An Indian, a Croatian, and an American were lost, barreling through villages in northern Syria.

“Peace be upon you! Sir, is this the road to al-Ghab, to Apamea?” Ali asked a bearded man on a motorcycle.

Even though Ali hailed from India, people often considered him Arab — khaleeji, from the Gulf.

The bearded man stopped, shook his head, and said to follow him. “Up this hill, my friends, is the shrine of Job.”

The Faster Times has just published a long Syrian road story of mine, based on a memorable cruise around the country with two close comrades. Read the rest here. The photo is of the rental Kia on the trip, dusty from the sands of Deir az-Zor and elsewhere. The photo is somewhere between Serjilla and the Ghab, probably near al-Bara.

Amit Chaudhuri writes for the LRB blog about flying through Dubai:

Two months ago, before the so-called (and oft-denied) crash in Dubai’s economy, I saw, rushing to catch a connecting flight, Western tourists gaping at, even photographing, the immense granite walls in the airport, with perfectly measured sheets of water cascading down them. I was reminded briefly of a Bengali proverb descended from colonial modernity: ‘To show a Bangal the High Court’. ‘Bangal’, in Bengali, means, strictly speaking, ‘East Bengali’ (someone from the region that’s now Bangladesh). But, just as north and south, east and west, have country-specific, often prejudicial connotations in, say, the US or in England, so too, in Bengal, ‘Bangal’ denoted a villager, or the opposite of a sophisticate. Calcutta was in West Bengal, and the East, for historical reasons, was seen to be agrarian, feudal, and less developed in ideas and institutions; notwithstanding the fact that a great deal of Bengali ‘high’ modernism was the work of East Bengali migrants.

To take a ‘Bangal’ to see the High Court, then, was to confront the oaf with modernity and power. While watching Western tourists at Dubai airport, I reflected on how many Europeans remain ‘Bangals’ at heart. Development generates its own simple but profound enchantment. I, on the other hand (and this too is an oafish anomaly), look out for old buildings and doors when I find myself in new cities. In Fribourg in Switzerland, I found versions of the specked mosaic floors we have in middle-class apartments in India; in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels there were red stone floors identical to those in my uncle’s (now destroyed) house in South Calcutta; in Cheltenham, noticing balconies, I couldn’t decide whether some memory of light among retired colonials had led to these (for England) unique additions, or whether the balconies themselves produced a special effect of light in Cheltenham. In turn, I’m surprised that more people who visit India – or Dubai, for that matter – don’t chance upon buildings, cornices, and windows that stir some buried, unlooked-for memory that tells them more about themselves and their histories than their guide books (which are about famous monuments) can. Dan Jacobson once told me that this was a habit of looking that migrants have: as we stopped to stare at an astonishing old bench on Hampstead Heath, he observed resignedly: ‘The locals don’t see this.’ In a few days, on my way back to Calcutta, I will be flying through Dubai. I can’t think that it will be any different from how I now imagine it.

Read the rest here.

The photo is by Martin Becka, from a recent exhibition “Dubai, Transmutations” at The Empty Quarter in Dubai, in which Becka used 18th century photo equipment and a view camera from 1857.

There have been various articles and reports for a while now about how this is happening, or how it’s not happening. Is it actually happening now? Seems not, entirely, since the ban reported on has been flaunted and overturned before.

To illuminate this point, I’ll refer to Eugene Rogan’s superb new history, “The Arabs,” which I started reading in Beirut during a recent visit over Eid.

In mid-18th century Damascus, the Ottoman governor wanted to abolish prostitution, which was plaguing the conservative city in the view of a barber, Ahmad al-Budayri, whose diary Rogan reads as an excellent source of social history. Problem was, many Damascenes admired these ladies, who eschewed veils and let their hair down, got drunk, and (one of them) even stabbed a leading judge in downtown Damascus. Various crackdowns and legal bans on prostitution failed. As the barber Budayri lamented corruption and the “prostitutes [who] proliferated in the markets, day and night,” the Ottoman governor, As’ad Pasha al-Azm gave up his anti-prostitution campaign. He “abandoned all efforts to expel the bold prostitutes,” Rogan writes “and chose to tax them instead.”

So, Cairo and your aged President. Why not tax the smokes?

A photo gallery from The Times.

26th of July, Zamalek, Cairo, 19/11/09 from Freddy Deknatel on Vimeo.

