The Zeitouns: From Jableh to Post-deluvian New Orleans

(This article is co-written by Abu Kareem and Abufares and posted simultaneously on both blogs)

by Abu Fares

There's a tomb at the far end of the Cornishe in Jableh, Syria. It is the resting place of 23 year old Mohamad Zeitoun (1941-1964), by far the most accomplished Syrian athlete of all times. Mohamad died in a car accident while on his way to the Suez Canal in Egypt to participate in the International Canal Swimming Race.The Zeitoun family came from Arwad, a small island off the coast of Tartous and the only inhabited one in Syria. The father, Haj Ahmad, was a master sailboat builder. He had witnessed family and friends perish in the treacherous waves of the unforgiving sea and wanted to offer his offspring an alternative life. Accordingly he moved to Jableh where he worked hard as a mason and brought up his sons into the business. The main concern of this simple man was to keep his family safe and away from the sea but fate, as it is often inclined to, had other ideas up its sleeve.

Mohamad Zeitoun, Syrian long distance swimmer, went on to become an international legend as 3 times World Champion (1960, 1961 and 1964). In 1959 his winning of the 40 km Nile Race in Egypt was nothing short of historic as he completed the final 10 km using one arm only due to injury. His 1961 world record in the Capri-Napoli International Swimming Marathon remained unbroken for many years as he swam the 38 km in 8 hours and 45 minutes, one full hour ahead of his nearest competitor. He crossed the 50 km Suez Canal Race in 12 hours and 3 minutes in 1963. Mohamad, who never had a coach, went on to win every single international event he participated in during his short-lived career. His brother Abdulwahab, a retired general, recalls how his father sent Mohamad to work as an apprentice blacksmith at 16. His boss had to make a custom 15 kg sledgehammer for him with a steel handle because he invariably kept breaking those made of wood. He was a powerful man who ultimately defied his father's will and couldn't keep away from the water. All of Jableh, including the father, gathered around the radio when Mohamad was racing and waited for the good news. A huge celebration would erupt upon the announcement of the expected result and the proud father would delightfully cry: Abaday, Allah Ywaf'o in his provincial Arwadi accent.

In 2005, 41 years later and halfway across the world, Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans, Louisiana. Another son of Haj Ahmad Zeitoun makes the headlines and becomes an American Legend. Heroism runs in the family evidently but why not continue reading about this fascinating story through the words of my friend Abu Kareem of Levantine Dreamhouse.

By Abu Kareem

Few books published in the United States since 9/11 have sought to understand those on the recieving end of the war on terror. Always on prominent display at bookstores are books with sensational titles written by self appointed Middle East "experts" with ulterior motives or an axe to grind. Such books fed the national paranoia and along with the popular media provided cover for the Bush-Cheney years.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers (see side bar for link to book) shatters that mold.  The book is a biography of a Syrian immigrant, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, living in New Orleans when hurricane Katrina devastated the city.  Abdulrahman, a native of Arwad and Jableh, steps onto dry land  in Houston after a ten-year wanderlust sailing the seven seas on commercial ships.  He makes his way to New Orleans where he settles down, marries an American woman and establishes a thriving business as a painting contractor.  A couple of days before Katrina strikes New Orleans, Abdulrahman sends his family away to safety and stays behind to look after his properties and his business.  After Katrina's passage over New Orleans, the levies break and Abdulrahman's neighborhood is flooded. He retreats to the second floor of his house and retrieves an old canoe from the garage. Setting out by canoe intending to check on his business and properties, he instead finds himself rescuing eldery people trapped in their houses and feeding dogs abandoned by their owners. He wife's pleas to leave the city go unheaded as he feels duty bound to stay behind to help out. As Abdulrahman's American story unfolds, Eggers weaves in anecdotes from his past in Arwad and Jableh.  We learn much about his family of seafarers, his childhood in Arwad, the moonless nights he spent sardine fishing off the coast of Jableh and his attachment to his older, now deceased, brother, a world champion swimmer.  These anectdotes help the reader understand Abdulrahman's character, his inner strength and resolve bordering on stubborness, his gentle piety, his devotion to his family, his dreams and ambitions and his deep sense of fairness.  One cannot help but like this man.

