Book 86, Qatar: "Al-Jazeera: the Inside Story of the Arab News Channel that is Challenging the West" by Hugh Miles

Holy crap, this was a good read. Found it hard to put it down, which is not what I expected of a 400-page book on new media in the Middle East.

Truth is, I wasn't sure if I'd pick it up at first, given that it's published in 2005, a year before Al-Jazeera English was launched - behind the times, much? But the alternatives didn't seem quite good enough - Josh Rushing's Mission Al-Jazeera talks about life as a reporter for the English channel but only after a huge blather about his life as a good ol' American Marine (also, the huge font looked insulting) while Philip Selb's The Al-Jazeera Effect seemed a wee bit too academic (I'm an intellectual snob, but I also read for fun, darling).

Can't say the cover attracted me much:

But the story - oh, what a story. First, the setup: Qatar is a tiny country with a citizen population of less than 300,000 people (Emiratis joke that they could fit all of them into one of their hotels). Their brand of Islam is Wahhabi, their system of government is near-absolute monarchy and their royal family was known as the "thugs" of the Gulf, due to their often violent successions. This hasn't improved much in recent history: the regnant Sheikh Hamad deposed his father while the latter was on holiday. (It's said that he collapsed in a fit of laughter when, as a young man in the UK, he first learned the concept of democracy.)

Pretty stereotypically backward Arab state, hein? But as soon as Hamad took power in '95, he abolished the Ministry of Information (which in fact was the Ministry of Censorship) and enshrined freedom of the press into the Constitution. Unheard of among Arab states. Then he used his vast fortune to found Al-Jazeera, drawing an international pool of foreign-educated Arab reporters to Doha, impressing upon them his guarantee of a truly modern Arabic news station.

Seems that back then, Arabic news was in the Jurassic age: newsreaders merely read out press releases from the Ministries and the social lives of the Mubaraks: Al-Jazeera drew people in with real investigative journalism, real debates between antagonistic opinions on The Opposite Direction, surprisingly liberal fatwas on Shariah and Life, and eventually the in-depth coverage of the Second Intifada and the US invasion of Afghanistan (especially in-depth in the latter case since Al-Jazeera was the only news station with reporters actually inside the country). Satellite transmission was free, sustained not by advertising but by the Sheikh's payouts, so that even the poorest Arab speakers could tune in - today, Miles tells us, nomadic Bedouin weddings no longer involve a dowry of jewellery, but the gift of a satellite dish instead, so that the newlywed couple can watch the news together.

And let's face it: this is a story with heroes and villains. Plucky little Al-Jazeera, its office compared to a matchbox by an incredulous Mubarak, has managed to deliver some of the most balanced news reportage in the world despite constant abuse and threats from Saudi Arabia, from Kuwait, from Jordan, from the USA and the UK. (The stories of how reporters and cameramen were arrested, abused, tortured, even strategically murdered by Coalition forces with no investigations following, are quite horrifying.)

Of course, hardly anyone believes it's balanced: in the Middle East there are so many agendas that any attempt to tell both sides of the story (it was the first Arab station to actually show Israelis speaking on the air!) is doomed to misunderstanding. It's been called pro-Israeli, pro-Hamas, pro-America, pro-Al Qaeda... pro-Qatari of course, but Miles assures us that the station openly criticises the government's policies, especially the fact that it houses the American air base from which the Coalition conducted the invasion of Iraq.

It's a fascinating story - more intriguing, I'd argue, than what's happened in Dubai, because it's about the explosion of information, not wealth; it's about rising up for free speech at the same time as America's clamped down on its objective reporting. It's about a transformation of consciousness, and it started from a tiny irrelevant country which only got rich in the '90s, after people figured out how to extract its natural gas reserves. (Not sure if it can be argued that it engendered the Arab Spring, though. Probably not.)

