I've already signed off for the four-day Thanksgiving weekend, and if you haven't watched the old videos I posted (just below) please do so, but a brief Facebook exchange on Thanksgiving night reminded me of the oddity 0f the term by which we call the bird so associated with Thanksgiving: that most American of birds, the turkey. (Ben Franklin thought the wild turkey, not the bald eagle, should be the American emblem.) For you non-American readers, Thanksgiving is associated with turkeys, which we eat for Thanksgiving dinner. At the first thanksgiving in 1621, after the Pilgrims in Plymouth had survived a horrible year, the Wampanoag Indians and the Pilgrims spent several days celebrating a harvest feast. They ate deer and the fruits of the harvest, and "fowl." Turkeys aren't mentioned (there are only two references to the first Thanksgiving, by William Bradford and somebody else), but have become canonical. This was a symbol of colonist/Indian amity, and has been celebrated for many years, starting sometime after the Wampanoag were essentially wiped out. The President of the United States issues a Presidential pardon to the official White House turkey and its backup (the Vice Turkey?) on TV:
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Turkeys are not terribly intelligent birds (that's an understatement, and probably why "turkey" is a pejorative at times) but are very good to eat.
That begs the major question: If the turkey is an American bird, why is it named for Turkey?
When Europeans first encountered turkeys on the American continent, they incorrectly identified the birds as a type of guineafowl (Numididae), also known as turkey fowl (or turkey hen and turkey cock) due to the birds' importation to Central Europe through Turkey. That name, shortened to just the name of the country, stuck as the name of the American bird.
Okay, but Guinea and Turkey are not particularly close to each other. But that's just the first step.
The Turks call it Hindi, or the Indian bird. French dinde, similarly, started out as d'Inde. So in Turkey, it's Indian. Apparently languages ranging from modern Hebrew to most Slavic languages (indyk or something similar) follow suit. But it's not an Indian bird, either.
In Arabic, or at least every Arabic country where I've talked turkey, it called dik rumi, the "Roman fowl," but "Roman" here means pertaining to the Byzantine Empire, hence Greek or Anatolian. It's not Greek or Anatolian either, though Anatolia today = Turkey. But various sources say that Palestinian and other Levantine dialects call it dik habashi, or Ethiopian bird. (Maybe better "Abyssinian bird" since the Arabic habash and the Greek Abyssinia are the same word.) I guess I never discussed turkeys in the Levant, if that's the case. And it's not Ethiopian, either.
I'm on a holiday break so I'm stopping there. Bernard Lewis, who whatever you think of his current politics is one of the last of the old-school orientalists, has suggested the bird is called by whatever term people see as meaning "exotic" or "foreign": something like "It's Greek to me."
I don't care what you call the damned bird. Pass the dressing.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day here in the US, beginning a four-day weekend for those of us not in retail sales, but the busiest weekend of the year for retailers, since it's the traditional start of Christmas shopping. Though my daughter prefers Cornish game hens to turkey, we'll be otherwise traditional and I'll be off the grid for a few days.
For the past three weekends, plus the Veterans' Day holiday, I've been doing my Weekend Historical Videos feature. Since this is a four-day weekend, it's only appropriate to double down, or more. There are a couple of hours or more of video below.
My Veterans' Day post dealt with videos from World War I in the Middle East, which is by and large our first real video record of the region: the armies on both sides took black and white, soundless, jerky video of some of the major events. There's more surviving footage than I posted there, though, and to give you something to do during my four days of absence (barring something big), I've decided to do a big video dump here. Some of these are as short as a minute, some more than an hour. Unlike the Veterans' Day post, these have no real connection to Thanksgiving, unless I make the really atrocious pun that they all involve Turkey in some way. But I would never stoop so low as to do that. So here goes:
Lawrence of Arabia
A collector has posted a video of what he originally thought was all the known video of T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia")(but see below), with, perhaps inevitably, the theme from the David Lean film as background. Since Lawrence is the first thing most Westerners think of when they think of the Great War and the Middle East, let's start here. (two minutes, 33 seconds):
He subsequently found a bit over one minute more:
Gallipoli
The British assault on the Dardanelles made a certain sense as long as it was a naval campaign, but when the Navy stalled and they decided to land ground troops, it became a great debacle. It ended Winston Churchill's career in the Admiralty and guaranteed he was never heard from again., (Well, almost.)The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) bore the brunt of the bloodshed, and ANZAC day is still their patriotic remembrance, as is blaming pommy bastards. So here's an early, silent, Aussie documentary about Gallipoli, restored by Kiwi Director Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame, with actual footage from the disastrous Dardanelles campaign, especially the ANZAC forces (just under three minutes):
And, from the other side, Turkish film footage of the Gallipoli campaign, with no narrative:
Mesopotamia and the Rest
A BBC documentary narrated by Sir Michael Redgrave, on the Mesopotamian campaign, though starting with a general introduction to the War in the Middle East generally and ending with the Palestine campaign. (Redgrave uses the pronunciation that was still official BBC into the 1970s at least: pronouncing "Sinai" as "SINE-ee-ai" for no visible reason. It's not pronounced that way in any language, including English, except by the BBC, and even they seem to have dropped it.) Mesopotamia, or Iraq, which the soldiers charmingly dubbed "Messpot," was a huge hemorrhage for the British Indian troops fighting there, though now largely forgotten. Some day I want to write something about General Townshend at Kut, a delusional man who surrendered the largest British Army (though largely Indian) to surrender between Yorktown (1781) and Singapore (1942). In prison, he convinced himself that he ended the war with Turkey, and bragged of this in his memoir. He was wrong.
