Video of Beirut in the 1920s

Via the blog Hummus for Thought, here's a video (silent, with French title cards), showing Beirut in the 1920, during the French Mandate:

Muzaffar al-Din Shah in Europe, 1900-1905: Earliest Film and Audio of a Middle Eastern Ruler?

Muzaffar al-Din Shah Qajar

Just under a year ago I wrote about the several visits of the late 19th century Iranian ruler Nasser al-Din Shah to Europe ("Friday Nostalgia for Rouhani's Visit: Nasser al-Din Shah's European Tours").

But Nasser al-Din Shah was not the last Qajar Shah of Iran to frequent European capitals. After he was assassinated in 1896, his son and successor Muzaffar al-Din Shah (1853-1907, Shah 1896-1907) also did so. Though today remembered mostly for his extravagant mustaches and for driving the country into debt that led to the Constitutional Revolution, he also was fascinated by technology.

More importantly, Thomas Edison had intervened. The Shah was fascinated with the cinematographe, and brought the technology back to Iran. More to the point, the first videos of the Shah on his European tour must be among the earliest videos of any Middle Eastern Ruler, unless there are earlier of the Ottoman Sultan. And the invention of early audio recording had also occurred, so there is even a recording of the Shah's own voice (in Persian, of course.)

This post at iroon.com explains what you are about to see:

Massoume Price writes: I think you would like this short documentary on Mozzafar ed-Din Shah's travels to Europe. All photos, most never seen before are from the private collection of Joachim Waibel in Vancouver BC. They even include newspaper drawings on attempt to assassinate him in Europe. Needs to be published more widely.

Below is a commentary from a friend with relevant information Dr.Tissaphern Mirfakhraii:

Excellent rare photos and films from Mozaffareddin Shah's travels in Europe. He visited Karlsbad, Ostend, Contrexeville, London, Paris, and Berlin. His host in London was Prince Arthur, Duke of Kent. Among his entourage photographed were Ataabak Amin os-Soltaan, Sa'd od-Dole, Shams ol-Molk, Vakil od-Dole, Hakim ol-Molk, and Moxber os-Saltane. There was also an assassination attempt on the Shah's life, shown in some of the photos.

The still photos are interspersed with extremely early moving pictures, cartoons and headlines of the day, and in the last minute plus you will actually hear a voice recording of the Shah himself.

If you know of earlier video of a Middle Eastern leader (not camels in the desert) please post in the comments.

This is the first I've ever seen of most of this.

A Startling Video of What it Feels Like When a Syrian MiG-29 is Angry With You

Here, via an aviation website, is a rather startling Syrian rebel video of a Syrian Air Force MiG-29; as the rebels are filming the aircraft, it maneuvers  directly towards the camera, opens fire with its gun, and the video abruptly ends with confusion and an "Allahu Akbar." Not a comfortable place to find yourself. Though designed as an air superiority fighter, Syria has been using the Mig-29 in a ground attack role; the 30mm cannon on its left wing has a 100-round magazine; that's what's being fired at the camera here. A 30mm round is serious business.

The Arabic in the upper left reads "Islamic Front: Army of Islam."

While I'm Busy, Old Cairo Videos

I'll be out all day at the Middle East Institute's Annual Conference.  Those of you in the DC area should come on down. (Admission to the Conference is free; only lunch is a paid event and there are plenty of dining options nearby.) If you're not around these parts it will be online fairly soon, and to keep you engaged I thought I'd drop in some YouTube videos of Cairo from the 1920s to 1979 or so. Enjoy.

1920s (caption says 1930s but it looks  earlier to me):


1930:


1938:


1950s, probably early in the decade:


1956, with a view of the old Opera House before it burned:



1960s:
 

1979:
This video has dropped off twice so I'm excluding it for now.


And a documentary on early Helipolis which, amid the talking head memories and a slightly hokey time-travel-by-train framing story, has some old stills and videos interspersed.

