inaction

Of late I have been studying the techniques of prolonging one's life, casting out all ideas of fame and glory, eliminating tastes, and letting my mind wander in stillness: what is most worthwhile to me is Inaction. [...] But beyond this, my mind tends toward melancholy, increasingly so of late, and I am personally convinced that I would not be able to stand any occupation in which I took no pleasure. I really know myself in this respect. If worse comes to worst and there is no way out, then I shall simply die.

From a letter to Shan T'ao by the poet Hsi K'ang (Xi Kang) (223-262), translated by J.R. Hightower.

Anthology of Chinese Literature: From Early Times to the Fourteenth Century

annual renewal of vehicle registration - the movie

EXT. GENERAL DIRECTORATE OF TRAFFIC – INSPECTIONS AREA – LATE MORNING

The inspector has just checked the car. (By "car" we mean brake lights.) He stamps and signs the form.

INSPECTOR

OK, that's all. Go directly to the post office.

BB
Really? Don't I have to go inside to finish the paperwork?

INSPECTOR
No, you've finished. You can go.

INT. POST OFFICE – EARLY AFTERNOON

BB reaches front of queue.

POST OFFICE EMPLOYEE
You need to fill in that form first.

BB completes form, goes back to queue. Reaches front, post office employee looks at form.

POST OFFICE EMPLOYEE
You are missing a stamp.

BB
Which stamp?

POST OFFICE EMPLOYEE
The third one, right at the bottom, showing that you have no traffic violations.

BB
But I asked about that, and the inspector told me I didn't need to go into the office, just come straight to a post office to submit the form.

POST OFFICE EMPLOYEE
Then he doesn't know the rules. We can't accept it without all three stamps.

INT. GENERAL DIRECTORATE OF TRAFFIC – OFFICE – LATER

BB hands over form at desk.

TRAFFIC DIRECTORATE EMPLOYEE
Why have you filled in this form?

BB
Because I have already been to the post office – and they sent me back here. I need the stamp that shows I have no violations.

Employee looks at the computer.

TRAFFIC DIRECTORATE EMPLOYEE
You have a speeding ticket.

BB
What?! I didn't know about this.

TRAFFIC DIRECTORATE EMPLOYEE
Yes, you were caught by a camera in the Seef District.

Look of confusion on BB's face, as she is lucky if her car even reaches the speed limit. She resigns herself to settling the fine.

BB
So where am I supposed to pay for this?

Pause.

TRAFFIC DIRECTORATE EMPLOYEE
I'm just joking!

CUT TO:

Strained smile on BB's face, as she fantasises about blowing up the traffic directorate.

THE END (until next year)

to shoot an elephant

To Shoot An Elephant is a documentary by Alberto Arce and Mohammad Rujailah, filmed in Gaza during the war a year ago:

This is an embedded film. We decided to be "embedded within the ambulances" opening an imaginary dialogue with those journalists who embed themselves within armies. Everyone is free to choose the side where they want to report from. But decisions are often not unbiased. We decided that civilians working for the rescue of the injured would give us a far more honest perspective of the situation than those whose job is to shoot, to injure and to kill. We prefer medics rather than soldiers. [...] It is a matter of focus. I am not interested in the fears, traumas and contradictions of those who have a choice: the choice of staying home and saying no to war.

The film is being screened around the world on Monday 18 January, the first anniversary of the end of Israel's attacks on the Gaza Strip (and as it is available to download under a Creative Commons licence, it's not too late to organise a screening wherever you are). In Bahrain, Hussain Yousif has arranged for the film to be shown at the Bahrain Medical Society in Juffair at 8pm on Monday. (The event is on Facebook here.) He is also hoping to arrange a Q&A with Mohammad Rujailah from Gaza via Skype after the screening.

To Shoot An Elephant is in Arabic and English, with subtitles in English.

