pieces of fiction by some of the Arab world’s most promising authors, five of whom have recently been selected for the Beirut39. This collection of stories will be published by Saqi Books in the UK in 2011. A second nadwa will take place in Abu Dhabi from 19–26 October 2010.

'mornings in jenin' by susan abulhawa

Mornings in Jenin: Susan Abulhawa's Palestinian family odyssey

“Mornings in Jenin”, by the Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa [pictured below], is a rarity in being a novel on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict written in English by a Palestinian and published by a mainstream Western publisher, Bloomsbury of London, New York and Berlin.
With the muscle of Bloomsbury behind her, and with her novel written in highly accessible vivid prose that carries the reader along, Abulhawa stands a good chance of becoming a mainstream bestselling author. Comparisons are being made between “Mornings in Jenin” and the 2003 novel “The Kite Runner” written in English by US-based Afghan Khaled Hossein which was a runaway bestseller and was also made into a film.
With translation into some 20 languages, Abulhawa’s novel is already enjoying success beyond the English-reading world. The author reported on her Twitter feed on 14 June: “Starting the week with awesome news! Mornings in Jenin is the #1 bestseller in Norway! [i’m ridiculously excited].”
Susan Abulhawa was born to refugees of the 1967 Six Day war. As a teenager she moved to the US where she graduated in biomedical science and forged a career in medical science. In 2001 she founded Playgrounds for Palestine – an organization dedicated to upholding Palestinian children’s Right to Play. She lives in Pennsylvania with her daughter.
“Mornings in Jenin” traces over six decades the lives of four generations of the Abulheja family. The family is originally from the village of Ein Hod east of Haifa, where life traditionally revolved around the cultivation of olives and figs.
The family lives through the vicissitudes visited on the Palestinians since the 1940s. The main character Amal is the granddaughter of the patriarch Yehya. She is an attractive personality, with passion, humor and intelligence. Abulhawa depicts with tenderness and acuteness Amal’s process of growing up in the harshest of circumstances, and the characters with whom she strikes up friendships throughout her life.
The prologue to the novel finds the adult Amal in Jenin refugee camp in 2002 with the muzzle of an Israeli soldier’s rifle thrust against her forehead. Amal wonders “if officials might express regret for the ‘accidental’ killing of her, an American citizen. Or if her life would merely culminate in the dander of ‘collateral damage’.”
Abulhawa clearly has a mission as a novelist. Her writing is fuelled by a sense of anger and urgency. She cites the late Palestinian scholar and activist Dr. Edward Said as a major influence. “He lamented once that the Palestinian narrative was so lacking in literature, and I incorporated his disappointment into my resolve.” The Palestinian academic and politician Hanan Ashrawi directly encouraged her to write, after reading Abulhawa’s published memories of Jerusalem.
“Mornings in Jenin” is backed by extensive research, and includes a bibliography. Abulhawa draws extensively on her own experiences. For example she traveled to Jenin in 2002 after hearing reports of a massacre in the town’s refugee camp. “The horrors I witnessed there gave me the urgency to tell this story,” she says. “The steadfastness, courage, and humanity of the people of Jenin were my inspiration.”
An earlier version of “Mornings in Jenin” was published a few years ago as “The Scar of David” by a small US press that subsequently went out of business. “The Scar of David” was translated into French and published by Editions Buchet/Chastel under the title “Les Matins de Jénine”.
Anna Soler-Pont then became Abulhawa’s literary agent and, as Abulhawa puts it, “began breathing new life into the novel”. It was subsequently translated into a score of languages, and Bloomsbury offered to reissue it after extensive revisions and editing.
The publication of “Mornings in Jenin” could hardly be more timely. Palestine is very much under the spotlight as a result of the blockade of Gaza, the continuing outrage over Israeli settlement expansion and demolition of Palestinian homes, and alarm over the threat of war in the wider Middle East.
Earlier this month Abulhawa made a well-received appearance at the London Literature Festival in conversation with writer Rachel Holmes at a session held by the festival in partnership with the Palestinian Festival of Literature (PalFest). Since its inception in 2008, Palfest has taken many high-profile British and other writers to Palestine, and Abulhawa herself participated in this year’s PalFest in May.
“Mornings in Jenin” comes with praise on its cover from two well-known British writers – travel writer Michael Palin and novelist Esther Freud – and from Hanan Ashrawi. Palin writes that the novel gives a “powerful and passionate insight into what many Palestinians have had to endure since the state of Israel was created”. For Freud it is “a powerful and heartbreaking book.” Ashrawi describes the novel as “a unique literary experience not to be missed.”
One main strand of the novel starts with Amal’s older brother Ismael being wrenched from his mother’s arms by an Israeli soldier in the chaos of the violent expulsion of the inhabitants of Ein Hod from their village in 1948. The soldier gives the child to his wife Jolanta, a Holocaust survivor rendered barren by brutal assaults on her by the Nazi SS. The couple bring Ismael up as their son David. But the boy has a scar on his face as the result of being dropped in his crib by his brother Yousef: this scar would “mark Ismael’s face forever, and eventually lead him to the truth.”
The narrative takes the reader through the brutalities of attacks on Palestinians by Zionist terror groups, and then by Israeli soldiers, in the 1940s; the Nakba (catastrophe) for the Palestinians when Israel is created in 1948; the agonies and uncertainties of life as refugees in Jenin; and the 1967 war in which Amal’s father Hasan disappears, her brother Yousef is taken prisoner and tortured, and her mother is psychologically destroyed. Amal herself is shot at by Israeli soldiers and her severe abdominal injuries lead to permanent and extensive scarring.
Amal wins a scholarship to America where she tries to reinvent herself as American “Amy”. Her teacher brother Yousef had joined the Palestinian resistance after the 1967 war and she had lost contact with him. But he manages to trace her and phones her in the US in 1981. She joins him in Beirut where he is living with long-time sweetheart, now wife, Fatima. Amal falls in love with and marries a Palestinian doctor, Majid, and returns to the US while pregnant to wait for her husband to join her.
But then Israel invades Lebanon and lays siege to Beirut. The withdrawal of the PLO, including Yousef, to Tunis is followed by the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila camps. Amal suffers a series of losses, and a member of her family is driven by grief and fury to carry out a suicide attack.
Running alongside the story of Amal is the story of Ismael who had been raised as David. After the 1967 war, fellow Israeli soldiers tell him that the imprisoned Yousef bears a strong resemblance to him, and in an effort to obliterate these hints of a link between him and Yousef he beats Yousef up at a roadblock. Years later David, by now a semi-alcoholic, traces Amal to try to establish the full truth of his origins.
One line of attack against the novel has been that almost the Israeli characters are unsympathetically drawn, but Abulhawa is showing the Israelis as they are experienced by Palestinians in specific contexts. It cannot be denied that the record of Israeli violence against the Palestinians over many years has been extraordinarily savage.
She does present a different version of possible Palestinian-Jewish relations in the friendship that blossomed in the late 1930s between Amal’s father Hasan, then a teenager, and a young Jew Ari Perlstein. Ari, the son of a German professor who had fled Nazism, reappears much later in the narrative as a kindly elderly professor.

Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette 26 July 2010

zeid hamdan makes mark in london

Zeid Hamdan: Lebanon's underground maestro
by Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette 22 July 2010

A throng of young people, many of them Lebanese, crowded into the basement of the Hoxton Gallery in East London a few nights ago for an eagerly-awaited performance by the legendary pioneer of Lebanese underground music Zeid Hamdan and his new band Zeid and the Wings.
Hamdan was born in Beirut in 1976, a year after the outbreak of the 15-year civil war. He is a pivotal figure in the development of alternative or underground music in Lebanon both as a performer and as a producer.
In an interview with Saudi Gazette, Hamdan said: “I grew up in a region where there is not an alternative movement for music. You have classical stars, and then the pop mainstream”. The mainstream pop scene has become dominated by Arabic video clips and “doesn’t have a beautiful vibration.”
Hamdan wanted “to give the Beirut youth a new model, a new way of considering Arabic music.” The Lebanese younger generation “has been traveling and learning abroad and coming back to the country with ideas.” The underground developed as a musical expression of this generation hungry for social and political change.
Hamdan and his band had been invited to London by the cutting edge Monocle magazine/website to record a show for Monocle’s Summer Series. Hamdan also took the opportunity to appear with his musicians at the concert arranged in the trendy area of Hoxton famed for its art galleries and restaurants.
The other acts booked for the concert included local bands Franco and Second Head and the Lebanese electro musician Charif-Pierre Megarbane, founder of Cosmic Analog Ensemble and of Heroes and Villains.
During the event, the performance of Zeid and the Wings could not quite go according to plan, with the visas of three members of the band not coming through in time for them to travel. The final line-up in the Hoxton Gallery consisted of Zeid with two members of Wings – keyboardist Rita Okais, and nay and bass clarinet player Bechir Saade – plus backing vocalist Reine Kabban, Charif-Pierre Megarbane on bass and local drummer Oscar Challenger.
Hamdan has his own special brand of on-stage charisma, and sang a selection of his songs in Arabic and English in his distinctive tender and soulful voice which in its upper reaches has an otherworldly quality. He was ably backed by the attractively-voiced Reine Kabban. Zeid and the group received an enthusiastic response to numbers including “Chouei”, “Castle of Sand” and “Ocean”, with “Sah al-Naum” as an encore.
Earlier in the day Monocle had recorded a Summer Series show with Zeid and his musicians in the Hospital Club in Covent Garden. Monocle will release the Zeid show as a podcast in mid-August. Producer Alex Mills said the “absolutely amazing” recording “went so well”.
Hamdan has come a long way since, as a young boy living in Paris, he first picked up a guitar and found himself spontaneously composing a song. His family moved to France for six years in 1986 when Zeid was ten.
While living in Paris he got to know the music of Western performers such as the Doors, David Bowie, French hip hop artists and above all the Beatles. “My band The New Government is very influenced by the Beatles” he says.
Hamdan typically has several music projects on the go. His solo vehicle is ShiftZ, into which “I throw all my experimentation. It can be a reggae song, it can be Arabic electronics. Shift Z is my playground, my space for myself.”

He has founded several bands over the years. After he returned to live in Lebanon in 1992 his first band was Lombrix, which released the hit EP “Lucy” in 1994. It was a time of optimism and stability and the press was interested “that a young Lebanese band made an EP after the war which had a mixture of Western and Eastern influences.” The Lombrix line-up included singer Yasmine Hamdan (no relation to Zeid), possessor of a beautiful sultry voice.
After other members left the group, Zeid and Yasmine formed Soapkills. Why this name? Hamdan explains: “I wrote a song called Soapkills, and it talked about erasing all remains of the war, cleaning up the town – like killing the memory, killing the truth, through the action of washing up.”
Soapkills drew both on classical Arabic song and on electronics. Zeid and Yasmine first wrote songs in English, but then the artists Rabih Mroue and Walid Sadek joined the group and worked with them on Arabic lyrics. Soapkills gained much from this input “because their writing in Arabic was so rich and funny, and because Rabih is an incredible flute player and Walid is a trumpet player.”

After Mroue and Sadek left the group Zeid and Yasmine continued as a duo and enjoyed considerable success in Lebanon and beyond. But the parting of ways came at the end of 2005 when Yasmine saw her music future as being in Europe and moved to Paris while Zeid wanted to develop the local Lebanese music scene.
Soapkills remains influential, and six of its albums are still on sale.
Hamdan was involved with several other acts on the burgeoning Lebanese underground scene, such as Scrambled Eggs. In 2006, he met Katibe 5, a hip hop group of five young Palestinians from the Bourj Al-Barajneh refugee camp. He got them signed to the Lebanese label Incognito and co-produced their 2008 CD “Ahla Bil Fik Moukhayyamat”.
In November 2004 Hamdan formed The Government. The name was changed to The New Government the following year after Lebanon was plunged into a period of assassinations and political instability. The New Government’s first CD was released in 2006.
The band had five members, of whom three now remain: Hamdan and French brothers Timothée and Jérémie Regnier. Although the Regnier brothers live in France, they regularly perform and tour with Hamdan.
On June 7 last year, the day of Lebanon’s parliamentary elections, The New Government released five free downloadable tracks to “voters” who cast a vote for the band on its website. Hamdan sums up the band’s indie rock style as “a blend of the Pixies tendency with the Beatles, Beach Boys and Franz Ferdinand.”
Hamdan’s African project Kanjha Kora-ShiftZ began in December 2006 when he was brought together with Kandia Kouyate, a 17-year-old singer and kora player from Guinea. The duo’s collaboration produced a highly appealing mixture of “reggae, hip hop, Guinean music and electro.”
Hamdan says The New Government and Kanjha Kora have signed publishing agreements with Moka Music, a subdivision of Chrysalis, and should be developing their new albums by the end of this year.
Hamdan has also worked to develop the singing career of Syrian singer Hiba El-Mansouri, who was last December signed by Jihad Al-Murr of Murr TV (MTV). Hamdan produced and directed Hiba’s first video, “Ahwak”, released in January this year. MTV recently released a video of Hiba’s rendition of “Fog el Nakhl” directed by Pedros Temizian with music produced by Hamdan. MTV is soon to produce a third video, the song “Suleyma” written by Nawaz Charif and originally sung by Zakia Hamdan.
Hamdan has written music for several films, and is currently scoring the music for the latest movie by controversial Lebanese director Danielle Arbid, due for release in spring 2011. He has also licensed seven tracks to Shankaboot, the Arab world’s first Arabic webdrama, which is produced by Batoota Films in association with the BBC World Service Trust. A Shankaboot launch concert took place in Beirut on June 12 with performers including Zeid and the Wings.
Hamdan is negotiating a CD release for Zeid and the Wings with the independent Beirut record label Forward Music,. “If we agree, a CD should be ready by the end of the year,” he says.
He has also produced with Wings, “with a special boost from Marc Codsi”, a song for the Nat Geo Music Channel series “Making Tracks.” On July 30, Zeid and the Wings are to perform at the Batroun International Festival in Lebanon, in an event entitled the Electro-Acoustic Waveform.
As ShiftZ, Hamdan is due to perform with the Syrian singer Dima Orsho in Damascus, Friday. “We’ll be creating an hour of live music in a workshop taking place from July 20 to 23. The concept is to create music for the live digital performance of a young genius visual artist called Mohamad Ali.”
As if all these activities weren’t enough, Hamdan is also playing guitar with Ziad Saad’s electro band Pop Will Save Us. “I think this band has a unique style and I am curious to push this project that has been on hold for too long,” he says.