Aswan in Color Video from 1911

Zeinobia posted this on her blog while I was on vacation, but if you haven't yet seen it it's fascinating: a rareearly color film using the Kinemacolor technique, from 1911, of Aswan, Egypt:

The Evanescence of a Social Media Revolution: A Year Later, 10% of Data, Images are Missing

 As someone whose discipline is history, I have naturally wondered about how the history of the past year will be written. At first glance the vast library of YouTube videos, live tweets as events transpired, cell-phone photos of events from hundred of sources, etc. would seem to mean the revolutions would have been well documented.

But endurance of these media may be an issue. Here's an important article I think: "Losing My Revolution: A year after the Egyptian Revolution, 10% of the social media documentation is gone." Using several aggregation sites, Storify, etc., a test study showed that up to 10% of the content, especially photos and videos, is no longer available. And that's after only a year.

This raises some interesting questions for digital archivists. I commended it to historians, techie geeks of various stripes, and anyone with an interest in social media.

Documenting the Brutality

SCAF's denials notwithstanding, and many Egyptians' apathy as well, modern multimedia are doing a good job of documenting the brutality of the last few days. Here are several sites collecting them, and I'll add others to this post as I find them: (Warning, violence, graphic bloodshed, disturbing images):

• SCAF Crimes  جرائم العسكر

• Some of the SCAF's violations

• Alien Troops

• A YouTube Playlist, انتهاكات العسكر ولاد الكلب (Violations of the Military Sons of Dogs), currently at 124 128 videos.

The Great Qadhafi, Uh, Whatever it Was Yesterday

All I can do is speculate: since singer Paul Simon is on a revival concert tour, perhaps Brother Leader felt a need to show who has the real claim to be "Still Crazy After All These Years."

Was it a pep rally? Why is he pumping both arms? Why are they driving so fast? It's the strangest thing since the bizarre umbrella appearance in February (and see comment here).

Oh, and the hat. Don't ignore the hat.

A Multimedia Collection of the Egyptian Revolution

Here is what appears to be a huge multimedia collection on the Egyptian revolution to date, called I Am #Jan25, including pictures and videos. It appears to be a valuable archive. I also find very interesting their masthead logo, which is the word "Misr" ("Egypt" in Arabic) but with the "r" transformed into the crescent-and-cross image of the 1919 Revolution.

I'm not alone in seeing links between 1919 and 2011.

Sex and Some Other City

Some of these links are from back in April, but heck, I'm an old married man with a kid who doesn't keep up with the whole Sex and the City thing (though at least I no longer have to watch Dora the Explorer cartoons), and it took a younger colleague to flag this issue for me. As apparently everyone on earth and several of the inner planets knows, the forthcoming movie Sex and the City 2, opening soon, is at least partly set in Abu Dhabi.

Except that both Abu Dhabi and Dubai declined the honor of allowing filming in their fair cities, since, as certain British and Pakistani couples have learned recently, and despite a general sense of openness, and some locals who know how to get around the rules, there's no sex in those cities. At least not officially, and especially not on the beaches. So Morocco is playing Abu Dhabi for the movies. What part of Morocco is not specified in the material I've seen, and it's been a long time since I've been in Morocco, but I'm guessing there's a lot of computer graphics backgrounds in use, unless Casablanca has gone all Shanghai on us, or they just figure nobody knows what Abu Dhabi looks like. (Anybody want to bet there are camels in it? Gotta be camels or you'd think it was Palm Springs, right? Our heroines are going to ride camels, right? Isn't that how you get from the airport to your hotel in Abu Dhabi? It was the last time Wilfred Thesiger was there. Except there was no airport. I'm ranting. Sorry.)

It would be interesting to know why the brains (if that was the bodily organ involved) behind Sex and and the City 2 decided to set the story in Abu Dhabi in the first place. Was it a Maurice Chevalier "Come wees me to ze Casbah" thing? Except for the old fort and a mosque or two, the oldest building in Abu Dhabi dates from the 1980s (oh, sorry, that one was just torn down to build a new one: make it the 1990s: wait, here come the bulldozers) so it's not exactly Casbah country.