Also of interest are the tidbits about Qatari society: how the people have been given hefty payouts and sinecures and are so wealthy they can retire in their thirties; how they've been pushed by the Sheikh to liberalise, sending their kids abroad to study and get their minds blown by Western democracy; how the Sheikh's second wife has become a spokesperson in her own right for children's rights, a phenomenon almost unknown in the Arab world.

Yep, there's some benefits to reading stuff by foreigners. Would a Qatari have fessed up to all these obvious details? Not so sure.

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Representative quote: Since then [i.e. the invasion of Afganistan] it has often been glibly stated that Al-Jazeera and the rest of the Arab media is shaping Arab public opinion towards the West for the first time. But Arabs have already been mulling over the pros and cons of democracy for almost two hundred years: what is meant is that today Arab public opinion matters for the first time.

Next book: "Voices: An Annotated Anthology of Contemporary Bahraini Poetry", edited by Marhamah Hasan Marhamah.

Book 85, United Arab Emirates: "The Sand Fish" by Maha Gargash

The UAE - or more specifically, the Emirate of Dubai - has a special significance for us Singaporeans: it's a tiny country that became a late capitalist success story by specifically emulating our path from third world to first world. But of course, ever since the exposé from the Independent came out, we know there's a dark side to this success too: massive income inequities, overdependence on foreign labour, ruthless exploitation of low-paid foreign workers, rampant pollution, complete erasure of heritage.

I haven't been to the country yet (have talked lots to friends who've worked and travelled there, though), so I was pretty interested in reading a non-fiction book explaining the rise of the city-state: Syed Ali's Dubai: Gilded Cage or Jim Crane's City of Gold, maybe. But then I decided I wanted to hear from a voice within the country. Was there an Emirati author out there, published in English? There was.

Maha Gargash actually wrote this in English. She's been educated in the US and London, and now makes documentaries for Dubai Radio and Television, so she's had to scour her country (and others) for exotica, remnant communities who still remember the Emirati way of life before the oil boom.

In the afterword, she talks about how she was inspired to set her tale in the 1950s, right between the dying age of pearl fishing and the rise of the international petroleum trade. She abandoned an early draft which told the story from the pearl fishers' point of view; now the heroine's Noora, a young mountain girl married off as the third wife of a wealthy trader.

Honestly, it's not a fantastic work of fiction. Perfectly acceptable, yes, but not a must-read. There's something oddly generic about the story, even though the author doesn't make completely conventional decisions. Noora's fundamentally a damsel in distress, reactive rather than proactive, abused by the elder wives, afraid of her fat husband, loins burning for the handsome young manservant Hamad. She does nothing truly heroic throughout the story; she doesn't venture beyond the walls of her sheltered harem life. Of course, the author's furnished her with a modicum of spunk and intelligence to make her seem like less of a doormat.

What's really interesting, I suppose, is Gargash's choice in subject matter: how she refrained from describing the chaos of Dubai today and instead mined history for material; even mapped out the old cities and houses to mark out a believable, tactile setting, bringing the past alive again. It's actually a lot like what Singaporean writers like Catherine Lim and Dawn Farnham have been doing: farming the past for treasure, precisely because so little trace of it persists in the present. Their flavours are ultimately very different: Singapore's past is colourful, noisy and violent, while Dubai's is quiet, parched, detached from the hubbub of urban developments. But we both have that desire to use fiction to remember who we are.

No, not who we are. Who we were. The trouble with historical fiction of this sort is that it's escapist: it concentrates on the terrible social problems of yesterday, allowing us to triumphantly declare that they've been fixed. It makes us ignore the terrible social problems that persist today.

The West is happy to fill the gap with its own Emirati fictions - even in film. What are Emiratis talking about amongst themselves?

Oh, and by the way, a sand fish is a kind of skink.

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Representative quote:

"Listen to you, you do every filthy thing. Then you pretend you didn't." There was spite in his voice now. "I don't know who you are, what you are. Something very different from the Noora I treasured." He threw his arms in the air. "You dug a hole in the sand and filled it with your shame, thinking it will be buried forever. But the sand is soft and the wind never stops blowing. And one day..." He bit his lip and looked away. "You are like a.. a..."

