Powerless

Nelly used to Rock before she started wearing tiny clothes and acting mainstream !

Frightful Fistula

I remember reading in a book by Louis de Bernières on the First World War; that in war one learns that there is no end to the things that can be shoved up a woman. Then yesterday I read an article about Fistula problems.

The militias in the Congo find conflict with other armed combatants too dangerous and so it is far easier to assault civilians. The simplest way to terrorise any population being, to rape brutally.

So if not penetration by militia men then by their guns, knives, bayonets or sticks sometimes even by firing into the vaginas of their victims. These foreign objects often break into their bladders and cause fistulas or a hole in the tissues as a result of which urine and faeces constantly trickle down their legs.

These women have very little or no hope of survival or care due to the difficult nature of the problem and the scarcity of any type of health care in most war torn areas. So often they lie there and just wait for death. They are incontinent, paralysed and often abandoned because of the constant smell.

Although it took the UN until 2008 to recognise that it was more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict and that rape was a war crime, the reality plays out in the Congo –among other areas- daily and the UN’s ‘great’ discovery without funding for fistula hospitals and more emphasis and provision of health care and equipped hospitals in war zones sadly changes NOTHING.

Bianchi Giampaolo's Black Tuareg

Rain on Me

Sing to me
in the melody of the drizzle
as it teases the sand in a flirty dance
Wink at me
with the electric suggestion of the lightning
in its opening act before the storm
Reach out to me
as the wind does to the clouds
drawing them closer in a comforting embrace
Kiss me
in a thunderous shower of passion
Drench me in your love

Prophetess

 From jurisprudence comes comes a singular but fascinating discussion as to whether a prophet can be a woman - answered in the affirmative for a nabiyy (a prophet who brings no divine law) but not for a rasul (a prophet with a divine law).

-Images of Muhammad by Tarif Khaldi

Nature Needs Heros

I LOVED this advert!

Mount of Mercy ... For Those Undertaking The Hajj

Photo: Abid Katib/Getty Images

The Greater Pilgrimage 

---

It is the ninth day of Zul-Hijjah and the greater pilgrimage has started. Where are you? It does, not matter! Wherever you may be - at Masjid-ul-Haram near Kaaba, in your hotel or on the street - now you must depart for the greater pilgrimage. Wear your Ihram attire and leave Mecca. How surprising, to leave Mecca behind you! Was not Qibla, here in Mecca? Yes it was, but the greater pilgrimage commences by leaving the Kaaba!!!

Were you not supposed to depart from your families, homes, lands and etc, in order to come to Mecca and face the Qibla ? Yes, you were; however, that was during the lesser Hajj (Umrah). And, why should you leave Kaaba now? Because you are going to start the greater Hajj! 
Deciding to go to Mecca is not the total actualization of Hajj nor are Kaaba or Qibla the goals of Hajj. These are misunderstandings on your part. The leader of monotheism (Ibrahim) teaches you that Hajj does not end in Kaaba, but begins the moment you leave the Kaaba. It is not your destination but the point from which you start!

Until now (at Kaaba), you were to become assimilated, ignore your personal interests, overcome your self-centeredness and your limitations and discover "yourself". Oh "immigrant" who is going to see "Him" (Allah), from here on you will be pursuing a different path and entering a new land. For Umra and in Miqat you were to leave "your house", but here for Hajj you must leave the "house of Allah"! 
At the verge of complete submission and the peak of your freedom, when you have discovered "yourself' - you are now qualified to obey this command: "Leave the Kaaba; and now you are closer to Me than Kaaba!" Visiting Kaaba during the lesser pilgrimage helped you to achieve self-discovery. Now you are going to approach Allah, not to visit the "house" but to see the "owner"! 
Quran XXIV:42 & XXXV:18 
Unto Allah is the journeying. 

Kaaba is only the "direction and not the "destination". You started off by coming "to Kaaba" but you are not to remain "in Kaaba".  

To give you direction so that you would not be misled by other Qiblas, Kaaba was your Qibla. However, in Mecca, the Qibla is someplace else. You must decide to go there and start a greater journey than coming to Mecca (i.e. the greater pilgrimage) 

So, on the day of departure (ninth of Zul-Hijjah), regardless of where you are, put on your Ihram, turn your back to Mecca and move on ...! What place is holier and more respectful than Mecca? Continue on; you will see ...! 

Ali Shariati

 

Mehmet's Heaven

Image Source: www.oeger.de

Skirting the hem of the travertine in the speckled moonlight we reluctantly left the delectable white meringue ruffles of the Cotton Castle to seek sustenance of a more conventional kind. To our delight almost hidden beneath the skirt we came upon Mehmet standing expectantly in the middle of the narrow road leading into the village of Pamukale, the quintessential innkeeper, stocky and pink with a ruglike welcoming moustache, he ushered us into his little heaven.

