Logorrhea, Mufti-Style

When it rains, it pours. and pours. and pours. and sometimes pours out so much that it starts to sound rabid. or maybe just very, very, very post-modern.

When I clicked on Naharnet’s evening headline, Jouzo: Let the Lebanese Maronite and the Rest of Lebanon Go Back to Syria, what I hoped to find were a few mis-translation gems. It never crossed my mind that this headline might in fact actually be what Mufti “dare to spell differently” Muhammed al Jouzo said. But apparently it was.

So. Let’s take this step by step.

In a statement on Sunday, Lebanese Sunni Mufti of Mt. Lebanon Sheikh Muhammed al-Jouzo said that “Lebanon has turned into an Arab Babylonian tower with its folkloric leaderships and new parliamentary faces only fit for exhibitions and decorations while the losers turn into sectarian symbols standing on the government’s doors” with their conditions hindering the formation of the government.

It must be hard to be the Sunni mufti of Mount Lebanon, an area historically low in Sunnis and high in other groups with elevated senses of their own importance. But sometimes getting up on a soapbox does more harm than good. Ancient Babylon was not Arab, and Lebanon’s leaders are not folkloric, unless “za’imi” now translates as “folkloric”. On the other hand, a MP campfire singalong would make for a priceless photo op. And I bet Sheikh Saad has a guitar.

“There are politicians who move from right to left and vice versa while their slogans change with the stock exchange. One day you see him a Gulf Arab and another day a Persian Iranian when a third time he becomes an American and then again a Russian. One day you see him an enemy of Syria and then again Syria’s best friend and so on. There are no principles, no morale, no charters and the ‘unity’ presidency stands bewildered before the political “Sufi-sectarianism”; next to the allies or to the opposition!” he added.

The Lebanese stock exchange changes basically only when Solidere does. The U.S. stock exchange, on the other hand, has been on a pleasant upward tick, Friday’s 250-point decline aside. Which bourse is he referring to here? And the only political figure who might possibly qualify for the bewildering khaliji-ajami-amerki-russi raqs is, of course, Yoda Bey. But even with him I’m skeptical. As for “Sufi-sectarianism” … hunh. I just don’t get it, but I’m trying. (Sunni Mevlevis twirl with hands up, Shii with hands down?)

“There’s no civilized nation in the world like that of our Great Lebanon. The Lebanese people abhor this category. To those I ask you, what’s your true identity? Who robs the electricity money, the foreign, internal, sea and land telecommunications’ money? A nation that lives the culture of hate with leaders leading them to sectarian wars, hating each other; hatred in the name of religion, in the name of sectarianism and in the name of the parties,” he added.

I’ve read this bit several times now, and I’m still wondering: which category is it that the Lebanese people abhor? Civilized? Nation? Great? Lebanon? And are they the “those” whom al Jouza addresses? (I think we all get the point of his question about robbery, but I don’t understand its connection to this bit about categories and abhorrence.) Condemning hate sounds more equitably distributed – “hating each other” – and hate is a good thing for a religious leader to condemn, even if his words are a bit vague.

“Our educated youth is faced with only one exit, that of emigration. They have grown to hate their country and their nationality and have traveled in quest of finding another one keen to protect their integrity and protect them from the politicians and their resentment,” he continued.

What? I’m not questioning the fact of emigration, but what other types of exits might there be? Mental? And as for “hating their country and their nationality” and journeying on some heroic quest to find another (a much nicer way of putting it than “trying for the American passport”), most overseas Lebanese I’ve met want nothing more than to return home.

This is the Lebanon of today, so why don’t all the people emigrate and offer our country as a gift to Syria and their infidels? Did not the Maronite come from Syria, so why not go back to it and along with them all of Lebanon and not just those who have missed Syria?,” he concluded.

Ah, the sectarian fun begins. Here’s where an Arabic original would be helpful (and here’s also where we reach and exceed the limits of back translation …), as well as a history lesson. By “infidels” does he mean the Alaouites who run Syria, or is suggesting that Syrians in general are irreligious? And what’s with the jibe at Maronites?

