8 - 14 February 2001
Issue No.520
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 8 - 14 February 2001 Issue No.520 |
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At a glance
A shorthand guide to the month compiled by Mahmoud El-Wardani
Books
Al-Tariq Ila Qlabak (The Way to Your Heart), Adel Imam, Cairo: General Organisation for Cultural Palaces (Family Library Publications), 2000. pp278
The renowned cardiologist's reader-friendly compendium of medical facts and tidbits, intended for the patient rather than the physician, is informative, exhaustive and illustrated. Adel Imam invokes his authority as a public figure to expound a wealth of medical knowledge, describing the heart as humanity's most fascinating and invaluable organ. The book deals with the various kinds of heart disease, their causes and symptoms and (mainly surgical) cures. Yet the author brings many non-medical traditions to bear on his text, quoting classic poetry and devoting a good portion of his book to explaining, demystifying and throwing in medical relief the popular mythology of the heart as a source of life and a guardian of the emotions.
Al-Quds: Sira' wa Tarikh (Jerusalem: Conflict and History), Tareq Azab, Cairo: Al-Ahram Publications, 2001. pp247
A journalist since 1977, the author of this book has worked in many departments of the national press, eventually specialising in Arab affairs. His work has enabled him to travel extensively around the region, including southern Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories, acquiring first-hand experience of a wide range of topics and gathering momentum for an even narrower focus. The present volume is an expansive analysis of the issue of Jerusalem, one of the overriding stumbling blocks in the Arab Israeli peace process. And the author brings to his topic a broad spectrum of accurate data and informed commentary on the history of the city, the circumstances of its overtake by the Zionist movement and the Islamic and Christian heritage it contains. As a reference work and a historical record, the book sums up its topic in a uniquely effective way.
Sharq Nama, a Quarterly of Iranian, Turkish and Central Asian Affairs, Issue No.1, Cairo: Dar Al-Mustaqbal Al-Arabi, Winter 2000/2001. pp54
According to the opening editorial of this new quarterly dedicated to Central Asia, Turkey and Iran, the purpose of this publication is to forge new terms with which to understand this strategically crucial region as a whole, particularly as a way of restoring cultural communication between the states that make it up. This programme, it is explained, is undertaken with a view to increasing the region's role in shaping its future and lifting the "suffocation" that has enveloped it over the last few hundred years as a result of foreign control. Sharq Nama, therefore, aims to be a "small route," hopefully among many others, towards regional cultural autonomy, promoting a collective stance towards the issues with which it deals and neither denying the past nor regarding it as sacred. It is from this collective position, the editorial continues, that the region may both open up to the world and take up its own proper position in world culture.
Tanzim Al-Nisa' (Organising Women: Formal and Informal Women's Groups in the Middle East), Dawn Chatty, Annika Rabo, eds, Damascus: Dar Al-Mada, 2001. pp269
Paradoxically this book, dealing with Arab issues and bringing together an impressive array of Arab woman writers, has appeared first in English. Both its editors and contributors have had extended field-work experience in Arab women's groups, and their essays variously deal with the central question of what happens when women attempt to organise themselves in the Arab World. Such, in a nutshell, was the research topic proposed at a workshop on the subject held by the Oxford University Centre for Cultural Research on Women, to which the papers collected here were first submitted. From formal and informal women's groups in Bahrain to the "reproduction of the political process" among women activists in Lebanon, the papers collected here offer a rich, varied and authentic account of an essential dimension of Arab life.
Al-Fallahoun wal-Sulta (The Fellahin and Power), Sayed Ashmawi, Cairo: Miret Publications, 2001. pp286
As the author of this book indicates, the idea behind it emerged prior to a meeting of the Egyptian Society for Historical Studies, to which he had submitted an earlier, shorter version of the book's argument. Dealing with the 20th-century period from 1919 on, Ashmawi traces the development of political consciousness among the fellahin, the forms that class conflict assumed in the provinces, their battle against oppression in the form of taxes and the confiscation of land, harvests and cattle, and their contribution to the national struggle. The author draws on Arabic literature dealing with these issues, starting with the work of Tawfiq El-Hakim, and he is not afraid to be geographically expansive, covering events and movements from the Upper Egypt to the Delta. He also, valuably, continues his account through to events in the 1990s and describes the 1992 and 1996 protests in detail.