the price of freedom

Haiti was an exception from the very beginning, from its revolutionary fight against slavery, which ended in independence in January 1804. "Only in Haiti," Hallward notes, "was the declaration of human freedom universally consistent. Only in Haiti was this declaration sustained at all costs, in direct opposition to the social order and economic logic of the day." For this reason, "there is no single event in the whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global order of things". The Haitian Revolution truly deserves the title of repetition of the French Revolution: led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, it was clearly "ahead of his time", "premature" and doomed to fail, yet, precisely as such, it was perhaps even more of an event than the French Revolution itself. It was the first time that an enslaved population rebelled not as a way of returning to their pre-colonial "roots", but on behalf of universal principles of freedom and equality. […] Denounced by Talleyrand as "a horrible spectacle for all white nations", the "mere existence of an independent Haiti" was itself an intolerable threat to the slave-owning status quo. Haiti thus had to be made an exemplary case of economic failure, to dissuade other countries from taking the same path. The price - the literal price - for the "premature" independence was truly extortionate: after two decades of embargo, France, the old colonial master, established trade and diplomatic relations only in 1825, after forcing the Haitian government to pay 150 million francs as "compensation" for the loss of its slaves. This sum, roughly equal to the French annual budget at the time, was later reduced to 90 million, but it continued to be a heavy drain on Haitian resources: at the end of the 19th century, Haiti's payments to France consumed roughly 80 per cent of the national budget, and the last instalment was only paid in 1947. When, in 2003, in anticipation of the bicentenary of national independence, the Lavalas president Jean-Baptiste Aristide demanded that France return this extorted money, his claim was flatly rejected by a French commission (led, ironically, by Régis Debray). At a time when some US liberals ponder the possibility of reimbursing black Americans for slavery, Haiti's demand to be reimbursed for the tremendous sum the former slaves had to pay to have their freedom recognised has been largely ignored by liberal opinion, even if the extortion here was double: the slaves were first exploited, and then had to pay for the recognition of their hard-won freedom.

a surfeit of syllables

I actually counted.

Note that in North America, the word "college" is very often used as a synonym for "university", especially in efficient conversation, for the simple reason that "college" is a two-syllable word, whereas "university" is five syllables long. Thus, if a person says, "I will return to college next fall," that term also includes any university, or any Institute of Technology (eight syllables long), such as the California Institute of Technology.

lakum lubnanakum wa li lubnani

Last month I went to Lebanon for this, and I stayed on for a week or so to see friends, and - well, who needs a specific reason?

This is my collection of pictureless postcards from that trip. (Postcards always arrive late.)

My apologies for the length; to paraphrase Blaise Pascal (et al.), I haven't had time to make it shorter.

Beirut (Hamra)
On the first day, before the conference started, I went to visit a friend. I took a taxi – a taxi, not a service – to Hamra, but though we reached the right street, I didn't know the exact building I needed to go to. It was raining heavily, and the taxi driver was really rude; he got fed up of trying to find the building and said, "What, do you expect me to ask? I'm just a driver." I ended up leaving the taxi, tired of arguing with him, and ran into an office building to get directions. The two men on reception were helpful, and told me the building I was looking for was at the bottom of the street (a five-minute walk). I thanked them and set off, but a moment later one of them ran out after me, calling, "It's raining! I can’t let you walk." He then gave me a lift down the road, and the unwarranted unpleasantness of a moment before was erased by a stranger's kindness.

Beirut (Bourj Hammoud)
A group of us went for dinner at an out-of-the-way Armenian restaurant, with a mercurial owner who has a reputation akin to Seinfeld's Soup Nazi (others have made that comparison, too). Our Armenian-American friend did all the ordering (in Armenian), so we managed to avoid any trouble. I loved the manti. There were frogs; I didn’t try them.

Beirut (Hazmieh)
Two of many inspiring moments:
Sa'ed from Ramallah spoke of how music has affected his life.
Hamzoz from Iraq told us that he always ends a blog post, however depressing, with something positive. When asked why, he said it was his nature to be positive. He even has a "cemetery for friends"; whenever someone does something bad to him, he takes that act and imagines burying it. That leaves him free to deal with the person just as another human. (Hamzoz is twenty-one years old.)
...

When I've been away from TV for a long time, watching it again makes me feel that I'm missing out on the real world, the world which everyone else refers to. And because I only watch random films and series that friends give me, I have no idea when they were originally shown, so the sense of disconnection is increased. All films and series exist in some vague television time, unrelated to particular years or periods.

I was introduced to lots of new things in my weeks in Lebanon, being around televisions again. I learnt that Laurence Fishburne is now on CSI, Jeff Goldblum is now on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and that there are all sorts of weird Japanese series about yo-yo academies and superheroes dubbed into Arabic.
...

Al Manar followed Obama's Nobel Prize ceremony with a history of all the war criminals who have received the prize.

Beirut (Solidere)
Near Nejmeh Square we stopped by a bench to take a group photo. Our photographer was setting up his tripod so he could be in the photo, and as he did so a group of Lebanese lads – who seemed to have been drinking – stopped and asked if they could have their photo taken. Abdelrahman agreed, the lads posed on the bench, and he took a number of shots. Then email addresses were exchanged, everyone shook hands, and off the lads went.

