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
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Saturday, 14 August 2010
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
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, 31 January 2010
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
Sunday, 10 January 2010
Eugene Rogan on The Arabs
Eugene Rogan on The Arabs
Eugene Rogan is Director of the Middle East Centre and a Faculty Fellow and University Lecturer in the Modern History of the Middle East at Oxford University. His research focuses on the social and economic history of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and the Arab states in the 20th century. His most recent book, The Arabs: A History, came out in 2009 to widespread media attention, not least because it offered historical insight into why US efforts to promote democracy in the region have been met with such suspicion.
You’ve started with a travel account from the early 19th century, John Lewis Burckhardt’s Travel in Syria and the Holy Land. Why this book?
Burckhardt really was the original Lawrence of Arabia, the Westerner who goes out to the Middle East, studies Arabic, dresses in the local fashion, and travels right through the Arab world. And he came away with a depth of understanding about the people among whom he travelled that was just unsurpassed in its day. Burckhardt was actually preparing himself not to be an Orientalist and Middle Eastern traveller, but to go and try to find the sources of various African rivers – he was fascinated by the origins of the Niger river. He was preparing himself to go into Central Africa but he never actually made it – he went up the Nile and made his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina and then came back to Cairo, where he got ill and died in 1817. So he never fulfilled the objective for which he was learning the language and travelling through the region. But in the process he left behind a couple of fantastic books. One was his travel book, Travel in Syria and the Holy Land, and the other one was a study of the Wahabis in Arabia, from the time of his pilgrimage to Mecca.
And of all the things he describes, what really sticks in your mind?
He is most famous for being the first Westerner to see the Nabatean ruins in Petra. He had discerned that the lost city of Petra might correspond to some places the Bedouin were talking about, and he finally persuaded some of them to lead him there. The Bedouin were very suspicious of anybody trying to visit ruins and old sites, thinking they were seeking gold or treasure or that they might be necromancers: Burckhardt was often suspected of raising the dead, because of his interest in travelling among ruins. And so his is a very quickly sketched description of Petra, because his guides took him to see it, showed him the place and then quickly frogmarched him out again. But I think that stands as one of the most famous passages in his travels. For me, what’s interesting are the reflections on the Arab societies in which he moved: this is someone who could talk to the people, who really came to grips with the politics of the local society. There’s a sophistication of knowledge and engagement that came from travelling, from living among people for a long time, from speaking their language, which makes him stand out above many of the other Western travellers of his generation.
So your next choice is al-Tahtawi’s An Imam in Paris, which was one of the most influential books in Arabic of the 19th century. What can you tell me about this book?
Al-Tahtawi was sent by the ruler of Egypt as the chaplain of an educational mission to France. The aim of the mission was to train young Egyptians in the languages and the arts and the sciences that had made Europe so strong in that first quarter of the 19th century. And he was a very insightful observer, who presents us with a pretty unique example of an Arab or Muslim traveller describing the manners and customs of an exotic people: in this case the French. He was very curious and he wasn’t particularly judgmental. So he went with an open mind and wide open eyes. He was fascinated by the relations between men and women, by how they dressed, by how they worked, by the way they decorated their homes and even how they set their tables. There are wonderfully vivid descriptions of all these things, which were so different from the way in which society worked in his native Egypt. He was also very interested in the way the politics of French society worked; he was fascinated by constitutional government, the idea that there could be rules that applied on rulers as well as on subjects. And he’s the first person to introduce the idea of a newspaper to the Arab world. At the time, in the 1820s, there were no newspapers in Arabic. He’s the first one to describe how they worked, how they allow accountability, how people’s actions can be put under scrutiny, and how anybody, whatever their standing in life, was able to write for these things called newspapers. The book was a bestseller from the moment it was published in Arabic. It was instantly translated into Turkish, so it reached the Ottoman world at large, and really is more responsible than any other book, in the first half of the 19th century, for setting reformist debates in Ottoman and Arab society. But it’s also just a great read – a fascinating, fantastic book, and there’s a wonderful new translation of it [by Daniel Newman].
On to One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate by Tom Segev. What does that mean, One Palestine, Complete?
It was a mock receipt for the handover between high commissioners in Palestine: the one handing on to his successor ‘one Palestine, complete’, in the same way someone handing over a battleship might give it into the hands of the next commander, itemising all aspects of the battleship. So it’s very much a reflection of a British notion of their responsibilities as commanders of this colony or ship. But the irony of it is, of course, that Palestine was made, by the British, into a twice-contested land: between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish Zionist immigrants. It was a country slated for partition. Arabs and Jews in Palestine were taking Palestine in the direction of a divided land, not ‘one Palestine, complete’. But, actually, Segev doesn’t dwell on that irony at any length. Instead, what he gives us is a very human history about the encounter between British imperial rulers, the indigenous Arab people and the Jewish immigrants in the inter-war years, when Palestine was created as a British mandate. The book is very richly peopled – these vivid characters from all three communities – and Segev tracks the way they didn’t live in isolation from one another, but interacted and were shaped by each other. It’s a book full of startling challenges to assumed wisdoms and borrowed wisdoms.
For example?
My favourite is his description of the Hebron Riots in 1929. This is an instance where growing tension between Arab and Jewish communities led to violence where Arabs attacked Jewish places of worship. They attacked the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and that set off a wave of attacks of other areas where there were Jewish communities in Hebron. As I recall, around 69 people were killed by Arab rioters, and it’s always portrayed as an instance of Arab intolerance towards the Jewish community in their midst, evidence of a genocidal streak. But what you get from reading Segev, is that what saved the Jewish community in Hebron from a much worse massacre was the fact that so many Arabs took in their Jewish neighbours to protect them. And, in this way, what could have been an elimination of the Jewish community in Hebron, led instead to two or three score people being killed rather than hundreds. I’d never read that anywhere else and I just think that this is a great example of how powerful a well-written book can be, for challenging people’s pre-conceptions.
Segev also gives us the very best portrait of Chaim Weizmann who was the Zionist diplomat responsible for the Balfour Declaration. He explains how Weizmann was able to leverage European misconceptions about international Jewry: he really played on their belief that he was the head of a kind of diaspora nation that he was in direct communication with, that they were organised and a force. The reality, as Segev points out, is that Weizmann was a guy in a small flat off Piccadilly, whose office was the suitcase of letters that he kept under his bed. There wasn’t more to him than that. But he was able to present himself and gain access to the very highest levels of British policymakers, and in this way shaped their views, so that they would come around to declaring British policy in favour of creating a Jewish national home in Palestine.
So Jewish stereotypes played in Weizmann’s favour?
There was always this notion among anti-Semites in Europe that there was a kind of Jewish International. And for some, this meant Jews were in some way seeking to dominate or control the economy or world politics. And Weizmann never fought that. He let people continue to work on such false assumptions and then presented himself as the head of the world Zionist organisation, as someone who was almost of head of state status; somebody who represented the interests of a lot of powerful, wealthy, influential Jews around the world. And he really wasn’t that. So it’s a book full of very rich and cliché-overturning anecdotes, told in a very lively and engaging way.