Taqrir Al-Itijahat Al-Iqtisadiya Al-Istratijiya (Report on Economic Strategic Trends), Ahmed El-Sayed El-Naggar, ed., Cairo: Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, 2001. pp319
The most recent of Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies' reports on the religious, political and social state of the country, the importance of this volume derives as much from its direct and informative approach as from the relevance of its subject. Written collectively by a broad array of Arab scholars and researchers, it comprises a thorough analysis of strategy and economy in Egypt, the Arab World and beyond, illuminating the economic future from a variety of sometimes incompatible perspectives. From an opening survey of recent world and regional economic issues, the report goes on to offer concrete proposals on how best to increase Arab integration, participation and interaction in the future world economy.
Al-Islam Al-Khawariji (Kharijite Islam), Ahmed M'ieta, Lataqia: Dar Al-Hiwar for Printing and Publication, 2001. pp265
Declaring their contemporaries to be apostates, The Khawarij called for eliminating the centralised authority of the caliphate, yet they led a unique life of collective frugality and equality between men and women. The present book deals with Khawarij beliefs and intellectual methods, as well as with the distinctive qualities of their poetry and art. The author believes that the poetic achievement of the Khawarij is a benchmark by which the history of Arabic poetry is to be measured, and he argues that the Khawarij's conception of art as the individual expression of a collective worldview stands out in Arab cultural history. This latter notion in particular, he says, represented the "de-commodification" of poetry at a time when the greatest Arab poets sought material gain through flattering the powers that be, often competing shamelessly against each other.
Taqdis Al-Shahwa: Al-Rumouz Al-Falakiya fil Nass Al-Qur'ani (Sanctifying Lust: Astrological Symbols in the Qur'anic Text), Ibrahim Mahmoud, Beirut and London: Dar Riyad Al-Rayes, 2000. pp372
In this remarkable book, a Syrian scholar investigates astrological and astronomical symbolism in the Qur'an in the light of questions that touch on the universe as a whole. Are humans the only example of conscious life in the universe? What were our ancestors like, and how might we relate to them? Is there any connection between Sourat Al-Baqara (The Cow sura in the Qur'an) and Taurus, the sign of the Zodiac? Does the Qur'an itself contain astrological information? The author indicates that his raising these questions is motivated more by a desire to extend our knowledge and the space within which it operates than by any attempt to find certain answers. Insofar as he does so, his book is as refreshing and provocative a read as one is likely to find anywhere.
Sabah Imra'a (A Woman's Morning), Ghalia Qabbani, Morocco and Lebanon: The Arab Cultural Centre, 2000. pp170
A failed marriage, an unexpected military invasion and all the questions that lie in between: in this terse fictional account of the Gulf War, Ghalia Qabbani draws on her personal experience, the social circumstances surrounding the war and the marks it left on the lives of Arabs working in Kuwait at the time. The collective nightmare of invasion is shown to complicate the meaning of the break-up of the marriage of the novel's protagonists, thereby investing recent Arab history with all the melancholy of a drawn-out divorce. However, distinctive as Qabbani's novel may be, it is still largely a further rendition of the story of a whole generation of educated Arabs who adopted national and leftist principles, witnessed the collapse of what they had stood for, and abandoned themselves to money-making in the oil-rich Gulf, suffering moral dissipation and human loss as they did so.
Muqawama (Resistance), Soha Bishara, French edition produced in collaboration with Gilles Paris, Beirut: Dar Al-Saqi, 2000. pp254
Introducing this, her unique first-hand account of years spent in prison, Soha Bishara writes, "a communist and liberated student from an Orthodox Christian, but essentially Lebanese family, I fought from early adolescence against foreign presence in my land. And I paid with my freedom as a result, being put in a prison cell without trial and without any way of knowing the number of years that I would spend there." The number, the reader discovers, was 10, the prison in question being the Khayam, and the crime the attempted assassination of the notorious chief of Israel's proxy militia, the South Lebanese Army, Antoine Lahd. The story of the book is as interesting as that of its subject. Years after her release, an expatriate living in Paris, Bishara received a package in the post, and, unwrapping it, she found her own hand-written prison journals, which had been sent to her by a journalist who had stumbled on them in Lebanon.
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