The famous mosques and historical palaces lining the Bosphorus elicit little more than polite interest from the boat's passengers. But as a luxurious waterfront villa comes into view, crowds swarm to the side of the boat. Cameras appear suddenly from the enveloping folds of black chadors.
Forget Topkapi Palace, this is where the Turkish soap opera Noor was filmed.
With its glamorous cast and extreme plotlines, Noor has become a phenomenon across the Middle East, sparking a tourism boom to Turkey that drew 105,000 visitors from Arab countries in May alone this year – an increase of about 33% on last year. First airing on the Saudi MBC satellite channel in early 2008, its final episode was seen by nearly 80 million viewers from Palestine to Morocco.
Noor, starring Turkish actors Songül Öden and Kivanç Tatlitug (pictured), tells the story of a girl from the country who marries into a wealthy Istanbul family – a modern day Cinderella story of sorts, albeit one that includes a lot of foreplay, an illegitimate child and some prison time for Noor herself.
Continue reading: Turkish soap opera Noor brings tourist boom to Istanbul
Saturday, 14 August 2010
Sunday, 1 August 2010
Valencia: what lies beneath
It’s past midnight, and I’m in a street surrounded by a group of people chatting and laughing as the sharp smell of gunpowder from crackling fireworks wafts over us in the thick night air. A colourfully dressed woman with dark brown eyes is wandering in and out of the crowd holding a plate of delicious nut-based sweetmeats, which she offers around.
“I made them,” she says proudly.
All at once, the hubbub of guttural voices dies down as the sound of a beating drum reverberates from the pavement opposite.
Tak takka tak!
And a man nearby starts playing a high-pitched reed instrument, like a snake-charmer, with slow, whining notes. After a few moments, a woman at his side begins to sing. But this is no sweet melody; it sounds more like a chant or a cry, her voice rising and falling in strange, swooping intervals, almost like a muezzin’s call to prayer. When she finishes, everyone cheers and claps, the drum beats again, and the crowd moves on down the street for more music and sweetmeats.
Though the music, food and atmosphere might make me feel as though I’ve been transported to North Africa for a street festival, I am actually in Valencia, on Spain’s eastern coast, a city that has been my home for the past 10 years. The sweetmeats – indistinguishable from halva – are known as turrón, and I’m witnessing a Nit d’Albaes – a common local fiesta where satirical songs are sung late into the night – but with an obvious Moorish flavour to them.
Valencia is not the first place you tend to think of when Moorish Spain is mentioned. Andalusia, to the south, has that honour, with its magnificent Alhambra Palace in Granada, the Great Mosque at Cordoba, and other picturesque sites. But historically, Valencia is as Moorish as any of these: it was ruled by Muslims for more than 500 years, until 1238, while the very last Moors in Spain, the Moriscos, were concentrated in the Valencia region when the order to expel all 300,000 of them to North Africa came in 1609. Under the Arabs, Valencia was at the centre of what was known as sharq al-andalus – the eastern region of Al-Andalus, while the city itself was known as hadiqat al-andalus – the garden of Moorish Spain, for its wonderful climate and extremely fertile soil.
Despite this heritage, however, you won’t find many mosques or ancient palaces to visit. Yet, although the region may be a less obvious tourist destination than its Andalusian counterpart, it is no less rewarding for it.
Today the city is the third-largest in Spain, a thriving Mediterranean seaport which recently hosted the America’s Cup and has staged two Formula One Grands Prix. From being an oft-overlooked corner of the country, it has arrived as a tourist destination in the past few years with the opening of the spectacularly modern City of Arts and Sciences – a space-age architectural delight comprising an opera house, museums, an aquarium and more – designed by local boy Santiago Calatrava.
Source: The National, Valencia: what lies beneath
“I made them,” she says proudly.
All at once, the hubbub of guttural voices dies down as the sound of a beating drum reverberates from the pavement opposite.
Tak takka tak!
And a man nearby starts playing a high-pitched reed instrument, like a snake-charmer, with slow, whining notes. After a few moments, a woman at his side begins to sing. But this is no sweet melody; it sounds more like a chant or a cry, her voice rising and falling in strange, swooping intervals, almost like a muezzin’s call to prayer. When she finishes, everyone cheers and claps, the drum beats again, and the crowd moves on down the street for more music and sweetmeats.
Though the music, food and atmosphere might make me feel as though I’ve been transported to North Africa for a street festival, I am actually in Valencia, on Spain’s eastern coast, a city that has been my home for the past 10 years. The sweetmeats – indistinguishable from halva – are known as turrón, and I’m witnessing a Nit d’Albaes – a common local fiesta where satirical songs are sung late into the night – but with an obvious Moorish flavour to them.
Valencia is not the first place you tend to think of when Moorish Spain is mentioned. Andalusia, to the south, has that honour, with its magnificent Alhambra Palace in Granada, the Great Mosque at Cordoba, and other picturesque sites. But historically, Valencia is as Moorish as any of these: it was ruled by Muslims for more than 500 years, until 1238, while the very last Moors in Spain, the Moriscos, were concentrated in the Valencia region when the order to expel all 300,000 of them to North Africa came in 1609. Under the Arabs, Valencia was at the centre of what was known as sharq al-andalus – the eastern region of Al-Andalus, while the city itself was known as hadiqat al-andalus – the garden of Moorish Spain, for its wonderful climate and extremely fertile soil.
Despite this heritage, however, you won’t find many mosques or ancient palaces to visit. Yet, although the region may be a less obvious tourist destination than its Andalusian counterpart, it is no less rewarding for it.
Today the city is the third-largest in Spain, a thriving Mediterranean seaport which recently hosted the America’s Cup and has staged two Formula One Grands Prix. From being an oft-overlooked corner of the country, it has arrived as a tourist destination in the past few years with the opening of the spectacularly modern City of Arts and Sciences – a space-age architectural delight comprising an opera house, museums, an aquarium and more – designed by local boy Santiago Calatrava.
Source: The National, Valencia: what lies beneath
Stop Wahhabi Indoctrination of Syrian Youth
The Website ALL4SYRIA reported (in Arabic) on July 17, 2010 that private Islamist elementary schools have been proliferating in Syria. The title of the article: Secrets and Background Behind the Decision to Ban the Wearing of the Niqab in Syria’s Schools and Universities Taken by the Office of National Security.
A Summary of the ALL4SYRIA article
Islamist groups in Syria have succeeded in controlling most private elementary schools (up to sixth grade), estimated to be around 200 schools (presumably in Damascus) with approximately 25% to 30% of all elementary schools enrolment. The article revealed that teachers are all women, don the Niqab (black covering of face and body), and belong to Islamist proselytizing groups, typically led and controlled by women. ALL4SYRIA added that classroom teaching material contravenes Ministry of Education curriculum and textbooks, that young children are instructed to insist that their mothers must wear the Niqab so that they avoid burning in hell’s fire, that large amounts of money have been paid by Islamist organizers to purchase secular private schools from their owners; for example, Dar Al-Faraj, Dar Al-Na’eem, Omar bin Al-Khattab, The Arab Islamic College, Ummat Al-Majd, Al-Yaqzah…).
Significance of the article
Such a development is disconcerting. Syria must be vigilant. At the core of Islamist teaching, just like Wahhabi teaching, is indoctrination and brainwashing in fanaticism. Sunni Islamists, Syria’s included, embrace Wahhabi extremism with all their being. Their speech and actions are akin to being members of a religious cult.
It should be noted that the word "Islamist" refers only to the tiny minority among individual Muslims who are extremists in their religious fervor and beliefs; specifically, the Hanbalite Wahhabis. The word "Islamist" does not apply to the 95% of Sunnis who follow the other three schools of jurisprudence (Hanafites, Maliktes, and Shafiates). This great majority is moderate, enlightened, and tolerant. On a macro level, the word "Islamist" refers to extremist Islamic states, not to moderate Islamic countries. While Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Syria, and Turkey, for example, are Islamic countries, Saudi Arabia is an Islamist country.
Source: Daring Opinion, Stop Wahhabi Indoctrination of Syrian Youth
A Summary of the ALL4SYRIA article
Islamist groups in Syria have succeeded in controlling most private elementary schools (up to sixth grade), estimated to be around 200 schools (presumably in Damascus) with approximately 25% to 30% of all elementary schools enrolment. The article revealed that teachers are all women, don the Niqab (black covering of face and body), and belong to Islamist proselytizing groups, typically led and controlled by women. ALL4SYRIA added that classroom teaching material contravenes Ministry of Education curriculum and textbooks, that young children are instructed to insist that their mothers must wear the Niqab so that they avoid burning in hell’s fire, that large amounts of money have been paid by Islamist organizers to purchase secular private schools from their owners; for example, Dar Al-Faraj, Dar Al-Na’eem, Omar bin Al-Khattab, The Arab Islamic College, Ummat Al-Majd, Al-Yaqzah…).
Significance of the article
Such a development is disconcerting. Syria must be vigilant. At the core of Islamist teaching, just like Wahhabi teaching, is indoctrination and brainwashing in fanaticism. Sunni Islamists, Syria’s included, embrace Wahhabi extremism with all their being. Their speech and actions are akin to being members of a religious cult.
It should be noted that the word "Islamist" refers only to the tiny minority among individual Muslims who are extremists in their religious fervor and beliefs; specifically, the Hanbalite Wahhabis. The word "Islamist" does not apply to the 95% of Sunnis who follow the other three schools of jurisprudence (Hanafites, Maliktes, and Shafiates). This great majority is moderate, enlightened, and tolerant. On a macro level, the word "Islamist" refers to extremist Islamic states, not to moderate Islamic countries. While Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Syria, and Turkey, for example, are Islamic countries, Saudi Arabia is an Islamist country.
Source: Daring Opinion, Stop Wahhabi Indoctrination of Syrian Youth
Monday, 19 July 2010
Syria's niqab ban is part of a clash within Islam itself
Far from the heated debates of Europe, Syria has banned the niqab in classrooms, adding another layer to this complex story
Quietly, away from the fanfare that accompanied the French vote on banning the niqab in public, and calls by Philip Hollobone to impose a ban in Britain, the Syrian government has instituted its own, more limited, ban, removing teachers who wear the full face veil from teaching in public schools.
At first glance, such a move might seem puzzling: Syria, with dozens of religious sects and a nominally secular government, has managed for decades to use a light touch, at least when it comes to personal faith.
But the rise of religion among the population has shaken the leadership: with overt displays of faith on the rise and a rare terrorist attack in Damascus two years ago attributed to Islamists, the government appears to be moving against hardline religious ideas.
The niqab ban in public schools is a fairly blunt instrument but, on such a small scale, it may be intended to send a message. Egypt, too, has instigated a similarly limited ban (for university exams), a move opposed by Islamists but upheld by the courts.
Continue reading Syria's niqab ban is part of a clash within Islam itself
Source: The Guardian
Quietly, away from the fanfare that accompanied the French vote on banning the niqab in public, and calls by Philip Hollobone to impose a ban in Britain, the Syrian government has instituted its own, more limited, ban, removing teachers who wear the full face veil from teaching in public schools.
At first glance, such a move might seem puzzling: Syria, with dozens of religious sects and a nominally secular government, has managed for decades to use a light touch, at least when it comes to personal faith.
But the rise of religion among the population has shaken the leadership: with overt displays of faith on the rise and a rare terrorist attack in Damascus two years ago attributed to Islamists, the government appears to be moving against hardline religious ideas.
The niqab ban in public schools is a fairly blunt instrument but, on such a small scale, it may be intended to send a message. Egypt, too, has instigated a similarly limited ban (for university exams), a move opposed by Islamists but upheld by the courts.
Continue reading Syria's niqab ban is part of a clash within Islam itself
Source: The Guardian
Sunday, 23 May 2010
T E Lawrence: hero or mirage?
The legacy of T E Lawrence, the British intelligence officer who fought alongside Arab irregulars and was immortalised in David Lean’s film, varies markedly between the West and the Middle East. Alasdair Soussi looks at the man and myth, 75 years after his death.
The arrival of the British-led Imperial Camel Corps into the Arab camp at Aqaba was always likely to cause friction. Despite fighting as allies against the might of the Ottoman Empire in the 1916-18 Arab campaign to drive the Turks out of the Middle East, the British troopers and the Arab irregulars never made comfortable bedfellows. This particular summer’s day in 1918, at the closing stages of the Great War, was to be no different.
The army encampment, in what is today Jordan’s southernmost city, reverberated to the sound of excited cries and musket fire as the 314-strong imperial troops galloped into town. Such was the greeting afforded them by the Arabs that many in the Camel Corps thought Aqaba itself was under attack.
By nightfall, tensions had reached breaking point. Unfamiliar with the ways of the Arab camp and convinced they had been shot at while bathing in the sea earlier that day, several troopers were about to take matters into their own hands with the aid of a few grenades when a figure in white appeared.
“He stood in the middle of the square, flung back his aba, showing his white undergarment, and illuminated by the countless fires, raised his hand,” one soldier recalled. “Immediately the firing ceased, the hubbub died down and we had a peaceful night.”
That figure was Thomas Edward Lawrence. T E Lawrence, who died 75 years ago this week, and who was pivotal in the success of the Arab revolt against the Turks, was the man the world would come to know as Lawrence of Arabia, and that anecdote – almost mythical in tone, yet a documented fact – is one of hundreds that have surrounded a life that continues to provoke the debate.
David Lean’s 1962 epic, starring Peter O’Toole, was based on Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence’s memoir of the two-year campaign. The film was a global sensation, but it was not the first time that the Lawrence myth had captured the popular imagination.
Forty-three years earlier, Lowell Thomas, a US journalist, toured the world with a highly romanticised film about Lawrence shot in the desert towards the end of the war. With Allenby In Palestine And Lawrence In Arabia was an immediate hit, not least in Great Britain where Lawrence was born in 1888. Consequently, Lawrence’s role in the Arab uprising, his pursuit of victory against the Ottomans, and his complete immersion in the Arab way of life as a British intelligence officer, all contrived to create a man more otherworldly than simply flesh and bone. Michael Asher, the English-born explorer and Arabist, and author of Lawrence: The Uncrowned King Of Arabia, is one of many who readily subscribes to this view.
“When I went to Lawrence’s cottage – now a museum – at Clouds Hill in Dorset [south-west England], it felt like a church. I realised that he was seen in Britain as a secular saint. If you think about it, Lawrence was really the only ‘hero’ to emerge from the First World War, a war in which millions died – he was the man who seemed to resurrect in his person the lost dead boys of a whole generation.”
Here, in the Middle East, the arena in which Lawrence gained his reputation, there are no such memorials.
So what is his legacy in this part of the world? Like many things concerning Lawrence, the answer is far from simple.
At only 1.65m tall and with a head that looked too big for his body, this shy Welsh-born son of an Anglo-Irish father and a Scottish mother was an unremarkable-looking man. Yet, he possessed a mind that was quite brilliant. After gaining a first-class degree in modern history from Jesus College, Oxford, Lawrence became an archaeologist, and travelled across the Middle East honing his knowledge of its geography and language, both of which he would come to master.
At the outbreak of the First World War, he joined the British intelligence service in Cairo and soon became involved in negotiations to orchestrate an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, which was sealed when Britain all but promised the Arabs a single unified nation should they triumph. But, while the revolt would be a major success, the European powers went back on their word. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret pact cooked up by Britain and France in 1916, carved up the Middle East into colonial spheres of influence in a post-Ottoman world, a betrayal that put paid to any Arab hopes of freedom.
Continue reading T E Lawrence: hero or mirage? Source: The National, Abu Dhabi
The arrival of the British-led Imperial Camel Corps into the Arab camp at Aqaba was always likely to cause friction. Despite fighting as allies against the might of the Ottoman Empire in the 1916-18 Arab campaign to drive the Turks out of the Middle East, the British troopers and the Arab irregulars never made comfortable bedfellows. This particular summer’s day in 1918, at the closing stages of the Great War, was to be no different.
The army encampment, in what is today Jordan’s southernmost city, reverberated to the sound of excited cries and musket fire as the 314-strong imperial troops galloped into town. Such was the greeting afforded them by the Arabs that many in the Camel Corps thought Aqaba itself was under attack.
By nightfall, tensions had reached breaking point. Unfamiliar with the ways of the Arab camp and convinced they had been shot at while bathing in the sea earlier that day, several troopers were about to take matters into their own hands with the aid of a few grenades when a figure in white appeared.
“He stood in the middle of the square, flung back his aba, showing his white undergarment, and illuminated by the countless fires, raised his hand,” one soldier recalled. “Immediately the firing ceased, the hubbub died down and we had a peaceful night.”
That figure was Thomas Edward Lawrence. T E Lawrence, who died 75 years ago this week, and who was pivotal in the success of the Arab revolt against the Turks, was the man the world would come to know as Lawrence of Arabia, and that anecdote – almost mythical in tone, yet a documented fact – is one of hundreds that have surrounded a life that continues to provoke the debate.
David Lean’s 1962 epic, starring Peter O’Toole, was based on Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence’s memoir of the two-year campaign. The film was a global sensation, but it was not the first time that the Lawrence myth had captured the popular imagination.
Forty-three years earlier, Lowell Thomas, a US journalist, toured the world with a highly romanticised film about Lawrence shot in the desert towards the end of the war. With Allenby In Palestine And Lawrence In Arabia was an immediate hit, not least in Great Britain where Lawrence was born in 1888. Consequently, Lawrence’s role in the Arab uprising, his pursuit of victory against the Ottomans, and his complete immersion in the Arab way of life as a British intelligence officer, all contrived to create a man more otherworldly than simply flesh and bone. Michael Asher, the English-born explorer and Arabist, and author of Lawrence: The Uncrowned King Of Arabia, is one of many who readily subscribes to this view.
“When I went to Lawrence’s cottage – now a museum – at Clouds Hill in Dorset [south-west England], it felt like a church. I realised that he was seen in Britain as a secular saint. If you think about it, Lawrence was really the only ‘hero’ to emerge from the First World War, a war in which millions died – he was the man who seemed to resurrect in his person the lost dead boys of a whole generation.”
Here, in the Middle East, the arena in which Lawrence gained his reputation, there are no such memorials.
So what is his legacy in this part of the world? Like many things concerning Lawrence, the answer is far from simple.
At only 1.65m tall and with a head that looked too big for his body, this shy Welsh-born son of an Anglo-Irish father and a Scottish mother was an unremarkable-looking man. Yet, he possessed a mind that was quite brilliant. After gaining a first-class degree in modern history from Jesus College, Oxford, Lawrence became an archaeologist, and travelled across the Middle East honing his knowledge of its geography and language, both of which he would come to master.
At the outbreak of the First World War, he joined the British intelligence service in Cairo and soon became involved in negotiations to orchestrate an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, which was sealed when Britain all but promised the Arabs a single unified nation should they triumph. But, while the revolt would be a major success, the European powers went back on their word. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret pact cooked up by Britain and France in 1916, carved up the Middle East into colonial spheres of influence in a post-Ottoman world, a betrayal that put paid to any Arab hopes of freedom.
Continue reading T E Lawrence: hero or mirage? Source: The National, Abu Dhabi
Tuesday, 16 March 2010
An appetite for Aleppo
At an indeterminate point in Aleppo’s main market street, the Souq al-Attarine, but most likely somewhere between observing a pair of goat testicles dangling off a skinned carcass, and running into a bloody, matted camel head hanging on a large metal hook, I lose my appetite. This is a shame, because we are due to lunch at Bazar al-Charq, a restaurant known for its myriad preparations of the ground-meat dish kibbeh, itself an Aleppan speciality.
I’m trailing Anissa Helou, the London-based, Syrian-Lebanese cookbook author and docent of delicacies, on a culinary tour through Syria.