The first half of the book recounting Abdulrahman's history is hopeful and heartwarming: an honest and hardworking immigrant thriving in his adoptive land.  Even in the midst of New Orleans' apocalyptic floods, our spirits are lifted by Abdulrahman's good deeds.  Soon, however, this American dream turns into a nightmare.

Instead of mounting a campaign to rescue the stranded citizens of New Orleans, the Bush administration, in true war-on-terror style, sets up a military seige of the city.  Thousands of heavily armed soldiers and private security guards -mercenaries in effect- are sent in.  As hundreds of citizens perish, the soldiers' first priority was to build a makeshift prison at the city's train station. Abdulrahman and three companions, two Americans and a Syrian, all of whom stayed behind hoping to ride out the storm, are arrested on suspicion of looting by overzealous soldiers armed to the teeth.  The Syrians are singled out as possible terrorists and all are detained in conditions that are a cross between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.  Claustrophobic and nightmarish, the second half of the book is a powerful indictment of the Bush administration and the militaristic attitude that permeated everything it did and where national security paranoia trumped even the most basic civil rights of its own citizens. Perhaps what is most shocking about Zeitoun is how the horrific treatment of detainees in post-Katrina New Orleans went completely unreported by the national media at the time.

Eggers is a compelling storyteller and a careful journalist.  He researched and cross checked all the facts of the events described in the book.  He even traveled to Syria several times to meet the Zeitoun clan and learn about the coastal towns of Syria.  As a good journalist should, he avoids sentimentality, though his admiration for Abdulrahman, his wife Kathy and the whole Zeitoun clan is hard to hide. Abdulrahman comes across as an admirable human being, fair and idealistic, almost to a fault.  Even after his arrest and mistreatment, he stubbornly refuses to think ill of his fellow human beings, assuming that it is all a misunderstanding that will soon be resolved.  It is perhaps this quality that also made him so liked among his neighbors and why so many New Orleanians were ready to come to his defense.

Even after Bush's departure, the perception of a "clash of civilizations" lingers and ignorance and suspicion of Arabs and Muslims remains an issue in the United States. I therefore take it as a hopeful sign that Zeitoun, a book with a fairly narrow focus, made it to the New York Times best seller list last year.

References:

Lecture Abdulwahab Zeitoun 2008 (Arabic)
The Guardian: The Amazing True Story of Zeitoun (English)
Nass MBC Net (Arabic)

The Tragic Tale of an "Overqualified" Diplomat

Too funny to pass.

From: Foreign Policy, by David Kenner; Feb 3, 2010. 
Despite having served for years as a distinguished Pakistani diplomat, Akbar Zeb reportedly cannot receive accreditation as Pakistan's ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The reason, apparently, has nothing to do with his credentials, and everything to do with his name -- which, in Arabic, translates to "biggest dick": In Saudi Arabia, size does count.


A high level Pakistani diplomat has been rejected as Ambassador of Saudi Arabia because his name, Akbar Zib, equates to "Biggest Dick" in Arabic. Saudi officials, apparently overwhelmed by the idea of the name, put their foot down and gave the idea of his being posted there, the kibosh.


According to this Arabic-language article in the Arab Times, Pakistan had previously floated Zeb's name as ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, only to have him rejected for the same reason. One can only assume that submitting Zeb's name to a number of Arabic-speaking countries is some unique form of punishment designed by the Pakistani Foreign Ministry -- or the result of a particularly egregious cockup.

Dining with Sheharazade: Medieval Middle Eastern Cuisine

Did you know that there are more cooking books in Arabic before 1400 than in all other languages combined?  I didn't, but I cannot say that I am surprised given how finicky Middle Easterners are about the food they eat. This and many other tantalizing tidbits appear in Medieval Cooking in the Islamic World by the Tunisian author Lilia Zaouali. It is a short, fascinating whirlwind tour of our culinary heritage.

