How to measure a mountain

Managed to sneak a letter into today's Guardian review in support of the Persian polymath al-Biruni (973-1048) against Renaissance hegemony.

Letter and accompanying cartoon.

On Casting the Safety Net

You can bring yourself up to date with the 4th instalment of my BMJ Blog here.

A Brief Break in Beirut

On returning from Hajj I was pleased to see that my account of a short stay in Beirut earlier this year has been published in this month's Emel magazine.

A Brief Break in Beirut

We stood out like the proverbial sore thumb. In reality, it was a sore foot and some luminous yellow crutches that made us stand out. A few days previously, across the border in the Syrian capital, my wife had re-enacted her own Damascene moment at the Eastern Gate of the Old City. Rather than a blinding light catalysing a religious revolution, her episode involved a stack of paving slabs and a third metatarsal, necessitating a visit to the nearby French missionary hospital. So it was with a limb wrapped in plaster of Paris and copious pain-killers that we crossed the border, one April evening, into Lebanon in the back of a weathered Chevrolet with an equally weathered taxi-driver at the wheel.

We were advised to give a wide berth to Lebanon let alone the volatile southern suburbs of Beirut. Since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on Valentine’s Day in 2005, Lebanon has experienced a string of assassinations, rising political and sectarian tensions and a 34-day war fought between Israel and Hezbollah. The collective wisdom of the Lonely Planet’s online Thorn Tree Forum helped us put aside our misgivings though. As we checked into the Mayflower Hotel we drew further comfort from the knowledge that this hotel, a former hangout for seasoned journalists, had safely housed these hacks during the brutal civil war.

The Mayflower lies very near to the uber-fashionable Hamra Street (or in keeping with Beirut’s French-leaning sensibilities, Rue Hamra), the retail heart of Beirut. Fashionistas and fashion-victims patrol the street and emerge from gleaming SUVs. During daylight hours the street is thronging with shoppers and by night it transforms into an open-air catwalk. There are some gems amidst the endless clothes shops including the Lebanese branch of the ground-breaking Al-Saqi books, just off the main road. Bibliophiles can also find a cluster of bookshops near the American University of Beirut, originally a missionary outpost know as the Syrian Protestant College, locally referred to simply as AUB. Librairie du Liban, the publishing house responsible for the ubiquitous Arabic dictionary by Hans Wehr and the increasingly common place Lane’s Lexicon, is amongst them.

Soon we were drawing not only comfort but courage from the souls that had passed through the Mayflower and it wasn’t long before we found ourselves braving a freak rain shower to attend a photography exhibition in southern Beirut. We’d picked up an emotive flyer in a theatre foyer the previous day advertising the exhibition entitled Algerie: Photographies d’une guerre sans images (Algeria: Photographs of a war without images). The showing was taking place at the unassuming but outrageously named Hangar, on Haret Hreik. As we entered the southern districts of Beirut the areas’ political affiliations became increasingly apparent; forests of Amal and Hezbollah flags and insignia vied for prime position in our field of vision. The central reservation of the road we were driving along soon sprouted a column of street lamps, each hosting a picture of a fighter killed in the recent conflict with Israel.

The exhibition, hosting a decade’s worth of photography by Michael von Graffenried from the Algerian civil war, was a moving collection. The images captured the incredible human suffering, injustice and brutality of that conflict. The parallels with Lebanon’s own situation did not go undetected.

We emerged from the Hangar into yet another downpour and quickly made our way to the nearby Ramadhan Juice at the Ghobayri Crossroad to take shelter. A muscular bearded man with a neck wider than his head sat at the till and politely enquired what we’d like to drink, pointing to the framed menu behind him. Alongside the menu was a huge mural of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah looking benevolently down upon the juice drinkers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first drink on the menu was a Katyusha rocket cocktail. After much deliberation though we opted for the less incendiary and far simpler mixed fruit cocktail and watched some al-Manar as we sipped our concoctions.

The dilemma that faces amateur Arabists when travelling through the Middle East is one of language. Modern standard and even classical Arabic are far more commonly taught in the West whereas the language on the street, ‘aamiyyeh or colloquial Arabic, is a far cry from the rigid grammatical structure of its more formal counterparts. Needless to say we reduced many Lebanese to tears of laughter as we requested assistance, directions and prices in the equivalent of Shakespearean English.