Finally, and just as a minor point: historically speaking, the Lebanese who wanted Lebanon to go back to Syria were the Sunnis. And only the Sunnis.

ones & zeros, waheds & sifrs

A friend of mine works as a technology journalist, and she just gave a big thumbs up to the newly launched Windows 7. I’m happy that the new system seems to be such a hit, although I doubt that I will personally get to try it out anytime soon. I use a Mac at home, and my work PC snidely reminds me that I “do not have Administrator privileges!” every time I try to approve even the most innocuous update.

However, I’m not writing this post simply for the chance to whine about my dis-empowerment. I’m writing because I’m happy to report that Windows 7 is also launching in Arabic – not a year from now, not six months from now, not whenever the programmers remember that there are indeed people in the world who do not use Roman script, but in two weeks. (You can see the news on PC Mag’s website, here.) Nor is this a last-minute line extension, either: I remember seeing news about the availability of a beta version last winter.

I think this reflects a very healthy evolution in computing culture. After all, computers think in 0s and 1s. They don’t care whether programs use script that reads left to right or right to left – but historically, programs have been biased towards the former, meaning that Arabic script often looks buggy.

Actually, Arabic still usually looks buggy on my Mac – not that I plan to go back to a home PC anytime soon. But for those of you who enjoy living in the PC world, you might check out Microsoft’s dedicated Arabic product and support site, here.

imagining a big bottle of water

Generally speaking, I prefer not to be a spectacle. In public, I like it best when people look at me once, decide that I am of no particular interest, and move on to look at other things.

But sometimes a little spectacle is a worthwhile price to pay for a great outing – as when my aunt and I go out with some of her Doha friends.

The morning after I arrived in Doha, we went to the beautifully restored Souk al Wakif for breakfast with Umm M and three of her daughters. I hadn’t seen any of the Umms in four years, and it was a delight to reconnect.

Our outing was a delight for everyone in the souk that morning as well. To the untrained eye, we don’t look like a group that should belong together. Some of the Umms wear niqab; some wear abayas with headscarves. I dress in the Gulf in what might be best described as “bohemian music teacher” style: long swoopy skirt, long-sleeved shirt, and hair left to its own messy devices. The khala wears tea-length linen or cotton dresses. As a group, we look like a live-action staging of Sesame Street’s “One of these things is not like the other” series.

We know this, and we accept that together we are indeed spectacular. (The six of us think that the stares are kind of a hoot, actually.)

After gracing the souk with our collective presence, and providing its merchants and shoppers with ample topics for morning chats, we entered one of the nicer restaurants and sat down for a heart-healthy breakfast of hummus and falafel.

Our waiter, a young Levantine man with beautiful eyes, did his best to act nonchalant, and to cope with the fact that each item ordered prompted extensive discussion among the five of us, in a mixture of Arabic and English. And this is where things got tricky.

Umm M had been doing most of the ordering – in Arabic. But when he asked whether we wanted anything to drink, our ordering was derailed by the need to count and recount the number of women who wanted tea. I love tea, but only with milk, so I wanted to be sure that we had water as well.

Ou 2aninat mai2 kabireh, please, I said.

It didn’t seem like a difficult request. After all, I was the person nearest to him, I was speaking clearly, and I wasn’t whispering.

I’m sorry? the waiter said, looking at me as if I had just broken into Japanese.

Sigh. I’ve mentioned my troubles with the Arabic word for “water” before – but the problem was one of having a culturally awkward pronunciation (Syrian rather than Lebanese), not one of having an incomprehensible pronunciation. And “large bottle of water” is a phrase that I have said at least one thousand times – so I didn’t think that I had mucked it up too badly.

I tried again, in English, with Umm M backing me up in Arabic.

When the waiter left, she burst out laughing.

Did you see, IntlXpatr? she asked my aunt. The waiter looked at her and couldn’t imagine that she was speaking Arabic – so he didn’t understand her.

Thank you, I said. I was beginning to wonder whether I had really lost my Arabic.