below: Hoxton Gallery gig

BQFP signs up Ahmed Khaled Taufiq's dystopian novel 'utopia'

Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing announced today that it has signed up the Arab world's most prolific horror and science fiction writer, Ahmed Khaled Tawfiq, to publish his bestselling Arabic novel Utopia in English translation in autumn 2011. (The author has copious internet references with his surname transliterated as Tawfik; BQFP transliterates it more accurately as Taufiq).

BQFP describes Utopia as a grim futuristic account of Egyptian society in 2023 which takes readers on an adventurous journey that ventures out of the gated communities insulating the wealthy from the bleak realities of Egyptian life. "A young man and a young girl break away from the idyllic bubble of affluence they know, and delve into the harsh existence of the impoverished Egyptians that live right outside the fortified gates of their compounds. Utopia’s twists and turns will certainly leave readers in suspense until the very last page."

Since its release in 2008, Tawfiq’s novel has enjoyed wide acclaim and was reprinted three times to fulfill the overwhelming demand of Arab readers. "With over 200 published titles, Tawfiq has perfected the art of horror and science fiction" BQFP says. It cites praise from the famed Egyptian author Alaa Al Aswany who dubs Utopia “a wonderful novel, a real addition to Arab literature.”

Tawfiq was born in 1962 in the city of Tanta, Egypt. In 1985, he graduated from Tanta University's medical school, and later received a PhD in 1997. In January 1993, he published the first installment in his Ma Waraa Al Tabiaa series of novels titled The Vampire and The Legend of the Werewolf.

The signing up of Ahmed Khaled Tawfiq is an interesting development in the publishing of Arabic literature in English translation. Arabic fiction in various genres has been translated, but this may be the first publication in English of an Arab horror/science fiction author. An Egyptian equivalent of Stephen King?

olufemi terry wins caine prize

[picture above: Olufemi Terry with bust of Sir Michael Caine]

First time for Sierra Leonean
By Susannah Tarbush - Saudi Gazette 12 July 2010
Caine Prize 2010 In his story “Stickfighting Days”, which won the Caine Prize for African Writing last week, the Sierra Leonean writer Olufemi Terry references the great British fantasy writer JRR Tolkien whose world of Middle-earth has captivated children around the world for more than 70 years.
The 13-year-old first person narrator Raul lives on a rubbish tip in an unnamed location. He and the other boys living in the dump sniff glue and fight with sticks. The “judge”, who arbitrates between the fights, has told the boys stories from Tolkien and Raul has secretly named his two sticks Mormegil and Orcrist after swords in Tolkien’s oeuvre. The narrator expresses an urge to eliminate his stickfighting rival: “I like Markham, but I’d like to kill him. I dream of doing it in front of a huge pack of boys. Clinically.” The story builds to a shocking end.
Speaking to Saudi Gazette the day after winning the prize, Terry said Tolkien had influenced the first story he ever wrote at an early age when he was at a boarding school in the northern English country of Yorkshire. The rules by which the rubbish tip boys live and fight have echoes of the arcane rituals of boys’ public schools in England.
In “Stickfighting Days” Terry choreographs the fights with such skill, engaging the reader viscerally in every move and reaction of the fighters, that one might assume he draws on minute observation of actual fights. But Terry says: “I made up all the stickfighting. Although stickfighting exists in different parts of Africa I didn’t watch it. But I did observe boys sniffing glue on the streets of Nairobi.”
He says the story “came out of me easily – I can’t say that always happens – and poured out as a torrent over a week or 10 days.” Terry’s story, which first appeared in Chimurenga magazine, was among the 115 entries from 13 African countries for this year’s prize. He won against strong competition from the four other shortlisted writers: Ken Barris and Alex Smith of South Africa, Lily Mabura of Kenya and Namwali Serpell of Zambia.
Terry was born in Sierra Leone and is the first Sierra Leonean to win the Caine Prize. But he left his country of birth at the age of one and has not been back since the mid-1980s. He points out that he also has a Caribbean side: his mother is from the Antilles.
At the Caine prizegiving dinner, held in the medieval Divinity School of Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, the chair of the five judges Fiammetta Rocco said Terry’s story “forces the reader to dwell on the short violent lives of African boys who live on urban garbage dumps sniffing glue and scavenging for food. Not a place many of you would like to visit, but guided by Mr Terry, you go anyway, unable utterly to stop reading.” She revealed that Terry had been “voted for by every single judge.”
Rocco added that the story is “ambitious, brave and hugely imaginative”. It presents “a heroic culture that is Homeric in its scale and conception. The execution of this story is so tight and the presentation so cinematic, it confirms Olufemi Terry as a talent with an enormous future.” The Caine prize, sometimes referred as the African Booker, is Africa’s most prestigious literary award. In addition to the £10,000 prize money the winner has the opportunity to spend a month as a writer in residence at Georgetown University, Washington DC.
Rocco, a third-generation Kenyan, is the literary editor of the Economist. Her fellow judges were Granta’s deputy editor Ellah Allfrey, the award-winning Libyan novelist Hisham Matar, Professor Jon Cook of the University of East Anglia and Professor Samantha Pinto of Georgetown University.
The prize was founded in 2000 in memory of Sir Michael Caine, who was for nearly 25 years the Chairman of the Booker Prize management committee. The prize is awarded for a short story of between 3,000 and 10,000 words, published in English.
Many previous winners and shortlistees of the Caine Prize are now prominent literary figures. They include Leila Aboulela, Binyavanga Wainaina, Chimanada Ngozi Adichie, Helon Habila, and Chika Unigwe.

