Abdulhadi's World

Waiting for a Visa: Epilogue

2009-05-26T09:57:00.004+03:00

This is the epilogue to my Waiting for a Visa Story. You can read Part I here, and Part II here.

Just outside the Turkish Consulate in London, a small and tranquil English garden is orientalised by the Middle Eastern vibrancy of the visitors. Groups of young men with gelled-back hair in black leather jackets and tight-fitting jeans jostle for attention outside their cars, while an audience of women of all ages sit on ornate metal garden chairs, like only the English would ever buy for outdoors use, and spit out the husks of dried seeds and talk on mobile phones. Just beyond the gate that leads to the cul-de-sac where the Consulate lay, the deafeningly quiet pace of Knightsbridge and England kept the contrast sharp.

I wondered then what Ghassan was doing at that moment. If he had been given the chance to be here today, how soon would he have waited to go back to the Middle East? Ten weeks and more, a full seventy-three days, I had waited and planned to get back to London. One week after getting there I was booking flights and getting ready to go back to an imperial capital we had known even before Britain planted its presence on our shores and changed our mental orientations forever.

He might have not been able to file his own papers, but the old boy spoke the truth when he said,

“if your envelope comes back full, it’s because they’ve given you the rejection letters … if you get a thin envelope, they’ve just given you the passport back.”

How strange it felt to get only my passports back; I almost wanted to throw them away, to hand the opportunity to Ghassan and many others like him who deserved the opportunity every bit as much as I did. The mocking grass seemed insignificant and I couldn’t care when the young woman next to me laughed at the way I jumped in the air. Then I could feel the Sun’s glow on my forehead, and the bitterness of a visa odyssey hit me.

While London had been in throes of a blistering dry cold, Amman was drenched in much-awaited torrential, freezing rain. Just a day before I had come to Jordan the first time around, to make my initial application, Tamara had seen me off at Heathrow, and our scarves and jackets could scarcely hold us apart. She had waited for me for two hours on a train platform before I arrived to catch a flight neither one of us wanted me to be on. The summer Sun and Mediterranean air already seemed so very different from the cold breezes of those days; and the only achievement I could show for the time it took the weather to change was a piece of paper giving me the right to work in London, and it came a month late.

Waiting For a Visa--Part II

2009-05-22T18:50:00.005+03:00

This is the continuation of the previous post, as the name suggests. Although it's kind of self-contained, you may wish to read the build-up here.

Waiting for a Visa: Part II

“So what are the English like once you have a chance to meet them? Are the people on the street as uncouth as these guys at the Consulate?”

How to explain? Hearing his question, it was impossible not to remember one of the later conversations I had had with Tamara. Beautifully enough, as she always was, she mentioned after a week in a secluded English village in Dorset—the sort of place which otherwise exists only in some vague cultural memory and is, therefore, as English as can be—remarking,

“It's not like they say … the English are really quite nice.”

I remember feeling slightly taken aback; as if I had wished to have been there to help her discover the kindness of English strangers; but it was true. So like a mathematician re-treading older ground, I had his question's answer ready. It made me feel awkward to have to tell this man that the place he had been planning to see was worth the while, for the people if definitely not for the food or the weather. How strange it was to tell him that for the most part, the English didn't care much for ID cards and unscrupulous attention to formality. It would do him no good to know that the villagers in Dorset had no appetite for these spiders' webs of paperwork. I told him regardless.

“It's not as if you see the police everywhere you go there … it's not like here”

We both looked around to make sure of exactly where it was we were. Finding the only place in the neighbourhood that was going to serve us a beer meant sitting on the best outdoor garden furniture of the Venice cafe. The name didn't seem particularly promising; the towns of Greater Syria are littered with cafes and bars and restaurants named for Italian cities. Just on the other side of a relatively small sea, Europe, and then for us London, would begin. Just like the grass earlier, it was as if even the local surroundings told you it was better to go abroad. In Jordan, even the beer they served was Dutch, instead of, as Ghassan and I had wishfully hoped for, brought over from Taybeh near RamAllah. Just in case we had a doubt, Amman was there to remind us that the grass was greener—and more abundant to begin with—to the North and West from here. Except that at the moment we couldn't go.

So we clinked bottles of Dutch beer and shared white cheese and cucumbers, and thought of the banality of it all. Ghassan found it difficult to form a complete sentence without expletives uncalled for on the table, and so I tried to help by asking about where he would be in RamAllah; RamAllah always brought smiles to the faces of those who knew her.

By the sounds of things, Ghassan had spent many an-hour sipping Taybeh beer and chewing on nuts under fig tree-shaded coffee shops in that hilly West Bank town. There he would sit and watch as others played backgammon--”I don't play, my brothers and I just never learned, I just kind of watch people do it...”--and observe as the world continued to braid an ever-tighter knot out of the Palestinians. The crooks amongst us found it easier to rob the innocent this way, and the innocent found that they could console themselves. For most of us, it meant just sitting on the sidelines and enjoying backgammon.

Tamara's father had been sitting there whiling away the tedium of his days by playing cards and backgammon at the same coffee shops as Ghassan would go to watch. With all the guilt of my former life of writing horoscopes, I would carry the gospel to anybody who would listen that coincidences meant nothing, that a lucky rabbit's foot or a fortuitous date of birth was going to help you as much as a penguin was going to be helped by a TV remote control; but then I didn't want to believe this now. I wanted to believe that there was a benevolent hand making me just the right strand in just the right strand of the braid; and I needed to know more about Tamara's father.

In better days I'd seen his face in photos and heard his voice echoing through a mobile phone; I'd heard of how Jamal Najih had overcome the loss of his hearing to as a youth to become a character on the West Bank. He would read the stories from people's lips and would tell jokes to follow up on them. As if proving he had a musicality with its own inaudible rhythm he would even, for the very lucky, write lyrical poems that would appear in Palestine's newspapers. It was good to know Jamal was well and that he was famous that Tamara had inherited. All this I wanted to believe over beer and cheese and cigarettes in Amman.

Ghassan had his own problems to worry and believe about. Through the years of NGO workers and diplomats and visiting scholars, and a now-former lover, he'd come to think that he had a home in England, with RamAllah being choked into a pale reflection of its former self. Now he didn't know if that home was ever going to be real to him.

“RamAllah isn't so bad now that I think about it ...”

“I've actually wanted to move there myself” I told him.

It was true once; whether it was true any more is another matter. Would I actually belong there? At one point I had imagined myself sitting on a table and playing Tarneeb with Tamara's father. At an earlier time, I had dreamed of teaching and working at Bir Zeit, making something of being a physicist in a country filled with scientists and poets and broken dreams. Yet here I now was, within driving distance of a gaze over Jerusalem and I was going, not to cross the Bridge—we all know which one it is when we mention it—but to apply for a work visa to go and live in London, and over the years of being a Kuwait-born Palestinian exile living in London, London became home and the Homeland became a memory to be consumed over the dinner-table. I wasn't rushing to help the homeland; I was rushing towards another self-imposed exile.

“I think you'll get your visa by the way ...” Ghassan offered without encouragement.

“You've been waiting for 3 working days now? Yeah, they would have rejected you on the first day. It takes them time just to print out the stuff; something tells me you're going to get yours tomorrow.”

Here was a man I had met only about 2 hours and several beers ago, and now I was prepared to hang on to his words like they were gold dust. He was speaking with all the authority of a scholar who didn't know how to fill out visa forms, and I needed to believe he was right, and I knew I was going to come back the next day and wait again throughout the same fiasco and ask the same questions at the window and maybe get another response that would allow me to continue hoping.

Epilogue … to be continued.

Waiting For a Visa--Part I

2009-05-20T11:07:00.002+03:00

Waiting for a Visa

It comes as something of a shock to one recently arrived from Kuwait to realise just how un-green Amman truly is. To those of us who are regular visitors from the Gulf, the name of Jordan’s capital city brings to mind the aroma of citrus and mulberry trees wafting down on hill-inclined residential boulevards. Coming into the town from the outlying airport, the pine forests are like a diminutive Yosemite, the difference being more donkey-pulled carts bringing the early watermelons to road-side stalls. Then grass changes everything.

