sarah maguire's 'the pomegranates of kandahar'

Guests at the launch of British poet Sarah Maguire’s latest collection “The Pomegranates of Kandahar”, at Daunt’s Books, West London, were treated to a bilingual reading of the title poem by Maguire and the renowned Iraqi poet Saadi Yousef. Saadi read his own Arabic translation of the poem, which appears in his collection of translations of Maguire’s poems published in Damascus. The title of the Arabic collection is “Haleeb Muraq”, the title of one of Maguire’s best known poems, “Spilt Milk”. Maguire is said to be the only living English-language poet with a book in print in Arabic.

One of those attending the launch said that 73-year-old Saadi’s moving reading of the poem in Arabic made him think not only of Afghanistan but also of the bloodshed in Saadi’s native country. This is just one example of Maguire’s ability as a poet to cross national boundaries and address questions of universal concern.

The powerful title poem moves between the famed pomegranates of Kandahar and the deadly legacy of landmines in Afghanistan. The collection’s cover illustration is of a cluster not of fruit but of landmines, and of a pair of vulnerable bare feet. The picture is a reminder of the many Afghans, especially children, who have been injured by land mines. The poem ends by telling the reader to open a pomegranate with a knife and tease each “jellied cell” from its white fur of membrane “till a city explodes in your mouth / Harvest of goodness, / harvest of blood.”

Maguire has dedicated the new collection, published by Chatto & Windus, to Saadi Yousef who has lived in exile from Iraq since 1979 and has resided in London since the late 1990s. Maguire has written that he is “widely acknowledged as having had the deepest impact on poets now writing in Arabic today.” He is the most significant translator of poetry into Arabic, and his translations “have transformed the way in which poetry is written.”

Maguire is one of the most highly-regarded poets writing in English today. In recognition of the high caliber of “The Pomegranates of Kandahar”, the Poetry Book Society has chosen the volume as its Summer 2007 choice. As the poems in the collection confirm, Maguire is truly a poet of our times, in language that is at once precise and charged with mystery.

Maguire’s concerns range across the world, particularly the Middle East. She was the first writer sent by the British Council to Palestine (in 1996) and Yemen (1998). She has taken a particular interest in the work of Palestinian poets, working on translations of poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Zakariya Mohammed and Ghassan Zaqtan.

In 2004 Maguire founded, and became director of, the Poetry Translation Centre at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University. The centre’s collaborations between British poets and linguists have resulted in top-quality translations of work by poets from countries including Sudan, Somaliland, Mexico, India, South Korea and Peru.

Maguire has also jointly translated with the Afghan Yama Yari the novel “A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear” by Afghan writer Atiq Rahimi. The poem “Almost the Equinox” in her new collection is dedicated to Yama. In it she writes of sharing a walk in London with an Afghan friend. The “huge nave” of St Paul’s cathedral reminds her companion of the Great Mosque in Kabul, “sunlight falling on pillars of stone, the hushed intentness / of prayer. Shattered, war-torn, it’s still standing, /somehow, next to the river by the Bridge of Bricks, /just as Wren’s great dome once soared above the Blitz, / intact.” The poem’s lines “the constant pull of elsewhere / mooring us outside ourselves” have echoes elsewhere in the collection.

Maguire wrote “From Dublin to Ramallah” for Ghassan Zaqtan, at a time when the situation in the West Bank prevented him from travelling from Ramallah to Dublin for a poetry event. The defiant poem plays with images of water, which knows no boundaries. “And instead of a postcard, I post you a poem of water. / Subterranean subterfuge, / an indolent element that slides across borders, / as boundaries are eroded by the fluency of tongues.”

The plight of migrants caught up in the international tides of human traffic is the subject of “Passages”, which was shortlisted in the best single poem category of the Forward prize in 2005. The stimulus for the poem was a news report of a stowaway falling to his death from an aircraft which was coming in to land at Heathrow.

In the poem“Europe”, young men on the coast of Tangier at night, lured by the prospects in Europe, “climb these crumbling ramparts // and face north / like true believers, while the lighthouse of Tarifa blinks // and beckons, / unrolling its brilliant pavement across the pitiless Straits.”

Maguire’s poetry is deeply informed by her passion for, and expertise in, plants and gardening. Born in West London, Maguire trained as a gardener after leaving school, before going to university and later becoming a poet and broadcaster. She has been Poet in Residence at Chelsea Physic Garden in London, and at Hungercombe Place Young Offenders’ Institution.

Maguire’s first collection “Spilt Milk”, published in 1991, was followed by “The Invisible Mender” in 1997. Her 2001 collection “The Florist’s at Midnight” comprises poems about flowers and gardens. She has edited two plant-related anthologies: “A Green Thought in a Green Shade: Poetry in the Garden” (2000) and “Flora Poetica: The Chatto Book of Botanical Verse” (2001).

Some of the poems in “The Pomegranates of Kandahar” are directly related to botany, and imagery from the plant world is threaded throughout her work. “The Grass Church at Dilston Grove” was inspired by the work of two artists who sowed grass seeds all over the walls of a deconsecrated church. “Glaucium flavum” focuses on the adaptation of the yellow horned-poppy to the harsh saline environment of the coast near Sizewell nuclear power station.

Throughout her career as a poet Maguire has written compelling love poetry, and there are several memorable examples in her new collection, which portray the difficulties of love in these times of dislocation, separation and unease. The lover seizes moments of intense joy amidst periods of waiting and yearning, and the poems have an elegiac tenderness. “Vigil” begins: “Late June, the night air stitched with the scent of lime-blossoms./When you left, these trees were bare.” Later, the poet writes: “I measure out the cloth to sew a new cover for our bed:/ the warp and weft of fabric, its journeys, the places we will meet.” In “A Bowl of Transvaal Daisies”, the wilting over time of a bunch of these flowers, also known as gerberas, parallels the painful decline of a love affair.

Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette July 2 2007

reem kelani and houria niati sing at leighton house

It is difficult to think of a more fitting venue for a festival of Muslim Cultures in London than Leighton House Museum near Holland Park in the west of the city. Leighton House was designed by the architect George Aitchison in the 19th century for one of the greatest-ever British lovers of Arab visual arts - the painter Frederic, Lord Leighton (1839-1896). The building is especially famed for the exquisitely-decorated Arab Hall (pictured) with its domed ceiling, marble-clad walls, mosaic floor, columns, fountain and more than 1,000 decorative tiles, most of them brought from Damascus.

The one-month festival was held at Leighton House throughout June. It started with a full-day conference on the theme Islam Today: Rich Past, Progressive Future. The topics included Islamic Art and Architecture; Science, Philosophy and Architecture in the Islamic Tradition; Educating for Inclusive Citizenship, and Islam Today. Among the speakers were Professor Robert Hillenbrand, Dr Nader El-Bizri, Dr Dina Kiwan and Professor Mona Siddiqui. Another major event during the festival was an afternoon on Iraqi Art Today addressed by two leading Iraqi artists, Baghdad-based Hana Mal Allah and Rashad Salim who lives in London.

For those with an interest in Arab music, the Afternoon of Middle Eastern Music was a particularly memorable part of the festival. The afternoon featured two London-based women singers from different parts of the Arab world. Houria Niati was born in Algeria, while Palestinian Reem Kelani was born in Manchester, England, to a mother from Nazareth and a father from the village of Ya’bad near Jenin, and grew up in Kuwait.

The singers performed in the first floor music room which has a gilt dome over the performance stage. The room is an intimate space that was Leighton’s studio, and where he held his famed musical evenings. The terracotta-colored walls are hung with paintings by Leighton himself and by contemporaries from his artistic circle which included Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, George Frederick Watts and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. A plaster cast of the Parthenon frieze runs along the upper section of one wall.

In Niati’s recital of Arab-Andalusian songs she was accompanied by the Spanish guitarist Miguel Moreno, who has studied under the legendary flamenco guitarists Geraldo Nunez and Eduardo Rebollar. Niati and Moreno often perform as a duo, under the name Habiboun. After the interval Kelani performed with the talented jazz pianist David Beebee whose inspiration lies in classical music, world music and modern jazz.

When Niati was growing up in Algeria her father was a music lover with a substantial collection of recordings of singers. “They were the top names of that time, but all have now passed away,” Niati said. “The women singers were like my heroines”. Niati trained in Arab-Andalusian singing in Algeria. She then studied art in London, at Croydon College of Art and Design and surprised her fellow students one day by breaking into an acapella (unaccompanied) rendering of a song from her native country.

Niati is now an installation artist, who combines painting, drawing and digital art, and her singing is an integral part of her art installations. She has exhibited her work in the US, Jordan, North Africa, the UAE, the UK and several other West European countries.

Niati’s repertoire is drawn from the compositions of singing, instrumentation and poetry known as nouba. Her music is indebted to the great ninth-century composer Ziryab (Arabic for ‘blackbird’) Ibn Nafi who was born in Iraq but forced into exile in Spain. The accomplished guitar playing of Moreno blended effectively with Niaiti’s sweet, expressive voice in the fusion of Arab-Andalusian and Spanish music. Niati explained to the audience that Arab-Andalusian music travelled to Algeria with the exile of Muslims and Jews who fled southern Spain during the inquisition.

