Posted on May 14, 2010 - by mira

In the footsteps of a terrorist, briefly

After the first few steps through the gate, I hesitate and stop to take it all in. It’s chilling to think of the significance of this place. The path leading to the entrance winds then disappears behind the neat shrubbery on either side, and the grass turf is a pleasant walled patch of green in Old Sanaa. A sign indicates this is the Arabic-language institute I am looking for. Not a conventional apartment building at all, the school is located in one of the Old City’s renovated mudbrick tower houses.

This is where Omar Farouq Abdel-Muttaleb studied Arabic.

A generation without a language

by mira on May 11, 2010

A custom that’s near extinction, these poetic contests were once more of a way of life on Socotra than words on paper, like poetry is in most parts of the world.

In the fishing town of Qalansiya, three young boys try to synchronize their paddles while rowing their boat to the beat of their chants. Men all over the island’s coastal towns used to sing poetry as they cast their fishing nets and the valleys echoed with women’s soft voices as they sang poetry and prepared butter oil. The descriptions evoke images of an island once merry with song, drumming up its inhabitants’ energy and pace for the work at hand and delighting its guests as they gaze with admiration.

American Yemenis caught between identity and belonging

by mira on May 6, 2010

“I’m viewed as American among Yemenis,” says Ibrahim Kabire, 30, a Yemeni-American living in Yemen. “My Yemeni friends say: Nothing about you defines you as an Arab. And in America, it’s the other way around. My American friends say: Everything about you defines you as Arabic.”

The island that no longer sings

by mira on May 6, 2010

Lovers of Fairuz will be familiar with the nostalgia that pervades many of her songs for a past that has been slowly evolving and hybridizing, eventually to disappear. Although the nostalgia peddled by Fairuz revolves around Lebanese village life, the elderly people of Socotra might be feeling a similar emotion.

However, theirs is not just a longing for an older way of life, but also great fear for the future of their endangered language and cultural heritage.

The Socotri people speak a language, Socotri, or Saqatari as they call it, which has no written form.

Ismailis: From Yemen to India and back

by mira on May 6, 2010

In Yemen’s ancient village of al-Qalaa, later renamed Tayba, with scenic views of Wadi Dahr, Ismailis visit the shrine of a da’i in the courtyard of a mosque frequented by the village’s Zaydi community. The village, historically important to Ismailis, is now home to around 250 Sulaymanis, says Haj Mohammed Abdullah, an elderly, learned member of the sect.