These days I feel as though I’m studying in every spare moment. My studies are entirely voluntary, nothing to do with my work, so it’s actually a pleasure; I feel most alive when I’m learning.
I have joined the Manama Singers again, who have just started to rehearse The Creation by Haydn (which celebrates the creation of the world as described in the Book of Genesis and Paradise Lost). The Manama Singers hold three or four concerts a year, but after I sang in Mozart’s Requiem last year (my first time singing in a choir), I was either too busy to rehearse for subsequent concerts, or not really drawn to the works being perfomed. I’m super busy at the moment, but I couldn’t resist an oratorio like The Creation, so have duly started to learn it (which for me means listening endlessly to the alto part in order to make it stick).
When I am not listening to Haydn, I am listening to Sheikh Mahmoud Khalil Al-Husary. My tajweed classes continue, and of course the better I prepare the more progress I make. I listen to Al-Husary because I find his recitation very clear; I came across it when I was attempting my juz’-a-day project in Ramadan a few years ago. (I must have extolled the virtues of his recitation then as well, as I recently bumped into the teacher of the Qur’an classes I was taking around that time, and he said, “Whenever I hear Sheikh Mahmoud Khalil Al-Husary I think of you.”)
Here is a beautiful performance by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Colin Davis, of Stimmt an die Saiten (Awake the harp) from The Creation:
To listen to Sheikh Mahmoud Khalil Al-Husary click here.
For more on Al-Husary see this programme (in three parts, in Arabic): 1, 2, 3. You can see footage of him on hajj in (I think) 1958 here.
the corniche
Corniche: noun, a road cut into the edge of a cliff, especially one running along a coast. (Origin: mid 19th century, from French)
Doha, 2008.
My favourite place in Doha is the corniche.
An April night. We went to the corniche to walk – briskly, not to stroll. The weather was warm but stormy, the energy of the sky and sea perhaps transmitted to us.
Waves, induced by the storm, hit the corniche. Spray mingled with occasional raindrops. We walked against the wind, pushing, exhilarated.
At the end we stopped, bought hot tea, stood looking at the lights of the corniche curving round the bay. Then we allowed the wind to push us back the way we had come.
Just before we reached the car, the real rain came.
Doha, 2005.
My favourite place in Beirut is the corniche.
A December night. A late night walk in the rain, chilly this time. Friends with whom both silence and conversation was possible. Roasted chestnuts. A perfect moment.
Beirut, 2009.
Alexandria, 2008.
When I think of the Nile Corniche I remember evening strolls, corn on the cob, paper cones of pumpkin seeds, music blaring from boats as they moved past.
Cairo, 2005.
And Bahrain? The corniches we knew earlier have all but disappeared, swallowed by “land reclamation” and construction, but this process is nothing new. Bahrain’s coastline is different for every generation.
Manama, 2002.
Around the harbour-front, the Corniche looped in a wide sweep past the moored yachts, the fishing dhows, cranes, container trucks and ships' funnels. It was, if one squinted a little and held one's nose, a lovely little golden city on the sea; and as the fairy-lights came up on the minarets, Doha gleamed and twinkled as prettily as if it had quite forgotten where it was and had mistaken the Gulf for the Riviera. The word “Corniche” alone, of course, assisted in the illusion; it tried to nudge one into remembering that other city on a bay, where Regine's, the Casino and the Royal Palace glitter in a tideless mirror of sewage and suntan oil.From Arabia Through The Looking Glass, Jonathan Raban (1979).
The “Corniche”, though, had come to Doha at fourth-hand. Beirut had borrowed it from Monte Carlo long ago. Then Kuwait looked at the Corniche in Beirut, saw that it was good, and transplanted it to the neck of the Gulf. Doha heard about Kuwait's Corniche, and so Doha has one too. Nor did it stop there. Abu Dhabi was not to be outdone in this competition to summon up echoes of Mediterranean glamour, and built a Corniche of its own; but the message had become a little scrambled by the time that it reached Abu Dhabi, where the Corniche is a long, dull promenade which bears the initially bewildering title of the “The Cornish Road”.
Doha, 2008.Photo by Doha Sam (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
My favourite place in Doha is the corniche.
An April night. We went to the corniche to walk – briskly, not to stroll. The weather was warm but stormy, the energy of the sky and sea perhaps transmitted to us.
Waves, induced by the storm, hit the corniche. Spray mingled with occasional raindrops. We walked against the wind, pushing, exhilarated.
At the end we stopped, bought hot tea, stood looking at the lights of the corniche curving round the bay. Then we allowed the wind to push us back the way we had come.
Just before we reached the car, the real rain came.
Down on the Corniche, things suddenly steadied and Doha came into focus again. The deep crescent of the waterfront put a limit on the place and gave it back a purpose and identity.From Arabia Through The Looking Glass, Jonathan Raban (1979).
Doha, 2005.Photo by alternatePhotography (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
So we swayed down the long curving Corniche and back into the lighted area of the city where the blue street-lamps came up one by one to peer into the gharry at us as we talked; and all at once it seemed that past and present had joined again without any divisions in it, and that all my memories and impressions had ordered themselves into one complete pattern whose metaphor was always the shining city of the disinherited — a city now trying softly to spread the sticky prismatic wings of a new-born dragonfly on the night.From Clea, Lawrence Durrell (1960).
My favourite place in Beirut is the corniche.
A December night. A late night walk in the rain, chilly this time. Friends with whom both silence and conversation was possible. Roasted chestnuts. A perfect moment.
Beirut, 2009.Photo by Samer N. (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Somewhere up here, skirting the edge of the Arab quarter the tram gives a leap and grinds round abruptly. You can for one moment look down through the frieze of shattered buildings into the corner of the harbour reserved for craft of shallow draught. The hazards of the war at sea had swollen their numbers to overflowing. Framed by the coloured domes there lay feluccas and lateen-rig giassas, wine-caiques, schooners, and brigantines of every shape and size, from all over the Levant. An anthology of masts and spars and haunting Aegean eyes; of names and rigs and destinations. They lay there coupled to their reflections with the sunlight on them in a deep water-trance. Then abruptly they were snatched away and the Grande Corniche began to unroll, the magnificent long sea-parade which frames the modern city, the Hellenistic capital of the bankers and cotton-visionaries — all those European bagmen whose enterprise had re-ignited and ratified Alexander’s dream of conquest after the centuries of dust and silence which Amr had imposed upon it.From Clea, Lawrence Durrell (1960).
Alexandria, 2008.Photo by diffendale (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
When I think of the Nile Corniche I remember evening strolls, corn on the cob, paper cones of pumpkin seeds, music blaring from boats as they moved past.
Cairo, 2005.Photo by StartAgain (CC BY-ND 2.0)
And Bahrain? The corniches we knew earlier have all but disappeared, swallowed by “land reclamation” and construction, but this process is nothing new. Bahrain’s coastline is different for every generation.
In those days, before the causeway was built, the sea came close up to the town [Manama], only a narrow footpath separating the houses from the foreshore. Nowadays the town limits change from one year to the next, as the shoreline is built up by dredging and new land for development is formed. […] In Mohurraq it is the same. Houses which once were just above the tide line are now separated from the sea by hundreds of yards of land.From The Gulf: Arabia’s Western Approaches, Molly Izzard (1979).
Manama, 2002.Photo by Fuad Al Ansari (CC BY-NC 2.0)