Reem Kelani’s CD “Sprinting Gazelle” was released in early 2006 to much critical acclaim. The CD comprised traditional Palestinian songs and Kelani’s settings of works by Palestinians poets. In her recital she performed compositions from this CD as well as from her second CD which is dedicated to the work of the great Egyptian musician Sheikh Sayed Darwish of Alexandria. He died in 1923 at the age of only 31.

Kelani began her recital in a whirlwind of clapping, yodeling and foot stamping as she performed a wedding song from the city of Acre. The audience was amused by her comment: “The family of the bridge tells the groom’s family that because you accepted our daughter in marriage, we are going to make you ruler of all Arab tribes. Mind you, if you had rejected her we would have made you clean up after our cattle.”

After this boisterous beginning, David Beebee jangled cow bells from the Khorasan region of Iran in the gentle introduction to a Galilean song, a setting by Kelani of a work by the late Palestinian poet and politician Tawfiq Zayyad. The song tells of the singer’s loved ones moving away. “My heart has never stopped shedding tears for them…if you see the cameleer of the caravan stop him to tell my loved ones in their deserted homes that hardship shall never last for ever.” The song was juxtaposed with a contemporary lullaby and with a 19th century lullaby in which Muslim women in Bethlehem ask the Virgin Mary to protect their babies while they are sleeping.

Niati had performed muwashahat from North Africa in her recital, and Kelani’s recital included a muwashaha from Egypt. Kelani observed that Western music abandoned quarter-tones but that they remain in Arab music. In her arrangement for piano of the muwashaha, “I’d like to pay tribute to the meeting point when quarter tones were still not dropped - and hopefully we’ll put the notion of a clash of civilizations into the dustbin, at least for this afternoon.”

Kelani then moved on to a song by Sheikh Sayed Darwish in a 17/8 rhythmic pattern known in Farsi as “khosh rank”, meaning “beautiful color.” The intricate dynamic rhythm carried the listener along with its syncopations and Spanish-type inflections. She also sang the Darwish composition “The Porters’ Anthem”. Darwish studied Italian opera, and also wrote a song for almost every manual profession in Egypt at the time. In his porters’ anthem he incorporates the porters’ cries of “Hela hela” that he would hear in his area of Alexandria.

Kelani’s next number was a love song she described as “’mellow,’ a sanitized way of saying it’s a wrist-slasher”. It was her setting of the qasida “Yafa!” written by Yafa (Jaffa)-born Mahmoud Salim Al-Hout in 1948 when he lost all his manuscripts while fleeing the city. He compares Yafa to a beautiful woman. David Beebee seemed to utilize the entire length of the piano keyboard in his solo introduction to the piece, which was tinged with sorrow and captured the depth and movement of the sea.

Kelani compared the qasida to Niati’s style of singing which is called in Spanish “canta hondo”, meaning “deep singing.” She observed that the Spanish poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca had written much about canta hondo and had paid tribute to the poets of Seville and Granada at a time when there was not much recognition in Spain of the influence of Arab music and Andalusian culture. Kelani said that Lorca had influenced many Palestinian poets after 1948 and that Samih Al-Qassem and Tawfiq Zayyad had dedicated poems to him.

Niati joined Kelani on stage for a rousing rendering of one of Darwish’s most famous songs “Zourouni kull sana marra” or “Visit me once a year”. As an encore Kelani performed Palestinian poet Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s translation into English of Love Poem by Samih Qassim.

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette June 25 2007

gordon brown an enigma on middle east

“Gordon Brown sets out plan for the Middle East”. This was a typical headline in the British media after the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who takes over as prime Minister from Tony Blair on 27 June, spoke a few days ago of the importance of tackling poverty in the Palestinian territories and called for “an economic road map”. Brown pointed out that the average annual income per head in Gaza is 800 US dollars while in Israel it is $20,000. He confirmed that he still believes in a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

In reality there was nothing new in Brown’s comments, made after Hamas’s seizure of power in Gaza. He has called for a Middle East economic road map before. It is still not known how he will try as Prime Minister to deal with the Middle East crisis, and whether he still stick as closely to US policy as Blair has. Anger within the Labour Party over Blair’s refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire during the Lebanon war last summer, and his perceived consistently pro-Israeli stance while Prime Minister, put pressure on him from within the party to hasten his departure. It was a major reason for his announcement last September that he would leave his position within a year. And it is still not known how Brown will deal with other issues related to the Middle East, particularly any US plan to attack Iran militarily.

Statements made in Iraq by Brown on his recent visit there were a clear indication of his wish to put a distance between him and the Blair era. Whereas Blair continues to defiantly defend all the decisions he took over Iraq, Brown admitted during his recent surprise visit to Baghdad that mistakes had been made and that he would “learn the lessons”.

One of the main reasons for the sharp drop in the public’s trust and confidence in Tony Blair and his government since 2003 has been the exaggerated and faulty intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction that the government presented in its dossier of September 2002. The dossier claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed within 45 minutes.

During his visit to Iraq Brown said that he has asked the cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, to ensure that in future any intelligence material released to the public is “properly verified and validated”, and that “all security and intelligence analysis is independent of the political process.”

Sources close to Brown said that his visit had confirmed his view that there should not be any hasty changes to the timetable for eventual British withdrawal. However there has been some speeding up, and defence secretary Des Browne told journalists that from next month British troops in Basra will be confined to a single base at the airport. At the same time the British forces will be cut by 500 to 5,000. It is planned that most British troops should have left Iraq within the next 12 months.

The period since 17 May, when it became clear that Gordon Brown would be the sole candidate leader of the Labour Party, and thus Prime Minister, has been a strange time in British politics. There have in effect been two prime ministers. Blair has been on his world farewell tour, trying to polish his political legacy despite the deep stain of Iraq. Meanwhile Gordon Brown has been travelling around Britain carrying out visits in preparation for the day he takes over from Blair.

Brown brings to his new job ten years of experience in government, but he also brings the heavy baggage of the Blair premiership which will be hard to shake off. He faces the challenge of rebuilding confidence in the government and attracting back voters who have deserted Labour, so as to secure for the party its fourth term in office in the general election of 2009 or 2010. He needs to counter the rise of the Conservatives’ leader David Cameron, who is only 40 while Brown is 56.

Although there has been no contest for the Labour leadership, there has been a lively electoral campaign among the six candidates standing for the deputy leadership to replace John Prescott. Prescott is also deputy prime minister, but it will be for Gordon Brown to decide whether the next deputy party leader should also be deputy prime minister.

The six candidates have felt liberated by the imminent departure of Blair to criticise aspects of his premiership. The secretary of state for Northern Ireland and Wales Peter Hain wrote in an article in the New Statesman that whether on Iraq, the reorganisation of the health service, the reform of schools, or civil liberties, “the relationship between Labour and millions of progressive voters has become sour and distrustful.” All six candidates have to varying degrees expressed opinions somewhat to the left of Blair, which has not pleased Blair.

Brown himself remains an enigma. As Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British understanding (CAABU), told Al Hayat: “there is an acute degree of uncertainty even within the ranks of the Labour Party. Although Gordon Brown has been a hugely powerful Chancellor of the Exchequer, with a firm control over British domestic policies for the last ten years, few people are really clear what Gordon Brown the prime Minister will do.”

Doyle adds: “In the foreign affairs field this is even tougher to anticipate. In the carve up of British politics it was Blair who had control over Britain’s international relations and Brown stayed out, hence his low profile on issues such as Iraq and Lebanon. The reality may well be that even Brown is not sure what his foreign policy will be as he, like so many in New Labour, has precious little understanding of international relations albeit outside the economic field.”

Doyle notes that Brown has been busy doing the groundwork for his premiership in the last few years, with his first visit to Africa, Indian Israel and the occupied territories. “Brown may well want to concentrate on domestic issues, conscious of the widespread criticism of Blair’s internationalism and tendency to intervene militarily. However, Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be ignored and there will be acute and sustained pressure on him to steer a different course.”

Nevertheless, one should not expect anything too drastic here. “Brown has a consistent record of interest in US politics and has close relations with the administration. He is thought to be more Euro sceptic than Blair.”

It is expected that in his first 100 days as Prime Minister Brown will announce many new initiatives. He is expected to announce the setting up of a “people’s assembly” to rewrite the constitutional settlement. Brown will also usher in a change in the style of government. There has been much criticism of Blair’s method of government and the way in which he centralised decision making, bypassing the cabinet and parliament. This style of government became known as “sofa” government with important decisions made at informal meetings in Blair’s offices in Downing Street.

