Arabic Poetry

Better to quarrel with the wound
Than be intimate with the knife.

- Qassim Haddad

Jehat Al Shi’ir is one of the best Arabic poetry websites on the Internet. Incidentally, it is based in Bahrain and is directed by Qassim Haddad, a very famous and respected Bahraini poet. It’s definitely worthy of being bookmarked if you’re into Modern Arabic Poetry.

A good feature in the website is having many of its Arabic sections translated into English, French, Spanish, and Dutch.. that's an excellent way to introdue and familiarize Arabic Poetry to people beyond the Arab world.

This is another link to one of my favourite websites on Arabic Literature and Poetry.

My Paper Money Collection

My dad was an avid collector of many things including coins and paper money. He stopped collecting for quite a while and generously gave me the opportunity and responsibility to build on his collection. Many of the paper money I have are not used anymore which makes them even more valuable. The collection has been growing pretty fast as I travel and as my friends from all around the world keep sending me.



There is so much to learn from those tiny little pieces of paper. They give a glimpse into the country's history, its achievements, arts, politics, etc. I enjoy looking at the designs, the colors and fonts used... I research about the person printed in the currency, the watermarked historical sites and all the other details that say quite a lot.

I’ve recently received some Chinese paper money from a Finnish friend of mine. Besides the Chinese characters that appear in large font on one side of the 1 yuan, I noticed 4 small writings on the reverse of it, one of which is written in Arabic script.


One Yuan: click one image to enlarge
After some research, I learned that it is written in Uyghur which is a Turkic language spoken in Xinjiang province (aka the Chinese Turkistan) Xinjiang Province is the largest province in China and the majority of its population are Muslims. The people in Xinjiang province are not Han Chinese, they are Turkic people mostly Uyghurs and Kazakhs... that’s why they have that beautiful Mogul complexion on their faces:



Besides the Uyghur in Arabic script, the other 3 written languages that appear in the bottom of the banknote are: Mongol (Mongolian), Zang (Tibetan), and Zhuang. These languages represent the minority groups in the autonomous provinces of China.

Here is a typical? Uyghur sign in Xinjiang Province!



Even though I knew there are millions of Muslims in China, I didn’t expect that they had a widely-used language based entirely on Arabic script. I remember a Chinese friend of mine saw some Arabic writing in a book I had and it was totally unfamiliar to her. I found that to be a bit strange, given that Arabic script is written on every single Chinese banknote.

Anyway, throughout my research about Uyghurs and Xinjiang province, I learned many interesting facts about Muslims in China. If you're interested, you may want to check out this website for a short summary.

Chat: Girls!

This is a chat between two friends of mine. The chat, by itself, is unfortunately considered a typical conversation between any two girls. It doesn’t go beyond the usual what-to-wear and how-to-look topics of discussion. But, if you wish to learn something from it, then you sure can. It’s an insight into the makeup of one segment of the Bahraini society and how social and religious conventions play a huge role in the sneaky attitude and the multiple identities people adopt. It saddens me that many capable and intelligent young people, especially girls end up living lives which lack the commitment and motivation to do things of value that will make a positive difference in our society. I am mainly referring here to the obsession girls have on looks, “beauty”, and physical appearance. It’s crazy how lives are being built on and revolve around such flimsy concepts. This is a serious problem because it means that all the money, energy, and time that could be invested on education, knowledge, global awareness, hobbies, self-improvement and other things that could elevate the standard of our society, is spent on clothes, cosmetics, jewelry, and building an ego that is insecure and easily threatened. I won’t be exaggerating to say that many, if not most of the girls in Bahrain are in the same boat. The desire to conform, man’s expectations from woman, lack of confidence, despair from having any other opportunity, you name it… are all factors that influence their behavior...and to top it all off, the feeling of being beautiful, sexy, and attractive and being told that, is so rewarding and satisfying that any opportunity cost becomes very well worth it.

Here's the conversation:

A: by the way, do you have a good hair dryer? and what type is it? the big one or the one with the brush stuck to it?

B: i have two, one with the brush stuck to it and the straightner..the iron one

A: You don’t have a hair dryer like the big ones they have in the saloons?

B: nope, but I think the one I use is good because it does my hair just fine, so i'm sure it will do yours just as well

A: ha ok, i don’t like the iron straightener but i will manage with the other one

B: okay

A: I don't do my hair that often anymore because when i get out from the shower its already straight...but just in case..