A tall, elegant woman with an attention-grabbing puff of silvery hair (small children compare her, sotto voce, to Cruella de Vil), Helou gives regular cooking classes in London and, once or twice a year, steers small groups of hungry travellers to the region’s gastronomic epicentres – Damascus and Aleppo in Syria, Istanbul and Gaziantep in Turkey – where they eat themselves to a standstill.
On this trip, the occasional cultural interludes, such as excursions to the Roman ruins of Palmyra and the Crusader castle of Krak de Chevaliers, feel like flickering film static interrupting a week-long highlight reel of Syrian cookery.
Syria has become a relatively popular tourist destination in the past five years, and not only for backpackers bouncing around the region on falafel-fuelled gap years.
A mandatory pit stop on both the Silk and the Spice Roads for hundreds of years, Aleppo’s residents (both welcome and unwelcome) have included Turkomen, French, Greeks, Indians, Italians, Chinese, Jews, Ottomans, Armenians and Kurds, all of whom bequeathed at least a trace of their cookery to the city.
Damascus, the capital, has many lovely courtyard restaurants, but it is best known for its spectacular variety of street food.
Aleppo, on the other hand, has evolved a tradition of more elegant, elaborate dining. Pierre Antaki, the co-founder and vice president of the Syrian Academy of Gastronomy, attributes this to economic factors: most Aleppans still go home for lunch, snooze a bit, then work again until evening, whereas Damascenes often work far from their homes and eat a quick bite in or near their shops or offices before finishing the day’s work.
“In Damascus, hardly anybody goes home for lunch,” says Pierre. “They work one shift, and live far outside of the city. Here, if the big fat boss doesn’t go home and eat and have his siesta, it’s not a day.”
Aleppo in particular is known for the quality of its raw ingredients; despite a brutal drought in the north-east of the country (and in neighbouring Jordan), the land surrounding the city is, and always has been, rich and green. The famous Aleppan pistachio, fistik halabi, for example, wears many hats in the local cuisine, appearing in both sweets and savouries.
We arrived just as the season kicked off, early October, and it’s difficult to turn a corner without encountering a mountain of fresh, unpeeled nuts, looking rather majestic for something the size of a nut, in their matte magenta robes.
The lush environs also nourish those higher up on the food chain; lambs are usually fed on an all-grass diet, resulting in top-quality meat that, know-how aside, sets Aleppo’s kibbeh apart. Florence Ollivry, the author of Les Secrets d’Alep: Une grande ville arabe révelée par sa cuisine, counts 58 different preparations, sculpted into various shapes, raw, baked, or fried, and served with everything from a simple drizzle of olive oil, a few mint leaves and a green onion to savoury yoghurt or tomato sauces.
At Bazar al-Charq, just outside of the old city in a 300-year-old building, we taste at least half-a-dozen of these. While two travellers recline on cushions at an empty table, recuperating from the various stomach plagues that Syria visits upon foreigners, I try to banish the testicles and hanging camel head from my mind and focus on the kibbeh carnival unfolding before me.
Bazar al-Charq has been around since 2003 and, according to Anissa, is one of Aleppo’s most underrated restaurants.
The setting – a large, basement room with vaulted stone ceilings – is slightly heavy on the Orientalist kitsch, but the kibbeh are no joke. Among those we tried were a well-seasoned kibbeh sajiyyeh (cooked on the saj, or concave grill), which was relatively light (kibbeh is more frequently encountered fried), kibbeh bi-laban (fried balls swimming in yogurt sauce, with tender bits of lamb floating alongside), kibbeh with sumac and aubergine (in a sour, dark sauce whose colour contrasted with the light, lemoniness of the sumac) and the formidable kibbeh maajouqa, a kind of quesadilla that substitutes discs of greasy meat for tortillas, with a filling of cheese and red and green peppers.
If we put all the ground meat on our table together, we could probably have assembled a small lamb.
Several of the diners are avid home cooks. What makes a perfect kibbeh?, they want to know.
“The proportion of meat to bulgur is very important,” Anissa begins. “Heavier on the meat. It should be well-seasoned and fatty without being greasy. And it should be grilled or fried until it’s crispy.”
On our first evening, we ate at Yasmeen d’Alep, which opened in 1995 in the Christian-Armenian neighbourhood of Jdeideh. We sit down, a bit ragged after what seemed like endless hours on the bus from Damascus. And the mezze parade begins: eggplants stuffed with bulgur salad, nuts and potatoes, rice kibbeh, sausage casing stuffed with rice, ground meat and chickpeas, and several salads.
If you go
The flight Return flights to Damascus from Dubai on Emirates (www.emirates.com) cost from $325 (Dh1,195) including taxes
For more information on the Syrian Academy of Gastronomy and Pistache d’Alep, see www.gastrosyr.com and www.pistachedalep.com
Along with excellent grilled meats, Yasmine d’Alep serves a superb rendition of kebab kerez, or cherry kebab, lovely little balls of spiced, minced meat swimming merrily in a sauce of sour cherries, topped with toasted flatbread. According to Antaki, the sweet-and-sour combination (arguably a Persian influence) is in fact a Chinese contribution to Aleppan cuisine, although the dish is considered Armenian. In lesser hands, it can taste as though someone opened a can of cherry pie filling onto a plate of meatballs; here the chef shows admirable restraint in tempering the tartness of the cherries.
The newest and perhaps most successful restaurant in Aleppo is Zmorod. It opened around a year ago, and the owner, Dalal Touma, was dining at a table by the door when we walk in, and the large courtyard, warmed by golden-rose light, is filled with mostly Syrian patrons.
Anissa orders what sounded like two of everything on the menu, despite the fact that most of us were still wobbling from lunch. The service is excellent – Anissa barely glances at the menu, and instead embarks on a swift back-and-forth with the waiter in Arabic, who has a number of suggestions for what’s freshest and most interesting. The highlights include a cold dish of chicken morsels covered with the thickest, richest tahini sauce imaginable, tender fish with spicy tarator (a tahini sauce spiked with red pepper), and a grilled red pepper salad.
Through her cookbooks, such as Modern Mezze (Quadrille Publishing, 2007), her occasional columns in The Financial Times, and her blog (www.anissas.com) Helou does her bit to champion Syrian cuisine, which despite its similarity to Lebanese food, is considerably less well known. This is most likely, she thinks, because Syrians never experienced the famine and political turbulence that, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, drove so many Lebanese into the diaspora, where they had to eat, of course.
“You can eat the same dishes in Syria and in Lebanon but they’ll taste totally different,” Helou says. “Kebab in Syria is actually kafteh (ground meat balls) whereas kebabs in Lebanon really means lahmeh meshoui (grilled chunks of marinated meat.)
The Syrian fattouche is different in that the bread is fried and it often has cheese in it, and it is dressed with pomegranate syrup whereas in the Lebanese fattouche, the bread is normally toasted and the dressing is mostly sumac.”
The two cuisines share many similarities – a mezze tradition, kibbeh worship, an emphasis on the fresh and the seasonal – but Syrian food has its particular charms. It also comes with an edge of danger. Judging from the number of travellers who fell ill on the tour (five out of seven, or everyone except Anissa and me), Syrians’ enthusiasm for hygiene is nowhere near as rigorous as their devotion to flavour.
One place where we are assured a higher degree of protection was at the home of Maria Gaspard Smara, a successful caterer known for her sure hand with Aleppan specialities (she also contributed many recipes to Ollivry’s book). She welcomes us with bowls of rosy, fresh pistachios and proceeds to demonstrate a series of classic Aleppan dishes, including muhammara, a dip made of red pepper paste, walnuts and pomegranate syrup, and a delicious snack of deep-fried aubergine slices dipped in egg batter and deep-fried again.
“There are four seasons in Aleppo, and each has its own cuisine,” explains Smara. Late summer, for example, is stuffed vegetable season. “Also, Aleppan cooks don’t waste anything,” she says, illustrating her point by using the insides of hollowed-out courgettes (to be stuffed with a rice mixture) to make a garlicky dip.
The main dish, frikeh, or toasted green wheat and lamb, she cooks in a meat broth flavoured with cardamom, cinnamon and pepper, topped with pistachios, almonds and pine nuts fried in semneh, or clarified butter, and served with a thick, plain yogurt. For dessert, it’s all we could do to find room for a couple of large, juicy figs.
On our last morning in Aleppo, Anissa took a few of us to Hajj Abdo, the city’s authority on beans. His beans – foul, or fava beans– simmer overnight in large copper vessels that appear to be as old as he is (66), and their hearty, faintly bitter smell hangs in the air around the corner shop he has been working in since he was 21. Having lived for a year in Egypt, I was traumatised by foul. Egyptians tend to turn it into something resembling mud, which, although I have not yet found an archaeologist to back me up on this, I believe it was used to bind the bricks of the Great Pyramids. But Anissa assured me this was something utterly different.
Eating under the scrutiny of a dozen pairs of eyes can be faintly uncomfortable for women travellers, but these beans demand to be savoured. There is one major choice to be made: shall it be with tahini or lemon? After this hurdle, everything else – chilli paste, garlic, salt, cumin, olive oil – is a matter of degree. Anissa and I prefer the tahini version, which has a certain unctuousness amplified by a ladleful (yes) of oil on top, and she goes for extra chilli, while I enjoy a spoonful of cumin.
The Aleppan leg of the tour wound down at an old favourite, Wanes, a modern-looking, rather characterless, and staunchly local eatery that has been open since 1977.
“My mother and I used to come here in the 1980s for their grills,” Anissa tells us as we sit down. After a morning of foul, we were too full for grilled meat, but Anissa orders an abundant spread nonetheless. (It is customary – and Anissa never strays from this custom – to order enough mezze so as to eliminate any negative space on the tablecloth).
The standouts are the jibneh kurdiyyeh (Kurdish cheese), a salty white cheese between two pieces of flat bread, with small but potent minced hot green chillies and slices of tomato, all pan-fried like a quesadilla, and the basterma, an Armenian speciality of spiced, pressed dried meat often served with thin slices of raw garlic and eaten drizzled with olive oil and freshly cured green olives on the side. For dessert, I hand out some plump, sweet figs I had picked up in the giant market outside the old city, and the group piles back into the bus to head to Palmyra.
If there was anything fabulous left to eat in Aleppo, it would have to wait until the next trip.
travel@thenational.ae
Source: The National: An appetite for Aleppo
I’m trailing Anissa Helou, the London-based, Syrian-Lebanese cookbook author and docent of delicacies, on a culinary tour through Syria.
A tall, elegant woman with an attention-grabbing puff of silvery hair (small children compare her, sotto voce, to Cruella de Vil), Helou gives regular cooking classes in London and, once or twice a year, steers small groups of hungry travellers to the region’s gastronomic epicentres – Damascus and Aleppo in Syria, Istanbul and Gaziantep in Turkey – where they eat themselves to a standstill.
On this trip, the occasional cultural interludes, such as excursions to the Roman ruins of Palmyra and the Crusader castle of Krak de Chevaliers, feel like flickering film static interrupting a week-long highlight reel of Syrian cookery.
Syria has become a relatively popular tourist destination in the past five years, and not only for backpackers bouncing around the region on falafel-fuelled gap years.
A mandatory pit stop on both the Silk and the Spice Roads for hundreds of years, Aleppo’s residents (both welcome and unwelcome) have included Turkomen, French, Greeks, Indians, Italians, Chinese, Jews, Ottomans, Armenians and Kurds, all of whom bequeathed at least a trace of their cookery to the city.
Damascus, the capital, has many lovely courtyard restaurants, but it is best known for its spectacular variety of street food.
Aleppo, on the other hand, has evolved a tradition of more elegant, elaborate dining. Pierre Antaki, the co-founder and vice president of the Syrian Academy of Gastronomy, attributes this to economic factors: most Aleppans still go home for lunch, snooze a bit, then work again until evening, whereas Damascenes often work far from their homes and eat a quick bite in or near their shops or offices before finishing the day’s work.
“In Damascus, hardly anybody goes home for lunch,” says Pierre. “They work one shift, and live far outside of the city. Here, if the big fat boss doesn’t go home and eat and have his siesta, it’s not a day.”
Aleppo in particular is known for the quality of its raw ingredients; despite a brutal drought in the north-east of the country (and in neighbouring Jordan), the land surrounding the city is, and always has been, rich and green. The famous Aleppan pistachio, fistik halabi, for example, wears many hats in the local cuisine, appearing in both sweets and savouries.
We arrived just as the season kicked off, early October, and it’s difficult to turn a corner without encountering a mountain of fresh, unpeeled nuts, looking rather majestic for something the size of a nut, in their matte magenta robes.
The lush environs also nourish those higher up on the food chain; lambs are usually fed on an all-grass diet, resulting in top-quality meat that, know-how aside, sets Aleppo’s kibbeh apart. Florence Ollivry, the author of Les Secrets d’Alep: Une grande ville arabe révelée par sa cuisine, counts 58 different preparations, sculpted into various shapes, raw, baked, or fried, and served with everything from a simple drizzle of olive oil, a few mint leaves and a green onion to savoury yoghurt or tomato sauces.
At Bazar al-Charq, just outside of the old city in a 300-year-old building, we taste at least half-a-dozen of these. While two travellers recline on cushions at an empty table, recuperating from the various stomach plagues that Syria visits upon foreigners, I try to banish the testicles and hanging camel head from my mind and focus on the kibbeh carnival unfolding before me.
Bazar al-Charq has been around since 2003 and, according to Anissa, is one of Aleppo’s most underrated restaurants.
The setting – a large, basement room with vaulted stone ceilings – is slightly heavy on the Orientalist kitsch, but the kibbeh are no joke. Among those we tried were a well-seasoned kibbeh sajiyyeh (cooked on the saj, or concave grill), which was relatively light (kibbeh is more frequently encountered fried), kibbeh bi-laban (fried balls swimming in yogurt sauce, with tender bits of lamb floating alongside), kibbeh with sumac and aubergine (in a sour, dark sauce whose colour contrasted with the light, lemoniness of the sumac) and the formidable kibbeh maajouqa, a kind of quesadilla that substitutes discs of greasy meat for tortillas, with a filling of cheese and red and green peppers.
If we put all the ground meat on our table together, we could probably have assembled a small lamb.
Several of the diners are avid home cooks. What makes a perfect kibbeh?, they want to know.
“The proportion of meat to bulgur is very important,” Anissa begins. “Heavier on the meat. It should be well-seasoned and fatty without being greasy. And it should be grilled or fried until it’s crispy.”
On our first evening, we ate at Yasmeen d’Alep, which opened in 1995 in the Christian-Armenian neighbourhood of Jdeideh. We sit down, a bit ragged after what seemed like endless hours on the bus from Damascus. And the mezze parade begins: eggplants stuffed with bulgur salad, nuts and potatoes, rice kibbeh, sausage casing stuffed with rice, ground meat and chickpeas, and several salads.
If you go
The flight Return flights to Damascus from Dubai on Emirates (www.emirates.com) cost from $325 (Dh1,195) including taxes
For more information on the Syrian Academy of Gastronomy and Pistache d’Alep, see www.gastrosyr.com and www.pistachedalep.com
Along with excellent grilled meats, Yasmine d’Alep serves a superb rendition of kebab kerez, or cherry kebab, lovely little balls of spiced, minced meat swimming merrily in a sauce of sour cherries, topped with toasted flatbread. According to Antaki, the sweet-and-sour combination (arguably a Persian influence) is in fact a Chinese contribution to Aleppan cuisine, although the dish is considered Armenian. In lesser hands, it can taste as though someone opened a can of cherry pie filling onto a plate of meatballs; here the chef shows admirable restraint in tempering the tartness of the cherries.
The newest and perhaps most successful restaurant in Aleppo is Zmorod. It opened around a year ago, and the owner, Dalal Touma, was dining at a table by the door when we walk in, and the large courtyard, warmed by golden-rose light, is filled with mostly Syrian patrons.
Anissa orders what sounded like two of everything on the menu, despite the fact that most of us were still wobbling from lunch. The service is excellent – Anissa barely glances at the menu, and instead embarks on a swift back-and-forth with the waiter in Arabic, who has a number of suggestions for what’s freshest and most interesting. The highlights include a cold dish of chicken morsels covered with the thickest, richest tahini sauce imaginable, tender fish with spicy tarator (a tahini sauce spiked with red pepper), and a grilled red pepper salad.
Through her cookbooks, such as Modern Mezze (Quadrille Publishing, 2007), her occasional columns in The Financial Times, and her blog (www.anissas.com) Helou does her bit to champion Syrian cuisine, which despite its similarity to Lebanese food, is considerably less well known. This is most likely, she thinks, because Syrians never experienced the famine and political turbulence that, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, drove so many Lebanese into the diaspora, where they had to eat, of course.
“You can eat the same dishes in Syria and in Lebanon but they’ll taste totally different,” Helou says. “Kebab in Syria is actually kafteh (ground meat balls) whereas kebabs in Lebanon really means lahmeh meshoui (grilled chunks of marinated meat.)
The Syrian fattouche is different in that the bread is fried and it often has cheese in it, and it is dressed with pomegranate syrup whereas in the Lebanese fattouche, the bread is normally toasted and the dressing is mostly sumac.”
The two cuisines share many similarities – a mezze tradition, kibbeh worship, an emphasis on the fresh and the seasonal – but Syrian food has its particular charms. It also comes with an edge of danger. Judging from the number of travellers who fell ill on the tour (five out of seven, or everyone except Anissa and me), Syrians’ enthusiasm for hygiene is nowhere near as rigorous as their devotion to flavour.
One place where we are assured a higher degree of protection was at the home of Maria Gaspard Smara, a successful caterer known for her sure hand with Aleppan specialities (she also contributed many recipes to Ollivry’s book). She welcomes us with bowls of rosy, fresh pistachios and proceeds to demonstrate a series of classic Aleppan dishes, including muhammara, a dip made of red pepper paste, walnuts and pomegranate syrup, and a delicious snack of deep-fried aubergine slices dipped in egg batter and deep-fried again.
“There are four seasons in Aleppo, and each has its own cuisine,” explains Smara. Late summer, for example, is stuffed vegetable season. “Also, Aleppan cooks don’t waste anything,” she says, illustrating her point by using the insides of hollowed-out courgettes (to be stuffed with a rice mixture) to make a garlicky dip.
The main dish, frikeh, or toasted green wheat and lamb, she cooks in a meat broth flavoured with cardamom, cinnamon and pepper, topped with pistachios, almonds and pine nuts fried in semneh, or clarified butter, and served with a thick, plain yogurt. For dessert, it’s all we could do to find room for a couple of large, juicy figs.
On our last morning in Aleppo, Anissa took a few of us to Hajj Abdo, the city’s authority on beans. His beans – foul, or fava beans– simmer overnight in large copper vessels that appear to be as old as he is (66), and their hearty, faintly bitter smell hangs in the air around the corner shop he has been working in since he was 21. Having lived for a year in Egypt, I was traumatised by foul. Egyptians tend to turn it into something resembling mud, which, although I have not yet found an archaeologist to back me up on this, I believe it was used to bind the bricks of the Great Pyramids. But Anissa assured me this was something utterly different.
Eating under the scrutiny of a dozen pairs of eyes can be faintly uncomfortable for women travellers, but these beans demand to be savoured. There is one major choice to be made: shall it be with tahini or lemon? After this hurdle, everything else – chilli paste, garlic, salt, cumin, olive oil – is a matter of degree. Anissa and I prefer the tahini version, which has a certain unctuousness amplified by a ladleful (yes) of oil on top, and she goes for extra chilli, while I enjoy a spoonful of cumin.
The Aleppan leg of the tour wound down at an old favourite, Wanes, a modern-looking, rather characterless, and staunchly local eatery that has been open since 1977.
“My mother and I used to come here in the 1980s for their grills,” Anissa tells us as we sit down. After a morning of foul, we were too full for grilled meat, but Anissa orders an abundant spread nonetheless. (It is customary – and Anissa never strays from this custom – to order enough mezze so as to eliminate any negative space on the tablecloth).
