In the March/April 1992 issue, writer and photographer John Feeney took AramcoWorld readers on a walk through the streets of Cairo during Ramadan. There, they were illuminated with the cover story and tradition of “Ramadan’s Lanterns.” Feeney, a longtime contributor with close to 100 credit lines in AramcoWorld, spent more than 30 years in Egypt, sharing stories and educating readers across the globe.
Ramadan, the ninth month of the Hijri lunar calendar, marks a time for fasting, blessings and prayers. Muslims give thanks to God during this holy month, and within Arab countries, one can find lanterns and other decorations adorning homes throughout. Merchants in larger cities even get in on the festivities, bedecking storefronts with these Ramadan lanterns, or fawanees as they’re called in Arabic.
“One week before Ramadan begins,” writes Feeney in his 1992 story, “part of Ahmad Maher Street, for most of the year a humble thoroughfare in the old medieval quarter of Cairo, is transformed. Usually home to tinsmiths, marble-cutters and makers of mousetraps, for one glorious month it becomes ’The Street of the Lanterns.’”
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]]>That is not to say that it is complicated. Just that it will give your spice rack a really good workout. It is one of my favorite lunch thingies.
It is loosely based on an Afghan recipe given to me by the mother of one of my customer’s neighbor’s cousins. Or something.
Chana dal are often called yellow split peas, but they are not the same thing—they are in fact split black chickpeas (aka Bengal gram) and cook like a slightly obdurate lentil.
They take around 35 minutes to cook (and do not need soaking)—but you do need to watch they as they froth up something awful and boil over the minute your back is turned. And just as with regular chickpeas, they need to be skimmed. Like most beans/legumes, they simply will not cook if you add salt or sour stuff to them (it’s all to do with osmotic pressure), so this is why we are going to boil them first.
Pick through the chana dal (they often contain small stones) and place them in a pan of cold water. Bring to a boil, leaving the lid slightly open to stop it from boiling over, and bubble for about 35 minutes or until the dal are just cooked. Drain and set aside.
Melt the ghee and oil in a pot and add the cumin, cardamom and mustard seeds. Sizzle over high heat for around 2 minutes before tossing in the onion, garlic and chiles. Once the onion has softened, add the celery and carrots and cook for 7-8 minutes or until the celery has softened and then add the remaining spices, stirring well. Add the chana dal and around 1 ¼ cups (300 milliliters) water plus the oat milk, mix well and simmer, topping up with water if the mixture starts to look dry. Simmer gently for around 20 minutes or until the mixture starts to dry. Simmer gently for around 20 minutes or until the ingredients begin to homogenize. Add salt to taste and serve with raw onion “spoons,” chopped chile, some salad Shirazi and plenty of warm bread.
Reprinted with permission from
Veganistan: A Vegan Tour of the Middle East and Beyond
Sally Butcher
Interlink Books, 2023
interlinkbooks.com
Sally Butcher is a London-based food writer and cookbook author. She runs Persepolis, the acclaimed Persian food store in London. Her most recent book, The New Middle Eastern Vegetarian (also published by Interlink) has been a hugely successful and was shortlisted for the Guild of Food Writers’ Cookery Book of the Year Award. Her first book, Persia in Peckham, was also published to critical acclaim and short-listed for the 2008 Andre Simon Award. It was also selected by The Sunday Times as their cookbook of the year. When Sally is not running her store, she blogs and tweets prolifically and has amassed a devoted online following.
]]>Growing up in South London, children’s book author Elizabeth Laird always hungered for stories. Although her family praised her for being a voracious reader, her parents monitored what she read, frowning on fairy tales or anything supernatural.
Despite this, Laird developed a passion for folktales that she would carry into her adult life, first as a teacher, working in countries all over the world, and then as an author, penning more than 100 books with works that have been translated into 20 languages.
Laird got the idea to start preserving folktales while visiting Ethiopia in 1996. While on Mount Entoto, overlooking the capital, Addis Ababa, she encountered an old man who “out of the blue” told her a fable about ants. “I suddenly realized there must be an enormous number of similar tales,” she recalls.
The next day she rushed to the offices of the British Council, an international organization that specializes in cultural and educational programs, to propose a project. Soon, she was traversing the country in search of stories. Ultimately, the story-collecting effort amassed more than 300 Ethiopian folktales, now available in an online archive in both Amharic and English.
In the years since, Laird has continued to track down stories from different corners of the world. Now, she has drawn on tales amassed over the years for her recent work, Folktales for a Better World, her seventh folktale collection.
AramcoWorld recently spoke with Laird about her latest book and her love of folktales.
How did you start collecting folktales?
I lived in Ethiopia for several years in the 1960s. I went back 30 years later and persuaded the Ethiopian Ministry of Education and the British Council to set up a project to collect stories from the 14 regions of Ethiopia [the Ethiopian Story Collecting Project]. Honestly, I cannot tell you how wonderful it was. For example, I’d be sitting there beside a tributary of the Nile with a storyteller—this was down in Gambela in Western Ethiopia—and he would tell me a story about the beginning of time when God created man. I had a marvelous time doing it. Then, in 2001, I wrote the stories in simplified English so that the Ethiopian children could use their own stories to learn English.
Did you have a favorite story growing up?
My family was very religious, so Bible stories were the beginning, really. I always loved the story of Joseph in which you’ve got these great characters. In the Bible you’ve got poetry, you’ve got laws, and you’ve got character studies like David. I mean it’s just the most marvelous stuff: the poetry, the end of the Book of Job.
