Salmiya

As all other countries in the Middle East, Egypt is a typical boys’ country. Women and girls after puberty are rarely seen on the streets, and if, they are more or less veiled. When I strolled through the mayhem of Cairo last week, I identified maximum 10 per cent females in the streets. Boys were everywhere, holding hands, praying in the middle of the alleyway, being active. In the evenings, more women showed. Mothers and their half-grown daughters and little kids went shopping. Downtown and in the Islamic part of Cairo, almost all of them were veiled. In the fancy restaurants on the shores of the Nile or in Al Azhad Park there was, of course, a completely different picture. The fun-loving, young, bold and beautiful celebrated birthday parties and enjoyed life. Young couples (of course not married) met for romantic candle-light dinners. Only some of the girls were wearing more fashionable head scarves, très chic . I talked with many young lads in the little shops of Khan Al Khalili, t...

A very dirty and depressing place. I wouldn’t recommend Souq Al Gamaal for a visit. We saw the pyramids when passing Giza to go north of Cairo. When we approached the site in Birqash, we saw dozens of decomposing bodies of camels, cattle, sheep, on what was a giant garbage dump. Tourists had to pay for a ‘ticket’. Incredible. Camels had been carried from Sudan, I was told, to this horrible place. Their usual fate is to be slaughtered. In order to prevent their quick escape, their left foreleg was bound, so they could only jump a bit. Young boys and men beat the beasts all the time, without any reason. My driver asked for camel milk for his sick mother in hospital. They had to milk a camel, and Ahmed was happy when he finally got the container with the milk. I spent some time with a “sheikh”, who supposedly was the boss of all of this. He showed me a year 2000 copy of a German magazine about Cairo where he and the camel market in Birqash had been featured. He was the owner of a unique ...

Unity, New Hampshire, June 27, 2008

Well, I wasn’t in Giza. It was too hot in Cairo last week and the prospect of lining up in endless queues in the burning sun, hefty gate-money, claustrophobia, and, in particular, simply too many tourists prevented me from visiting. I have seen the Fab Three from the car when passing Giza on my way to another “exotic” place outside of Cairo, Birqash with its horrible camel market (I will report later), and the proximity of the pyramids to residential areas was in fact amazing. No, we went to Saqqara and Dahshur, further to the south. Saqqara is home of the first stone monument, the Step Pyramid. Here also a life-size limestone sculpture of the Pharaoh Djoser was found, who governed the country 2650 BCE when Imhotep, his later deified architect built this ingenious pyramid (I suppose it took more than one year, but that was the information given) which originally was totally encased with limestone. His Step Pyramid is about 60 meters high. Few tourists were strolling around the complex,...

Coptic Quarter, Cairo

It will be pretty quiet here for the next couple of days. I will get my annual dose of the Middle East this time in Egypt. So, Carlton Hotel has finally confirmed my reservation and I will arrive tomorrow morning at Cairo airport. Very early tomorrow morning. I have always spared Egypt when I was still living in Kuwait. The country seems to be easy to approach from the West, contrary to countries like Iran, which had been the destination of my previous Morgenlandfahrt . So, why not postpone the visit to Cairo when living and working in the Middle East anyway. I am very curious. It is not only the bustling city of Cairo; it is also the HEAT, which will represent a sharp contrast to the green winter (called summer) here in Tromsø. I’ll report later, insha'allah. Ma’asalamah!

"He is a gentleman, he grew up with the Saluki" (Arab proverb).

In previous postings I have outlined that the real origin of the three current monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (another one is Manichaeism of antiquity, which has vanished), most probably lies in Zoroastrian Persia of the 6th and 5th century BCE. Eurocentric humanists have always looked at the Greek achievements during that time with great admiration. It was a time of tremendous development of Science, Philosophy, and Art. In the East, Siddharta Gautama Buddha (ca. 563-483 BCE) abandoned his earthly body and entered Parinirvana, and Confucius taught his philosophy in China. However, it was the dynasty of the Achaemenids who, during these years, erected their true World Empire. While seated mainly in the province of Fars in southern Iran, they tried to secure the periphery of the then known world by relative tolerance in religious matters and several military campaigns towards Egypt, Greece, the Scythians, and India. Their main capital was Pārsa, and the Helle...

