Mohsin Hamid on Mumbai and the media

It has been widely reported in the foreign media that the gunmen in the current attacks in Mumbai are specifically targeting Westerners and Jews. Does this point to a higher likelihood that Muslims are behind it? 

Well they’re not Muslims … they just call themselves that. But it’s preposterous to focus on this.

Who is losing their lives? Over 100 brown people have been killed – Hindus, Muslims and Christians indiscriminately– but the media focuses on the white faces being killed. 

The vast majority are Indians, police, soldiers and so on. Clearly they want to attack foreigners they but have no problem with attacking locals too … this has been overlooked.

Mohsin Hamid interviewed by Al Jazeera. Last year he spoke at Vassar and talked to an English class before his lecture. I remembering asking him something related to the following quote, from an interview about The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

FP: What does your novel say about how the United States deals with Muslim immigrants and expatriates?

MH: It’s very complicated. Changez is not particularly discriminated against. Working in New York, he prospers. Yet inside him is this latent identity, a sense of pride in somebody else’s narrative. And that’s something that Americans often forget: These other narratives of people who are much less successful—on the metrics we can measure—are still equally proud.

Inside the United States, there is a disproportionate fear of Muslims and of terrorism generally. Three thousand Americans died on 9/11, another 3,000 or so have died in Iraq, and over 42,000 Americans are killed in automobile accidents every year. Yet when we see a Muslim, we feel fear. When we see an automobile, we don’t feel that fear. It’s this exaggerated fear that results in the sorts of behaviors toward the Muslim world that I think are the problem.

Interview here.

Filed under: Literature, Media , attacks, India, media bias, Mohsin Hamid, Mumbai, Pakistan, Reluctant Fundamentalist

At the gate

You couldn’t siege a traffic circle today. 

The remnants of the Byzantine forces now withdrew to Damascus. The Muslims pursued them. The siege of Damascus became one of the set pieces of the conquest of Syria. To a remarkable extent we can retrace the progress of the siege because of the detailed descriptions of the sources and the preservation of the fabric of the city. The walls of old Damascus, Roman or earlier in origin and continually restored since, are still largely intact. Only at the western end where the city expanded in Ottoman times is the old circuit breached. All except one of the ancient gates survive and they bear the same names today as they do in the early Arabic sources: it is an astonishing example of the continuity of urban geography and architecture through almost fourteen centuries We are told that Khalid b. al-Walid was stationed at the East Gate (Bab Sharqi), Amr b. al-As at St. Thomas’s Gate (Bab Tuma), Abu Ubayda at the now demolished Jabiya Gate on the west side and Yazid b. Abi Sufyan at the Little Gate and Kaysan Gate on the south side. 

Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests, 79.

Filed under: Literature, Syria , Arab Conquest, Bab Touma, Damascus, Hugh Kennedy, St Thomas

Anxious Mumbai

Naresh Fernandes writing in The New Republic:

Everything that evening had been surreal. At 10:15pm, shortly before the attack, I’d been handed a visiting card that read, “George W Bush, Former President, The United States of America (currently seeking employment).” Sipping my glass of merlot, I shook hands with the man who had given it to me. He wore a dark suit and a giant rubber Dubya mask. I was at the premiere of “The President Is Coming”, a mockumentary about six young Indians taking part in a competition that offered the winner an unforgettable prize: the opportunity to shake Bush’s hand on his imminent visit to the subcontinent.

Less than two hours later, Mumbai didn’t have very much to laugh about. After a flurry of text messages alerted me to rumours of a bloody gang war downtown (Nigerians or Somalis were suggested as the likely culprits), I found myself 22 kilometres away from the movie theater, outside the Taj. The hotel has been the rendezvous of choice for the city’s rich and powerful every since it opened in 1903, and, because it has been featured in dozens of Bollywood films as the ultimate symbol of privilege, it is familiar to Indians everywhere. The scene that greeted me, though, didn’t remind me of any of those celluloid fantasies. Instead, it took me back to a bright summer’s day in 2001 when I stood at the window past my desk at the Wall Street Journal’s offices at the World Financial Center in downtown New York and watched bodies drop lightly into the street below.

Via.