One of Brown’s key appointments has been that of former British ambassador to Israel, Simon McDonald, as his chief foreign policy adviser replacing Blair’s adviser Sir Nigel Sheinwald. McDonald (46) was ambassador in Israel from 2003 to 2006 and is currently head of the Iraq desk at the Foreign Officer.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz said that political sources in Jerusalem expressed satisfaction with the appointment of McDonald, a “friend to Israel.” It said the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem “regard McDonald with great esteem”. He is considered one of the most influential foreign envoys posted to Israel, and one well-connected to Israeli decision makers and Israeli political sources said: “It is a signal that Britain will continue its positive policy towards Israel.”

Under Blair’s premiership there has been some resentment within the Foreign Office at the way in which its role was to some extent marginalised by the prime minister and his inner circle. It is said that the Foreign Office greeted Brown’s appointment of McDonald with enthusiasm, as an assurance of the pivotal role of the Foreign Office.

The Jewish community has warmly welcomed Brown’s accession to the premiership. He is close to the chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks and wrote the foreword to the paperback edition of Sacks’ book “The Politics of Hope”. Brown said that the book had had a “profound influence” on his thinking. In February Brown appointed the chief rabbi’s 24-year-old daughter Gilda Sacks as a special adviser. The treasury said Gilda Sacks had been appointed because of her experience in strategic development.

In April Brown addressed the annual lunch of the lobby group Labour Friends of Israel, and was also guest of honour at the annual dinner of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Brown often mentions how he got to know about Israel when he was growing up as a boy because his father, who was a minister in the Church of Scotland, visited Israel twice every year. He told the Board of Deputies of British Jews that he remains “a life-long friend and supporter of Israel... Britain will be a true and constant friend – in good times and bad and we will never compromise our relationship to political expediency.”

The question of boycotts against Israel is currently attracting much controversy in Britain. Brown told the Board of Deputies dinner: “I recoil in revulsion at the prospect of boycotts of Israel and the Israeli academic community.”

Brown is very supportive of the Holocaust Education Trust, and at the Trust’s annual dinner last September he was given a special award. In 2006 he announced a £1.5 million grant to enable the Holocaust Educational Trust to take two students from every UK secondary school and further education college to visit Auschwitz concentration camp.

At the Labour Friends of Israel annual lunch Brown announced that UK Treasury and the Pears Foundation will each contribute £250,000 over three years to the Holocaust Educational Trust for teacher training. He said that “any suggestion the Holocaust will be dropped from the curriculum is nonsense.” He insisted there was a strong and forceful commitment from all parties to fight anti-Semitism.


One of Brown’s closest advisers is Sir Ronald Cohen (left), who was born in Egypt to a family of Jews from Aleppo (his mother, Sonia Doueik, was English). Cohen is known as the “father of British venture capital” and has wealth is estimated at around £250 million. In 2004 he was the fourth largest funder of the Labour Party, and in 2005 he started to fund Gordon Brown’s bid to be the next Labour leader. (Sir Ronald’s third wife, Sharon Harel-Cohen, is the daughter of Yossi Harel, the Haganah member who was commander of the Holocaust survivors’ ship Exodus).

Sir Ronald Cohen is founder and chairman of the Portland Trust, a not-for-profit British foundation that aims to promote Palestinian-Israeli peace through economic development. It works with a range of partners including the British government, EU and World Bank. Brown said at the Board of Deputies dinner: “With others, including the Portland Trust, we are ready to underpin a political road map with an economic road map.”
When Gordon Brown was guest speaker at the Muslim News Awards for Excellence dinner in London in March 2005 he praised the “huge contribution” British Muslims make to Britain’s success. He described British Muslims as “our modern heroes; standing for the highest ideals, bearing burdens, and bringing hope to us all in Britain.”

However, since then life for Muslims in Britain has become much more difficult as a result of the suicide bombings in London on 7 July 2005 and the uncovering of various terror plots. Brown has constantly stressed the need for Britishness and shared British values, and he can be expected to support and develop policies designed to try to combat extremism by decreasing segregation and increasing social cohesion.

Brown is planning fresh anti-terror measures, and he is to revive proposals to increase the length of time a terror suspect can be held without charge from 28 to 90 days. He will call for a review of the laws under which evidence obtained by phone tapping cannot be used in court. But Brown also stressed the need for civil liberties to be upheld, and says courts and parliament will have greater oversight over the proposed anti-terror measures.

Susannah Tarbush

Al Hayat (in Arabic translation) June 22 2007

anissa helou brings mezze into the 21st century

The food writer Anissa Helou remembers how, when she was a girl in Beirut, her father would celebrate his arrival back from a long business trip by taking the family in his Buick to the town of Zahleh. There they would cross a bridge to one of the riverside mezze restaurants.

Her father would order as many as 20 different mezzes. He did not order from the menu, but quizzed the waiter about what was in season and particularly fresh that day. “The waiters brought tray after tray of small dishes, all cleverly stacked so that the food stayed intact inside,” Helou writes in the introduction to her latest book “Modern Mezze”, published in London by Quadrille.

She describes the gorgeously garnished dishes: “The raw meats with fresh herbs, the dips with sprinklings of brightly coloured spices or pomegranate seeds, the salads with tiny cubes of shiny red tomatoes, the savoury pastries with bright yellow lemon wedges and so on. The feast was as much for the eye as for the appetite.”

Helou’s abiding interest in the visual impact of dishes is much in evidence in “Modern Mezze” with its sensuous photographs by Vanessa Courtier. The cover illustration shows a seductive-looking Turkish dish of grilled red peppers, glistening with a dressing of vinegar and garlic (unusually, no oil is included in the recipe) and scattered with thyme leaves. The pages of the book are bursting with contrasting colors and textures. Even a simple dish of carrots cooked with green lentils looks enormously appealing mounded in a bowl and topped with Greek yoghurt and garlic, and a sprig of dill.

“Modern Mezze” contains more than 100 recipes from Lebanon, Morocco, Turkey and Greece. Helou defines mezze as “leisurely savoring a tremendous selection of small dishes”. While mezze is part of the culinary tradition of the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, Helou points out that this is not so in Morocco. There, the nearest equivalent is “salades variees”, a variety of salads present on the table throughout a meal. “These salads are a wonderful if unorthodox addition to a mezze spread.”

It would be impracticable for a home cook, given the pressures of time and space, to attempt to recreate the vast array of dishes one finds in a restaurant mezze. In the home-style mezze presented in Helou’s book there are fewer dishes, served in larger quantities. Helou helpfully suggests 12 mezze menus for when mezze is to be the starter course, and 12 more substantial menus in cases when mezze is a meal in itself. In addition to the prepared mezze dishes, there are various musts for the mezze table: bread of one or more types, crudités, olives , pickles, roasted nuts and seeds, to which can be added cheese, labne balls, thinly sliced pasturma (the only cured meat in the Middle East) and, if you are feeling extravagant, dried mullet’s roe (bottarga). Helou says that sea urchins also make a splendid mezze when they are in season.

“Modern Mezze” is both inspiring and practical. There are step-by step photo sequences of some of the more complicated techniques. These include making and stuffing Lebanese kibbe (minced meat and burghul) balls, and filling and folding filo pastry sheets to make spinach triangles or Turkish borek.

The recipes are divided into seven main sections: dips, salads, pastries and mini wraps, pulses and grains, vegetable dishes, fish and shellfish, and chicken wings, kibbe and other meat. Helou draws on her wide experience to give many useful tips. She also gives advice on the purchase of ingredients. For example the burghul bought in Middle Eastern shops is “far superior” to any found in health food shops and supermarkets.

Some of the dishes in “Modern Mezze” are familiar to diners and supermarket shoppers in the West, such as hommus, baba ghannuge, tabbule, stuffed vine leaves and falafel. Helou adds her expertise and special touches to her recipes for these standards. Many other recipes in her book are for unusual mezzes that Helou has found on her travels. One’s interest is piqued by recipes for dishes such as chilli and herb dip, mackerel and hazelnut dip, white tabbule, beetroot salad decorated with tahini sauce, broad bean risotto, sardines chermula from Morocco and Turkish mussel brochettes. There are recipes for two raw kibbe dishes. One is a spicy Turkish version; the other, from southern Lebanon, includes dried rosebuds and grated citrus zest.

Helou has devised some mezzes. One is a Lebanese version of bruschetta, toasted bread served with various toppings. Rather than top the bread the Italian way, she uses typical Lebanese or Turkish sandwich fillings, such as labne with chopped olives and mint, aubergine salad, feta cheese salad or za’tar (thyme and sesame dip).

Another of her suggestions is “za’tar bites” in which za’tar is put atop small circles of puff pastry , instead of the usual bread base. When baked, the circles rise like mini-top hats. The same principle can be used to make spicy lamb bites or aubergine mixture bites. She also describes a Lebanese version of sushi made by cutting up a rolled feta cheese, cucumber and mint wrap.