The language of food (and not only love) is thankfully universal. We enjoyed some excellent meals in Beirut, none surpassing the wares offered at the longstanding Kabab-ji which has outlets throughout Lebanon. The delicious kebabs and mezze being served up were even more palatable with some sumptuous muhammara, a walnut and roasted red pepper accompaniment. Nearer to our hotel, a Swiss patisserie that appeared to be untouched since the French mandate, provided us with some tasty treats. (To the genial old lady running the store, I extend my apologies for dripping coffee all over your shop floor).

A crucial stopover in Beirut has to be the corniche, where the Mediterranean Sea laps at the Lebanese shoreline. The people-spotter buried in each of us cannot fail to be unearthed by the panoply of characters promenading alongside the coast. We wandered past Pigeons’ Rock, an outcrop of rock jutting up from the mainland not dissimilar to some of the physical geography off the Dorset coast, and our collective consciousness was suddenly invaded with the dredges of GCSE geography that we carried with us.

The much lauded Downtown area proved to be a bit of an underwhelming experience. The area was the cultural heart of the city before being destroyed in the civil war. It has been painstakingly restored but the perfect, unblemished facades of the buildings make it feel a little surreal. Several security cordons were filtering access to the area resulting in a disproportionate number of well-to-do Beirutis dining al fresco while their rotund children were chased around with spoonfuls of food by their Philippino nannies. The fact that I was frisked by one of these security cordons did nothing to endear Downtown to us. However, there is something undeniably alluring about strolling around amidst the vestiges (some original, but mostly touched-up) of a huge spectrum of architectural periods and forms from Crusader to Ayyubid and from Mamluk to Ottoman.

We hailed a taxi outside Charles Helou bus station to take us back to Damascus without much difficulty. Our apparent stroke of good fortune was soon blacked out by the cigarette fumes from the living chimney that was our taxi driver. Through the clouds of ash we struggled to see him and breathing became a little tricky until we convinced him that on this occasion, open windows was a better choice than air conditioning. He soon got talking and was elated by me underestimating his age by a decade. He disclosed that he was a father of four allegedly demanding children and as a result not a great fan of Eid.

Our driver got us safely back to the Old City in Damascus and once again we felt like we’d stepped out of a time machine.

Postscript

A month after our visit, the country erupted in yet another bout of the cyclical violence that has plagued the tiny state. A poignant extract from Khalil Gibran’s ‘The Prophet’ follows the title page of Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation and it remains just as resonant.

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats a bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not from its own winepress.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.
Pity the nation that despises a passion in its dream, yet submits in its awakening.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block.
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.
Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpetings once again.
Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strong men are yet in the cradle.
Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.

Sweet Cider

It was worth making the effort to get to the penultimate showing of Sweet Cider, Emteaz Hussain’s stage debut for Tamasha productions. It helps that I am enamoured with the plethora of Turkish grill restaurants, or mangal ocakbasis, that encircle the Arcola theatre in Dalston. (My cousin recently changed my life by introducing me to Hasan Meze & Mangal whose grilled onion with pomegranate juice, olive oil and lemon juice is simply superb).

The play itself was both charming and challenging. The audience is invited to share an unspecified period of time with two Muslim girls from somewhere near Manchester as they rebuild their lives having been forced to relocate to a women's refuge. It was refreshing to see the idiosyncratic Northern Anglo-Pakistani dialect replicated so wonderfully well on stage.

My only criticism would have to be the writer's succumbing to dealing with seemingly every single issue affecting British Muslim youth at the expense of character development. A noteworthy debut nonetheless.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes

Earlier this week I managed to pop in to the London Literature Festival taking place at the Southbank Centre and hear Mohammed Hanif read from his admittedly hilarious first novel 'A Case of Exploding Mangoes'. His laissez-faire demeanour, outrageous accent, deadpan delivery and the endless contortions of his plasticine face only added to the mirth. He also had to endure a conversation with the terribly 'high-society' Muneeza Mirza in which his rapier wit really left her reeling - a delight for the audience.

A Tate Coincidence

As part of the gruelling, evidence-based, intense training to make me into a(n even) better doctor, my tutorial group went to...the Tate Britain this afternoon!

For the cynical amongst you, it may not have been particularly gruelling or intense but the visit was evidence-based...sort of.

By strange coincidence whilst on the Victoria lie down to Pimlico, the book I've been reading, Iqbal Ahmed's Sorrows of the Moon, concluded with a passing reference to the Tate.