Filed under: Media , Mumbai, Naresh Fernandes, terrorists attacks, The New Republic

Telegraph Tower, Merjeh

In the 1950s, from a recent photo show at Damascus University. And today…

Filed under: Syria , Merjeh, Photos, Telephraph Tower

Gaza

This morning I ducked into a little mahal near Bab Touma to buy credit for my cellphone. The old man behind the counter, who’s always smiling, always rattling off greetings, still had a smile on his face when I walked in. But the TV was on and the smile left at the next moment.

“Haram… shame on them.”

I turned around the see the small television on a shelf. On it was a news program showing the powerless hospitals in Gaza.

“What’s the news?” I asked, forgetting at this early morning hour that Gaza was once again without power, that hospitals were again forced to run on generators after the only power plant shut down; that foreign aid was just barely leaking in; that foreign reporters last week were barred from entering the coastal strip. 

“The Israelis and their siege. Look at the hospitals…” he deadpanned. The Syrian news showed an old man slumped in a corner of a dingy room in blinking fluorescent light. It hardly looked like a hospital. “Shame, shame on them.”

From the BBC:

Many will tell you that they feel a time of deep division in Palestinian society is being taken advantage of.

Few take Israel’s explanation, that it is only protecting its citizens from the horror of rocket attacks, at face value.

“Isn’t it enough that their army kills the people who fire rockets?” asks Mr Nasser.

“We are not responsible, so why are we all being punished? It makes no sense.”

He talks of the long-term impact on children in Gaza, including his own, aged six, five and two.

“It’s getting harder for us to answer our childrens’ questions about the situation, without instilling hatred in their minds about the people responsible for our suffering,” he says.

He does not just mean the Israeli government.

“People here see everyone as responsible for their miserable lives. They see Israel closing Gaza, but they also see people around the world doing nothing.

“They see Hamas making things worse by using the blockade as an excuse not to be accountable, and they do whatever they like.

“People see the silence of the PA, [the Fatah-dominated Palestinian government in the West Bank] and blame them too,” he says.

“It’s so hard to see where the hope is, and so hard to stop these conditions breeding more hatred.” 

Filed under: Israel/Palestine, Media, Syria , blockade, Gaza, siege

Cats and taxidermy

Zenobia, my little black cat full of djinn, was adopted from a kind family that lives outside the Old City in a courtyard house full of cats. There was a full litter, a half dozen babies, running around on the Friday in mid-September when a few of us paid our visit. Their parents and aunts and uncles were less active, lounging by the fountain. Towards the end of our visit, after finishing our coffees and deciding on our kittens — including Zenobia’s brother, whom the family called Tigo and a friend adopted and renamed al Ghadanfar, the Lion — the mother of the family brought out a family treasure: two stuffed cats. It was the kittens grandparents, or great-grandparents. The taxidermy job was strange: the cats were mounted almost in battle pose, and their eyes had been glazed over, giving them a crazed look, hardly inviting. But they didn’t scare the family; far from it. I learned that day just how Syrians love their cats. Which doesn’t mean all Syrians, nor all cats. The wail of street cats echo at night in the Old City. A walk home through dark alleys usually means an encounter or two with a plump garbage diver. 

I’ve been sitting on this picture for a while. Enjoy. 

Filed under: Syria, Writing , cats, taxidermy

Righto

Filed under: Iraq, Media , cartoons, Iraq, This Modern World, Tom Tomorrow

Today’s ride

The cab driver today was from Yarmouk but he was not Palestinian. As usual we got to talking. I wasn’t stumbling too much for the first five minutes prompting the compliment that I speak Arabic “well.” When I told him that I was an Arabic student from the States, he lit up. 

“Excellent! And what about this new president?”

“Obama!”

“I have a question, you are American. This Obama, he is African?”

“Well his father was from Kenya. But his mother, from Kansas. He was born in America.”

A friend of mine was in an old bookshop yesterday, and the bookseller was apparently convinced that Barack Obama was Jewish. 

“Aha, so he’s not African.”

“No, well half. What do you think of him?”

“Better than Bush!”

This is the Syrian refrain, at least from my small sample size, mostly cab drivers. I’ve come to calling Bush “Shaytan” — the Devil, though translated literally in many ways (as a noun: “adversary” or “enemy” or “opponent;” as an adjective: “adversarial,” “opposing,” or “evil”)  — which always elicits a warm response and usually some laughter. It’s the easiest way to get my politics across, right away. 