Terry hopes that winning the Caine Prize will boost the chances of publication of his first novel, which he started to write in 2000 while living in New York. He also hopes that the prize money will give him space to write.
“Stickfighting Days” and the four other shortlisted stories are published in this year’s Caine anthology “A Life in Full and Other Stories”, newly issued in the UK by New Internationalist, in South Africa by Jacana and in West Africa by Cassava Republic Press.
Terry also had a story, “Digitalis Lust”, published in the 2008 eighth annual collection of Caine Prize writing. As well as organizing the prize itself, the Caine Prize fosters African writing by holding writing workshops in Africa. It was at the Celtel Caine Prize African workshop held in Cape Town in 2008 that Terry wrote “Digitalis Lust”, a haunting tale of an emotionally isolated scientist who offers to help a woman, whom he visits for monthly “massages”, to slowly poison her handicapped sister.
Terry’s father is a distinguished plant expert and administrator who has held key posts at international agricultural research and development institutions in various countries. Terry grew up in Nigeria, the UK and Ivory Coast. He graduated from New York University in 1994 with a BA in Political Science, and from 1995 to 1998 he held several editing positions at the Wall Street Journal.
Terry also has a 2002 Master of Professional Studies in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University’s Tisch School. He has worked for a host of international organizations, including publications in the Economist group, researching, editing and writing reports on mainly African issues.
For the past three and a half years Terry has been living in Cape Town, where in 2008 he completed an MA at the University of Cape Town’s renowned center for creative writing. His MA thesis was the novel he has been working on over the past decade, “The Sum of All Losses.” This coming of age diasporic novel, set mainly in New York City, focuses on two Africans in their early twenties with very different backgrounds and experiences.
One of the young men is a Cameroonian who has been living in the US for around four years. The other is a Nigerian who lived in the UK before going to the US and who feels alienated from Nigeria, England and the US. “One of them does not survive the novel,” Terry says.
The novel has been through four or five drafts, and Terry is currently tweaking the final version. He hopes to have a publisher by the end of the year. Cape Town has an active publishing scene. But Terry says Cape Town publishers are most interested in novels which, unlike his, are by South African novelists or are set in South Africa. He thinks it is possible the novel will be published in Nigeria. However, with his literary star in the ascendant as a result of winning the Caine Prize, the novel would seem to have a good chance of being taken on by a UK or US publisher.
Asked about his favorite authors, Terry names Americans James Salter and Ernest Hemingway; the South Africans J. M. Coetzee and Damon Galgut (author of “The Good Doctor”) and Erich Maria Remarque (the Franco-German author of “All Quiet on the Western Front”). As regards British writers, he is partial to the work of Will Self.
Terry is also interested in reading authors of mixed heritage, such as the Anglo-Nigerian Diana Evans and Anglo-Sudanese Jamal Mahjoub. In particular he mentions Mahjoub’s novel “Travelling with Djinns”.
below: Baroness Emma Nicholson, president of the Caine Council, in Oxford with the shortlisted writers

elias khoury writes novel 'requestioning' Bab El Shams (Gate of the Sun)

Just to clarify the statement in the June 20 posting below that Elias Khoury is currently working on a sequel to his Palestinian novel Gate of the Sun, "sequel" was used in a loose sense. This is a raw transcript of the relevant portion of his discussion with Jeremy Harding:

Jeremy Harding: Could I ask you a last question about what you’re working on at the moment – you’re doing something that’s a kind of sequel isn’t it to Gate of the Sun?... a kind of evolution of Gate of the Sun – Bab El Shams
Elias Khoury: Actually I’ve finished a novel which is nothing to do with Bab El Shams, it ‘s coming out in December I hope. So it’s finished.
And then my new project which I began working on since five years is – because you know Bab El Shams finishes with Khaleel saying “and I walk and I walk and I walk” and there is no full stop. And I insisted upon my publisher that there must not be a full stop because this is not the end of the novel. So my new novel is not a continuation, it is a requestioning of Bab El Shams itself
Jeremy Harding: a rephrasing?
Elias Khoury: No - a total requestioning of the Bab El Shams approach, and it is from the approach of the Palestinians who stayed behind, the Palestinians who stayed in Israel and their experience and then their experience mingled with the experience of the West Bank...
It’s an attempt not only to read the Palestinian daily life and everydayness – which I think is very important – and an attempt not only to read what we can call the necropolitics of occupation – there are major issues about occupation, where you can bury and you cannot bury and it is one of the major things that the Palestinians in the West Bank are facing and nobody speaks about it – but also it’s a questioning of the literature related to the question of Palestine – that is a requestioning of Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, Emile Habibi’s Pessoptimist, and requestioning the literature of our Israeli cousins where the Palestinian character is a shadow and trying to put these elements together in the real experience of the Palestinians...

london review bookshop's world literature weekend

World Literature Weekend
by
Susannah Tarbush

During the three-day World Literature Weekend organized by the London Review Bookshop in the Bloomsbury area of central London, writers from more than 15 countries took part in nine events on the overarching theme: language and exile.

The bookshop’s director of bookselling Andrew Stilwell said the focus was “writers who have changed their country or their language or both, whether through choice or compulsion. We want to hear how they have made their experiences heard across frontiers and how they have used the language and literature of one country to understand and contribute to that of another.”

The Middle East and North Africa region was well represented in the program. On the evening of the first day there was a discussion at the London Review Bookshop between the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury and British writer Jeremy Harding, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books.

Elias Khoury

Harding described Khoury as “a man of many attributes”. In addition to his fiction writing Khoury edits the weekly cultural supplement of An Nahar, and he has been involved in Palestinian activism for more than 40 years. He studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and has taught at universities in Lebanon and the US.

Harding recalled that Khoury’s famous novel on the Palestinians, “Gate of the Sun”, had made such a “huge difference” to Harding’s way of seeing things that in 2006 he wrote to Khoury and arranged to visit him in Beirut. The late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said described Khoury as giving “voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages.”

Harding and Khoury talked about Khoury’s 1981 novel “White Masks”, which was recently published by Archipelago Books of New York in an English translation by Maia Tabet.

