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Category Archives: Saudi Arabia
art of resistance, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen
04/24/2017 middleeastrevisedaden, dubai, laleh khalili, logistics, Middle east, migrant workers, ports, refugees, Saudi Arabia, transport, United Arab Emirates, Yemen Leave a comment
/We are the dream makers, Dubai by Arcadia Blank/
Laleh Khalili is professor of Middle East politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She is the author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge, 2007) and Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford 2013), and the editor of Modern Arab Politics (Routledge 2008) and co-editor (with Jillian Schwedler) of Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion (Hurst/Oxford 2010).
Khalili's most recent research projects deal with the politics and political economy of war and militaries as it intersects with infrastructure, logistics and transport with specific focus on the Middle East.
Your book Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies deals with continuities in counterinsurgencies, with the way tactics of war shifted to elaborate systems of detention and encouraged policy makers to willingly choose to wage wars. Doing the research for this book, what were the biggest discoveries for you personally?
The moment I decided to do the project was one of those great epiphanies. I was doing the final research on my first book, which was about Palestinian refugees. I was talking to a Palestinian man who was raised in Lebanon and served as a PLO fighter during the Lebanese civil war. He was captured and held in prisons inside Israel. Around the same time I was interviewing him, the Abu Ghraib pictures were published. He told me it was difficult for him to look at those pictures because he was also kept naked, and dogs were used to intimidate him while he was imprisoned. It was a surprise for me to hear that.
Why was it surprising?
We often hear about different methods of torture that don't leave marks used in these prisons, but the fact that there were other things, like dogs and nakedness, really interested me. When I started working on the project, which was originally about the different kinds of detention practices, the more I started to read, the more it became clear to me that this is not random. There is a particular way in which states that claim to be liberal, that claim to be following the rule of law and discourse of human rights, use particular methods of subjugation that seem to repeat across different contexts.
This was as true of the British and the French in the 19th and 20th centuries, and finally to Americans and Israelis nowadays. There are actual channels through which these forms of oppression travel. Finally, what became clear to me was that the more you made the war liberal in situations where people have a democratic say about the conduct of war, the more you fight a "humane" war, the better it is for arguing in favour of war. You can say you're going to have a nice war, but in the end there's no such thing as a nice war.
Just last week, more than a thousand Palestinians in Israeli prisons launched a hunger strike, demanding better living and medical conditions for approximately 6,500 prisoners. Unlike similar instances in the past, this hunger strike is being reported on by the mainstream media. How did the situation change from the time you did the research for Time in the Shadows, do you think there's more media space for these issues now?
The media space for Palestinians opens and closes cyclically and it depends on what else is going on in the world. Between the time I began the research on the book and now there has been a space opening up for discussion about the kinds of atrocities that are committed. It's also important to say that the politics around Israel and conditions of Palestinians inside Israel and under Israeli settler colonialism, and the way the media chooses to portray that have shifted.
This shift has less to do with counterinsurgencies and wars being fought and more to do with the successes Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) struggles have had in trying to find a voice in which Palestinians don't get sidelined, in which the conditions they live in are amplified in European and North American media. That plays a significant role in us being able to hear about the hunger strike of prisoners.
One of the issues you deal with in Time in the Shadows is what happens when states expand beyond their borders. For the last couple of years in Europe, in dealing with the so-called refugee crisis, we are witnessing the externalization of borders, not just in relation to third countries, but also within EU member states themselves. How does this re-articulation of border management practices, the formation of new institutions and policies, affect the ideas of nation-states, jurisdiction and sovereignty?
There are particular ways in which forms of control that were used externally are being used on refugees who are within the borders or are trying to cross the borders. The jurisdictional power now attaches to bodies. We get to move around Europe easily because of our citizenship, because of the rights attached to our passport. The absence of rights attached to that passport makes us profoundly vulnerable to different forms of coercion. The border is no longer a line on the map, it's not a geophysical feature of the territory, but rather something that happens crosses the body of the person. The border ends up being me, ends up being you. That is one of the ways this externalization is being brought home.
What are the other ways?