I visited the Tate Britain a few years after my arrival in Hampstead. When I saw the dreadful landscapes painted by John Constable, it reminded me of the middle-class women in Hampstead who raved about these paintings. I could not accept Forster's description of Hampstead as 'a thoughtful little suburb of London'. It had been painful for me to live in this neighbourhood. Its landscape, like the paintings of Constable, was very gloomy. It was an area where people apologized often but showed little kindness to others.

The Review, reviewed

This week's review has plenty to ponder over. Pankaj Mishra, in his now regular column, raises his bat to 'Joseph O'Neil's beautiful new novel Netherland', set in New York, which 'so skilfully uses cricket's particular morality to dramatise geopolitical as well as interpersonal conflicts'.

Elsewhere Jhumpa Lahiri is accused of failing 'to challenge the inadequacies of this elite America - the latent racism that underpins it - and, as a result, Unaccustomed Earth isn't a truly provocative or innovative American book'. However, the Guardian's editor in the main section lavishes her with praise.

The first volume of Amitav Ghosh's trilogy is set on a ship amidst the Opium Wars of the lat 19th century and discover the uses of a spatula mundani in Tony Horowitz's account of America post-Columbus and pre-Jamestown.

Reviewing The Review

Last Saturday's guardian review exceeded its usual quota of literary-appetite whetting. Three reviews in particular caught my eye. Firstly, the gushing praise lavished on Salman 'I actually look like the Devil' Rushdie's latest offering, a piece of historical fiction uniting the Medici clan, Machiavelli and Emperor Akbar!

Secondly, the bizarrely entertaining autobiography of Narendra Singh Sarela, former heir to the tiny princedom of Sarila in Central India.

This vibrant tale of growing up in princely India is unlike almost any other memoir in that it is so totally without personal points of reference for the reader. You never get that flash of recognition: oh yes, as a child I used to ritually behead a goat just like that! Or: how like the elephant I had as a pram when I was little! When Narendra Singh, heir to the tiny princedom of Sarila in central India, was first asked his name by a schoolteacher, he did not know how to answer: no one had ever needed to ask who he was before.

And finally, Asne Seierstad's The Angel of Grozny, an account of her clandestine return(s) to Chechnya to bring to our attention the plight of the Chechen people, in particular its forgotten orphans. The Digressive Mind and I managed to get to her recent reading at the ICA and were quite frankly completely underwhelmed by her lack of knowledge of the area and its people and her seemingly unashamed wish to capitalise on people's misfortunes. In fact, we were captivated by the person she was in conversation with - Tony Wood, deputy editor at New Left Review - and we ended up walking away with his book Chechnya: The Case for Independence!

Conrad, Galloway & Somnolence

I'm midway through Joseph Conrad's 'The Secret Agent', my first foray into Conrad's works, and am in awe of the ingenuity and clarity of his prose. Furthermore, the sheer audacity and subversiveness of the book, considering it's early 20th century origins, is amazing. The depiction of late Victorian London as a hotbed of anarchist activity wherein ordinary citizens unwittingly share public transport, meals and glances with others who are hell-bent on bringing chaos to the city's streets is ominously resonant with the London of today. (Incidentally, the National Portrait Gallery has a small collection of what can only be described as understated yet statesmanlike portraits of Conrad on display in Room 29 marking the 150th anniversary of his birth that are worth seeking out).

Elsewhere, George Galloway continues to entertain. This time on Newsnight.

The Wellcome Collection's newest exhibition entitled 'Sleeping and Dreaming' is worth a visit too if only to find out just how damaging a week of night-shifts can potentially be!

The Last King of Scotland

Giles Foden's excellent novel 'The Last King of Scotland' depicting the relationship between Idi Amin Dada, the eccentric and brutal Ugandan dictator, and his fictional personal physician, has been translated to the silver screen. It is previewing at this year's London Film Festival (incidentally celebrating its 50th anniversary).

See the trailer here.

All importantly, Peter Bradshaw gives it his thumbs up.

Foden reflects on his inspiration for the novel in a piece for the Guardian in 2003.

Some Idi Amin gems:

To Nixon after cuts in US aid to Uganda

My dear brother, it is quite true that you have enough problems on your plate, and it is surprising you have the zeal to add fresh ones. At this moment you are uncomfortably sandwiched in that uncomfortable affair [Watergate], I ask almighty God to solve your problems. We Ugandans hope that the great United States of America does not continue to use its enormous resources, especially its military might, to destroy human life on earth.

To Lord Snowdon after his split with Princess Margaret

Your experience will be a lesson to all of us men to be careful not to marry ladies in high positions.