Your next book is Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War.
Fisk writes the most compassionate and engaging prose about his own experiences in Lebanon. As a journalist he seems to get underneath the skin of that society better than just about anyone I know. And it’s a book I relate to very personally, having lived for five years in Lebanon and having been forced to leave the country because of the outbreak of the civil war. So I felt very close to his subject. Fisk, of course, stayed through the very worst days of the conflict, when any rat worth his skin was going to get on a ship and get out of Lebanon. And so he wrote the story of the horrors that he saw in war-torn Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, and I think it probably stands as the best example of a book of political journalism of conflict in the Middle East that I can think of. He just writes like an angel.
What insights does it offer into the conflict?
The central dilemma for Fisk is the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps in the fall of 1982. He begins the book by going to talk to Holocaust survivors, and he’s trying to come to grips with how it was possible for a Jewish state, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, to be party to a massacre that was so exterminationist in its nature. The Israelis did not kill Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila, but they surrounded the camps and allowed their Maronite allies into them. The book is not in any sense a gratuitous swipe against the Israelis, because the Israeli public was also deeply appalled by the violence done in the camps, and one-tenth of the population of Israel actually took to the streets to protest, and the Israeli Supreme Court convened a commission of inquiry that was to find a number of government officials responsible to different degrees for that mass murder.
He is also trying to understand how a society divided by its own feuds or – worse than feuds – by genocidal warfare, how the Maronites, the Palestinians and the different militias can get to that point of brutality.
The other story in Fisk’s book is the kidnapping of Westerners, part of the emergence of a new Shiite power called Hezbollah, which fought its war against outside domination with very unconventional means. That started with the advent of suicide bombing and then went through the taking of hostages as a political bargaining chip. His friend Terry Anderson, the AP journalist, was not released by the time this edition came out. That too is one of the big stories that sticks in your mind after you’ve read the book.
Given our broader topic is the Arabs, does Fisk’s book say anything that is relevant when you look at other countries in the region?
Lebanon was not unique in facing civil conflict. There was Algeria in the 1990s where the cancellation of a parliamentary election led to a massive civil war. The longest civil war in the region is in the Sudan, and if we think more recently to what’s been going on in Iraq since its 2003 invasion, there are a number of examples of internecine conflicts that reached the degree of violence that Lebanon knew, and much worse.
I think the other thing about the broader Arab story is how many Arab countries are playing out their inter-Arab rivalries through the Lebanese conflict. You see Syria had a very strong position there; Iraqis opposed Syria’s involvement in Lebanon and didn’t want to compromise, and the Saudis were backing some groups. In some sense Lebanon was going to become a microcosm of broader regional conflicts too. All that is very much captured in Fisk’s book.
A lot of your choices seem to focus on personal narratives – it’s very much about firsthand accounts, what people are going through, rather than broad impersonal histories…
I find that this human interaction in history is what really hooks me, and it makes history much more immediate to readers generally. Though my fifth book is going to be in some ways the most impersonal and broad-sweeping of the lot. There’s an exception to every rule.
This is Albert Hourani’s A History of the Arab Peoples?
Yes. Though, actually, Hourani begins with a person too: Ibn Khaldun, the great Arab father of sociology, the 14th-century Arab intellectual. Khaldun wrote a very serious history about the rise and fall of empires which saw the driving energy of Arab history as coming from the desert. The power of the tribes from the desert conquers the towns and establishes itself as dominant power, and then, in the course of generations, loses its martial ardour, and becomes shaped by the refinement and culture of city life. So in the end it is no longer strong enough to defend itself against the next wave of ardour coming from the desert that will challenge the political order in the now effete city and impose a new political order. He sees the rise and fall of empires in Arab classical history as in a sense shaped by this cyclical pattern.
He also sees the loyalties of Arabs being shaped by a force called asabiya. This is the notion that your loyalties belong to those you know best. So it’ll be me against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, us and our cousin against the next family over, us and our neighbours against the next town over, us and our villages against those in another province – this notion of social cohesion that grows more diffuse the larger the unit. Khaldun sees asabiya as being one of the driving forces of Arab history.
And Hourani picked up on Khaldun’s cyclical notion of the rise and fall of Arab empires, and these almost Weberian notions of loyalty, as the key themes with which to weave a history of the Arab peoples – critically he speaks in the plural. He sees the Arabs as being many peoples and one people at the same time, and his history traces the Arab world from the rise of Islam to modern times, and does so with an elegant conciseness that allows him to cover that huge sweep of 14 centuries in about 500-600 pages.
Hourani is in many ways the most respected modern historian of the Arab world. He made his career here in Oxford – he was the founding father of the Middle East centre where I work – and when I met him as a graduate student, the awe and reverence with which I approached the great man was, I’m sure, pretty funny to him. But he was a delightful man. When I came to take my appointment to Oxford in 1991 I had two years of seeing him before he died. I keep being described as disciple of Hourani, or a student of Hourani, and I was neither of those things. I never got a chance to study under Albert, though I would have loved to. But I always wanted to write a book like Albert Hourani did. I always felt very much in awe of his scholarship and his depth of knowledge and erudition. And, in a sense, all of those great qualities were brought to bear in his last great work, A History of the Arab Peoples.
Given how much has been written about Arabs, why did you decide to write your own book, The Arabs: A History?
After 9/11 there was a feeling that terrorism posed a threat to our way of life. And I wanted to give some insight into the fact that in the Arab world there was also a feeling that we posed a threat to their way of life. There is a long and deep history for that Arab perception of the West. So I wanted, in a way, to balance our understanding of a region which we are ever more engaged with – sending hundreds of thousands of troops and ruling these places.
I also wanted to present a modern history from modern Arab sources. I’m not an Arab, but I can introduce some of those sources that are less well known in the West. Hourani was at his briefest writing about the 19th and 20th centuries; he had only brief coverage of those centuries, whereas I am a modern historian.
Also, I thought a history was needed that integrated the end of the Cold War. Most Arab histories, like Albert’s, were written in the 1980s. But younger readers don’t relate to the Cold War; it’s ancient history to them. When you talk to students now about the Cold War, you might as well be talking about the English Civil War.
Interview conducted by Sophie Roell
Source: The Browser Eugene Rogan on 'The Arabs'
Eugene Rogan is Director of the Middle East Centre and a Faculty Fellow and University Lecturer in the Modern History of the Middle East at Oxford University. His research focuses on the social and economic history of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and the Arab states in the 20th century. His most recent book, The Arabs: A History, came out in 2009 to widespread media attention, not least because it offered historical insight into why US efforts to promote democracy in the region have been met with such suspicion.
You’ve started with a travel account from the early 19th century, John Lewis Burckhardt’s Travel in Syria and the Holy Land. Why this book?