While you wait outside the awning-covered entrance to the WorldBridge Visa Center in Amman—British connections notwithstanding, it’s the American spelling which carries the day in today’s Middle East—you come across that rarest of luxuries in the Levant, a grass lawn. Between the awnings and the pavement in the smart Shmeisani neighbourhood, in an area not much more than 10 meters squared, the blades of grass insult your senses, telling you that the cedar trees were a mirage, you have been in a desert all along. In a country where drought is a perennial menace to drinking water in homes, the grass screams to be sent to another, more green, perhaps even more pleasant, little piece of land tucked away in the North Sea and off the coast of Europe. Here, on this patch of grass, eagerly anticipating crowds gather to get news of their visa applications to England, to Britain, the United Kingdom; usually London.

Here, over the English lawn in the desert city of Amman, the wealthy villa-dwellers of Abdoun, collecting visit visas for their annual shopping trips, stand next to Iraqi refugees—Amman being deemed a safer destination than Baghdad to apply for a visa—seeking to join family members in Kensal Green. Here too stand young academics from BirZeit, having crossed the River Jordan, who now wait for their student visas to complete PhDs in archaeology at the University of London. Together with them are Damascene merchants, and a motley crew of young and old, some assuredly wealthy, others self-consciously middle class and still others desperately aspiring to escape some perilous non-existence in Jordan and the surrounding countries.

For those waiting to find out if they have been granted a visa, the doors open at 4:00; we began arriving at 3:00. By 3:30, the first numbers are assigned to the grass-stomping crowd. The signs all over the visa centre let you know that “WorldBridge… a business operation in association with the UK Border Agency… our employees … not involved in the decision-making process …” Maybe it’s the mild sun-induced delirium, or maybe just the pure chaos of humanity, but neither the security guards outside the centre nor the waiting crowds paid any attention to the meaning of this sign; instead, a sort of theatrical exchange played itself out.

“You can’t stand on the grass … do you want to get your number? Want your visa today? Get off that square, that’s being monitored by CCTV!...I don’t care, just shut up!”

After some abuse from the security guards, a chorus of replies comes back from some of the older men gathered outside.

“What good are you anyway? You can’t even tell me if my application has been processed or not! I’ve been coming here every day for 2 weeks and you can’t tell me a thing! Who do you think you are?”

The thought of standing outside, every day for 2 weeks in the dusty and hot Amman summer came over the people waiting outside. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. Called in by number, one-by-one, we were searched and passed through the revolving gates, reminders of prison dramas, to the seating area indoors. A security guard, clearly a man whose passion to work in airport customs was thwarted, but never crushed, a long time ago, goes through your pockets with sadistic completeness. Quite why any of this was necessary was beyond me. A television screen elevated in the top corner of the room lets out the BBC World Service. Posters on the walls urge you to visit Edinburgh, and another reminds any curious applicant that lying on your visa application will “bring shame onto you and your family”. The whole place has the sanitised and unwelcoming feel of an airport waiting lounge, before people thought of making those a bit more comfortable. Now again the sadism of the security guards forces its way onto us.

“Sit there … don’t leave that chair empty, sit right next to that man over there if you could …no, no, you can’t take that jumper off… do you have to fill a cup from the water cooler right now?”

The spectacle having been carried out to the guards’ pleasure—they always win in the end—we are left alone to sit and wait for a few moments and, some nervous conversation grows out of nowhere. Ghassan, sitting next to me in remarkably casual polo shirt and jeans, was a new face to me.

Despite his choice of t-shirt, Ghassan, who would normally have been in RamAllah, was clearly not in the best of moods. Over a period of 2 months, he’d been rejected 3 times for a student visa, and didn’t seem too hopeful that his fourth attempt, about which he was enquiring today, would come back positively. Like so many in the Middle East, his attitude was characterised by one of total fatalism: By sheer force of will, he would either get the visa, or would not. How he had expected to get anywhere in the past was slightly mysterious as, he explained, “I didn’t even bother giving them anything other than the application form the first 2 times—how was I supposed to know they really wanted the stuff?”

Ghassan was a good guy, and, given his credentials, a lot more clever than he had given the British Consulate in Amman reason to believe. His thesis at BirZeit had been supervised by a cousin of mine, the sort of relative one likes to boast about, on account of his stature amongst Palestinian historians, but who in reality I met only once, at a stilted gathering. The Palestinian diaspora being what it is, we instantly found our ways from one mutual friend to another. Soon enough, my number was called and I waited to see what the envelope on the other side of the screen might hold for me.

“Ayyad? Serial number? Nope, not here…come back tomorrow”.

So it was. The suspense had been suspended hardly after I knew it had built up to begin with.

Back outside, Amman had cooled down slightly in between the time it took to arrive and wait and the moment it took them to tell me there was nothing to be known. A little meandering stroll, cigarette in hand, usually solves all problems, or so I told myself.

What was one other day when I had been stuck in Kuwait for 2 months waiting to make this application? When exactly did the days turn into weeks and the weeks into months? At what point did it make sense to wait for 2 months for a 24-month visa? Just how much had I lost through all of this? Was it worth it?

It was impossible not to bring these questions to the stress of the affair, and I wondered if it reflected itself on my completed forms. In fact, none of the really important stuff could be put down on the form. I could let them know that I was most definitely not a supporter of terrorism, nor had I committed any acts either in collaboration with the Nazis or the Red Army. I could—and did—undertake legally that none of those awful things were true about me. Yet there was no real place to let them know that I have been known to be the life and soul of many parties in London. That in fact my knowledge of some bits of English history rivalled most of the natives'. That I was the kind of guy who loved London every bit as much as she loved me. There was to be no place to tell them that I'd already suffered enough as a result of the last 2 months; on no question on the form was I asked if I had unduly placed my life in suspended animation as a result of this. There was no room for me to tell them that there had been once, not too long ago, a lovely young woman in London who loved me very much; and that all the waiting and frustration finally doused out a flame which once burnt brightly and warmly. Where was the compensation for this bureaucratic smouldering of human mystery?

Ghassan was probably thinking the same thing. With his palm to his forehead, he looked over the rejection letter and tried to make sense of his prospects. Adding insult to injury, Ghassan was told that he was, presumably, a cheat and a liar, and a negligent one at that: “You have submitted copies of purported bank statements… you did not submit original copies of these statements…” Purported. The cruelty lied in the way that a foreign speaker would not pick up on the hint, would not know how to purport in the first place, but was told all the same that it was not going to be good.

“Well, I really don’t understand, I gave them exactly the papers I got from the Arab Bank in RamAllah … these are the only sort of statements the bank can give me.” Kafka had written Jackals and Arabs about themes not too far away from this piece of land, and now his wit had returned to the region in the shape of a visa rejection letter.

It would be malicious, but nonetheless true, to admit that I took comfort from the fact that I wasn’t the only person to suffer with bureaucracy. It was reassuring that this was nothing personal; at least, there were other perfectly decent young Palestinian men who were slapped around in exactly the same way. I instinctively offered Ghassan a cigarette; even life in London, and longing to live in London anew, the habit of gifting cigarettes, in the sure knowledge that they will be appreciated, is only good manners in the Arab Middle East. So we smoked and talked.

Just as had happened with me, Ghassan’s last romance had fizzled in the midst of a bureaucratic to-and-fro. Standing between him and English pastures, between pints of warm beer at the pub with classmates who would quickly become friends, overturning the stereotypes most had of the English; all of these culture shocks would remain unreal by Ghassan. The exasperation was enough to bring out raw honesty; maybe everybody in Jordan smoked, and shared cigarettes, but sharing a drink was a sign of intimacy reserved for those who were truly special.

So time it was to find a beer.

Is there any hope to be found here?

2008-07-30T15:43:00.002+03:00

For some inexplicable reason, I am drawn to repeatedly watch the point-blank range shooting of Ashraf Abu Rahme, an unarmed protester objecting to the construction of the wall on his village's lands. While I want to take solace from the fact that this episode was captured through the efforts of an Israeli human rights organisations, I am also reminded by the dozens of very similar videos which were broadcast from the West Bank and Gaza during the 1987-1992 intifada. While the 87 intifada did lead to a new political reality--albeit an imperfect one--for the Palestinians, it is not widely thought that the infractions against Palestinian human rights, and the attention this garnered on the world stage, had much to do with it.

Nevertheless, there is this sense of indestructibility of the Palestinian resistance which I get from watching the video. As in the same videos from 2 decades ago, a lone Palestinian man was taken away from a group surrounding him in order for him to be brutalised in front of the others; to emasculate, humiliate and dehumanise the victim, and to make a show of tearing apart the Palestinians as a people...and yet, yet, we survive, not just as individuals, but as a group.