There's more of them, and they don't have to do only with migrants. Domestic policing is being militarized and the kinds of tactics that were used in counterinsurgencies are being brought home in North America and Europe. They are used in counterterrorism operations against both citizens and those perceived to be outsiders, whether or not they are citizens. Entire communities are subjects of these new kinds of policing, based on their religion, skin color, etc.
Bringing home of the external violence is fascinating – we see armoured vehicles being used in domestic demonstrations. But that is inevitable – when you're waging big wars, it's only a matter of time when those war methods and equipment will be used at home. And people of course, a lot of ex-soldiers become police officers and prison wardens.
In connection to what you mentioned before in regard to citizenship, Arjun Appadurai makes an interesting point how most of the citizenships laws we have today are based in the past, in blood, parenthood, etc. For a change to happen, he argues, we would need to think about citizenship based on the imagined future, on aspirations. Do you think there are possibilities for this sort of a citizenship narrative to become a part of the mainstream discussion?
The idealist in me would like to see more space for that, but looking at the way belonging is often used as means of exclusion, limiting access, limiting the ability to dream, it's hard for me to imagine that sort of citizenship in practice. It's interesting to think about aspirational forms of citizenship, and the dream of belonging, but I am not entirely sure without actual concrete instruments how to transform it into reality. It's still important to remember that all forms of belonging draw borders, even the aspirational, future oriented belonging. All dream worlds come with attached catastrophes. It is important to think about what we aspire to, because the aspiration itself is not enough. The content of it is what matters.
In your recent projects you deal with the political economy of war and militaries and the way it intersects with infrastructure, logistics and transport. Your specific focus is on the Middle East. How did you come to this point in your career, where is the continuity with your previous work?
There are two things that brought me here. I was interviewing a US military officer about matters of counterinsurgency, and he said: "Oh, you academics and journalists, you all love everything that bleeds". To really understand the war, he said, you need to look at military logistics, that's where all the money is spent. That was the first signal that got me looking in that direction. The vast majority of US military budget around the war is spent on getting the fuel to the fighters, getting food, setting up where they live, getting the uniforms and ammunition. Food and fuel tend to be the biggest logistical expenses. There is an entire machinery behind that.
The second thing was that friends who work for the International Transport Workers' Federation were interested in finding out more about the Arabian peninsula, and they encouraged me in this direction. It was a combination of wanting to find out more about the role of military logistics, and about the working conditions of people in these maritime settings in the Arabian peninsula. The Arabian peninsula was perfect for this because Kuwait and Qatar were staging grounds for the American war in Iraq, and the UAE continues to be a logistical staging ground for the US war in Afghanistan.
You're primarily interested in the role of US and British military and oil companies in the Arabian peninsula. In which ways do the policies of these countries affect the infrastructure of the Arabian peninsula, and specifically the working conditions of people employed in the ports and maritime transport business?
It depends on the country. In Saudi Arabia, the role of the US is much more important than the role of the British, while in the smaller Emirates, as well as Oman and Yemen, the role of the British is much more important due to colonial history. Emirs in these countries continue to be advised by the British and to a certain degree the indirect colonial control continues today. The US and GB didn't only have a substantial role in the structure of these states.
Oil companies and tanker terminals have a different history, but it is very crucial to the formation of these states and their transport infrastructures. The conditions of work that emerged in tanker terminals, the geographic placement of these terminals far from cities, the way they were automated from very early on, in the 1940s and 1950s, have been essential in shaping practices within container industries many years later.
The second thing that has been really interesting is that the oil companies, in order to be able to start extracting oil in the Arabian peninsula, have to bring in all the materials, pipes, heavy equipment. They couldn't do that because many of these ports simply didn't allow for ships to come close enough, particularly in the Gulf area, where the coast is very shallow and tends to be mudflat, with no deep harbours. They had to build new ports and that shows the connection of the cargo history with oil companies.
In your lectures you often talk about the significance of Yemen and the city of Aden as a port, and the changes it went through in the recent history. Why is Aden so significant?