Burckhardt really was the original Lawrence of Arabia, the Westerner who goes out to the Middle East, studies Arabic, dresses in the local fashion, and travels right through the Arab world. And he came away with a depth of understanding about the people among whom he travelled that was just unsurpassed in its day. Burckhardt was actually preparing himself not to be an Orientalist and Middle Eastern traveller, but to go and try to find the sources of various African rivers – he was fascinated by the origins of the Niger river. He was preparing himself to go into Central Africa but he never actually made it – he went up the Nile and made his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina and then came back to Cairo, where he got ill and died in 1817. So he never fulfilled the objective for which he was learning the language and travelling through the region. But in the process he left behind a couple of fantastic books. One was his travel book, Travel in Syria and the Holy Land, and the other one was a study of the Wahabis in Arabia, from the time of his pilgrimage to Mecca.
And of all the things he describes, what really sticks in your mind?
He is most famous for being the first Westerner to see the Nabatean ruins in Petra. He had discerned that the lost city of Petra might correspond to some places the Bedouin were talking about, and he finally persuaded some of them to lead him there. The Bedouin were very suspicious of anybody trying to visit ruins and old sites, thinking they were seeking gold or treasure or that they might be necromancers: Burckhardt was often suspected of raising the dead, because of his interest in travelling among ruins. And so his is a very quickly sketched description of Petra, because his guides took him to see it, showed him the place and then quickly frogmarched him out again. But I think that stands as one of the most famous passages in his travels. For me, what’s interesting are the reflections on the Arab societies in which he moved: this is someone who could talk to the people, who really came to grips with the politics of the local society. There’s a sophistication of knowledge and engagement that came from travelling, from living among people for a long time, from speaking their language, which makes him stand out above many of the other Western travellers of his generation.
So your next choice is al-Tahtawi’s An Imam in Paris, which was one of the most influential books in Arabic of the 19th century. What can you tell me about this book?
Al-Tahtawi was sent by the ruler of Egypt as the chaplain of an educational mission to France. The aim of the mission was to train young Egyptians in the languages and the arts and the sciences that had made Europe so strong in that first quarter of the 19th century. And he was a very insightful observer, who presents us with a pretty unique example of an Arab or Muslim traveller describing the manners and customs of an exotic people: in this case the French. He was very curious and he wasn’t particularly judgmental. So he went with an open mind and wide open eyes. He was fascinated by the relations between men and women, by how they dressed, by how they worked, by the way they decorated their homes and even how they set their tables. There are wonderfully vivid descriptions of all these things, which were so different from the way in which society worked in his native Egypt. He was also very interested in the way the politics of French society worked; he was fascinated by constitutional government, the idea that there could be rules that applied on rulers as well as on subjects. And he’s the first person to introduce the idea of a newspaper to the Arab world. At the time, in the 1820s, there were no newspapers in Arabic. He’s the first one to describe how they worked, how they allow accountability, how people’s actions can be put under scrutiny, and how anybody, whatever their standing in life, was able to write for these things called newspapers. The book was a bestseller from the moment it was published in Arabic. It was instantly translated into Turkish, so it reached the Ottoman world at large, and really is more responsible than any other book, in the first half of the 19th century, for setting reformist debates in Ottoman and Arab society. But it’s also just a great read – a fascinating, fantastic book, and there’s a wonderful new translation of it [by Daniel Newman].
On to One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate by Tom Segev. What does that mean, One Palestine, Complete?
It was a mock receipt for the handover between high commissioners in Palestine: the one handing on to his successor ‘one Palestine, complete’, in the same way someone handing over a battleship might give it into the hands of the next commander, itemising all aspects of the battleship. So it’s very much a reflection of a British notion of their responsibilities as commanders of this colony or ship. But the irony of it is, of course, that Palestine was made, by the British, into a twice-contested land: between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish Zionist immigrants. It was a country slated for partition. Arabs and Jews in Palestine were taking Palestine in the direction of a divided land, not ‘one Palestine, complete’. But, actually, Segev doesn’t dwell on that irony at any length. Instead, what he gives us is a very human history about the encounter between British imperial rulers, the indigenous Arab people and the Jewish immigrants in the inter-war years, when Palestine was created as a British mandate. The book is very richly peopled – these vivid characters from all three communities – and Segev tracks the way they didn’t live in isolation from one another, but interacted and were shaped by each other. It’s a book full of startling challenges to assumed wisdoms and borrowed wisdoms.
For example?
My favourite is his description of the Hebron Riots in 1929. This is an instance where growing tension between Arab and Jewish communities led to violence where Arabs attacked Jewish places of worship. They attacked the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and that set off a wave of attacks of other areas where there were Jewish communities in Hebron. As I recall, around 69 people were killed by Arab rioters, and it’s always portrayed as an instance of Arab intolerance towards the Jewish community in their midst, evidence of a genocidal streak. But what you get from reading Segev, is that what saved the Jewish community in Hebron from a much worse massacre was the fact that so many Arabs took in their Jewish neighbours to protect them. And, in this way, what could have been an elimination of the Jewish community in Hebron, led instead to two or three score people being killed rather than hundreds. I’d never read that anywhere else and I just think that this is a great example of how powerful a well-written book can be, for challenging people’s pre-conceptions.
Segev also gives us the very best portrait of Chaim Weizmann who was the Zionist diplomat responsible for the Balfour Declaration. He explains how Weizmann was able to leverage European misconceptions about international Jewry: he really played on their belief that he was the head of a kind of diaspora nation that he was in direct communication with, that they were organised and a force. The reality, as Segev points out, is that Weizmann was a guy in a small flat off Piccadilly, whose office was the suitcase of letters that he kept under his bed. There wasn’t more to him than that. But he was able to present himself and gain access to the very highest levels of British policymakers, and in this way shaped their views, so that they would come around to declaring British policy in favour of creating a Jewish national home in Palestine.
So Jewish stereotypes played in Weizmann’s favour?
There was always this notion among anti-Semites in Europe that there was a kind of Jewish International. And for some, this meant Jews were in some way seeking to dominate or control the economy or world politics. And Weizmann never fought that. He let people continue to work on such false assumptions and then presented himself as the head of the world Zionist organisation, as someone who was almost of head of state status; somebody who represented the interests of a lot of powerful, wealthy, influential Jews around the world. And he really wasn’t that. So it’s a book full of very rich and cliché-overturning anecdotes, told in a very lively and engaging way.
Your next book is Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War.
Fisk writes the most compassionate and engaging prose about his own experiences in Lebanon. As a journalist he seems to get underneath the skin of that society better than just about anyone I know. And it’s a book I relate to very personally, having lived for five years in Lebanon and having been forced to leave the country because of the outbreak of the civil war. So I felt very close to his subject. Fisk, of course, stayed through the very worst days of the conflict, when any rat worth his skin was going to get on a ship and get out of Lebanon. And so he wrote the story of the horrors that he saw in war-torn Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, and I think it probably stands as the best example of a book of political journalism of conflict in the Middle East that I can think of. He just writes like an angel.