I cannot ask if the photos were sent. I have to believe that they were.
…

It feels magnificent to walk in mild weather, and see snow on the mountains ahead.
…

A soldier on guard near Nejmeh Square leans over the metal barrier, holding a single red rose in his hand.

Beirut (Achrafieh)
At Place Sassine, Noha wanted to buy some sweets to take back to Egypt. We stumbled across the tiny Patisserie Jean, where an old man – no doubt Jean himself – stood in a white coat, arms crossed, as he may well have done for thirty or forty years. The choice of sweets was small, but his attentiveness and consideration made going elsewhere unthinkable. Once he had heard what Noha needed, he sent us down to the road to the "one dollar shop" to purchase a plastic container – better for carrying the sweets abroad than his cardboard boxes. When we came back he took a good half-hour cleaning the container, weighing it, choosing sweets then weighing them, and giving instructions. (If travelling to the US or Europe the sweets should be packed, if travelling to somewhere in the Arab world they can be taken as hand luggage.)

Beirut (Hamra)
As we waited in the car, the wind started pushing and pulling the branches of the nearby palm trees, making them swing and jump like crab pincers on a tacky toy that moves when placed near music.

Deir Al Qamar
In summer Deir Al Qamar is full of visitors. In winter – and in the rain – there was just our car and one other vehicle. There is something liberating about acting like a mad tourist.

Beiteddine
In Beiteddine the sky was dark. It was raining, and orange leaves lay on the ground. I thought of Shropshire.

Wood smoke rose from the tops of the hills. I thought of the West Bank.
…

We sat in a restaurant, the only customers. It was dark outside: dark skies, dark hills, a light moving across the top of one.

Inside: music and light. Christmas lights – white stars – hung in perpendicular lines down the windows. At one point Madonna was playing.

The food was awful.

Jbeil
Is there a point in your life when everything starts to remind you of something else? When things stop being unique – though are still able to be special? Jbeil reminded me at moments of Monterosso. I don't see this as a bad thing. I am not worried that nothing will be new again. I just feel that slowly everything's connection to everything else is becoming apparent.
…

Some years ago a friend and I drove from Beirut to Berlin, and each country we drove through seemed just a little different from the one before. At the time it made everything seem connected. Now it seems like a game of Chinese (sic) Whispers, when the original message turns into something completely different at the end of the line.

Tyre
We left Beirut much later than expected. We drove to Tyre, hit a large pothole, and - ta da! - burst two tyres.

The journey there: techno music, stumpy banana palms, beautiful views of the coast.

The wait: unlit roads, offers of help by strangers, a walk to sit in a café, a trip to a sweet seller next door.

One friend, suspiciously: "I'm sure this sweet shop is a front for Hizbullah."

The journey back: a debate about evolution, genetics, and sceptical empiricism.

The same friend, trying to remember a phrase: "There are two words, and they both mean something."

Saida
We ate Palestinian za'atar and talked about Palestine, and Palestinian politics. One of those moments when you feel happy and sad at the same time.
…

My friend asked her nine-year-old if he had memories of my last visit three years ago. He replied, "I don't remember anything. I was six years old. I am just living in the moment."
…

Her five-year-old insists on speaking standard Arabic, which he has picked up from watching cartoons.
…

I am quite convinced that in whatever part of the world you travel to you will find people who are addicted to FarmVille.

Rashidieh
During my stays in Rashidieh over the years I have found that the most common question asked (usually by older women) in order to gauge the cost of living in Bahrain is how much tomatoes cost. I have never memorised the information to be able to tell them.
…

Leaving Rashidieh, the service taxi I was in took a detour to avoid some traffic jams. We drove past a Hussainia, where people were gathering. A young Palestinian woman asked her companion, "What's going on?" The older woman replied, "It's the second day of Ashoora." The young woman then asked, "Why are they wearing black?"

Tyre
When I was visiting my friend a few days later, we went to the same "Hizbullah" sweet shop which is coincidentally just next to her home. I prefer to speak Arabic in public (to avoid being charged higher prices) but my friend is used to speaking English with me. Listening to us talk about what sweets to take, the shop owner scolded us. "Why are you speaking English? Why do people always lean towards the West?"
…

We also went to the same café that I had been in with the others, and we drank some "cappuccino" – made with Turkish coffee.
…

My friend told me about her experience of taking a teacher training course in Cambridge in 2002. The course was attended by teachers from many countries such as Brazil, Croatia, Spain, and Switzerland, but she was the only participant from the Arab world. When they introduced themselves, only one person – a Swiss teacher – knew what "Palestinian" was. An Italian teacher came to my friend the next day and said that she had tried to find Palestine on the map, but couldn't.
…

On the way to Rashidieh in daylight, I examined the road we had burst the tyres on just days earlier, but found no evidence of any potholes – along any of it.