Aden was a British colony from 1834 to 1967. It was originally colonized because the British needed a coaling station in that location, but also the British wanted to colonize that area because of the location close to the Red Sea, and the East African coast and of course to India. With the opening of the Suez Canal in the mid-19th century, Aden became far more significant than it has been before. That's when it becomes the fourth largest coaling station for ships in the world. There's a long history of Yemen being on these trade routes, because it was a hub for coffee. Mocha coffee we know today is named after a port there.
After 1950s when the British lost their big refinery in Iran, because it was nationalized, a major refinery was built in Aden. The rise of Aden as a port continues until British are forced to leave by the anti-colonial struggle which begins in the late 1950s. The British didn't want to give up Aden, it was a major city, cosmopolitan, of strategic importance, and crucial to the conduct of empire, but later in the 20th century Americans are stepping into the game.
What has happened in the last decades is fascinating because now regional capital is injecting money into Aden, money from Dubai and so on. The deals that these companies are making are corrupt. Aden ended up taking Dubai Ports World, one of the biggest terminal management companies, to court and managed to cancel the 35-year container terminal concession with them. Now, when Aden is being destroyed in a war waged by Saudi Arabia and UAE, one of the first things UAE announced once they got the control of Aden, is that they will help rebuild the port. There's such comfortable traffic between war and commerce.
In connection with Yemen, it is the only country in the Arabian peninsula that has (had) functional unions. Are there any possibilities for workers to organize in other countries?
In the Arabian peninsula, only three countries have unions – Yemen, Kuwait and Bahrain. The difference between them is that in both Kuwait and Bahrain unions are not as functional as in Yemen. In Bahrain there are independent unions, but they only cater to citizens, not to the migrant population, and they are only unions of state employees.. The same rules applies to Kuwait, except that it's even more limited and the unions are practically the arms of the state.
Part of the reason for the existence of unions there and not elsewhere is that Kuwait and Bahrain had far more developed set of industrial relations with the British, and they allowed the creation of unions as ways of trying to channel nationalist and radical sentiments among workers. Unions were never allowed to emerge in other countries.
What makes Yemen a different case?
Yemen is a very different case, because unions there became quite significant for the independence struggle. Reading through the history of Yemen, one finds constant stories of worker mobilization in the ports. They still have a functioning set of unions, although at the moment, with no ports functioning, workers are are receiving a small amount of aid but they are not working.
The presence of unions there is extremely important because it has meant that there has been far more accountability in terms of the managements of the ports and far more visible sets of protests against unjust policies. These kinds of protests exist in places like the UAE but because there are no unions there are no ways to organize them better and make them more substantial and longer-lasting.
Going through the history of protests organized by the port workers, how was the cooperation between different nationalities, because it is factor that can be used to divide the workers?
The response differs depending on the location and time. During times of very heightened nationalist sentiments, the unions tend to act as instruments of ethnic and xenophobic exclusion, and that is much more the case in the Northern part of the Arabian peninsula, than in the South. Yemen is a special case because so many of the workers in the ports were of Somali origin and the unions didn't have the distinction between Yemenis and others.
The British actively tried to undermine cross-national unity. One of the things they realized is that if the workers in the ports were Arabs, from many different countries, they could be quite demanding in asking for their rights, and they couldn't be easily pushed aside because their governments could protect them. This wasn't as true for a lot of the South Asian workers whose governments wouldn't protect them and they couldn't easily mobilize together with the Arabs because of the issues of language. It shows how British were good at divide and rule.
Are these colonial labour tactics and structures still present today?
The structures of ports today, particularly the big, mechanized, automated container ports in the Arabian peninsula, still reflect colonial labour structures. CEOs of the ports and the top managers are usually from North and West Europe, mostly British, the next level of managers are European. After that come the administrators, which are usually educated Indians, and then you have a large labour force that comes from the migrant communities working in these cities.
The conditions in which they work are far more precarious then those of the expat communities, European and other. There are differentiated labour regimes operating in these settings, quite familiar from the past. It's useful to have different nationalities working in clusters, because that way you can separate them and they can't collaborate with one another and form unions or protest. It also helps to have deportable labour because the moment there are difficulties you can send them out of the country.
In a lot of your lectures and writings, you use literary examples. You often mention two books – Melville's Moby Dick and Kanafani's Men in the sun. Why are these books so important for the research you do?