What insights does it offer into the conflict?
The central dilemma for Fisk is the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps in the fall of 1982. He begins the book by going to talk to Holocaust survivors, and he’s trying to come to grips with how it was possible for a Jewish state, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, to be party to a massacre that was so exterminationist in its nature. The Israelis did not kill Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila, but they surrounded the camps and allowed their Maronite allies into them. The book is not in any sense a gratuitous swipe against the Israelis, because the Israeli public was also deeply appalled by the violence done in the camps, and one-tenth of the population of Israel actually took to the streets to protest, and the Israeli Supreme Court convened a commission of inquiry that was to find a number of government officials responsible to different degrees for that mass murder.
He is also trying to understand how a society divided by its own feuds or – worse than feuds – by genocidal warfare, how the Maronites, the Palestinians and the different militias can get to that point of brutality.
The other story in Fisk’s book is the kidnapping of Westerners, part of the emergence of a new Shiite power called Hezbollah, which fought its war against outside domination with very unconventional means. That started with the advent of suicide bombing and then went through the taking of hostages as a political bargaining chip. His friend Terry Anderson, the AP journalist, was not released by the time this edition came out. That too is one of the big stories that sticks in your mind after you’ve read the book.
Given our broader topic is the Arabs, does Fisk’s book say anything that is relevant when you look at other countries in the region?
Lebanon was not unique in facing civil conflict. There was Algeria in the 1990s where the cancellation of a parliamentary election led to a massive civil war. The longest civil war in the region is in the Sudan, and if we think more recently to what’s been going on in Iraq since its 2003 invasion, there are a number of examples of internecine conflicts that reached the degree of violence that Lebanon knew, and much worse.
I think the other thing about the broader Arab story is how many Arab countries are playing out their inter-Arab rivalries through the Lebanese conflict. You see Syria had a very strong position there; Iraqis opposed Syria’s involvement in Lebanon and didn’t want to compromise, and the Saudis were backing some groups. In some sense Lebanon was going to become a microcosm of broader regional conflicts too. All that is very much captured in Fisk’s book.
A lot of your choices seem to focus on personal narratives – it’s very much about firsthand accounts, what people are going through, rather than broad impersonal histories…
I find that this human interaction in history is what really hooks me, and it makes history much more immediate to readers generally. Though my fifth book is going to be in some ways the most impersonal and broad-sweeping of the lot. There’s an exception to every rule.
This is Albert Hourani’s A History of the Arab Peoples?
Yes. Though, actually, Hourani begins with a person too: Ibn Khaldun, the great Arab father of sociology, the 14th-century Arab intellectual. Khaldun wrote a very serious history about the rise and fall of empires which saw the driving energy of Arab history as coming from the desert. The power of the tribes from the desert conquers the towns and establishes itself as dominant power, and then, in the course of generations, loses its martial ardour, and becomes shaped by the refinement and culture of city life. So in the end it is no longer strong enough to defend itself against the next wave of ardour coming from the desert that will challenge the political order in the now effete city and impose a new political order. He sees the rise and fall of empires in Arab classical history as in a sense shaped by this cyclical pattern.
He also sees the loyalties of Arabs being shaped by a force called asabiya. This is the notion that your loyalties belong to those you know best. So it’ll be me against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, us and our cousin against the next family over, us and our neighbours against the next town over, us and our villages against those in another province – this notion of social cohesion that grows more diffuse the larger the unit. Khaldun sees asabiya as being one of the driving forces of Arab history.
And Hourani picked up on Khaldun’s cyclical notion of the rise and fall of Arab empires, and these almost Weberian notions of loyalty, as the key themes with which to weave a history of the Arab peoples – critically he speaks in the plural. He sees the Arabs as being many peoples and one people at the same time, and his history traces the Arab world from the rise of Islam to modern times, and does so with an elegant conciseness that allows him to cover that huge sweep of 14 centuries in about 500-600 pages.
Hourani is in many ways the most respected modern historian of the Arab world. He made his career here in Oxford – he was the founding father of the Middle East centre where I work – and when I met him as a graduate student, the awe and reverence with which I approached the great man was, I’m sure, pretty funny to him. But he was a delightful man. When I came to take my appointment to Oxford in 1991 I had two years of seeing him before he died. I keep being described as disciple of Hourani, or a student of Hourani, and I was neither of those things. I never got a chance to study under Albert, though I would have loved to. But I always wanted to write a book like Albert Hourani did. I always felt very much in awe of his scholarship and his depth of knowledge and erudition. And, in a sense, all of those great qualities were brought to bear in his last great work, A History of the Arab Peoples.
Given how much has been written about Arabs, why did you decide to write your own book, The Arabs: A History?
After 9/11 there was a feeling that terrorism posed a threat to our way of life. And I wanted to give some insight into the fact that in the Arab world there was also a feeling that we posed a threat to their way of life. There is a long and deep history for that Arab perception of the West. So I wanted, in a way, to balance our understanding of a region which we are ever more engaged with – sending hundreds of thousands of troops and ruling these places.
I also wanted to present a modern history from modern Arab sources. I’m not an Arab, but I can introduce some of those sources that are less well known in the West. Hourani was at his briefest writing about the 19th and 20th centuries; he had only brief coverage of those centuries, whereas I am a modern historian.
Also, I thought a history was needed that integrated the end of the Cold War. Most Arab histories, like Albert’s, were written in the 1980s. But younger readers don’t relate to the Cold War; it’s ancient history to them. When you talk to students now about the Cold War, you might as well be talking about the English Civil War.
Interview conducted by Sophie Roell
Source: The Browser Eugene Rogan on 'The Arabs'
Saturday, 9 January 2010
Folklore and love combined – a different look at medieval Anatolia
Few collections of folk tales and folk poetry from medieval Anatolia have been translated into English. Thanks to Professor Talat Halman, a new book has recently been published that provides examples of both. According to Halman, the material came from books, anthologies, and special publications, as well as story-telling sessions in rural areas
Illustration from Professor Talat S. Halman's “Popular Turkish Love Lyrics & Folk Legends.”
Illustration from Professor Talat S. Halman's “Popular Turkish Love Lyrics & Folk Legends.”
Turkish folklore has not been collected and studied for as long as othethe folk tales of other countries. Some studies have done nothing other than recount the stories, who told them, where they were collected and when.
The Vedas of India, or sacred texts, have been considered the origin of many folk tales, and some parts of them date back as far as 1500 B.C. Stories from Egypt come from approximately the same time, so one cannot be very sure of origins. The Greek fable-teller Aesop told some fabulous stories in the fifth century B.C., and there is reason to believe he did not make some up; rather, he may have retold stories he heard growing up. Scholars have even traced the origin of some of his fables back to Sumer and Akkad. Similar folk stories can be found in material from Australia, New Zealand and the Americas. This makes it unlikely, if not impossible, that these tales originated from a single source.