“Modern Mezze” is the fifth cookery book of the prolific Helou, who is also a radio and TV broadcaster and regularly writes for the Saturday edition of the Financial Times. She arrived on the cookery book scene in 1994 with “Lebanese Cuisine”, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Andre Simon award. This was followed by “Street Cafe Morocco”, “Mediterranean Street Food” and “The Fifth Quarter” (named after the French term for offal). “Modern Mezze” is not her only book to appear this year: “Savory Baking from the Mediterranean: Focaccia, Flatbreads, Rusks, Tarts & Other Breads” will be published in New York in August by William Morrow, a HarperCollins imprint.

Before becoming a food writer, Helou enjoyed a career in the world of art and collecting. Born in Beirut to a Syrian father and Lebanese mother, she moved to London at the age of 21 and became the Middle East representative of the London-based auction house Sotheby’s. She also owned and ran an antique shop in Paris. Between 1978 and 1986 she lived in Kuwait advising collectors, including members of the ruling family, on building their holdings of Islamic and other art. At the same time she assembled her own remarkable collection which went under the hammer at London auction house Christie’s in 1999 when she sold her house in Clapham, South London.

She then bought a two-storey warehouse loft in Shoreditch, an area of East London that buzzes with new art galleries and restaurants. Helou has transformed the loft into a minimalist light and airy space with a state-of-the-art kitchen. Here she set up Anissa’s School, where she gives demonstration classes on Mediterranean cookery.

Helou’s entrepreneurial spirit is opening up new horizons. In December she is to conduct her first culinary tour, taking a group of up to 12 travelers to the Moroccan cities of Marrakesh and Essaouria. Next year, culinary trips are planned to Damascus and Aleppo; Palermo and Siracusa; Istanbul, and Fez. She is also planning Anisssa’s Kitchen, a London delicatessen specializing in the foods of the Eastern Mediterranean, and Anissa’s branded food products.

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, June 18 2007


Anissa Helou in her kitchen

iraq national library director's online diary

While doing some surfing on the damage to Iraq's heritage recently I came across the diary of Saad Eskander, the director of the Iraq National Library and Archive, via the British Library website.

http://www.bl.uk/iraqdiary.html

Eskandar's diary is a moving chronicle of how he and his staff are trying to revive and reestablish the library and archive, looted and burned after Saddam's overthrow, admidst horrendous circumstances. Some of his staff, and members of their families, have been killed or injured in the period in which he has been writing the diary from last November and there are constantly attacks around and occasionally even on the National Library and Archive. The diary is a mixture of refined culture and barbaric events. Two days ago there still were no entries for June in his diary which was rather worrying, but today it is there up to last Friday. His wife has just given birth to their second child, a daughter Hanas.

row over Israeli architects deepens

The world of international architecture is being rocked to its foundations by a fierce row over a campaign which demands Israeli architects end their complicity in creating “facts on the ground” which exclude and oppress Palestinians and wipe out the possibility of a viable future Palestinian state.

The dispute has engulfed some of the leading figures in British and Israeli architecture. In an interview in the latest issue of the British weekly magazine Building Design, Israel’s most prominent architect, Moshe Safdie, accuses British architects of being “hypocritical, self-serving and hateful” for signing a petition organized by the London-based organization Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP).

The temperature was raised further when it emerged that a lobbying group British Architect Friends of Israel and the Simon Wiesenthal Center have written jointly to the Paris-based International Union of Architects (UIA) - the worldwide umbrella of 102 national organizations and 1.3 million architects - calling on it to suspend the membership of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) unless RIBA dissociates itself from the APJP petition. The letter alleges that with its “anti-Israeli focus” the campaign violates EU clauses and definitions on national discrimination and anti-Semitism.

The petition was signed by RIBA’s current president Jack Pringle as well as by former presidents Sir Richard MacCormack, Paul Hyett and George Ferguson, and president-elect Sunand Prasad. Boston-based Safdie lambasted Pringle for signing the petition and suggested he should either have resigned as RIBA president before doing so, or should have sought a decision from the RIBA Council over whether it supported the petition.

The petition, which was published as a half-page advertisement in the Times newspaper of London, was signed by more than 260 architects, planners and others from around the world, among them some of Britain’s most famous architects and a number of Israeli architects and human rights activists. The petition says that the actions of Israeli architects and planners working in conjunction with Israel’s policies building of illegal settlements on Palestinian territory are “unethical and contravene professional codes of conduct and UIA codes.”

The petition argues that it is time to challenge the Israeli Association of United Architects (IAUA) and the Israeli government to end such projects, and says the IAUA should adhere to UIA codes. It calls on the IAUA “to declare their opposition to the inhuman Occupation, and to end the participation of their members and fellow professionals in creating facts on the ground with a demographic intent that excludes and oppresses Palestinians.” APJP has sent copies of the petition with letters to the presidents of the IAUA and the UIA.

The petition has infuriated the Israeli government and its supporters, and readers of Israeli newspaper and TV websites have posted numerous hostile messages, in some cases accusing British architects and the British in general of anti-Semitism. A typical message said that “Israel-bashing” England is on its way to becoming “the first Islamic state in Western Europe”. One reason for the anger aroused by the APJP petition is that it came around the same time as the University and College Union (UCU) voted at its annual meeting to support moves towards an academic boycott of Israel. The boycott issue is now one of the hottest topics in British-Israeli relations, and in the House of Commons Prime Minister Tony Blair called on the UCU to drop the resolution it had adopted. The APJP petition does not specifically call for a boycott, but it is being drawn into the boycott controversy.

Moshe Safdie claims to advocate a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict and says that “many have objected, as I have, to building in the West Bank. Some have joined groups fighting the construction of the wall, but we are all aware of the complexity of the issues and all of us, collectively, are disappointed and angered by the position of our British colleagues.” Safdie said he was disgusted that British architects, including Will Alsop, Terry Farrell and Richard MacCormac, had singled out Israel when regimes across the world carry out “the most terrible atrocities.”

Jack Pringle robustly rebutted Safdie’s remarks. He told Building Design: “Moshe Safdie is a brilliant architect but it’s not for him to make policy for the RIBA, myself individually or as president.” Pringle “totally accepts” that there are oppressive regimes all over the world, “but to say you can’t criticize one without criticizing them all is extremely naïve”.

In his blog on the RIBA website, Pringle explained that he and his successor, Sunand Prasad, had signed the petition in their own capacities and not as representatives of RIBA, which is a non-political organization. He added that although he is a staunch supporter of a State of Israel, he signed the petition because “I believe, as a citizen and as an engaged observer, that the Israel/Palestinian issue is the most destabilizing and the most important issue in the Middle East and thus in the world today.” Until a lasting and fair peace is established in the region, there can be no prospect of a stable world peace. “To do this both sides must play by the rules with a measure of respect for each other’s rights. These particular petitions relate to Israel’s actions on territory in contravention of many UN resolutions, with the notable involvement of architects and planners.” Pringle also condemned the “many grave, violent and heinous Palestinian misdemeanors in other spheres of the ongoing war, with its attendant terrorism.”

Pringle rejected any charge of anti-Semitism as “very offensive to me and quite absurd as a glance at the petition with its many Jewish co-signatories will show. Indeed, many Jewish agencies support the petition, and its main promoter is Jewish himself.” (The last reference is to the APJP chairman, the architect Abe Hayeem). He was sorry if any RIBA members were offended by his signing the petition, “but I trust they will understand the balance of my opinion – and my right to express it.”

Other signatories to the petition have also publicly defended their stand. The eminent architect, critic and theorist Charles Jencks (pictured below)wrote a letter of protest to Building Design after Michael Peters, who is founder and chairman of the international branding consultancy Identica and has worked extensively with Israeli architects, warned that as a result of the petition “British architects are going to burn their bridges with a number of developers – Israeli, British and European”, Jencks, who has been one of APJP’s most vocal supporters since it was set up in February 2006, described Peters’ warning as being in “the worst tradition of intimidation. Of course, some architects will succumb to such veiled and explicit threats because it sometimes pays to be silent, but the list of signatories – including four RIBA presidents and the next one – shows that, contrary to Peters, many British architects do indeed understand the situation in Israel and that number is growing…One cannot but protest at the destruction of a nation.”

The issuing of the petition coincided with the 40th anniversary of the 1967 war, which has focused world attention on the massive changes that have been wrought by the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. As the APJP petition states, acting against international law Israel continues to build illegal settlements on Palestinian territory, with the help of Israeli architects and planners.

The APJP petition highlights “three typical projects that make Israeli architects, planners and design and construction professionals complicit in social, political and economic oppression, in violation of their professional ethics.” One of the projects is in the village of Silwan near Jerusalem, where 88 Palestinian homes are under threat of demolition as part of a development for ultra-religious Israeli settlers from the El-‘Ad group on illegally annexed Palestinian land. The EU has condemned the development. APJP points out that the Ministry of Housing for the Jerusalem District and Jerusalem Municipality appointed Moshe Safdie’s Jerusalem office to prepare a Master Plan for the southern slopes of the Old City which include the Silwan neighbourhood of Al-Bustan where the 88 threatened houses are located.