The oldest Arabic cookbook titled Kitab al-Tabikh, dates from the 10th century and was penned by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq and included recipes from the 8th and 9th century Caliphs and members of their court. The influences and complexities of Medieval Islamic cuisine grew predictably as the geographic reach of the Islamic world expanded.  Expanding Northward from the Arabian peninsula, Arab cooking was infused with Persian influences as well as those of the Aramaic speaking Christians of Syria and Iraq.  Moving Westward, Arabs brought Near Eastern recipes to North Africa and Andalusia but also adopted Berber and Iberian influences.  With the Arrival of the Ottomans, the cuisine of the Eastern and Western Islamic world grew apart with the Near Eastern cuisine becoming heavily influenced by Turkish culinary traditions.  Paradoxically, however, some of the more ancient common recipes, lost in the East are preserved in the Maghreb.

The history of the development of a particular cuisine also provides a window into the societal and political workings of the era. There seems to have been a distinct preoccupation with the health aspects of particular foods with many physicians of the era, Muslim Jewish and Christian writing about the benefits and harmful effects of certain foods. Eggplant, for example, with its bitter taste was considered unhealthy and did not become part of the cuisine until someone figured out that salting the eggplants before cooking took the bitterness out. The importance of hygeine in cooking also emphasized as way to ward off fevers. Cooking pots had to be scrubbed clean and cooks were advised not to cut their vegetables on board used to cut uncooked meat.  Surprisingly, some of the cookbooks even included recipes for making wine and beer.  At different periods in the medieval Islamic world alcohol consumption was tolerated though overindulgence was considered unacceptable.  I remember, as a child, asking my father about references to Khamr  in old Arabic texts or poems I read; he would invariably and disengenuously tell me that it really referred to grape juice. 

The book also includes 174 recipes divided into medieval recipes and modern recipes, the latter being mostly Maghrebi dishes, that can be traced back to medieval ones. Most sound delicious and have combinations of sweet and savory that is no longer common in today's Middle Eastern cuisine -except, perhaps in Maghrebi cooking. Also, there was widespread use of fermented sauces, akin to soy sauce or Asian fish sauces, in medieval recipes that, to my knowledge, are no longer used. Despite the differences, there remains some commonalities: the heavy use of nuts, pomegranate, lemon and the frequent use of cinammon and other spices. Some recipes like Beef with rosebuds sound intriguing while others, like the one detailed here, sound ominous:

Fish Drowned in Grape Juice:

Take a large fish. Put in black grape juice in a vessel deep enough for it to be completely immersed. It will thrash about and swallow the juice until its body is filled with it.  When the level of the juice goes down and the belly and gills are saturated with it, remove the fish, clean it and cook it on the grill...

Sounds cruel, but I guess it is not any worse than throwing a live lobster into scalding water.

Perhaps the most suprising thing is how few medieval recipes survive.  Though some of the names sound very familiar, the medieval recipes are often totally different than their modern namesakes.  It should come as a surprise, the food we eat is influenced by the times we live in.  Recipes for the same dishes evolve over time with changes in tastes and introduction of new ingredients -like the tomato- not available in medieval times. Witness, for example, the demise of the use of samneh (clarified butter) in favor of vegetable oil. Samneh was considered so important that a scandal over tainted samneh once toppled a government in Syria. Moreover, even at any given time recipes for the same dish vary tremendously from family to family and from town to town, each thinking their recipe is the ultimate, immutable version for that particular dish.

Deconstructing Obama's Oslo Speech

Here is a piece from ConsortiumNews that shreds Obama's speech for it faulty reasoning:

"Whether Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize is not the point. He didn’t. The fact is he got it, and was gifted with the chance of a lifetime to make a classic speech on the politics of peace-making, a speech that in the glare of Nobel could have attained instant biblical standing.
He failed miserably, producing a hodge-podge that resembled the work of a bright but undisciplined sophomore." (Read more Here)

An Immigrant's Dilemma

My Homeland!
A word that sends chills down my spine
Emotions that confound me
And questions that persist
Is my homeland the place where I was born
Or the place that I live in
Is my homeland the land that pushed me away
Or the land that welcomed me
Is my homeland just a collection of old memories
Or is it the memories in the making
And the list gets longer, and the questions multiply
But there are no answers
In the end, one question lingers
One burning more than all others combined
Do I really have a homeland?