Another theory proposed in modern times was that the tales resulted of humans’ explanations of nature. They attributed life to everything in nature including stones, the earth and more. This is commonly found in cultures all over the world and suggests a common origin – even where one would think there could be no resemblance. Stories involving legal cases occurring in both early Athens and in modern times among natives of a Southeast Asian island, considered a javelin as the murderer rather than the person throwing it.
The javelin in both cases is given an animated nature, something we would never think of today in modern jurisprudence.
One could place the second theory even further back to the customs and practices of early humans worshipping animals and beliefs that they were descended from animals. Taboos or prohibitions may have occurred from the same source.
In the end, scholars decided that it was hopeless to attribute a common point of origin for folk tales as it is impossible to determine sources for any instances mentioned, and people are mostly stereotyped and can be found in a lot of places.
Folk tales in modern times
Although the Brothers Grimm wrote at the beginning of the 19th century and were not the first to collect folk tales in the modern era, they are usually pointed out as the forerunners of modern fairy tale collecting. Their fairytale work was followed by collecting folk music. During their lifetime, they gathered several hundred tales and adhered to the original stories as closely as possible. These were not stories they made up, so any attempts at psychological analysis of the Brothers Grimm is useless unless one wonders why they collected more of one type of story rather than another. It was only later when methods and standards for collecting and publishing fairy tales were decided.
Folk tales have been collected from almost everywhere around the globe, including Turkey. They were usually transmitted orally, and it remained to the older people to tell the younger ones. When modern communications were introduced and many people migrated in search of a better life, those traditional stories began to be lost. One of the earliest collectors of Turkish folk tales was Ignacz Kunos, a Hungarian scholar who traveled through Anatolia and collected stories from the people living there. Forty-four Turkish fairy and folk tales he collected were published in 1896 and are at present available free of charge online. P.N. Boratav who is better known for having collected Turkish folk music in Anatolia is also credited with having gathered folk tales as well.
Collecting folk tales in Turkey was supported by the feelings of nationalism arising after the proclamation of the Republic in 1923. Their study was even available in universities. Since then, a fair number of studies have been produced and collections, such as the one at Texas Technical University in Lubbock, Texas, have been made. A department of folklore was established at Indiana University under the chairmanship of Ilhan Basgoz. It includes ethnomusicology or the study of folk music.
The latest in Turkish folk tales/folk poetry
In November, a new book, written by the prolific author and translator Professor Talat S. Halman, joined the few books of Turkish folk tales available in English. The publisher, Syracuse University, said that it was the first time an illustrated book of Turkish lyric poetry and folk tales had been published in the United States.
Continue reading Hurriyet: Folklore and love combined – a different look at medieval Anatolia
Illustration from Professor Talat S. Halman's “Popular Turkish Love Lyrics & Folk Legends.”
Illustration from Professor Talat S. Halman's “Popular Turkish Love Lyrics & Folk Legends.”
Turkish folklore has not been collected and studied for as long as othethe folk tales of other countries. Some studies have done nothing other than recount the stories, who told them, where they were collected and when.
The Vedas of India, or sacred texts, have been considered the origin of many folk tales, and some parts of them date back as far as 1500 B.C. Stories from Egypt come from approximately the same time, so one cannot be very sure of origins. The Greek fable-teller Aesop told some fabulous stories in the fifth century B.C., and there is reason to believe he did not make some up; rather, he may have retold stories he heard growing up. Scholars have even traced the origin of some of his fables back to Sumer and Akkad. Similar folk stories can be found in material from Australia, New Zealand and the Americas. This makes it unlikely, if not impossible, that these tales originated from a single source.
Another theory proposed in modern times was that the tales resulted of humans’ explanations of nature. They attributed life to everything in nature including stones, the earth and more. This is commonly found in cultures all over the world and suggests a common origin – even where one would think there could be no resemblance. Stories involving legal cases occurring in both early Athens and in modern times among natives of a Southeast Asian island, considered a javelin as the murderer rather than the person throwing it.
The javelin in both cases is given an animated nature, something we would never think of today in modern jurisprudence.
One could place the second theory even further back to the customs and practices of early humans worshipping animals and beliefs that they were descended from animals. Taboos or prohibitions may have occurred from the same source.
In the end, scholars decided that it was hopeless to attribute a common point of origin for folk tales as it is impossible to determine sources for any instances mentioned, and people are mostly stereotyped and can be found in a lot of places.
Folk tales in modern times
Although the Brothers Grimm wrote at the beginning of the 19th century and were not the first to collect folk tales in the modern era, they are usually pointed out as the forerunners of modern fairy tale collecting. Their fairytale work was followed by collecting folk music. During their lifetime, they gathered several hundred tales and adhered to the original stories as closely as possible. These were not stories they made up, so any attempts at psychological analysis of the Brothers Grimm is useless unless one wonders why they collected more of one type of story rather than another. It was only later when methods and standards for collecting and publishing fairy tales were decided.
Folk tales have been collected from almost everywhere around the globe, including Turkey. They were usually transmitted orally, and it remained to the older people to tell the younger ones. When modern communications were introduced and many people migrated in search of a better life, those traditional stories began to be lost. One of the earliest collectors of Turkish folk tales was Ignacz Kunos, a Hungarian scholar who traveled through Anatolia and collected stories from the people living there. Forty-four Turkish fairy and folk tales he collected were published in 1896 and are at present available free of charge online. P.N. Boratav who is better known for having collected Turkish folk music in Anatolia is also credited with having gathered folk tales as well.
Collecting folk tales in Turkey was supported by the feelings of nationalism arising after the proclamation of the Republic in 1923. Their study was even available in universities. Since then, a fair number of studies have been produced and collections, such as the one at Texas Technical University in Lubbock, Texas, have been made. A department of folklore was established at Indiana University under the chairmanship of Ilhan Basgoz. It includes ethnomusicology or the study of folk music.
The latest in Turkish folk tales/folk poetry
In November, a new book, written by the prolific author and translator Professor Talat S. Halman, joined the few books of Turkish folk tales available in English. The publisher, Syracuse University, said that it was the first time an illustrated book of Turkish lyric poetry and folk tales had been published in the United States.
Continue reading Hurriyet: Folklore and love combined – a different look at medieval Anatolia
Friday, 1 January 2010
The caged and the saved: finding feminism in the Islamic world
Like most ideas, this one did not have a single genesis. I’ve been thinking, and to some extent writing, about feminism for many years and in many guises.
The word itself is controversial, with some damning it as the force that destroyed the family and others defending it as the movement that freed a gender.
It is one of those terms that starts simply and rapidly gets tangled: if you look around the world and think there are inequalities between the genders, and that those inequalities are not biological and are unfair, you are probably a feminist. And that’s where the arguments begin.
But definitions are only useful for what they illuminate, and the language of feminism, like the languages of democracy or freedom, has often been used to obscure.
So much of the discourse around the West’s relationship with the Muslim world has been framed through the language of women.