Living in the Future: Why London Will be Like the Gulf Very Soon

2008-04-13T15:27:00.003+03:00

Last week I played host, albeit for only an hour or so, to two visitors from London coming to Kuwait City. The differences between these two conurbations are clear enough for anybody to see, and feel, at a glance; but I want to use this slot to put out a warning to people living in my newfound hometown on the Thames, and tell them how they're quickly catching up with the energy-consuming, waistline-expanding, concrete building-dwelling denizens of the Gulf.

Wimbledon Village, despite its growing population of moneyed Arabs, is probably one of the last parts of London one would expect to resemble Kuwait or the Gulf in general. But an idyllic stroll around the very English common on a Sunday is a good place to witness the worrying convergence between the Gulf and the south of England. It's not uncommon, in 2008, to watch as English couples leave their children of imported maids and nannies from East Asia, typically, as is the case in the Gulf, from the Phillipines. The fact that these families, who demonstrably have ample time which they could spend their children are hiring foreign help will not be without its consequences. As at least one Kuwaiti sociologist points out, leaving your children with a underpaid foreign help is bad enough for the underpaid foreign help--but it also means, as the nannies concerned are likely to only speak pidgin English, that the children are growing up with a sever linguistic and social handicap. With their first experiences of many Asian nationalities coming through the person of domestic help, children in this part of the world quickly pick up a form of racism which is obstinate in its presence. The rapid economic rise in places like India has been greeted with something approaching disbelief here--if they were doing so well, how is it they have to send legions of labourers here?

Like the Gulf, and completely unlike India, the UK is also going about it non-industrially; there is almost a religious belief in the media and "creative" industries being able to drive the economy as a whole. If thousands of Islington-dwelling arty farty film types can make enough money to buy DVD players for £15, then why worry about trying to put people in back-breaking jobs where they physically have to make the machines? This ability to live off the cream of the land without having to do any of the milking has earned the Gulf states the admiration of even former heads of the WTO . Surprisingly, nobody has considered the fact that having absolutely no manufacturing base whatsoever has meant that both the UK and the GCC have uncontrollable inflation problems--if all the goods available in a given market are produced and priced abroad, simply twiddling interest rates at Central Bank level will do no good for anybody. The ultimate result of all this is in fact making itself in the increasingly similar ways in which the UK and the Gulf are treating their workers: Witness suggestions that new immigrants to Britain should expect fewer economic advantages, later, a result of growing unease at the sheer numbers of foreigners contributing to the British economy. Like the Gulf states before, one of the first casualties will be syndicated labour within the British economy.

So I'm going to end this long-overdue blog post like so many others in the past, with little glue to hold the bits together, and just a nod to some things which have been bothering me.

This time it's for real: Facebook has "deleted" Palestine

2008-02-29T15:10:00.002+03:00

Facebook is probably the number one reason why I don't blog here so often any more. If blogging is akin to flipping through the last edition of The Economist, facebook is the web 2.0 equivalent of slouching in front of the television while drinking a coke. It's not that I think facebook will bring an end to civilisation as we know it, nor do I deny the fact that I enjoy catching up with old friends. It's not even the advertising revenues I mind: everybody knows that they never really follow an individual, but just trends averaged over and between networks as a whole.

What is driving me mad this morning, however, is that the administrators of facebook have taken it upon themselves to decide that Palestine is not a country. In the past, facebookers could use their profile to display or conceal any information they felt was important--hometown, educational info, etc. So, naturally for a Palestine, I typed into a text box that my hometown was "Abu Dis, Palestine".

This state of affairs kept everybody happy for some time--until, that is, some time earlier this month, when facebook changed the functionality of the site so that the hometown line of the profile had to be selected from a pre-determined list, instead of just filling in a text box. Bizarrely, given that there is a Palestine network, they have decided to dis-include Palestine from the list of available countries from which one can select a hometown.

If anybody knows how to contact the facebook site administrators, it'd be useful knowledge. I remain, for now, a Palestinian with a Palestinian hometown.

The Mughniya Affair: Who they Didn't Kill

2008-02-13T16:54:00.003+03:00

With the perenially elusive Imad Mughniya now killed by a car bomb in Damascus (English news story here, with Arabic story here and here), Israel has one more bee to plant in its intelligence service bonnet; people in the Middle East now have further proof, if proof be needed, that Israel has deeply penetrated the security services of their countries.

What surprises me almost as much as the fact that Israel actually managed to track Mughniya down, is the fact that they decided to go after a character who was relatively old hat, in comparison with, say, Khaled Meshal. This would suggest to me that the Israelis are keeping open the option of dealing with Hamas pragmatists at the moment, including Meshal, who would have been much, much easier to track down in Damascus than Mughniya.

Where to spot me next...

2008-02-12T18:23:00.000+03:00

If y'all missed the chance to meet up at the 18th Battersea Beer Festival (excellent, no hangover!!), then you might be able to catch a glimpse of me at the Platts IP Methodology Forum, on the 18th February at the Hyde Park Hilton.

See link above. Take care and good luck.

Nick Broomfield’s Bad Film Trying to be Good

2008-02-02T14:29:00.000+03:00

A lovely old friend who I used to know from a past life called me up recently to suggest attending The Battle of Haditha, a film made by Nick Broomfield, complete with a Q&A session with the Director at the Russell Square Renoir. Of course, yours truly can’t resist a good bust-up with a Director after a film, and Nick Broomfield has always been on the recommended list. Back in the good old days, Broomfield had set out to visit the besieged Yasser Arafat in his RamAllah compound, and was famously served an unfinished ear of corn from Abu Ammar’s plate. More famously, the filmmaker had made the amazingly challenging and intelligent documentary film Aileen, later immortalised by Hollywood through Charlize Theron in Monster. In nearly perfect symmetry, Broomfield, whose documentaries once found their way into Hollywood, was now leading himself down the reverse journey: Instead of his usual forte of documentaries, Broomfield was this time de-documentarising his subject matter, the much-publicised massacre of innocent Iraqis by US Marines in Haditha in March of 2006.
The major problem here is that Broomfield took the fact that The Battle of Haditha was not a documentary as license not only to dramatise the events and breathe into life characters who became known to the world through the affidavits of witnesses, but, astonishingly for a man of Broomfield’s liberal credentials, to find a way to create a moral equivalence from the Iraqis of Haditha and the Marines who butchered them. Oddly enough, this humanisation of the US Marine Core was the only theme on which Broomfield chose to depart from the strict re-enactment of events which came to light thanks to investigative journalism, after an attempted cover-up by the US military.

The disappointing thing was that the film started off well enough, with the audience being shown the passionate sex life of Rashied, who was shot dead by the Americans in Haditha, and his wife Hiba. “Arabs having sex!” as my friend pointed out in a hushed tone. “But we’re like amoebas” I retorted to her. While it could easily have been misinterpreted by a Middle Eastern audience, the intimacy within the marriage is probably a much needed wake-up call for film goers in Bloomsbury: Arabs, like them, are sexual beings and, when we’re lucky, we can express that in a relationship. That alone went a long way towards humanising the other. Unfortunately, Battle of Haditha went downhill from there to re-hash some seriously dubious Orientalisms.
Where the film fell down irredeemably for me was towards the closing, when Broomfield allows the character of Cpl. Ramirez, the most senior Marine on the ground over 2 hours of killing in Haditha, to re-imagine in a dream-like sequence what he would have done differently, had he been given the chance. Ramirez is shown going into a room full of sleeping children and decides to leave them in peace, later helping a frightened young girl out of a bath she has climbed into while clothed out of fear. In the actual sequence of events, which astonishingly Broomfield had depicted just shortly before, Ramirez had shot the innocents dead, not one of them having ever posed a threat. Why the need to absolve Ramirez of sin? And why am I so worked up about it?

As Nick Broomfield pointed out when I angrily put this to him from the audience, he never wants to stop humanising Ramirez and people like him, even going so far as to claim—wait for it—that the Marines were also “victims” of the war in Iraq. I have no problem understanding that, as my companion pointed out several times, the enlisted men in the US armed forces are drawn from the bottom of the US demographic barrel, with “kids” using military service as a means of avoiding a life of grime and crime. But this can hardly account for the events which took place in March of 2006. Well-armed, trained soldiers fighting for the world’s most powerful country were in charge of a large civilian population and choose to mercilessly slaughter them. While the individual persons might have done things differently before they joined the army, the wearing of a uniform does not, I fear, give them carte blanche when in warmer climes. Instead, what Broomfield did, whether intentionally or otherwise, was to produce a film which fits into a long pedigree of American crappers, designed to make them feel warm about their boys in uniform when abroad.