Elias Khoury and Jeremy Harding

The novel starts with the discovery of the corpse of a disappeared civil servant in a garbage dump. The narrator tries to piece together the story of the dead man from the voices of some of those who knew him. Khoury said: “The job of literature is not to tell us what happened, but to question our knowledge and way of seeing. There are different possibilities and versions, the many versions of reality.”

Multiple versions are central in the novel “Yalo”, the central figure of which is a young man detained during the civil war on charges of robbery and rape. His interrogators force to write the story of his life. Khoury’s latest novel is due to be published in Arabic in December, and he is now working on a sequel to “Gate of the Sun”.

Another session during the weekend took the form of a discussion between two Arab novelists who write in English and are long-time residents of London – Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif and Libyan Hisham Matar. The intention was to explore the way in which living in one language and writing in another “can create a space for languages and cultures to meet.”

Ahdaf Soueif

The two authors read excerpts from their latest fiction works to an appreciative audience. It is 11 years since a book of fiction by Soueif was published. Her 1999 second novel “The Map of Love” was short-listed for Britain’s leading literary prize, the Man Booker, but since then her writing energies have been diverted into essays and reportage. In 2004 Bloomsbury published a collection of her essays, “Mezzaterra: Fragments of the Common Ground”. She launched in 2008 the annual Palestine Festival of Literature (Palfest). The novel on which Soueif is now working moves between present-day and ancient Egypt.

Hisham Matar’s fiction has echoes of the extraordinary circumstances of his own life, as the son of Libyan opposition activist Jaballa Matar who was kidnapped in Cairo in 1990 and imprisoned in Libya. Nothing has been heard from him since the early years of his incarceration, but at the beginning of this year Hisham received news that his father had been seen in a prison in 2002.

Hisham Matar

Matar’s debut novel “In the Country of Men”, published by the Penguin imprint Viking, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2006. His second novel, due to be published next spring, is about a man who is haunted by the absence of his father. Matar described it as being concerned with “the existential reality of living with inconclusive loss”.

L to R: Atiq Rahimi; interpreter Carine Kennedy; Tahar Ben Jelloun; Adam Shatz; Eli Amir

Another session, which carried a ‘Recommended by PEN’ slogan, featured Moroccan-born Tahar Ben Jelloun and Afghan Atiq Rahimi, both of whom write in French and have won France’s highest literary award, the Prix Goncourt. Ben Jelloun won the prize in 1987 for “The Sacred Night” and Rahimi won it in 2008 for his latest novel “The Patience Stone”.

Ben Jelloun said his exile is a linguistic exile, and that “my writing in another language allowed me to say all kinds of things that I wouldn’t necessarily have said if I had been writing in Arabic.” His parents did not speak a word of French and “I was writing in a language they couldn’t understand. I wrote things they would not have liked to have heard, especially with regard to the condition of women”.

Ben Jelloun added that exile is “something that preoccupies me every single day. I write a lot about immigration and about those who are exiled. Even when I am back in my country Morocco I still feel in exile.” His latest novel to appear in English translation is “Leaving Tangier”.

Atiq Rahimi, who lives in Paris, wrote his first books in Afghan Persian, starting with the 2000 novella “Earth and Ashes”, followed by “A Thousand Rooms of Dreams and Fear”.

Atiq said that after visiting Afghanistan in 2002 for the first time in 18 years, “I suddenly realized that I could no longer write in my mother tongue, and so when I wrote ‘The Patience Stone’ I wrote it in French.” Polly McLean’s English translation is published by Other Press in the US and Chatto & Windus in the UK.

Atiq said: “I would never have written ‘The Patience Stone’ in my mother tongue. I might have written about women who are victims, or who have to wear the veil, and talked about their social conditions, but I would never have written something that was provocative. I would never have written about sexuality in the way that I write about it in that particular book.”

Appearing alongside Ben Jelloun and Rahimi was the Iraqi-born Jewish writer Eli Amir, who left Baghdad for Israel in 1950 at the age of 13 and has never returned. Amir said: “We felt we were in exile when we were in Iraq, and when we came to Israel we again felt we were in exile.” In Israel the Iraqi Jews were newcomers encountering an entirely different culture with a different language and which knew “almost nothing about Arab culture and Arab countries.”

It took him more than 20 years to start writing books, and his first novel, “Scapegoat”, was about the ordeal of changing identity in a new society. It was with his second novel “The Dove Flyer” (also known as “Farewell Baghdad”) that he drew on his memories of Iraq. “Every time I want to remember Baghdad I read a chapter of my book.” Halban of London recently published the English translation from Hebrew, by Hillel Halkin, of the novel which is set in Baghdad in 1950, a time of increasing difficulty for Iraqi Jews.

Amir noted that three or four writers from Arab countries have become famous in Israel – and his writing is part of the school curriculum – but he complained that in bookshops their works are not considered part of mainstream literary culture but are consigned to shelves for Arab, “Oriental” or “ethnic” writers.

Eli Amir

number of elected representatives of mideast origin increases in britain

Mixed results in the British general and local elections for candidates of Middle Eastern origin
by
Susannah Tarbush
[original of article that appeared in Arabic in Al-Hayat 17 June 2010]

When the first weekly “questions to the prime minister” session of the new British parliament was held in the House of Commons on 2 June, among the few MPs chosen to ask a question was the new Conservative MP for Stratford-upon-Avon, Nadhim Zahawi [pictured top].

Zahawi (43), who was born in Iraq in 1967, made history in the general election of May 6 by becoming the first person born in an Arab League country, and the first Kurd, to be elected as an MP.

Zahawi asked the new Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron: “Was the prime minister surprised that so many people in the public sector earn more than he does?”

Zahawi was referring to the new coalition government’s publication of public sector salaries, as part of its policy of transparency. The figures showed that as many as 172 top civil servants each earns more, in some cases much more, than the £ 142,000 annual salary of the Prime Minister.

Cameron replied that the publication of the figures is good for democracy and accountability and will help to control public spending. “There will be pressure to keep top pay levels down,” Cameron said. He added it is possible that the new government will restrict the salary of those at the top of a public sector organisation to a multiple of no more than 20 times as much as the salary of those at the bottom of the organisation.

Zahawi’s constituency of Stratford-upon-Avon is the English town in which the great playwright and poet William Shakespeare was born in 1564. The seat is a safe Conservative seat, and the Conservative share of the vote rose in the election to 51.6 per cent, from 49.2 per cent in the 2005 election.

Before the election, Zahawi was best known as the co-founder in 2000 of the highly successful market research and opinion poll company YouGov in 2000, whose operations now extend from Britain to Middle East, Scandinavia, Central Europe and the USA.