Moby Dick is wonderful because it's just a wonderful book. There is a really long tradition of reading Moby Dick as an allegory for labour struggle and many other things. It's also important for all of the information and research that went into it, and the descriptive geography it offers to the reader.
Kanafani's book came as a surprise to me, because I've read it a lot of times and I've always seen it as an allegory for the Palestinian condition. But when I read it again recently, it struck me how well researched it is. You can learn all sorts of details about migration routes of Palestinians who went to Kuwait to find jobs, but also about Trans-Arabian Pipeline and its pumping stations and how they were connected to roads and many other logistical features.
There's also a third book, Abdul Rahman Munif's Cities of Salt. It's a wonderful, difficult and dense novel about the coming of Aramco to Saudi Arabia. It is deeply researched and I love it because there are so few memoirs of people who worked in the ports and oil industries in Saudi Arabia in the moment when Aramco came, and Munif is a wonderful documentor of this moment in time and all the changes that happen.
People underuse these amazing literary works as documentary sources. There's also an amazing genre of fisherman's songs from Kuwait and Bahrain, and I want to analyze them and see what else can we learn about the transformation from fishermen to industrial communities.
This interview was also published on H-Alter.
art of resistance, Saudi Arabia, Yemen
Yemen | 2017 Humanitarian Needs Overview.
11/26/2016 middleeastrevisedconflict, crisis, human rights, humanitarian help, Middle east, poverty, Saudi Arabia, war, Yemen Leave a comment
/Then What, painting by Louay Kayali/
An estimated 18.8 million people in Yemen need some kind of humanitarian or protection assistance, including 10.3 million who are in acute need. Escalating conflict since March 2015 has created a vast protection crisis in which millions face risks to their safety and basic rights, and are struggling to survive.
Even before March 25, 2015, when the conflict in Yemen escalated, the country faced enormous levels of humanitarian need, with 15.9 million people requiring some kind of humanitarian or protection assistance in late 2014. These needs stemmed from years of poverty, under-development, environmental decline, intermittent conflict, and weak rule of law – including widespread violations of human rights.
The conduct of hostilities has been brutal. As of 25 October 2016, health facilities had reported almost 44,000 casualties (including nearly 7,100 deaths) – an average of 75 people killed or injured every day. These figures significantly undercount the true extent of casualties given diminished reporting capacity of health facilities after 19 months of war and many people's inability to access healthcare at all.
Read the full report on Yemen here.
(Interview) Judith Brown: Yemen Is A Mess & It's Getting Worse.
10/16/2016 middleeastrevisedmedia, Middle east, news, Saudi Arabia, uk, USA, war, Yemen Leave a comment
/photo © Josef Hoflehner/
The war in Yemen, with all of its tragedies, keeps on unravelling far from the media flashlights. In a recent horrific attack in Sana'a, when Saudi-led warplanes struck a funeral, more than 200 people were killed, and more than 500 were injured.
A day after the attack in Sana'a, former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who easily forgets his own mistakes (from 1978 till today), called for an attack on the enemy – Saudi Arabia. On the same day, the White House issued a statement saying it had begun an "immediate review" of its support for Saudi Arabia in Yemen. It is hard to believe that there will be such a review, since this is not the first attack by Saudi Arabia, and it will probably not be the last one.
There have been numerous attacks – on schools, hospitals, markets – killing and injuring thousands of civillians. In August, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) withdrew their staff from six hospitals in northern Yemen after a coalition airstrike on a hospital in Hajjah killed 19 people. Countless attacks on health facilities and services all over Yemen, happened despite the fact that MSF has systematically shared the GPS coordinates of hospitals with the parties involved in the conflict.
In the past year, Human Rights Watch has documented 43 airstrikes, some of which may amount to war crimes, which have killed more than 670 civilians, as well as 15 attacks involving internationally banned cluster munitions.
The infrastructure in Yemen has been significantly devasted during the last couple of years, and humanitarian organisations have been sending warnings about the lack of immediate and unhindered access to people who urgently need food assistance. That fact, compounded by a shortage of funding, means that famine is a possibility for millions of people.