In countless films on Viet Nam, we see American soldiers needlessly killing civilians, but, through some cathartic mechanism, we come to realise that they are not the villains: Instead, it is men in grey suits who operate in Washington, DC or perhaps commissioned officers giving orders. Hell, it was the Communists who started it anyway, right? As Broomfield stated while he was trying to shut me up, it’s the “Bushes, Blairs and Rumsfelds” of the world who should carry the blame. While I don’t disagree with that, I don’t see how letting Kilo Company of USMC off the hook is going to help the cause of justice.

Many of us have had jobs in which we are told to do things which go against our better judgement, sometimes against our very humanity. Yet most of us know that there are limits which are not to be crossed. Bus drivers in London are told not to wait long for commuters running after them, no matter how close. Recently, I witnessed one bus driver who, against the protests of everybody who was on board, refused to wait for a man on crutches to catch up. I also know of another bus driver who would never dream of such a thing. Can these two bus drivers really be equal? One of them accepts the banality of evil implicit in his job, another refuses to bend, insisting on being human. The Marines in Haditha, armed to the teeth and backed-up by enormous fire power could have chosen to the latter, but instead followed the path of cowardice, and shot dead the occupants of a small car, for no good reason other than being bystanders when an IED went off near their Hummer. (Again: Broomfield was largely true to the facts of the case on these parts.) Can anything Cpl Ramirez have said, thought or felt make up for that? Through the looking glass of Broomfield’s incomprehensible Absolution of the Sins of Ramirez—who is in fact a defendant in an ongoing court martial—other aspects of the film begin to take on a more sinister meaning.

Ramirez, who was a friend of the one Marine killed in Haditha in the IED explosion which forms the denouement of the film, grieves in a dignified, noble way for the slain man, tormenting himself while shaving and protesting that he, poor soul, “will live forever with his guilt”; while Hiba, who lost the father of her unborn child in the rampage led by Ramirez is seen to do nothing more than dumbly beat her chest and attack mindlessly, savagely at the Earth. It was here that Broomfield could have lent some humanity where humanity was due: to explore, perhaps, how Hiba would feel as a newly widowed young woman in Iraq, to think perhaps about how the child would grow and with what kind of bitterness.

Of course, as Broomfield did point out, “the Iraqis, particularly in the area around Haditha, are very tribal”. This of course means that they will “never forget” the massacre and, in one full swoop, it is the Americans who really need to start worrying about Iraqi violence.

Moral relativism has to have its limits somewhere, and trying to depict Ramirez and Co. in a way which justifies the killing of innocents crosses one boundary too many for this reviewer, and so I will urge you all to save your ticket money for something more fulfilling. I can recommend Maison Bertaux, the world’s greatest cake shop, in Soho, which is also holding an exhibition of Noel Fielding’s art work.

The Twelve Months of Ramadan

2007-12-27T16:11:00.000+03:00

On a particularly damp Christmas Eve in London, I found myself nursing a pint of Mr Young’s (are we now to call it Mr Wells’?) finest at an over-lit, over-priced and rather less-than-sexy wooden pub in Wimbledon Village. Into pint number more-than-two, my weary companion finally cottoned on that I wasn’t going to move on quickly to the restaurant, and so remarked, why for I don’t understand, on the juxtaposition of Eid Al Adha so close to Christmas this year.

Islamic history can be a touchy subject at the best of times, and the slightly tipsy state I was in wasn’t going to make things any easier, but, like a dutiful faqih educating the benighted infidels of this piss-drenched city, I began to explain how this was well and truly a coincidence; no, like a coincidence that could only happen every three and a half decades or so. While in my current state of existential indecisiveness about the big questions in life means it is unlikely that I will appreciate this cosmic coming about at anything other than face value, the very fact of the constant change in the Islamic months—making Ramadan appear during the long summer days one year, and the bitter cold of winter in another—is worth studying in its own right.

It was on the Prophet Mohammed’s fateful last trip to Mecca, better known for the injunction to treat Arab and non-Arab alike as they were in the eyes of God, that the good man of Quraysh declared that there should be only 12 months. In fact, Islam goes one further: “For God”, the Koran tells us, “there can only be 12 months”. If the injunction had remained within the more contestable hadith tradition, then, like many others, it might have found itself on the dusty shelf of unused Islamic rules. Finding its way into the canonical Othmani text, however, its finality has been sealed.

But wait! I can hear you think, what has the number of months got to do with the way they’re arranged? Well, as I explained to my by now more confused friend at the pub, the pre-Islamic Arabs used the same type of calendar then in use throughout the region, counting months by lunar cycles, but substituting a thirteenth month every seventh year in order to bring the 12-month cycles in line with the rotations about the Sun. While the months did of course fall on different points in the solar cycle, they stayed in the same season of the year, at least. By doing away with the crucial thirteenth month, we are now in the rather bizarre pickle of wherea month called Rabi’ (in the “Islamic” calendar), meaning Spring, could be in August, or December, and only rarely during the actual Spring. This is a rather difficult thing to explain to an 11-year-old.

Of course, the obvious motivation behind the calendar shift, or so it seems to me, is to do away with the then-important class of oracles, magicians astrologers and sooth-sayers, who monopolised the understanding of celestial affairs in those times and posed a serious threat to the burgeoning new religion. Shaker Nabulsi has written about how many of this group shaped Islam from its earliest and can be credited with some of Islam’s tenets; the curious reader is invited to make enquiries.

The problem with undermining the magicians and learned astronomers is that their role had to be taken by a whole cast of completely questionable freaks. How could you synchronise a harvest cycle to your calendar, when the month named under the photo of the busty beauty tells you nothing about whether or not you should sow, harvest or feast? Given Islam’s mercantile bent, it is also hard to square this with the thought of multi-year commercial contracts, surely something of a headache. Of course, while the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia continues, uniquely, to insist on printing official documents and observing official anniversaries according to the Hejri dates, nobody else really bothers. When asked for their birthday, nobody ever says “oh, 25 Ramadan”. You might choose to call it innocuous, another word for a completely useless way to keep dates.

Epilogue:

We ate at the new Limon Shish restaurant closer to Wimbledon station. A satisfactory one course meal—well-seasoned skewer of chicken, very well considered mezze, with some individual character—can be had for around £10. Not quite as good as Patogh, which boasts similar prices, but in the Middle Eastern desert that is the London Borough of Merton, it is a new gem.

As for the calendars, the more attentive of my readers will probably now point out that the Jewish calendar, which, of course, was inspired by the same Babylonian/Assyrian/Chaldean sources as the pre-Islamic Arabic calendar, has continued to thrive to this day. Well I already knew that. Some, perhaps fewer, will point out the funny story about what happened when a Saudi man stuck in Kuwait had his ID card checked by an Iraqi soldier at a checkpoint during the 1990 conflict (“What the hell do you think you are telling me you’re that old?”). I’ve heard it already.

On a final note, to those who take issue with my description of London as “piss-drenched”, I invite you to read the thoroughly enjoyable Clerkenwell Tales by my new-found friend Peter Ackroyd. In it, you can find out that your favourite city and mine has in fact quite a good pedigree of being piss-drenched, going back some centuries.

Good night.

18 ذو الحجة 1428 هجري
27 December 2007

My Letter in The Observer

2007-11-15T21:38:00.000+03:00

Not many people are keen on Saudi Arabia, but when they get bashed for doing this that they actually didn't, then that's just stupid. So follow the link below to read my letter which the Observer published last Sunday:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,2209155,00.html

(You have to follow the link and scroll well down ....)

In London, but ...

2007-10-22T17:46:00.000+03:00

... leaving Kuwait has meant that the amount of nail-bitingly frustrating time I have at hand to write blog posts has decreased exponentially. Of course, this doesn't mean I love anybody any less (and then again, nobody has bothered commenting in the mean time, any way). SO I will hold off on telling you all about how I'm back in the swing of things doing physics nowadays, but I will instead post this link:

http://www.jerusalem-in-exile.net/

If you're a fellow Palesto living outside of the homeland, then visit the site and fill in the blanks. Share your experience of exile.

