Salmiya

These pictures are not from Kuwait's desert but have rather been released by NASA. They were taken by the Mars robot "Spirit" and show a man-like formation, a sculpture, or a shadow (or a creature?, apparently praying?) on the surface of the Red Planet. Published by SPIEGEL ONLINE on January 25, 2008.

Where had I been in late April 2004? I remember (as an almost significant emotional event* ) an afternoon in Damascus. I had invited an Iraqi Professor of Geophysics to my room in the Cham Hotel. I was a tourist, and he had just brought his family with the car from Holland, where he worked, to Baghdad. Right now, he was on his way back to Amsterdam in order to quit his job and then permanently move to Iraq. He had some hope of getting a position at Baghdad University. The stopover in Damascus provided him with the opportunity of visiting some of Islam's holiest places. Dr. Saad had noticed me when entering the Umayyad Mosque, one of the most awesome buildings in the Islamic world. It was my first visit of a mosque ever, and I had been stumbling into the smooth as glass-like courtyard, when I suddenly heard his warning: “Better remove your shoes!” With an apology I did, and when I entered the gorgeous prayer hall itself, I met him again. We chatted, about Kuwait, Iraq, Holland, Germ...

Tromsø, January 23, 2008

Husayn ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib and his family left Madinah on the 4th of Rajab in the year 60 AH and reached Makkah on the 4th of Shaban. They stayed there for some time, but they did not complete the hajj as they had pretended to do. Rather, on the 8th of Dhu’l Hijjah the small caravan set out for Kufa in Iraq, Ali’s former Capital. It was on a hopeless mission. The plot against Yazid, the infamous and so much hated Umayyad Caliph, Muawiya’s dissipated and incompetent son in Damascus, had been betrayed. When they reached the Euphrates, the local ringleaders had been executed already. Husayn, his family and his men, not more than a few dozens, would have better been advised to surrender. The enemies' army consisted of thousands. But the brave knights didn’t. The battle on the banks of the Euphrates at Karbala on the 10th of Muharram in the year 61 AH, the day of Ashura, didn’t take long. Although Husayn was wearing his grandfather’s cloak and had taken-up the Dhul’fiqar , Ali’s famo...

George W. Bush has accomplished his first visit to Israel and Palestine. On January 5, 2008, just hours before heading to Jerusalem and Ramallah on a trip mainly scheduled for pressing ahead the Middle East peace process, an obscure and difficult-to-judge ‘incident’ in the Strait of Hormuz had occurred, when 5 Iranian speed boats approached 3 American war vessels, allegedly threatening them to blow them up. Videos made by both sides have been released and broadcasted in the meantime, not really giving the impression of a serious incident . While Bush absurdly admonished Mahmoud Abbas to exerting his influence on Gaza Strip's Hamas, talks in Jerusalem and Ramallah did not really prove particular knowledge of the World’s single superpower's leader about the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Nevertheless, it is hoped for both peoples (and the Americans and us, too) that the Annapolis Peace Conference of November 2007 will not be in vain, and Bush’s promise of a peace treaty in 2008 wi...

On the 25th of Shawwal (November 5, 2007), a public holiday is celebrated in Iran, commemorating the martyrdom of the 6th Imam, Jafar as-Sadiq. Thus, the old quarters of Esfahan , in the 11th to 13th century the capital of the Seljuk Turks, with the gorgeous Masjed-e Jomeh , were very calm on this morning. But the shops in the bazaar opened later. Men were gathering for mourning, and banners and black flags could be seen in many places of the bazaar. Imam Hossein’s half brother, Abbas ibn Ali ibn Abu Talib, who was martyred at the battle of Karbala, too, is displayed on the picture at the entrance of the little mosque in the bazaar, with beautiful tile patterns on one the main iwan. While walking through the narrow lanes of the old city, the two minarets of Soltan Bakht Agha and Baba Qassem’s mausoleum, both from Seljuk’s era, attracted my attention. In the northeastern direction a significant landmark is a single, more than 50 meters high, Seljuk minaret, Monar-e Sareban, the 'min...

About 10 years ago, the infamous impeachment attempt of former President Bill Clinton took place. The public scandal started when Linda Tripp provided Kenneth Starr with her surreptitiously recorded tapes of talks with Monica Lewinsky. On February 12, 1999 the attempt to remove Clinton from office eventually failed. Clinton’s impeachment was based on an alleged, negligible sin; not of having sex with a trainee, but rather not admitting that in public. His prosecutor Kenneth Starr as well as Monica Lewinsky later vanished from the scene. Starr himself was applying the morals of a hypocrite. When focusing on tackling foreign affairs, Clinton was certainly one of America’s weakest presidents. Only 5 weeks after his inauguration, on February 26, 1993, the New York’s World Trade Center was shaken by an enormous bomb blast in the underground garage. The explosion yielded a 60 meter wide crater in the car park. One may wonder what Clinton would have done if the Twin Towers had actually co...

A sort of marshes in southern Iraq I noticed only once, when I was on my return to Europe in May 2007, a rare day-flight. The rivers in the glistening desert and some vegetation were a bit stunning to me. But is that what had been left after Saddam’s draining by building a dam for the Euphrates? The first time I heard about the Marsh Arabs was shortly after my arrival in Kuwait in 2001. A luxurious reprint of the book by Sir Wilfred Thesiger, the last of the great British explorers of the last century, was lying on the coffee table of a colleague. Thesiger had visited the Marshes several times in the 1950s, and in fact had lived with the people there. The book immediately fascinated me because of the completely different way of life of these Arabs. They were not Bedouins but rather had settled in the swamps and alluvial salt marshes in Southern Iraq, the land in-between the Tigris and Euphrates, Mesopotamia. These Arabs built large reed houses used for conventions, called mudhif ...