The standouts are the jibneh kurdiyyeh (Kurdish cheese), a salty white cheese between two pieces of flat bread, with small but potent minced hot green chillies and slices of tomato, all pan-fried like a quesadilla, and the basterma, an Armenian speciality of spiced, pressed dried meat often served with thin slices of raw garlic and eaten drizzled with olive oil and freshly cured green olives on the side. For dessert, I hand out some plump, sweet figs I had picked up in the giant market outside the old city, and the group piles back into the bus to head to Palmyra.
If there was anything fabulous left to eat in Aleppo, it would have to wait until the next trip.
travel@thenational.ae
Source: The National: An appetite for Aleppo
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
'Falafel, falafel - every day falafel!'
By Omar Chatriwala in
Iraqis are proud and passionate about their food - at least here in Baghdad.
Iraqis are proud and passionate about their food - at least in Baghdad. I’m told Anbaris (people from Anbar province) are less preoccupied with it.
Pacha, baterma (fatty sausage), qouzi, kebab to name a few – meat dishes feature heavily in the traditional Iraqi diet. Lamb, especially, is big.
Kibbeh is a traditional, meaty breakfast food. Other morning classics include dibis, a sweet date syrup, asal (honey) and qaimar, thick cream taken off the top of full-fat milk.
Once an occasional treat, qaimar can now easily be found pre-packaged in stores.
Black tea here is brewed with cardamom and served sugary. And samoon, a fluffy, diamond-shaped bread baked in brick ovens, is what ties it all together. (Great with sunny-side up eggs, my Iraqi editor tells me.)
At the Abu Nawas Beach restaurant a little past noon, we found the kitchen staff preparing for the lunch crowd, due in at half past one.
On the open flame outside, Baghdad’s famous masgouf – a fish caught from the Tigris River, and grilled spread open. Concerns over the river's pollution scared some off the renowned dish, but I'm told these are farm-raised carp.
Inside, two Bangladeshi men were at work alongside the Iraqi staff inside.
Twenty-year-old Sadek said he’s been in Iraq for 5 months, and has found the adjustment very hard. A food server here, he eats and sleeps in the kitchen.
Magid Ali San, the restaurant’s cashier, tells us that the restaurant was damaged three months back by a nearby blast, which hurt business. But it’s since been renovated, and looks good.
The park surrounding the restaurant is quiet in the middle of a working day. “Lovers” stroll the walkways, and old friends catch up.
Friends relaxing by the Tigris
Sitting with shisha, and inviting us to tea and lunch, Tha’ir Jaboori and his friends say they come out regularly (all day, every day is the claim), to sit and talk.
All three voted in Sunday’s election, and they say it went well. Jaboori says he voted for Allawi's Iraqiya Coalition – a secular mix-sect group, just like theirs, he points out. At the table are two Sunni Arabs and a Shia Kurd.
Food of necessity
In Baghdad’s trafficy Salhiya district, we step into a bustling falafel shop.
Here, bright yellow falafel balls are being shoved into loaves of samoon bread with some shredded lettuce. Customers than go down the buffet line and stuff the sandwich with whatever toppings they prefer. Cost: 1000 Iraqi dinars ($0.86)
A stuffed felafel
Back at the Baghdad bureau, our Iraqi companions decline to share in the fast food spoils.
“Falafel, falafel, every day [we have] falafel!” exclaims one of our guards.
It’s a daily street food staple now, but my colleague Omar al-Saleh tells me growing up in Baghdad, falafel was practically unheard of.
Faced with tough international sanction in the 1990s and a resulting failed economy, Iraqis had to find new ways to survive, and this cheap Egyptian fare was one of them.
Almost two decades later, it seems that situation continues.
Source: Al Jazeera: 'Falafel, falafel - every day falafel!'
Iraqis are proud and passionate about their food - at least here in Baghdad.
Iraqis are proud and passionate about their food - at least in Baghdad. I’m told Anbaris (people from Anbar province) are less preoccupied with it.
Pacha, baterma (fatty sausage), qouzi, kebab to name a few – meat dishes feature heavily in the traditional Iraqi diet. Lamb, especially, is big.
Kibbeh is a traditional, meaty breakfast food. Other morning classics include dibis, a sweet date syrup, asal (honey) and qaimar, thick cream taken off the top of full-fat milk.
Once an occasional treat, qaimar can now easily be found pre-packaged in stores.
Black tea here is brewed with cardamom and served sugary. And samoon, a fluffy, diamond-shaped bread baked in brick ovens, is what ties it all together. (Great with sunny-side up eggs, my Iraqi editor tells me.)
At the Abu Nawas Beach restaurant a little past noon, we found the kitchen staff preparing for the lunch crowd, due in at half past one.
On the open flame outside, Baghdad’s famous masgouf – a fish caught from the Tigris River, and grilled spread open. Concerns over the river's pollution scared some off the renowned dish, but I'm told these are farm-raised carp.
Inside, two Bangladeshi men were at work alongside the Iraqi staff inside.
Twenty-year-old Sadek said he’s been in Iraq for 5 months, and has found the adjustment very hard. A food server here, he eats and sleeps in the kitchen.
Magid Ali San, the restaurant’s cashier, tells us that the restaurant was damaged three months back by a nearby blast, which hurt business. But it’s since been renovated, and looks good.
The park surrounding the restaurant is quiet in the middle of a working day. “Lovers” stroll the walkways, and old friends catch up.
Friends relaxing by the Tigris
Sitting with shisha, and inviting us to tea and lunch, Tha’ir Jaboori and his friends say they come out regularly (all day, every day is the claim), to sit and talk.
All three voted in Sunday’s election, and they say it went well. Jaboori says he voted for Allawi's Iraqiya Coalition – a secular mix-sect group, just like theirs, he points out. At the table are two Sunni Arabs and a Shia Kurd.
Food of necessity
In Baghdad’s trafficy Salhiya district, we step into a bustling falafel shop.
Here, bright yellow falafel balls are being shoved into loaves of samoon bread with some shredded lettuce. Customers than go down the buffet line and stuff the sandwich with whatever toppings they prefer. Cost: 1000 Iraqi dinars ($0.86)
A stuffed felafel
Back at the Baghdad bureau, our Iraqi companions decline to share in the fast food spoils.
“Falafel, falafel, every day [we have] falafel!” exclaims one of our guards.
It’s a daily street food staple now, but my colleague Omar al-Saleh tells me growing up in Baghdad, falafel was practically unheard of.
Faced with tough international sanction in the 1990s and a resulting failed economy, Iraqis had to find new ways to survive, and this cheap Egyptian fare was one of them.
Almost two decades later, it seems that situation continues.
Source: Al Jazeera: 'Falafel, falafel - every day falafel!'
Saturday, 6 March 2010
And then Cairo turned itself inside out
As the megacity brims with informal settlements, the upper classes are leapfrogging over the urban perimeter for an escapist paradise of luxury desert property. Ursula Lindsey reports.
To drive Cairo’s Ring Road – a 110-kilometre freeway that loops the city – is to sail through an endless sea of red brick. The brilliant green of the Nile Valley appears only in flashes through the expanse of cheap apartment blocks.
The buildings occupy what were once agricultural parcels; like those parcels, they are long and narrow, with only a hair’s breadth of space between them. They crowd right up to the freeway, so close that motorists may glance directly into their bare rooms. From their rooftops sprout unfinished supporting columns – ready for the addition of yet another floor. Their only decoration is bright, mismatched shutters; balconies enlivened by bold geometric patterns – pink and purple lozenges, green and orange stripes; and the bricks that spell, along the upper floors: “Allah.”
These are Cairo’s slums, what experts call its “informal” or “spontaneous” neighbourhoods. Egyptians call them ashwa’iyat – from the Arabic word for “random”, “haphazard”. They are the dense, sprawling answer to Cairo’s population explosion and its lack of affordable housing. Almost six in 10 Cairenes – at least 10 million people – live in informal neighbourhoods, often with limited access to water, electricity, schools, hospitals or refuse collection, and no real roads.
Hoda Hanin, 26, and her daughter Mariam stand in the Bashteel district of Imbaba, where Hoda grew up. "The people here are real," she says, "they're good country people." Dana Smillie for The National
Most capitals are magnets, but the speed with which the Egyptian one has grown in the last century is testament both to a remarkable centripetal power and to a surrounding vacuum of opportunity. Swelled by waves of rural migration, the population of greater Cairo has gone from less than one million at the beginning of the 20th century to about 18 million today – a megacity in the order of Mumbai or São Paulo, with more people than Lebanon, Jordan and Libya combined.
For centuries, Cairo’s expansion has been checked by geography: the city is bounded by a narrow strip of fertile, Nile-irrigated land, with nothing but desert beyond. The migrants who flocked to the city in the last century found there was nowhere to live: they built shacks on rooftops; they made homes out of covered alleys, inner courtyards, and stairwells. Priced out of the soaring formal real estate market, they started building illegally – on the agricultural land that surrounds the city and on the barren plateau that separates it from the desert.
The author Hamdi Abu Golayyel describes the slum in which he lived for six years as "a mongrel of a place, part village and part unplanned city fringe, destination of squatters and incomers". Dana Smillie for The National
Cairo has long been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The city teeters under the weight of its multitudes – its public services worn ragged; its air pollution among the worst in the world; its traffic barely managed by freeway overpasses and tunnels, clumsy last-minute bypass surgeries intended to repair its clogged and failing arteries.
Faced with the city’s barely contained chaos and alarmed by the growing slums, Cairo’s elites have begun to dream of escape. Along the Ring Road, billboards advertise exclusive new private developments, with names like country clubs or bad discos – Utopia, Le Reve, Dreamland, Qattamiya Heights, Palm Hills, Belle Ville – and slogans like ““The Egypt of My Desires.” One advertisement, overlooking dilapidated buildings in the centre of town, simply asks: “Why Are You Here?”
Cairo’s future, it seems, lies outside the city’s boundaries, in the desert – where it can be built from scratch. Today the outer edges of the city are one vast construction site, full of subdivisions where empty million-dollar villas stand among the sand dunes, and giant gated communities that promise a luxurious escape from Cairo’s pollution and friction.
What will be the effect of this flight on the city that’s left behind? If Cairo’s future is uncertain, its present is no easier to comprehend. “Perhaps today’s greatest riddle is not so much ‘Where is Cairo headed?’”, notes the writer Maria Golia, “as ‘Where is Cairo at all?’”
Somewhere between the dirt alleys of the slums and the golf courses of the gated suburbs; between the resourcefulness of millions of poor residents and the real estate speculation that has redefined the city’s edges; between the fears that Cairo is becoming one giant “slum” and the fantasy of starting over – the Egyptian capital is taking shape once again.
Hoda Hanin,a 26-year-old teaching assistant, balances her six-month-old daughter on her hip as she heads down a narrow dirt alley to her parents’ home in the slum of Bashteel. She grew up here, back when it was a village on the western bank of the Nile. “It was all farmland,” she says, “then people started clearing it out, selling the land, building homes for their kids.” Today, Bashteel and numerous other nearby villages have been absorbed into the crowded informal neighbourhood of Imbaba.
The average density in Cairo is 90,000 people per square mile; in Imbaba, it’s over 200,000, three times that of Manhattan. Imbaba’s side-streets are unpaved and no more than two metres wide: narrow, endless crevasses between the red-brick buildings. Three-wheel tuk-tuks, imported from India, are the only vehicles capable of navigating the bumpy, rubbish-strewn paths.
For decades, the Egyptian government willfully ignored the spread of the ashwa’iyat. The low-level officials who were supposed to enforce zoning and building laws took bribes to look the other way; on official maps of Cairo, these areas simply didn’t exist. Under this regime of collusion and neglect, the slums grew and grew, providing the masses much-needed cheap housing and allowing the authorities to forgo providing services.
The Talaat Mustafa Group's latest mega-development, located in the desert east of Cairo. Dana Smillie for The National
By the early 1990s, however, Cairo was forced to face its slums. The earthquake that struck the city in 1992 left thousands in the informal neighbourhoods homeless; since then fires and collapses have regularly put one slum or another on the front pages of local newspapers. At around the same time, the Islamist group Jama’a Islamiya took de facto control of Imbaba – creating what the foreign press quickly dubbed “the Islamic Republic of Imbaba”. The government dispatched more than 12,000 soldiers to carry out a six-week siege, round up the Islamists, and reimpose its authority.
After regaining control of Imbaba, the government announced it would spend hundreds of millions of Egyptian pounds to – as one newspaper put it – “Transform Centers of Terrorism into a Civilised Area”. The government set aside LE600 million (about $200m, or Dh402m) for slum upgrades, demolitions and relocations, and further plans for Imbaba are under way – to create more public housing, relocate thousands of street vendors, demolish some buildings and cut major new thoroughfares through the area.
Hoda thinks new, wider roads would be a great improvement. But like many residents here, her complaints about lack of services are tempered by her pride in how successfully, and civilly, Imbaba manages its own affairs. “The people here are real,” she says, “they’re good, country people.” When on our way home we become stuck in traffic in one of Imbaba’s many impassable intersections, she points to the neighbourhood men who are volunteering as impromptu traffic police: “See how they drop everything to help out.” When I ask Hoda where else she might like to live, her eyes grow wide and she says emphatically: “No, no, no! I never want to live outside Imbaba. I know the people here. We’re used to each other.”
“The people in my street let you take pictures there because they trust that I won’t let anyone give Imbaba a bad name,” Hoda tells me, after my visit. “What will you write about Imbaba? Will you write good things?”
Her anxiety over how her neighbourhood will be depicted by outsiders isn’t surprising, given the tenor of most discussions of the ashwa’iyat. Hand-wringing over Cairo’s slums has become a favourite habit of Egypt’s policymakers, artists and public intellectuals. The Egyptian and pan-Arab press abounds with horrified descriptions of these supposedly irredeemable hellholes. An article in Dar Al Hayat newspaper offers a description that is typical in its tone of Victorian shock: the ashwai’yat, the author writes, “are neighbourhoods with no laws and no values and no fixed sources of livelihood … They are neighbourhoods with no peace and security, where crime, selling and taking drugs, prostitution, wanton sex from a young age, take place. Relations are stamped with gangsterism, fighting, revenge, and violence. It’s a life without hope, vision, conviction, or the ability to change one’s destiny.”
More sympathetic depictions of the ashwa’iyat are often no less voyeuristic. A blockbuster 2007 film set in the slums, Hena Maysara, tells the melodramatic story of star-crossed lovers named Nahed and Adel; by the end of the film, Adel has become a gangster, Nahed a prostitute; their illegitimate child becomes a homeless teenage grifter. The slum they inhabit, taken over by extremists, is blown to smithereens in a fiery battle with the police.
The director, Khaled Youssef, called the film “a warning cry”, but in scene after titillating scene of sex, violence and drug use, it gives the impression that the ashwai’yat don’t contain a single law-abiding, gainfully employed resident. The Egyptian Ministry of Housing estimates there are 67 informal areas in Cairo. They range from truly dismal slums to lower-class neighbourhoods that are dense and under-serviced, but hardly dens of vice and desperation. Yet even as they use the ashwai’yat to mount a critique of the Mubarak government, many artists and intellectuals end up stigmatising these areas as dark, dangerous, and radically different places, which threaten the city’s supposed order and culture.
“It’s impossible to distinguish between what’s ashwa’i and what’s not, in Cairo,” says Hamdi Abu Golayyel. Abu Golayyel lived in the slum of Manshiyat Nasr for six years, and described it as “a mongrel place, part village and part unplanned city fringe, destination of squatters and incomers” in his 2006 novel Thieves in Retirement.
Abu Golayyel and I head there one night, in a taxi that speeds, for almost an hour and half, south along the Nile. Manshiyat Nasr (“Nasser’s New Town”) is in the industrial suburb of Helwan. It started as public housing for the workers in the nearby state-owned cement factories; but it soon overflowed into the surrounding countryside. A patch of palm trees, stranded between apartment buildings, conjures the fields that stood here just a few decades ago.
Abu Golayyel paid LE 100 a month (about $30, or Dh67 at the time) during his stay there, from 1995 to 2001. He waves towards the stocky little buildings, the small doors and cramped stairwells – these are “living spaces in the most basic sense,” he says. “Spaces to eat and sleep.”
Manshiyat Nasr is a new slum, and it lacks Imbaba’s self-confidence and cohesiveness. Abu Golayyel’s sly, satirical novel depicts a world in which every basis for community is frayed and unstable. But in his novel the slum isn’t the anti-city – it’s the essence of the city.
“I don’t understand what critics mean by the word ‘marginalised,’” says Abu Golayyel, as we leave Manshiyat Nasr. He gestures around him: “This neighbourhood isn’t any more marginalised than the rest of the city. People in Midan Tahrir,” he says, mentioning Cairo’s central square, “have no more power to make political decisions than people here. Mubarak is the core, and the rest of us are all marginalised.”
“It’s the future,” the salesman beside me says matter-of-factly, as we drive across a grey and empty desert plateau, 40km outside Cairo. We’ve finally reached the outer edge of the seemingly endless belt of construction that surrounds the city. Here lies Madinaty (“My city”), an enormous planned gated community, the brainchild of the disgraced tycoon Talaat Mustafa – once close to the Mubarak family, now appealing a death sentence for the hit he ordered on his Lebanese pop singer girlfriend. Madinaty is designed to house 500,000 people, as well as hospitals, universities, malls and a water park. The developer’s website calls it “the biggest all-inclusive enclosed city in the Middle East.” Renditions of the city feature palm-dotted lawns, man-made lagoons, glistening office towers, spotless shopping arcades.
The Egyptian government has long been convinced – since the early 1960s – that the solution to Cairo’s ills lie in expansion beyond its borders. Back then, however, it was the government that did the developing, erecting a series of self-sufficient blue-collar desert cities that drew disproportionate subsidies but attracted few residents. In line with Egypt’s latter-day rapprochement with capitalism, the Mubarak government has taken a drastically different approach, turning over the colonisation of the desert to the forces of private enterprise, selling off vast swaths of state land to developers.
Frenzied real-estate speculation has continued to drive development on Cairo’s outskirts: houses and apartments in the new cities are sold and resold many times over before they’re even built. My salesman, it turns out, lives in another new development called Dreamland, but he also bought an apartment in Madinaty “as an investment”; in the few years since his purchase, it has already doubled in value. So many people have purchased “investment” properties that, in a city with a severe housing shortage, an estimated million apartments sit empty.
We pass the security checkpoint and enter Madinaty’s endless, sweeping driveway. Its main gate is the size of the Arc de Triomphe. The architecture of the duplexes, town houses and apartment buildings inside is internationally bland and rigidly repetitive: red-tiled gables, sun patios, sliding glass doors. The two-bedroom apartments here will set you back Dh370,000; the grand and bland villas cost close to a Dh3.7m.
But what’s here so far is nothing compared to what is coming. I look out towards the horizon at a construction site the size of, well, a small city – row upon row of buildings, rising from the sand like a pastel mirage.
The salesman notes the clean, bracing breeze. Madinaty is on a desert plateau, almost 300 metres above Cairo. Water from the Nile will have to be pumped all the way up and out here – as to all the new cities – by state-built infrastructure. Electricity and roads – a second ring road is now being planned – will also be provided by the New Urban Communities Administration, which has just issued an LE 10bn (Dh6.7bn) bond to fund its efforts.