How did you start writing folktale collections?
Once I started collecting them, the more I read, the more I realized the enormous similarities. There’s the story about the magic cow in Afghanistan, one of the most popular Afghan tales, which is pretty similar to the one in the Sudan border. These stories have been circulating around the Middle East and Africa since time began, and so I got terribly interested in the origins. I’ve always enjoyed the tales, but finding these echoes of stories across so many different cultures was so intriguing I kept looking for more.
When you were putting together Folktales, how did you choose which stories to include?
I wanted to find stories about reconciliation, peace and kindness. The aim was to find stories which had a winning message and to show that these cultures have these wonderful traditions of hospitality and forgiveness. I spent ages reading through my collection. The Afghan story “The Emir and the Angel” comes from renowned Afghan storyteller Amina Shah, the sister of the great man of letters, Idries Shah. The Palestinian tale “True Kindness” really spoke to me for this book. I just adore the Sudanese tale “Allah Karim” because it has the most beautiful reconciliation in the end.
What did you hope to accomplish with Folktales for a Better World?
I wanted to feature a series of stories originating in places like Ramallah and Gaza, Afghanistan and Syria, places I’d actually visited and places whose people are having a particularly hard time at the moment. In my grandson’s London classroom, you will find him next to a Syrian boy and an Afghan boy. There are refugee children in all our schools here. My dream for this book is that a teacher will read one of these stories aloud in class and a child from one of these countries will say, “That’s me. That’s mine.” These stories are intended to act as a reminder that these are beautiful, ancient and wonderful cultures of which they can be very proud.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
]]>Saudi Couture Designer Merges Contemporary Fashion with Arabian Heritage
The scene echoed the celebratory vibe of Abid’s debut show more than three years prior. During Paris Haute Couture Week she presented an equally glamorous 50-piece collection to invitation-only guests and the alluring songs of famous Tunisian singer Oumaima Taleb.
“Tima Abid has been a household name in Jeddah, known for its glamorous take on the female silhouette and an unapologetic esthetic of decadence,” says Marriam Mossalli, a Saudi lifestyle editor and founder of communications agency Niche Arabia.
Abid’s collections are regal, grand, bold and ultrafeminine. Highlighted pieces at Riyadh Fashion Week included a skirt made entirely of metallic sequins and blue and red feathers that glistened with every step the model took as well as a wedding gown with jewel-embellished silk panels.
Some contemporary looks came in the form of fitted bolero jackets decorated with jewels and waist-hugging corset dresses; other garments featured high jeweled necklines and fitted long sleeves with feathers or other jewels at the wrists.
Abid’s career did not begin with such a spectacle but stems from more than two decades of hard work.
From the time she was a young girl in Jeddah, Abid loved fashion. Elegant dresses represented a magical world about which she would dream.
Growing up, Abid says, she didn’t get much exposure to the world of fashion. “There’s wasn’t much television in my household or magazines for me to read about the latest trends. I still always loved dresses. I even have dresses I have kept for over 25 years.”
Abid’s first trip to Paris was for her honeymoon. “It was there that I was exposed to the world of international fashion—to Max Mara and Dior,” she says, adding, “I fell in love with everything I saw in the designer stores.”
The looks she saw in Paris, one of the centers of the fashion world, became her biggest inspirations.
Abid returned home with her passion amplified. “I began looking at the differences in couture versus ready-to-wear and began to try and re-create what I had seen with my own style and vision,” she says.
“I had a new fire in me—a fire that led me to design dresses,” she says.
Entirely self-taught, Abid would go to local shops to buy fabrics she loved. “I would then teach myself the difference between the fabrics, the cuts and the way they’d fall on the body,” she recalls. “I would have a big pile of fabrics on the floor, and I would select from there and just begin designing, first creating dresses for myself and then for my family and friends.”
She began designing bridal gowns for friends’ and family weddings. As she received more and more compliments, she realized she could open her own business.
Abid’s daughter, Sultana Bokhari, remembers the family living room becoming a place for her mother’s work where she would meet with clients to discuss the dresses they wanted.
Abid studied psychology at university—a subject that had little to do with the garments she was designing. However, an understanding of emotion has also enhanced the way she creates fashion for women.
“When meeting clients my mother would at first learn about them, their personality, their tastes, dreams and style—the fitting had very little to do with the actual garment,” Bokhari explains. “It was from getting to know the client that she would then design the gown.”
Over the decades Abid’s designs have come to represent both contemporary fashion through avant-garde cuts and Arabian heritage. It is here where she has found her power. This is found in her latest collection through structured gowns exposing legs and arms while covering other parts in long abayas (loose-fitting robes), shaylas (headscarves) and, at times, even embellished batulah—the Arabian Gulf metallic-looking traditional mask.
“Whoever wears my dresses should know that they evoke boldness with deep balance, strength and freedom and represent part of the personality of whoever wears them,” she says.
Fashion shows in the Arabian Gulf have grown exponentially over the past decade and a half. In this emerging environment, Abid has a clear goal. “I want to be the Chanel of Saudi Arabia,” the designer told Vogue Arabia after her first haute couture presentation in Paris in 2020.
Recently, leading fashion brands like Dolce & Gabbana, which staged its first fashion show in the historical desert region of al-’Ula in 2022, have flocked to Saudi Arabia. Additionally, the national Fashion Commission is producing numerous events such as Riyadh Fashion Week to encourage young and established designers like Abid to present their creations to a wider audience.