The National, Abu Dhabi's increasingly lively English daily, has been on the case, with an early take here; an article here on potential tourist boosts, and a piece on films made in locations other than their alleged setting here (familiar to Washingtonians who've seen plenty of films and TV shows where the chase passes the Lincoln Memorial and then the Sierra Nevadas show up in the background).

So Morocco, which has played a lot of other Arab countries in films before (as has Israel, for that matter), may drive a tourism boom to Abu Dhabi. But to paraphrase the title of a famous British play: no sex, please, we're Emirati.

Late Addition: A commenter has noted that my 1) CGI Abu Dhabi and 2) camel comments are not only dead on, but in the trailer (1:17, 1:23). So I have no alternative but embedding the trailer:


Forgive me. It's worse than I'd imagined.

Yesterday's Cairo Protests: The Videos

From the 6 April protests yesterday, some YouTube videos:

First, if you didn't read the article in Daily News Egypt I linked to yesterday, you probably should start with that as a good eyewitness account, written by journalist and blogger Sarah Carr

Next, an English-language narrated video from Daily News Egypt:



Some other YouTube videos, this from Midan Talaat Harb:



Outside the Shura Council (Upper House of Parliament):

Remembering Oum Kulthum 35 Years Later

Back when I was posting Arabic Christmas carols by Fairuz, I noted that she was perhaps the greatest living Arabic female vocalist, but that Oum Kulthum, an Ascended Master, would be discussed another time.

One of my readers has nudged me with the reminder that February 3, 1975, 35 years ago today, was the date Oum Kulthum left the building. (And Elvis references are not at all out of line: she was that big in the Arab world, perhaps bigger. Though a lot different to be sure.) Certainly during her lifetime she was a superstar unlike any other, and Arab Gulf potentates would fly to Cairo to hear her concerts. Here's her Wikipedia entry in English. Here's Arabic Wikipedia. And here's an article called "Oum Kalthoum for Non-Arab Ears."

Her name can appear as Umm Kulthum, Oum Kalthoum, Oum Kulsum, and so on, for reasons we have discussed before. She was born Fatima Ibrahim al-Baltagi. She's still called Kawkab al-Sharq, the Star of the East, and Cairo has a museum devoted to her.

She also made movies, which I haven't seen but I suspect that, like Elvis' movies, they were mostly vehicles for letting her break into song. (I'm pretty sure they're not like Elvis movies in any other ways.)

Since some of her songs could go on for an hour or more, she's not necessarily ideal for short sampling, and my own lack of sophistication in Arab music probably makes me a poor commentator anyway. So I'll let YouTube do it. [Note: the second one I posted earlier had no vocals, so I've substituted one that does.]

Khomeini's Return in Video

Still on the 31st anniversary theme, an Iranian video:

Wa'el ‘Abbas Talks to Al-Jazeera About Nag Hammadi

Egyptian blogger Wa'el ‘Abbas was interviewed by Al-Jazeera English today about a video that was E-mailed to him of the aftermath of the Christmas Eve shootings in Nag Hammadi last night:



If you want to see the full video with the Arabic background, here's Wa'el's upload to YouTube:



And elsewhere on YouTube, today's funeral:



Obviously a lot of outrage in play.

Impressive that information can get out so quickly. As I write this Al-Ahram's website headlines the story of the Egyptian border policeman killed at Rafah, followed by a report that the Copts are celebrating Christmas today. The independent media were posting stories last night; Al-Ahram will doubtless get around to it eventually, and I gather there may have been more in the print paper, though not headlined. [UPDATE: here on the website: Security says it wasn't sectarian. Nah, shooting Christians coming out of Christmas eve services and apparently hitting some of the bishop's deacon/escorts isn't sectarian. Thank you for clearing that up.] For those who read Arabic, Al-Yom al-Sabi‘ reviews how the various media are treating the story, including its own comments on Al-Ahram's relative silence.