B: Hey listen, i will try too loose more weight before you come…coz I want you to be my fashion designer… I want to change my style…

A: sure, I need to do a lot of shopping too

B: ohhh, I forgot to tell you.. this is major news...I finally bought a baby pink top and I wore it yesterday…so this is a step forward towards wearing colors… instead of all black

A: wow… mabrooook

B: yah hehe, this is the only colored shirt I have

A: this is a big big step, we will buy for you more bright colored shirts inshallah

B: yep, btw have you seen the delegates of miss universe 2004?

A: no

B: it’s on june first, so watch it.

A: inshallah

B: I remember it used to be the event of the year … we all go to uncle Saeid's house to watch it

A: ya i know

B: haha

A: cuz he enjoys watching pretty woman with bikinis heheh

B: all men do..uncle Saeid is supposed to be the "mosque and maatam" guy but look at what-

A: yeah..it's just infront of the people...

A: Do you have beaches there?

B: haha why?

A: i wont wear a bikini, don’t worry… im just asking

B: yes, there are beaches and they’re relatively clean

A: ya i know, not like the ones we have in Bahrain

B: but canada is not considered a “beach country”

A: ya i know

B: but we will take you to the beach one day... we can just have a barbecue party..

A: ya that's what i want... oh and one more thing… I might wear sleeveless shirts and stuff, do you mind?

B: no, i don't mind...i wear sleeveless shirts and tight tops when i go jogging

A: really, hehe cute...good… good…I need to take my freedom for once

B: yep

A: you know my mother doesn’t mind if I wear sleeveless clothes, but not infront of my brothers u know …so it's not like I will be doing things behind my mother's back...I will be wise.

B: I know.. I know

A: its just that i need to feel more comfortable when we go shopping and stuff…

B: sure.. we’ll have so much fun

A: allaaaaaaaaaaaay [bahraini expression of excitement]

B: hahahah

A: I will finally come to Canada!

B: yes, finally!

A: hehe i know that there is a smile on ur face right now

B: hahahah…yup

B: and i'm laughing alone

A: ya me too

B: i'm so excited now …we haven’t seen each other for such a long long time

B: yeah, I'm really looking forward to having you with us in Canada. Anyway, i have to go to the gym now, I will talk to you later.

A: okay.. yalla bye

B: yalla bye bye

Bahrain: A Tradition of Demonstrations

Since I moved to study in Canada, I haven't been closely following the news in Bahrain. Every once in a while I would skim through the websites of local Bahraini newspapers or ask friends and family members about recent updates and that's about it. Thanks to a few Bahraini blogs (check my link list) I can now learn about what’s happening back home in a timelier manner and from a far more interesting perspective.

Latest event was a protest in Manama against what’s happening in the holy shrines of Najaf and Karbala. The huge crowd resulted in confrontations with the police who tried to oppress the demonstrations using their usual force tactics. Weird how police, who are supposed to maintain the peace and order…end up causing all the mess. Talk about getting the job done right!

Even though it’s very disappointing to know that a peaceful demonstration has been dealt with by the police in such an oppressive manner, I really feel proud that Bahrainis continue to express themselves without fearing the consequences. I personally don't regard those demonstrations as signs of unrest or instability but as signs of an alive and active society that is speaking out and doing something about the injustices that occur.

Speaking of demonstrations, I would like to share a couple of old pictures illustrating this long tradition of political and religious manifestation in Bahrain. I am not sure of the exact years or occasions so if anyone could correct me or fill me in with more details I would appreciate it.

My friend approximates that this picture is taken in the 1940’s. It clearly shows an azza procession. Boy, people looked different back in those days. Azza is a religious procession usually held by shia Muslims when commemorating the death of important religious figures. It mainly involves chanting eulogies and hitting oneself on the chest as an expression of grief and sadness.


This picture could have been taken the 1960’s. It's a political demonstration; I am not sure what the demonstration was about.


click on image to enlarge

Arna's Children

I saw Arna's Children in the Passionate Eye. Excellent heart-breaking documentary to say the least. I hope everyone gets the chance to see it.