The cabbie went on to ask me if the American government pays for all students expenses, to which I said no. My Arabic got worse here, and he might  have realized I didn’t deserve the compliment after all. He had rattled of the spate of wars — Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine — that Bush and others had created or exacerbated for the new half-African American president to tackle. 

“American people, do they like Bush at all anymore?”

“Hardly. Some of them still do. More of them used to.”

I tried explaining the wave of jingoism in the early part of the decade that prompted the invasion of Iraq, but again here my Arabic fell short. 

“I have another question for you, forgive me. You are an American here. But what about these four helicopters…” he pantomimed an air raid with his hands.

“Abu Kamel…”

“Abu Kamel.”

He launched into a condemnation of the American cross-border raid. I said it was ridiculous — or rather just a “big problem, bad politics” I couldn’t find the Arabic word for absurd, or last-ditch attempt by an out-going American president to destabilize the region. He explained how the Syrian-Iraqi border was hundreds of kilometers long. 

“The government tries to monitor all that area, but if it can’t, why is it up to the Americans to be the police? You are from where you said? The city of Boostoun?”

“Boston.”

“Okay, yes, Boston. Well let me ask you: if you were in Boston, and someone attacked the border of the city, or the border of the area outside the city, you would be angry and would want to retaliate, no? It’s your land.”

A fair question, and a serviceable analogy for understandable Syrian outrage at a cross-border raid that seems rapidly forgotten in the international press. 

We were nearing our destination. He had been going on about a few things I didn’t understand, so I asked a question.

“Do you think Iraq is better off without Saddam Hussein?”

“Well… Iraq without Saddam is better, okay. But this doesn’t mean it’s any good. All the killing, and for what? Petrol.”

“Petrol!”

“Exactly. For what’s under the ground.” 

He delved into a history of colonialism. “The French, they were in Algeria for a hundred and twenty years! And how many dead Algerians? And they wonder why they have problems in France!”

I said that the American government was a bad student of history, that “they’re following in the footsteps of the British…”

….”who invaded Iraq 90 years ago!” the driver interrupted.

A Mercedes drove by and he changed the subject yet again. “What a car!” We were in the diplomatic part of town; a BMW SUV was driving towards us. 

“Merceedeez. Bee Emm…”

…”W?”

“Right! German cars. Japanese cars!” he tapped the wheel of his Hyundai, which was in fact Korean. “German people, Japanese people. All good people.”

There aren’t any American cars in Syria, at least few that came off the assembly line after the 1970s or 80s. I wanted to repeat the game: American cars….

But we was going on about the traffic in front of us, its nationality. We were where I needed to be. “Okay, you can stop here,” I said.

We said our goodbyes, remarking on the good fortune of having met. I was standing on the sidewalk leaning in the passenger window to pay. I traffic police, or an embassy guard — we were near the Saudi Embassy — was waving his hands and approaching. Horns were honking. “Move the car! Get moving!”

I slipped the money through the window. He laughed, peace be upon you, and sped off.

Filed under: Syria, Writing , Damascus, driver, taxi cab

“These images were taken as early as 1850″

If collecting photography is collecting the world, here are two worlds: sepia and digital color; late 19th and early 21st centuries; Damascus and Cairo in old and current photographs. Right now I’m delighting in MidEastImage.com.

ABOVE: The Treasury, Omayyad Mosque Damascus, undated (late 19th century?).

ABOVE: The Treasury on my first trip to Sham, April 2007. 

ABOVE: “Photograph by Tancred R. Dumas, Italian in origin, studio in Constantimople and later in Beirut, photographed late ninteenth century. The photo is of the northern gallery of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.”

 

ABOVE: Omayyad Mosque earlier this fall, looking toward the northern gallery. 

ABOVE: Souq al-Hamidiyeh, Damascus, early 20th century.

ABOVE: Souq al-Hamidiyeh today.

And because Cairo is always close…

ABOVE: Ibn Tulun Mosque, “by Bonfils, 1870s.”

ABOVE: Ibn Tulun in June 2007.

Filed under: Egypt, Media, Syria , Cairo, Damascus, Ibn Tulun Mosque, Omayyad mosque, photography, Souq al-Hamidiyeh

Now, a traffic circle

Bab Touma, the Gate of St. Thomas, in an undated photograph from MidEastImage; an excellent source for the way things were, or at least how they looked. 

Today it’s Sahat Bab Touma; a traffic circle.