Zahawi was one of a number of candidates with roots in the Middle East or North Africa who stood in the general elections of May 6 or in the local elections held on the same day in London and many other places in England.

One of the Arab candidates who was elected as a councillor in the local elections, Algerian Mouna Hamitouche, has since then been elected by her fellow councillors to serve as the Mayor of the North London borough of Islington for 2010/11. She is the first Arab woman, and the first Algerian, to be a mayor in the UK.

“Being the first Arab woman to hold the office of Councillor and now Mayor makes me hugely proud of the values we hold here in the UK for tolerance, respect and equality,” Hamitouche [pictured in her mayoral robes] told Al-Hayat.

Hamitouche first became a councillor in the 2006 local elections when she was elected for Labour in the Barnsbury “ward” (ie electoral district) in the borough of Islington. At that time she had the distinction of being the first Algerian, and the first Arab woman, to be elected as a councillor in the UK.

Several candidates with roots in an Arab League member country stood as parliamentary candidates in the general election. They included Labour politician Mark Hendrick (52), who was re-elected as Labour MP for the northern English constituency of Preston. Hendrick, who was born in northern England, is half-Somali and served as a member of the European Parliament before first being elected for Preston in a by-election in 2000.

Beirut-born Bassam Mahfouz (30), who stood for Labour in the newly-created West London constituency of Ealing Central and Acton, had a good chance of being elected as an MP. The constituency was regarded as one of the closest three-way marginals in the country, in which the three main parties were very close. After a vigorous election campaign he was in the end beaten into second place by the Conservative candidate Angie Bray. She got 38 per cent of the vote, while Mahfouz got 30.1 per cent, pushing the Liberal Democrat candidate John Ball into third place.

Bassam’s journalist father Hafez Mahfouz is originally from the town of Marjayoun in southern Lebanon. The family moved to London when Bassam was four years old and he joined the Labour Party at the age of 17. He has for a number of years been a councillor on the council of the borough of Ealing.

As well as standing in the general election on May 6 Mahfouz [pictured] stood in the local elections, and was re-elected as a councillor in the Northolt West End ward of Ealing. Labour did well in the local elections in Ealing, and seized control of the council from the Conservatives. Mahfouz is now a member of the Ealing Council Cabinet, in which he has responsibility for Transport and Environment.

Two women with Arab roots stood as parliamentary candidates for the Liberal Democrats. Anood Al-Samerai , the daughter of an Iraqi father and British mother, stood for the party in the constituency of Ilford South in north-east London which is traditionally a safe Labour seat. Al-Samerai came third, but she also stood in the local elections in which she was
re-elected as a councillor in the Riverside ward of Southwark, where she has already been a councillor for some years. More than that, Al-Samerai was chosen as leader of the Liberal Democrats group of 25 councillors on Southwark council.

Layla Moran [pictured], the daughter of a Palestinian mother and English father, stood for the Liberal Democrats in Battersea, London, at the age of only 27. Like Al-Samerai, she came third.

Even though Mahfouz, Al-Samerai and Moran were not elected, it is encouraging that young British Arabs are now being selected as parliamentary candidates for the main British political parties. Their experience gained through being candidates will be invaluable to their political futures – and it should anyway be remembered many of the biggest names in British politics lost in at least one general election early in their parliamentary careers.

In the local elections, there was a marked increase in the number of elected councillors with roots in Arab League countries, even if the number is still modest. Most of the Arab candidates in the local elections stood for Labour, although there were some exceptions.

In contrast to its performance in the general election, Labour did well in the local elections in London, increasing the number of boroughs it controls by eight, to a total of 17 boroughs. The Conservatives control 11 boroughs and the Liberal Democrats two, while two boroughs are not under the control of any one party.

The chairman and founder of the British Arabs Association [Rabita Al-Arab Al-Britianiyeen] Atallah Said [pictured], who was born in Palestine in 1947, was for the first time elected as a Labour councillor in the May 6 elections, in the East Actor ward of Ealing. He notes that Ealing Council now has three Arab councillors, all of them from Labour – him, Bassam Mahfouz, and the Somali councillor Abdullah Ahmed Gulaid who represents Acton Central ward.

Atallah joined the Labour Party in 1997 and in 2000 founded the Arab Labour Group. Despite the defeat of the Labour government in the general election, Atallah remains an optimist about the party’s future, and declares: “Well be back!”

He chairs the Arab Labour Group, and Mahfouz is the secretary. The vice chairman is Abdessalem El Idrissi El Amrani (known as “Skip Amrani”) who is of Moroccan origin and who was elected on May 6 as a Labour councillor in Catford South ward of the borough of Lewisham in south-east London. El-Amrani is the director of trade services at the Arab-British Chamber of Commerce. He first served as a councillor from 1998, but lost his seat in the 2006 local elections.

Last year Atallah founded the British Arabs Association as “a forum for British Arabs to promote integration and promote domestic issues which are of wide concern to the community.” The Association was launched at a reception [pictured] at which the guest of honour was the then Foreign Secretary David Miliband.


The British Arabs Association is to hold a reception on 8 July to celebrate its first anniversary, at which Miliband, who is now the front runner in the contest to become new Labour leader, will again be the main guest. The other guests will include Arab councillors elected last month.

Among the new Arab councillors is energetic Egyptian lawyer Ahmed Gharib Abdel-Hamid, who is thought to Britain’s first-ever Egyptian councillor. He was elected for Labour in the Church Street ward of the borough of Westminster. The Church Street ward is located around Edgware Road, the street in central London famed for its many Arab restaurants, cafes, newspaper shops, apartments and small businesses.

Abdel-Hamid has lived in Britain since 1973 and is the founder and chair of the Anglo Egyptian Society, a charity based in Harrow Road which gives legal and other services to the local community, whether Arabic speaking or not.

At least seven Somalis have been elected as councillors. The upheavals in Somalia have led to a large influx of Somalis into Britain in recent years, many of them as refugees. It is striking that they are keen to participate in local politics, and it was estimated that around 17 Somali candidates stood in the latest local elections.

The newly-elected Somalis almost all stood for Labour in London boroughs. As well as Abdullah Ahmed Gulaid in Ealing, they include Abdifatah Aden in the borough of Brent, Adbul Mohamed in Southwark and Ahmed Adam Omer in Tower Hamlets. Outside London, Asad Osman is a Liberal Democrat councillor in Ardwick ward, Manchester.

Awale Olad [pictured below] has been elected as a Labour councillor in the Holborn and Covent Garden ward of the borough of Camden at the age of only 25. Born in Mogadishu, he came to England in 1992 at the age of seven. He lives in Holborn, where he went to a local school.