A Merry Christmas, But Also a Reminder of Bethlehem's Wall

   Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
        Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
        This bird of dawning singeth all night long,
        And then they say no spirit dare stir abroad,
        The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
        No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
        So hallowed, and so gracious, is that time.
        (Hamlet 1.1.158-64)

It's Christmas Day for the Western churches (still the Orthodox and Armenians to go, though), so let me wish those who celebrate today, or even those who simply observe the secular feast, a Merry Christmas. I'm going to let YouTube do most of the work today:

Fairuz doing four Christmas songs, a couple of which appeared in earlier videos:



Fairuz singing "Go Tell it on the Mountain" in Arabic:



And one those my age may remember, the first (and to date, only) Christmas message from lunar orbit, Christmas Eve, 1968:



On a more somber note, many will disagree with this rather country-ish song and the video that goes with it, but it reminds us that Bethlehem today is cut off from Jerusalem by the separation wall:



Merry Christmas. The Psalmist asked us long ago to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Still seems like a good idea.

Clayton Swisher Reporting from Afghanistan

Clayton Swisher is a reporter for Al-Jazeera English, but before he was that, he was the Director of Programs for the Middle East Institute (and author of The Truth About Camp David), so I consider his reportage sort of part of the extended family's news. He's embedded in Afghanistan and sent me a couple of links to reports, one December 21 northwest of Kandahar, the other December 22 in Helmand.

Merry Christmas, Clayton; Glad I'm Not There [Update: he e-mails he's back in Doha now]:





And thanks again to Al-Jazeera for being savvy enough to put their reports on YouTube and allow embedding. It gets their reportage a much broader audience.

A Musical Bank Shot: Why the Internet is So Darned Cool

A lot of folks of my generation claim to be bewildered by the Internet, but I love it, having spent a career in earlier forms of publishing and communication and knowing improvement when I see it, and one reason has recently been driven home by a comment that makes me think I've just watched Minnesota Fats or some other great pool player do a bank shot that runs half the table. (Non-native-English speakers: something really cool happened.)

I know a lot of my readers don't regularly read the comments to the posts: this isn't the sort of blog where huge, intense debates go on in the comment threads, and a post that generates 10 comments is pretty good. But sometimes my commenters provide essential information that I didn't have.

And sometimes, the sheer networking of the Internet becomes apparent. Case in point: My Blizzard of '09 post over the weekend, with all the examples of Arab bagpipes (another post for which YouTube can claim a lot of the credit, another cool thing about Web 2.0), included a YouTube video of Moroccan bagpipes in a Moroccan group, a video which I noted was captioned in a language I did not know (but suggested might be Hungarian). In a comment to that post, one I. Warner said:

The Kobza Vajk Group does indeed have Hungarian subtitles - Szentendre is an adorable little town up the Duna (Danube) from Budapest. Being a piper in the US (with a friend in Saudi who reads your blog), I enjoyed all the videos.

Now let's look at the play-by-play here, or what a Muslim hadith scholar would call the isnad, or chain of authorities. I post a jeu d'esprit sort of thing about Arab bagpipes. One video is of a Moroccan bagpiper. I note the captions look maybe Hungarian. An American bagpiper who is familiar with the group knows the "adorable little town" in Hungary where they are based (though if his name is "Warner" he doesn't sound Hungarian). How did an American bagpiper find my blog? Via "a friend in Saudi who reads your blog."

Bank shot. Try that with a dead-tree newspaper.