Filed under: Media, Syria , Bab Touma, Damascus, historic photographs, Mideastimage

“Obama’s ambiguity”

Sons are not responsible for the racism of their fathers. But they do have a responsibility to let others know that they disagree vehemently with such sentiments. This is certainly the case for individuals in public service, particularly the man President-elect Barack Obama has chosen as White House chief of staff. Yet, Rep. Rahm Emanuel has not said a word regarding the troubling statement his father made to the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv.

In a recent interview, Dr. Benjamin Emanuel asserted that his son’s appointment would be beneficial to Israel. “Obviously he will influence the president to be pro-Israel,” the elder Emanuel said, according to the Jerusalem Post. “Why wouldn’t he be? What is he, an Arab? He’s not going to clean the floors of the White House.”

The public has a right to expect Mr. Emanuel to reject such raw racism especially given the historic resonance of Mr. Obama’s victory. It’s especially important for Arab and Muslim Americans who came through the election campaign feeling they are the last group of Americans who can still be publicly denigrated.

Mr. Emanuel – whose father fought with the Irgun, the pre-state Jewish militia that carried out terrorist attacks on Palestinians and the British in the 1940s – has a hawkishly pro-Israel record. He has never publicly distanced himself from his father’s contribution to the dispossession of more than 750,000 Palestinians, nor criticized Israel’s frequent attacks on Palestinian communities that have killed and maimed thousands of civilians.

In June 2003, Mr. Emanuel signed a letter criticizing President Bush for being insufficiently supportive of Israel. “We were deeply dismayed to hear your criticism of Israel for fighting acts of terror,” Mr. Emanuel, along with 33 other Democrats, wrote to Mr. Bush. The letter asserted that Israel’s policy of assassinating Palestinian political leaders “was clearly justified as an application of Israel’s right to self-defense.” Such killings violate the Geneva Conventions, and the State Department’s human-rights report specified that there were more civilian bystanders killed in Israeli assassination attempts than actual targets in 2003.

Ali Abuminah in the Washington Times (?!). I guess if the Left can’t help them, Palestinian intellectuals have to play ball with that part of the Right that still beholds William Buckley but stopped subscribing to Fouad Ajami or Richard Perle.

In other news about the President-elect: Galilee Bedouin claim Obama as lost member of tribe

Filed under: America, Israel/Palestine, Media , Alu Abuminah, Barack Obama, Bedouin, Galilee, Haaretz, racism, Rahm Emmanuel, Washington Times

Beirut-Damascus

I sat in a backseat with two older women, muhajabas. We talked about the sea and language. I probably communicated the hardness of accents and grammar and agreement, but at least I said or should have said that I love the sea, as they said ‘But there is no sea (there).’ Up the road, across the anti hills not really mountains, and down to the oasis that has dried up: concrete. But the olive trees (are they olive trees?) or the shrubs at least, along the road, they scarlet in fall.

Filed under: Lebanon, Syria, Writing , Beirut, Damascus, highway, Lebanon, Syria

Obama apparel and opinions

They’re selling Obama T-shirts at the knick-knack tourist shops on Qaimaria in the Old City now. Alongside grey “University of Damascus” tees (“since 1923″) and tees with the Iraqi flag now hang red tees and white tees and blue tees with Obama in raised white lettering across the front, in Arabic and English. They’re hot commodities, and the vendor who otherwise sells overpriced scarves must know the value of the shirts: he’s charging 450 Syrian lire now, almost 10 dollars. A friend on his way of the country bit the bullet and bought a few; a good welcome-home gift from Sham for friends in America. The shirts might say something about Obama’s popularity here; wearing his white and blue Obama tee, my friend was the target of plenty of warm hellos and congratulations in Damascus and especially over the weekend in Beirut. Every news stand from here to there is plastered with magazine and newspaper covers of Obama’s serious or beaming face (okay, they’re more numerous in Beirut). There were slurred high fives from night-lifers in Lebanon Saturday night, offering the typical line of Bush destroying America’s standing but Obama offering more than superficial redemption. One bartender said Obama’s election was the first time that he thought Americans had finally “made the right decision.”

“I’ve been following the news in the States since the early 1990s, since the first Gulf war. And I’ve been following the NBA.”

His dream was to move to LA and finally see a live game.

“I love the NBA, the Lakers, Kobe, Shaquille O’Neal. He plays where now? Arizona?”