Camden is an area of high Somali concentration. Olad estimates there are between 4,000 and 6,000 Somalis in Camden, although “you can never be sure without a proper census” , of whom 2.500 are registered to vote.

But Olad makes it clear that he wants to help all communities in his ward, and not particularly the Somali one. For example he is currently a volunteer football coach to the 8th Holborn Scouts. “Not a single Somali in sight – but I hope to inspire the kids who turn up every Thursday evening to be good citizens, show kindness, respect, and give up their free time for charitable causes. Charity is very important for me.”

He has been chairman of the Somali Youth Development Resource Centre which started in 2000, and for which he first started to do volunteer work with young people after he had finished university.

A major reason he has always supported Labour is the benefits it has provided to those who are less well off. This includes the Education Maintenance Allowance “which took huge financial burdens off my mother and helped me greatly at school. It may have even saved my education.” He says the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats would not dream of giving such incentives.

He joined the Labour Party in 2005 but did not become a party activist until after the 2006 local elections when Labour lost control of Camden Council to a Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition which “deployed the worst assault on public services, housing, education and the third sector [ie non- governmental organisations], that this borough has ever seen. It mobilised me – it made me want to stand up and fight back – it made me a Labour councillor. And their temporary stewardship came to a swift end.” (Labour regained control of the council in the May elections).

Asked about the fact that there are now at least seven Somali councillors in Britain, and about the apparent keenness of Somalis to get involved in British politics, Olad says:
“I never stood to just be part of a small contingent of Somali councillors. I stood because I felt the injustice locally and wanted to fight for what I believe in. But if seven councillors of Somali origin will inspire the Somali community to engage with local and national politics, even though I sincerely do believe that Somalis, like other communities, are politically active and aware of current affairs; then that can only be a good thing. But do it for the right reasons – do it because you want to represent everyone and not just a minority of people, and have a vision.”

'raising dust' with the politics of palestinian dance

Exploring the politics of Palestinian dance
by Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette June 10 2010

Nicholas Rowe [pictured below] is a graduate of the Australian Ballet School and has worked as a choreographer and dancer with major dance companies in several countries including Finland, the Philippines, New Zealand and Turkey. But it was a trip to the Occupied Palestinian territories in 1998 that changed his life.
He decided to move to the West Bank, and lived in Ramallah from 2000 to 2008 working with young dancers on various projects. “Curiosity brought me to the West Bank, but love made me stay,” Rowe writes in his book “Raising Dust: A Cultural History of Dance in Palestine”, newly published by IB Tauris of London and New York. On his first trip to the West Bank he had met a beautiful and creative dancer, Maysoun Rafeedie. The two eventually married, and they are the parents of two young daughters.

Rowe is now an Associate Dean at the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His book is based on a PhD thesis he completed through London Contemporary Dance School.
Rowe was recently in London for the launch of his book at the Mosaic Rooms, part of the A. M. Qattan Foundation, and for the screening at the Palestinian Film Festival of his 2009 film “The Secret World” made with Ramallah schoolchildren. At the launch he spoke with insight and humor about his experiences of working with Palestinians in dance workshops and training them to run workshops themselves.
Rowe’s account of the circumstances around his first visit to the West Bank shows the extent to which culture can be a minefield in the Israel-Palestine context. He had gone to Israel at the invitation of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to write a critique of “Curtain Up – Zionist Movement”, the annual showcase of Israeli contemporary dance. A few months earlier some artists in Cairo had given him dance contacts in the West Bank, and he decided to combine his visit to Israel with a one-week dance workshop at the Popular Arts Center in Ramallah.
Rowe was struck by the contrast between the dance workshop, which was not very different from dance workshops he had taught in other places around the world, and the conditions the Palestinians had to endure. Each day on leaving the studio he would step “into a world so shaped by military oppression that the very thought of dancing seemed bizarre.”
At the workshop the young West Bankers had used movement to try to tell their stories in ways that might interest and inspire others in the community. In his published review of “Curtain Up” Rowe commented on how peculiar it was that none of these stories from the West Bank could be found in the tales of personal angst performed at the comparatively lavish contemporary Israeli dance festival just an hour’s drive away in Tel Aviv.
The Israeli Ministry of Culture never invited him to write about Israeli dance again. “’Why did you have to go and get political?” the Israeli cultural attaché in London bellowed at him down the phone. “We sent you to write an article on dance!”
In his book Rowe traces the numerous interrelationships between Palestinian dance and politics. The history of Palestine has been a highly contentious area of study, resulting in radically polarized versions of events. Israeli school textbooks for example, have largely ignored the pre-Zionist existence of a local Palestinian population, and the traumatic impact of Zionist colonization and nation building on that population.
“A presentation of local dance history that first recognizes the existence of a substantial local population in the region prior to Zionist colonization and then examines the collective trauma experienced by that population is therefore bound to provoke contention,” Rowe says.
His thorough and lucid study covers dance in Palestine from its ancient roots to the present day. The earliest reference he has come across was in a letter written 3,800 years ago by King Zimri-Lim of Mari to his wife Queen Spitu.
The book includes reproductions of a number of remarkable old photographs of dance-related events, some taken 100 or more years ago [picture shows Bethlehem women performing a wedding danceand song in 1940s]. Recent photographs capture the work of leading West Bank dance groups El-Funoun Popular Dance Troupe and the Sareyyet Ramallah Troupe for Music and Dance [pictured bottom].
At the heart of Rowe’s book is a discussion of the dance revival movements that have played a prominent role in battles over cultural ownership between Palestine’s indigenous population and the colonizers. The revival of dances from Palestine’s indigenous population occurred three times in the 20th century, associated with Zionism, pan-Arabism and Palestinian nationalism respectively. Each approached the revival process from different ideological and aesthetic viewpoints.
The Zionist “salvage” amounted to an appropriation of the dance practices of the indigenous Palestinians. The motive was partly a desire to forge a collective Israeli identity and to reestablish cultural links with an ancient Jewish past, of which local traditional dances were claimed to be a legacy.
In the 1930s and 1940s Zionist dancers researched the local Palestinian peasant dabkeh. The steps were re-choreographed into stage presentations of folk dance by Zionist youth. Israeli choreographer Shalom Herman said that the new Israeli dances became “one of the best known ambassadors of the spirit of the new State of Israel and its people.”
Pan-Arabist salvage was seen in the West Bank under Jordanian rule in 1947-67 when the stress was on pan-Arabism rather than Palestinian nationalism. Folkdance productions from Lebanon became particularly influential.
The Palestinian nationalist salvage of dance culture came after the 1967 war. Under the Israeli military occupation, West Bank academics researched folklore and looked to ancient culture to challenge the Zionist narrative and provide unifying symbols of collective Palestinian national identity. “By striving to authenticate a distinctly ‘Palestinian’ dabkeh, Palestinian nationalist folklorists were challenging both Zionist appropriation and pan-Arabist assimilation.”
Rowe terms the 1980-2008 period the “post-salvage paradigm”. This period included the first intifada, the Oslo peace process, and the second intifada. The Palestinian nationalist folklore movement continued to play a prominent part in West Bank dance revival but in the 1990s there was a dramatic increase in cultural encounters between local and foreign artists.
Dance artists were “forced to negotiate with both the ongoing local salvagist ideals of unchanging traditions and foreign definitions of modernism and postmodernism.” This led to disputes over cultural identity and cohesion in the early years of the 21st century, when the West Bank became relatively isolated once more.