Do take care ....

Deodorising Karl Popper

2007-09-04T14:23:00.001+03:00

On those occasions when I make an attempt to not appear like such a pitiful depressive, I point out to correspondents and friends, over here and abroad alike that Kuwait is the kind of place where you can read...and read, and read. The lack of a nightlife might make itself felt in other ways not so nice, but generally, when I pick up a book and find the bookmark, I can rest assured that no friend is going to ring out of the blue to suggest we go get a pint, watch a film or attend a concert--of course, this is ultimately because Kuwait is a dry country where all the films are insipid pop-flicks and the only concerts which ever happen are never publicised (an entire season of world music this summer was sponsored by the Youth & Arts Council, a publicly funded body, where international guests played to empty auditoria because, I gather, nobody could be bothered to advertise anything more than 24 hours in advance, if they advertised them at all).

If you've read anything, you know that books come in different flavours... sure, they all have something in common, and what they have in common is always debatable, but there are books which you read from cover to cover only to forget the characters mid-way (anything written by the Brontes of this world for me) or feel like maybe if one more author died it wouldn't be such a bad thing (see Thomas Friedman, or Peter Singer). Then there are the books which you make you wish you knew people who were more like them: Insightful, funny, poignant, thought-provoking, sexually thrilling, even if sometimes, tragically, flawed (maybe not all at the same time). While it may not be everybody's idea of a piece of vaudeville titillation, Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery definitely belongs in the latter category.

Aside from anything else, the book should be read to remind one of two oft-neglected truths in the modern world, at least by those hooked on American television and its trappings. Firstly, philosophy did not die out with the Stoic school, but is instead an active field of enquiry that stretched well into the Twentieth Century (I once wanted to hit a man who sat next to me at the dinner table and told me that he read Philosophy "but only the good old stuff, like Plato and Aristotle"). Secondly, there are some real questions about what does, and what does not, make science.

Take for example the biggest imprint the book left on this reviewer anyway. To qualify as a theory, says Popper and everybody else, an idea should be able to make future predictions about what will happen in a way that can be disproved, or "falsifiable". To borrow an example from Carl Sagan, if you want to posit the statement that a large pink elephant is in the room, you must be able to show in some way that said elephant has an effect. Maybe you can not see the elephant, but even so, one must be able to smell, feel, hear or otherwise feel the influence of the elephant: At this stage, you must be able to design a way of testing your idea which could conceivably go wrong. If it is impossible for your idea to be proven wrong in any way, then you have gone into the realms of the un-scientific. In short, if it's inconceivable that the suggestion you're putting forward could be disproved, then it just isn't science.

Of course, the fact that the above statement is so well-known, to the point of being a mantra amongst some, makes Popper's books difficult to approach with fresh eyes: You're not really going to disagree with what you're about to read, but the development of the argument which Popper puts forward leaves you with the kind of passionate commitment worthy of--wait for it--a religious initiate. Instead of mildly disliking evolutionary psychologists ("evo pscyhs" as the dimwits call themselves), you feel like wanting to tear all their writings to shreds and burn them in a pile. Like his ideas on falsifiability, Popper also expresses in The Logic of Scientific Discovery some ideas on the interpretation of probabilities, particularly as it applies to quantum theory, also building here on the contributions of those who went before. This is probably the part of the (episodic) book which I most want to read anew, partially for the polemic value of not having to hear someone say that quantum physics "allows you to be two places at once".

On a slightly more disturbing note, Popper also goes to great lengths to suggest that inductive reasoning doesn't count as science. Well, if you can show that n is true, and later that n-1 is true, soon enough you will have mathematicians believing things, so why Popper doesn't like it I don't know. The use of empirical evidence to work towards something also has an air of appealing utilitarianism about it. It's certainly true that some studies of this type go past the peer-review machine and into the media, like the link between deodorant and breast cancer. It might not be easy to find a falsifiable experiment for this one, but do we really want to take risks? Sure, if you're living in the rarefied world of Noether's theorem and Einstein's Relativity, then empirical law science is a little something for the kiddies, but I have in the past wandered away from physics, and seen the ugly world of analytical chemistry, where they use the Beer-Lambert Law, and I have seen that while it is grubby, workmen's science, it is good.

Almost as good, in fact, as Popper's book, which has come out at me through the decades to relieve me of my boredom in Kuwait.

I AM the Guns of August

2007-09-03T16:04:00.000+03:00

It seems that I am a human incarnation of this book I have yet to read by an author who I understand to be one of the high-brow greats...or so this overly pretentious smarmy online psychometric test would have me believe. Just click a few buttons on a website and see how you measure up...

You're The Guns of August!

by Barbara Tuchman

Though you're interested in war, what you really want to know is what
causes war. You're out to expose imperialism, militarism, and nationalism for what they
really are. Nevertheless, you're always living in the past and have a hard time dealing
with what's going on today. You're also far more focused on Europe than anywhere else in
the world. A fitting motto for you might be "Guns do kill, but so can
diplomats."

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Proof that Democracy is Alive and Well

2007-08-27T21:08:00.000+03:00

As if in response to the fiasco with the Kuwaiti weekends, we now have proof from England, the teet from which all parliaments suckled, that people, indeed, are capable of ruling themselves.

Shortly before leaving to make way for his fiscally sound Chancellor, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair outdid himself and set up a website to allow Brits the right to petition their Prime Minister directly in a coordinated way. After the drama surrounding the former British Prime Minister's refusal to listen to protestors opposed to the Iraq war, this was his way to show that he was "listening" to the people in England and, had it succeeded, it would have in fact been the complete opposite to how it was billed--it would have been the end of democracy. When people petition a leader instead of working to effect change themselves over time, what they are doing is recognising the petitioned's power over them, and acquiescing in the system which grants it. The Abbasid Caliphs and their contamperaneous European counterparts received petitioners; a modern Prime Minister should be no different from the citizens... and so, it was with great relish and joy that I discovered the "rejected petitions" lists.

Being inherently sensible, the e-petitioners knew exactly how to catch Central Government out: Demand that the UK invade France; Cancel Tuesdays and replace them with Fridays; lock Jade Goody inside the Big Brother House for good and best of all "make Pete's mom a national resource". There is usually a very pithy explanation for why the said petitiions were rejected, because they were "outside the remit or powers of the Prime Minister and Government", and this is it how it should be. They can impose taxation, fight wars abroad and build roads, but on the really important issues--locking up Jade Goody, changing the order of the days in the week and making friends' mothers available--governments are powerless. It is with the people that power lies. Enjoy reading: Great Ideas from the British Electorate.

Just an update...

2007-08-26T20:02:00.000+03:00

... with regards to the last post: Kuwait will be enjoying a 3-day weekend this Thursday, Friday and Saturday, after which the country is meant to switch to the Friday and Saturday weekend. Momentous stuff indeed.

Today is also the day I turned 26... some times I feel like I've had the weight of the world on my shoulders and grown decades before my time, and others I just want to hang on to any shred of youth and try to tell myself that I am not that old. It struck me in a conversation today that I have only 14 years left before turning 40, and whence middle aged. My what a waste it's been, but some of it has been fun no doubt.

Well, until I figure out something a little bit more light-hearted to blog ...and, oh, in case you guys have missed it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKsoXHYICqU

It almost makes me want to be a Democrat... pity about the Middle East policies.

In a Month of Saturdays...

2007-08-08T11:49:00.000+03:00

Picking out of a hat any number of Kuwait-related topics to blog on, I have chosen to write, my good friends, on the defiance of the Kuwaiti legislature (the link is in Arabic by the way) in the face of an executive decree to move the countryto a Friday/Saturday weekend as opposed to the current Thursday/Friday arrangement. Now, I believe that it's good to get a sense of perspective for these things. In this day and age, it might be useful for many of us to remember that there still exist many ways to count a year--Jewish, Hijri, even Bengali and Russian--slightly skewed from the normal Gregorian 3-6-5 full rotation about the Sun business, so I don't necessarily start off from a point of opposition to the Thursday/Friday weekend.