I haven’t lost it, but I did forget how jarring it is for people when I speak – a total face and language disconnect. In Beirut I used to find that people were much more willing to take me as an Arabic-speaker when I kept my sunglasses on.

So: lesson learned. The next time we have breakfast with the Umms, I’m going to add to our collective spectacle by wearing a pair of massive sunglasses inside the restaurant .

words and things: what’s in a car?

I’ve been slowly working my way through a thin but rich family memoir: Grace Dodge Guthrie’s Legacy to Lebanon, about the various contributions of her paternal and maternal families (the Dodges and the Blisses, both deeply connected to AUB and to Robert College in Istanbul). Grace, who was born in Beirut in 1915, writes sweetly of her childhood there and her parents’ work while her father, Bayard Dodge, served as AUB’s president.

She describes her father’s arrival to Beirut during a family trip in 1910:

After being ferried ashore by red-tarboushed boatmen rowing forward to prevent colliding with other boats and being waved through customs under President Bliss’s wing, the Dodge family would have ridden to the college in arabiyehs, open carriages manned by colorful drivers urging on their scrawny horses with cries and whips.

I’m rolling my eyes a bit at this depiction of AUB extra-legality (though under Ottoman laws the Dodges were likely exempt from most customs scrutiny in any case), but what really makes me curious is the word “arabiyeh”. When I studied Arabic in school, I was taught that “siyara” was the word for car.

As my aunt says, sometimes you don’t even know what it is that you don’t know. I didn’t hear the word “arabeh” in Damascus for some time, because I didn’t know to listen for it – just like I didn’t know to listen for “bagnole” when listening to my Parisian friends, because I knew that the word for “car” in French was “voiture”.

But I did begin to hear it – both as “arabeh” and “arabiyeh” – and I did begin to wonder. Why would there be a word for “car” in Arabic that sounded just like the word for “Arabic” in Arabic?

My short attention span meant that I stopped wondering at some point – probably when I grew enough accustomed to Lebanese car culture to refer to cars by their model and make, rather than simply as “car” . But Guthrie’s use of the term reawakened my curiosity, and I turned to my dictionary and to Google.

My dictionary confirmed what I already knew: that “araba” and “arabiyeh” both refer to a “carriage, vehicle, araba, cart, car, [or] coach”. And Google produced a Wiktionary entry, which gave me a sense of 1) just how much the Wikipedia empire has expanded and 2) the origins of the term. It defines “araba” as: a carriage used in Turkey and Asia Minor drawn by horses or oxen.

And – just like the OED – it includes historical illustrations of the word’s usage:

Quotations

• 1836: No one but a native of the luxurious East could ever have invented an araba, with its comfortable cushions, and its gaily painted roof, and gilded pillars. The prettiest are those of brown and gold, with rose-coloured draperies, through which the breeze flutters to your cheek as blandly as though it loved the tint that reminded it of the roses of the past season amid which it had wandered.”— Julia Pardoe, City of the Sultan; and Domestic Manners of the Turks, in 1836.
• 1845: I found the examination of these antiquities much less pleasant than to look at the many troops of children assembled on the plain to play; and to watch them as they were dragged about in little queer arobas, or painted carriages, which are there kept for hire. William Makepeace Thackeray, Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, 1845
• 1898:There is, however, such a thing as an “araba,” a vehicle drawn by oxen, in which the wives of a rich man are sometimes dragged four or five miles over the grass by way of recreation. The carriage is rudely framed, but you recognise in the simple grandeur of its design a likeness to things majestic; in short, if your carpenter’s son were to make a “Lord Mayor’s coach” for little Amy, he would build a carriage very much in the style of a Turkish araba. — Alexander William Kinglake, Eothen, 1898.
• 1917:Whenever I mounted the araba, he would whip his horses to a sharp trot or canter for half a mile, and then at a word stop for me to get out. — W.J. Childs, Across Asia Minor on Foot, 1917.

I love these quotes, and even though I’m not a wiki’er, I love knowing the origins of the word “araba” (or “arabiyeh”). I see so many Ottoman influences in Lebanon and in Syria and am delighted to have found one more.

hummus for the Homsis

Its been a work-weekend for me, and I’m afraid that I have nothing witty or even vaguely interesting to contribute to the blogosphere. On the other hand, I did manage – barely, but still! – to make several key deadlines, which is making me inordinately impressed with myself.