The second project is for the conversion of the ruins of the Palestinian village of Lifta , also near Jerusalem, into a development for wealthy American visitors with, APJP says, “the exclusion of the original Palestinian inhabitants, their heritage and memory.” APJP is supporting the campaign to save Lifta which is spearheaded by the Israeli group the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST).

The third project is the E1 plan to expand the largest illegal Israeli settlement, Ma’ale Adumim, to link it with metropolitan Jerusalem. This will dissect the northern and southern West Bank, destroying the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state.

The issuing of the petition raises the question of whether architects should involve themselves in political issues. Former RIBA president Paul Hyett wrote in Building Design that politics has a role to play in architecture. He recalled his past as a member of Architects Against Apartheid, when he played a part in the 1972 decision of RIBA to sever links with the South African Institute of Architects.

On a 2002 visit to South Africa, when he was RIBA president, Hyett apologized to the South African Institute of Architects for any upset caused by the decision to sever links 30 years earlier. However, “many South African architects told me that severance had been a huge boost to morale. They said it had highlighted international support for their own disgust at their government’s actions.”

Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette June 11 2007

naim attallah's new memoir

In the first three volumes of his memoirs, published since 2004, the London-based Palestinian publisher Naim Attallah recounted his boyhood in Nazareth, his adventures in Britain after arriving there as a student in 1949, and his experiences of the British and Arab business scenes.

Now in the recently-published fourth volume, “Fulfilment & Betrayal 1975-1995”, he tells of his career as a publisher heading the Namara Group with its main publishing wing Quartet Books and its offshoot The Women’s Press. He also funded several magazines including the Literary Review and The Oldie. In parallel to his work in publishing, he was chief executive of the famous Aspreys luxury-goods group of New Bond Street in London. At the same time he was an impresario, producing and financing a series of film and theatre productions, and an entrepreneur in pursuit of new ventures.

Attallah is a man of colossal energy and drive, an eccentric extrovert of considerable charm, but at the same time a sensitive person susceptible to being wounded. At the age of 76 his activity levels remain high and he has been busy promoting his new book, including holding a launch party attended by some of the many women who in their youth worked at Quartet. The press used to refer to the bevy of lovely creatures at Quartet as Attallah’s “harem”. In a ‘Londoner’s Diary’ that he wrote recently for the Evening Standard weekly magazine, Attallah said it was delightful to see at the launch party these women “assembled in one venue, retaining their original sparkle and having with maturity grown more devastatingly attractive than I would have dared to imagine.”

The names of Attallah’s stable of female former employees read like a roll call of British aristocracy. The Quartet alumni include the actress Helena Bonham-Carter, the biographer Rebecca Fraser, the food writer and TV chef Nigella Lawson, and the heiress and socialite Sabrina Guinness.

Attallah describes in his book how he embarked on a successful long-distance wooing of the Syrian writer Rana Kabbani to come and work for him in London after her second attempt at marriage to the Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish broke down and she returned from Paris to Damascus.

Kabbani is one of the numerous former employees of Attallah who have contributed tributes to him that are published in the book. “It is only now, as I write this twenty years later, that I realize Naim Attallah probably saved my life,” she writes. Kabbani gives a vivid picture of life at Quartet in its ramshackle, Dickensian buildings in a broken-down area off Tottenham Court Road. “Everyone working there looked like a character from a novel – lush, mad, exotic and highly-strung, with a hilarious sense of humor.”

Each volume of Attallah’s memoirs has been longer than its predecessor. The first, “The Old Ladies of Nazareth”, was a slender 71 pages, while the fourth volume runs to nearly 800 pages. Attallah is one of the best-connected people in Britain, and the index of names at the back of “Fulfilment & Betrayal” takes up 19 pages and reads like a ‘who’s who’ of British and Arab culture in the last quarter of the 20th century.

Nor is its vast size the only thing that marks a departure from the previous volumes. Up to now Attallah has written about himself in the third person, which has a distancing effect, but in his new book he uses the more spontaneous and direct first person. He claims this is because “the banker completes his transformation into a man in charge of his own destiny.”

The compendious book is structured chronologically, with Attallah telling us in minute detail, year by year, of his publishing and other activities, sprinkled with entertaining anecdotes and descriptions of people. Attallah is disarmingly frank about the lows as well as the highs, and there are full accounts of the many spats and controversies in which he has been embroiled. He reproduces attacks that have been made on him in articles, reviews or letters, as well as the responses he fired off.

One fiasco was his “grandiose vision” of an Arabian Fantasy show at the Royal Albert Hall. It was to have been “an extravaganza featuring Arabian music and dancing, with all the exotic sights and sounds from the Middle East, from harem girls to real camels.” A lead dancer, Ludmilla Nova, was engaged, the hall was hired and a performance date was set for 2 April 1976. But the show was badly choreographed and insufficiently rehearsed, and it turned out to be a shambles. Attallah was too ashamed to emerge from his box at the interval as he saw members of the audience, which included many celebrities, leaving by the score. He writes: “the night was destined to be the most embarrassing of my entire career”, and he quotes from a scathing review in the Guardian.

“Fulfilment & Betrayal” has attracted much interest from reviewers and interviewers, and even those who poke fun at some of the more flamboyant aspects of Attallah’s behavior admit that he has a record of solid achievements and has contributed much to British publishing. The Jewish Chronicle’s reviewer David Herman observed that the history of British publishing is full of colorful characters, many of them Jewish refugees. “However few are a match for Naim Attallah, the Palestinian self-made millionaire, former chief executive of Aspreys and for 30 years the man behind Quartet and The Literary Review.”

Attallah has also proved generous and willing to dig deeply into his own pockets to support publishing and other ventures. The Literary Review accumulated losses of over two million pounds of his money before it was eventually sold, and Attallah is still keeping The Oldie afloat.

One of Attallah’s main objectives in becoming a publisher was to publish books of Middle Eastern interest. He wanted not only to cover the Palestinian conflict and the sufferings of the Palestinian people, but also to promote the Arab culture that had been so long ignored in the West. He was determined to have Arabic literary output translated into English to stand alongside Quartet’s international list, “which was made up of sometimes obscure or newly discovered talent together with established writers.”

Among the books he commissioned was “The Palestinians”, published in 1979, by the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby with photographs by Donald McCullin. The book gave the Palestinian side of the conflict, which was a breakthrough for those days. As Attallah observes: “There was no shortage of eminent publishers, like George Weidenfeld, to persist in promoting the Israeli side of the picture.” The book caused a stir and was attacked by pro-Zionist sections of the press, but mainstream reviewers thought the true voices of the Palestinians came through in the text.

Several of Attallah’s most fraught times came in relation to the Palestinian issue and he was sometimes accused of being a propagandist for the Palestinians, or of the PLO, and even of being anti-Semitic. In 1983 the writer Roald Dalh wrote a review for the Literary Review of Tony Clifton’s book “God Cried” which is about Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. When Attallah read the review he knew its publication “would send the influential pro-Zionist lobby into a frenzy of rage”. The editor of the Literary Review was also taken aback by the piece, and she and Attallah consulted the lawyer of the firm, who happened to be Jewish. To their “utter surprise” he liked, and approved of, the review and after editing out a few of the more intemperate expressions he urged them to publish it.

“The reaction to the review was far more extreme that we had anticipated,” Attallah recalls and there were calls for a boycott of the magazine. The writer Paul Johnson, known for his Zionist sympathies, wrote in the Spectator that Dahl’s review was, in his view, “the most disgraceful item to have appeared in a respectable British publication for a very long time.”

But Attallah writes that his Palestinian sympathies “have never prevented me from highlighting the plight of any other repressed minority or race, the Jews being no exception.” He includes in the book a list of books published by Quartet that are by Jewish authors or on Jewish topics.

Over the years Attallah was caught up in the intrigue and Asprey family feuding over the luxury-goods group. Asprey was sold in November 1995 to Prince Jefri Bolkiah, the brother of the Sultan of Brunei. Attallah asserts that “the glory days of Asprey sadly came to an end with my departure”, and denies that all its problems were due to his expansionist policies while he was its chief executive.