Her latest collection reflects, she says, “darkness, light and opposites.” Designed especially for Riyadh Fashion Week, her highly architectural looks were inspired by her country’s natural desert landscapes, its lush, verdant oases and mountains.
That approach has inspired her before.
“Sometimes even rocks on top of each other at the beach grab my attention,” she says. “I even remember one time I was on a plane. I saw the clouds from above, and it gave me a different feeling, so I made a white dress out of cloudy-looking feathers. The dress ended up in the Paris fashion show.”
Glamorous and bold, Abid’s latest designs merge Arabian heritage with a sense of modernity, where traditional Arabian details, such as the abaya, headscarf and batulah are incorporated into cutting-edge western styles, such as form-fitting long sleeves, tight high waists, slits, bare shoulders and short skirts.
The results are lavish intercultural gowns that reflect an Arabian woman—one who wears her heritage with grace and dignity while embracing the rapidly changing present.
Named to signal the setting of an Islamic court, Dining With the Sultan is the first exhibition to consider Islamic art within the context of food, according to Linda Komaroff, the department head and curator of art of the Middle East at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show explores an aspect of or influence in Islamic food culture over time through nine thematic sections, organizing some 250 illustrated manuscripts, pieces of tableware and cookbooks from 30 public and private collections across the US, Europe and the Middle East. The items, mostly dated from the eighth to 19th centuries, focus primarily on Arab, Persian, Ottoman and Mughal empires.
Komaroff spoke about the coordination and intentionality invested in the exhibition that gives viewers a look into the preparation and serving of food.
Why was the appearance of the dishware important to the presentation of a meal?
It is an art form to prepare the food, but it’s more the interrelationship between food and art, except that the act of dining was in high enough esteem in Islamic lands, especially among the elite that you would have an absolutely fabulous table where that would be worthy of the food that goes with it … . [In a tent depicted in a 10th-century cookbook featured at the exhibition], it becomes clear that not only is the taste and the aroma important but how the food looks as well. Sometimes they might make [dishware] that’s all black or green or white, but the dishware has contrast—decorating [the food] with almonds and pistachios dyed red or yellow. … Wouldn’t it be fun if after you emptied your bowl, it looked the same as when it was full or it reminded you of what it looked like when it was full?
What purpose did cookbooks serve?
The cookbooks are not really for cooks there … . It’s the kind of thing that someone would have in his library, but it would not end up in his kitchen. The cookbooks come under the heading of adab, or etiquette, targeted to a male audience. The person reading it would be more concerned about the types of dinners he’s going to, to be able to recognize, “This is such-and-such dish, and the history of the dish is such-and-such.”
To be a chef, someone in your family was probably a chef and you became an apprentice … . It’s the kind of thing that’s passed on. The same with recipes and variants of recipes. The cook would be taught. They either memorize [the recipes] or they took notes. … What you can see here is we’re dealing with a highly literate and sophisticated culture.
Tell us about the importance of serving food correctly.
From the time of Akbar, the Mughal emperor who ruled in India in the 16th century, there’s an entire [description] on how food was served. Literally once the food is prepared, someone tastes it to make sure it tastes good. [If so], it’s put into Chinese porcelain or some other bowl with a cover on top of it, and it’s secured with a ribbon and then someone signs it like a certification. So that’s how you know. I always joke that I don’t think he ever got to eat a hot meal because by the time all of this is done, it’s possibly not hot anymore.
What from the exhibition has carried over to the present day?
People like to see how the rich and famous live … . Elite objects—that’s what survives. Exclusively things that were precious and costly and needed to be, or someone wanted to save them.
We dine on glazed ceramic tableware even today. … It’s a very clean and eventually economical way to produce tableware because they’re easy to wash. [Additionally], coffee-making traditions are still the same. … A lot of the foods are the same. Sometimes the ingredients change, but the recipes live over a very long period of time.
What do you want visitors to take away from this exhibition?
How fabulous Islamic art is … . I’d like to think with art … .It does open your mind if you allow it to, to thinking a different way, which is something that’s important to me. … Because I don’t think we are going to arrive at a better place in this world if people can’t move closer to another person’s viewpoint.
Abdessalem Zgaya stands on baked, cracking soil where water once trickled, looking over his fruit fields on the plain below Kesra, northern Tunisia. It’s the first time he has seen a spring dry up. “The summers just get hotter and hotter,” he says, adjusting his cap to block the sun. “I don’t know how much longer my lemon trees can survive.”
Amid the still, heavy air, Zgaya points out a row of young trees, starkly green against the brown-gold tones of the landscape. “The figs are different. See how their leaves are wilting? It helps the plants conserve water in the heat. When it gets cooler tonight, they’ll perk back up.”
Indeed, fig trees tolerate drought better than most, and as agriculture struggles in a warming world, that makes them ripe for study. For nearly four years, a Mediterranean research initiative, FIGGEN, has assessed how figs succeed while climate changes are causing other crops to fail. Though Zgaya isn’t part of the project, he, and other farmers in Tunisia, stand to benefit from FIGGEN’s findings.
The study, which concludes in 2024, involves DNA stress testing and analysis of a wide variety of figs in Tunisia, Turkey and Spain. Scientists have been working to identify specific genetic traits that enable the resilience of figs and their varieties that cope best with hot and dry conditions. When FIGGEN publishes the results Mediterranean farmers concerned for their future livelihoods may choose to grow the most promising types. Additionally, the study aims to plant a seed for preserving the biodiversity of increasingly arid ecosystems.