It was around women that early Christian Europe framed its opposition to the pleasure palaces of the “Mohammedans”, the barely disguised yearning for the exoticism of the Orient. The role of women in Egyptian society was cited by Napoleon as a wedge through which to enter the country; was cited again as a justification for the Anglo-American invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan, and is regularly cited as apparent evidence of a lack of commitment to equal rights in Muslim communities.
Within the Muslim world, discourse around women’s roles and rights remains highly charged. As much as some point to the treatment of women in Europe as evidence of the vanishing of the West’s moral compass, it is also the case that, across much of the Muslim world, women’s dress has become a way to impose a religious vision upon the society, even as Muslim women use the veil to reclaim their own identities.
And, still, in too many countries, internal social and cultural wars are fought on the battleground of women’s bodies.
So the question of what counts as feminism, as liberation, in the Arab and Islamic worlds is complicated and intricate. To try and answer it, I am leaving London next week for Beirut, the first stop on a journey that will take me thousands of kilometres across Arab and Islamic lands, through Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and to the very edges of Indonesia.
Through interviews, experiences and research, I hope to come close to an answer, and I’ve been immensely privileged to be awarded a Churchill Fellowship, the living memorial to Britain’s wartime leader, to fund this exploration.
What do I hope to find? Not easy answers, for sure. Even the idea of what counts as liberation is mixed.
I have called the introductory chapter of the book I am writing about this journey “The caged and the saved”, reflecting the two ways people think of what the Muslim veil does.
In it, I tell an anecdote of encountering these contrasting attitudes in real life, when, walking around London with a friend, she asked me, of a woman wearing a Saudi abaya, “How can she think she is liberated when she dresses like that?” It occurred to me another woman might ask the same question about the women around her displaying acres of flesh.
Nor is there a clear dividing line between political and religious perspectives. Earlier this year in Morocco I interviewed Nadia Yassine, of the banned Islamist group Al Adl wal Ihsane. As much as she spoke the language of women’s rights and of female liberation, she was reluctant to be pigeonholed as a feminist in the western understanding of the term. Her perspective, she said, stemmed from her faith. The imam and the activist can sometimes reach the same conclusions.
Within the Muslim world, as within the West, the idea of what feminism is, where it comes from, how relevant it is, what form equality ought to take are real, live debates. They come to us in snatches: harassment of women on the streets of Cairo, the wearing of trousers in Sudan, unsegregated university campuses in Saudi Arabia, the burning of girls’ schools in Pakistan.
And threaded through these snatches are less-regular glimpses of clear successes: the leadership of women such as Queen Rania, Benazir Bhutto and Lubna Olayan. And there is the immense lived experience of millions of women, who assert their own independence daily through their work, relationships, devotion to their family and faith.
The Arab and Islamic worlds are going through a period of immense change and the ideology that holds nations and regions together is altering. The big –isms of the world – nationalism, capitalism, Islamism – affect women in each country differently.
The outward symbols of faith are obvious illustrations of this, but the framework of the society is equally important.
The professor in Tehran and the village-woman in Indonesia will not only dress differently, they may also have different conceptions of the relationship between men and women. I expect to meet those who espouse feminism from a purely secular perspective, and those who say that Islam has provided a clear manifesto for women’s rights.
So I am not setting out with preconceived notions. I don’t begin from the assumption that one way of living is better than another, nor do I go in with the assumption that what occurs to one person in one country is indicative of a nation or a faith. But I do think it is possible to delineate between ways of organising a society: that if you look closely enough at a society’s history and people, it is possible to make fine, sensitive judgements. Though I expect differences, I also hope for some common ground.
The Arab world is a complex place; nations of Arabic speakers who think they are one but act like they are many. It is a place that defies easy categorisation.
I have lived, travelled and reported across many Arab countries over many years, but there are still times when I come across something – an event, a conversation – that makes me think I have barely scratched the surface.
Such has been the case with my conversations about feminism: I’ve often understood the word in terms of equality of laws, education and employment. But it is astonishing how varied people’s perceptions are around the Middle East.
If that is the case with the Arab world, with all its many commonalities, imagine the complexity of the Islamic worlds that stretch across Asia and Africa. That’s the reason I have broadened the journey out to encompass the vast non-Arab Islamic world: the Shia customs of Iran, the South Asian experience in Pakistan and the newer Asian traditions in Indonesia.
The exploration of these places will be a key theme, because no idea lives in isolation; all are shaped by the experience of their societies. I want to go beyond a purely intellectual discussion to understand the lived experiences of women in these societies.
I admit there have been times these last few weeks, as I prepare to leave London and skim through old books on the subject, that I have wondered if it is perhaps an overwhelming one. I have been incredibly lucky so far to have friends and colleagues who have helped me get started – I know I will meet many more over the next few months. What I don’t know is if I will find any answers, or even if there are any: that’s why I am going.
Follow Faisal al Yafai’s journey at faisalalyafai.com. His book will be published by IB Tauris in 2011.
Source: The National 'The caged and the saved: finding feminism in the Islamic world'
The word itself is controversial, with some damning it as the force that destroyed the family and others defending it as the movement that freed a gender.
It is one of those terms that starts simply and rapidly gets tangled: if you look around the world and think there are inequalities between the genders, and that those inequalities are not biological and are unfair, you are probably a feminist. And that’s where the arguments begin.
But definitions are only useful for what they illuminate, and the language of feminism, like the languages of democracy or freedom, has often been used to obscure.
So much of the discourse around the West’s relationship with the Muslim world has been framed through the language of women.
It was around women that early Christian Europe framed its opposition to the pleasure palaces of the “Mohammedans”, the barely disguised yearning for the exoticism of the Orient. The role of women in Egyptian society was cited by Napoleon as a wedge through which to enter the country; was cited again as a justification for the Anglo-American invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan, and is regularly cited as apparent evidence of a lack of commitment to equal rights in Muslim communities.
Within the Muslim world, discourse around women’s roles and rights remains highly charged. As much as some point to the treatment of women in Europe as evidence of the vanishing of the West’s moral compass, it is also the case that, across much of the Muslim world, women’s dress has become a way to impose a religious vision upon the society, even as Muslim women use the veil to reclaim their own identities.
And, still, in too many countries, internal social and cultural wars are fought on the battleground of women’s bodies.
So the question of what counts as feminism, as liberation, in the Arab and Islamic worlds is complicated and intricate. To try and answer it, I am leaving London next week for Beirut, the first stop on a journey that will take me thousands of kilometres across Arab and Islamic lands, through Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and to the very edges of Indonesia.
Through interviews, experiences and research, I hope to come close to an answer, and I’ve been immensely privileged to be awarded a Churchill Fellowship, the living memorial to Britain’s wartime leader, to fund this exploration.
What do I hope to find? Not easy answers, for sure. Even the idea of what counts as liberation is mixed.
I have called the introductory chapter of the book I am writing about this journey “The caged and the saved”, reflecting the two ways people think of what the Muslim veil does.
