September 2004 Archives

MoorishGirl: Publish (in English) or Perish?

MoorishGirl has a lengthy discussion of the dearth of Arab literature available in English translations. She points out that English speaking readers would need a sample of Arab literature in order to decide whether it was to their taste. My question is whether there is an English speaking community that is publicly discussing Arab literature. In other words, what kind of word of mouth are Arab titles getting in the English speaking world?

I have just finished reading . Ibn Batuta's tale of his travels first to Mecca and then to the exotic East, with a brief coda on his voyage to Mali, provides a glimpse into a world far removed from most of our experience.

In the first place, Ibn Batuta's voyages, though often fraught with peril in the form of shipwrecks and attacks by pirates and bandits, are enveloped with an air of privilege. He travels from one sultan's court to another, where he is invariably showered with presents and frequently appointed to a state office. He leverages his experience in one court at the next by impressing each successive sultan by his intimacy with his previous host. His prestige reaches its apex when the Sultan of Dihli (Delhi) appoints him ambassador to China.

For protection on the road, Ibn Batuta typically travels with an armed escort or in a merchant caravan. In addition to being well provisioned, these caravans enable Ibn Batuta to bring his retinue, including a number of slaves male and female, with him on his journeys.

The society that Ibn Batuta describes centers around a series of royal courts, generally presided over by a sultan. In attendance on the sultan are one or more viziers and any number of princes. Ibn Batuta encounters a number of Sufis and other Islamic holy men along his route, and even withdraws from the world and embraces an ascetic life at one point until he is once again seduced by the pleasures of the court. Ibn Batuta was by birth a shaikh and by training a qadi, or Islamic judge, and various sultans appoint him to judgeships in the course of his travels. Merchants are mentioned, but mostly in paasing to explain how the court is provisioned, there is little description of them in terms of individuals. Finally, one gets the impression that the courts that Ibn Batuta visits are maintained by a veritable army of slaves.

Ibn Batuta's world is also clearly one of male privilege. As mentioned above, he usually travels with several slave girls, whose main purpose is evidently his sexual gratification. He even mentions at one point that one of his slave girls bore him a child. In addition, at any given court at which he stays for any length of time, he takes up to four wives (the maximum number that the Koran allows). When it is time to move on, he simply divorces them, a practice that in some cases was enjoined by a ban on women's traveling. In one instance he returns to India to look for a son that was born to him twenty years earlier, but the boy has died in the interim.

The Travels are punctuated with savage violence. In addition to the brigandage en route, the usual means by which one Sultan succeeds another seems to have been by murdering his predecessor, who is often a member of his own family. In addition, such offenses as picking up a piece of fruit lying on the public highway are in some kingdoms a capital crime, and the hapless offender is impaled and crucified as an example to others. Ibn Batuta appears to take such punishments as a matter of course.

Ultimately, the Travels portray a rich mosaic of sophisticated cultures throughout the Islamic world in the 14th century, when it was arguably at its zenith, and for that reason alone are well worth reading.

I am reading about Ibn Batuta's voyage to China, which he considered the most sophisticated civilization of the time (despite their not being Muslims). Ibn Batuta was writing in the 14th century, during the reign of the last Khan before the descendants of Genghis Khan were overthrown by the Ming dynasty. Although I have not come across a mention of Xian, he does talk about a number of walled cities. I happened across this picture quite by chance, but it spoke to me.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Adoption of a Foreign Child

The United States Embassy has a statement on adopting children from Morocco:

If you wish to adopt a child abroad, and you are in the United States, contact the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Service office that has jurisdiction over your place of residence. Please be advised that securing custody of Moroccan orphans for immigration is extremely difficult as adoption is essentially illegal in Morocco.

I do not know the full story, but my understanding is that the prohibition stems from a desire that Muslim children not be adopted by non-Muslims and so lost to the faith. After all, the King of Morocco is still the Emir Al Moulmenin (Commander of the Faithful).

Malika and I are pictured at La Creche Lalla Hasna, where I worked during the summer of 1989 between school years. The Creche was a privately funded charity and day care center attached to the state orphanage, and offered extra care to children from 8 months to 3 years old. The plight of the children was quite poignant, since they were unlikely to be adopted, and the resources at the state orphanage were not sufficient to care for them properly.

During the year,I was teaching English as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the village of Outat El Haj, and coming to the big city was a marked cultural change. (Naturally, it was also cooler on the coast than in the desert.)

MoorishGirl discusses her meeting with Karim Tazi, who runs a number of charities in Casablanca, including one that helps people in the Casablanca bidoville (slum) where the Casablanca bombers lived:

I wish people who spend their time talking about bringing democracy to the Arab world and who accuse Arabs of not doing enough would come see for themselves. Maybe then, instead of bombing these people into democracy, they'd roll up their sleeves and help.

My first thought is to wonder whether Mr. Tazi is any relation to the Mme Tazi who sponsored La Creche Lalla Hasna when I volunteered there in the late 90's. The Creche provided enriched day care to orphans between the ages of 8 months and 3 years who lived at the adjoining state run orphanage. The children faced a hard future — illegitimate or born of prostitutes, they were unlikely to be adopted by Moroccans. At the same time, state policy discouraged adoption by non-Muslims, so they were likely to remain wards of the state for a long time. The state run orphanage simply did not have adequate resources to give the children the care and attention they needed.

Keeping up even one weblog is a lot of work, and I have not had much success keeping up a second. This is particularly true when the second weblog is about a far away country about which I have a general, not a specialized, knowledge. Nevertheless, since I regard the a la menthe as something of an extended love letter to the country where I lived once and from whom I have been too long away, I am willing to give it another go.

One reason for the neglect of this blog was that I found that I wanted to include my occasional observations about Morocco in my main blog, A Web Undone 2. Now with advances in blogging technology (the MultiBlog plugin) I can include content in both blogs at once! Bismillah!