The tinkling laughter inside came from a group of Japanese houris tucked comfortably around a small round table; nargli fumes hovering like a translucent mist above them.

The coal fire in the middle of the room glowed furiously lighting up magical carpets of every hue of red, ochre and peacock blue, striking a fading portrait, a strange old metal ornament and the glasses that Mehmet produced with a jovial whisk.

“Hot Apple tea,” he announced, the smell of fresh green apples and cinnamon   and his warm greetings and salutations were embraced with woops of delight. “Salaam Alaykum” was our key to unconditional hospitality and an immediate sense of familiarity and kinship. Mehmet’s wife looked up from her knitting and his son, a fifteen year old hesitated and then beamed a tentative smile before returning to the serial he and his mother were watching. This was a family vignette, our family if we had been home on this cold winter’s night, tucked away in this cosy little café.

Mehmet regaled us with snippets of his life, he had grown up in the mountains hugging Pamukale, no he didn’t own farmlands, and the village was the heart of tourism and agriculture. “Very few tourist come in winter, this has been a bad year, especially, and the snow’s thick and wallets empty. The recession,” he shrugged fatalistically “next year Insha Allah.”

Our orders taken, all three members of the family disappear behind walled carpets leaving us to soak in the Anatolian   simplicity and randomness that gradually assumed wholeness, completeness over years. Mehmet’s soul was everywhere in old faded photographs, in the red faded fez that clung to the edge of a bench, an old sewing machine, khanjars, hand painted porcelain, alabaster vases, a picture of Ataturk. Old and new was thrown together in heavenly disarray, exciting our curiosity and triggering conversations about history, culture and Turkey’s courtship with the European Union.

The food arrived, the aroma of the steaming shorba, homemade bread and kebabs and ample portions of tender chops decked with the freshest herbs filled the wooden table. Food that is blessed has barakat, eighth-century Imam Jafar al-Sadiq said, "When you sit at the table with your brothers, sit long, for it is a time that is not counted against you as part of the ordained span of your lives". I hope he meant sisters too could sit awhile and savour the warmth of family and friends. The Arabic root of adab is "to invite," or "to gather together for a banquet. Hospitality is regarded as sacred duty in Islam, and this linguistic connection illuminates the significance of the relationship of guest and host. Our host, didn’t need to look like a dervish to embody the qualities of graciousness, slipping away quietly leaving us to say Bismillah and to thank Allah for bringing us to this little heaven at the foot of yet another of his amazing creations.

Pamukale in the bright winter light gleamed white in counterpoint to the snow capped mountains in the distance, we couldn’t resist its magnificence at night after the generous meal, at Mehmet’s insistence, we had braved the sharp air, up to the entrance to Hierapolis. The moonlight cast intriguing shadows of the ruins and the ancient turrets beckoned, but my animal magnetism was too strong for the stray dogs to resist. It started quite harmlessly; a scrawny dog his tail wagging stealthily nudged close to my feet, as I ambled slowly around the grand entrance to the thermal wonder, I didn’t mind him, but as we walked he emitted a slow whine that revved up to a plaintive howl and suddenly as if commanded by a battle cry, dogs emerged from every fallen column and crevice, a cavalcade of shapes and sizes from whimpering to full throttle war cries, I saw my companions’ amazement turn to discomfort and fear as a dozen or more dogs surrounded me. Strangely, they were not aggressive just overwhelmingly howling and closing in on me. Pamukale had to wait till the safety of morning. 

The carpet of shy red anemones that greeted us that morning soothed any anxiety we may have had, the long path led to the ancient Roman ruins to our right on hills above the travertine. First the Greeks and then the Romans claimed this natural wonder as a gift from Zeus and Pluto as they cavorted in the hot underground springs perplexed by the phenomenon but relishing the curative potential, sadly like all human power theirs diminished and now lay in crumbling testimony to the ravages of time.

The fascination for us, lay in the layers of shell-like basins of the purest almost blinding white with gushing channels of hot steaming water; barefoot, trousers rolled up, we plunged into the shallows of an inviting shell. The basins of chalk and calcified frills gleamed like open oysters inviting us to wade in its hot centre as rivulets poured over the edge, clung to the precipice of shell after shell forming new ones, the hot spring deep in the bowels of the earth gushes out generously into the sacred pool. In the midst of the Mediterranean winter the pools are empty of swimmers, splashing comfortably, ensconced on the solidified edges, we marvel at nature’s resilience and unique gift to man, giving abundantly unceasingly, could this be “ the rivers of milk whereof the flavour changeth not….” as mentioned in the Quran (Surah Muhammed verse 15). 