When not work-working, I’ve been working on straightening up my apartment. My parents, Big and Business Diamond, are arriving on Friday, and while they aren’t staying with me, they certainly will not be impressed by the amount of paper debris collecting on my desk, side table, and coffee table. What can I say? I am a paper magnet.

Buried in those paper piles are several old issues of Aramica, which I skimmed before adding to my recycling. Those of you who read Arabic may get a kick out of this issue’s collection of Homsi jokes:

My understanding is that Aramica’s audience includes Arab New Yorkers from all around the region, although skewing slightly Lebanese in its coverage thanks to the publisher. Evidently the market for Homsi jokes is broad enough to amuse all of them – Egyptian, Yemeni, Palestinian, etc.

The jokes are a little stereotypical for me, but they were certainly a change from everything else I had been doing .

nothing but blah blah blue skies

I love posters, I love graphic design, and I love election campaigns. So its been killing me to miss out on all the fun that +961, Beirut/NTSC, QN, and others have been having with their photos of the various and varied electoral posters that currently pepper Lebanon’s highways and byways.

Of course, I have been enjoying all the digital riffs I’ve received via email (not to mention those on which friends have been “tagged” on Facebook); my favorite, of course, is the Jumblatt’ed “Sois Beik et Pivote”. And last week I began to have the glimmer of a hope that I might have stumbled upon a new source for electoral ads: the Daily Star.

But I’m not sure in the end that this is worth getting at all excited about. Here is last week’s political ad, courtesy of Mustaqbal:

Ho-hum.

Am I missing something here? Is there some deeper meaning to “blue sky”? I get that Mustaqbal’s color is blue, and that blue skies are tranquil. But in my memory, blue sky days are good not only for beachs and skiing, but also for a whole lot of less-than-tranquil ishtibakat’ing. If I were a voter, I’d like to see a detailed platform explaining how a Mustaqbal vote would encourage some blue-sky activities and discourage others.

Sometimes simplicity is artistic. And sometimes its just unhelpfully vague. Blue sky. Yawn.

a second look at hope

A few weeks ago H and I got into a super-charged lunchtime discussion about the relationship between Amal and Hizbullah – a no-doubt thrilling experience for those at adjacent tables. (As those of you who have spent time in New York know, an “adjacent table” is usually three-to-six inches away. So they definitely got to listen in, interested or no.)

H has been doing some background research on the way that Hizbullah began positioning itself from the mid-1980s, if I remember correctly, by using Amal as a foil. So H decided to use me as a test case: what does the average self-appointed foreign expert think of Amal?

What do you think of when you think of Amal? H asked as I doused my lunch in carrot tahini.

I think of Amal as being more secular and also more corrupt, I said, playing right into H’s hands.

Ah, H said, nodding sagely. That’s exactly what you are supposed to think. From what H has read, these stereotypes about Amal were cultivated partly by Hizbullah as a way of distinguishing the two groups from one another. If Amal was secular and corrupt, Hizbullah could be religious and honest. And when Amal’s members do exhibit their religious faith – as on Ashoura – Hizbullah’s followers distinguish themselves further by commemorating the event without (or at least with less visible) bloodshed.

I’ve had an unpleasant run-in with one of Nabih Berri’s children, not to mention the goobers who “guarded” my neighborhood last May, so I suspect that my antipathy towards Amal is largely the product of an extended fit of pique. But still: H’s research made me feel like a dupe.

(I should note here that both parties have evolved considerably over the past twenty years, which seems to be when this “if you’re defined as this, we’ll be defined as that” approach seems to have been employed. But I do think that these stereotypes continue to frame how outside observers, at least, understand the relationship between Amal and Hizbullah.)

It also made me rethink a photograph I snapped last June, of recent graffiti on the back wall of a particularly decrepit parking lot in Hamra:

I took this photo without much of a purpose: I noticed the new graffiti, thought “hunh – Amal graffiti that mentions Ali, how interesting”, took the photo, and left it to languish on my computer for the next ten months.