Things are getting increasingly strange here. Hosni Mubarak’s eldest son, Alaa, has basically added fuel to peoples’ fake fire against Algeria – the government co-opting popular frustrations with Wednesday’s loss and the news that Egyptian businesses in Algeria were attacked and Egyptian fans in Khartoum were assaulted by Algerians.”It is impossible that we as Egyptians take this, we have to stand up and say ‘enough,’” said Alaa, who had traveled to Khartoum for Wednesday’s game, the AP reported. “There should be a stance, we have had enough. When you insult my dignity … I will beat you on the head,” added the younger Mubarak.”

Today Zamalek is a cordoned police zone, thousands of Central Security troops and dozens of trucks not only around the Algerian Embassy, but on every side street on that side of the island. Honking horns and chants against Algeria can be heard in the air — I was walking near the Indian Embassy this afternoon and heard crowds, probably across the river in Bulaq. 26th of July street is littered with rocks, garbage, and broken glass. Storefronts on money exchanges and the various other shops — Egyptian stores — were smashed late last night, early this morning.

I took some video of the protests on 26th of July last night, but before the rioting really took off. Still, people were burning Algerian flags, waving huge Egyptian ones, and chanting insults to Algeria – (not just “Allahu Akbar” as the AP and other agencies focus on). More vulgar things.. insults more suitable for a kind of soccer riot, which this is, sort of, but is clearly ballooning into something else.

The vehemence, fanaticism, and recriminations that were blatantly expressed in the media and on the streets of Algeria, Egypt, and Sudan [the host country where the deciding final game is to be played] all point to a trend. This is the logical outcome of the narrow nationalism that has prevailed in Arab politics since the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the former Egyptian president.

Asad AbuKhalil on the politics of a sporting rivalry for Al Jazeera English.

In an earlier time.

Talaat Harb, Cairo, Egypt 2, Algeria 0 from Freddy Deknatel on Vimeo.

Egypt beat Algeria in dramatic fashion last night, with the crucial second goal coming in the 95th minute, sending both teams to Sudan for a qualifying playoff on Wednesday. Afterward Downtown Cairo was a carnival. Started in Talaat Harb, moved to Tahrir.

Photographs by Dustin Aksland. From Good. Via BLDGBLOG.

Marking Berlin anniversary, Palestinians breach Israel’s wall

Ramallah – Ma’an – Marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Palestinian demonstrators breached Israel’s concrete barrier near the West Bank city of Ramallah on Monday.

Reporting from the scene, Ma’an’s correspondent said the protesters, once they reached the other side, set fire to tires. Israeli forces also opened fire, the reporter said.

24  February 1958 and the declaration of the United Arab Republic. Looks like Merjeh thereabouts from the view to Mt. Qassioun. From this invaluable web archive of Nasser that includes a glut of photos, speeches, recordings, etc. Fully searchable collection run by the Biblioteca Alexandria. In many ways the site is the very opposite of going to the library in Egypt (with AUC’s brand-new, USAID-made library one exception) — a bureaucratic affair that is often, like the “Greater Cairo Library” in a palace in Zamalek, never open.

I’ve been doing some research on foreign press coverage of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s trip to Damascus in 1958 and the declaration of the United Arab Republic. It was his first visit to Syria, and before his arrival the Syrians already declared him their new president. I looked in the archives of Time Magazine, which is available and free, including covers, back in the days when Time was, if not more serious, at least better to look at. The catalog of their covers of Nasser:

Sep 26, 1955

Aug 27, 1956

July 28, 1958

Mar 29, 1963

May 16, 1969

Oct 12, 1970

Mrs. Clinton’s statement was intended to clarify her remarks in Jerusalem, which had left some of her aides nonplused because she had not voiced the administration’s official position that settlements are illegitimate.

Though not a core subject in peace negotiations, Jewish settlements are a charged issue for Israelis and Palestinians because they involve building in areas that both claim as their ancestral lands.

How not to start the day: read bits like this in the Old Gray Lady, wonder why they go to pains to misinform. The words occupation, occupied land, international law, violation of international law, land seized in war, illegal annexation and the like were axed, because the Times doesn’t want you to think of the conflict like that. It’s about ancestral land claims and, in fact, colonies housing a half million Jews on the occupied West Bank (very much including East Jerusalem) are not a core subject in this nebulous thing called the peace process. No, they’re not.

Instead read this interview with Rashid Khalidi on CFR.org. He says very clearly what many others have on the need to negotiate confront the settlements:

The point is, though,that settlements were designed expressly to make a negotiated resolution of this conflict impossible. We have to accept this. They’re not just there because they happened to grow like mushrooms on hilltops. They were scientifically planned so as to cut Jerusalem off from its hinterland. They were scientifically planned to cut the West Bank into pieces. They were scientifically planned to prevent movement from point A to point B. As long as these objectives are achieved, there’s not a West Bank state. There is not sovereignty, there is not contiguity, there is not economic viability.These huge settlements have to either be removed or enormously shrunk or subjected to some other arrangement whereby the objectives for which they were established are defeated. I’m sure it would be hard for an Israeli government but otherwise you won’t have a deal, or you’ll have a deal that collapses immediately and then everybody will go back and say “well we told you so.” I’m telling you now, if you don’t deal with the root issues caused by the settlements you won’t have a viable deal.”