The Desert Muse

From Nights & Horses & the Desert - An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature

Edited by Robert Irwin:

Most of what we know about Arabia in the age of Jahiliyya, the pagan period of 'Ignorance' prior to the preaching of Islam, both concerns poetry and has been transmitted in the form of poetry. According to a ninth-century philologist and biographer of poets, al-Jumahi, 'In Jahili age, verse was to the Arabs the register of all they knew, and the utmost compass of their wisdom; with it they began their affairs, and with it they ended them.' According to another saying, 'Poetry is the public register [diwan] of the Arabs: by its means genealogies are remembered and glorious deeds handed down to posterity.' According to the fourteenth-century North African philosopher-historian, Ibn Khaldun, 'The Arabs did not know anything except poetry, because at that time, they practised no science and knew no craft.'

Pre-Islamic poetry composed in the Arabian peninsula (as well as in what is now southern Iraq) celebrated the values of nomadic, camel-rearing tribal life. Poets boasted of the tribes' exploits, commemorated tribal genealogies and celebrated inter-tribal feuds and camel raids. Metre and rhyme were mnemonic aids in preserving a tribe's history. The poetry they produced enshrined the tribal values of desert warriors: courage, hardihood, loyalty to one's kin, and generosity. The theme of vengeance features prominantly in early Arabic poetry. the Jahili Arabs believed that dead men in their graves become owls and, if a man's killing was unavenged by his kinsmen, then the owls would rise from the earth crying, 'Give me to drink! Give me to drink!' Poetry was also used to convey wisdom and moral precepts with a more general application. Aphorisms in verse formed part of the common conversation stock.

The Prophet Muhammed is said to have declared that 'Verily eloquence includes sorcery'. In pre-Islamic Arabia the boundary between writing a poem and casting a spell was far from clear. Poetry was commonly referred to as sihr halal (legitimate magic). Tribal poets saw their poetry as a kind of sorcery by means of which one could build up one's own strength and weaken that of one's enemies. Poets were inspired by jinns. A qarin means 'companion', but it has the special sense of a jinn who accompanies a poet and inspires him, thus acting as his genius. Not satisfied with inspiring poets, the jinns were also known to compose poetry in their own right. The soothsayers (kahins) of the Jahili period made use in their incantations of a rhythmic form of rhymed prose, known as saj', as well as of a crude, folk-poetry metre known as rajaz. In the very earliest period the distinction between a soothsayer and a poet was blurred.

Tuareg Women Of Algeria

(Picture Source: Google)

Voyager Dust

When they arrive in the country,
voyagers carry it on their shoulders,
the dusting of the sky they left behind
The woman on the bus in the downy sweater,
I could smell it in her clothes
It was voyager's dust from China
It lay in the foreign stitching of her placket
It said: We will meet again in Beijing,
in Guangzhou. We will meet again.
My mother had voyager's dust in her scarves
I imagine her a new student like this woman on the bus,
getting home, shaking out the clothes from her suitcase,
hanging up, one by one, the garments from the old country
On washing day my mother would unroll her scarves
She'd hold one end, my brother or I the other,
and we'd stretch the wet georgette and shake it out
We'd dash, my brother or I, under the canopy,
its soft spray on our faces like the ash
of debris after the destruction of a city,
its citizens driven out across the earth.
We never knew
it was voyager dust. It said:
We will meet again in Damascus,
in Aleppo. We will meet again.
It was Syria in her scarves.
We never knew it
Now it is on our shoulders too

1999


Poem by Mohja Kahf
published in Emails From Scheherazad

Child's Play

Emirati girls in traditional bedouin dress playing after the camel race at the Sweihan Camel Festival

Source: www.lightstalkers.org
Photographer: Nicole Hill

Giving Her the Finger

The most sadistic thing that could be done to a rape victim is for her to be violated again and again after the assault. When that violation is perpetrated by the examining doctors, it is unforgivable. If a woman claims to have been raped and seeks medical assistance in most developed countries and several developing or under developed countries, she will undergo a procedure that allows for forensic evidence to be gathered. A rape kit is used, which most often includes medical swabs for collecting fluids, blood collection devices, forensic glass slides for lab processing and other devices. Most emergency doctors should be trained, with specific guidelines on how to conduct a rape examination, and that training should include bedside manner with a victim of rape, who would be highly sensitive as a result of the trauma she may have incurred. 