Back in 2006, in the ruins of a prehistoric village in the Jordan River Valley, a team of archeobotanists found proof that figs had been cultivated 11,400 years ago—long before the domestication of wheat, barley or legumes. As they outlined in the journal Science, this discovery could make the fruit trees the oldest-known agricultural crop.
The fig’s place in our history and culture is indeed deeply rooted. From its culinary use to its religious symbolism, as evoked in the Bible and the Qur’an, the fig has played a role in the birth of civilization. Believed to be indigenous to northern Asia Minor, figs have been cultivated around the Aegean and the Levant since ancient times. During the Greek and Roman empires, the popularity of figs spread, and their love of the well-draining soil of semi-arid climates made them an important crop, alongside olives, grapes and dates, farmed across the Mediterranean Basin by the first century CE.
Nowadays, agricultural conditions in the region are changing. According to a World Meteorological Organization report released at the end of last year, 2011-20 was the warmest decade on record. Land temperatures, it reports, have increased by 2 degrees Celsius since Industrial times—twice the global average—and the future bodes more frequent summer heatwaves and less rain. Such conditions also raise salt levels in dwindling groundwater, compounding the challenges plants face.
Fig trees, however, survive with minimal water, have little need for fertilizer and are resistant to many pests. They may burn in a forest fire but will grow back the following year. When a fig tree is cut down, a new shoot will generally spring from its stump. Wild figs may even grow on cliffs or in walls, where no soil can be seen and no water reach. Their formidable, fast-growing roots can tear rocks apart, finding water where other trees simply cannot.
That makes many of the 800 species of the Ficus genus, as per the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, ecologically exceptional. Shade offered by their dense leaf canopies cools hot air and slows evaporation and the flow of rainwater over the ground, which limits erosion and retains soil moisture and organic matter.
Ficus fruits are a food source for more animal species than any other known fruit, a 2001 Cambridge University study showed. Animals disperse fig seeds (and those of other plants) widely, increasing the landscape’s biodiversity and rendering it more resistant to climatic uncertainties.
A few years ago, the sight from a train window of a fig tree growing robustly out of a cliff drove Riccardo Gucci, a professor of agrarian science at the University of Pisa in Italy, to investigate how any tree could thrive in such an environment. That thought eventually grew into FIGGEN.
To discover which varieties of Ficus carica (the common fig) cope best with climate change, FIGGEN teams gathered cuttings of a total of 270 different varieties. Some fig trees fruit once a year and others two or three times. Some have male and female flowers, others only female. Some trees need pollination, whereas others can produce fruit without it. In laboratory gardens, eight plants of each variety were grown in pots, and in late 2021 the testing of their resilience to a lack of water and increased salinity began.
The FIGGEN researchers have compiled a list of the 23 fig varieties that did best. A catalog will detail each project country’s most tolerant varieties, and their characteristics, including the fruits’ size, juiciness and perishability, and the tree’s resistance to disease. Catalogs will be distributed to dozens of farmers, nurseries and plant breeders, so that they may choose the most commercially viable and drought-resistant figs to work with in the future—potentially enabling agriculture across the Mediterranean to adapt to new conditions.
“Figs have the potential to be one of the most profitable crops in the Mediterranean today, especially in areas that are difficult for other crops,” says Tommaso Giordani, the coordinator of FIGGEN.
For the first time, FIGGEN’s work is identifying DNA sequences linked to the plants’ characteristic resilience to drought and salinity, among other qualities. “It is not our job to make future hybrids,” explains Giordani. “But by providing the first advanced genetic markers associated to these important traits, we will support fig breeders in their quest to create new varieties of fig even better adapted to climate change and help Mediterranean farmers to survive.”
According to World Bank records, Turkey is by far the biggest exporter of figs worldwide. Yet Tunisia is an important producer on the south side of the Mediterranean and, unlike Turkey, has never widely industrialized the process.
Tunisian varieties of Ficus carica, both wild and cultivated, are numerous. They vary from region to region, where they have adapted to local conditions and been selectively bred by villagers, who continue the age-old Mediterranean tradition of small-scale family farming. It was in Tunisia where FIGGEN researchers scoured the greatest range of regions and climates for fig varieties, rather than taking samples from national collections.
Ghada Baraket, of the University of Tunis El Manar’s Faculty of Science, holds a doctorate in fig genetics and heads up the FIGGEN project team in Tunisia. Thanks to the length and breadth of the country, and the contributions of farmers, cuttings of no less than 110 varieties were collected for FIGGEN’s drought-testing protocol. “We are all different thanks to our DNA, and our morphology is an expression of that. Figs are no different—what makes them resistant to drought conditions is coded in their DNA. We are trying to find that rather special resistance gene,” Baraket says.
Because there are hundreds of varieties of the common fig, they bear different names depending on where in the Mediterranean Basin they are grown. The names of Tunisian figs likewise vary by their region of origin; common ones include Bouhouli, Zidi and Magouli.
Figs from the Djebba region, in northwest Tunisia, are known for their exceptional quality because of the valley’s microclimate and local farmers’ ancestral growing methods.
Few of the terraced plots known as ejennas exceed one hectare, and figs grow alongside other fruit trees, vegetables and herbs in polyculture, a sustainable system that is based on traditional Berber farming. A network of tiny canals, established in the 17th century, provides water to hundreds of local farmers.
The hanging gardens of Djebba el Olia, perched on Mount Gorra, are a United Nations-recognized agricultural heritage system and serve as a food resource to the landowners. Djebba’s figs—mainly the Bouhouli variety—were the first fruit in Tunisia to receive an appellation d’origine contrôlée food-standards label, a recognition for their distinctive qualities.