Beirut (Hamra)
According to the map, the street I was staying on in the west of Hamra was called Bahrain Street.
…

The building across from the flat I was staying in was abandoned, but certain flats were occupied by squatters. At night these random flats lit up like a game of Celebrity Squares.
…

Communication in Hamra cafés and restaurants fascinates me. Whatever language a conversation with a waiter or waitress starts in, it will end in another.
…

Why would anyone go to a place with the reputation of having the best coffee in Hamra, and ask for Nescafé?

……

My connection to Lebanon goes back maybe eight years. However, I have never learnt as much about Beirut as I did this time, thanks to a single car ride with Moussa.
…

Actually, my connection to Lebanon goes back to before I was born. When my mother was pregnant with me, and she and my father were flying back to India after a visit to Britain, they had to transit in Beirut. While there, my mother almost miscarried me, but did not thanks to treatment by a local doctor. Many years later, when I visited Lebanon for the first time, my father (who never forgot names) wanted me to look up the doctor who had saved my life in order to introduce myself, and - how touching! - pass on his thanks. I didn't look up the doctor, but as I walked around Beirut I kept glancing at the signs covering every building on the off chance that the name would appear.

Thank you, C.

the minaret

Whether or not minarets are actually used to call the faithful to prayer, they remain potent symbols of Islam, and have sometimes been targeted accordingly. [...] Such clashes between competing visual cultures are unfortunately not only recent news, although modern weapons and explosives tend to make the results more dramatic. After the Ottoman sultan Fatih Mehmet conquered the Byzantine capital of Constantinople in May 1453, one of his first acts was to order a wooden minaret added to the 900-year-old church of Hagia Sophia to signal its conversion into a mosque. [...] Meanwhile, at the western end of the Mediterranean, as Christians wrested the Iberian Peninsula back from Muslims in the late Middle Ages, the victors transformed the great stone or brick minarets of Andalusian congregational mosques into church belltowers. [...] From the perspective of the history of architecture, these episodes can be seen as rounds in an ancient game of architectural "tit for tat." Some 500 years earlier, Christians in ninth-century Córdoba had accused the Muslims of pulling down the "pinnacles" - that is, the belltowers - of their churches and "extoll[ing] their prophet" from their "towers and foggy heights." The Córdoban theologian Eulogius histrionically recounted how his grandfather had had to clap his hands over his ears to shield himself from the muezzin’s cry.

But it is not only Christians who have objected to minarets: At certain times and places some Muslims believed - and some still believe - that minarets have no place in the design of mosques. In many parts of the Muslim world - Malaysia, Kashmir and East Africa, for example - tower minarets were virtually unknown before modern times. In the 20th century, however, the expansion of visual communication and travel has homogenized regional architectural styles into an international "Islamic" norm of domes and soaring towers. Nevertheless, one expert, Dr. Mohamad Tajuddin bin Mohamad Rasdi of the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, recently stated that modern architects and their clients who build monumental mosques with fancy minarets, domes and muqarnas ignore the teachings of the Prophet.

Other Muslims may differ with Dr. Rasdi’s interpretation of Islamic tradition, but there can be no doubt that while the beautiful adhan clearly dates back to the time of the Prophet, the minaret is certainly a later invention. When Islam was revealed in the early seventh century, Jews called the faithful to prayer with the shofar (ram’s horn) and Christians used a bell or a wooden gong or clacker. Indeed, the sound of a bell wafting in the breeze from a distant monastery is a frequent image in pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry. In this context, we can well understand how ‘Abd Allah ibn Zayd, one of the Prophet’s companions, dreamt that he saw someone calling the Muslims to prayer from the roof of the mosque. After he told the Prophet about his dream, Muhammad recognized it as a vision from God and instructed Bilal, an Abyssinian freedman and early convert to Islam, "Rise, Bilal, and summon all to prayer!" Bilal, who was known for his beautiful voice, did so, thereby becoming the first muezzin. (The word muezzin comes from the Arabic mu’adhdhin, or "one who gives the adhan.")

According to Islamic tradition, Bilal and his successors normally gave the call to prayer from a high or public place, such as the doorway or roof of a mosque, an elevated neighboring structure or even the city wall, but never from a tall tower. Indeed, it is said that ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet’s cousin, son-in-law and fourth caliph, ordered a tall mi’dhana (a place from which the call to prayer was given) torn down, because its height enabled the muezzin to see into the homes around the mosque. The call to prayer, ‘Ali believed, should not be given from any place higher than the roof of the mosque. It is for this same reason that, in later years, blind men have often been selected and trained as muezzins, for they are unable to inadvertently violate the privacy of other people’s homes.