Relocating Cairo’s wealthier residents will not alleviate the crowding and poverty they leave behind. Though Imbaba has now been “pacified”, across enormous tranches of the city the state is still regarded as an unwelcome interloper, and anger is never far from the surface. When a cliff collapsed in the dismal slum of Duwaiqa, in 2008, killing 60 people and destroying 35 houses, emergency vehicles took hours to arrive. The authorities seemed more concerned with sealing off the area to journalists and aid workers than helping distraught residents who had been digging for their relatives with their bare hands. Then bulldozers arrived to demolish 1,000 homes at risk of collapse. Furious residents threw volleys of stones at the bulldozers and the governor’s convoy. They compared themselves to Palestinians under Israeli occupation. One columnist in an opposition newspaper wrote of “The Intifada of the ashwa’iyat”.
The new enclaves in the desert promise protection from such tensions. A friend knows a lady who bought a home in one of the new private developments. Her house was in the outer row, not far from a nearby public housing project. She decided to switch to a house nearer the centre – because, she said, “when those people rise up,” she didn’t want to be in the front line.
The slums are most often referred to as a “cancer” – and by that analogy, Cairo is already a terminal case. And the better off residents of this supposedly dying city have embraced the new developments as a sort of miracle cure.
I catch a glimpse of their enthusiasm at a five-star hotel overlooking the Nile, where a fashionable crowd – the men in suits, the women in slinky black dresses, not a headscarf in sight – nibbles on canapés while a jazz band plays in the background. I’m attending a reception organised by the real-estate developers SODIC and SOLIDERE to promote their new development, WestTown, located in the desert on the opposite side of Cairo from Madinaty.
I ask a salesman if business has slowed due to the global recession. He assures me that almost all the 175 units on sale – high-end apartments with whirlpools and teak floors, which can be customised in one of three styles: “Urban Chic,” “Natural Zen” and “Modern Islamic” – have been snapped up.
Guests take turns huddling around a maquette of the development. A projector has been mounted on the ceiling above, to create little virtual future residents, driving their cars down traffic-free, palm-lined streets, eating lunch in the cafes of the (closed-circuit-TV-monitored) plaza and diving into the rooftop pools. It is a projection of a perfect life, and it could be taking place anywhere.
Such pristine, self-sufficient communities are in fact a global phenomenon. But in a city where until recently everyone has been forced to endure close quarters, it is a new development. If, in the next few decades, the enclaves in the desert are populated by Cairo’s upper classes, this will represent what one expert on the Egyptian capital calls “a radical reformulation of Cairo’s urban landscape.”
Modern Cairo came into being, 150 years ago, with another “reformulation”, one that bears some striking resemblances to what’s going on today. In the 1860s, Egypt’s ruler, Khedive Ismail, grafted a European façade onto his capital, hoping to impress the foreign dignitaries invited to the opening ceremonies of the Suez Canal. A western downtown, complete with an opera house, public gardens, and wide Parisian-style avenues, was erected in the span of a few frantic years.
Ironically, the cost of these public works contributed to Egypt’s bankruptcy and led to the 70-year-long British occupation that would follow. Ismail showed off, then lost the country; but the district he established flourished, attracting the upper classes and the first modern government services. The nearby medieval core of the city, meanwhile, was increasingly seen as a dirty, disorderly relic of the past.
For most of the 20th century, the fault line between these two worlds – foreign and local, modern and “backward”, rich and poor – dominated the real and imaginative landscape of the city. What the anthropologist Janet Abu Lughod has called the “rent in the social fabric” of Cairo featured prominently in work of great Egyptian writers such as Naguib Mahfouz and Youssef Idris.
But in 20th-century Cairo, the new and the old city were contiguous, and crossing from one to the other was a fraught but relatively common journey. Today, as spatial segregation and social inequality increase, a much greater chasm seems to be opening.
Or perhaps it would be better described as a vacuum, for Cairo risks becoming a city where no one belongs – a place where the lower classes are blamed for their own disenfranchisement, and from which the upper classes are eager to secede. The preoccupation with the slums shows the malaise most Cairenes feel over the way their city has drifted, seemingly rudderless, over the last half-century.
To stigmatise the ashwai’yat for their poverty and their supposed chaos is politically convenient, but to bemoan them as the apocalyptic end of Egypt’s urban civilisation is far-fetched. The slums of Cairo are the visible symptoms of the shortage and misdirection of Egypt’s resources, of the limits of public oversight, interest and authority. They’re the best that most of Cairo’s residents – left largely to their own devices – have been able to come up with.
The fantasy that leads into the desert and the hysteria over the slums are two sides of the same coin, each one the sign of a deep unease over Cairo’s future and a desire to avoid confronting its present. In the escapism of the gated cities and the horror over the ragged lower-class neighborhoods, after all, there is the same whiff of denial – of a city eager, at least for the time being, to stick its head in the sand.
Ursula Lindsey is a freelance journalist based in Cairo, and writes the culture blog The Arabist Review.
Source: The National: And then Cairo turned itself inside out
To drive Cairo’s Ring Road – a 110-kilometre freeway that loops the city – is to sail through an endless sea of red brick. The brilliant green of the Nile Valley appears only in flashes through the expanse of cheap apartment blocks.
The buildings occupy what were once agricultural parcels; like those parcels, they are long and narrow, with only a hair’s breadth of space between them. They crowd right up to the freeway, so close that motorists may glance directly into their bare rooms. From their rooftops sprout unfinished supporting columns – ready for the addition of yet another floor. Their only decoration is bright, mismatched shutters; balconies enlivened by bold geometric patterns – pink and purple lozenges, green and orange stripes; and the bricks that spell, along the upper floors: “Allah.”
These are Cairo’s slums, what experts call its “informal” or “spontaneous” neighbourhoods. Egyptians call them ashwa’iyat – from the Arabic word for “random”, “haphazard”. They are the dense, sprawling answer to Cairo’s population explosion and its lack of affordable housing. Almost six in 10 Cairenes – at least 10 million people – live in informal neighbourhoods, often with limited access to water, electricity, schools, hospitals or refuse collection, and no real roads.
Hoda Hanin, 26, and her daughter Mariam stand in the Bashteel district of Imbaba, where Hoda grew up. "The people here are real," she says, "they're good country people." Dana Smillie for The National
Most capitals are magnets, but the speed with which the Egyptian one has grown in the last century is testament both to a remarkable centripetal power and to a surrounding vacuum of opportunity. Swelled by waves of rural migration, the population of greater Cairo has gone from less than one million at the beginning of the 20th century to about 18 million today – a megacity in the order of Mumbai or São Paulo, with more people than Lebanon, Jordan and Libya combined.
For centuries, Cairo’s expansion has been checked by geography: the city is bounded by a narrow strip of fertile, Nile-irrigated land, with nothing but desert beyond. The migrants who flocked to the city in the last century found there was nowhere to live: they built shacks on rooftops; they made homes out of covered alleys, inner courtyards, and stairwells. Priced out of the soaring formal real estate market, they started building illegally – on the agricultural land that surrounds the city and on the barren plateau that separates it from the desert.
The author Hamdi Abu Golayyel describes the slum in which he lived for six years as "a mongrel of a place, part village and part unplanned city fringe, destination of squatters and incomers". Dana Smillie for The National
Cairo has long been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The city teeters under the weight of its multitudes – its public services worn ragged; its air pollution among the worst in the world; its traffic barely managed by freeway overpasses and tunnels, clumsy last-minute bypass surgeries intended to repair its clogged and failing arteries.
Faced with the city’s barely contained chaos and alarmed by the growing slums, Cairo’s elites have begun to dream of escape. Along the Ring Road, billboards advertise exclusive new private developments, with names like country clubs or bad discos – Utopia, Le Reve, Dreamland, Qattamiya Heights, Palm Hills, Belle Ville – and slogans like ““The Egypt of My Desires.” One advertisement, overlooking dilapidated buildings in the centre of town, simply asks: “Why Are You Here?”
Cairo’s future, it seems, lies outside the city’s boundaries, in the desert – where it can be built from scratch. Today the outer edges of the city are one vast construction site, full of subdivisions where empty million-dollar villas stand among the sand dunes, and giant gated communities that promise a luxurious escape from Cairo’s pollution and friction.
What will be the effect of this flight on the city that’s left behind? If Cairo’s future is uncertain, its present is no easier to comprehend. “Perhaps today’s greatest riddle is not so much ‘Where is Cairo headed?’”, notes the writer Maria Golia, “as ‘Where is Cairo at all?’”
Somewhere between the dirt alleys of the slums and the golf courses of the gated suburbs; between the resourcefulness of millions of poor residents and the real estate speculation that has redefined the city’s edges; between the fears that Cairo is becoming one giant “slum” and the fantasy of starting over – the Egyptian capital is taking shape once again.
Hoda Hanin,a 26-year-old teaching assistant, balances her six-month-old daughter on her hip as she heads down a narrow dirt alley to her parents’ home in the slum of Bashteel. She grew up here, back when it was a village on the western bank of the Nile. “It was all farmland,” she says, “then people started clearing it out, selling the land, building homes for their kids.” Today, Bashteel and numerous other nearby villages have been absorbed into the crowded informal neighbourhood of Imbaba.
The average density in Cairo is 90,000 people per square mile; in Imbaba, it’s over 200,000, three times that of Manhattan. Imbaba’s side-streets are unpaved and no more than two metres wide: narrow, endless crevasses between the red-brick buildings. Three-wheel tuk-tuks, imported from India, are the only vehicles capable of navigating the bumpy, rubbish-strewn paths.
For decades, the Egyptian government willfully ignored the spread of the ashwa’iyat. The low-level officials who were supposed to enforce zoning and building laws took bribes to look the other way; on official maps of Cairo, these areas simply didn’t exist. Under this regime of collusion and neglect, the slums grew and grew, providing the masses much-needed cheap housing and allowing the authorities to forgo providing services.
The Talaat Mustafa Group's latest mega-development, located in the desert east of Cairo. Dana Smillie for The National
By the early 1990s, however, Cairo was forced to face its slums. The earthquake that struck the city in 1992 left thousands in the informal neighbourhoods homeless; since then fires and collapses have regularly put one slum or another on the front pages of local newspapers. At around the same time, the Islamist group Jama’a Islamiya took de facto control of Imbaba – creating what the foreign press quickly dubbed “the Islamic Republic of Imbaba”. The government dispatched more than 12,000 soldiers to carry out a six-week siege, round up the Islamists, and reimpose its authority.
After regaining control of Imbaba, the government announced it would spend hundreds of millions of Egyptian pounds to – as one newspaper put it – “Transform Centers of Terrorism into a Civilised Area”. The government set aside LE600 million (about $200m, or Dh402m) for slum upgrades, demolitions and relocations, and further plans for Imbaba are under way – to create more public housing, relocate thousands of street vendors, demolish some buildings and cut major new thoroughfares through the area.
Hoda thinks new, wider roads would be a great improvement. But like many residents here, her complaints about lack of services are tempered by her pride in how successfully, and civilly, Imbaba manages its own affairs. “The people here are real,” she says, “they’re good, country people.” When on our way home we become stuck in traffic in one of Imbaba’s many impassable intersections, she points to the neighbourhood men who are volunteering as impromptu traffic police: “See how they drop everything to help out.” When I ask Hoda where else she might like to live, her eyes grow wide and she says emphatically: “No, no, no! I never want to live outside Imbaba. I know the people here. We’re used to each other.”
“The people in my street let you take pictures there because they trust that I won’t let anyone give Imbaba a bad name,” Hoda tells me, after my visit. “What will you write about Imbaba? Will you write good things?”
Her anxiety over how her neighbourhood will be depicted by outsiders isn’t surprising, given the tenor of most discussions of the ashwa’iyat. Hand-wringing over Cairo’s slums has become a favourite habit of Egypt’s policymakers, artists and public intellectuals. The Egyptian and pan-Arab press abounds with horrified descriptions of these supposedly irredeemable hellholes. An article in Dar Al Hayat newspaper offers a description that is typical in its tone of Victorian shock: the ashwai’yat, the author writes, “are neighbourhoods with no laws and no values and no fixed sources of livelihood … They are neighbourhoods with no peace and security, where crime, selling and taking drugs, prostitution, wanton sex from a young age, take place. Relations are stamped with gangsterism, fighting, revenge, and violence. It’s a life without hope, vision, conviction, or the ability to change one’s destiny.”
More sympathetic depictions of the ashwa’iyat are often no less voyeuristic. A blockbuster 2007 film set in the slums, Hena Maysara, tells the melodramatic story of star-crossed lovers named Nahed and Adel; by the end of the film, Adel has become a gangster, Nahed a prostitute; their illegitimate child becomes a homeless teenage grifter. The slum they inhabit, taken over by extremists, is blown to smithereens in a fiery battle with the police.
The director, Khaled Youssef, called the film “a warning cry”, but in scene after titillating scene of sex, violence and drug use, it gives the impression that the ashwai’yat don’t contain a single law-abiding, gainfully employed resident. The Egyptian Ministry of Housing estimates there are 67 informal areas in Cairo. They range from truly dismal slums to lower-class neighbourhoods that are dense and under-serviced, but hardly dens of vice and desperation. Yet even as they use the ashwai’yat to mount a critique of the Mubarak government, many artists and intellectuals end up stigmatising these areas as dark, dangerous, and radically different places, which threaten the city’s supposed order and culture.
“It’s impossible to distinguish between what’s ashwa’i and what’s not, in Cairo,” says Hamdi Abu Golayyel. Abu Golayyel lived in the slum of Manshiyat Nasr for six years, and described it as “a mongrel place, part village and part unplanned city fringe, destination of squatters and incomers” in his 2006 novel Thieves in Retirement.
Abu Golayyel and I head there one night, in a taxi that speeds, for almost an hour and half, south along the Nile. Manshiyat Nasr (“Nasser’s New Town”) is in the industrial suburb of Helwan. It started as public housing for the workers in the nearby state-owned cement factories; but it soon overflowed into the surrounding countryside. A patch of palm trees, stranded between apartment buildings, conjures the fields that stood here just a few decades ago.
Abu Golayyel paid LE 100 a month (about $30, or Dh67 at the time) during his stay there, from 1995 to 2001. He waves towards the stocky little buildings, the small doors and cramped stairwells – these are “living spaces in the most basic sense,” he says. “Spaces to eat and sleep.”
Manshiyat Nasr is a new slum, and it lacks Imbaba’s self-confidence and cohesiveness. Abu Golayyel’s sly, satirical novel depicts a world in which every basis for community is frayed and unstable. But in his novel the slum isn’t the anti-city – it’s the essence of the city.
“I don’t understand what critics mean by the word ‘marginalised,’” says Abu Golayyel, as we leave Manshiyat Nasr. He gestures around him: “This neighbourhood isn’t any more marginalised than the rest of the city. People in Midan Tahrir,” he says, mentioning Cairo’s central square, “have no more power to make political decisions than people here. Mubarak is the core, and the rest of us are all marginalised.”
“It’s the future,” the salesman beside me says matter-of-factly, as we drive across a grey and empty desert plateau, 40km outside Cairo. We’ve finally reached the outer edge of the seemingly endless belt of construction that surrounds the city. Here lies Madinaty (“My city”), an enormous planned gated community, the brainchild of the disgraced tycoon Talaat Mustafa – once close to the Mubarak family, now appealing a death sentence for the hit he ordered on his Lebanese pop singer girlfriend. Madinaty is designed to house 500,000 people, as well as hospitals, universities, malls and a water park. The developer’s website calls it “the biggest all-inclusive enclosed city in the Middle East.” Renditions of the city feature palm-dotted lawns, man-made lagoons, glistening office towers, spotless shopping arcades.
The Egyptian government has long been convinced – since the early 1960s – that the solution to Cairo’s ills lie in expansion beyond its borders. Back then, however, it was the government that did the developing, erecting a series of self-sufficient blue-collar desert cities that drew disproportionate subsidies but attracted few residents. In line with Egypt’s latter-day rapprochement with capitalism, the Mubarak government has taken a drastically different approach, turning over the colonisation of the desert to the forces of private enterprise, selling off vast swaths of state land to developers.
Frenzied real-estate speculation has continued to drive development on Cairo’s outskirts: houses and apartments in the new cities are sold and resold many times over before they’re even built. My salesman, it turns out, lives in another new development called Dreamland, but he also bought an apartment in Madinaty “as an investment”; in the few years since his purchase, it has already doubled in value. So many people have purchased “investment” properties that, in a city with a severe housing shortage, an estimated million apartments sit empty.
We pass the security checkpoint and enter Madinaty’s endless, sweeping driveway. Its main gate is the size of the Arc de Triomphe. The architecture of the duplexes, town houses and apartment buildings inside is internationally bland and rigidly repetitive: red-tiled gables, sun patios, sliding glass doors. The two-bedroom apartments here will set you back Dh370,000; the grand and bland villas cost close to a Dh3.7m.
But what’s here so far is nothing compared to what is coming. I look out towards the horizon at a construction site the size of, well, a small city – row upon row of buildings, rising from the sand like a pastel mirage.
The salesman notes the clean, bracing breeze. Madinaty is on a desert plateau, almost 300 metres above Cairo. Water from the Nile will have to be pumped all the way up and out here – as to all the new cities – by state-built infrastructure. Electricity and roads – a second ring road is now being planned – will also be provided by the New Urban Communities Administration, which has just issued an LE 10bn (Dh6.7bn) bond to fund its efforts.
Relocating Cairo’s wealthier residents will not alleviate the crowding and poverty they leave behind. Though Imbaba has now been “pacified”, across enormous tranches of the city the state is still regarded as an unwelcome interloper, and anger is never far from the surface. When a cliff collapsed in the dismal slum of Duwaiqa, in 2008, killing 60 people and destroying 35 houses, emergency vehicles took hours to arrive. The authorities seemed more concerned with sealing off the area to journalists and aid workers than helping distraught residents who had been digging for their relatives with their bare hands. Then bulldozers arrived to demolish 1,000 homes at risk of collapse. Furious residents threw volleys of stones at the bulldozers and the governor’s convoy. They compared themselves to Palestinians under Israeli occupation. One columnist in an opposition newspaper wrote of “The Intifada of the ashwa’iyat”.
The new enclaves in the desert promise protection from such tensions. A friend knows a lady who bought a home in one of the new private developments. Her house was in the outer row, not far from a nearby public housing project. She decided to switch to a house nearer the centre – because, she said, “when those people rise up,” she didn’t want to be in the front line.
The slums are most often referred to as a “cancer” – and by that analogy, Cairo is already a terminal case. And the better off residents of this supposedly dying city have embraced the new developments as a sort of miracle cure.
I catch a glimpse of their enthusiasm at a five-star hotel overlooking the Nile, where a fashionable crowd – the men in suits, the women in slinky black dresses, not a headscarf in sight – nibbles on canapés while a jazz band plays in the background. I’m attending a reception organised by the real-estate developers SODIC and SOLIDERE to promote their new development, WestTown, located in the desert on the opposite side of Cairo from Madinaty.
I ask a salesman if business has slowed due to the global recession. He assures me that almost all the 175 units on sale – high-end apartments with whirlpools and teak floors, which can be customised in one of three styles: “Urban Chic,” “Natural Zen” and “Modern Islamic” – have been snapped up.
Guests take turns huddling around a maquette of the development. A projector has been mounted on the ceiling above, to create little virtual future residents, driving their cars down traffic-free, palm-lined streets, eating lunch in the cafes of the (closed-circuit-TV-monitored) plaza and diving into the rooftop pools. It is a projection of a perfect life, and it could be taking place anywhere.
Such pristine, self-sufficient communities are in fact a global phenomenon. But in a city where until recently everyone has been forced to endure close quarters, it is a new development. If, in the next few decades, the enclaves in the desert are populated by Cairo’s upper classes, this will represent what one expert on the Egyptian capital calls “a radical reformulation of Cairo’s urban landscape.”
Modern Cairo came into being, 150 years ago, with another “reformulation”, one that bears some striking resemblances to what’s going on today. In the 1860s, Egypt’s ruler, Khedive Ismail, grafted a European façade onto his capital, hoping to impress the foreign dignitaries invited to the opening ceremonies of the Suez Canal. A western downtown, complete with an opera house, public gardens, and wide Parisian-style avenues, was erected in the span of a few frantic years.