“Yea, Phoenix.”

“Ah, the Suns.”

“What about the Celtics?” I had to ask. My brother scored season tickets high up near the roof of the new Garden last year just before the playoffs. We took in a few Celtics drubbings although both of us missed Game 7.

“I hate Larry Bird. I hate the Celtics. I follow the NBA for a long time: Jordan, Magic Johnson, Dr. J. But I hate Larry Bird.”

I didn’t argue, took another sip of my drink. At least he liked Obama, and here, now, in our time, isn’t that what matters?

Filed under: Lebanon, Syria, Writing , Barack Obama, Beirut, Damascus, Lebanon, NBA, Syria, t-shirts

“What is the difference between plot and narrative?”

Last night I saw “The Savages” on the second night of the Damascus Film Festival. The organizers put up a huge amount of money this year, to support among other things screening all of Martin Scorcese’s films and even coercing Scorcese to come to Damascus to meet the judges and open the festival. At least this was according to someone from one of the European cultural centers, whom a friend of mine met yesterday on his way to pick up an elusive film schedule. The booklets were finally printed and available yesterday, a day after the opening.

It was my first time at a Syrian cinema. With the exception of the shabab gawking and trying to smoke cigarettes in front — amazing there is no smoking allowed in Syrian movie theaters — the old movie theater almost reminded me of the Coolidge Corner cinema in Boston.

 ”The Savages” was probably Amitava Kumar’s favorite movie of last year, as he reminded his class weekly in a 9/11 lit seminar last spring. He must have wanted us to imagine characters in our writing like Wendy Savage, who lies to her brother, a professor of Brecht in Buffalo, about getting a Guggenheim fellowship. Later she admits that funding for her freelance playwrighting has come from FEMA, money allotted for 9/11 victims. Her brother’s aghast but amused. 

Wendy: “I worked downtown! I was affected!” 

Jon: “The whole world was affected.” 

The two Syrian men who came into the theater at the same time as us were a few steps ahead when the movie ended and we were out the door. They lit their cigarettes and seemed to bounce on the sidewalk after bounding from the cinema steps. They seemed to love the movie. 

“What did you think?” my friend asked.

“Excellent,” said one of the men with a smile. He was missing an arm, one of his shirt sleeves rolled up near the shoulder. Like his friend he was puffing on the after-movie cigarette in delight.

“Yea?”

“Yes, excellent. Mumtaz.”

They hopped in a cab and the two of us walked back to the old city, talking about The Savages as we passed by the citadel and the Omayyad mosque, its minarets still lit up brilliant. Somewhere nearby a rooster was cocking, a little early for 2am.

Filed under: Syria, Writing , cinema, Damascus Film Festival, The Savages

Sahat Umawiyeen, 1950s

From a recent architecture show at the University of Damascus.

Filed under: Syria , 1950s, Photos, Sahat Umawiyeen, University of Damascus

“As if on cue..”

What I wrote from an email exchange with Josh Landis on Graham Bowley’s ridiculous Times story:

“This Times story was a crock. the protest was government-orchestrated — university students and working people were encouraged or even shooed into the Square and it dispersed pretty quickly. No surprises. But the tone of the article disregards any Syrian grievances. Bowley’s last article was filed from New York, he’s cribbing off of the AP and BBC reporters here and projecting his weirdly aggressive bias thousands of miles away, based on the anonymous US officials’ story.

Large scale popular protests may not be permitted… a fact of politics here… but that doesn’t mean people aren’t anrgy over the raid. I haven’t talked to a cab driver here who thinks the family in Abu Kamel was connected to this shadowy Iraqi smuggler. People are genuinely angry: their country was invaded. Why would the Times doubt that?

Bowley seems to delight in scorning Syria; the government and the people, whose anger is somehow illegitimate because their protest was “apparently stage-managed by the government.” Maybe Bowley, like BBC’s Paul Wood, should actually go to Deir az-Zur, to Abu Kamel, and interview people. He’d hear outrage and the widely held view here that the Americans killed civilians. He might even interview some of the wounded, or the relatives. But it’s a story the Times doesn’t want, so they don”t send their reporter.

Why is it that all of the articles about Syria this week in the Times are filed from the States or from Baghdad? As you wrote, where is Robert Worth? Damascus is no so far from Beirut.”

Filed under: America, Media, Syria , America, anger, New York Times, protest, Syria