We've discussed Yemen with Judith Brown, activist and aid worker from United Kingdom, who started the page Yemen News Today, which brings daily news from Yemen in English. Brown worked with refugees in Yemen from 1998 until 2001 and has visited the country every year from 2001 until 2014. She is now seventy years old and retired, but has recently started postdoctoral research into the media coverage of the Yemen war.
You've started the page Yemen News Today, trying to bring daily news from Yemen to the wider audiences, in English. How did that idea come to you, was it due to the lack of news from Yemen in the mainstream media?
I began Yemen News Today out of desperation because there was no news of Yemen in the media. I also know that I have a big Yemeni following now. My motivation was to tell as many people in the West as I could about the suffering, with the aim of increasing awareness and political pressure.
You've also worked as a manager at Refugee Health Project in Yemen, until 2001. What are your experiences like – how did the situation with refugees change over the last couple of years?
I left the refugee health programme in 2001, and this programme was for international refugees. Although I understand that since the Saada wars the UN had taken some responsibility for the displaced people – something they are not doing now simply because of the lack of resources.
For a time after the start of the war all the international employees were moved out of Yemen and many of the local staff were not able to function because they too were displaced, especially in Aden where the biggest refugee programmes are. I think the UN refugee offices are functioning now in Aden and Sana'a, but I am not sure exactly what their responsibilities are.
/photo: BBC, 2015/
In a recent interview with Status Hour, journalist Safa al Ahmad argues that there's no longer a Yemen, that North and South are completely separate from each other. Would you agree with that?
The north and south are functioning as at least two separate parts for complex reasons. Firstly, Saudi Arabia and UAE have a difficult relationship and different aims due to the war and this has meant they have largely divided their sphere of responsibilities, with Saudi controlling the war in the north and UAE taking little responsibility for the south militarily, but it is developing commercial interests there.
There is also animosity in both parts, but especially Hadramaut governors made statements about a year ago that they would not accept anyone from the old North Yemen, and many people there have developed an intolerant Sunni position, but they also want to keep free of the effects of the Yemen war.
In Aden the secessionist movement is strong – though not supported by everyone by any means – and the secessionists have said they will not accept any people from the north or even southerners that have lived for a long time in the north, and it seems to be that Aden Lahj and Bab al Mandab operate as a separate entity. They are not keen on having people from east and central Yemen move to Aden either because of their fears of the militias from there taking control – such as Al-Qaeda but not limited to Al-Qaeda. Taiz is more or less on its own. And the old north (less Taiz) is under the control of the Houthis and the old Yemen army.
What is happening with the government?
What is true is that in effect there are two systems of government, one in Sana'a and one mostly in Riyadh (with a few of the Riyadh ministers in Aden). There are two Yemen armies – most of the original army support the Houthis, and the new army is paid for by Saudi Arabia and trained by UAE (KSA are mostly in Aden). There now appear to be two banks as president Abd Rabuh Mansur Hadi moved the central Yemen bank to Aden, with new staff, and the remaining central bank staff who were sacked by Hadi are still in Sana'a. So it's a mess. As in all wars.
You're constantly trying to bring attention to the issues of starvation and famine in Yemen. With food ships finding it hard to get into Yemen's ports due to a virtual blockade, over half the country's 28 million people already do not have enough to eat, according to the United Nations. How does that look like on the ground, how do the people survive?
The famine is everywhere in the north, but worst in Hodeida and the north west. It is getting more and more difficult for families to cope – even middle class families who used to have money don't know how they can afford food. People have used up their savings and there are few jobs and little humanitarian aid getting in. Those with homes and businesses destroyed are not able to get any compensation.
Some people have family and friends overseas who are helping them to survive. The rich Inside Yemen have been very generous – for example providing most of the free water in cities. But even their resources are strained now because there is so much need. Some are just very hungry and some are starving to death, especially the very young. There are very few resources for the displaced.
Where do we move from now, what can be done in this situation?
It is difficult to see how the situation will change unless USA and UK stop their unconditional support for Saudi Arabia. I really don't know what can be done and I feel desperate sometimes. It is a situation even more complex than Syria and it is escalating as USA seems to have joined in the war and Iranian warships are now openly stating that they are in Yemeni waters. But this is still not in the Western media. I just feel I have to keep on trying to get the story out and do what I can. But it's not enough.