FIGGEN participants Faouzi Djebbi and his wife, Latifa, are the proud owners of a 0.7-hectare plot in Djebba el Olia. Seven varieties of fig trees jostle with orange, pomegranate and quince trees; chickens snooze among the broad beans, onions and geraniums growing in the dappled shade.
“All my knowledge about figs, farming and growing food comes from my father, which came from my grandfather, which came from his father,” says Faouzi. Yet he says changing climate threatens timeless traditions here. Springs that flowed at 30 liters per second five years ago have slowed to half that, and some crops are disappearing.
Faouzi’s father used to grow tomatoes and parsley in the garden, but they don’t survive anymore. “Snow used to coat our garden every winter, soaking the soil and killing pests. But it only ever falls on the summit these days,” says Latifa, pointing up to the rocky peak of Mount Gorra.
A Ficus carica may be resilient to drought, but when watered regularly (farmers in Djebba water their trees up to 3,000 liters every fortnight), it becomes dependent and grows shallow, vulnerable roots.
Faouzi’s neighbor Anwer Djebbi (no relation) says his father’s garden is outside the catchment of Djebba el Olia’s springs and has limited access to water. But he says that is not necessarily a bad thing. “If you don’t give a fig much water, it will find it by itself, growing roots far down into the soil.”
A big drought a few years ago reinforced what the family knew: “My father’s figs may be smaller, but he didn’t lose a single tree—unlike many of the farmers growing figs around here.”
Kesra is the highest village in Tunisia, perched at an altitude of 1,150 meters. Looking out over breathtaking views from the café terrace, Zgaya points out his plantation on the plateau below. It is one of the largest fruit farms in the area. Alongside cherry, lemon, orange and walnut trees, Zgaya tends to 1,200 fig trees, the majority of the Zidi variety. “When my father was my age, only half the fig trees in Kesra were Zidis,” he says. “Nowadays Zidis have completely taken over.”
Many traditional varieties originating from the Kesra region produce abiadh (white) figs. Over the past 20 years, these older varieties have started to disappear. Until the 1960s, figs could not be transported far as they spoil quickly in the heat, so they were sold locally or kept for home consumption. Vehicles and new techniques to keep cargo cool opened the possibility of selling figs in distant cities where the biggest, darkest, juiciest offerings commanded the highest prices. Zidi figs are large, with a thick skin that keeps the fruit fresh for longer and, depending on their size, farmers can sell Zidis for three times the sum paid for other, smaller abiadh varieties.
There is a catch: To grow lots of fat figs, Zidi trees demand plentiful water. As the land becomes drier, farmers are realizing that reduced fig diversity may threaten their livelihoods. During recent droughts, Zgaya observed that his Zidis sacrificed their fruits to survive. Instead of producing 30 kilograms (60 pounds) of figs, a tree was giving perhaps only 7 kilograms (15.4 pounds) and the fruit was smaller. “However, I have noticed that the fruits of other varieties of fig are less affected by drought,” he says.
For example, “one day I tasted some delicious figs in the market that I didn’t recognize. I found out that they came from Medenine” in southeastern Tunisia, Zgaya says. His curiosity led him to take a few cuttings from a Bayoudhi fig tree that grew in a wall in that village.
Through his contacts, he was astonished to learn that his cuttings would need watering only once when put in the soil to root. While slower growing than local trees, they had resisted drought conditions well, and Zgaya was thrilled that they produced a large quantity of fruit and high quality: sweet and suitable for drying. He now plans to open a fig nursery and pioneer the propagation of this southern variety in Kesra.
Zgaya was lucky with his discovery. But as the growing season begins, fig farmers, breeders and observers around the Mediterranean will be able to benefit from FIGGEN’s catalogs.
The study identifying the most drought-tolerant fig varieties in Tunisia, Turkey and Spain will be available on its website and in scientific journals this year. FIGGEN’S vital work will help protect farmers’ livelihoods, benefit rural Mediterranean economies and preserve lands that might otherwise be lost to cultivation entirely in the face of a hotter and drier climate reality. Back in Kesra, Zgaya takes a fig leaf gently in his hand.
“Figs were here before us,” he says. “They belong not to us but to this land, and they will be here long after we are gone. There is no doubt about that.”
Growing up near Sacramento with British parents, she’d made many trips across the pond, at times by ship.
As a young adult, she’d indulged wanderlust with long backpacking trips in Europe and North Africa, and in her early 30s took a job as a photo editor in Cairo, beginning a 12-year tenure in Africa marked with memorable journeys that began where paved roads ended.
AramcoWorld published photos from her camel trek along the Forty Days’ Road between Egypt and Sudan, and she’d spent six weeks bumping along the dunes of Mauritania photographing a piece about the ancient manuscripts preserved in that desert country.
Returning to the United States in 2003, Chittock was merging back onto the road, reacquainting herself with the country of her birth.
“I loved being on the move, so when I was living in both Egypt and Kenya I had this idea—how can you be on the move and be at home at the same time?”
Her plan for a grand American adventure: Create a mobile photography studio and crisscross the country working on books and practicing her craft, with her two slim Saluki dogs in the back.
“I had this idea that it was always going to be in these wild, open places like I had been while traveling in the Middle East,” she says.
She just needed assignments; that’s where AramcoWorld came in once again.