On Middle Eastern affairs

Arab victory in the war with Israel is inevitable and prime minister of Israel Mrs Golda Meir's only recourse is to tuck up her knickers and run away in the direction of New York and Washington.

The Last Mughal

A thousand camels to Hadi Sahib for bringing the following Radio 4 'Book of the Week' serialisation to my attention.

Monday 25 - Friday 29 September 2006

The Last Mughal

By William Dalrymple, abridged by Libby Spurrier, read by Robert Bathurst

An account of the largest uprising the British Empire ever had to face.

The last of the Great Mughals was Bahadur Shah Zafar II: one of the most talented, tolerant and likeable of his remarkable dynasty, he found himself in the position of leader of a violent uprising he knew from the start would lead to irreparable carnage.

Zafar’s frantic efforts to unite his disparate and mutually suspicious forces proved tragically futile: the Siege of Delhi was the Raj’s Stalingrad, and Mughal Delhi was left an empty ruin, haunted by battered remnants of a past that was being rapidly and brutally overwritten.

John Maxwell Coetzee

I'm revisiting a collection of essays by J.M. Coetzee and am re-enthralled at his brillian prose. (I still haven't got round to reading his fiction despite tc's numerous prompts!)

On The Africans by Ali Mazrui

The camera has no ideology: it will lie on behalf of whoever points it and presses the button; it will lie even more persuasively when there is the right music in the background.

On The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie

If Rushdie's Satanic Verses outraged the dour literalists within Islam, then The Moor's Last Sigh is aimed at the fascist-populist element within the Hindu political movement. On Raman Fielding [a caricature of Bal Thackeray] Rushdie lavishes some of his most stinging satirical prose: 'In his low cane chair with his great belly slung across his knees like a burglar's sack, with his frog's croak of a voice bursting through his fat frog's lips and his little dart of a tongue licking at the edges of his mouth, with his hooded froggy eyes gazing greedily down upon the little beedi-rolls of money with which his quaking petitioners sought to pacify him...he was indeed a Frog King.'

I struggled to page 10 of The Moor's Last Sigh before bailing out; Rushdie's haughty narrator's tone and idionsyncratic style proved unbearable.

Naipaul's Second Chance

Don't worry. I'm not gracious enough to offer V S Naipaul a second chance. His brutal demolition by the late Prof Edward Said (in amongst other places the essay 'Among the Believers' found in his remarkable collection of essays entitled 'Reflections on Exile') rendered me more likely to eat a vegetable than read anything by Naipaul. (Those of you who know me will no doubt be smiling in recognition of my carnivorous tendencies). However, I must admit to being pleasantly surprised at the wonderful dialogue in Radio 4's dramatisation of Naipaul's book 'A House for Mr Biswas' over the weekend.

I couldn't possibly end with praise of Naipaul so here are some snippets of Said's cutting prose:

"In the post-colonial world he's marked as a purveyor of stereotypes and disgust for the world that produced him - although that doesn't exclude people thinking he's a gifted writer."

"…on the basis of his being a Trinidadian, [Naipaul] has had ascribed to him the credentials of a man who can serve as witness for the third world; and he is a very convenient witness. He is a third worlder denouncing his own people, not because they are victims of imperialism, but because they seem to have an innate flaw, which is that they are not whites."

Hosni Mubarak - the Idiots' Idiot

Why Hosni Mubarak would feel compelled to utter such stupidity I know not.

The episode does bring to mind a scene from Haroon Moghul's (AKA avari-nameh) wonderful novella The Order of Light wherein Egypt disintegrates into the brink of chaos and revolution looms as Hosni makes a terrible slip on public television. He is celebrating yet another term in power and his audience, the Egyptian masses, are stuperose - any semblance of choice comprehensively wrestled from their hands. He goes on to introduce himself with the usual grandiose honorifics but when it comes to his name he pronounces it 'Khosni' rather than Hosni and the irreparable damage is done.

The masses pick up on this seemingly innocuous error and interpret it as a predilection for Hebrew over its Semitic cousin Arabic providing sufficient evidence for them to conclude that Hosni is in fact an agent of their nuclear neighbour and they take to the streets!

Capturing the conqueror

Orhan Pamuk, recently exonerated from offending Turkish national sentiment by daring to mention the Armenian genocide, wrote a fascinating piece in this week's Guardian review on a new exhibition at the National Gallery - Bellini and the East.