The thinking goes, that by having our weekends on the Thursday/Friday, we allow ourselves the same days of rest as the rest of the world and yet keep a vestige of Islam by ensuring that "our" holy day, conveniently a Friday, is kept sacred. You can see that things can get easily complicated if you're planning a bank transfer, parcel delivery or even an overseas phone call to a country anywhere else in the world, since even in the UAE and Qatar the state bureaucracies have adopted a Friday/Saturday weekend. On the other hand, it might be an idea to think of why we of have a weekend in the first place.

A "weekend" is itself is a patently Western idea, and the fact that the weekend came from Europe says much not only about differing patterns of industrialisation, but also about variations in hermeneutics between Islam and Christianity. The Western Sabbath has its justification in Genesis, where God creates a universe in six days and rests on the Seventh; somehow, this was interpreted very early on to mean that people, too, should rest on a seventh day. Remarkably, the line in Genesis is found nearly verbatim--translations permitting--in the Koran's Story of the Hefer, where:

"God created the Universe in Six Days, and rested on His throne on the Seventh"

(my translation)

but historically, the interpretation of this verse focused only on the anthropomorphism of God in this part of the Koran, and never on the number of days or hours it took God to create the world . It's only trite here to point out that a 7-day week in Genesis and in the Koran fits nicely into the Babylonian precedent to both of them, but I've just done it any way. Never in the history of Islam has a significant personage read the above verse and gone about insisting that we all not work on Friday--that people are now insisting we keep Friday holy is a sign of our self-orientalisation as it were, something which you all know I love to pick on. For the record, the debate between different Muslim attitudes to the anthropomorphism in the Koran is dealt with quite well in Nasr Abu Zaid's
الاتجاه العقلي في التفسير
(this book is not yet availale in English, I think, but I don't mind plugging Nasr Abu Zaid, one of the writers who restored my faith in Arab civilisation).

Indeed, in these days where the "Islamic finance" and the archaic codes of practice for Islamic banking are being promoted as the new elixir of life, we might choose to remember that in the very early days of Islam, the re-opening of markets after prayers were over on Friday was considered an imperative. In the very mercentile belief system of my ancestors--almost all of the great early Muslims were merchants at one point or another in their lives, including the Prophet Mohammed--money is not filthy, nor does dealing with it on the hallowed day involve make one less worthy in the eyes of God.

Ergo, the weekend itself is an example of that most vile of intellectual contraband in the Middle East, the بدعة, the innovation, the corrupting alien concept brought in to un-do the majestic purity of the religion of the desert. Never, in a month of Saturdays must this transgression on my faith be allowed to pass. My suggestion is: Drop the weekends altogether. Let us work like coolies under the sun. In order to amend for previous trespasses on the holy law, I suggest each parliamentarian in Kuwait gets 10 lashes for every Friday he shirked from work at the Assembly.

Just a funny video...

2007-07-25T10:05:00.000+03:00

Politically incorrect in the absolutely funniest way ... I'm waiting till I get some more comments before posting again. I know you guys are reading it, why isn't anybody posting?

Naji El Ali: 20 Years On

2007-07-22T06:35:00.000+03:00

Today, 22 July 2007 marks two decades since Palestinian caricaturist Naji El Ali was shot--and eventually killed--by mysterious gunmen in London. El Ali had been forced into exile in the UK after the PLO leadership pressured Kuwait (that would be the Kuwait I live in now) to discontinue their protection of the artist, who had gained Pan Arab fame through his cartoons which appeared in Kuwait's quality Al Qabas (which I notice did not run a front-page story on this one today...).

El Ali's assassination was another of Palestine's multi-layered tragedies: Some are convinced that Arafat himself ordered the shooting (the reasons given vary from the somewhat plausible political motivations to the simply silly). Regardless, Yasser Arafat does of course carry some of the blame for El Ali's killing with him in the grave for having insisted that Kuwait (where he would have been reasonably safe) force the man out. In London, city of international espionage, nobody could be safe with a situation where the government tolerated a modest level of terrorism in order to better keep an eye on all the spooks.

I was reminded of this event, and the debate surrounding who to blame, in a discussion I had on Facebook and thought that it might be a good idea to bring it up on the blog...Despite all the different groups who try to claim him, Naji El Ali was most importantly an artist, whose work can not be commandeered for one cause or the other. So I'm going to remain quiet about what I think and instead post a site in honour of Handala, El Ali's emblematic character who became the poster boy for Palestinian refugees: http://www.handala.org

Where my Limits Stop

2007-07-13T10:51:00.000+03:00

It's good to test one's limits. So after I've been blogging ceaselessly about the shortcomings of my religion of birth and my co-religionists (such as it were), it is quite relieving, in a way, to be offended by some crass type of assault on Islam. It almost makes me realise I still have some religious bones in my body; or perhaps I still have some concept of good taste.

The latest viral video to be doing the rounds in this part of the world, which will completely not help the "dialogue of civilisations", a recording of a young American woman soldier describing how a mosque on her base in the Middle East is regularly used for sexual liasons or, as our friend here from (what I believe is) Camp Doha in Kuwait puts it "a fuck". So when we learn that not only the rank-and-file but that Commissioned Officers are going into a "Hajji Church" to escape the heat of the desert and the monotony of barracks life, I was surprised to find myself in a mad rage. This type of thing should not be treated lightly, which is why I'm hoping this video gets a wide circulation--it is building steadily in Kuwait--and that somebody finds a way of doing something about it.

Now I'm wise enough to know that this sort of thing does and will happen--in an almost reciprocal way, I knew of Arab immigrants abusing the hospitality of churches in Europe (I remember having to explain to some fellows who I was helping with assylum applications that they shouldn't be putting out their cigarettes in a church garden), and amongst Europeans themselves there is the regular use of churchyards by the downtrodden to shoot heroin and sleep rough. The difference is, these people were not the downtrodden of the world; they were armed, trained members of a foreign army for which the host country has been ludicrously welcoming. What's more, and I suspect this will be the biggest factor in the dessemination of this video and its contents, our lovely GI Jane here saw fit to publicise her act through an oh-so-Yankee game of Truth or Dare, as if it were a flippant indiscretion, on the same level as kissing your married boss on the lips after one too many drinks at the Christmas party. Maybe this is how we deserve to be treated: We've gone and allowed this foreign army to come down and take out another Arab leader. This is what you get.

Two Eagles Saved: Spun Gold for the Apologists of Israel

2007-07-10T11:35:00.000+03:00

With a strategic victory downright impossible for either side, it is now a cliche that the war over television audiences' perception of the Palestine conflict is as important as any short-term military gains. At the beginning of the intifada, spokesmen of the Israeli state did not shirk from appearing, speaking Arabic, on Arab television screens to present their "case" (that Al Jazeera bent over backwards and made this possible, through a brave show of professionalism, is a long-overlooked fact in the Western media). Palestinians meanwhile learned a few tricks in the early days of battle: Michael Tarazi and Diana Buttu--a face it was hard to argue with--were brought out to Anglophone television viewers, instead of the regular bald, moustached party apparatchiks who were previously tasked with these missions (the re-appearance of this stereotype, in the person of Sufyan Abu Zaida, on Al Jazeera International recently, is a sad reminder of those Bad Old Days of the Palestinian image). So when an Israeli park ranger finds out that 2 endangered Golden Eagles were being "held" in Hebron, in what he later described as "cramped conditions", the mis-named Israel Defense Forces jumped at the opportunity for a media coup.

Surely, it must be a source of some consternation, not to say confusion, for the family of Gilad Shalit: If the Israeli military was willing to search the homes of innocent Palestinians in Hebron for the sake of two feathered friends, why not go look for Shalit in Gaza? Of course, the so-called Defense Forces might have taken the time to investigate what their settlers are doing to the defense-less people of Hebron (warning: You really need to prepare youself before watching this video), but about this I have not received any advice. Could it be, and in a way I hate to suggest this, that the Israeli authorities are actually more interested in scoring media points than might be healthy for a state? Or perhaps, that Israel is in need of proving, to itself for a start, what makes Israel, Israel?

The recent release of Alan Johnston paved the way for what will become EU acceptance of the Palestinian government (I have discussed this before)--the earlier one...or the emergency one... the Hamas cabinet, you know what I mean--and this left Israel badly in need of proving something to the world, at least to the Western world, and maybe the best step was to show, once again, just how "Western" Israel is in relation to the surrounding barbarians, i.e. me, my family and my mates. Now, with an ever-changing, dynamic Palestinian society, this is becoming difficult. Palestinian feminists would claim that the situation for women in Palestine is not quite equitous but, as our elections process, and the very existence of feminists suggest, we are not Saudi Arabia. Even the Alan Johnston debacle brought out the very best of Palestine: it displayed our "civil society" of trades unions and associations and school boards, where it became clear just how "modern" Palestinian society could be.