For 75 years, the magazine has commissioned journeys around the globe in pursuit of stories that center human perspectives. Words have always been important, but over time vibrant images have become increasingly vital for providing readers a sense of perspective and place.
AramcoWorld’s former editor Richard Doughty, who’d helped Chittock get to Egypt when he hired her at Cairo Today in the early 1990s, knew she was traveling along the eastern US and asked her to photograph Arab American authors and poets who’d settled mostly along the New England coast.
She mapped an itinerary overlaid with the homes of friends she’d met in Egypt. In those reunions, as well as in meetings and meals with Arab authors, Chittock felt she’d picked up a lost rhythm.
“The authors and poets lived both far from cities and immersed in the hustle and bustle. What was consistent were the symbols in their home of what they’d left behind and brought to the new land,” she says. “The spaces they created for themselves were all quiet and peaceful, even if the outside was crazy and chaotic. Or maybe it was me? I, too, was trying to orient myself to a world that had changed radically since I left in 1991. Being amongst those authors was like coming home.”
Such opportunities were not rare at AramcoWorld.
Norwegian writer and photographer Tor Eigeland helped shape this sensibility over some 50 AramcoWorld assignments spanning 1966 to his last assignment in Tangier in 2015.
While he wrote and photographed entire issues on Saudi Arabia and Oman in the ’70s and ’80s, Eigeland’s work also tracked the way the magazine gradually opened to other parts of the world. Among memorable journeys to the jungles of Brunei, the hills of Andalusia and the marshes of Iraq, Eigeland navigated the Silk Road behind the Iron Curtain from Istanbul to China in 1988 and, in his native Norway in 2012, reported a story on Muslims breaking their Ramadan fast north of the Arctic Circle.
So, what’s his lesson from that lifetime of journeys? He says despite their differences, people are basically the same the world over.
“I have never thought of people as ‘others.’ We are all people, and we are all diverse. I started traveling as a 16-year-old, taking a year out from school to be a merchant seaman, and my traveling never stopped,” Eigeland says.
The magazine has also sought not only to send photographers from West to East, or from the developed world to the developing but to view the world through local lenses where possible.
Shahidul Alam, a prominent photojournalist in Dhaka, Bangladesh, says that’s vital in a world where the long dominance of Western media has contributed to biases and discrepancies in coverage, he said, citing an African proverb.
“Until the lions find their storytellers, stories about hunting will always glorify the hunter,” he says.
To counteract these forces, he founded Dhaka’s Drik Picture Library to help outside news organizations source locally produced images and to build the capacity of photographers at home and across what he calls the “majority world.”
Still, he says, sending trained writers and photographers across borders can offer a refreshing outsider perspective—with the right level of sensitivity.
“Our own limitations and thinking need to be challenged, and they are not always apparent when you’re in your comfort zone,” Alam says.
Photojournalist David Wells has seen this during 30 years of traveling to India. Married to an Indian photographer, he has a personal interest in the country where he has undertaken many AramcoWorld assignments. Those included a journey to the historical city of Bijapur, also known as Vijayapura, which boasts an Islamic architectural legacy some liken to a Taj Mahal without tourists.
In the early days, Wells says he was bringing visual storytelling skills that were harder to find. Now, it’s his position between cultures, born of extensive in-country travel and study, that informs the work.
“I think of myself sometimes as a kind of cultural translator,” he says, giving a nod to AramcoWorld for offering the space not only to physically embed in a place but also to imbibe its culture. “You need people like us, journalists, to take the story and frame it in such a way that somebody who doesn’t know it will look at it and say, ‘I want to know it, I’m being educated, my brain is being expanded.’”
In the late 1990s, documentary photographer Kevin Bubriski intersected with the magazine as it sought to widen its lens on the Islamic world.
He undertook many assignments in the ensuing decades, joining conservationists following a migrating herd of elephants across Mali and portraying the descendants of sultanates in the mud-walled Saharan city of Agadez in Niger.
These would set up what would become, unbeknownst to Bubriski at the time, one of his most important pieces from a documentary perspective: a profile featuring his portraits of shop owners in the souk of Aleppo, Syria, in 2003.
“Photographing is always documenting what is for the future,” Bubriski says, admitting he didn’t know civil war would transform Syria in the ensuing years, but he did have a sense of its fragility.
Photos from that journey took on heightened relevance amid the subsequent destruction and displacement, forming the basis for his 2017 book Legacy in Stone: Syria Before War.
“Like the title says, it’s to remind us of what was and what was lost,” he says.
South African photographer Samantha Reinders, who also edits and assigns photographic pieces for the magazine, agrees AramcoWorld has a knack for surfacing stories about timeless customs that may not be well understood outside of where they emerged. That was the case on a dual assignment in 2022 to West Africa, where she examined the prospects for the all-important ground-nut industry in Gambia and did a deep dive into pirogues, the traditional fishing boats of Senegal.
At first, she wondered why a story on the ground nuts of Gambia was relevant; then she hit the ground and tasted that first spoon of peanut butter, the product of an industry that supports many livelihoods in the country of 2.7 million.
“Farming to selling to transporting it to using it, it is kind of around you,” she says.
Upon arrival, it was evident that the riverine nation of Gambia was a world apart from her home, reinforcing Africa’s diversity in 54 countries.
For one, she happened to be there during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which somewhat limited her working hours but gave her a different opportunity. She decided to fast with her Gambian hosts.
“That enabled me to get slightly into the headspace of the people that I’m working with, she says.”