"Sand fish," she mumbled."

Next book: Hugh Miles's Al-Jazeera: The Inside the Story of the Arab News Channel that is Challenging the West, regarding Qatar.

Book 84, Saudi Arabia: The Quran

Happy New Year! So after over a month, I'm finally done with al-Quran Qadim!

Yessir, I knew I could've gone with easier choices like Rania al-Baz's Disfigured (socially significant and pretty well written), Rajaa Alsanea's Girls of Riyadh (revolutionary but badly written, according to most critics), and Jean Sasson's Princess (still don't trust its veracity). But I wanted something really iconic, a jewel of world literature. a book worth the boasting rights. Why not a book written (or transcribed) by the most influential man in history, a figure whose name I dare not utter without a pbuh and whose face I dare not upload at all?


And the truth is, there are several reasons why this wasn't an entirely good idea.

I still remember having to read bits of the book for my Contemporary Civilization class during sophomore year; we were guided by an Arabic-speaking Jewish girl who gushed over the sheer poetry of the text, and all the Americans oohed and aahed over how much more liberal and enlightened some of the laws are compared to Deuteronomy or Leviticus. Whereas I was distressedly thinking how all the Muslims I knew (especially in Singapore) were more liberal and enlightened than even that. (Yes, imprisonment for female adultery [an alternative reading of "stoning"] is less draconian than death, but in the 21st century?)

Still, I figured maybe reading the whole thing would give me some context. My friends recommended the rather beautifully archaic Abdullah Yusuf Ali translation for my enjoyment. And now I'm finished, I've ended up delaying my post for three days, so nervous am I about how to appear as both a critical humanist and a non-Islamophobe.

Yet at the risk of incurring the wrath and legal action of everyone in Singapore, I'm going to make a list of 4 reasons why reading the Quran alone isn't a great way to fall in love with Islam.

1. The surahs are super confusing.

The Quran, as you probably know, is a series of divine revelations: each one of them is meant to be a stand-alone insight into spirituality. So they're free to meander as they like from topic to topic, rather than staying focussed on a single issue - e.g. Surah 4, an-Nisa, is supposedly all focussed on women but after 25 verses it goes into more generalised, abstract ethics. Pretty difficult for study, no?

2. The stories are scattered all over the place.

The Book contains all these references to tales of prophets from the Old and New Testaments: Adam, Noah, Lot, Abraham, Moses, Zakariya, Mary, Jesus; also non-Biblical stories like Saleh and the Companions of the Elephant. But these are mostly told in fragments, so that you need a concordance or annotations to piece everything together - plus, a few key details are repeated in sura after sura, while others in the Biblical versions are left out. Thus you'll get pretty damn tired of the Pharaoh yelling at Moses, but no mention is made of the colourful variety of plagues he visited on Egypt. The versions of the stories in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles are patently more accessible and rounded out.

3. The order doesn't help.

I'm not complaining about chronological order here - I know it'd be next to impossible to trace their history, so I can't blame the original redactors for placing them in order of length. But currently, the surahs are arranged from longest to shortest. That's really frustrating for a novice reader: we have to plough through the long, bifurcating thought processes of Surahs 2 through 40 before we start seeing some surahs with the sheer, crystalline focus of secular poems. (Yes, there are wonderful poetic moments in longer surahs, but they get gobbled up in the range of topics covered.) Imagine if they were arranged from shortest to longest: then people would be hooked in by the concise poetry of the early suras and keep reading all the way to the end.

Hmmm. In retrospect, this might not be a good idea. Most of the laws are laid out in the longer suras; they're important.