Attallah concludes his book by writing that after his departure from Asprey he refused to be put out to grass. “I set sail to explore fresh seas and my journeys of discovery were to uplift my spirits and lead me intellectually to more fertile lands.” This next phase of Attallah’s life will be the subject of the next volume of his memoirs.
Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette 4 June 2007

below: Attallah with his mascot 'Kaiser' in 1984

architects and planners for justice in palestine (apjp) petition

( photo of Lifta by Hussam Siam)

From the Saudi Debate website, article on the Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP) petition:

Israel's illegal occupation of the West Bank has not only been carried out using tanks, bulldozers, troops and colonialist settlers; it has also required builders and architects, whose complicity in the occupation has rarely been highlighted but which is essential to the entire, disgraceful project now underway. As the 40th anniversary of the June 1967 war approaches - on 5 June - architects around the world are increasing the pressure on Israel's architects to withdraw their professional services in the designing and building of Israel's illegal expansion into Palestine. As Susannah Tarbush writes, the position of the architects has led to the routine, unsurprising accusations of anti-semitism from the usual quarters; even so, some Jewish and Israeli architects have joined others in being vociferous in their calls for their fellow-professionals to end the role they are playing in changing the ‘facts on the ground' which are steadily obliterating the idea of a viable Palestinian state... article can be seen via http://www.saudidebate.com/

pressures on musicians

From the Saudi Debate website: Beyond the public condemnation by conservatives of live music and theatrical performances that are criticised for falling short of Islamic practices, a burgeoning community of artistic talent is finding a growing audience among Arabs across the Middle East and around the world. From Bahrain’s ‘Spring of Culture’ festival to London’s ‘Ramadan Nights’ season, Arab musicians and others are defying various forms of popular and governmental censorship despite serious risks – including death threats – against which they have little or no protection. As Susannah Tarbush writes, the fury meted out against the Lebanese composer Marcel Khalife and the Bahraini poet Qassim Haddad in response to their staging in Bahrain recently of the love story Laila and Majnoun, was disconcertingly typical of the artists’ plight. 20 May 2007.

Article begins:

The ongoing investigation by a Bahraini parliamentary committee into the "immoral" and "anti-Islamic" performance of a new work by Lebanese composer Marcel Khalife and Bahraini poet Qassim Haddad is just one example of the intense political and religious pressures on the freedom of musical expression in some Arab and Muslim countries.

The new work by Khalife and Haddad is an interpretation in music, poetry and dance of the classic Middle Eastern love tragedy Laila and Majnoun. It was performed two nights running at the beginning of March as the inaugural event of Bahrain's annual Spring of Culture Festival.

Khalife and Haddad are two of the most prominent artists in the Arab world, known for constantly pushing forward the creative boundaries in their respective fields. Their version of Laila and Majnoun features male and female dancers in intimate positions. It triggered fury among Islamist MPs, who control three-quarters of the 40 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. But a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Information's Culture and Heritage Department, which organised the festival, said the response to Laila and Majnoun had been overwhelmingly positive.

The Salafist Al Asala Islamic Society issued a statement saying the dances were "depraved and offended our religious and moral sensitivities as well as our traditions." The lyrics were "a blatant violation of our Islamic precepts and values." MP Shaikh Mohammed Khalid, of the Sunni Islamist Al-Menbar bloc, dubbed the festival "the Spring of Foolishness". He told the Gulf Daily News that Khalife and Haddad's work was against Islam because "it depicted adultery between the two main characters. The actions of the dancers was clearly meant to depict a sexual act between a man and a woman." Khalid called for future Spring of Culture festivals to be modelled on festivals in Saudi Arabia, and to consist of poetry recitals and lectures.

The Chamber of Deputies voted to set up a seven-member committee to investigate the controversy. The committee is due to report back within six months. If it finds evidence of wrong doing, information minister Dr Mohammed Abdul Ghaffar may face parliamentary questioning and a vote on whether he should be sacked.

The MPs could hardly have chosen a more high-profile Bahraini cultural event as their target. The six-week festival of art, poetry, music, dance, theatre and lectures was supported by the Economic Development Board and sponsored by telecommunications company Batelco. Among the international and local artists participating were the Senegalese singer Youssou N'Dour, Bahraini singer Khalid al Shaikh and the spectacular Brazilian group Brasil Brasileiro...

i never said goodbye

“Munem, how can we ever go to Iraq now?” These were the words of a young Englishwoman, Pauline Knowles, to her Iraqi fiancé in July 1958 as they watched in horror the black and white TV news of overthrow of the monarchy in Iraq. But it was inevitable that Munem Samarraie would eventually return to Iraq from England, where he had been sent by his government on a scholarship. Three years later he left for Baghdad, having completed his studies in engineering at the University of Birmingham.

The following year Pauline, whom he had married not long after the coup, joined him in Iraq with their young son Mazin. It was the first time this unsophisticated young woman from the town of Halifax in the north of England had ever flown in an aircraft.

“I didn’t even feel the slightest twinge of anxiety or fear when faced with the prospect of a new culture, a new language and a new country with a history as old as Time itself,” Pauline Knowles-Samarraie writes in “I Never Said Goodbye: A Mother’s Memoir of Love and Brutal Loss Inside Saddam’s Regime”, published recently by Andre Deutsch of London. She was “like a blank page, all ready for the story of my new life to be written upon it.”

Pauline could not have known that the story of her life over the following four decades would have tragedy and loss written on its pages, in parallel with the bloody trajectory of Iraq’s modern history. Her husband Munem would fall foul of the Saddam regime and would, like so many others, be killed. And as if that was not enough, her son Mazin would be imprisoned in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison and she would only find out his terrible fate years later.

But these tragedies lay far in the future, and when Pauline first arrived in Baghdad her new life lived up to her expectations. She quickly made friends, and was given a job in the English section of Iraq radio. In their free time she and Munem would travel around Iraq seeing the sights, including his home town of Samarra.

More than 40 years on, Pauline lives near Brighton on the south coast of England, far from the horrific turmoil of Iraq. She wrote her memoir in collaboration with Karen O’Brien, Arab World Regional Editor for the BBC World Service and author of biographies of singers Kirsty MacColl and Joni Mitchell.

The memoir includes accounts of political and economic developments in Iraq alongside Pauline’s personal drama. The first coup Pauline experienced was in 1963. When she returned to her broadcasting studio she found it had been “turned into an executioner’s chamber: the walls and floors were smeared with dried blood.”

Munem rose within the oil industry and the family moved to a new house near the Dora refinery. They enjoyed a rich social life: there were gatherings in friends’ houses, poolside parties at embassies, nightclubs on the banks of the Tigris, open air cinemas and Thursday night dances at the Engineers’ Union. “We were a cosmopolitan group in the Swinging Sixties and we loved the social life.” Pauline gave birth to her second child, a daughter Nada.

Saddam Hussein made his presence increasingly felt. Pauline remembers his coming to her in-laws’ house to pay his condolences after the death of Munem’s brother Bedri in a London hospital. Saddam was a friend of Munem’s oldest brother, Faleh, and was already regarded as something of a hero because he had been among the group of Baathists that had tried to assassinate the leader of the 1958 coup, Abdul Karim Qassim. Pauline conveys his almost movie-star charisma.

Just as Saddam came to take over Iraq and to impose his ruthless power, so he came to dominate the life of Munem Samarraie and his wife. In 1972 the Iraqi oil industry was nationalized which gave the Ministry of Oil new power and status. The sharp oil price rises after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war brought Iraq the riches to embark on ambitious economic development. Munem was intimately involved in the development of the oil industry.

Saddam telephoned Munem so frequently that “my husband came to dread the sound of the ringing telephone.” Munem never had a break from work and Saddam would phone him at all hours of the night to demand “Why didn’t you do this? What’s happening about that?” Pauline writes: “Later we would realize just to what extent Saddam was able to use people but, in using them, he destroyed them. He cleverly hid his cruel streak initially; so many people – millions in fact – were completely taken in by him.”

The intolerable pressure on Munem at work put the couple’s relationship under much strain. According to Pauline, Munem took his frustration out on his family. And yet when she and Munem were invited to a reception by Saddam, “like every other women in the room, I was completely drawn in by the aura of power exuded by this handsome man.”

Nowadays biographies published in Britain are expected to give a warts-and-all picture of their subject, and “I Never Said Goodbye” is no exception. Pauline tells us how she found a candid love to Munem letter from a European woman, whom she calls Anita. He assured her it was just a brief fling, long over. Some time later Munem told Pauline to take the children back to England and then wrote telling her that their marriage was over and that she should not return to Iraq. After Pauline wrote to his brother Faleh, she received new tickets and she and the children rejoined Munem. Later on she discovered a large bundle of hidden letters that had been sent to Munem at his office address by several women in England, France and Germany whom he had met during his long trips on government business. Munem blamed her and seemed unrepentant, but he refused to let her leave him.

Pauline’s depictions of Munem are tinged with bitterness. It is as if the discords of her marriage have blighted her assessment of a man who was remarkable in a wider context. As she recognizes, he had a deep commitment to his country and developing its potential. Indeed, one of the things that first attracted her to him when he was studying for his A-levels in Halifax was his determination, and the way he seemed so assured about himself and his path in life.

Munem was clearly courageous. He realized he must get his family out of Iraq, but knew this plan would be blown if they all left at once and in any case Mazin was at that time in the army. He therefore insisted that Pauline and Nada leave first, as if they were going on holiday to England.

The last time Pauline saw Munem was in a hotel room at Heathrow airport where he had stopped off during a business trip. He was sitting with a number of friends who had left Iraq and now lived in England. Munem told Pauline that Saddam had told him to leave Iraq, but that he could not do this because he did not want to endanger Mazin and his family. She later found out Munem was imprisoned when he returned to Iraq, and executed without trial on August 19 1986. She suspects he had got into trouble for speaking out against something that outraged him. “Munem had gone back to Iraq for that final time in defiance of Saddam, purely to protect his son. It was tantamount to signing his own death warrant.”