In it, I tell an anecdote of encountering these contrasting attitudes in real life, when, walking around London with a friend, she asked me, of a woman wearing a Saudi abaya, “How can she think she is liberated when she dresses like that?” It occurred to me another woman might ask the same question about the women around her displaying acres of flesh.
Nor is there a clear dividing line between political and religious perspectives. Earlier this year in Morocco I interviewed Nadia Yassine, of the banned Islamist group Al Adl wal Ihsane. As much as she spoke the language of women’s rights and of female liberation, she was reluctant to be pigeonholed as a feminist in the western understanding of the term. Her perspective, she said, stemmed from her faith. The imam and the activist can sometimes reach the same conclusions.
Within the Muslim world, as within the West, the idea of what feminism is, where it comes from, how relevant it is, what form equality ought to take are real, live debates. They come to us in snatches: harassment of women on the streets of Cairo, the wearing of trousers in Sudan, unsegregated university campuses in Saudi Arabia, the burning of girls’ schools in Pakistan.
And threaded through these snatches are less-regular glimpses of clear successes: the leadership of women such as Queen Rania, Benazir Bhutto and Lubna Olayan. And there is the immense lived experience of millions of women, who assert their own independence daily through their work, relationships, devotion to their family and faith.
The Arab and Islamic worlds are going through a period of immense change and the ideology that holds nations and regions together is altering. The big –isms of the world – nationalism, capitalism, Islamism – affect women in each country differently.
The outward symbols of faith are obvious illustrations of this, but the framework of the society is equally important.
The professor in Tehran and the village-woman in Indonesia will not only dress differently, they may also have different conceptions of the relationship between men and women. I expect to meet those who espouse feminism from a purely secular perspective, and those who say that Islam has provided a clear manifesto for women’s rights.
So I am not setting out with preconceived notions. I don’t begin from the assumption that one way of living is better than another, nor do I go in with the assumption that what occurs to one person in one country is indicative of a nation or a faith. But I do think it is possible to delineate between ways of organising a society: that if you look closely enough at a society’s history and people, it is possible to make fine, sensitive judgements. Though I expect differences, I also hope for some common ground.
The Arab world is a complex place; nations of Arabic speakers who think they are one but act like they are many. It is a place that defies easy categorisation.
I have lived, travelled and reported across many Arab countries over many years, but there are still times when I come across something – an event, a conversation – that makes me think I have barely scratched the surface.
Such has been the case with my conversations about feminism: I’ve often understood the word in terms of equality of laws, education and employment. But it is astonishing how varied people’s perceptions are around the Middle East.
If that is the case with the Arab world, with all its many commonalities, imagine the complexity of the Islamic worlds that stretch across Asia and Africa. That’s the reason I have broadened the journey out to encompass the vast non-Arab Islamic world: the Shia customs of Iran, the South Asian experience in Pakistan and the newer Asian traditions in Indonesia.
The exploration of these places will be a key theme, because no idea lives in isolation; all are shaped by the experience of their societies. I want to go beyond a purely intellectual discussion to understand the lived experiences of women in these societies.
I admit there have been times these last few weeks, as I prepare to leave London and skim through old books on the subject, that I have wondered if it is perhaps an overwhelming one. I have been incredibly lucky so far to have friends and colleagues who have helped me get started – I know I will meet many more over the next few months. What I don’t know is if I will find any answers, or even if there are any: that’s why I am going.
Follow Faisal al Yafai’s journey at faisalalyafai.com. His book will be published by IB Tauris in 2011.
Source: The National 'The caged and the saved: finding feminism in the Islamic world'
Thursday, 10 December 2009
Egypt starts building steel wall on Gaza Strip border
Egypt has begun constructing a huge metal wall along its border with the Gaza Strip as it attempts to cut smuggling tunnels, the BBC has learned.
When it is finished the wall will be 10-11km (6-7 miles) long and will extend 18 metres below the surface.
The Egyptians are being helped by American army engineers, who the BBC understands have designed the wall.
The plan has been shrouded in secrecy, with no comment or confirmation from the Egyptian government.
The wall will take 18 months to complete.
For weeks local farmers have noticed more activity at the border where trees were being cut down, but very few of them were aware that a barrier was being built.
'Impenetrable'
That is because the barrier, made of super-strength steel, has been hidden deep underground.
The BBC has been told that it was manufactured in the US, that it fits together in similar fashion to a jigsaw, and that it has been tested to ensure it is bomb proof.
When we get a political solution, there will be no need for tunnels. I don't think this new wall will affect the smuggling, we are talking about thousands of tunnels
Abed Elrahman al-Assouli, Khan Younis, Gaza
Egypt's Gaza barrier: Your views
It cannot be cut or melted - in short it is impenetrable.
Intelligence sources in Egypt say the barrier is being sunk close to the perimeter wall that already exists.
They claim 4km of the wall has already been completed north of the Rafah crossing, with work now beginning to the south.
The land beneath Egypt and Gaza resembles a Swiss cheese, full of holes and tunnels through which the Palestinians smuggle the everyday items they are denied by the blockade.
But the Israelis say the tunnels are also used to smuggle people, weapons, and the components of the rockets that are fired at southern Israeli towns.
The wall is not expected to stop all the smuggling, but it will force the Palestinians to go deeper and it will likely cut the hundreds of superficial tunnels closer to the surface that are used to move the bulk of the goods.
Source: BBC: Egypt starts building steel wall on Gaza Strip border
When it is finished the wall will be 10-11km (6-7 miles) long and will extend 18 metres below the surface.
The Egyptians are being helped by American army engineers, who the BBC understands have designed the wall.
The plan has been shrouded in secrecy, with no comment or confirmation from the Egyptian government.
The wall will take 18 months to complete.
For weeks local farmers have noticed more activity at the border where trees were being cut down, but very few of them were aware that a barrier was being built.
'Impenetrable'
That is because the barrier, made of super-strength steel, has been hidden deep underground.
The BBC has been told that it was manufactured in the US, that it fits together in similar fashion to a jigsaw, and that it has been tested to ensure it is bomb proof.
When we get a political solution, there will be no need for tunnels. I don't think this new wall will affect the smuggling, we are talking about thousands of tunnels
Abed Elrahman al-Assouli, Khan Younis, Gaza
Egypt's Gaza barrier: Your views
It cannot be cut or melted - in short it is impenetrable.
Intelligence sources in Egypt say the barrier is being sunk close to the perimeter wall that already exists.
They claim 4km of the wall has already been completed north of the Rafah crossing, with work now beginning to the south.
The land beneath Egypt and Gaza resembles a Swiss cheese, full of holes and tunnels through which the Palestinians smuggle the everyday items they are denied by the blockade.
But the Israelis say the tunnels are also used to smuggle people, weapons, and the components of the rockets that are fired at southern Israeli towns.
The wall is not expected to stop all the smuggling, but it will force the Palestinians to go deeper and it will likely cut the hundreds of superficial tunnels closer to the surface that are used to move the bulk of the goods.