4. And yes, I know this will be controversial: there's a lot of hellfire.

The Quran does mention tolerance and how Allah is all-merciful, but it's really hard for a non-believer to swallow this when so many of the suras (especially the longer suras) mention fire and punishment for us in some way. We're told we'll be cast into the fiery pit and forced to eat of the tree of Zaqqum; there are also constant invocations of prophets at Warners of the end of the world, when our very bones shall testify against us. It gets really exasperating. Maybe fear works as a conversion tactic for some people, but us freethinker skeptics? You'll catch more flies with honey than vinegar. (It was actually the act of reading the Old Testament that made me stop being a Christian ten years ago.)

Thus I do think it's understandable why some Muslims end up as terrorists, because the Quran contains so much condemnation of unbelievers and polytheists and those who ignore the Signs. While there are commandments for tolerance of other religions - People of the Book, that is - they make up a much smaller total portion of the book.

What does this mean? Well, basically that the Quran is a supremely slippery text, and it's not immediately accessible to outsiders; perhaps not even to insiders. It's quite different from most books of the Bible; in fact, it recalls the compilations of Zhuang Zi in some respects - how nonlinear and poetic it is, and how strange. Obviously Muslims pair it with the Hadith and the writings of religious scholars who've interpreted the Book.

It also means that the best strategy to make people conceive of Islam as a positive force in the world is for Muslims to be positive forces in the world themselves - boasting about the roots of your religion isn't going to be so effective when the roots are so tangled. Let's hope the bits of the Quran that are especially venerated from now on are the ones that celebrate tolerance, science, co-operation, social justice

As for me, I don't know what to think. Sure, I've got minor boasting rights for getting to the end of a book, but do I understand Islam any better than I did before? Damned if I know.

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Representative quote: And such are the Parables We set forth for mankind, but only those understand them who have knowledge. (29:43)

Next book: Maha Gargash's The Sand Fish, from the United Arab Emirates

Merry Christmas/Nathar Puthu Varuda Valthukkal!

Still not done with the Quran, so I'll just post about the book I gave my boyfriend:



It's a picture book! Captions in both English and Tamil, available for just 395 rupees at Flipkart, and for considerably more from Amazon.

Sunday book market at Daryaganj!

Not even 3/4 of the way through the Quran, 'cos I'm rushing deadlines (and anyway my iBooks is acting funny now I'm back in Singapore).

So I'll fill this post with images of the lovely Sunday second-hand book market in New Delhi, in the district of Daryaganj, just outside the Jamaa Masjid. Mostly classics and textbooks, as you can see...


But there's some cool stuff hidden in there.


...even an entire section devoted to erotic literature!


Most of this cost from 50 cents to S$4. Only trouble was limiting myself, reminding myself that I had to cart all this shit back home.


They might say print publishing is dying, but its fruits will be with us in Asia for some time to come. Yay for paperbacks!

I wanted to buy a Guru Granth Sahib in Amritsar...

... but the only full English translation available as like, five mega-thick volumes long, with old and crinkled covers. The bookstore owner at the Golden Temple had to present it on a folding book stand when he wanted to show it off: everything's in the original Gurmukhi script, the Latinised transliteration, and English so you get the sound of the original poetry unadulterated for home worship.

Luckily, there was also an introductory book of extracts for dilettantes like me, selling at 80 rupees (20% off the cover price, equivalent to roughly S$2!). Will skim through it on the plane, maybe, since it's easier going than my other holiday reading: Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast and the Quran (halfway through now!).

Did finish Victor Pelevin's Omon Ra, though. 'Sgood!

Now, could I ask you folks: what should I read for my India book? Kalidasa's Shakuntala? Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses? Mahasweta Devi? The Penguin edition of the Upanisads? Chetan Bhagat's 2 States? Or the Guru Granth Sahib?

Progress update

I'm only about a quarter of the way through the Quran, which I'm actually reading off a .pdf file on my iPhone, so I'm temporarily leaving you with this TED talk from another, more committed Quran reader:


Incidentally I'm also in India with my mother: we're currently in an obscenely lovely heritage hotel that would quite probably coincide with the Muslim vision of paradise. Lucky us!