This interview was also published in Croatian, on H-Alter.
art of resistance, India, Iran, Israeli - Palestinian conflict, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia
Five For Friday: Conversations With History.
05/01/2015 middleeastrevisedAmira Hass, Andrew Scott Cooper, Berkley, Conversations with history, Harry Kreisler, India, Iran, Islam, Israel, John Esposito, Juan Cole, oil, Pakistan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Tariq Ali, west Leave a comment
Conversations With History was conceived in 1982 by Harry Kreisler, as a "way to capture and preserve through conversation and technology the intellectual ferment of our times." It's a great series which includes over 500 interviews. Here are five of my favorites concerning various issues related to the Middle East (although there are more than just five great ones, of course).
1. Conversations With History: Tariq Ali
Tariq Ali talks about the creation of Pakistan, issues with India, and the dysfunctionality of the state today. He also talks about Israel, drawing parallels between states with strong religious and ethnic identities and the way that identity cripples them.
2. Conversations With History: Juan Cole
Juan Cole talks about journalism and academia, the way his life changed after the years he spent in Beirut and how he came to do his academic work on Islam. He also talks about his great blog Informed Comment and the idea behind it.
3. Conversations With History: Amira Hass
Famous Israeli journalist Amira Hass talks about Israeli occupation, Palestinian terrorism, and the consequences of the conflict for the daily lives of both Israelis and Palestinians.
4. Conversations With History: Andrew Scott Cooper
Andrew Scott Cooper discusses his book The Oil Kings. Focusing on the geopolitics of the Middle East in the 1970's, the book centers on the complex relationship between Nixon, Kissinger and the Shah of Iran. Revealing the contradiction between the Shah's dependence on the rise of oil prices and the need to fund his new military role, Cooper explains how this contradiction resulted in the Shah's downfall and the implosion of Iran.
5. Conversations With History: John L. Esposito
John L. Esposito, the author of Who speaks for Islam?, talks about the diversity of the Muslim world, extremism, and the complex forces shaping Islam and its relationship with(in) the West.
Lectures and Interviews on Middle East & Islam
art of resistance, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates
Beyond the architectural text (Middle East).
07/25/2014 middleeastrevisedphotography Leave a comment
The Damascene House is beyond the architectural text
The design of our homes…
Is based on an emotional foundation
For every house leans … on the hip of another
And every balcony…
Extends its hand to antoher facing it.
Nizar Qabbani
Peter Gould is an Australian artist. In 2002, he began traveling around Middle East and was inspired by cities like Fes, Damascus, Istanbul and Mecca, with his work resulting in a great visual fusion of classical Islamic design elements with his vibrant, fresh graphic styles.
His photography is maybe best described by one of his curators:
"Peter's photography is as much about the spiritual as it is about the visual, offering no questions or answers but rather affording the viewer to simply being in that moment and that moment at first glance seems to curiously exist without time or consequence."
Beirut.
Mecca.
Jerusalem.
Damascus.
Nizwa.
Abu Dhabi.
Fes.
Marrakesh.
/all photos © Peter Gould/
For more on Gould and his work, visit his official website.
art of resistance, Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia's Cities of Salt.
04/07/2014 middleeastrevised Leave a comment
Abdulrahman Munif was a Saudi writer, famous for his novels parodying the Middle Eastern elite, and examining the changes oil business brought to Arabian deserts. Munif was born a Saudi national and brought up in Amman, Jordan to Saudi parents and an Iraqi grandmother.
He started to write in his thirties and quickly became known for his scathing parodies of Middle Eastern elites, especially those of Saudi Arabia, a country which banned many of his books and stripped him of Saudi citizenship. His most famous work is The Cities of Salt quintet, which followed the evolution of the Arabian peninsula as its traditional Bedouin culture is transformed by the oil boom. The novels create a history of a broad region, evoking comparisons to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.