Pauline lost contact with her son, and found out he was in Abu Ghraib prison. Years later, in 1995, she revisited Iraq and it was only then that one of her brothers-in- law, who had also been in prison, told her: “Saddam hanged him”. She realized the extent of her in-laws’ deception since Mazin’s disappearance.

Throughout her book Pauline paints her in in-laws in generally negative, unsympathetic tones. Of course, we only hear her side of the story. During Munem’s absences from Baghdad on business, she and the children would be expected to stay with his family. She tells how early in her married life his brother Badir objected to her makeup and Western clothes and smashed the wardrobe mirror in her room. It took her years to reach a modicum of understanding with the great matriarch of the family, her mother-in-law Umm Faleh.

One gratifying outcome of the publicity marking the publication of Pauline’s memoir is that it has prompted some Iraqis who knew Munem very well to record their own memories of him. A moving and deeply-felt tribute from the London-based Iraqi oil analyst Muhammad-Ali Zainy was published on April 15 on the blog Iraqi Mojo .

Zainy describes Munem as his dearest and best friend. Both of them graduated from Birmingham University, and they were long-time colleagues in Iraq’s Ministry of Oil. He writes in his lengthy tribute: “Yes they executed Munem, for a ready-made but sham accusation, bribery! What a tasteless joke! Munem lived a poor man and died a poor man. He was most patriotic, most honest, and most incorruptible. He was a true democrat and a strong believer in human rights. His only sin was that he was against the regime and that was a medal of honour for him and for all Iraqis who were martyred for the same reasons.”

Zainy proposes that some time in the future when life in Iraq goes back to normal, the Ministry of Oil should make an oil and gas museum. “The museum should include a big room for all those oil and gas Iraqis who got martyred for one reason or another, from the beginning of the Iraqi oil industry till this day; and the late Munem al-Samarraie should have a statue in that room.”

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette 7th May 2007

fadiq faqir's novel 'my name is salma'

The Jordanian-British writer Fadia Faqir’s third novel “My Name is Salma” has been a long time coming, but looks destined to attract major interest among readers on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond with its themes of honor killings, exile and personal reinvention. The gripping, non-linear narrative is rendered in a rich multi-layered style, switching constantly in time and place between the Middle East and England.

Faqir’s first novel “Nisanit” was published 20 years ago and her second, “Pillars of Salt”, in 1996. Both were acclaimed by critics, propelling Faqir to a prominent place among Arabs writing fiction in English. “My Name is Salma” will further boost her literary reputation.

Leading publishing houses competed to publish the novel. In Britain, Doubleday/Random House is about to publish it, while in the US it will be published (under the title “The Cry of the Dove”) by Grove Atlantic. The novel’s Canadian publisher is Harper Collins, and it is also being issued in translation by publishers in Italy, France, Spain and Denmark.

The novel’s first-person narrator, Salma, is a young Bedouin woman from an unnamed country in the Levant who, after becoming pregnant out of wedlock, faces being killed by her brother in order to restore the family honour.

Salma has been having a recklessly passionate affair with a young man she has fallen in love with, but as soon as she tells him she is pregnant his charm turns to fury. “You are responsible. You have seduced me with the yearning tunes of your pipe and swaying hips,’” he says. A midwife’s crude efforts to abort the baby using metal implements fail and in order to save Salma from an honor killing her teacher gets her taken into protective custody.

In prison Salma’s companions include Noura, who has been charged with prostitution, and a woman who was arrested for walking out naked into the street after being driven crazy by her husband’s taking a second wife. When Salma gives birth, Noura pays a warder to take the baby girl away from her immediately, thinking this will be better for Salma than being parted from her baby after she has breastfed and bonded with her.

Salma spends several years in prison before being rescued by a nun who takes her to a convent in Lebanon. But her brother is still looking for her, and a Miss Asher manages to arrange the paperwork necessary for her to adopt Salma, under the name Sally Asher, and to take her to England.

In England Salma is held in immigration detention and is released through the efforts of Miss Asher and a Quaker man, who argues that she deserves political asylum because she will be killed if she is returned to her own country. Salma eventually moves to the cathedral city of Exeter in south-west England.

Here she faces a new set of problems as an alien who has somehow to find a new identity and a life for herself. She yearns for her daughter, whom in her mind she calls Layla, and is so haunted by the trauma she suffered back home that she has hallucinations of a man who has come to kill her.

In her acknowledgements at the end of the novel, Faqir says she started working on “My Name is Salma” in 1990 but “a winter of despair had set in. I finally emerged from under the yew tree and picked it up again in January 2005. While writing, and not writing, ‘My Name is Salma’ I had guiding spirits of my own: Angela Carter, Malcolm Bradbury and Lorna Sage, now dead but their souls will always soar above my head.”

Before starting her fiction writing career, Faqir obtained an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia’s famed writing course, and was the first person to be awarded a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing there. Carter, Bradbury and Sage, all major figures on the British literary scene, were among her teachers. Faqir was brought up in Amman, and now lives in the cathedral city of Durham in the north of England with her Magyar-Irish-English husband Dean Torok.



In addition to her work as a novelist, Faqir has been general editor of the Arab Women Writers series, published in the UK by Garnet, which brought to an English-language readership five novels in translation by writers including Huda Barakat, Liana Badr and Salwa Bakr. Faqir also edited and contributed to “In the House of Silence: Autobiographical essays by Arab women writers” in the same series.

Faqir has written short stories, plays, academic papers, and chapters in books on literature and Arab women. Her short story The Separation Wall, which was published in ‘Bound, New Writing North’ and ‘Magnetic North 2005’ is to appear in the forthcoming anthology “Arab-American and Arab Anglophone Literature”, edited by Nathalie Handal.

The long gestation period of “My Name is Salma” has not reduced the novel’s topicality. One has only to follow news from the Mideast, or skim through newspapers published in the Arab world, to see that honor killings, and other intolerable measures against women, continue. In some Arab countries war, instability and growing extremism are worsening the situation of women.

Faqir has carried out research into honor killings in Jordan, so has an inside knowledge of the subject. In countries in the West, there have been honor killings among some immigrant communities. Salma’s best friend in Exeter is Parviz, a young woman from a Pakistani community in northern England who ran away from home when her father tried to marry her off to someone against her will. Like Salma, Parviz lives in fear of being tracked down and kidnapped, or worse, by her family.

Faqir’s writing in “My Name is Selma” covers a wide emotional range, from moments of high drama to quietly satisfying everyday scenes. Faqir captures Salma’s sense of confusion and of being caught between her memories and the fragmented British society in which she finds herself. Faqir’s prose is sensual, fully alive to colors, tastes, smells and bodily sensations. She is an astute observer of English society and of its rules and nuances of behavior.

The author has a gift for creating authentic characters, even those who, like shopkeeper Sadeq, owner of the Omar Khayyam off-licence, play a relatively minor role. There are many touches of gentle humor in her narrative, as seen in the scenes featuring an elderly North African man who runs a kebab van with his son. He suspects that Salma is either a tramp or an employee of intelligence agency MI5.

Salma has experienced cruelty within the patriarchal society of her home country, but British men also have their flaws. She is chatted up one evening in a pub by a seemingly understanding man, an ageing hippy type with a pony tail who runs a health food shop. Salma invites him into her lodgings for a cup of tea with sage, and he stays the night. The man proves to be a letdown. He is furtive when she next meets him in the street by chance, and later he even accuses her of stalking him.

Despite her vulnerability and anxieties, Salma emerges over the course of the novel as a resolute character. When her boss Max, for whom she works as a seamstress, denies her the pay rise she had requested she takes a second job working evenings in a hotel bar. She assiduously tries to improve her English, and enrolls for a BA in English literature.
There is pathos in the predicament of Salma’s elderly landlady Liz, with whom she lodges in Swan Cottage. Liz has a severe drink problem and withdraws into memories of her days in India as a teenager when she had a doomed love affair with an Indian. Salma witnesses the decline of Liz with compassion and horror. In one scene a drunken, whip-wielding Liz dressed in riding breeches and boots slashes Salma’s arm so badly she needs hospital treatment. Another elderly woman, retired Welsh headmistress Gwen, becomes a close friend of Salma’s. Such older women are often neglected by fiction writers, but in Faqir’s hands they are intriguing characters.

The development of Salma’s relationship with John, the university tutor who will become her husband, is convincingly drawn. The couple are happy together and have a baby son. But Salma has an irresistible compulsion to seek her out her daughter, sensing that she is in danger. In the novel’s searing final chapter she embarks on a journey back to her village, and Faqir keeps us guessing the outcome up to the end.

Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette 30th April 2007

nadej sadig al-ali's book on iraqi women

Soraya, an Iraqi woman in her seventies, recalls the exciting days of political and cultural blossoming in Iraq in the 1950s and early 1960s when she was involved in mostly clandestine political activism but also revelled in the cultural and intellectual life of Baghdad. “I used to meet my boyfriend in Cafe Swiss,” she recalls. “There were always lots of intellectuals, painters and poets hanging around, drinking coffee and discussing things. Both men and women. Everybody used to know everybody. We would talk a lot about literature, art and music.”

Sumaya is the widow of an Islamist political activist in the Al-Dawa party and in the 1980s she was arrested and tortured a few days after her husband was killed by security forces in Baghdad University. She says his body was dissolved in a chemical solution in front of his colleagues, who were forced to watch. As a result of her torture, “I had to have my shoulder blades replaced. They beat me, and hung me by the hair. They hit me with a cable that had iron inside...I was a student of Amina Sadr, also known as Huda Bint Sadr. I am the only one of her students who survived.”

Hana, a Baghdad University professor, complains of how life has changed since the 2003 invasion and occupation. “I want my country back. Why do I have to pay the price for their bad government? Since the occupation, I do not feel safe to go to university. The university is no longer the place I used to know. I cannot socialize. I cannot visit my friends. I cannot even read when I want, because there is no electricity.”

Soraya, Sumaya and Hana are just three of the many Iraqi women whose memories of Iraq’s history over the past 60 years are included in the important and stimulating new book by Nadje Sadig Al-Ali , “Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present”. The 292-page book is published by Zed Books of London and New York.

The book makes a vital and original contribution to the literature on Iraq’s modern history and to the literature on gender and women’s studies. But at the same time its rich, fascinating and revealing text is enormously readable and accessible to the non-specialist, and it deserves a wide readership.

Through her excerpts from interviews with Iraqi women, Al Ali gives a voice to Iraqi women of different backgrounds and ages, from teenagers to their late seventies, who spring vividly to life in her book’s pages. She seeks to dispel any impression that Iraqi women are merely “passive victims.” She shows that they have over the decades been resourceful in facing up to a succession of extremely difficult circumstances, and of coping with wars, sanctions, laws and state policies. From the 1920s they have set up their own organisations and have been part of political movements, and this continues despite the harsh conditions for women in today’s Iraq.

In addition to her interviews, Al-Ali has drawn on a variety of other sources, including the works of Iraqi women writers, among them novelist Beteool Khedairi, diarist Thura Al-Windawi (whose 2004 book “Thura’s Diary: My Life in wartime Iraq” was written when she was only 19), and the famous young woman blogger known only as Riverbend, whose blog was published in book form as “Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq”.

Some older women tell of the thrilling days when they were part of political and social movements, a number recalling their activities in the Iraqi Communist Party. Some others are reluctant to admit how attracted they were to the Ba’th party when they were young, as part of their Arab nationalism and admiration for Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The book includes memorable black and white photographs of women demonstrating in the streets in different eras. Interwoven with the testimonies on political, social and economic changes at different times are the stories of flirtations, family dramas and sometimes secret love affairs.

Al-Ali is the daughter of an Iraqi father and German mother who is now Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter in south-west England. Her previous books include “Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East” (2000) and “New Approaches to Migration” (2002).

Although Al-Ali ‘s family lived in Germany, they kept in close touch with their relatives in Iraq and visited Baghdad from time to time. Al-Ali contributes her own experiences and those of her family in Iraq to her book. Her late aunt Salima, who began to lose her sight as a child, was a main pillar of the family, despite her blindness. The book is dedicated to her and to the late Cynthia Nelson, Al-Ali’s professor at the University of Cairo.

Alongside her academic career, Al-Ali is a political activist, and was a founder in 2000 of the Iraqi-British organisation Act Together: Women’s Action for Iraq. She is also a member of the London section of Women in Black, a worldwide network of women who are against war and violence

Over the past ten years Al-Ali has extensively documented the ways in which Iraqi women, and gender relations, have changed within the context of political repression under the Ba’th regime, changing policies towards women, a series of wars, and economic sanctions. For her latest book she has extended her time frame back to the late 1940s and interviewed more than 100 women in addition to the 80 she had interviewed earlier. In order to encourage the women to speak freely, their identities are concealed. Although she spoke to women who were diverse in age, marital status, and political and religious background, she recognises that they are mainly middle-class urban women, and that there is further research to be done among poor and rural women.
Al-Ali examines the growth and changing nature of the Iraqi diaspora. It is estimated that more than four million Iraqis, out of a total of 24 million, are scattered over the world. In addition hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced within Iraq itself. She interviewed women for her book in four locations: London, Amman, Detroit and San Diego. The reason for choosing two cities in the US is the role the US is playing in contemporary Iraq. The Detroit area is home to the largest Arab community in the US, including Iraqis, and there she met in particular members of the Iraqi Christian Chaldean and Shi’i communities. In San Diego county, California, there are more 8,000 Iraqi Kurds.

In Amman there are around a million Iraqi refugees while thousands of other Iraqis visit the Jordanian capital for short periods. As regards London, Al-Ali describes her own experiences of the Iraqi diaspora there after she moved to London from Cairo, where she had been studying, to do her PhD on the Egyptian Women’s Movement. She describes these experiences as “becoming Iraqi in London”.

Ali stresses that the current tendency to classify Iraqis in terms of their sect is relatively recent. Before, other classifications were more important, such as social class, generation, place of residence, urban or rural identity, professional background and political orientation. At the same time, she recognises that at certain times Saddam Hussein encouraged sectarianism and tribalism at certain times to increase the regime’s grip on power. Her interviewees include an Iraqi Jewish woman living in London who grew up in Iraq in the late 1930s and 1940s in a multicultural society, and was proud of being both Iraqi and Jewish

Al-Ali’s academic and activist activities are inspired by her feminism. She acknowledges that feminism is now a “thoroughly unfashionable and almost dirty word“ both in Muslim societies, where it is often seen as imposed from outside and, in western societies where it is seen as being to do with man-hating radical women.

She is scrupulously objective and balanced in recording what the women told her and in putting her text together. She probes beneath the surface of what the women say, and her interviewing method was interactive and involved her having discussions with the woman and occasionally arguing with them. One aspect she brings out is tensions between those women who had stayed in Iraq before the invasion and those who returned in 2003 and afterwards, sometimes after decades outside the country. Some women in Iraq resented such newcomers who were put in positions of “empowering” them.

Al-Ali explores crucial issues regarding memory and the construction of history and personal narratives, and recognises the possibility of “multiple truths” about an event. “Memories, whether individual or collective, are not static and frozen in time, but are alive, rooted in the present as much as in the past, and linked to aspirations as much as social experience.”

In the context of Iraq after the 2003 invasion, “and the escalating violence and sectarian tensions, contestations about power and national identity, history becomes a very important and powerful tool. Contesting narratives about what happened in the past relate directly to different attitudes towards the present and visions about the future of the new Iraq.”

She finds a tendency among Iraqi women, finding themselves in bad circumstances at various points of history, to look back on the past with nostalgia. Women were involved in the major Al-Wathba uprising of 1948 and in other activities against the monarchy, but despite the inequalities and repression then some women now look back with great nostalgia to that time. Some have revised their views of that period in light of the conditions in succeeding decades.

Al-Ali brings out the contradictions in the history of women in modern Iraq. Saddam Hussein in the early years of his rule spoke out for the liberation of women, although the intention may have been to thereby gain the loyalty of women and their influence on the next generation. Women were active in the work force, and were encouraged to combine lives at work and at home. “Even some of the women I interviewed who were extremely critical of the Ba’th regime and had suffered themselves in various ways stressed some positive policies vis a vis women,” she writes.

Iraqi women became among the most educated and professional in the entire Middle East. And although the General Federation of Iraqi Women was a branch of the ruling party, it played a positive role in promoting women’s education, literacy, labour force participation and training and health. It was not a mere mouthpiece of the regime, but did have tensions and differences with the Ba’thist leadership in defending women’s rights and gender equality.

But the year 1980 marked the beginning of a decline in conditions for Iraqi women, with the start of a series of wars, violence and hardship. During the war with Iran there was a stress on the Iraqi male’s military prowess, and on the woman as a mother. Women were asked to have five children in the fertility campaigns.

The Gulf war of 1991 and the 13 years of sanctions brought further deterioration in the conditions for women. There was a drop in employment and pay levels, crime increased, women went back into their homes, and “umm beit muharama” (the respectable housewife) replaced the educated Iraqi woman as the “proper Iraqi female”. The education system declined and illiteracy soared.

“More than three years after the invasion, all indications point to the painful reality that women are among the biggest losers in the new Iraq,” Al-Ali writes in the conclusion of her book. Women have been used “by all political parties and actors concerned to score points and get across specific messages and signals. They have been pushed back into their homes. They are targeted not only because of what they wear or do not wear, their activities, their politics, even their driving, but often simply for being women.”
But despite this she feels that “Iraqi women continue to carry and embody the seed of hope for a more secure, peaceful and dignified time.”

Susannah Tarbush

Al Hayat website, 3 May 2007 (accessible at: http://tinyurl.com/2wg4eo)