The documentary includes the Allenby campaign as well. (Many of the same clips and even some of the interviews were in the BBC piece I ran on Veteran's Day, in the latter part. The BBC recycles, apparently.) It's in four parts, 10 minutes each; total about 40 minutes.
Atatürk
A documentary on Kemal Atatürk in (sonorous, somewhat stentorian) English, but Turkish made and sponsored. While it does go into the 1920s and 1930s, the bulk of it deals with the war and the Greek-Turkish war which followed it, so I think it qualifies. Kemal was the only Turkish military commander to perform really well in the war (at Gallipoli, no less). Be warned. This is pure Kemalist/Turkish nationalist propaganda, but with lots of old video and stills in it. But take it with a grain of salt: the video accompanying the (poorly supported by the Royal Navy) naval attempt to run the Dardanelles, leading to the Gallipoli disaster, looks more like Jutland to me than the outmoded ships Britain actually used. If they'd had those dreadnoughts at Gallipoli, the Ottomans would have given up Constantinople and there might not have been a Russian Revolution. Then again, some documentary maker probably thought, ships are ships.
If you're Greek, Armenian, British, or possibly anything other than Turkish, it will seem heavy-handed at times, but watch it for the video. (Long: an hour and 21 minutes.)
This is probably just posturing but, combined with worries about a new Lebanese civil war, it reminds us that the STL is playing with fire. It's seeking justice, but even Rafiq Sa‘d Hariri, who would seem to have as much interest as anyone in solving his father's murder, is trying to dial back on the tensions.
Lebanon being Lebanon, he could ask Walid Jumblatt how he coped with his father's murder.
As Barbie supposedly might have said, Diplomacy is Hard: Let's Go Shopping. Apparently Fidel Castro recently said some nice things about Israel in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. Binyamin Netanyahu, who's not getting a lot of good press at the moment, apparently praised this, and President Shimon Peres sent a thank-you note of sorts.
Oops. The incoming Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, now that the Republicans have taken the House, is Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), a longtime staunch supporter of Israel but, trumping that, a Havana-born Cuban-American who represents Miami's Little Havana, so she sent Bibi word that, as much as she loves Israel, she hates Castro more. Netanyahu has now clarified his position: he only agrees with Castro when he praises Israel, not for any of that other stuff.
Rami Khouri is almost always worth reading; he and Michael Young are among the few remaining reasons to check out the Beirut Daily Star, once the best English daily in the Arab world but now in its dotage. He has a good piece at Agence Globale he calls "Guide to the Young Arab World." It's brief (maybe succinct is the better word) and enlightening.
By now we've all been primed for the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL)'s expected indictment of senior Hizbullah figures in the Hariri assassination. Though that hasn't happened yet, an apparent leak of details of the investigation has now provoked a lot of debate and armchair analysis. I'm not even going to try to summarize the story here, since the report, by CBC News, is lengthy, detailed, and includes charts. (The fact that the current chief of the STL, Daniel Bellemare, is Canadian comes to mind, but the CBC report by Neil Macdonald goes out of its way to note that Bellemare refused to be interviewed by the CBC.) Read the report first, so you'll know what the various blogosphere commenters are talking about.
Of course this kind of point by point criticism of a leaked story suggests the leak itself was planted by someone. All of which reminds us that in a region where every event produces a related conspiracy theory, this one clearly was a conspiracy that involved a lot of people, reached into the Lebanese security services, and perhaps involved some deliberate false flags.
Read both the CBC report and the commentaries. They'll likely preoccupy Lebanese coffeehouse debates until the STL really does unveil its conclusions.