Now I look at it and wonder: what else have I missed ?

Islamic silver, Christian gold?

I ran across this advertisement in a regional publication this morning (yes: the tasks of my current job can indeed be somewhat eclectic) and am stumped:

What makes silver Islamic? Is there anything wrong with un-Islamic silver?

What am I missing here?

hair, water, and taxis: Syrian triggers in Beirut

This morning, an article in The National by Rasha Elass caught my eye – and brought back memories. Rasha writes about her reception at a posh Beirut hair salon, when the stylist learns that she is Syrian.

Having lived in Damascus for some time before moving to Beirut, I too learned about the perils of my accent. Unlike Rasha, however, my learning was generally ex post facto. Hence in summer 2005 I was booted from a Beirut service for saying something too shami; and when I moved to Beirut, I avoided saying “water” for months after seeing the looks on waiters’ and shopkeepers’ faces when I asked for “moy” rather than “mai”. And I only learned to stop saying “lissa” one evening when the person to whom I had been speaking drew back from me as if I were diseased.

Ahh, memories.

In any case, my experiences were those of an outsider: someone who had committed the offense of learning Arabic like a Syrian, rather than a Lebanese – and not someone who had committed the evidently graver offense of being Syrian, like Rasha.

Here is her article – enjoy!

The Lebanese hairdresser had a sleight of hand typical to his profession, alternating quickly between his left and right hand as he cut, razored, pulled and tugged the strands of my hair. He came highly recommended by a friend, so I wasn’t worried about the way my hair was going to look when he was done.

But I was worried about him picking up on my Syrian accent, given that I was in an area of Beirut where many hold strong anti-Syrian sentiments.

And then came the inevitable.

“Are you Lebanese?” he asked.

Sometimes I purposely don’t speak Arabic when I venture into anti-Syrian areas in Lebanon. During a road trip to Batroun, a charming small town with a staunchly anti-Syrian community, my Lebanese friend made me promise not to say a single word in Arabic.

“They’ll pick up you’re Syrian from the minute you open your mouth,” she warned.

Though her concern was exaggerated – violence motivated by hatred is extremely rare since the end of the civil war in Lebanon – times were tense, and people might have been rude or snooty towards us if they had found out that I was Syrian.

Your accent in the Arab world is like an identity card. Even the unfamiliar ear can place you in a region, be it the Gulf, the Levant, Egypt or North Africa. The familiar ear can even figure out if you’re an urban or rural Syrian, a Damascene or from Aleppo, a Kurd from northern Iraq or a Shiite from the south, an Algerian or a Moroccan, and whether you grew up locally or abroad.

Accents also often are the butt of political jokes, like the popular favourite for Lebanese and Syrians taking political jabs at each other.

It pokes fun of the words moo and ma, Syrian and Lebanese slang for “right”, as in: “You’re coming to dinner, moo?”

“‘Moo’? What are we? Cows?” goes the joke.

“Better than ‘ma’,” it continues. “‘Ma’ is for sheep.”

Given my propensity to say moo, I couldn’t lie to the hairdresser, so I confessed that I was Syrian.

“Emm,” he muttered, his face visibly annoyed. I briefly worried he might purposely ruin my hair, which would be a disaster given I was to attend a posh Syrio-Lebanese wedding later and needed it to be flawless.

“You’re Syrian from both parents?” he asked.

Here, I thought, could be my way out. I could lie and end the conversation amicably, guaranteeing a good haircut. Or I could keep playing cat and mouse and see where the game took us.

“Umm, no. My mother is American,” I lied.

“Aaah, OK,” he said, looking relieved, as if everything about me finally made sense to him.

The most striking thing when travelling from Syria to Lebanon is how politicised everything is in Lebanon. While Syrians are bashful about discussing domestic politics, the Lebanese think nothing of asking you where you stand on their domestic political spectrum the minute they meet you.

“Are you with or against?” is probably the most common question in Lebanon after “what’s your name?”