The above poem, in Arabic, appeared on the blog Migrant Bird. The words resonated with my own experience and I took the liberty, with George's permission, to translate it into English.

Alas, it is the inescapable fate of all first generation immigrants to never feel fully at home anywhere. I have, long ago, become reconciled with that fact. The facet of my immigrant psyche that remains problematic, however, is my sometimes ambivalent relationship with the land of my birth. My family did not emigrate by choice; it was not a voluntary, planned or orderly process, but a harried, furtive, and frightful departure. Our life, like that of many other compatriots, was suddenly upended, and we were sentenced to a nomadic and fragmented existence away from home and extended family. A hopeless optimist, I always told myself that the unique experience of our family's disrupted life would make me stronger. But it is impossible to make it through such chaotic formative years without some psychic scars. However well camouflaged, these scars do, from time to time, resurface, raw and painful as if the wounds were inflicted yesterday.

So I sometimes wonder, why should I care about the country of my birth? Have I not earned the right to turn my back and walk away? Somehow, though, I cannot walk away. My home might be here, but my roots, as forlorn and dessicated as they might, are still there.

Into the Wild

Until a few weeks ago, I had never been camping. So when a friend, an experienced outdoors man, offered to take me on a camping trip, it was hard to say no. Not even a forecast predicting an overnight temperature of two degrees (Celsius) for the weekend of our trip, dimmed my enthusiasm; on the contrary, the extra challenge strengthened my resolve.

The plan was to hike 23Km of the Finger Lakes Trail in upstate New York over two days. The trail runs hundreds of miles East to West, perpendicular to the Southern tips of a dozen or so elongated lakes carved into the landscape by ancient glaciers. The trail runs through forested hills, farmland and along streams and glens. An added bonus at this time of the year, is the foliage ablaze in fall colors. But October, in this part of the world, can also be very wet and very cold.

Predictably, it was dark, cold and raining the morning we drove South. After parking one car at the destination of our hike, we drove to our planned starting point. As we drove deeper into the countryside and paved roads turned into unto desolate dirt roads, images from the 70s movie classic Deliverance crossed my mind. What, I wondered, would a bunch of rednecks do if they found an Ayrab lost in the woods. Other than the isolation, however, there was nothing threatening about the quiet, bucolic countryside that surrounded us. Several miles from our destination we came across a sign planted in the front yard of a house announcing: "Arab Mare for Sale". The sign was sitting under the street sign: Templar road. We had to chuckle at this odd juxtaposition. Not even deep in the backwoods of the New World can you get away from ghosts of the Old World.

We parked the car, dressed in layers to keep warm and dry, donned our backpacks and set out onto the trail. It was mid morning but felt more like dawn. A grey mist hung heavy across the valleys and a constant drizzle saturated the air. The cold, damp air scented with the distinctive smell of fall, was invigorating. The trail was carpeted with fiery red, rust-colored and golden leaves glistening from the rain. Other than the sounds of our steps, the woods were silent without even the distant din of traffic, a reassuring sound for the urban dweller, a sign that civilization is still within reach.

We walked mostly in silence, enveloped by the vegetation around us and exhilarated by the solitude. This was no leisurely stroll in the woods, however, we walked at a determined, purposeful pace. We had to make it to our campsite before dark. Every couple of hours, we would drop our backpacks and collapse unto the wet ground for a quick break. We shed or added layers of cloths according to the ambient temperature and we refueled with water, nuts and dried fruits. Over the next seven hours we walked through woods, along creeks, across streams, past small waterfalls, emerging occasionally from the woods to walk around farms, unto hilltops with distant views of the surrounding hills and lakes. Our most striking encounter in the woods, however, had nothing to do with nature. It was the abandoned cemetery of an old, long gone settlement, an eerie vision in the middle of the woods. Most of the tombstones were toppled or cracked by the encroaching trees and the chiseled names worn down by age and the unrelenting dampness of the undergrowth.