Fred Frith, Iva Bittová, Pavel Fajt (1989)

Kroken, June 10, 2008

Cyrus II encouraged the Jews in Babylon to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, knowing well that imperial generosity will grant stability in the empire’s periphery. It is interesting to note that the Jews declined. Too comfortable had life been in the Diaspora, several generations under better circumstances than in Judah. It was Darius I (522-486 BCE) who ordered the construction of the temple, as a fortress, as a proper place for administration, and, of course, to worship Yahweh. Yehud was, after the conquest of Egypt, no longer a marginal province. Darius appointed Zerubbabel as local governor who was a Davidide. This period is covered in the Tanakh in the Books of Haggai, Zechariah 1-8, and Isaiah 56-66 (the Third Isaiah). Darius’ strong influence as a lawgiver who respected local laws (see, for instance, his carved-in-stone, multilingual inscriptions in Behistun ) expedited the canonization of Yehud’s religious texts, of course. For the short period between Cyrus and Darius, Cambyses ...

I have recently reported on my visit of Pir Bakran near Esfahan and its very old Jewish cemetery and a small but still active synagogue . Recent distressing strong rhetoric of the Iranian president but also the response of a highly-ranked Israeli politician (not to mention new remarks of outgoing Bush and presidential hopeful Obama ) augur badly . Remember, Jews and Persians have lived most of the time in harmony, even under Islamic rule. Presently, the Jewish community in Iran (of course less than 40'000) is the largest in the Middle East outside of Israel. Representing a minority (like Zoroastrians), a Jew is also a member of the Iranian Majlis. So, the abject rhetoric is definitely (and fortunately) not directed to Jews as a people or religious group. As a matter of fact the canonization of the Tanakh was accomplished under Persian rule, in particular in the first half of the two centuries of the Achaemenian Empire (539-330 BCE). Most interested in the millennia-old history of...

Barack Obama yesterday at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) meeting. Everything is okay but the tenor has changed anyway.

Krokelvdalen, May 31, 2008. 17 degrees Celsius (62 degrees Fahrenheit) .

When I recently visited Yemen , I had read about a sensation which had happened more than 30 years ago. When restoring parts of the Grand Mosque in Sana’a in 1972, workers stumbled in a small niche between the outer and inner structure of the roof across fragments of paper manuscripts. Careless as they were, they packed the pages into potato bags and subsequently forgot about them. Years later, the president of the Yemeni Antiquities Authority, Qadhi Ismail al-Aqwa’, realized that he had to ask for international assistance to study what is now known as one of the oldest versions of the Holy Qur’an. It was the German Qur’anic paleographic Gerhard R. Puin who started the restoration of the tens of thousands of fragments of the Holy Scripture. Little has been published in the meantime since the message might be too disturbing for the common faithful Muslim. See the article by Toby Lester in The Atlantic Monthly here . In upcoming August, there might be another heavy dispute about the hid...

When this happened I visited Damascus where I got to know an Iraqi professor who was visiting the city too. The shocking pictures induced considerable disturbance, and I have reported on that almost significant emotional event some time ago. President G. W. Bush apologized for the mistreatment of detainees in Abu Ghuraib on May 6, 2004. But that was not well-perceived in the Arab world. Shockingly, the American hostage Nicholas Berg was beheaded one day later by the dastard slayer Abu Musab al-Zarqawi . I remember the horrible video which immediately circulated on the internet. And that I was more or less forced to see it by an Arab colleague who obviously wanted to teach me, the Westerner, a lesson. Zarqawi was killed in a US bombing raid exactly 2 years ago. Berg's assassination added a new, indeed catastrophic, dimension to the war in Iraq. The award winning semi-documentary Standard Operating Procedure by Errol Morris can now be seen in movie theatres throughout Europe. Thi...