On the other hand, few issues show the differing world views of East and West as much as the treatment of animals, or animal "rights" as some would have it. In my new-old home on the Arabian Peninsula, there is much adoration for the beasts of Bedouin lore: the horse, the bird of prey and, garden space permitting, the Seluki hound, but even these here are now a novelty in the homes of the rich or trophies, with little appreciation of our relation, as humans, to these creatures. To be sure, these eagles, had they reached market, would have been the cherished living room ornaments of a harmless, pot-bellied "Lt Colonel" in the Palestinian armed services, who would have called himself "Abu Nisrain" (or "Father of the Two Eagles" in Modern Arabic--the word Nisr is actually "vulture" in Medieaval Arabic, but I digress), because our Lt Colonel friend is embarrassingly childless as of this writing, and wanted to use the eagles them to remind himself, and bemused guests working for European aid agencies, of his once-famous masculinity, which reached its peak back in the pay-as-you-go days of the Beirut Corniche.

For the now-dejected Abu Nisrain, his eagles have left his man-fantasy and gone to live in a theme-park world of Israeli nature enthusiasts, for whom nature, feathered, four-legged and scaly-skinned (and I'm not just talking about Netanyahu) fits into their Western model of nationalism. For us this is not so.

I was recently a guest--prisoner?--at the Kuwait Imax cinema where I saw the Siegfried and Roy flick. It struck me that it could have passed for a Nazi propaganda film paid for by the Las Vegas tourist board. Then I was taken back to an even more disturbing thought that has recurred to me over the years: If the European nationalists can weave a love of their surrounding "nature" into the story of their nationalism, why not us? We have no alps to worship, but there are some amazing pine forests in Greater Syria and Oman is blessed with mountain ranges, waterfalls, sand dunes, beaches... (OK, just get out of these parentheses and go to Oman). We do have our own instance of nature and natural beauty, and perhaps our lack of nationalistic pride in who we are and where we come from--literally--has resulted in a complete absence of any environmentalist movement to speak of within the Arab Homeland (I hate the phrase "Arab World" I mean, when did that one come about?). Going back in time, we can see there must have been some sense of pride in the surrounding Old Country. Everybody, or at least everybody who can still read Arabic, knows of the Taghreebit Bani Hilal and the love the refugees who were scattered to Palestine and Morocco had for the old country of Najd. Many air-conditioned shopping malls and American fast food restaurants later, the attachments with the old country are under threat, and the vast piles of rubbish left in the desert by picnicers never elicit a word of serious protest. We have hastily decided that the desert is a place of itchy sand and kept only the paternalistic politics of Bedouin life, abandoning the environment to fend for itself.

So all in all this episode has been for me, as so many others have, a multi-layered disaster. While our in-house rifts prevent us from capitalising on the safe release of Johnston, the Israelis take two golden eagles all the way to the bank. A further two of my own countrymen, however dim and misguided for trying to sell two eagles, are now to be detained in conditions which will probably make an eagle's cage seem luxurious. Lt Colonel Abu Nisrain will now be staring ever more vacuously into his child-less existence, and will probably beat his wife, who will accept her fate as a desperate soul in an increasingly lawless realm run by men with guns. Ergo, we are now less modern, and this sucks.

Just in case...

2007-06-27T14:49:00.000+03:00

When I was a kid, my parents used to tell me that if I never achieved in school, that I could look forward to a life on the streets. I'm not sure the evidence has held up their opinions. I never really did "well" at school, and so far I have not gone wanting; but then again I do now have an advanced degree in the physical sciences, and well, life is not THAT great for me. So this story from the usually wealth-friendly telegraph just serves to make the point that one can be both wealthy beyond need and stupid beyond feasability.

If you can't find a way express your thoughts, ask a poet

2007-06-20T15:58:00.000+03:00

It's been a while since I've posted anything. I must admit that the attention I get from people emailing demanding "post, post!" is flattering, but the main reason I haven't written anything is sheer dumbfoundedness at how my countrymen have found increasingly inventive ways of killing each other. It's quite maddening.

So, a few days when a friend of mine, a staunch Fathawi sent me the following poem by Mahmoud Darwish, printed in the Palestine daily Al Ayyam, I thought it would be cathartic to trnalsate it. Those of you on Facebook can read the note; this slightly more polished version has taken on some of the suggestions of the meticulous Najeeb--our very own--and for this he gets much thanks.

I also noticed that a quite similar translation was posted on http://conflictblotter.com by C Levinson on the same day as my Facebook note; I want to point out that any similarities are probably due to the very direct style Darwish uses here. In short, this poem translates reasonably well but is just not a good poem.

(Apologies, of course, for the messiness of the formatting.)

أنت منذ الآن غيرك!
"يوميـات"
محمود درويش

You are, from now, Different

Mahmoud Darwish

هل كان علينا أن نسقط من عُلُوّ شاهق، ونرى دمنا على أيدينا... لنُدْرك أننا لسنا ملائكة.. كما كنا نظن؟
Did we have to fall from our great heights, to see our own blood on our own hands, to learn that we are not the angels we thought we were?

وهل كان علينا أيضاً أن نكشف عن عوراتنا أمام الملأ، كي لا تبقى حقيقتنا عذراء؟
Did we have to expose ourselves shamelessly, so that our own reality would lose its innocence?
كم كَذَبنا حين قلنا: نحن استثناء!
How deceitful it was for us to exclaim: "We are an exception!"

أن تصدِّق نفسك أسوأُ من أن تكذب على غيرك!
To believe your own lies is worse than to lie to others!

أن نكون ودودين مع مَنْ يكرهوننا، وقساةً مع مَنْ يحبّونَنا - تلك هي دُونيّة المُتعالي، وغطرسة الوضيع!
To be gentle with those who hate us, and vicious with those who love us[1]—that is the proud man's secret vice, and the gall of the weak.

أيها الماضي! لا تغيِّرنا... كلما ابتعدنا عنك!
To the Past I say, do not change us just because we move away from you.

أيها المستقبل: لا تسألنا: مَنْ أنتم؟
وماذا تريدون مني؟ فنحن أيضاً لا نعرف.

The future I beg: Do not ask us: "Who are you? What do you want of me?"
We also do not know.

أَيها الحاضر! تحمَّلنا قليلاً، فلسنا سوى عابري سبيلٍ ثقلاءِ الظل!
Of the Present, I request: Bear with us a little, we are but uncouth vagabonds!

الهوية هي: ما نُورث لا ما نَرِث. ما نخترع لا ما نتذكر. الهوية هي فَسادُ المرآة التي يجب أن نكسرها كُلَّما أعجبتنا الصورة!
Identity is: What we pass on. Not what was passed on to us. It is something we invent, not something for us to recollect. Identity is the mirror to be broken every time we like what we see.

تَقَنَّع وتَشَجَّع، وقتل أمَّه.. لأنها هي ما تيسَّر له من الطرائد.. ولأنَّ جنديَّةً أوقفته وكشفتْ له عن نهديها قائلة: هل لأمِّك، مثلهما؟

He donned a mask and borrowed courage, and killed his own mother; because that is who he could kill…and because a woman-soldier stopped him at a checkpoint, revealed her breasts to him and asked: "Does your mother too, not have these?"

لولا الحياء والظلام، لزرتُ غزة، دون أن أعرف الطريق إلى بيت أبي سفيان الجديد، ولا اسم النبي الجديد!
Were it not for the shame, I would have visited Gaza, without knowing the way to the house of the new Abu Suffyan, nor of the new Prophet.

ولولا أن محمداً هو خاتم الأنبياء، لصار لكل عصابةٍ نبيّ، ولكل صحابيّ ميليشيا!
Were it not that Mohammed was the Final Prophet, each gang would have as its leader a Prophet, and for each of his Apostles, a militia.

أعجبنا حزيران في ذكراه الأربعين: إن لم نجد مَنْ يهزمنا ثانيةً هزمنا أنفسنا بأيدينا لئلا ننسى!
This June brought with it a surprise with its fortieth remembrance: There was nobody to defeat us a second time, and so we defeated ourselves.