marina warner delivers first edward w said london lecture

New lecture series honors memory of Edward Said
by Susannah Tarbush

Nearly seven years after the death of the outstanding Palestinian scholar, author, music lover, and campaigner for Palestinian rights Edward Said, an annual lecture series in his memory has been launched in London with the inaugural lecture delivered by British scholar and author Marina Warner.

The topic of this first Edward W Said London Lecture, held in the British Museum’s BP lecture theatre, was “Oriental Masquerade: Fiction and Fantasy in the Wake of the Arabian Nights.”

Marina Warner is Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and holds positions at several other institutions. She is an intellectual of exceptional originality and breadth and has won numerous distinctions and awards.

Warner first got to know Edward Said in 1993 when he gave that year’s Reith series of BBC lectures. “He was a man of great warmth, and dazzling elegance, and huge presence and when he gave you his interest and his friendship it was a very great thing,” she recalled. He was “a mentor and catalyst to so many”.

The event was introduced by Professor Jacqueline Rose of Queen Mary, London University, and opening remarks were given by the eminent Jamaican-born sociologist cultural theorist Stuart Hall. Professor Rose described Said as “one of the – if not the - most important and influential public intellectual of his time. I know I am not speaking for myself alone when I say that he taught us what being a public intellectual might mean.”

Hall paid tribute to Said’s “capacious capacity for friendship and his deep influence on my thinking and writing.” He outlined some of Said’s hallmark concepts, such as “worldliness” and “contrapuntal reading”, and gave an overview of his books including the enormously influential “Orientalism” (1978).

The work of Said which touched Hall most personally was the memoir of his childhood and youth, “Out of Place”, partly because it carried so many echoes of , and correspondences with, Hall’s own experiences.


The BP Lecture Theatre was packed out for the lecture, which was sponsored by the A M Qattan Foundation and supported by the British Museum, London Review of Books and the Lebanese-British author Hanan Al-Shaykh.

Said’s widow Miriam Said had travelled to London for the event, as had his son Wadie and daughter-in-law Jennifer.

One focus of Warner’s lecture was the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (WEDO) founded by Said and the Argentine-born Israeli conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim. The orchestra began in 1999 when Said, Barenboim and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma held a workshop in Weimar, Germany, for young musicians aged between 18 and 25 from the Arab world and Israel.

Weimar was European Capital of Culture in that year, which also marked the 250th anniversary of the birth of the great German writer and poet Goethe. Said remembered that it was in Weimar that Goethe had composed the 1819 collection of poems “The West-Eastern Divan”, which was inspired by his enthusiasm for Islam and for Persian poetry.

The orchestra adopted as its name the title of Goethe’s cycle of poems. “The name of the orchestra was born: it wasn’t discussed further and it has remained – resonant, mysterious, a promise of possibility” Warner said.

The establishment of the orchestra was “politically heroic and anachronistic, and it remains so. Its existence brushed against the grain of so much in the region at that time, and its struggle to survive continues even more acutely now (the almost unimaginably deteriorating situation since then is not diminishing the difficulties).”

Warner did not elaborate on the difficulties that have faced the orchestra recently, with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) alleging that WEDO violates the boycott and promotes “normalization”.

Miriam Said refuted the allegations in an article published in March, but in a response PACBI stuck to its previous line. Miriam has played an active role in the orchestra’s activities since Edward’s death and is vice president of the Barenboim Said Foundation. She described in her article how Said had described WEDO as “the most important thing I do in my life”.

Warner said that WEDO’s two founders “markedly rejected interpreting the orchestra as a political enterprise: in his 2006 Reith lectures Barenboim affirmed that the work of the orchestra was musical through and through.”

Warner examined how Goethe’s “West-Eastern Divan” poems embody the orchestra’s vision. The Divan became part of what the French literary scholar Raymond Schwab called The Oriental Renaissance in his 1950 study “The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880”.

Schwab’s book excited Said’s enthusiastic endorsement. “It explored how the culture and civilisation of the West was actively shaped by the encounter with Arabic, Middle Eastern and Asian cultures in ways that have not been sufficiently explored or recognised, even when the European debt to Arab science is remembered.”

Oriental Masquerade was the height of fashion in the 18th century in theatre, literature, philosophy and politics – for example in the writings of Montesquieu and Voltaire. Mozart’s opera “Cosi Fan Tutte”, which Said admired, used Oriental impersonation and masquerade.


In the opera Ferrando and Guglielmo appear in their masquerade with Ottoman style moustaches in order to prove the fidelity of their betrothed.

“The Albanian disguises of their fiancés trigger out-of character behaviour in the two young women,” Warner said. “Said chose to see past the light malice of the opera’s ideas about the ways of all women and suggest instead that it offers a deeper insight into human character.”

Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte “project a modern understanding of the self as changeable in relation to others, rather than atomised; identity does not possess fixed integrity, but alters as elective affinities work metamorphoses upon it.

Goethe was in his sixties when he began pouring out the poems of the “West Eastern Divan”. As Edward Said himself grew older, his thoughts turned to the effects of lateness in his essays “On Late Style” posthumously edited by Michael Wood and published in 2006.

Towards the end of her presentation Warner quoted from a lecture Said gave at Berkeley in early 2003, the year of his death in which he spoke of his WEDO project with Barenboim. Said asserted that separation between peoples and ignorance of the other is no solution to the problems dividing people. Cooperation and co-existence of the kind the project had experienced through living, performing and sharing music might be a help.

Warner concluded: “The courage of Said as polemicist developed this late style of furious ‘advocacy’ as well as invective. He never lost his fine fury, but the many antagonists of his insights are blind to the deep humanity of his vision and the possibilities he saw of making culture cross borders and even move them.”