The first novel is Mudun Al Milh (Cities of Salt), one I read and very much liked. The novel creates the great landscape of disruption and change with the coming of the oil age as the Anglo-American technical world begins to move into the rural Arabic world of small oasis towns, caravans and trade. The swift transformation of the tiny, forgotten village in the sands into a modern town for the Americans, and the waves of new arrivals from unknown lands, brought with it problems and situations that were unrecognizable to them. The wadi is transformed. Families are told they have to move. The young men no longer long to go out on the caravans but to work with the machines.
Stone by tone, we constructed,
Inch by inch, we built the pipe,
Now that we have build and raised,
What do you say, o company, o God!
The oil wealth, instead of modernizing Arabian society, enthroned and perpetuated backward monarchies allied with primitive religious establishments as well as Western governments. And nobody knows how it will change, and will it change at all.
"Ours is a long story, Abu Othman."
"Long. How much longer?"
"Trust in God. man. All is well with the world."
"God only knows. He laughed sadly.
"Hope for the best. No one can read the future."
While Munif's works were never particularly successful in the west, throughout the Middle East they are critically acclaimed and extremely popular. Cities of Salt was described by Edward Said as the "only serious work of fiction that tries to show the effect of oil, Americans and the local oligarchy on a Gulf country."
Four other novels of the trilogy are The Trench, Variations on Night and Day, The uprooted, The desert of Darkness (the last two not translated in English).
Munif was one of the biggest critics of Saddam Hussein and his regime, but he was utterly opposed to the American invasion of Iraq and spent the last two years of his life working on non-fiction projects to oppose what he saw as renewed imperialism.
Read Munif, he's great and his work very much applicable today too.
Filming on the Fringe – Saudia Arabia's and Yemen's first female filmmakers.
Author: Natalie Shooter / Reorient
In the midst of a nascent film industry, a handful of female filmmakers have emerged in the Arabian Peninsula, pioneering film in the region and using it as a tool to fight for change. Saudi Arabia and Yemen both present volatile environments for any director; in the former, cinemas are illegal, and in both, authorisation from the government prior to shooting is obligatory. However, in these conservative, patriarchal societies, the challenges for female filmmakers are even greater.
As Yemeni documentary filmmaker Khadija Al-Salami was witnessing the 2011 revolution against the now-ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh on television, the presence of women amongst the crowds of protesters came as a shock. Segregated from men in many areas of public life, their boldness inspired her to leave her diplomatic job at the Yemeni embassy in Paris and document the movement. 'For me, this was a true revolution – all this oppression had been lingering for so long' Al-Salami says. 'To see these women uncovered and not shy of the camera was unbelievable. They just wanted to be a part of this; they were just saying "we exist"'.
Al-Salami's 2012 documentary, The Scream, follows the women of that revolution. Originally in search of Nobel Peace Prize winner Tawakkol Karman – the human rights activist considered the 'mother' of the Yemeni revolution – Al-Salami came across thousands of other women fighting not just for the collapse of the regime, but also for their place in society. Accordingly, Al-Salami followed journalist Rahma Hugira, human rights activist Balqis Al-Lahabi, and poet Huda Al-Attas, all of whom were fighting for the liberation of Yemen. 'The presence of women in the revolution is a message', says one of the women in the documentary. 'I want to be present, and my presence will be prolonged throughout and beyond the revolution'.
Khadija Al-Salami
In The Scream, Al-Salami explores how much has actually changed for women in post-revolution Yemen; barely anything seems to be the general consensus. 'There's change, but there are still a lot of restrictions and oppression from families', says Al-Salami. 'I now see thousands of girls that have awareness of their rights. They have to keep their courage and continue to fight for change'.
The tradition of child marriage in Yemen presents a hotly debated topic with respect to the situation of women therein. According to a 2012 UNFPA report, 32% of 20 – 24 year-old Yemeni women in 2011 were previously married under legal age. In Al-Salami's adaption of I Am Nujood, the memoir of a ten year-old Yemeni girl married to a man 20 years her senior, it's the focus of the film – a fact made more poignant by Al-Salami's own story. Married at 11 and disowned by the male side of her family after fighting for divorce, she had to juggle a job at her local television station with school to support herself and her mother.