Ironically, the cost of these public works contributed to Egypt’s bankruptcy and led to the 70-year-long British occupation that would follow. Ismail showed off, then lost the country; but the district he established flourished, attracting the upper classes and the first modern government services. The nearby medieval core of the city, meanwhile, was increasingly seen as a dirty, disorderly relic of the past.
For most of the 20th century, the fault line between these two worlds – foreign and local, modern and “backward”, rich and poor – dominated the real and imaginative landscape of the city. What the anthropologist Janet Abu Lughod has called the “rent in the social fabric” of Cairo featured prominently in work of great Egyptian writers such as Naguib Mahfouz and Youssef Idris.
But in 20th-century Cairo, the new and the old city were contiguous, and crossing from one to the other was a fraught but relatively common journey. Today, as spatial segregation and social inequality increase, a much greater chasm seems to be opening.
Or perhaps it would be better described as a vacuum, for Cairo risks becoming a city where no one belongs – a place where the lower classes are blamed for their own disenfranchisement, and from which the upper classes are eager to secede. The preoccupation with the slums shows the malaise most Cairenes feel over the way their city has drifted, seemingly rudderless, over the last half-century.
To stigmatise the ashwai’yat for their poverty and their supposed chaos is politically convenient, but to bemoan them as the apocalyptic end of Egypt’s urban civilisation is far-fetched. The slums of Cairo are the visible symptoms of the shortage and misdirection of Egypt’s resources, of the limits of public oversight, interest and authority. They’re the best that most of Cairo’s residents – left largely to their own devices – have been able to come up with.
The fantasy that leads into the desert and the hysteria over the slums are two sides of the same coin, each one the sign of a deep unease over Cairo’s future and a desire to avoid confronting its present. In the escapism of the gated cities and the horror over the ragged lower-class neighborhoods, after all, there is the same whiff of denial – of a city eager, at least for the time being, to stick its head in the sand.
Ursula Lindsey is a freelance journalist based in Cairo, and writes the culture blog The Arabist Review.
Source: The National: And then Cairo turned itself inside out
Saturday, 27 February 2010
A brief history (or lack thereof) of Atatürk in the movies
With Zülfü Livaneli's Atatürk biopic 'Veda' (Farewell), along with another offering on the same subject, due out in the next few months, we look back at the history of Atatürk biopics in Turkish cinema - or, more accurately, at the lack of them
A scene from 'Veda' by Zülfü Livaneli.
A scene from 'Veda' by Zülfü Livaneli.
Despite the passing of nearly a century since one of the first films detailing Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s role in the War of Independence, we have yet to see a truly impressive, groundbreaking feature film on Atatürk.
This week, “Veda” (Farewell), an Atatürk biopic by revered writer, composer, singer and filmmaker Zülfü Livaneli is being released. And in March, we will get to see another biopic, “Dersimiz Atatürk” (Today’s Lesson, Atatürk), written by Turgut Özakman, who penned the biggest-selling novel/biopic on Atatürk, “Şu Çılgın Türkler” (These Crazy Turks).
Both films promise to be essentially chronological tales of Atatürk’s life from childhood to death, a story memorized by heart by everyone born in Turkey. “Veda” is narrated by Atatürk’s childhood friend Salih Bozok, a devoted follower to his vision. The second film is told by an old storyteller to children – meaning we will get to watch another film about the founder of the Turkish Republic in narration, much like Can Dündar’s controversial 2008 documentary, “Mustafa.”
From Olivier to DeMille
As long as there has been cinema in Turkey, there have been rumors about Atatürk films, with a definitive feature biopic perpetually in the works since the 1950s. The reasons why these films were never made boil down to three basic facts: Atatürk’s image as a deity in the collective conscience of the Turkish people; apprehension about deviating from the state accounts of Atatürk’s biography; and the significance of such a film for the current political agenda.
According to Metin Erksan, one of Turkish cinema’s greatest filmmakers, Hollywood’s interest in an Atatürk biopic goes back to the late 1940s. American actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was cast to play Atatürk after World War II; when he visited Turkey in 1951, he was welcomed as a national hero, but the film project never came to fruition.
Later, Sir Laurence Olivier showed interest in the same script. But his interest also wore off as no government, civil or private institution from Turkey chose to cooperate in the project. Soon, another big name, the legendary American director and producer Cecil B. DeMille, showed interest in adapting Atatürk’s life, the Independence War and the Kemalist revolutions to the silver screen.
DeMille, who was known for his penchant for extravaganza with big epic dramas such as “The Ten Commandments” and “Cleopatra,” approached state representatives from both Turkey and the United Kingdom. Though U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave a green light to the project, Turkey once more remained silent.
After DeMille died, his production partner, Adil Özkaptan, talked with Turkish President Cemal Gürsel. Both Özkaptan and Yul Brynner, the latest actor cast as a potential Atatürk, also met with Gürsel, but were once again unable to produce an Atatürk biopic.
License to film Atatürk
Tarquin Olivier, the son of the British cinema giant, tried for more than a decade to bring Atatürk to the screen – even linking Antonio Banderas to the role at one point. The plan was shelved, however, and Banderas had to content himself with playing Ché in “Evita” and Zorro in “The Mask of Zorro” and its sequel.
The latest in a line of international Atatürk projects was initiated not long ago by Fuad Kavur, a British citizen who is also the cousin of the late Turkish director Ömer Kavur. The script is apparently ready and there are rumors that Kavur has been approaching producers with the idea of casting Daniel “James Bond” Craig in the lead role.
Despite the abortive foreign attempts, there are a few examples of Atatürk biopics in the history of Turkish cinema – some of them merely adaptations of school books, others expensive productions that are little more than glorified adaptations of the same school books.
The most noted of these offerings are director Feyzi Tuna’s “Metamorfoz” (Metamorphosis), commissioned by President Kenan Evren following the 1980 coup; the early 1990s television series “Kurtuluş” (Independence), directed by Ziya Öztan and written by Özakman; and “Cumhuriyet” (The Republic) by the same duo in the late 1990s.
Semih Tezcan began attempting an Atatürk biopic in 1980s; his three-decade-long quest to make the movie, however, resulted instead in the book, “Atatürk Filmi Projesi Nasıl Baltalandı?” (How Did the Atatürk Biopic Project Get Axed?).
Was ‘Mustafa’ a cautionary tale?
The most recent example of an Atatürk movie was a documentary film that proved more controversial than it deserved to be. Dündar’s “Mustafa” shed a whole new light on Turkey’s greatest hero, depicting the deified leader as a human being for perhaps the first time.
As implied by the first-name title, “Mustafa” was a very intimate recounting of Atatürk’s life in a never-before-seen light. Following painstaking research in the public archives from Atatürk’s personal journals, Dündar brought a whole new dimension to an exalted leader who finally came down from his pedestal.
Here was a man who flirted, missed his mother, had his heart broken, clashed with his friends, made mistakes, danced, drank and eventually led a lonely life in the face of a new century he could understand perfectly well but had no one with whom to share it.
From the first day of its release, “Mustafa” became the top subject of newspaper stories and TV programs. Did Atatürk talk about an autonomous land for the Kurds? Could he be called a dictator? What were the motives behind showing him smoking? And, oddly enough, how could he be lonely with a whole nation in awe of him?
Two years after “Mustafa” and the endless debates around it, two new feature films on Atatürk are ready to hit the screens.
The debates surrounding Dündar’s efforts seem to have sounded a cautionary note because, from the looks of the trailers, both films promise to be history lessons rather than character dramas. Here’s hoping the trailers are misleading.
Source: Hurriyet: A brief history (or lack thereof) of Atatürk in the movies
A scene from 'Veda' by Zülfü Livaneli.
A scene from 'Veda' by Zülfü Livaneli.
Despite the passing of nearly a century since one of the first films detailing Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s role in the War of Independence, we have yet to see a truly impressive, groundbreaking feature film on Atatürk.
This week, “Veda” (Farewell), an Atatürk biopic by revered writer, composer, singer and filmmaker Zülfü Livaneli is being released. And in March, we will get to see another biopic, “Dersimiz Atatürk” (Today’s Lesson, Atatürk), written by Turgut Özakman, who penned the biggest-selling novel/biopic on Atatürk, “Şu Çılgın Türkler” (These Crazy Turks).
Both films promise to be essentially chronological tales of Atatürk’s life from childhood to death, a story memorized by heart by everyone born in Turkey. “Veda” is narrated by Atatürk’s childhood friend Salih Bozok, a devoted follower to his vision. The second film is told by an old storyteller to children – meaning we will get to watch another film about the founder of the Turkish Republic in narration, much like Can Dündar’s controversial 2008 documentary, “Mustafa.”
From Olivier to DeMille
As long as there has been cinema in Turkey, there have been rumors about Atatürk films, with a definitive feature biopic perpetually in the works since the 1950s. The reasons why these films were never made boil down to three basic facts: Atatürk’s image as a deity in the collective conscience of the Turkish people; apprehension about deviating from the state accounts of Atatürk’s biography; and the significance of such a film for the current political agenda.
According to Metin Erksan, one of Turkish cinema’s greatest filmmakers, Hollywood’s interest in an Atatürk biopic goes back to the late 1940s. American actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was cast to play Atatürk after World War II; when he visited Turkey in 1951, he was welcomed as a national hero, but the film project never came to fruition.
Later, Sir Laurence Olivier showed interest in the same script. But his interest also wore off as no government, civil or private institution from Turkey chose to cooperate in the project. Soon, another big name, the legendary American director and producer Cecil B. DeMille, showed interest in adapting Atatürk’s life, the Independence War and the Kemalist revolutions to the silver screen.
DeMille, who was known for his penchant for extravaganza with big epic dramas such as “The Ten Commandments” and “Cleopatra,” approached state representatives from both Turkey and the United Kingdom. Though U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave a green light to the project, Turkey once more remained silent.
After DeMille died, his production partner, Adil Özkaptan, talked with Turkish President Cemal Gürsel. Both Özkaptan and Yul Brynner, the latest actor cast as a potential Atatürk, also met with Gürsel, but were once again unable to produce an Atatürk biopic.
License to film Atatürk
Tarquin Olivier, the son of the British cinema giant, tried for more than a decade to bring Atatürk to the screen – even linking Antonio Banderas to the role at one point. The plan was shelved, however, and Banderas had to content himself with playing Ché in “Evita” and Zorro in “The Mask of Zorro” and its sequel.
The latest in a line of international Atatürk projects was initiated not long ago by Fuad Kavur, a British citizen who is also the cousin of the late Turkish director Ömer Kavur. The script is apparently ready and there are rumors that Kavur has been approaching producers with the idea of casting Daniel “James Bond” Craig in the lead role.
Despite the abortive foreign attempts, there are a few examples of Atatürk biopics in the history of Turkish cinema – some of them merely adaptations of school books, others expensive productions that are little more than glorified adaptations of the same school books.
The most noted of these offerings are director Feyzi Tuna’s “Metamorfoz” (Metamorphosis), commissioned by President Kenan Evren following the 1980 coup; the early 1990s television series “Kurtuluş” (Independence), directed by Ziya Öztan and written by Özakman; and “Cumhuriyet” (The Republic) by the same duo in the late 1990s.
Semih Tezcan began attempting an Atatürk biopic in 1980s; his three-decade-long quest to make the movie, however, resulted instead in the book, “Atatürk Filmi Projesi Nasıl Baltalandı?” (How Did the Atatürk Biopic Project Get Axed?).
Was ‘Mustafa’ a cautionary tale?
The most recent example of an Atatürk movie was a documentary film that proved more controversial than it deserved to be. Dündar’s “Mustafa” shed a whole new light on Turkey’s greatest hero, depicting the deified leader as a human being for perhaps the first time.
As implied by the first-name title, “Mustafa” was a very intimate recounting of Atatürk’s life in a never-before-seen light. Following painstaking research in the public archives from Atatürk’s personal journals, Dündar brought a whole new dimension to an exalted leader who finally came down from his pedestal.
Here was a man who flirted, missed his mother, had his heart broken, clashed with his friends, made mistakes, danced, drank and eventually led a lonely life in the face of a new century he could understand perfectly well but had no one with whom to share it.
From the first day of its release, “Mustafa” became the top subject of newspaper stories and TV programs. Did Atatürk talk about an autonomous land for the Kurds? Could he be called a dictator? What were the motives behind showing him smoking? And, oddly enough, how could he be lonely with a whole nation in awe of him?
Two years after “Mustafa” and the endless debates around it, two new feature films on Atatürk are ready to hit the screens.
The debates surrounding Dündar’s efforts seem to have sounded a cautionary note because, from the looks of the trailers, both films promise to be history lessons rather than character dramas. Here’s hoping the trailers are misleading.
Source: Hurriyet: A brief history (or lack thereof) of Atatürk in the movies
Liberation and artistry have transformed the Arab novel
There is little doubt that the Arab novel has been on the rise in recent years. The volume of published works, the expansive themes and forms, the breaking of taboos, the new emerging prizes and the active translations into other languages all point to such a rise. Size of readership is also widening, though not at the same pace as other promising developments. In certain ways, part of the impetus of this rise could be accredited to the late Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz winning the Nobel Prize in 1988. Since then Arab novel writing and publishing have witnessed a remarkable leap.
This new contemporary wave of Arab novel has indeed moved the art of fiction writing in the Arab world into new territories: breaking more taboos and developing new aesthetics.
Socially and culturally, the Arab novel has come to the forefront, exposing and questioning many previously unquestionable traditional forms of sociality.
Aesthetically, creative forms and experimental structures and prose have also flourished, challenging classical traditions and reflecting more self-confidence and adventurous attitudes.
Key to understanding the rise and success of the recent surge of the Arab novel, which deserves to be underlined, is its relation to the suppressive socio-cultural and political conditions in the Arab world. The flourishing of Arab fiction is in fact linked and provoked by the continuation of these conditions, and is a sharp response against its coercions and an uncompromising denunciation of it.
This key linkage between the success of the Arab novel and the suppressive environment from which it is emerging merits further elaboration in more than one aspect.
In the first place, the sheer contradictions and interwoven sets of political, social and religious patriarchies of the Arab reality at home and/or abroad keep creating manifestations of suffering, longing and revolt at individual and group levels.
All this produces ripe themes waiting to be captured aesthetically and creatively, not only in novel writing but also in other forms of art. The Arab reality over the past two decades, in the 1990s and 2000s, has perhaps witnessed a trajectory of the sharpest changes: global wars fought on Arab land, deep rifts among and within many individual countries, a mushrooming of sectarianism, increases in religiosity and conservatism.
The recent Arab reality has also experienced both a continuing lack of justice and the heavy presence of authoritarianism, compounded with confusion over modernity and westernisation led by the globalisation of communication, satellite broadcasting and internet penetration.
Added to this has been the collapse of pan-Arab ideologies which has brought with it lack of meaning and purpose, and also the alienation of younger generations and general challenges to identity and belonging. For many Arabs, aspects and consequences of this vastly compounded surreal reality seem in fact unbelievably more fictitious than fiction.
Thus successful creative representations of these aspects and consequences, when cleverly formulated, have yielded astounding works, as has indeed been the case over the past two decades in the field of novel writing.
A second aspect worth noticing is the fact that the Arab novel has become one of the freest intellectual and yet public platforms of expression in the Arab sphere.
Apart from the internet and blogging, no other intellectual platform could accommodate the sensitivity, daring and provocation that the new Arab novel is addressing. While some relatively free media outlets that challenge the boundaries of political free expression shy away from touching traditional social taboos, representations in Arab fiction challenge exactly these religious, social and cultural boundaries.
Fanaticism in general and even religion itself is criticised, existential questions are posed, social norms and traditions are deconstructed, self-expression and longing for emancipation takes voice limitlessly, and so on and so forth.
But on top of all this and related to it is the incidence of both female writings and writers. A generation of female novelists, from the Maghreb countries to the Gulf countries, has strongly and confidently burst on to the literary scene. All prize short-lists have had on them successful female writers. It could be said that nowhere else in Arab writing or social platforms are women’s issues, including suppression, desire for rebellion against traditional constructs and emancipation, expressed and presented as they are in the Arab novel.
Intimately related to the above is a third aspect that is worth mentioning and that is the diverse background of the Arab novelists in general.
Because of the harsh Arab reality and the limited venues of free expression, we have witnessed ex-politicians, journalists, academics and activists, males and females, migrating to the field of fiction writing. Most of them have done so seeking a freer sphere for self-expression. Some of their production suffers, expectedly, from directness and emphasis on message-delivering at the expense of aesthetics. But a considerable part of the writing by these groups has nonetheless succeeded in impressing.
Many of these newcomers have discovered in fiction writing a new terrain. It is here and not in academic or serious journalistic writing where almost everything is allowed: subjectivity and self-expression, freedom from political correctness, wild articulation, naming things even with prejudice, nurturing metaphors that are decoded by all, and so on.
Notwithstanding all of the cultural considerations mentioned above, it must be said that it is not just cultural criticism that matters in fiction and creative writing. Literary forms, artistic presentations and imaginative approaches remain first and foremost. No compromise on the aesthetics of literary works should ever be accepted. And the guarding of the aesthetics of the new wave of Arab novel has evolved into the a motivating cause for a number of fiction prizes in the Arab world, chief among them the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, launched in 2007/2008.
In taking a quick or even a deeper look at the titles that have made it on to the long and short lists in the past three years, one could safely conclude that a combination of fine artistic writing and social and political taboo-breaking themes has lain at the heart of this plethora of Arab fiction writing. Taboo-breaking works are common in all cultures; most of them substitute lack of aesthetics with sensationalism. This type of work has little artistic value, if any. The same applies to Arab fiction writing. There have been many “works of fiction” that were produced exploiting a challenge to the three traditional taboos: politics, sex and religion. Hastiness and opportunism are clear in many cases where authors seek fame and publicity, claiming heroism because of the sensitive subjects they embark on, sometimes with risks. One could compile a long list of Arabic works over the past few years that belong to this taxonomy.
However, the carte blanche that used to be given to these works only on the basis of taboo-breaking has been revoked. The true contribution of the fiction and literary prizes comes exactly at this juncture – that is to shepherd all experimentation, cultural challenges and theme exploration within the boundaries of literary criticism as the main criteria for judging creative writing.
Dr Khaled Hroub is the Director of Cambridge Arab Media Project at the University of Cambridge. The International Prize for Arabic Fiction is funded by the Emirates Foundation and is independently managed by its own board of trustees
Source: The National: Liberation and artistry have transformed the Arab novel
This new contemporary wave of Arab novel has indeed moved the art of fiction writing in the Arab world into new territories: breaking more taboos and developing new aesthetics.
Socially and culturally, the Arab novel has come to the forefront, exposing and questioning many previously unquestionable traditional forms of sociality.
Aesthetically, creative forms and experimental structures and prose have also flourished, challenging classical traditions and reflecting more self-confidence and adventurous attitudes.
Key to understanding the rise and success of the recent surge of the Arab novel, which deserves to be underlined, is its relation to the suppressive socio-cultural and political conditions in the Arab world. The flourishing of Arab fiction is in fact linked and provoked by the continuation of these conditions, and is a sharp response against its coercions and an uncompromising denunciation of it.
This key linkage between the success of the Arab novel and the suppressive environment from which it is emerging merits further elaboration in more than one aspect.
In the first place, the sheer contradictions and interwoven sets of political, social and religious patriarchies of the Arab reality at home and/or abroad keep creating manifestations of suffering, longing and revolt at individual and group levels.