This blog hasn't devoted much time to the approaching referendum in Sudan on January 9, and the real probability of a separation of the southern Sudan likely to follow it. Unless various major issues of citizenship, water, and control of the Abyei region are resolved by then, the dangers of conflict or even civil war cannot be completely excluded. As the referendum approaches, there's growing apprehension in neighboring Arab countries about the first potential secession in the region since Eritrea left Ethiopia.
I'll be watching the issue more closely as the deadline approaches, but the International Crisis Group has just released a report on the issue which can serve as a good backgrounder and analysis, including a look at potential scenarios. The summary is here; the full report in PDF is here; the first link also has links for French and Arabic versions.
I'm sure the world's tanker traffic is grateful to know this. Four months later. To be fair, though, everyone concerned with oil security has been aware of this for some time.
This blog has taken no notice of Prince William's recent engagement; the ghost of my Irish great-grandmother would haunt me if I showed much interest in the House of Windsor. But I did find it amusing to see a writer in the Saudi English-language paper Arab News' indignation that the British press keeps running polls on whether Prince William, instead of his father, should succeed when Queen Elizabeth goes.
I'm sure it has absolutely nothing to do with the news that King ‘Abdullah is heading to the US for medical treatment and his Crown Prince also-ailing Prince Sultan (also in his 80s) is filling in, but the author is rather livid that the British press might speculate about lines of succession:
Since the public has no say whatsoever when it comes to the royal line of succession, such polls are not only inconsequential but are also hurtful to the royal family. The Daily Mail got into the act as well with a Harris poll showing 48 percent of respondents prefer King William to King Charles.
For one thing, such questions are premature when the queen at age 82 is still healthy and has sworn to serve as monarch until her last breath. Indeed, if she carries the same genes as the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother she could remain on the throne for up to 20 years. Any speculation as to who should succeed her is disrespectful and akin to dancing on her grave.
No, nothing to do with succession speculation anywhere else. No lèse majesté for us please, we're Saudi.
The Indian Ocean has been a zone of human interaction for several millennia, boasting a 1,500-year history of active high-seas trade before the arrival of Europeans in 1498. This website seeks to enhance the profile of Indian Ocean history, long neglected relative to the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean in both academic study and world history courses. To do so, it provides more than 800 primary sources, as well as ample contextual information and lesson plans, as a teaching tool for Indian Ocean history in upper elementary, middle, and high school classrooms. It is easily the most comprehensive website for studying and teaching Indian Ocean history currently available.
Primary sources, including maps, objects, and excerpts from travelers’ accounts and official documents, are accessible through seven chronological maps ranging from the Prehistoric Era (90,000 BCE to 7000 BCE) to the present. These primary sources, along with contextual information on commodities, peoples and cultures, trade and migratory routes, and the environment, are embedded into the maps through eight icon classes: documents, technologies, places, goods, geography, routes, travelers, and objects. These icons, numbering more than 50 for each map, are distributed in relevant geographic locations. Clicking on an icon calls up a short primary source excerpt and/or between one and three images, as well as some contextual information.
Though ‘Abdullah's health has not been as precarious as his Crown Prince/brother Prince Sultan's, he is 86 years old. Sultan, who will run the Kingdom in his absence, was himself absent for most of last year, undergoing surgery in the US and a long recovery period at his palace in Agadir, Morocco.
The Hajj supervision was delegated to Prince Nayef, considered unofficially next in line after Sultan. The advancing age of the senior generation is likely to provoke new speculation about when and how the succession will pass to the next generation, the grandsons of the founder.
We haven't said much about Mauritania lately (which may be good because it's usually only their tendency to have coups that gets the attention of their neighbors), but Kal over at The Moor Next Door has an informative post on the Ba‘th Party/Tendency in Mauritania. I vaguely knew there were Ba‘this in Mauritania and that the Syrian and Iraqi wings of the Party both had sympathizers, but he's put together a lot of useful, if informal, background detail.
This week's "Weekend Historical Video" — again poaching from the wealth of YouTube so I can enjoy the weekend — is a BBC documentary on the 1956 Suez War. It doesn't carry a date but must be in the last few years since it includes much information that was only declassified after 40 years or more. [UPDATE: Looks like 2003.] But its strength is it contains, in addition to the inevitable talking heads, a lot of contemporary newsreel clips of Nasser, Eden, etc.
Now that 1956 is more than half a century in the past, the Suez War does not seem to occupy a very prominent place in most Westerners' collective memory; most aren't old enough to remember it. When it comes to Arab-Israeli wars, 1948 is enshrined in Israeli memory as the war of independence, and 1967 and 1973 are much studied as the formative matrices of the modern Middle East. Israel was a bit player in 1956, its invasion of Sinai a pretext (planned in advance) for the Anglo-French intervention. And in Britain and France, it's an incident best forgotten, the last death rattle of empire, when the once dominant powers were brought low by their erstwhile American ally, which turned out in those days to actually mean its anti-colonial rhetoric.