National Geographic has a very good feature on Syria this month, “Shadowland,” focusing on Bashar al-Assad’s assumption, the lessons he’s taken from his brutal father Hafez, and all the other hot topics in journalism about the Assads and Syria today: economic reform, political grips, ancient cities, people needing jobs, a President well-spoken enough to mask the truths of his regime. It opens with a somewhat campy Godfather analogy, in which Michael Corleone comes home to take over the family business after hearing of his brother’s death, with the famous line: “Tell my father to get me home… “Tell my father I wish to be his son.”

If there was a moment like that for Bashar al Assad, the current president of Syria, it came sometime after 7 a.m. on January 21, 1994, when the phone rang in his rented apartment in London. A tall, scholarly ophthalmologist, Bashar, then 28, was doing a residency at Western Eye Hospital, part of St. Mary’s Hospital system in Britain. Answering the phone, he learned that his older brother, Basil, while racing to the Damascus airport in heavy fog that morning, had driven his Mercedes at high speed through a roundabout. Basil, a dashing and charismatic figure who’d been groomed to succeed their father as president, died instantly in the crash. And now he, Bashar, was being called home.

Fast-forward to June 2000 and the death of the father, Hafez al Assad, of heart failure at age 69. Shortly after the funeral, Bashar entered his father’s office for only the second time in his life. He has a vivid memory of his first visit, at age seven, running excitedly to tell his father about his first French lesson. Bashar remembers seeing a big bottle of cologne on a cabinet next to his father’s desk. He was amazed to find it still there 27 years later, practically untouched. That detail, the stale cologne, said a lot about Syria’s closed and stagnant government, an old-fashioned dictatorship that Bashar, trained in healing the human eye, felt ill-equipped to lead.

…

Syria is an ancient place, shaped by thousands of years of trade and human migration. But if every nation is a photograph, a thousand shades of gray, then Syria, for all its antiquity, is actually a picture developing slowly before our eyes. It’s the kind of place where you can sit in a crowded Damascus café listening to a 75-year-old story­teller in a fez conjure up the Crusades and the Ottoman Empire as if they were childhood memories, waving his sword around so wildly that the audience dives for cover—then stroll next door to the magnificent Omayyad Mosque, circa A.D. 715, and join street kids playing soccer on its doorstep, oblivious to the crowds of Iranian pilgrims pouring in for evening prayers or the families wandering by with ice cream. It’s also a place where you can dine out with friends at a trendy café, and then, while waiting for a night bus, hear blood-chilling screams coming from a second-floor window of the Bab Touma police station. In the street, Syrians cast each other knowing glances, but no one says a word. Someone might be listening.

The Syrian Embassy in the US is up in arms over the article. Perhaps because the writer, Don Belt, and photographer, Ed Kashi, were given access and didn’t reciprocate with overly fawning coverage . Ambassador Imad Moustapha wrote a long, windy letter to National Geographic accusing Belt of of being a neo-con and having his impressions of Syria fixed before he landed in Sham — “Shadowland” is certainly a suggestive title. Josh Landis has the letter on SyriaComment, and it’s too long to hash out and cite… and frankly it often confirms what Belt is getting at: that Syria, to no surprise, remains politically closed despite the advent of international chains, of privatization, of tourism, and a new reputation for reform supposedly embodied in the chic first couple, who are said to enjoy gallery openings and going out to dinner. There have been openings, for sure, but you could call them cosmetic.. especially when journalists favor citing trendy bars and hotels as evidence of a “new Syria.” Take this bit from Moustapha on Belt’s description of hearing screams from the police station in Bab Touma. I wonder about the accuracy of the scene myself, having lived near there for a year and never heard a scream late at night — and I was there often, since the fiteer shop in Bab Touma was open all night. Here is Moustapha’s rebuttal of that:

Bab Touma is the second most touristic place in Damascus (after the Omayyad mosque) and it is ludicrous to think that there would be such horrible interrogations taking place among the tourists and visitors of that area.  In fact, this area has underwent the most transformation in the city as the public and private sectors focused on reviving the old city, promoting it into a premier tourist destination by turning its old houses into boutique restaurants and hotels.  Thus, as one reads this awful depiction of screams, seemingly out of a thriller novel, we have to question whether there is any proof for such theatrical stories. I challenge you to find any Syrian who would confirm this woven tale.