The article offers a scholarly insight into the friction and cross-pollination that took place between Renaissance and Ottoman-Persian art that formed the basis of his groundbreaking My Name is Red. The book touched on the rivalry between miniaturists and calligraphers for recognition as being the truest depicters of Allah's creation; the former arguing that their work was most representative whereas the latter held that miniaturism was on a par with creation itself and therefore blasphemous.

The miniaturists developed their own code of conduct and elaborate social rituals - the pinnacle being reaching the point of blindness due to the demands of such intricate work, some artists deliberately blinding themselves to reap the honour of a station they didn't merit. The Safavid court's constant presence and the artistic warfare (besides the military warfare) between the competing sultanates is yet another strand Pamuk develops.

The most striking feature of the book though is the narration of the story (a murder mystery) piecemeal, each chapter told by a different character, including animals and inanimate objects.

No other sultan from the golden age of the Ottoman empire, not even Suleyman the Magnificent, has a portrait like this one. With its realism, its simple composition, and the perfectly shaded arch giving him the aura of a victorious sultan, it is not only the portrait of Mehmed II, but the icon of an Ottoman sultan, just as the famous poster of Che Guevara is the icon of a revolutionary. At the same time, the highly worked details - the marked protrusion of the upper lip, the drooping eyelids, the fine feminine eyebrows and, most important, the thin, long, hooked nose - make this a portrait of a singular individual who is none the less not very different from the citizens one sees in the crowded streets of Istanbul today. The most famous distinguishing feature is that Ottoman nose, the trademark of a dynasty in a culture without a blood aristocracy.

Letter published in The Guardian Review

In response to Oliver Miles' review of Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation. It's a shame they edited the letter's original title: Pedants Unite!

Role of Fatima

In addition to being the cousin of the prophet, as Ahdaf Soueif rightly points out in her response to Oliver Miles's review of Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation ("The big picture", November 19), Imam Ali was also the prophet's son-in-law by virtue of marrying his only daughter, Fatima. Miles is quite correct: "mistakes undermine the reader's confidence".Link

The suspense is killing me

Two juicy snippets of gossip from the literary world about William Dalrymple:

TRAVEL writer William Dalrymple has moved to Bloomsbury, following his editor Michael Fishwick with whom he worked closely for nearly 20 years at HarperCollins. Fishwick has bought five new books via agent David Godwin, the first of which, The Last Moghul, will be published in October 2006. Fishwick said: “I am immensely happy to have brought William Dalrymple to Bloomsbury. I have worked with him ever since I took on his first travel book, In Xanadu, nearly 20 years ago, and am looking forward to a similar period of time working with one of the greatest, most brilliant and exciting people writing today.” (Publishing News)

And from the Guardian:

He is now at work on a Mughal Quartet, four books telling the story of the Great Mughals from the time of Babur to the last Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. The first volume will be published by Bloomsbury next autumn.

Guardian pulls Chomsky interview

In response to a sorry excuse for an interview in The Guardian's G2 section (the original article has been removed from The Guardian's website but can be accessed here) Prof Noam Chomsky 'complained to the readers' editor over comments attributed to him about the Srebrenica massacre.'

The US academic and activist had complained that the October 31 interview, published in the newspaper and on Guardian Unlimited, falsely portrayed him as denying that massacres were committed there during the Bosnian war.

Professor Chomsky complained in particular about the headline for the interview which read: "Q: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated? A: My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough."

The Guardian's readers' editor, Ian Mayes, said today in a corrections and clarifications column printed in the paper, that no question in that form had been put by interviewer Emma Brockes to Prof Chomsky and that "the headline was wrong and unjustified by the text".

In an open letter dated November 13 on his official website Chomsky.info, Prof Chomsky attacked the Guardian interview as a "scurrilous piece of journalism" where the reporter had a definite agenda.

Chomsky's letter is worth a read.

Gliding

Camps Bay, Cape Town, South Africa. ©Tauseef Mehrali 2003

Letter to The Guardian

In response to a text box accompanying an article in today's Guardian:

Dear Sir

The information box outlining the Iranian President's 'devotion to a mystical religious figure' (Second coming - The president's beliefs, November 18) implies that the belief in the Mahdi is a cultish and exclusively Shi'a construct. In fact, the Mahdi is an integral figure in Islamic eschatology such that several individuals have laid claim to the title for various ends. The main difference between the Shi'a and Sunni perspectives is whether the Mahdi has been born or not. The former believe he has, is in a period of occultation and await his reappearance.