مهما نظرتَ في عينيّ.. فلن تجد نظرتي هناك. خَطَفَتْها فضيحة!
No matter how much you look into my eyes, my gaze will not be there. It was kidnapped by this scandal.

قلبي ليس لي... ولا لأحد. لقد استقلَّ عني، دون أن يصبح حجراً.
My heart is no longer mine, nor does it belong to another. It has broken free of me, without turning into stone.

هل يعرفُ مَنْ يهتفُ على جثة ضحيّته - أخيه: >الله أكبر< أنه كافر إذ يرى الله على صورته هو: أصغرَ من كائنٍ بشريٍّ سويِّ التكوين؟
Does the one who chants "God is Great!" over the body of his brother-victim that he is an apostate in the eyes of God: For God sees that he has taken a perfect human life?

أخفى السجينُ، الطامحُ إلى وراثة السجن، ابتسامةَ النصر عن الكاميرا. لكنه لم يفلح في كبح السعادة السائلة من عينيه.
رُبَّما لأن النصّ المتعجِّل كان أَقوى من المُمثِّل.
The prisoner, so desperate to inherit his jail, hid the smile of victory from the cameras but he could not hide the joy in his eyes.
Maybe the script written for him was better than his acting skills.

ما حاجتنا للنرجس، ما دمنا فلسطينيين.
What need have we for Narcissus[2], since we are Palestinian?

وما دمنا لا نعرف الفرق بين الجامع والجامعة، لأنهما من جذر لغوي واحد، فما حاجتنا للدولة... ما دامت هي والأيام إلى مصير واحد؟.
Since we can not tell the difference between a Mosque and a University, what need have we of a state…so long as its fate is sealed?

لافتة كبيرة على باب نادٍ ليليٍّ: نرحب بالفلسطينيين العائدين من المعركة. الدخول مجاناً! وخمرتنا... لا تُسْكِر!.
A sign on the entrance to a nightclub: "We welcome the Palestinians returning from battle. Entrance is free. Our wine…does not inebriate![3]"

لا أستطيع الدفاع عن حقي في العمل، ماسحَ أحذيةٍ على الأرصفة.
لأن من حقّ زبائني أن يعتبروني لصَّ أحذية ـ هكذا قال لي أستاذ جامعة!.
"I can not defend my right to work," said a shiner of shoes on the pavement.
"My customers, they have the right to look at me as a thief of shoes—this is what a Professor told me!"

>أنا والغريب على ابن عمِّي. وأنا وابن عمِّي على أَخي. وأَنا وشيخي عليَّ<. هذا هو الدرس الأول في التربية الوطنية الجديدة، في أقبية الظلام.
"I take the side of the foreigner against my cousin, and the side of my cousin against my brother. I take the side of my Sheikh against myself"
Day One in Civics class, under the new Domes of Darkness.

من يدخل الجنة أولاً؟ مَنْ مات برصاص العدو، أم مَنْ مات برصاص الأخ؟
بعض الفقهاء يقول: رُبَّ عَدُوٍّ لك ولدته أمّك!.
Who shall enter Heaven: The one killed at the hands of the enemy, or the one killed by his brother?
Some of the Scholars will say: "Your worst enemy was born of your mother!"

لا يغيظني الأصوليون، فهم مؤمنون على طريقتهم الخاصة. ولكن، يغيظني أنصارهم العلمانيون، وأَنصارهم الملحدون الذين لا يؤمنون إلاّ بدين وحيد: صورهم في التلفزيون!.
سألني: هل يدافع حارس جائع عن دارٍ سافر صاحبها، لقضاء إجازته الصيفية في الريفيرا الفرنسية أو الايطالية.. لا فرق؟
قُلْتُ: لا يدافع!.
I am not enraged by the Fundamentalists, they are believers in their own way; their secular defenders, their atheist proponents, they anger me. They have but one sacred wish: To see their faces on television screens.
I was asked: Would the hungry security guard work for the absentee lord of the house, who is abroad on the Riveria, in France or Italy?
I replied: He will not defend!

وسألني: هل أنا + أنا = اثنين؟
قلت: أنت وأنت أقلُّ من واحد!.
..and he asked me: Do me and myself make two of us?
I said: You and yourself are less than one!

لا أَخجل من هويتي، فهي ما زالت قيد التأليف. ولكني أخجل من بعض ما جاء في مقدمة ابن خلدون.
I am not ashamed of my identity; its story is still being written[4], but I am ashamed of some things recorded in Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddama.

أنت، منذ الآن، غيرك!.

You are, from now, different.
[1] You will notice the allusion to a famous saying by Omar Ibn Al Khattab, although it is not verbatim in the Arabic
[2] Also the name of a flower in Arabic, نرجس If people know of something similar in English, please point it out.
[3] As in, the Muslim description of Heaven, hint hint. There is a tradition of this going back to Abu Ala Maari in case you're wondering…
[4] You will notice that the Arabic word هوية can mean both "identity" and "identity documents"

Saudi Surprise

2007-06-07T19:47:00.000+03:00

So it seems that a Saudi Prince has been receiving payments from a quasi-public UK arms firm. Of course, we've been reporting on this developing story on Abdulhadi's World for some time now, but the fact that the BBC is reporting on it again just goes to show you how difficult for these real stains to be washed off. In a later development, the Prince's American lawyers have admitted that he used this money to finance the building and refurbishment of his palace.

In the end, life sucks for the honest: A Saudi Prince will almost certainly get off scott-free for his actions; in the meantime, British mandarins, executives and elected officials might be facing the music because of a deal which was going to benefit the export industry of their country. Look, we all know that the Sterling couldn't keep ridiculous exchange rates without Britain importing something. As an Arab, I say to Britain: We understand and forgive you.

Tidying things up...

2007-05-31T17:56:00.000+03:00

Since I've last blogged, people have been asking if I might have made up the story about the Mufti and the nipple-sucking. Sadly, I had not, I only wish I had that kind of sharp rhetorical wit. Unfortunately, the said Mufti has been forced to swallow his words and recant; no religion-sanctioned sessions with the Sec for me, but I *did* have a conversation with her. That's right, two days ago we exchanged 1.5 paragraphs worth of words. It went like this:

Me: "Uhm, hi... so, uh, you do modelling work in your spare time, right?"

Sec: "Yeah, maybe, sure... how did you know?"

Me: Mummbles (what the fuck was I supposed to say? That I worship her from across the office but haven't had the courage to say 2 words?)

Sec: "Well, yeah I do"

Me: "You know there are these people in Kuwait looking for some models for a catalogue shoot..."

Sec: "A what?"

Me: "A catalogue shoot you know... with, uhm, traditional Arabic clothes on and that kind of thing."

Silence. I turn my gaze to the corner of the room, where the bathroom is. It's only a minute before somebody walks through that door, I think, and then they're going to want to know why I'm not at my desk. They'll be wondering why I'm standing at Sec's desk, how I know she's a model. Maybe THE BOSS is a jealous freak who has his eyes on her and will kill me for even trying to make contact... SHIT!!

OK, things are good. She wants to know more...

Me: "Well, have you heard of Facebook, you see it's this thing, kind of like hi5, which I saw your photos on, but it's less smutty, you see" ....SHIT, I've just told her I think she's a smutty whore for being on hi5. FUCK. NICE ONE.

Sec: "Yeah I know, I'm on Facebook already, see here it is"

She clears off some tabbed windows of solitaire, some Arab music download portals and a few MSN instant messaging conversations. Who needs to work when you look so good?

This is not what I was hoping for. In my mind's eye, she would have come to MY desk, and I could've showed off my 40 wpm typing skills (that kind of shit impresses secretaries, right?), and my ability to distinguish social networking sites.
"Oh, you type so fast..."
"Yes, yes I do..." I say as I look into her eyes from the seat, touch-typing while melting her heart with a few twitches of my nose...and then we kiss and embrace, and get fired. SHIT! End of fantasy.

Sec: "So, yeah, where do I go now?"

Me: Long list of meaningless instructions... can't really grab her mouse and move the Facebook screen for her, can I? Who's going to understand what I just said? But she does!!

She's got it!

Sec: "Hmmm... haven't heard that name...but here's a number, thanks".

Gets back to playing solitaire.

Me:"OK, take care"

Sec: SMILES.

Ah, all in a good day's work. Yes, yes and I confirm I spoke to her 2 days later, and I asked her if she called. She said no. OK.