Since tower minarets were unknown in Muhammad’s lifetime and for many decades after his death, how then did the tower come to be so identified as the preeminent architectural symbol of Islam? And why do minarets take such different shapes - ranging from the tall, pencil-slim towers of Ottoman mosques through the multistoried towers of Egypt to the square shafts of North Africa and Spain - while such other features of the mosque as minbars (pulpits) and mihrabs (the wall niche marking the direction of Makkah) are remarkably consistent in form?

Find out here.

unveiled

A popular opinion on the Arabian Peninsula is that the veil is something foreign – introduced to the Arabs by either the Persians or the Turks. Many men and women equally point out that in the time of the Prophet, that is when Islam was at its strongest as a religious force, there was little veiling. One foreign journalist taking pictures of Bahrain’s 50th anniversary of education celebrations a few years ago provoked an unexpected reaction when he trained his camera on a group of veiled women onlookers: they immediately took the veils off.

From Saudi Aramco World, March/April 1971.

the great escape

I have dozens of unread books on my shelves, including some French books. But a couple of weeks ago I had the urge to read something different in French – I didn't know what – so I decided to make a visit to Family Bookshop, which stocks some French literature. I got there ten minutes before closing time, just enough time to scan a few shelves, and pick up whatever book appealed to me. That happened to be Lettres de mon moulin (Letters From My Windmill), and I couldn't have made a better choice.

As I mentioned before, I've been feeling quite contemplative recently, and this book fitted my mood perfectly. I think I may have read it as a teenager, but if so I remembered nothing of it. Written by Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897), it's a collection of short stories written mostly from a windmill in Provence where Daudet went to escape the world (which for him meant Paris), write, and think. (Not all the stories are about Provence; there are even a couple set in Algeria, including one showing the poor treatment of the Algerian Jewish community.)

I found an English translation of the book online, and this extract gives an idea of Daudet's view of life, written from an island in the Gulf of Ajaccio:

Imagine a ruddy isle, savage of aspect; the lighthouse on one point, on the other an old Genoese tower, where, in my day, lived an eagle. Below, on the shore, was a ruined lazaretto, overgrown with herbage; and everywhere ravines, clusters of great rocks, a few wild goats, the little Corsican horses galloping about, their manes streaming in the wind; and above, far above, in a whirl of sea-birds, the house of the beacon, with its platform of white masonry where the keepers walk up and down, its green arched doorway, and its cast-iron tower, at the top of which the great lantern with facets shines in the sun, giving light by day as well as by night… That is the Île des Sanguinaires, as I saw it again this wakeful night, while I listened to the snoring of my pines. It was in that enchanted isle that I shut myself up at times, before I came to my mill, when I needed the free air and solitude.

What did I do there?

Just what I do here, only less. When the mistral or the tramontana did not blow too hard, I lay between two rocks at the sea-level, amid the gulls and the petrels and the swallows, and there I stayed nearly all day long in that species of stupor and delightful dejection which comes with the contemplation of the sea. You know, don't you, that lovely intoxication of the soul? We do not think, we do not dream. All our being escapes us, flits away, is scattered. We are the gull that dives, the dust of foam that floats in the sunlight between two waves, the vapour of that steamer over there in the distance, that pretty little coral-boat with its ruddy sail, that pearl of the water, that flake of mist, — all, we are all, except ourself. Oh! what precious hours of semi-slumber and self-dispersion have I spent upon my island!

Letters From My Windmill is very enjoyable (and also very short). I was reminded of other books involving an escape from city life, such as Walden and Bitter Lemons, while the humorous portrayal of characters made me think of The Little World of Don Camillo.

Alphonse Daudet suffered from illness all his life, and his final escape, from life itself, was dramatic:

Daudet died suddenly while at dinner, on December 16, 1897. Two doctors were called when he collapsed, Dr. Gilles de la Tourette, after whom Tourette’s syndrome was named, and Dr. Potain, Daudet’s old friend. Using a popular method at the time, they gave artificial respiration by pulling on his tongue for an hour and a half. Daudet was only afterwards pronounced to be dead.

thus spake the profit

Student, discussing the difference between conventional and Islamic credit cards: "With conventional cards, if you don't pay, interest increases."

I heard, "If you don't pray."

A certain logic there.