First of all, find a Syrian who would confirm this, and they’d promptly be in jail, or a police station (presumably not the one in Bab Touma) dealing with the consequences. Willful expression of political truths are hardly common in Syria, the advent of so many years of authoritarian government built around the cult of a leader. When they do happen, they are spoken softly, even in the confines of an apartment — because who might be listening? It’s fairly absurd to think a Syrian would come forward to the regime, to its ambassador in DC of all people, and confirm that yes, they hear screams from police stations and, naturally, try and ignore them on their walk home. Also, it’s revealing that Moustapha uses development to change the subject: one wouldn’t hear interrogation screams in Bab Touma, because interrogations aren’t done there, because there are so many tourists there, because so many old houses have been converted into hotels and restaurants there, because the Old City is the heart of Damascus’ tourism push. Quite a progression of explanation.

Of course the National Geographic article is that of two visiting journalists to Syria — Belt and Kashi also did a feature on Arab Christians last spring that included reporting from Syria — and they favor quick details of metaphor like an old cologne bottle on Hafez al-Assad’s desk. Oliver August has a long story for Conde Nast Traveler that is not exactly a foil to “Shadowland,” but is sharper, written out of much more time spent living in Damascus. It opens with an excellent scene at the theater in Damascus. The President arrives, and the play — an adaption of Richard III — takes on some other meanings, since the King is sitting in the audience, continuing to support the arts. Later, August is talking students and Syrians at the Journalists’ Club, where the intricacies and truths of expression come out.. with a quote from Syrian writer Khalid Khalife, of course.

Does Bashar Assad’s surprise patronage signal new cultural liberties or rather the co-opting of the arts into his political machine? To be sure, a transformation of some kind is taking place. Assad is relaxing state controls on the once-Socialist economy. The arts seem to be opening up, at least a crack, and the Old City is turning into something of a party town. The fact that we can have this discussion in public is a clear sign of change, though nobody refers to the president by name. Nobody except Khaled Khalifa, a renowned novelist. He sits at the next table and seems to be celebrating the fact that his latest book—banned in Syria—was short-listed for the inaugural Arab Booker Prize.

“What? Bashar?” he says loudly between drinks. “Wish I had been there. I would have told him to let some of my friends out of jail.”

CAIRO – In the desert east of the city, off the highway to the Suez Canal, is the new 260-acre campus of the 90-year-old American University in Cairo (AUC). It opened last fall at a price tag of more than $400 million, a quarter coming from USAID. University administrators and developers hope New Cairo will one day be home to some 2 million people. It’s a model of Cairo’s present and future urbanism, a profitable solution to congestion and overcrowding in one of the world’s largest and most polluted cities. Faculty and administrators are split on the changes.

“We should not immediately approve of this kind of transformation without asking about the wider context of privatization and how a university relates to society,” says Hanan Sebea, an assistant professor of anthropology.

In the face of Cairo’s crowded infrastructure, the development answers for years have looked to the possibilities of building elsewhere. AUC is keeping part of its old, eight-acre campus on Tahrir Square.

“Central Cairo is overloaded with lots of pressures that are beyond the capabilities of its infrastructure,” says Ashraf Salloum, the university architect who oversaw the large design team behind the campus. “If we want to really help the development of the city, we need to give the city space to breathe.”

AUC will be an “anchor for development” in this stretch of desert, he says. But are new, world-class facilities enough, even at the loss of a central urban site?

“Space is very symbolic, but it’s not only about infrastructure,” Ms. Sebea says. “Downtown, presence is very important, and it goes beyond fieldwork. It’s accessibility and the interest of the university to interact with society.”

Another recent story for the Christian Science Monitor.

Hanna is in Gaza and has a blog. It’s not always about what she does in the world’s largest open air prison — there are other topics: architecture, photography, women, the museum. But here she writes about a current exhibition of Israeli and Palestinian photographers in London, “Beware the Cost of War,” that removes credits and captions from images of Israel and Palestine (for many of the photos, its Gaza and southern Israel last winter, specifically) as a way of looking, hopefully, at conflict devoid of identity, ideology, politics. It’s interesting, gruesome, and mostly it works. The New York Times photo blog covered the show and quotes organizer, Israeli photographer Yoav Galai: “People want to see the world as they see it: there’s good guys and bad guys.. I wanted to give the pictures back to the photographers. Away from the headlines. Away from pro- or anti-something. So you can see the reality of the conflict.”