In Senegal, she spent multiple days persuading pirogue pilots of her pure intentions. Yes, she was there to tell the story of the long wooden boats, not reporting on an illicit activity.
The real heroes of each story, she said, were the local people who helped her unlock each place, gaining the cultural license needed not only to snap a beautiful photo but to relay a more nuanced story than the classic portrayals of African poverty and dysfunction.
“You generally hear about the same old, same old. As an African, it’s so depressing to hear about the place that you live in described in the same way,” Reinders says adding that she appreciates working on stories that challenge long-held stereotypes.
Doing so, says Chittock, requires a publication that values time spent on the ground, among the people one is endeavoring to cover.
After stints in the US and Chile, Chittock returned to Africa about a year and a half ago, settling—for now—in Tanzania. In a hurried world, she says, pace in many ways equals perspective.
“Slow travel is more valuable than fast, and I think this is one of the things that I had in my head when I bought that Jeep Wrangler. I didn’t want to just fly in and fly out of a country and just grab little pieces. I wanted to go slower,” Chittock says. “What we’re trying to give the audience, the viewer, is just a taste of that.”
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Growing up in London, Rachel Beckles Willson was surrounded by Western classical music. Her mother, a children’s book author, played piano at home, and when she wasn’t playing, BBC’s Radio 3 filled the air with Mozart, Beethoven and Bach.
“I don’t think there was any moment in my life when I didn’t think I’d be working with music,” Beckles Willson recalls now.
Beckles Willson’s own skillful playing won her a place at the Royal Academy of Music studying piano performance, and she later became a concert pianist. By the time Beckles Willson obtained her doctorate from London’s King’s College in 2003, she chose to focus on academia, hoping to balance performance and research. But she let go of performing, as it didn’t seem possible to do both.
That is until she discovered the `ud (oud), the pear-shaped lute descendant found in the Middle East and North Africa.
Entranced as much by its sound as by its centuries of history, in 2010 Beckles Willson started playing `ud, building enough skill to start performing on the instrument. She also became curious about its origins.
In 2016 she won a fellowship to explore how the instrument has been used around the world. That research resulted in her latest book, The Oud: An Illustrated History, an engaging chronicle featuring a wide array of photos, drawings and illustrations.
Today Beckles Willson is a professor of intercultural performing arts at Codarts University of the Arts, in Rotterdam, and Leiden University in the Netherlands. She performs whenever she gets the chance.
AramcoWorld caught up with Beckles Willson to discuss her book, and her personal and scholarly exploration of one of the world’s most iconic musical instruments.
How did you first meet the `ud?
I was writing a book in 2006 about European musical missions in Palestine and met `ud player Nizar Rohana. He showed me his collection of historic `uds. Each one was different. Each had a unique sound and story. I was completely captivated. Whenever I returned to the region working on that book (published in 2013), I would meet with him.
A few years later, I was living in Berlin and had a circle of Syrian friends. Often, when we got together, someone would have an `ud, and everyone would start singing. When I moved back to London in 2010, I decided that I needed to have an `ud in my new home. So I bought one and started trying to play it.
What place does the `ud hold in Arab society?
I think the `ud has a particular symbolism for the Arab world. It’s an instrument that people in the Arab world are obsessed with. Many people absolutely love it. It’s very much connected, I believe, to identity and probably to male identity in the Arab world. It’s a treasured thing, it isn’t just an instrument.
How do you explain the origins of this symbolism?
It comes, in part, from its history. The `ud was played at the time of the great Arab civilizations, the caliphate when there were thousands of women, great choirs of women playing the `ud. It was a time of great plenty, of joy, at least in the courts, where we have the sources, and the `ud was there. I suspect it still carries a sense of this past greatness.
Then there’s the instrument’s physical beauty. Each `ud has the opportunity for wonderful decoration, even calligraphy in the rosette.
Was it challenging to learn to play it yourself?
It’s a very awkward thing for a woman to hold. For a small female like me, the standard Arab `ud is very large, making it extremely uncomfortable and difficult. I couldn’t get my arm around it. Then it’s very hard to hit the right string. You can’t see what you’re doing when the `ud is in the correct position, which is facing away from you. The `ud slips in your lap until you get the knack. So, there are all sorts of difficulties, in combination with the culture, that expects you to just “get on with” this marvelous instrument.
Your book is not so much an academic work as it is a personal guided tour through a rich woven tapestry of ideas, stories and themes. Why did you write it this way?
We know history isn’t a straight line. As the `ud moved through time, there were at least three parallel developments in different countries, which may or may not be connected. So how do you tell three or more stories happening at the same time? It becomes impossible. I approached it more topically with themes while following a broad chronology. The book is intended to engage people who pick it up, look at the pictures and read a chapter or two. They should get something out of it, even if they read just one chapter.
What do you hope readers will learn from your book?
A richer understanding of the instrument and the cultures around it, as well as its history. I hope readers will discover connections between spaces that are sometimes separated.
I also feel passionate about telling the stories of women `ud players, about recognizing that the `ud has a very deep history with women. Currently, it’s associated with men, but that is very recent. I was able to source and include several old photographs of women playing the `ud in the book.
As an `ud player yourself, you prefer to play older instruments. Why is that?
I think every `ud player has their preference. I’m very attached to two `uds, both extremely imperfect, both made by Armenians. One is a tiny `ud made by Ali Galip in 1920. The other one is a larger one made by Beirut-based craftsman Leon Istanbuli.