All this produces ripe themes waiting to be captured aesthetically and creatively, not only in novel writing but also in other forms of art. The Arab reality over the past two decades, in the 1990s and 2000s, has perhaps witnessed a trajectory of the sharpest changes: global wars fought on Arab land, deep rifts among and within many individual countries, a mushrooming of sectarianism, increases in religiosity and conservatism.
The recent Arab reality has also experienced both a continuing lack of justice and the heavy presence of authoritarianism, compounded with confusion over modernity and westernisation led by the globalisation of communication, satellite broadcasting and internet penetration.
Added to this has been the collapse of pan-Arab ideologies which has brought with it lack of meaning and purpose, and also the alienation of younger generations and general challenges to identity and belonging. For many Arabs, aspects and consequences of this vastly compounded surreal reality seem in fact unbelievably more fictitious than fiction.
Thus successful creative representations of these aspects and consequences, when cleverly formulated, have yielded astounding works, as has indeed been the case over the past two decades in the field of novel writing.
A second aspect worth noticing is the fact that the Arab novel has become one of the freest intellectual and yet public platforms of expression in the Arab sphere.
Apart from the internet and blogging, no other intellectual platform could accommodate the sensitivity, daring and provocation that the new Arab novel is addressing. While some relatively free media outlets that challenge the boundaries of political free expression shy away from touching traditional social taboos, representations in Arab fiction challenge exactly these religious, social and cultural boundaries.
Fanaticism in general and even religion itself is criticised, existential questions are posed, social norms and traditions are deconstructed, self-expression and longing for emancipation takes voice limitlessly, and so on and so forth.
But on top of all this and related to it is the incidence of both female writings and writers. A generation of female novelists, from the Maghreb countries to the Gulf countries, has strongly and confidently burst on to the literary scene. All prize short-lists have had on them successful female writers. It could be said that nowhere else in Arab writing or social platforms are women’s issues, including suppression, desire for rebellion against traditional constructs and emancipation, expressed and presented as they are in the Arab novel.
Intimately related to the above is a third aspect that is worth mentioning and that is the diverse background of the Arab novelists in general.
Because of the harsh Arab reality and the limited venues of free expression, we have witnessed ex-politicians, journalists, academics and activists, males and females, migrating to the field of fiction writing. Most of them have done so seeking a freer sphere for self-expression. Some of their production suffers, expectedly, from directness and emphasis on message-delivering at the expense of aesthetics. But a considerable part of the writing by these groups has nonetheless succeeded in impressing.
Many of these newcomers have discovered in fiction writing a new terrain. It is here and not in academic or serious journalistic writing where almost everything is allowed: subjectivity and self-expression, freedom from political correctness, wild articulation, naming things even with prejudice, nurturing metaphors that are decoded by all, and so on.
Notwithstanding all of the cultural considerations mentioned above, it must be said that it is not just cultural criticism that matters in fiction and creative writing. Literary forms, artistic presentations and imaginative approaches remain first and foremost. No compromise on the aesthetics of literary works should ever be accepted. And the guarding of the aesthetics of the new wave of Arab novel has evolved into the a motivating cause for a number of fiction prizes in the Arab world, chief among them the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, launched in 2007/2008.
In taking a quick or even a deeper look at the titles that have made it on to the long and short lists in the past three years, one could safely conclude that a combination of fine artistic writing and social and political taboo-breaking themes has lain at the heart of this plethora of Arab fiction writing. Taboo-breaking works are common in all cultures; most of them substitute lack of aesthetics with sensationalism. This type of work has little artistic value, if any. The same applies to Arab fiction writing. There have been many “works of fiction” that were produced exploiting a challenge to the three traditional taboos: politics, sex and religion. Hastiness and opportunism are clear in many cases where authors seek fame and publicity, claiming heroism because of the sensitive subjects they embark on, sometimes with risks. One could compile a long list of Arabic works over the past few years that belong to this taxonomy.
However, the carte blanche that used to be given to these works only on the basis of taboo-breaking has been revoked. The true contribution of the fiction and literary prizes comes exactly at this juncture – that is to shepherd all experimentation, cultural challenges and theme exploration within the boundaries of literary criticism as the main criteria for judging creative writing.
Dr Khaled Hroub is the Director of Cambridge Arab Media Project at the University of Cambridge. The International Prize for Arabic Fiction is funded by the Emirates Foundation and is independently managed by its own board of trustees
Source: The National: Liberation and artistry have transformed the Arab novel
Sunday, 14 February 2010
The Ottoman architect who linked East and West
The extent to which the great Ottoman Empire influenced the rest of Europe can still be seen from the buildings it has left behind, explains architecture and design expert Jonathan Glancey.
Driving west from Istanbul, it looks as if the city will never end.
Out through the commanding Roman walls of the town - bulldozed in parts to let six-lane carriageways of traffic race through - the skyline turns into a seamless blur of fourth-rate quick-build apartment blocks.
Cheap hotels bristle with dripping air-conditioning units, anonymous business headquarters are set behind jammed car parks, carpet warehouses proffer colourful displays behind enormous plate glass windows.
And the giant cranes - I couldn't begin to count them all - raise reinforced concrete skeletons of ever more apartment blocks on floodplains and hillsides, on what were once fields and forests, as far as the eye can possibly see.
Istanbul is one of the world's fastest growing cities, expanding north, south, east and west
Will the built-up area ever stop? Will it go all the way to the Balkans, Greece and Italy?
Perhaps it will, especially if Turkey becomes a member of the European Union, and also because Istanbul, with a population of who knows exactly how many millions of people, is one of the world's fastest growing cities, expanding north, south, east and west.
But what I could not help thinking, as I made my way to Lake Buyukcekmece on the far side of the city's Ataturk Airport, is that the Ottoman Empire that drove Istanbul for the best part of half a millennium, once headed this way too.
Reconnecting Istanbul
If Suleiman the Magnificent, the 16th Century Ottoman emperor, had had his way, the road west would have led directly to Rome - the city that had been the hub of the empire that had created Istanbul, or Constantinople, in the first place.
Inside the Rustem Pasha Mosque (completed by Sinan in 1563)
How far did Ottoman style influence Europe's great architects?
Calling himself "Caesar of all the lands of Rome", Suleiman dreamed of reconnecting Istanbul with Rome.
He would do it by conquest, travelling on the road that passes over Lake Buyukcekmece on a bridge designed and built by his architect, Sinan.
In fact, his armies did set foot and hoof in Italy - but they never made it as far as Rome.
In recent years the superb bridge, too narrow for modern traffic has been bypassed.
A lonely tourist attraction, it takes off from a sorry-looking public park, complete with a cartoon-style statue of Sinan sporting an ambitious turban, and lands at the foot of another concrete panorama, blocking the view west.
This was the bridge Suleiman saw rising as he set off on his last military adventure, to conquer Hungary. He was killed in the campaign so never saw it completed.
Nor had he managed to forge a direct link between what had been the ancient Roman Empire and his New Rome, Ottoman Istanbul.
From his death in 1566, the empire sank into a long, if exquisite, decline.
Yet one legacy Suleiman left is that of his architect, Sinan.
Influential art
Sinan lived to be 100, realising hundreds of designs for mosques and madrassas, bridges and aqueducts.
One of Palladio's churches: St Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
Does Palladio's St Giorgio Maggiore borrow from the works of Sinan?
This contemporary of Michelangelo and Andrea Palladio, two of the most influential Italian architects, is little known in the West, yet not only did Sinan shape some of the world's finest buildings - who could argue with the choice of his Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul or Selimiye Mosque in Edirne? - but his work was also to influence that of the most ambitious architects of the Italian Renaissance, as theirs was to affect his.
What I came to understand on my latest trip to Istanbul - with the penny, or Turkish Lira, dropping as I walked across Sinan's Buyukcekmece bridge - is just how real this connection was.
Istanbul was joined to the West culturally if not politically or in terms of religious belief, and if not by political treatises, then by architecture.
Michelangelo's dome, soaring above the roof of St Peter's, Rome, was surely influenced by those of Sinan's daring mosques in Istanbul.
Scholars might yet stumble on correspondence between the greatest architects of Italy and Istanbul
Equally, it seems possible that Sinan would have seen drawings by the Italians.
Palladio's champion and patron, Marcantonio Barbaro, was for six years the Venetian ambassador to Istanbul.
Surely he made some sort of connection between Sinan and Palladio?
Whenever I go to Venice and look afresh at Palladio's sublime churches of St Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore - the Redeemer - I am sure I am seeing or scenting something in their design from east of the Mediterranean - from Istanbul?
Somewhere in undocumented Ottoman archives, scholars might yet stumble on correspondence between the greatest architects of Italy and Istanbul, confirming a connection between the Italian and Suleiman's Renaissance, between the old and new Romes.
FIND OUT MORE
Radio 3 Sunday Feature: Sinan the Magnificent
Presented by Jonathan Glancey, Architecture Correspondent for the Guardian
2000GMT, 14 February
Available for 7 days on the iplayer
The desperate sprawl of modern Istanbul makes today's city somehow further from Rome, the West or the European Union, than Sinan and Suleiman's city was 500 years ago.
As I stood on the haunting bridge across Lake Buyukcekmece it seemed somehow sad that the road across it leads not to some new glory or to a shaking of modern Turkish hands in western Europe, but to the blank-faced and all too solid walls of yet another, architecture-free concrete housing estate.
Source: BBC News: The Ottoman architect who linked East and West
Driving west from Istanbul, it looks as if the city will never end.
Out through the commanding Roman walls of the town - bulldozed in parts to let six-lane carriageways of traffic race through - the skyline turns into a seamless blur of fourth-rate quick-build apartment blocks.
Cheap hotels bristle with dripping air-conditioning units, anonymous business headquarters are set behind jammed car parks, carpet warehouses proffer colourful displays behind enormous plate glass windows.
And the giant cranes - I couldn't begin to count them all - raise reinforced concrete skeletons of ever more apartment blocks on floodplains and hillsides, on what were once fields and forests, as far as the eye can possibly see.
Istanbul is one of the world's fastest growing cities, expanding north, south, east and west
Will the built-up area ever stop? Will it go all the way to the Balkans, Greece and Italy?
Perhaps it will, especially if Turkey becomes a member of the European Union, and also because Istanbul, with a population of who knows exactly how many millions of people, is one of the world's fastest growing cities, expanding north, south, east and west.
But what I could not help thinking, as I made my way to Lake Buyukcekmece on the far side of the city's Ataturk Airport, is that the Ottoman Empire that drove Istanbul for the best part of half a millennium, once headed this way too.
Reconnecting Istanbul
If Suleiman the Magnificent, the 16th Century Ottoman emperor, had had his way, the road west would have led directly to Rome - the city that had been the hub of the empire that had created Istanbul, or Constantinople, in the first place.
Inside the Rustem Pasha Mosque (completed by Sinan in 1563)
How far did Ottoman style influence Europe's great architects?
Calling himself "Caesar of all the lands of Rome", Suleiman dreamed of reconnecting Istanbul with Rome.
He would do it by conquest, travelling on the road that passes over Lake Buyukcekmece on a bridge designed and built by his architect, Sinan.
In fact, his armies did set foot and hoof in Italy - but they never made it as far as Rome.
In recent years the superb bridge, too narrow for modern traffic has been bypassed.
A lonely tourist attraction, it takes off from a sorry-looking public park, complete with a cartoon-style statue of Sinan sporting an ambitious turban, and lands at the foot of another concrete panorama, blocking the view west.
This was the bridge Suleiman saw rising as he set off on his last military adventure, to conquer Hungary. He was killed in the campaign so never saw it completed.
Nor had he managed to forge a direct link between what had been the ancient Roman Empire and his New Rome, Ottoman Istanbul.
From his death in 1566, the empire sank into a long, if exquisite, decline.
Yet one legacy Suleiman left is that of his architect, Sinan.
Influential art
Sinan lived to be 100, realising hundreds of designs for mosques and madrassas, bridges and aqueducts.
One of Palladio's churches: St Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
Does Palladio's St Giorgio Maggiore borrow from the works of Sinan?
This contemporary of Michelangelo and Andrea Palladio, two of the most influential Italian architects, is little known in the West, yet not only did Sinan shape some of the world's finest buildings - who could argue with the choice of his Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul or Selimiye Mosque in Edirne? - but his work was also to influence that of the most ambitious architects of the Italian Renaissance, as theirs was to affect his.
What I came to understand on my latest trip to Istanbul - with the penny, or Turkish Lira, dropping as I walked across Sinan's Buyukcekmece bridge - is just how real this connection was.
Istanbul was joined to the West culturally if not politically or in terms of religious belief, and if not by political treatises, then by architecture.
Michelangelo's dome, soaring above the roof of St Peter's, Rome, was surely influenced by those of Sinan's daring mosques in Istanbul.
Scholars might yet stumble on correspondence between the greatest architects of Italy and Istanbul
Equally, it seems possible that Sinan would have seen drawings by the Italians.
Palladio's champion and patron, Marcantonio Barbaro, was for six years the Venetian ambassador to Istanbul.
Surely he made some sort of connection between Sinan and Palladio?
Whenever I go to Venice and look afresh at Palladio's sublime churches of St Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore - the Redeemer - I am sure I am seeing or scenting something in their design from east of the Mediterranean - from Istanbul?
Somewhere in undocumented Ottoman archives, scholars might yet stumble on correspondence between the greatest architects of Italy and Istanbul, confirming a connection between the Italian and Suleiman's Renaissance, between the old and new Romes.
FIND OUT MORE
Radio 3 Sunday Feature: Sinan the Magnificent
Presented by Jonathan Glancey, Architecture Correspondent for the Guardian
2000GMT, 14 February
Available for 7 days on the iplayer
The desperate sprawl of modern Istanbul makes today's city somehow further from Rome, the West or the European Union, than Sinan and Suleiman's city was 500 years ago.
As I stood on the haunting bridge across Lake Buyukcekmece it seemed somehow sad that the road across it leads not to some new glory or to a shaking of modern Turkish hands in western Europe, but to the blank-faced and all too solid walls of yet another, architecture-free concrete housing estate.
Source: BBC News: The Ottoman architect who linked East and West
Prism Magazine
A new magazine was launched recently by wrongly accussed and subsequently tortured Mahed Arar. The focus of the magazine is national security, obviously with an emphasis on Canada.
Prism Magazine
Prism Magazine
Where religion and civil society meet
The US-Islamic World Forum – held this weekend in Qatar – will once again explore the nature and possibilities of the power dynamics between these two entities, one a nation state, the other, ostensibly a religion.
However “Islamic”, or its place holder, “Muslim”, has come to mean more of a region than anything more meaningful.
As a region, “Islamic” would embrace the Christian, the atheist, the Jewish, the Marxist and the non-committed. Adding to the stickiness of the proposition is the prevalence of Islam in regions not designated “Islamic”. Albania and Bosnia are soundly European. Spain was a Muslim country for 700 years. And yes, the US itself has been witnessing its second wave of indigenisation since the turn of the 20th century; the US ambassador to the Philippines converted in 1888 and continued to advocate the Muslim faith among New York’s elite society until his death in 1916. Muslim “buffalo soldiers” fought with the Union army during the 1861-1865 American Civil War.
This weekend’s conference will explore among other things, possibilities for strengthening civil society and non-governmental efforts to fill the “human development” gaps left by beleaguered or otherwise distracted governments.
But what, if anything, has religion to do with this? Quality of life services are socially inclusive and universally perfected by international NGOs that transcend, in their technique, any religious affiliation. It is a shared knowledge, a common effort, and an inclusive pursuit.
So has the utility of religion in the equation been reduced to no more than one among several policy facilitators? Has religion been reduced to an opiate for steering masses with this particular fix?
Here is a case for an expanded consideration that may not have been lost on all the organisers. Barbiturates and intoxicants are forbidden in Islam because of their propensity to cloud the mind, whereas Islam unflinchingly calls for the enhancement and sharpening of the rational faculty.
The contribution that theological reasoning makes to civil society and human development initiatives is unique in its three dimensional approach.
Man is a whole as body, mind, and soul; not body alone. Being is material, spiritual and divine; not material alone.
The effective value-add of theological reasoning to human development initiatives turns upon five themes: First, it brings sense to the confusion stemming from the displacement of the human condition in an alienating modernity.
Second, it assesses the ordering of material and circumstantial priorities in light of an authentic Islamic worldview.
Third, it provides doctrinal grounding for fundamental human development objectives.
Fourth, it can facilitate, advocate and encourage helpful and constructive behaviours for good global citizenship and environmental consciousness.
Fifth, it can potentially contribute to the development of an integrated, engaged and participatory Muslim identity for the 21st century.
Returning to the motif of the opiate. The Muslim poet said: “Our wine is the wine of meaning; it is permissible and not unlawful.” The difference between the wine of the world is that it dulls the senses and shackles you to the ground. But the wine of paradise sharpens the mind and lifts you out of the petty, the mundane, and the unidimensional. It gives life to the life of the mind, to the life of the spirit, and not merely to the life of body alone. It is 360 degrees, in three dimensions, it is whole, and it is vibrant.
Jihad Hashim Brown is director of research at the Tabah Foundation. He delivers the Friday sermon at the Maryam bint Sultan Mosque in Abu Dhabi/
Source: The National: Where religion and civil society meet
Tabah Foundation
However “Islamic”, or its place holder, “Muslim”, has come to mean more of a region than anything more meaningful.
As a region, “Islamic” would embrace the Christian, the atheist, the Jewish, the Marxist and the non-committed. Adding to the stickiness of the proposition is the prevalence of Islam in regions not designated “Islamic”. Albania and Bosnia are soundly European. Spain was a Muslim country for 700 years. And yes, the US itself has been witnessing its second wave of indigenisation since the turn of the 20th century; the US ambassador to the Philippines converted in 1888 and continued to advocate the Muslim faith among New York’s elite society until his death in 1916. Muslim “buffalo soldiers” fought with the Union army during the 1861-1865 American Civil War.
This weekend’s conference will explore among other things, possibilities for strengthening civil society and non-governmental efforts to fill the “human development” gaps left by beleaguered or otherwise distracted governments.
But what, if anything, has religion to do with this? Quality of life services are socially inclusive and universally perfected by international NGOs that transcend, in their technique, any religious affiliation. It is a shared knowledge, a common effort, and an inclusive pursuit.
So has the utility of religion in the equation been reduced to no more than one among several policy facilitators? Has religion been reduced to an opiate for steering masses with this particular fix?
Here is a case for an expanded consideration that may not have been lost on all the organisers. Barbiturates and intoxicants are forbidden in Islam because of their propensity to cloud the mind, whereas Islam unflinchingly calls for the enhancement and sharpening of the rational faculty.
The contribution that theological reasoning makes to civil society and human development initiatives is unique in its three dimensional approach.
Man is a whole as body, mind, and soul; not body alone. Being is material, spiritual and divine; not material alone.
The effective value-add of theological reasoning to human development initiatives turns upon five themes: First, it brings sense to the confusion stemming from the displacement of the human condition in an alienating modernity.
Second, it assesses the ordering of material and circumstantial priorities in light of an authentic Islamic worldview.
Third, it provides doctrinal grounding for fundamental human development objectives.
Fourth, it can facilitate, advocate and encourage helpful and constructive behaviours for good global citizenship and environmental consciousness.
Fifth, it can potentially contribute to the development of an integrated, engaged and participatory Muslim identity for the 21st century.
Returning to the motif of the opiate. The Muslim poet said: “Our wine is the wine of meaning; it is permissible and not unlawful.” The difference between the wine of the world is that it dulls the senses and shackles you to the ground. But the wine of paradise sharpens the mind and lifts you out of the petty, the mundane, and the unidimensional. It gives life to the life of the mind, to the life of the spirit, and not merely to the life of body alone. It is 360 degrees, in three dimensions, it is whole, and it is vibrant.