The images represent the conflict, and they’d come to represent “one side” if printed in a newspaper and given a caption, we are supposed to believe. Like Hanna, I looked for the first sign of Israeli or Palestinian in every photograph — the Star of David on the medic’s vest, for one. (Actually it’s quite easy to pick out the Palestinians, by the quality of clothes and the extent of wounds and destruction). This proves the curator’s point, in a way, that we need to connect suffering with its subject, presumably to lay blame and understand its context. Galai said he was inspired by this bit of Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others:

To an Israeli Jew, a photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicide-bomber. To a Palestinian, a photograph of a child torn apart by a tank round in Gaza is first of all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordnance. To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions.

But what about moral equivalency in a conflict, in this case last year’s assault on Gaza, that doesn’t demand a balance of both sides, given the shear imbalance of dead and casualties (13 Israelis, 3 of them civilians, to 1,400 Palestinians, most of them civilians; crude rockets falling on Israeli towns, to guided bombs destroying Gaza’s only flour mill, bulldozers flattening chicken farms, and white phosphorus falling on children and a UN school). From scopophobia:

…I came across a picture of a dead dog (the “victim” of a Hamas rocket attack in southern Israel) next to images of dead Gazan children buried in piles of rubble that used to be their homes. I understand they were short of images of Israeli suffering (so they had to include some war criminal soldiers with minor cuts to rouse outr empathy), but really? Rather than open my eyes to the suffering of the Other, this collection of photographs showed me that the suffering is not the same. That saying “individual suffering is immeasurable, let’s not play the numbers game” is really closing your eyes to reality.

By creating a moral equivalency between the victims of both sides, this project is not taking a neutral stance ‘reaching across the lines’ as it fashions itself as doing. If you say to me “Israelis are suffering just as much as Palestinians,” you are actually saying this: one Israeli home damaged in Sderot is worth 25,000 homes in Gaza, one Israeli soldier captured is worth 11,000 Palestinian prisoners is Israeli jails, 13 Israelis killed (3 of them civilians) is worth 1,400 Palestinians (most of them civilians), 60 people in Ashqelon with PTSD is the equivalent of 40 years of occupation. And those kids who live upstairs from you, who sometimes come home from school singing an unbearable number of repetitions of “Biladi,” their lives are worth as much as that of a well-bred Israeli dog.

The National recently ran an analysis of improving Saudi-Syrian relations within longer talk of Damascus’s (shrewd?) handling of its various opponents and allies. There’s very little talk of Lebanon, strangely enough, and much more attention paid to Bashar and how he might mimic his father:

To survive the pressure and isolation, the younger Assad studied his father’s statecraft. Hafez Assad, wrote the British journalist Patrick Seale, “had always been a patient man, able to take the long view in conflicts with Arab rivals and in the contest with Israel. Believing that time was on the Arabs’ side, he counselled other leaders not to hurry, not to negotiate impulsively, not to make concessions from weakness.”

In the 1970s and 80s, Hafez Assad used Syria’s regional influence and its confrontation with Israel as levers to generate economic aid. Syria received billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment from the Soviet Union and hundreds of millions in grants from the Gulf Arab states. But Arab governments cut off aid in 1980, when Assad supported Iran at the start of its eight-year war with Iraq. Assad argued that Saddam Hussein was wasting valuable Arab resources by fighting Iran, instead of Israel. But the Gulf states were more concerned with their regional security, and they viewed Iran as a greater threat than Israel.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Assad deftly joined the US-led coalition that drove Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait – and Arab aid once again flowed to Damascus. The foreign aid allowed the regime to avert economic collapse, but it was not enough to generate self-sustained growth in the Syrian economy. From Washington, Assad extracted an even more important concession: he was granted control over Lebanon as it emerged from a 15-year civil war.

Bashar Assad’s main goal today is to preserve the rule of his Alawite regime in a Sunni-dominated country. (The Alawites are a minority sect within Shiite Islam.) That may explain the regime’s history of tortured alliances and constant hedging. But the ultimate goal for Assad – as it was for his father before him – is to regain control of the Golan Heights, a strategic promontory that Israel occupied during the 1967 Middle East war. Some western and Arab analysts have long argued that it is in Assad’s interest to remain in a perpetual state of war with Israel – this enables Syria to fall back on its rhetoric as “the beating heart of Arab nationalism” and last bastion of Arab resistance to the West. As a result, this line of thinking goes, Assad will be reluctant to make a deal with Israel.

The Google video won’t embed — here is the link to Edward Said’s long last interview from 2003.

All of the information on how to donate to Tomorrow’s Youth Organization in Nablus is available here.