ARNA'S CHILDREN tells the story of a theatre group that was established by Arna Mer Khamis. Arna comes from a Zionist family and in the 1950s married a Palestinian Arab, Saliba Khamis. On the West Bank, she opened an alternative education system for children whose regular life was disrupted by the Israeli occupation. The theatre group that she started engaged children from Jenin, helping them to express their everyday frustrations, anger, bitterness and fear. Arna's son Juliano, director of this film, was also one of the directors of Jenin's theatre. With his camera, he filmed the children during rehearsal periods from 1989 to 1996. Now, he goes back to see what happened to them. Yussef committed a suicide attack in Hadera in 2001, Ashraf was killed in the battle of Jenin, Alla leads a resistance group. Juliano, who today is one of the leading actors in the region, looks back in time in Jenin, trying to understand the choices made by the children he loved and worked with. Eight years ago, the theatre was closed and life became static and paralysed. Shifting back and forth in time, the film reveals the tragedy and horror of lives trapped by the circumstances of the Israeli occupation. click here for more

The Arabic Language and My Fanaticism

My friend and I were having a chat in a shawarma place here in Canada when the Lebanese owner of the restaurant curiously asked: “How come you’re both from Bahrain but you speak very differently?!” My friend and I broke out into laughter because we do have very different accents and we very often make fun of it. You don’t even have to understand Arabic in order to notice the difference in the way a person from Muharraq speaks in comparison to a person from Manama. I, myself, wonder how almost each village in Bahrain ended up having a very distinctive accent of its own. This could make for a very interesting study. Anyway, I find the variety of accents and dialects a very interesting phenomenon. The Arab world is a perfect case in point. Dialects significantly vary from one Arab country to the next and if it wasn’t for radio and television, understanding one another would have been quite a challenge. Despite the beauty of dialects, however, and the distinctiveness they add to the different cultures, I would rather see them disappear from the Arab world. If a linguistic genie comes to me one day and asks me to make a wish for the Arab world it would definitely be to eradicate all the accents and dialects spoken by the Arab people. I know this sounds very radical, but I seriously believe that if classical (fusha) Arabic was the common day-to-day language used by every Arab citizen, the Arab world would have easily been the pinnacle of world literature and poetry. I am certain that one reason behind the golden era of Arab culture and science was the fact that classical Arabic was mastered by everyone. It was the language spoken by the common man and hence it was easy for people to articulate their ideas in a lucid and intelligible manner. They spoke the language so eloquently that their poetry was improvised. Fine speech was their lifestyle. Now, I don’t want to render local dialects as being useless because they have produced a wide ranging form of popular art and folklore across the Arab world but just thinking of the amount of benefit we could obtain by internalizing classical Arabic as our every day language, local dialects become worth the sacrifice- if compromise was not an option. In a nutshell, I think that we should not underestimate the shortcomings of not writing the way we talk or rather not talking the way we write.

The sad thing… or the funny thing (depending on how you look at it) is that if I approach my friends today and start talking with them in classical Arabic, they won’t take me seriously. I would probably be laughed at for sounding like a cartoon character. It would be equivalent to using Shakespearean English in a casual conversation. That should not be the case because classical Arabic is the only formal way we can communicate in and for a formal way of communication to be so outlandish for us is not exactly what we want. It is also disappointing to know that a significant amount of the literate Arab population who supposedly speak Arabic are not able to form one coherent sentence in classical Arabic without having some major flaw in it . This is very unfortunate because it means that a major form of expression is eliminated.

The last time I was in Bahrain, I watched a debate on Bahrain television, can’t remember if it was a shura council or a parliamentary session debate…all I remember is that the public speaking skills of the men who spoke out leave a lot to be desired. They say it’s better to keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and prove it. How true. However, I am certain that if classical Arabic was spoken in such public forums the nonsense being said would have sounded way better.

Oh well, regardless of how the Arabic language is being spoken, I think it is the most beautiful language in the world. It looks beautiful in writing. It sounds beautiful when spoken in prose, read in poetry, or recited from the Holy Quran.. and above all it is amazingly structured…knowing Arabic is like weaving a Persian carpet, once you know how the inner knots are made, the possibilities of developing words and connotations are infinite.

Sorry for sounding like a linguistic chauvinist, but I’m writing this post directly after spending some time reading Al Motanabby’s poetry and so I am in a kind of an ultra-appreciative mood for the Arabic language.