Jihad Hashim Brown is director of research at the Tabah Foundation. He delivers the Friday sermon at the Maryam bint Sultan Mosque in Abu Dhabi/
Source: The National: Where religion and civil society meet
Tabah Foundation
Sunday, 31 January 2010
Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World by James Mather
William Dalrymple applauds an exemplary study of the 16th-century Levant Company and England's dealings with the mighty Ottoman empire
For 200 years, from the mid-15th century, the Ottoman Empire was the most powerful force in all Eurasia and Constantinople was the Mediterranean's greatest port. The sultan and his viziers ruled a great patchwork of peoples, languages and religions, an empire comparable in size and importance to that of Rome. Decisions made in Ottoman Constantinople affected millions across the globe, from Ireland through Poland to Sumatra. There was no other city in Europe that in size or grandeur could begin to compare.
1. Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World
2. by James Mather
3. 320pp,
4. Yale University Press
By contrast, 16th- and 17th-century England was a small and relatively impoverished mono-religious and mono-lingual state, perched precariously on the cold northern edge of Christendom. Compared with the might of the Ottomans, it was neither a major political nor military power. Although Britain's navy was sufficient to defend it from its immediate neighbours, Ottoman technological superiority at sea led to the capture of large numbers of British vessels and by the 1620s the Turkish navy had extended its reach into the waters of the British Isles.
Yet despite this, much of the contact between Britain and the Ottoman empire was both peaceable and profitable. After the founding of the English Levant Company in 1581, through a charter of Queen Elizabeth I, Britain was closely engaged with the Turks as the Ottoman empire expanded westwards through central Europe and Britain's trade network expanded eastwards to meet it. The company sold wool and tin (to be used in Ottoman armaments and munitions production) and in return bought huge quantities of Ottoman silks, Indian spices and indigo and, oddly enough, currants.
There was, in consequence, a great deal of movement between the two worlds. Elizabethan London had a burgeoning Muslim community that encompassed a large party of Turkish ex-prisoners, some Moorish craftsmen, a number of wealthy Turkish merchants and a "Moorish solicitor". At the same time, large numbers of Englishmen – from traders and diplomats to renegades and galley slaves – lived in Ottoman lands. When Charles II sent Captain Hamilton to ransom some Englishmen who had been enslaved on the Barbary Coast, they refused to return: the men had converted to Islam and were now "partaking of the prosperous Successe of the Turks... they are tempted to forsake their God for the love of Turkish women," wrote Hamilton. "Such ladies are," he added, "generally very beautiful."
James Mather's wonderful book is the first full-length study since 1935 of the Levant Company, the organisation that oversaw both England's trade and diplomacy with the Ottoman world, and which supervised and set the tone for the odd yet remarkably successful relationship between the two. As Mather shows, by the end of the 17th century trade with Turkey accounted for one quarter of all England's overseas commercial activity. It was the first non-Christian environment in which Englishmen established a major and distinct national presence and was an important and largely forgotten precursor to the centuries of empire ahead.
Yet as Mather is at pains to emphasise, there was an important distinction between these early contacts and the later colonial relationships that grew out of them. The attitude of the Jacobean travellers was utterly different from the arrogance of their Victorian successors. In the Ottoman Middle East, it was they and not their alien associates who had to conform; indeed, at this period, most Turks had never heard of England and as one imprisoned Englishmen put it, in Ottoman Jerusalem "the Turks flatly denied... they had ever heard of either of [his] Queen or country".
Mather excels at portraying the everyday life of the Englishmen who joined the Levant Company. He traces their recruitment, apprenticeship and training and the adventure of their maiden voyage out: "The Seae beating sometimes into my very Cabin; & I tossd & tumbled sometime my bed upon mee, & sometimes I upon my bed... all wet & dabbled, & in a confusion of Torments." Another factor compared life on ship to "imprisonment... with a chance of drowning besides".
Many seem to have lived like modern expats, keeping to their own compounds, importing their own cider, butter, beer and bacon, playing "bowles" and "krickett", indulging in amateur dramatics and drinking too much. The Aleppo factors even imported their own pack of English hounds. Others mixed in, recording the detail of Ottoman life in a series of fascinating dispatches, though few Englishmen seem to have had as much intimacy with Ottoman life as Francesco Lupazzoli, the priapic Venetian consul in Smyrna, who lived until he was 114, fathering no less than 126 children, 105 of them illegitimate, from his five wives and innumerable Smyrniot mistresses. The English factors, in contrast, had to vow to avoid all indulgence in "fornication and matrimony" as well as "cards, dice, tables, taverns and playhouses".
It is a fascinating and little studied subject and Mather's work is a major contribution to the historiography of Britain's relationship both with the Mediterranean and the world of Islam, which at that point was much more tolerant than religiously repressive Reformation Europe. It is also a vital corrective to the influential but wrong-headed readings of the flagbearers of intellectual Islamophobia such as VS Naipaul and Bernard Lewis, both of whom have manufactured entirely negative images of one of the most varied empires of history and the complicated European relationship with the Ottoman world.
One of the most interesting questions Mather raises is why the Levant Company never went the way of its younger contemporary, the East India Company, and turned into an empire-building, land-seizing, imperial-military power. After all, in the early years, the two companies overlapped to a considerable extent in terms of both investors and personnel: in the 1630s, 28 of the 47 directors of the East India Company court were also Levant Company members. It was not, he believes, for lack of opportunity so much as because of the conservative way in which the Levant Company was managed. It always erred on the side of caution and tried to avoid the devastating expenses incurred by its India counterpart in the course of its military adventures.
Ironically, though, it was the East India Company that eventually helped bring down the company that had inspired its birth. After the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, the East India Company moved into the country and the Levant Company sank into financial impotence. Yet at its height in the 1630s, it was "the most flourishing and beneficial company to the commonwealth of any in England" and the agent through which Britain engaged with and interacted with the Islamic world. Given this, the importance of this excellent and balanced study cannot be underestimated.
William Dalrymple's most recent book is Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Bloomsbury)
Source: The Guardian: Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World by James Mather
For 200 years, from the mid-15th century, the Ottoman Empire was the most powerful force in all Eurasia and Constantinople was the Mediterranean's greatest port. The sultan and his viziers ruled a great patchwork of peoples, languages and religions, an empire comparable in size and importance to that of Rome. Decisions made in Ottoman Constantinople affected millions across the globe, from Ireland through Poland to Sumatra. There was no other city in Europe that in size or grandeur could begin to compare.
1. Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World
2. by James Mather
3. 320pp,
4. Yale University Press
By contrast, 16th- and 17th-century England was a small and relatively impoverished mono-religious and mono-lingual state, perched precariously on the cold northern edge of Christendom. Compared with the might of the Ottomans, it was neither a major political nor military power. Although Britain's navy was sufficient to defend it from its immediate neighbours, Ottoman technological superiority at sea led to the capture of large numbers of British vessels and by the 1620s the Turkish navy had extended its reach into the waters of the British Isles.
Yet despite this, much of the contact between Britain and the Ottoman empire was both peaceable and profitable. After the founding of the English Levant Company in 1581, through a charter of Queen Elizabeth I, Britain was closely engaged with the Turks as the Ottoman empire expanded westwards through central Europe and Britain's trade network expanded eastwards to meet it. The company sold wool and tin (to be used in Ottoman armaments and munitions production) and in return bought huge quantities of Ottoman silks, Indian spices and indigo and, oddly enough, currants.
There was, in consequence, a great deal of movement between the two worlds. Elizabethan London had a burgeoning Muslim community that encompassed a large party of Turkish ex-prisoners, some Moorish craftsmen, a number of wealthy Turkish merchants and a "Moorish solicitor". At the same time, large numbers of Englishmen – from traders and diplomats to renegades and galley slaves – lived in Ottoman lands. When Charles II sent Captain Hamilton to ransom some Englishmen who had been enslaved on the Barbary Coast, they refused to return: the men had converted to Islam and were now "partaking of the prosperous Successe of the Turks... they are tempted to forsake their God for the love of Turkish women," wrote Hamilton. "Such ladies are," he added, "generally very beautiful."
James Mather's wonderful book is the first full-length study since 1935 of the Levant Company, the organisation that oversaw both England's trade and diplomacy with the Ottoman world, and which supervised and set the tone for the odd yet remarkably successful relationship between the two. As Mather shows, by the end of the 17th century trade with Turkey accounted for one quarter of all England's overseas commercial activity. It was the first non-Christian environment in which Englishmen established a major and distinct national presence and was an important and largely forgotten precursor to the centuries of empire ahead.
Yet as Mather is at pains to emphasise, there was an important distinction between these early contacts and the later colonial relationships that grew out of them. The attitude of the Jacobean travellers was utterly different from the arrogance of their Victorian successors. In the Ottoman Middle East, it was they and not their alien associates who had to conform; indeed, at this period, most Turks had never heard of England and as one imprisoned Englishmen put it, in Ottoman Jerusalem "the Turks flatly denied... they had ever heard of either of [his] Queen or country".
Mather excels at portraying the everyday life of the Englishmen who joined the Levant Company. He traces their recruitment, apprenticeship and training and the adventure of their maiden voyage out: "The Seae beating sometimes into my very Cabin; & I tossd & tumbled sometime my bed upon mee, & sometimes I upon my bed... all wet & dabbled, & in a confusion of Torments." Another factor compared life on ship to "imprisonment... with a chance of drowning besides".
Many seem to have lived like modern expats, keeping to their own compounds, importing their own cider, butter, beer and bacon, playing "bowles" and "krickett", indulging in amateur dramatics and drinking too much. The Aleppo factors even imported their own pack of English hounds. Others mixed in, recording the detail of Ottoman life in a series of fascinating dispatches, though few Englishmen seem to have had as much intimacy with Ottoman life as Francesco Lupazzoli, the priapic Venetian consul in Smyrna, who lived until he was 114, fathering no less than 126 children, 105 of them illegitimate, from his five wives and innumerable Smyrniot mistresses. The English factors, in contrast, had to vow to avoid all indulgence in "fornication and matrimony" as well as "cards, dice, tables, taverns and playhouses".
It is a fascinating and little studied subject and Mather's work is a major contribution to the historiography of Britain's relationship both with the Mediterranean and the world of Islam, which at that point was much more tolerant than religiously repressive Reformation Europe. It is also a vital corrective to the influential but wrong-headed readings of the flagbearers of intellectual Islamophobia such as VS Naipaul and Bernard Lewis, both of whom have manufactured entirely negative images of one of the most varied empires of history and the complicated European relationship with the Ottoman world.
One of the most interesting questions Mather raises is why the Levant Company never went the way of its younger contemporary, the East India Company, and turned into an empire-building, land-seizing, imperial-military power. After all, in the early years, the two companies overlapped to a considerable extent in terms of both investors and personnel: in the 1630s, 28 of the 47 directors of the East India Company court were also Levant Company members. It was not, he believes, for lack of opportunity so much as because of the conservative way in which the Levant Company was managed. It always erred on the side of caution and tried to avoid the devastating expenses incurred by its India counterpart in the course of its military adventures.
Ironically, though, it was the East India Company that eventually helped bring down the company that had inspired its birth. After the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, the East India Company moved into the country and the Levant Company sank into financial impotence. Yet at its height in the 1630s, it was "the most flourishing and beneficial company to the commonwealth of any in England" and the agent through which Britain engaged with and interacted with the Islamic world. Given this, the importance of this excellent and balanced study cannot be underestimated.
William Dalrymple's most recent book is Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Bloomsbury)
Source: The Guardian: Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World by James Mather
Arab society's crunch points
A talk by Brian Whitaker at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, 26 January 2010
ONE OF the things I have always tried to do as a journalist writing about the Middle East is to look at it from the inside rather than the outside. What I mean by that is that I try to focus as much as possible on issues that concern people actually living in the region rather than the issues that affect western governments.
It’s not always easy, because newspaper editors – and their readers too – tend to have rather fixed ideas about what constitutes news from the Middle East.
I didn’t fully appreciate how fixed their ideas are until I started writing full-time about the region for the Guardian. I would meet people at parties who asked what my job was, and they would immediately assume that I was either a war correspondent or some kind of terrorism expert.
Obviously journalists can’t ignore the big conflicts but readers can easily get the impression that the Middle East is a region of death and destruction and very little else.
It’s important to remember, though, that millions of Arabs go through their entire lives without ever seeing a shot fired in anger, let alone firing one themselves.
This brings me to the title of my book, What’s Really Wrong with the Middle East, where you see the word “really” highlighted in red.
The point I’m making here is that there’s a discrepancy – quite a large discrepancy in fact – between the problems of the Middle East as perceived from the west and its problems as perceived by Arabs themselves. The priorities are different.
Although the book is a critique of Arab society, and in some respects quite a stern one, I wanted it to reflect opinions from the inside rather than the outside. So I decided right from the start to use Arab sources as much as possible – which I have done, with only a few exceptions.
My research included about 20 formal interviews with Arabs in various countries, most of them lasting an hour or more, and my aim was to keep them as unstructured as possible – basically to sit back and let people talk.
So I looked on the internet and found 10 critical statements about the Middle East – about politics, oil, the media, corruption, and so on. I sent this list to the interviewees and asked them to choose the statements they wanted to talk about.
This was where the distinctively Arab priorities really started to show up. In fact, the issues that figure most prominently in western foreign policy seemed to be nowhere near the top of my interviewees’ agenda (or at least not in the way they are usually framed).
For example, democracy was hardly mentioned as such, though there was a lot of talk about the lack of transparency and accountability, the lack of good governance and the need to get rid of corruption.
There was also one statement on the list that people wanted to talk about more than any other. So much so that towards the end I was saying to people: “Please, let’s not talk about that one, I’ve heard enough already.”
The statement in question was the title from from one of al-Jazeera's Doha Debates and it said: "The family is a major obstacle to reform in the Arab world."
I’LL COME BACK to this issue of the family in a moment but there’s one more point I’d like to make about the book and its title.
Although it’s mainly a critique of Arab society it’s also, less directly, a critique of westerm policy. I wanted to make a case for change in the Arab countries that would not be based on neocon arguments.
Several people have asked if the title of my book alludes Bernard Lewis’s famous book, “What went wrong?” Lewis, of course, was Bush’s favourite historian and Bush often turned to him for advice. So my answer is yes, I did have Lewis in mind when thinking about the title, though the book itself doesn’t mention him or his work.
Before Bush’s arrival at the White House in 2001, American policy towards the Middle East – and British policy too, for that matter – had been primarily about maintaining stability.
Bush and the neocons changed that, largely in response to the September 11 attacks which opened the way to more a radically interventionist discourse – especially interventions of the military kind.
In a major speech in 2003, Bush said:
Sixty years of western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe – because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export.
There were many things wrong with Bush’s policies but I think he was right to say we should not be “excusing and accommodating” a lack of freedom in the Middle East. I think he was also right to say that purchasing stability at the expense of liberty is a bad idea in the long term.
Continue reading al Bab: Arab society's crunch points
ONE OF the things I have always tried to do as a journalist writing about the Middle East is to look at it from the inside rather than the outside. What I mean by that is that I try to focus as much as possible on issues that concern people actually living in the region rather than the issues that affect western governments.
It’s not always easy, because newspaper editors – and their readers too – tend to have rather fixed ideas about what constitutes news from the Middle East.
I didn’t fully appreciate how fixed their ideas are until I started writing full-time about the region for the Guardian. I would meet people at parties who asked what my job was, and they would immediately assume that I was either a war correspondent or some kind of terrorism expert.
Obviously journalists can’t ignore the big conflicts but readers can easily get the impression that the Middle East is a region of death and destruction and very little else.
It’s important to remember, though, that millions of Arabs go through their entire lives without ever seeing a shot fired in anger, let alone firing one themselves.
This brings me to the title of my book, What’s Really Wrong with the Middle East, where you see the word “really” highlighted in red.
The point I’m making here is that there’s a discrepancy – quite a large discrepancy in fact – between the problems of the Middle East as perceived from the west and its problems as perceived by Arabs themselves. The priorities are different.
Although the book is a critique of Arab society, and in some respects quite a stern one, I wanted it to reflect opinions from the inside rather than the outside. So I decided right from the start to use Arab sources as much as possible – which I have done, with only a few exceptions.
My research included about 20 formal interviews with Arabs in various countries, most of them lasting an hour or more, and my aim was to keep them as unstructured as possible – basically to sit back and let people talk.
So I looked on the internet and found 10 critical statements about the Middle East – about politics, oil, the media, corruption, and so on. I sent this list to the interviewees and asked them to choose the statements they wanted to talk about.
This was where the distinctively Arab priorities really started to show up. In fact, the issues that figure most prominently in western foreign policy seemed to be nowhere near the top of my interviewees’ agenda (or at least not in the way they are usually framed).
For example, democracy was hardly mentioned as such, though there was a lot of talk about the lack of transparency and accountability, the lack of good governance and the need to get rid of corruption.
There was also one statement on the list that people wanted to talk about more than any other. So much so that towards the end I was saying to people: “Please, let’s not talk about that one, I’ve heard enough already.”
The statement in question was the title from from one of al-Jazeera's Doha Debates and it said: "The family is a major obstacle to reform in the Arab world."
I’LL COME BACK to this issue of the family in a moment but there’s one more point I’d like to make about the book and its title.
Although it’s mainly a critique of Arab society it’s also, less directly, a critique of westerm policy. I wanted to make a case for change in the Arab countries that would not be based on neocon arguments.
Several people have asked if the title of my book alludes Bernard Lewis’s famous book, “What went wrong?” Lewis, of course, was Bush’s favourite historian and Bush often turned to him for advice. So my answer is yes, I did have Lewis in mind when thinking about the title, though the book itself doesn’t mention him or his work.
Before Bush’s arrival at the White House in 2001, American policy towards the Middle East – and British policy too, for that matter – had been primarily about maintaining stability.
Bush and the neocons changed that, largely in response to the September 11 attacks which opened the way to more a radically interventionist discourse – especially interventions of the military kind.
In a major speech in 2003, Bush said:
Sixty years of western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe – because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export.
There were many things wrong with Bush’s policies but I think he was right to say we should not be “excusing and accommodating” a lack of freedom in the Middle East. I think he was also right to say that purchasing stability at the expense of liberty is a bad idea in the long term.
Continue reading al Bab: Arab society's crunch points
Saturday, 30 January 2010
The rise and fall of the Turkish coffeehouse
Istanbul got its first taste of coffee in 1554, when Syrian traders Hakim and Sems opened a coffeehouse in the city's Tahtakale district, although individual residents must have previously savored the hot brew during trips to other places in the Middle East. Among the different types of coffeehouses, one popular kind would have a minstrel or minstrels who would sing, known as an aşık. Turkey's last great minstrel, Aşık Veysel, garnered a following when he started singing in a coffeehouse
The rise and fall of the Turkish coffeehouse
Since no one knows exactly when coffee was first introduced, it’s not possible to celebrate an anniversary. But coffee lovers around the world don’t need a special day; for them, every day is coffee day.
The first records of coffee drinking come from the Yemen area, where the beans grew wild, although some say coffee initially came from Ethiopia. It was seen as a precious commodity to be protected before people realized they could sell the beans and get a good return on them.
Coffee drinking has had its ups and downs. It was viewed with suspicion as a powerful, addictive drug and attempts were made to stop people from drinking it. Religious mystics who belonged to one of the many Sufi lodges that sprang up are thought to have used coffee as a stimulant for their often strenuous religious services.
There were mixed feelings about coffee drinking from the beginning because of its effect on people. This is even less surprising since coffee was not drunk in the diluted fashion now favored by the Western world. It came hot and thick and if you weren’t careful, you would end up with some of the grounds in your mouth. Actually, the same holds true for Turkish coffee today. One researcher on coffee and coffeehouses cites a document dated to 1511 that he believes shows the first time that coffee was banned, an incident that happened in Mecca.