In India, however, it has been "normal" practice for doctors to conduct what is known as the finger test on rape victims. This despicable act involves the doctor sticking two of his fingers into the vagina of the victim to determine whether or not her hymen is intact or if she is accustomed to having sex. How this can be accepted as "standard procedure" is beyond my comprehension! Apart from lacking any sensitivity and presuming promiscuity on the part of the victim it also discounts the various possible rape scenarios, including marital rape! Shockingly, these tests are being conducted in huge state hospitals even in the more developed cities and the "evidence" acquired in these tests is admissible in a court of law to discredit and tarnish the woman's character and morality, further violating her. It is no wonder that women who have been victims of rape are so afraid to come forward and give evidence against the perpetrator. There's a long line of perpetrators including the doctors and lawyers!

Human Rights Watch has recently issued a detailed report, calling the finger test inhumane and unscientific. There are civil society campaigns trying to introduce international protocols in evidence collection in rape cases but sadly the fight is still in its infancy.

The Day of the Dead

Salud and an embrace to reach to Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras. There is no doubt that death is enamoured with poverty.

From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.
Subcomandante insurgente Marcos.
Mexico, November of 1998.

P.S. Disguised as zapatista graffiti:
Death will die mortally dead. From death we shall kill, from life.

P.S. A story is told of the Day of the Dead: It is the custom of our peoples to set out an offering for the dead every year in the celebrations from October 31 until the dawn of November 2. In addition to flowers and ornaments made of paper, between two candles, some food is gathered, whatever the deceased most liked, and, if he smoked, some tobacco. Some say this offering is to remind the dead person that he still has roots in life, that he walks in others, that he continues in others. Others say this offering is in case the dead person comes and is in need of food and rest, because he has not achieved what he wanted, and the deceased still goes about, seeking. The search can last for a long time, but the dead person is not saddened, because he knows he can return each year to his family to gain strength and to gather heart and so continue on his path.

To remind him that he still has roots on this side and that he walks in us and he continues, and in order to recover strength and hope in his search, each year the zapatistas put out an offering for Pedro (fallen in combat in 1974, raised up again fallen again in combat in 1994, raised up again, struggling always). At the dawn of each November 2, thousands of offerings in so many other indigenous homes shine for Pedro.

Each of the last four years, Don Jacinto offered to watch over the offering which we put out because of and for Pedro in the General Headquarters of the EZLN. Every year, with the arrival of the morning of November 2, the food and the tobacco which we had put out on the little table for this purpose, had disappeared. And early on we would find Don Jacinto leaving the little room with the offering, we would greet him and he would respond with a "the deceased came, he ate and drank, and he smoked the tobacco." We all knew it was Don Jacinto who had eaten the little plate with the bread and two oranges, who had drunk the coffee without sugar which Pedro worshipped, and who had smoked the little box of cigarettes (24 stubs were left scattered about). All of us knew. Not now.

Don Jacinto died a few weeks ago, after being brutally beaten in one of those attacks of the "State of Law" against the indigenous autonomous municipalities. Don Jacinto did not die, his son told me, they killed him. And he explains to me that it is not the same to die of death as to die of being killed.

Each year since 1994, Pedro's offering dawned empty on the morning of November 2. All of us knew that Don Jacinto had taken notice of it during the evening. All of us knew. On the day of October 31, 1998, we put out the offering as was our custom, but now with the added sadness of knowing that Don Jacinto would not be here to watch over it and to take notice of the bread, the oranges, the coffee and the tobacco, as we all knew. The morning of this November 2 we went to clean up the offering, and we found the plate with bread empty, the orange rinds, the little cup of coffee with grounds, and the stubs on the floor. It is curious, the rinds and the stubs were on both sides of the table, in equal parts: 12 stubs on one side and 12 on the other, the rind of one orange on one side, and the other on the other. We all looked at each other and we were silent, only the sea said: "The year which is coming, you will have to put out double."

All of us knew that Pedro's offering dawned empty because Don Jacinto took notice of it. All of us knew. Not now.

All of this occurred at the dawn of the month of November of 1998, in the fifteenth year of the armed rebellion and the fifth of the war against forgetting, in the mountains of the Mexican southeast, dignified corner of the Patria, in the America they call "Latin," in the third planet of the solar system, just when, in the worn wheel of history, a century which some call "Twenty," is about to extinguish itself, all of which I bear witness to, and I affirm that it is destined to remain in the collective memory, which is another way of naming tomorrow.

P.S. For the February which is concealed in November: Now we are more and stronger. All of our dead will arrive. And so by nature are our dead: they make us great. Great to us, so small...

The Sup, asking for his little skull...

What Is Love ?

"Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being "in love", which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident." 

— Louis de Bernières (Captain Corelli's Mandolin)