Source: BBC: Egypt starts building steel wall on Gaza Strip border
Sunday, 6 December 2009
Dutch department store gives Arabic letters a sweet twist
In the Netherlands, the name day celebration of the children’s patron saint, Nicholas (Sinterklaas), on December 5, is more important than Christmas. It is thought that Santa Claus has his roots in Sinterklaas, who was known for his secret gift-giving. The theory is that it all started in the former Dutch colonial town of New Amsterdam, currently known as New York City. Either way, Sinterklaas is an important national holiday for 16 million people in the north of Europe and has its own traditional candied goodies to go with it.
One of the must-have sweets for the Dutch is a chocolate version of their initial. Children will leave carrots and hay in their shoes next to the chimney when they go to bed, hoping Sinterklaas, who rides around the rooftops on a white stallion, will exchange them for a small present and some sweets – this is where the chocolate letter comes in.
This year for the first time, the Dutch department store HEMA has offered something special for children from Arabic backgrounds – Arabic chocolate letters. The store offered two milk chocolate letters: the “S” and the “M”. The design department picked the “M” because many first names start with it and the “S” for Sinterklaas. Both weigh 125g and cost €2.95 (Dh16) a piece.
The HEMA (an acronym for Hollandse Eenheidsprijzen Maatschappij Amsterdam or Dutch Standard Prices Company Amsterdam) is well known for its contemporary design, decent products and ever-changing assortment. “Actually, our store is a small version of society,” Marianne Noordanus, a spokeswoman for the company, said. “Young and old, rich and poor, men and women. Our employees and our customers are a reflection of that. When our chocolate buyer suggested an Arabic chocolate letter, we decided to try it out.”
And it looks like it’s a hit. Although the company does not want to give out sales numbers, the HEMA website confirmed the “S” had sold out before December 5 and reactions were positive.
Strangely, it isn’t the first time that chocolate Arabic letters have been in the limelight in the small country, which has a population that includes nearly 20 per cent non-western immigrants. Two years ago, the cultural institution Mediamatic initiated a project with young local designers to fuel the public debate on mutual understanding between cultures.
They did this by creating an Arabic version of HEMA, said Willem Velthoven, a concept developer and project manager at Mediamatic. “We wanted to make an exhibition that would appeal to a wide audience and came up with the HEMA because it’s the temple of Dutch culture. It’s value for money, everything you need, clean, fresh, great design and very contemporary.”
El Hema, as the installation was named, whipped up a flurry of media attention. It sold the whole Arabic alphabet in chocolate, halal sausages, affordable high-quality headscarves, school notebooks with lining for Arabic from right to left and duvet covers with Arabic poetry. “The HEMA wasn’t very pleased that we went behind their backs,” Velthoven admitted. “But we managed to work things out, because it made a lot of people very happy.”
Source: The National: Dutch department store gives Arabic letters a sweet twist
Local Istanbul municipality restores tekkes
Though few dervish lodges remain in Istanbul as meeting places for Sufi orders, a visit to any of their locations throughout the city can reveal much about the background of the various orders
Local Istanbul municipality restores tekkes
Though the 1925 ban against Sufi orders meant the closing of all their properties, recent efforts have seen the restoration of many orders’ tekkes, or dervish lodges, throughout Istanbul.
For centuries, the architecture of the sects’ lodges was often dictated by the practices of the sects themselves. The more elaborate the tekke, the wealthier the people who subscribed to that sect – even though many of these mystic sects called for the renunciation of worldly goods in order to become one with God or the ultimate Truth. The main lodge was usually built where the founder of the mystic sect was buried or vice versa.
Tekke architecture
Generally speaking, tekkes were made of wood and sometimes stone, depending on the amount of money and materials available. Even when quite large, they were not especially imposing buildings, yet all had a large room that formed the central portion of the lodge where the members would gather for various ceremonies. This large hall might be round, octagonal or even multi-sided to represent any of the numbers the group held holy.
There would be standing room or possibly sitting space to observe the participants. When a sect combined music with its ritual ceremonies, there would be space for the musicians. Leading off the main room would be a series of other rooms devoted to various practices, including a kitchen and a refractory, a library and rooms for the leader of the sect or the person in charge of that particular lodge and his family. In addition, there were often also rooms for those studying to become full members of the lodge, or for sect members who were traveling in the area.
Few of the tekke buildings were as elaborate as the one devoted to Rumi in Konya. Because of the veneration for Rumi, the founder of the Mevlevi sect, the original mosque and school greatly expanded over the centuries to incorporate nearby buildings and cemeteries. A better example of a normal Mevlevi tekke is the one found in Istanbul’s Tünel neighborhood.
The building was closed with the banning of Sufi orders in 1925, but from time to time, permission was given for the upkeep of the building. The center in Konya became a museum, as did the one in Tünel. Eventually the Mevlevis were allowed to perform their whirling ritual as a theatrical performance in the Tünel tekke.
Continue readin: Hurriyet: Local Istanbul municipality restores tekkes
Local Istanbul municipality restores tekkes
Though the 1925 ban against Sufi orders meant the closing of all their properties, recent efforts have seen the restoration of many orders’ tekkes, or dervish lodges, throughout Istanbul.
For centuries, the architecture of the sects’ lodges was often dictated by the practices of the sects themselves. The more elaborate the tekke, the wealthier the people who subscribed to that sect – even though many of these mystic sects called for the renunciation of worldly goods in order to become one with God or the ultimate Truth. The main lodge was usually built where the founder of the mystic sect was buried or vice versa.
Tekke architecture
Generally speaking, tekkes were made of wood and sometimes stone, depending on the amount of money and materials available. Even when quite large, they were not especially imposing buildings, yet all had a large room that formed the central portion of the lodge where the members would gather for various ceremonies. This large hall might be round, octagonal or even multi-sided to represent any of the numbers the group held holy.
There would be standing room or possibly sitting space to observe the participants. When a sect combined music with its ritual ceremonies, there would be space for the musicians. Leading off the main room would be a series of other rooms devoted to various practices, including a kitchen and a refractory, a library and rooms for the leader of the sect or the person in charge of that particular lodge and his family. In addition, there were often also rooms for those studying to become full members of the lodge, or for sect members who were traveling in the area.
Few of the tekke buildings were as elaborate as the one devoted to Rumi in Konya. Because of the veneration for Rumi, the founder of the Mevlevi sect, the original mosque and school greatly expanded over the centuries to incorporate nearby buildings and cemeteries. A better example of a normal Mevlevi tekke is the one found in Istanbul’s Tünel neighborhood.
The building was closed with the banning of Sufi orders in 1925, but from time to time, permission was given for the upkeep of the building. The center in Konya became a museum, as did the one in Tünel. Eventually the Mevlevis were allowed to perform their whirling ritual as a theatrical performance in the Tünel tekke.
Continue readin: Hurriyet: Local Istanbul municipality restores tekkes
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