But anyways... since this linguistic genie of mine will never come… and since it will take centuries and centuries for dialects to disappear and real language to prevail and that is only IF the desire to change was there in the first place… and since fairouz sings in dialect and we all want to continue listening to her... I have another more realistic wish to make…and that is simply for the Arabic language to be less strange and more familiar to us as Arab people.

now, you might wonder why on earth am I writing this blog in English.

OSAMA

OSAMA is a movie about a young afghan girl disguised as a boy to support her family. What I liked most about the movie is the cinematography. The use of color is fantastic… every scene in the movie is a work of art. I liked the raw looks of the afghan people. They are untouched by the outside world, strong in their simplicity, serene despite all their suffering. The depiction of the characters was pretty effective too…be it the flamboyant mullah who is obsessed with wet dreams ablution… or the young Espandi who talks a lot… or the judge whose decision to execute people is as easy as fingering a bead in his misbah… they all had this air of authenticity in them.

Just few weeks ago before watching OSAMA, I watched an Iranian movie called “BARAN”. It was also about a young afghan girl (a refugee in Tehran) disguised as a boy in order to work and provide for her family. It’s hard to believe how oppression could reach to such extremes as to force people to take on measures that can hardly be considered as sensible plausible options to take. An afghan friend of mine who is living in Canada told me that two girls in his family back in Afghanistan had to disguise themselves as boys for a couple of years because they did not have a man to work and take care of the family. One of the girls couldn’t get away with it for too long because her breasts started growing. The other girl got so used to her role as a boy that her voice and behavior, after she had to be a girl again, were still very masculine.

Reality is stranger than fiction sometimes!

In the Name of Identity

When I first moved to study in Canada I was fascinated by its diversity and multiculturalism. I still am. I loved asking people about their experience moving to and living in Canada. One common question I used to ask was: “Do you feel more Canadian or Indian/Arab/Latino/Russian/or whatever their ethnicity was?” I never got any definite answers and that's probably because my question is fundamentally flawed.

In his book, Amin Maalouf begins by expressing his concern over the political correctness or rather incorrectness of this question that I have been asking many people. He says: “How many times, since I left Lebanon in 1967 to live in France, have people asked me, with the best intentions in the world, whether I felt “more French” or “more Lebanese.” Questions like that bothered him because they require a choice to be made while he firmly believes that identity CANNOT be compartmentalized. “You can’t divide it up into halves or thirds or any other separate segments. I haven’t got several identities: I’ve got just one, made up of many components in a mixture that is unique just to me, just as other people’s identity is unique to them as individuals.” Amin Maalouf is Arab, French, Lebanese, Catholic, and a mixture of other “components” and he rejects to slice and dice himself up into multiple identities or to be put in situations that would require him to choose an either/or.

The book reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend from Bahrain some few years ago. Before getting into what he said however, I should mention to those who don't know that Bahrain, relative to its small size, is a very diverse place...there are Sunnis, Shias, Arabs, Ajams, etc.. This diversity naturally caused some friction not very long ago in Bahrain’s history. Accepting, understanding, and embracing the other.... be it at school, the streets, or the workplace took some time and is still an ongoing process.

Anyway, my friend is Bahraini from Iranian decent. Most Bahrainis like him, in addition to Arabic, speak Farsi or rather a very informal dialect of Farsi locally referred to as "Ijmi." To my surprise, he told me one day:"I am a person with no identity. I am not Bahraini and I doubt most Bahrainis consider me as one. Many members of my family don’t even understand or speak a word of Arabic. I am not Iranian either. I’ve never set foot in Iran nor do I have any family over there... I belong nowhere." He said that but I don’t know if he really meant it. It could have been just one of those moments of anger or depression or whatever. But that’s beside the point because it really made me think that there could be many other Bahrainis who feel the same way. In multicultural places like Canada, the US, UK, Australia, etc. this might not be an issue with most people. However, in a country like Bahrain and in a region like the Arab world, citizenship and affiliation seem to be an issue. Society in general puts a pressure on individuals to reduce their identity to one single affiliation. And that is wrong from both a religious and a social point of view because “it encourages people to adopt an attitude that is partial, sectarian, intolerant, and domineering.” People MUST feel at home in the place they live in. “When someone feels that his language is despised, his religion is ridiculed and his culture is disparaged, he is likely to react by flaunting the signs of his difference. On the other hand, when someone feels he has a place in the country where he has chosen to live, then he will behave in quite another manner.”