Istanbul got its first taste of coffee in 1554, when Syrian traders Hakim and Sems opened a coffeehouse in the city’s Tahtakale district, although individual residents must have previously savored the hot brew during trips to other places in the Middle East. One source has suggested that was the case because there were Mamlukes, who were part of the rulers of Egypt’s army, found in Erzurum quite early on. Ottoman Sultan Selim I took Egypt in 1517 when there were already hundreds of coffeehouses in Cairo. In doing so, the coffeehouse became a center for men who, for one reason or another, weren’t working or didn’t want to go home directly after work.
Little coffeehouses sprang up all over the city and then spread out to towns and villages. By 1595, a foreign observer noted that there were some 600 coffeehouses in Istanbul, attracting men with time to spare. No food was served, although no one would object to a customer bringing food in. The coffeehouse became a center where information was exchanged about the local area and beyond. Those who couldn’t read could find help and advice there.
The coffeehouse also provided a place for different social groups to gather; some even boasted musicians, theatrical performances, storytellers or wandering minstrels. The mix that allowed for socializing also made coffeehouses venues for political talk and they were considered potential hotbeds for revolt. Attempts were made to stamp them out, without much success – with one exception. In 1623, Sultan Murat IV came to power and personally forbade the sale of coffee. Though edicts issued by religious authorities were regularly flouted, the coffee ban was one prohibition that was obeyed, at least as long as the sultan lived, because he had the force to back it up. The coffeehouses reopened in 1640, upon his death.
Architecturally, the Ottoman coffeehouse would usually be a one-story building with a very high ceiling and tables and chairs or benches covered with cushions around a large open space. It was not unusual to find a fountain in the middle of the main area, and there might be rooms off to the sides. In winter, heat would be provided by braziers, or metal fire boxes, while in summer, the favored coffeehouses were those that opened on a veranda or patio, preferably shaded by tall, old plane trees. If there was a view, so much the better.
Among the different types of coffeehouses, one popular kind would have a minstrel or minstrels who would sing, known as an aşık. Turkey’s last great minstrel, Aşık Veysel, garnered a following when he started singing in a coffeehouse. If another minstrel happened to be around, they might start a duet or – more likely – an improvised duel, with one starting off the stanza of a song and the music to go with it and the second having to respond. More formal competitions might be even organized to attract an audience.
Eventually coffee was accepted as a drink that did not violate the Muslim prohibition against alcoholic beverages. It became part of socializing, even for women, although they were never to be found in coffeehouses until modern times. Even today, a Turkish woman might feel uncomfortable entering such an establishment. Women in Ottoman times would drink coffee in harem settings or at a hamam (Turkish bath); a number of paintings showing such gatherings can still be seen today. The ceremonies were perhaps not as elaborate as those conducted as part of serving tea in Japan, but special cups and pots were used. Learning about them was part of a well-brought-up girl’s education and when a young man’s parents came to call on her family to ask her hand in marriage, she had to show off her ability to make coffee.
Once a man found a coffeehouse that he felt compatible with, he would usually continue to frequent that place. Because of this, it was possible to leave messages for people at coffeehouses, knowing that sooner or later, the intended recipient would get it. Coffeehouse ownership would traditionally pass from father to son, with the boys in the family waiting on tables and cleaning up. The spread of television and the broadcasting of football matches have kept the coffeehouse popular on special occasions. Men with time on their hands still frequent coffeehouses to play dominoes or other games with their friends, or simply to sit there with their horse-racing forms or crossword puzzles.
Coffee drinking in Turkey was eventually supplanted by tea drinking. In spite of experiments with coffee-growing, the country’s geography is not suitable for it, and so coffee has to be imported. It never lost its popularity, but simply became so expensive that it was beyond the reach of many households. In fact, its importation was banned in the 1970s because the foreign currency required to purchase it was far too scarce to be used for something as nonessential as coffee. People who had foreign friends visiting would ask them to bring coffee and even five-star hotels were reduced to finding circuitous routes for their supplies. Nescafe thus became the coffee of choice and coffeehouses became more like teahouses. Now that coffee is once again available, customers will be offered a choice of tea or coffee, but tea is mentioned first.
Most recently, Turks have fallen under the spell of “modern” international coffeehouse chains that appeal in spite of their higher prices, but are visited only occasionally for that same reason. Moreover, the traditional Turkish coffeehouse has all but disappeared from many neighborhoods in big cities and those that do exist are often too far out of the way to be conveniently visited.
That doesn’t mean the traditional Turkish coffeehouse isn’t respected as part of the country’s culture. It just isn’t there anymore to be used as a community social center and it doesn’t seem as if it will ever come back.
Source: Hurriyet: The rise and fall of the Turkish coffeehouse
The rise and fall of the Turkish coffeehouse
Since no one knows exactly when coffee was first introduced, it’s not possible to celebrate an anniversary. But coffee lovers around the world don’t need a special day; for them, every day is coffee day.
The first records of coffee drinking come from the Yemen area, where the beans grew wild, although some say coffee initially came from Ethiopia. It was seen as a precious commodity to be protected before people realized they could sell the beans and get a good return on them.
Coffee drinking has had its ups and downs. It was viewed with suspicion as a powerful, addictive drug and attempts were made to stop people from drinking it. Religious mystics who belonged to one of the many Sufi lodges that sprang up are thought to have used coffee as a stimulant for their often strenuous religious services.
There were mixed feelings about coffee drinking from the beginning because of its effect on people. This is even less surprising since coffee was not drunk in the diluted fashion now favored by the Western world. It came hot and thick and if you weren’t careful, you would end up with some of the grounds in your mouth. Actually, the same holds true for Turkish coffee today. One researcher on coffee and coffeehouses cites a document dated to 1511 that he believes shows the first time that coffee was banned, an incident that happened in Mecca.
Istanbul got its first taste of coffee in 1554, when Syrian traders Hakim and Sems opened a coffeehouse in the city’s Tahtakale district, although individual residents must have previously savored the hot brew during trips to other places in the Middle East. One source has suggested that was the case because there were Mamlukes, who were part of the rulers of Egypt’s army, found in Erzurum quite early on. Ottoman Sultan Selim I took Egypt in 1517 when there were already hundreds of coffeehouses in Cairo. In doing so, the coffeehouse became a center for men who, for one reason or another, weren’t working or didn’t want to go home directly after work.
Little coffeehouses sprang up all over the city and then spread out to towns and villages. By 1595, a foreign observer noted that there were some 600 coffeehouses in Istanbul, attracting men with time to spare. No food was served, although no one would object to a customer bringing food in. The coffeehouse became a center where information was exchanged about the local area and beyond. Those who couldn’t read could find help and advice there.
The coffeehouse also provided a place for different social groups to gather; some even boasted musicians, theatrical performances, storytellers or wandering minstrels. The mix that allowed for socializing also made coffeehouses venues for political talk and they were considered potential hotbeds for revolt. Attempts were made to stamp them out, without much success – with one exception. In 1623, Sultan Murat IV came to power and personally forbade the sale of coffee. Though edicts issued by religious authorities were regularly flouted, the coffee ban was one prohibition that was obeyed, at least as long as the sultan lived, because he had the force to back it up. The coffeehouses reopened in 1640, upon his death.
Architecturally, the Ottoman coffeehouse would usually be a one-story building with a very high ceiling and tables and chairs or benches covered with cushions around a large open space. It was not unusual to find a fountain in the middle of the main area, and there might be rooms off to the sides. In winter, heat would be provided by braziers, or metal fire boxes, while in summer, the favored coffeehouses were those that opened on a veranda or patio, preferably shaded by tall, old plane trees. If there was a view, so much the better.
Among the different types of coffeehouses, one popular kind would have a minstrel or minstrels who would sing, known as an aşık. Turkey’s last great minstrel, Aşık Veysel, garnered a following when he started singing in a coffeehouse. If another minstrel happened to be around, they might start a duet or – more likely – an improvised duel, with one starting off the stanza of a song and the music to go with it and the second having to respond. More formal competitions might be even organized to attract an audience.
Eventually coffee was accepted as a drink that did not violate the Muslim prohibition against alcoholic beverages. It became part of socializing, even for women, although they were never to be found in coffeehouses until modern times. Even today, a Turkish woman might feel uncomfortable entering such an establishment. Women in Ottoman times would drink coffee in harem settings or at a hamam (Turkish bath); a number of paintings showing such gatherings can still be seen today. The ceremonies were perhaps not as elaborate as those conducted as part of serving tea in Japan, but special cups and pots were used. Learning about them was part of a well-brought-up girl’s education and when a young man’s parents came to call on her family to ask her hand in marriage, she had to show off her ability to make coffee.
Once a man found a coffeehouse that he felt compatible with, he would usually continue to frequent that place. Because of this, it was possible to leave messages for people at coffeehouses, knowing that sooner or later, the intended recipient would get it. Coffeehouse ownership would traditionally pass from father to son, with the boys in the family waiting on tables and cleaning up. The spread of television and the broadcasting of football matches have kept the coffeehouse popular on special occasions. Men with time on their hands still frequent coffeehouses to play dominoes or other games with their friends, or simply to sit there with their horse-racing forms or crossword puzzles.
Coffee drinking in Turkey was eventually supplanted by tea drinking. In spite of experiments with coffee-growing, the country’s geography is not suitable for it, and so coffee has to be imported. It never lost its popularity, but simply became so expensive that it was beyond the reach of many households. In fact, its importation was banned in the 1970s because the foreign currency required to purchase it was far too scarce to be used for something as nonessential as coffee. People who had foreign friends visiting would ask them to bring coffee and even five-star hotels were reduced to finding circuitous routes for their supplies. Nescafe thus became the coffee of choice and coffeehouses became more like teahouses. Now that coffee is once again available, customers will be offered a choice of tea or coffee, but tea is mentioned first.
Most recently, Turks have fallen under the spell of “modern” international coffeehouse chains that appeal in spite of their higher prices, but are visited only occasionally for that same reason. Moreover, the traditional Turkish coffeehouse has all but disappeared from many neighborhoods in big cities and those that do exist are often too far out of the way to be conveniently visited.
That doesn’t mean the traditional Turkish coffeehouse isn’t respected as part of the country’s culture. It just isn’t there anymore to be used as a community social center and it doesn’t seem as if it will ever come back.
Source: Hurriyet: The rise and fall of the Turkish coffeehouse
Muslim inventions that shaped the modern world
London, England (CNN) -- Think of the origins of that staple of modern life, the cup of coffee, and Italy often springs to mind.
But in fact, Yemen is where the ubiquitous brew has its true origins.
Along with the first university, and even the toothbrush, it is among surprising Muslim inventions that have shaped the world we live in today.
The origins of these fundamental ideas and objects -- the basis of everything from the bicycle to musical scales -- are the focus of "1001 Inventions," a book celebrating "the forgotten" history of 1,000 years of Muslim heritage.
"There's a hole in our knowledge, we leap frog from the Renaissance to the Greeks," professor Salim al-Hassani, Chairman of the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation, and editor of the book told CNN.
"1001 Inventions" is now an exhibition at London's Science Museum. Hassani hopes the exhibition will highlight the contributions of non-Western cultures -- like the Muslim empire that once covered Spain and Portugal, Southern Italy and stretched as far as parts of China -- to present day civilization.
Hospitals as we know them today, with wards and teaching centers, come from 9th century Egypt
Here Hassani shares his top 10 outstanding Muslim inventions:
1. Surgery
Around the year 1,000, the celebrated doctor Al Zahrawi published a 1,500 page illustrated encyclopedia of surgery that was used in Europe as a medical reference for the next 500 years. Among his many inventions, Zahrawi discovered the use of dissolving cat gut to stitch wounds -- beforehand a second surgery had to be performed to remove sutures. He also reportedly performed the first caesarean operation and created the first pair of forceps.
2. Coffee
Now the Western world's drink du jour, coffee was first brewed in Yemen around the 9th century. In its earliest days, coffee helped Sufis stay up during late nights of devotion. Later brought to Cairo by a group of students, the coffee buzz soon caught on around the empire. By the 13th century it reached Turkey, but not until the 16th century did the beans start boiling in Europe, brought to Italy by a Venetian trader.
3. Flying machine
"Abbas ibn Firnas was the first person to make a real attempt to construct a flying machine and fly," said Hassani. In the 9th century he designed a winged apparatus, roughly resembling a bird costume. In his most famous trial near Cordoba in Spain, Firnas flew upward for a few moments, before falling to the ground and partially breaking his back. His designs would undoubtedly have been an inspiration for famed Italian artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci's hundreds of years later, said Hassani.
4. University
In 859 a young princess named Fatima al-Firhi founded the first degree-granting university in Fez, Morocco. Her sister Miriam founded an adjacent mosque and together the complex became the al-Qarawiyyin Mosque and University. Still operating almost 1,200 years later, Hassani says he hopes the center will remind people that learning is at the core of the Islamic tradition and that the story of the al-Firhi sisters will inspire young Muslim women around the world today.
5. Algebra
The word algebra comes from the title of a Persian mathematician's famous 9th century treatise "Kitab al-Jabr Wa l-Mugabala" which translates roughly as "The Book of Reasoning and Balancing." Built on the roots of Greek and Hindu systems, the new algebraic order was a unifying system for rational numbers, irrational numbers and geometrical magnitudes. The same mathematician, Al-Khwarizmi, was also the first to introduce the concept of raising a number to a power.
6. Optics
"Many of the most important advances in the study of optics come from the Muslim world," says Hassani. Around the year 1000 Ibn al-Haitham proved that humans see objects by light reflecting off of them and entering the eye, dismissing Euclid and Ptolemy's theories that light was emitted from the eye itself. This great Muslim physicist also discovered the camera obscura phenomenon, which explains how the eye sees images upright due to the connection between the optic nerve and the brain.
7. Music
Muslim musicians have had a profound impact on Europe, dating back to Charlemagne tried to compete with the music of Baghdad and Cordoba, according to Hassani. Among many instruments that arrived in Europe through the Middle East are the lute and the rahab, an ancestor of the violin. Modern musical scales are also said to derive from the Arabic alphabet.
8. Toothbrush
According to Hassani, the Prophet Mohammed popularized the use of the first toothbrush in around 600. Using a twig from the Meswak tree, he cleaned his teeth and freshened his breath. Substances similar to Meswak are used in modern toothpaste.
9. The crank
Many of the basics of modern automatics were first put to use in the Muslim world, including the revolutionary crank-connecting rod system. By converting rotary motion to linear motion, the crank enables the lifting of heavy objects with relative ease. This technology, discovered by Al-Jazari in the 12th century, exploded across the globe, leading to everything from the bicycle to the internal combustion engine.
10. Hospitals
"Hospitals as we know them today, with wards and teaching centers, come from 9th century Egypt," explained Hassani. The first such medical center was the Ahmad ibn Tulun Hospital, founded in 872 in Cairo. Tulun hospital provided free care for anyone who needed it -- a policy based on the Muslim tradition of caring for all who are sick. From Cairo, such hospitals spread around the Muslim world.
For more information on muslim inventions go to: muslimheritage.com. For more information about the exhibition at London's Science Museum go to: science museum.org.uk
Source: CNN: Muslim inventions that shaped the modern world
But in fact, Yemen is where the ubiquitous brew has its true origins.
Along with the first university, and even the toothbrush, it is among surprising Muslim inventions that have shaped the world we live in today.
The origins of these fundamental ideas and objects -- the basis of everything from the bicycle to musical scales -- are the focus of "1001 Inventions," a book celebrating "the forgotten" history of 1,000 years of Muslim heritage.
"There's a hole in our knowledge, we leap frog from the Renaissance to the Greeks," professor Salim al-Hassani, Chairman of the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation, and editor of the book told CNN.
"1001 Inventions" is now an exhibition at London's Science Museum. Hassani hopes the exhibition will highlight the contributions of non-Western cultures -- like the Muslim empire that once covered Spain and Portugal, Southern Italy and stretched as far as parts of China -- to present day civilization.
Hospitals as we know them today, with wards and teaching centers, come from 9th century Egypt
Here Hassani shares his top 10 outstanding Muslim inventions:
1. Surgery
Around the year 1,000, the celebrated doctor Al Zahrawi published a 1,500 page illustrated encyclopedia of surgery that was used in Europe as a medical reference for the next 500 years. Among his many inventions, Zahrawi discovered the use of dissolving cat gut to stitch wounds -- beforehand a second surgery had to be performed to remove sutures. He also reportedly performed the first caesarean operation and created the first pair of forceps.
2. Coffee
Now the Western world's drink du jour, coffee was first brewed in Yemen around the 9th century. In its earliest days, coffee helped Sufis stay up during late nights of devotion. Later brought to Cairo by a group of students, the coffee buzz soon caught on around the empire. By the 13th century it reached Turkey, but not until the 16th century did the beans start boiling in Europe, brought to Italy by a Venetian trader.
3. Flying machine
"Abbas ibn Firnas was the first person to make a real attempt to construct a flying machine and fly," said Hassani. In the 9th century he designed a winged apparatus, roughly resembling a bird costume. In his most famous trial near Cordoba in Spain, Firnas flew upward for a few moments, before falling to the ground and partially breaking his back. His designs would undoubtedly have been an inspiration for famed Italian artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci's hundreds of years later, said Hassani.
4. University
In 859 a young princess named Fatima al-Firhi founded the first degree-granting university in Fez, Morocco. Her sister Miriam founded an adjacent mosque and together the complex became the al-Qarawiyyin Mosque and University. Still operating almost 1,200 years later, Hassani says he hopes the center will remind people that learning is at the core of the Islamic tradition and that the story of the al-Firhi sisters will inspire young Muslim women around the world today.
5. Algebra
The word algebra comes from the title of a Persian mathematician's famous 9th century treatise "Kitab al-Jabr Wa l-Mugabala" which translates roughly as "The Book of Reasoning and Balancing." Built on the roots of Greek and Hindu systems, the new algebraic order was a unifying system for rational numbers, irrational numbers and geometrical magnitudes. The same mathematician, Al-Khwarizmi, was also the first to introduce the concept of raising a number to a power.
6. Optics
"Many of the most important advances in the study of optics come from the Muslim world," says Hassani. Around the year 1000 Ibn al-Haitham proved that humans see objects by light reflecting off of them and entering the eye, dismissing Euclid and Ptolemy's theories that light was emitted from the eye itself. This great Muslim physicist also discovered the camera obscura phenomenon, which explains how the eye sees images upright due to the connection between the optic nerve and the brain.
7. Music
Muslim musicians have had a profound impact on Europe, dating back to Charlemagne tried to compete with the music of Baghdad and Cordoba, according to Hassani. Among many instruments that arrived in Europe through the Middle East are the lute and the rahab, an ancestor of the violin. Modern musical scales are also said to derive from the Arabic alphabet.
8. Toothbrush
According to Hassani, the Prophet Mohammed popularized the use of the first toothbrush in around 600. Using a twig from the Meswak tree, he cleaned his teeth and freshened his breath. Substances similar to Meswak are used in modern toothpaste.
9. The crank
Many of the basics of modern automatics were first put to use in the Muslim world, including the revolutionary crank-connecting rod system. By converting rotary motion to linear motion, the crank enables the lifting of heavy objects with relative ease. This technology, discovered by Al-Jazari in the 12th century, exploded across the globe, leading to everything from the bicycle to the internal combustion engine.
10. Hospitals
"Hospitals as we know them today, with wards and teaching centers, come from 9th century Egypt," explained Hassani. The first such medical center was the Ahmad ibn Tulun Hospital, founded in 872 in Cairo. Tulun hospital provided free care for anyone who needed it -- a policy based on the Muslim tradition of caring for all who are sick. From Cairo, such hospitals spread around the Muslim world.
For more information on muslim inventions go to: muslimheritage.com. For more information about the exhibition at London's Science Museum go to: science museum.org.uk
Source: CNN: Muslim inventions that shaped the modern world
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