But Suez' memory is still alive in Egypt, for this was Nasser's finest hour, the defiant victory over the former colonial masters, his apotheosis as an Arab symbol, never completely erased even by the disaster of 1967. The victory over the "Tripartite aggression" is still a staple of school history in Egypt.
[In the documentary I do have one historical nit to pick. When discussing Nikita Khrushchev's nuclear threats against London and Paris, the documentary cuts to clips of a silo-launched missile and to another missile which is in fact an SA-2 surface-to-air missile. Neither of these was in service in 1956. The first Soviet ICBM, the R-7, was tested in 1957 (and launched Sputnik later that year) and none were silo-launched in the early days. The SA-2, which is an anti-aircraft defense, was also first introduced in 1957 and most famously demonstrated against Francis Gary Powers' U-2 in 1960. So those clips are anachronisms; though Khrushchev talked a lot about missiles, in those pre-Sputnik days most Westerners interpreted any nuclear threat as involving bombers.][End of Nitpick.]
The BBC documentary is in three parts, totaling about half an hour, below. Have a nice weekend.
As noted Wednesday, this isn't likely when the Hajj advances into the summer months; most of Mecca's rare rain falls in November. But it makes this year's pilgrimage, like last year's, memorable, though the flooding last year appears to have been more dangerous.
Admittedly, though, it's way down the web page from the lead, the Jonas Brothers' concert in Abu Dhabi. (And yes, with a 10-year-old daughter, I do know who they are.)
Somehow I think China's role in Abu Dhabi will last longer than the Jonas Brothers.
The town of Ghajar, an ‘Alawite town in the Golan Heights on the Lebanese border, has been a thorny issue for years. You'll find this blog has revisited it many times, and that link in te previous sentence will also link you to YouTube video and podcasts of an MEI presentation by Asher Kaufman of Notre Dame, not to mention his article in the Middle East Journal (only free to subscribers; sorry). Well, it looks like after a lot of discussion, Israel is finally going to withdraw from the northern half of the town, which it acknowledges as Lebanese. The southern half, which was Syrian before 1967 (some argue the northern half was, too) remains under Israeli occupation like the rest of the Golan.
This being the Middle East, of course, it's not as simple as it sounds, or as immediate as it might be. Although the Security Cabinet has authorized the withdrawal, the details are being negotiated between Israel and the United Nations (emphatically not between Israel and Lebanon), since Israel wants UNIFIL to take over security, fearing the alternative will be Hizbullah.
Most Ghajar residents consider themselves Syrian, and say they were never considered a part of Lebanon; the town expanded northward during Israel's long occupation of South Lebanon from 1982 to 2000, and has been reunited since 2006. They fear partition will separate families, and owners from their farmland. Many accepted Israeli citizenship during the long years of occupation, and may fear retribution, especially if Hizbullah moves in. So while the end of occupation is a step forward, absent a solution to the Golan Heights as well, it may have unfortunate personal impact on those involved.
Also, stand by: Israel still has to negotiate the details with UNIFIL, and Israeli negotiations with the UN (unless they've worked it out behind closed doors already) may not be automatic.
I don't know the reliability of this particular link but The Arabist seems to trust it, and I can assure you if this occurred it won't be in the UAE newspapers.
The technical details are way beyond me, so I merely refer you to the article, since we've dealt with this story before. It does sound increasingly like Iran may have been the target.
On the second day of stoning the devil, as the Hajj draws to an end, the skies have opened and it has rained in Mecca and Mina. Many hajjis are seeing it as a sign from heaven that their sacrifices have been acceptable. And curiously, last year heavy rains and flooding hit Mecca at the beginning of the Hajj.
Average precipitation in Mecca is just over an inch a year, which would seem to suggest something unusual is happening for it to rain two years running, but then again, more than half of that inch of rain falls in November, and since the feast moves around the calendar, and has been in November the past two years, perhaps it's natural. Or global warming.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has said he will never sign the death warrant for former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq ‘Aziz. He reportedly said he would not do so because of ‘Aziz' age (74) and because he is an Iraqi Christian. But the BBC report notes that one of the two Vice Presidents signed the warrant for the execution of Saddam Hussein. But the Vice President's have not yet been formally chosen for Talabani's new term. France, Russia, and the EU and Vatican have all protested the death sentence against ‘Aziz.
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