In the late afternoon, as we approached our destination for the night, we saw the only other hiker we came across on the trail. He was an older, white bearded man, making his way into the woods with a full backpack and walking sticks. We exchanged greetings but he was rather taciturn. He seemed determined to get away from it all and longed for the solitude of the wild; our small talk just got in the way. We reached our campsite at around five in the evening, time enough to make a fire, eat and prepare for the night. A lean to, a small wooden platform, closed on three sides, was going to be our shelter for the night. The night was jet black except for the dying embers of our fire. To keep the wildlife at bay, we hung all of our food in a bag high on a tree branch some fifty meters from our shelter. The night was uneventful with no unexpected visits from any of the wildlife - foxes, coyotes and occasional black bears- that live in the area. Early next morning, energized by the crisp cold air and a cup of instant coffee, we set our onto the trail for the final eight kilometers ending at the Watkins Glen state park. We must have been a strange sight to the tourists strolling in the opposite direction into the park, two scruffy, muddy, unshaven middle aged men with backpacks walking with a brisk confident pace. It was the confidence borne from a sense of achievement at having hiked 23Km in a day and a half and except for a couple of blisters, we were none worse for wear.

My first venture into the wild was exhilarating. OK, we did not cross the Amazon or survive a week in the arctic, but there were neverless real dangers had we been foolish or unprepared. Get wet when the ambient temperature is two degrees and you rapidly become hypothermic. There is a certain primordial pleasure in regaining some of the lost skills of our ancient ancestors and sense of achievement when you reach your goal. To get there, you have to shed all concerns of your daily life and fixate on a very primal need, survival: staying warm, dry, and safe. I can't wait to get back out there again though I will likely wait out the frigid subzero winter months; I am no Survivoman ... at least not yet.

My Eureka! Moment

It was a eureka moment eighteen years in the making. Two years ago, a wealthy man made me a proposal I could not refuse. A family member with an inherited neurological condition was my patient. She suffered from a disease that I had been researching for a number of years. He wanted to help move the research forward and asked me to give him a far-reaching, long-term research plan and he would fund it. I came up with a seven year plan to create a "center without walls" with the aim of bringing together researchers with complementary expertise to work collaboratively on this project. He agreed to the plan and committed several million dollars to the project. It was an unusual proposal. Most scientists would have opted for a project that would keep all of the money at their institution. That was never a consideration for me as I thought that the quickest and most efficient way to move the science forward was to tap into already existing expertise elsewhere rather that try to recreate it locally.

Scientific research is a cutthroat business full of back-stabbing, petty jealousies and over-inflated egos. It is these attributes that often get in the way of scientific advancement and make successful collaborative research a rarity. The medical sciences are no exception. Therefore I had to choose my partners carefully. In addition to being good scientists, they must be willing to leave their egos at the door. I partnered with a Dutch scientist whom I had known for some time. He not only had the scientific talent, but he also had the temperament that I was looking for in a collaborator. A year into the project, we extended the collaboration to include a scientist in Seattle.

Last week, we gathered to go over the data generated in the first two years of the project. I knew this would be a good meeting. When careful scientists not usually given to hyperbole and exaggeration tell you that they are "very, very, excited...", you cannot help but get giddy. When all the data was presented, the members of the scientific advisory board overseeing the project were stunned. Several independent lines of evidence all pointed to one mechanism for this disease. For eighteen years since the initial discovery of the genetic defect, there were several competing theories about what was happening at the cellular level to cause this disease. With the data presented last week, all but one remains, and that last one is now backed by solid evidence.

Of course it is not the end of the road. It will be years before we have an effective treatment, but we finally have a target to go after and the technology to eventually reverse the effects of this sometimes devastating neurologic condition. For me, as a clinician, I can now for the first time offer my patients hope and truthfully tell them that we understand their disease and that we are working on a treatment.

My next eureka moment will come when I can look my patients in the eye and tell them that we finally have a treatment.