Desperate to leave Yemen to study abroad after being exposed to the outside world through her job at the station, Al-Salami was awarded a scholarship at 16, and left shortly afterwards for the United States. Now based in Paris, her documentary work has been almost entirely dedicated to highlighting the plight of Yemeni women. 'Since I was a kid [I've been] fighting for my rights', she remarks. 'I fulfilled my dream in liberating myself, but I needed to go back to try and help these women'. With the illiteracy rate among women in Yemen currently at around 70%, Al-Salami set up the My Future Foundation in Sana'a, which helps provide young girls with an education. 'My grandmother used to say a girl was only born to be buried or married. She and my mother never went to school, and I decided to go back and fight for that'.
Working within an almost nonexistent film industry is not without its challenges, but filming in a country where one cannot freely express themselves also involves courage and persistence. Nobody believed Al-Salami would get the go-ahead to film a female prisoner inside a cell for her 2006 film, Amina, but the director not only received permission to interview the woman who was given a death sentence at 14, but was also able to temporarily live with her in her cell. At other times, her filming was suspended by the authorities, and she risked the penalties of illegally filming in the street with hidden cameras.
Haifaa Al Mansour
For Saudi Arabia's first female director, Haifaa Al Mansour, getting authorisation to shoot her film, Wadjda – the first feature film short entirely in the country – wasn't so much a problem as filming within a conservative society. Her 2012 film, recently released in European cinemas, follows Wadjda, a rebellious ten year-old girl, who challenges her country's rigid laws in a quest to purchase a bicycle and race against her friend Abdullah; not exactly a thrilling subject for Hollywood's standards, but in Saudi Arabia, it's the stuff of revolution. Filmed in Riyadh, Al Mansour had to direct her actors via walkie-talkies from the back of a van in the city's more conservative areas.
Al Mansour's realist drama highlights the marginalisation of women in Saudi society through the character of Converse-clad Wadjda. Though the director plays it safe in the subtlety with which she tackles the subject of women's rights, the more trying aspects of the situation of women in Saudi Arabia are clearly highlighted throughout the film, in which the desert surroundings under a stifling blue sky are devoid of any trace of womanhood. As Al Mansour's film provides a rare glimpse into a relatively insular and misunderstood society, it's no wonder why Wadjda has received so much international attention since its release.
A co-production between Saudi Arabia and Germany, Al Mansour's real challenge came in finding a young actress to play the leading role. 'A lot of parents don't want to have their girls appear in cinema' says Al Mansour. 'We had many girls come to casting, and then at the last minute, they would dissapear'. Waad Mohammed came to casting only one week before the movie was set to be shot. 'She was wearing jeans and an 80s-style jacket with loose curly hair, listening to Justin Bieber. It was exactly this global youth culture I wanted to capture'.
Wadjda, still from the movie
Though many restrictions remain in place for women in the Kingdom, progress, some might say, has been made there in the last few years: female athletes competed in last year's Olympic games, and women were appointed to the government's advisory council last January. '[Those among] the new generation in Saudi are different', Al Mansour says. 'They have access to information and the internet, and want to live like everybody else'. However, real change for Al Mansour will come only from the bottom up. 'It's not about making one big change; it's about breaking it down and making it more tangible for our own lives'.
Both Al-Salami and Al Mansour are confident about cinema's role and ability with respect to social reform. Though Yemeni intellectuals initially predicted a violent public reaction to Al-Salami's Amina, screenings in rural areas of the country were received in a positive light. 'After that film,' remarks Al-Salami, 'journalists were encouraged to tackle subjects they considered sensitive. Expose your problems, and you're forced to find a solution'. Al Mansour is also hopeful that the wheels of change are slowly being set in motion. 'There's a debate going on now about cinema', she says, hoping a national dialogue will bring new opportunities for herself and others. 'For women, sharing something [about yourself] was considered ayb', (lit. 'wrongdoing') says Al-Salami. 'Now, you see how eager they are to express themselves. Al Mansour, while optimistic, is more of a realist. 'Cinema is a tough place to be. There is no funding, no system'. The solution? 'You need to be individual [and] persistent, find your voice, and carry on'.


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