Eastern Christmas Music in Several Languages

As we count down to Christmas, it's one thing to listen to Fairuz singing Jingle Bells or Silent Night in Arabic. Those are in Arabic by a great Arab vocalist, but they are Western carols. Christmas is not, however — whatever WalMart may think — a Western invention. Bethlehem is in Palestine, not Europe. Western Christians and the West generally tend to be ignorant of and uninterested in the Eastern Christian traditions. But these are ancient and rich. First, a Byzantine nativity chant in Arabic:



From the tradition of the Church of the East (the Christian tradition that evolved outside the Roman Empire, and is often labeled "Nestorian" by Westerners, though the Chaldeans are Catholics now), a Chaldean Christmas chant in, I presume, Eastern Aramaic (Aramaic being, as Aramaic speakers usually tell you in the first 30 seconds, the language Jesus spoke)*:



And lest Western Aramaic be neglected, a rousing Christmas song in Syriac:



Or for a more liturgical and reverent Syriac hymn ("Suryoyo" is Syriac for Syriac):



For a faster tempo, some Armenian Christmas songs and dances, complete with both the nativity scene and dancing Santa Clauses (no, really):




* And if modern Aramaic interests you, by all means see this article in the Sunday Washington Post travel section on the Syrian town of Ma‘alula. I never got to visit it.

(The Copts aren't represented but as an old Egypt hand I promise they'll have their own Christmas moment.) I'll have more. As I've noted previously, in the Middle East, you get three Christmases in a row.

Sometimes, YouTube does all the work anyway.

Counting Down to Christmas: Fairuz Does "Silent Night" in Arabic

If you enjoyed Fairuz' performance of Jingle Bells in Arabic, here's her Arabic Silent Night (Sawt al-‘Eid):



Once again, she's in her 70s now, which dates these clips. But as part of the whole Middle Eastern/Christmas season runup, here's another entry.

Fairuz was born Maronite and became Greek Orthodox when she married into the Rahbanis, so she's entitled.

For the Still Snowed-In: More Arab Bagpipes and Bagpipe Scholarship

Still stuck in the snowed-in East. My Friday post on Bagpipes in Bethlehem provoked fairly scholarly comments from LJMarczak and The Moor Next Door, so, what the heck, here's more:

The Qatar Army Pipe Band at an Arabian horse show:



Dubai Pipe Band playing in the UAE at Zayed University:



An Egyptian bagpipe band (I think the first group are doing the Grand March from Aida, but my ear isn't that great and I've never heard Verdi on Bagpipes; then they're at the Pyramids briefly):



On second viewing I think they may be in front of the Sphinx, though it doesn't show except for the paws. If so, perhaps this is part of the Sound and Light Show.

This one claims on YouTube to be "The Best Palestinian Bagpipe Player." I doubt that, and the pipers who've commented on the video disagree. Lone pipers only work if they're standing in mist covered mountains piping a lonely air. It's not an indoor instrument. Massed pipes are better, but heck, the Palestinians seem to really love the pipes:



Wikipedia's "bagpipes" article notes the pipes are known in the Middle East but doesn't go into it in any detail. The comments on the earlier post are, right now, my best source of data for origins: pipes in one form or another seem to be known in the Arab world, North Africa, Turkey and the Caucasus, many predating any British or Celtic influence in the region. Some regional bagpipes are not on the Scottish model. (Neither are Irish pipes, as I understand it.)

You can catch a Moroccan version of the bagpipe in this video, though the captions are in some language (educated guess: Hungarian? See Comment Below) I don't know (wait till the oud player's winding down at 1:01 or 1:02):



Now that's a Middle Eastern sound.

For a traditional Tunisian pipe known as the mezoued which looks nothing like a Scots pipe, and sounds different too, try this:



And just to round things out in the Maghreb, the Algerian raï singer known as Cheb Mami: the bagpipes kick in about two minutes in (2:19 or so) and the photo looks a lot like the Tunisian mezoued. Catchy tune, too. I don't know much about raï, but this song's definitely listenable.



And while the Arab contribution to piping is obviously important, a reader has reminded me quite clearly that there is a highly famous Scots pipe tune on a Middle Eastern theme: "The Barren Rocks of Aden." Here's the tune:



And, while many online sources say there are no known lyrics, somebody linked to the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders has a gent with a convincing Scots burr singing lyrics:



So there. I may play it while I try to find my car under the giant snowball it has become.