I was still at the hairdresser’s watching my transformation in the mirror when I was asked this question.

“Are you with or against the Americans?” the hairdresser said.

Before I could answer, a customer in her mid fifties walked in frazzled, her short blonde-dyed hair brittle and uncombed. According to my friend, this hairdresser is known to the stars and the wives of politicians.

“Je suis en retard,” she announced to the hairdresser, her head appearing in my mirror. She spoke the French typical of Sodeco, a predominantly Christian neighbourhood.

How their conversation moved from “I’m running late” to comparing political affiliation is beyond me. But after exchanging the usual “ça va” and “walaw”, the latter being colloquial for no worries, they vented politics at each other.

“I know you’re a supporter of Aoun,” she told the hairdresser. “But I’m not,” she announced, her head’s reflection still floating in my mirror.

“And that’s why you were late,” he said in French, laughing.

The conversation ended as quickly as it started, and the woman sat herself down in a chair for a shampoo.

Turning his attention back to me, he made a reference to one pro and one anti-Syrian Lebanese politician and asked:

“Are you with or against Aoun? Or do you prefer Geagea?”

I mumbled something about not caring a whole lot for internal politics in Lebanon.

“Ah, mais vous êtes Syrienne. Vous aimez Hariri,” he concluded, half testing if I understood French, another telltale political sign for some Lebanese.

Fortunately, he got distracted and forgot to wait for an answer. When he finished my hair, I paid in US dollars, then thanked him in French. I walked out into the street, and my hair looked fabulous.

more fun with citrus fruits

Thanks to Qifa Nabki’s very helpful comments on my last post, the bulk of my follow-up post on citrus fruits has already been covered: that pomegranates are called “roman” (rumman) not because they were thought to come from Rome, but from a common Hebrew/Arabic/Aramaic root r/m/n. As a charming Austrian site called “Spice Pages” notes:

In many European languages, the weapon shell has names similar to granate or grenade. These derive from the same Latin word granum grain: The reference is to the many fragments resulting from the detonation of a shell. Remarkably, also in Hebrew the word rimon [רימון] may mean both pomegranate fruit and shell. The underlying Semitic root, RMN, means high, exalted and does not refer to grainy-ness.

(While doing some pre-QN research online, I also came across a sweet, pomegranate-centered post by an Israeli Arab, which you might also enjoy reading.)

Okay – so pomegranates are covered. But what H and I really went to town about was the word for “grapefruit”.

I don’t remember ever buying or ordering grapefruit in Lebanon – I’m just not that into citrus. And if I did, the only way I would be able to do so would be in French. “Pamplemousse” is the only word I know for “grapefruit”. So when H told me what he learned as the Arabic term – hamoud something – I had nothing to say.

Instead, I went back to my dictionary, which identifies “grapefruit” as “laymun hindi”, “laymun al-janna”, or the slightly giggle-able “krabe froot”.

The Indian lemon? The paradise lemon? I needed another opinion – so I asked A, who was busy doing some real work.

What would you say for “grapefruit” in Arabic? I asked.

I’d have to use French, A replied, sighing at my interruption. I’d say “griffon”.

What? I asked. “Griffon” isn’t the French word for “grapefruit”.

Hmm, A replied. You’re right. I think a griffon is a kind of dog.

I sighed. The griffon is a dog: a small, Belgian breed.

I think I have it now, A said a bit later. I could say “bomelo”, but its not exactly a grapefruit.

Pomelos do seem to be related to grapefruits: this site describes them as grapefruit’s “ancient ancestor”. I thought at first that this might be the fruit that used to grow in M’s courtyard in Damascus, but it was sour and had a much more puckered surface. The sites I found claim that grapefruit was created when early medieval “Arab traders” brought grapefruits to Spain, where they were bred with oranges – but I’d like to see some footnotes before wholly buying into this story.

In any case, if you are interested in grapefruit from a more professional standpoint, you might enjoy purchasing a copy of this report: “The World Market for Fresh or Dried Grapefruit: A 2009 Global Trade Perspective“. At 637 Euros a copy, its a bargain.