There’s something different in the way these two instruments sound, but it’s not obvious. Frequently there’s something less direct, a little more complex. The sound might not be technically as good as a modern instrument, but it just pulls me.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
]]>No Bengali New Year celebration in Bangladesh is complete without various kinds of bhorta. If tomatoes are available, this bhorta will definitely be on the table.
Since it has a salsa-like texture, it can be used as a relish for burgers or even grilled halloumi. It’s a great accompaniment to barbecued meats too. It can be made in advance and kept covered in the fridge for 24 hours until you are ready to eat.
There is a messy way to roast the tomatoes, using direct heat—either by cooking them on the embers of a barbecue or by holding them in tongs directly in a flame, turning them so they roast evenly. These methods give an added smokiness, but they are not always practical. The easiest way is to heat up a tawa or a griddle over high heat and roast the tomatoes on it until the skins blacken.
Once they are cool enough to handle, remove the skins and chop the tomatoes into small pieces.
Mix the tomatoes with the chiles, onions, oil and salt and serve chilled or at room temperature, garnished with cilantro.
Reprinted with permission from
Ammu: Indian Home-Cooking to Nourish Your Soul
Asma Khan.
Interlink Books, 2022.
interlinkbooks.com.
Asma Khan is the chef and restaurateur of London’s Darjeeling Express, which began as a supper club, then a pop-up, before settling in its permanent location to wide acclaim. Khan’s food is homage to her royal Mughlai ancestry and the busy streets of Calcutta, where she grew up. An all-women team runs the kitchen at Darjeeling Express, which has been featured in Time Out, Harper’s Bazaar, The Guardian and numerous others. In 2015 it was named one of the best restaurants in London by the Evening Standard, and in 2017 Eater named it one of its most impressive restaurant newcomers.
]]>As we celebrate the 75th anniversary of AramcoWorld this year, we are looking back at some of the memorable and visual story spreads in the magazine. In the past, AramcoWorld has written about the cultural impact of a simple reed hut like those in the marshes of Iraq and built recently in Houston, Texas. That journey really began in 1964, with the publishing of Wilfred Thesiger’s book The Marsh Arabs. His travelogue connected the world to a culture and people few had known or experienced. AramcoWorld amplified that connection in the November/December 1966 issue with the story "In the Marshes of Iraq."
]]>Iraqi American Israa Mahdi had never seen a mudhif, an ancient reed hall indigenous to the marshes in the southern part of her homeland—until she helped build one on the Rice University campus in Houston, Texas, last summer.
“I never had an opportunity in Iraq to go visit the marshes,” said Mahdi, a Baghdad native who emigrated to the United States at age 19 in 2009.
She was among dozens of Arab and non-Arab volunteers who constructed the mudhif, a structure dating back 5,000 years to the time of the Sumerians and the dawn of the written word, that was the centerpiece of the Senan Shaibani Marsh Arabs Project, which opened to the public in September. Before it closed in December 2023, UNESCO inscribed the practice of building the mudhif on its Intangible Cultural Heritage List.
Despite putting down roots and building a family in Houston, Mahdi said she had found “something missing” from her life. The Marsh Arabs Project filled that gap and gave others new insights into her country.
“The mudhif project put the soul back into my life,” she said. “It’s a great feeling. It makes me proud of my country, proud of my Sumerian history, proud to be here.”
Built entirely from Phragmites reeds that grow in the marshes between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the mudhif traditionally serves as a hall for senior male village members to consult with their leader, or sheikh, a place to celebrate holidays and hold wakes, and a guesthouse for visitors.
The project was led by two local organizations, Archaeology Now and the Arab-American Educational Foundation (AAEF), and backed by a number of community groups and businesses, including Aramco, publisher of AramcoWorld.
For many Iraqi Americans it offered their first look at part of their culture. It also gave other volunteers and visitors insights into an ancient society that has succeeded in sustaining itself but is threatened with extinction today.
“The mudhif is amazing,” said Melissa Carroll, a Houstonian who attended an open house with her husband, John Eikenburg, and their son in September. “It’s a living-history museum, a living artifact. It tells a story about maintaining a culture.”
Retired Houston real estate agent Leslie Cauffman was equally impressed. “It’s fascinating,” she said. “I wanted to see its architecture, how it was built. It’s really natural.”
At first glance, the ancient structure standing on a grassy lot next to a huge arts building looked like a mirage. But up close it was certainly real. The volunteers who built it during the city’s long, hot summer could vouch for that.
Opening day in the fall featured tours, samples of cuisine from the marshes and hosa (celebratory chanting and dancing). Some Iraqi Americans choked back tears as poet Muhannad Neamah, who hails from Baghdad and now lives in Houston, celebrated the structure at the opening and spoke longingly of the “home” that he and his compatriots had left.
The project also included visits to the mudhif by middle school students from Houston schools, a talk about the biodiversity of the marshes and a “Culinary Adventure” evening featuring dishes and drinks from the marshes.
Becky Lao, executive director of Archaeology Now, the Houston affiliate of the Archaeological Institute of America, said the idea for the project took root in 2021 when she learned about mudhifs from archaeologists in the United States and Britain and discovered that some Marsh Arabs live in Houston.
“It’s not often that you find a tradition that is 5,000 years old” with ties to the local community, Lao said. “Here we are, anchored in the nation’s most diverse city, and we work to tell the stories of the people who fill this space.”
The initiative quickly gained support from AAEF President Aziz Shaibani, a longtime Houston resident who became its lead donor. The project is named after his late son, Senan, who was “driven by his love for Iraqi culture,” he said.
More than 4,000 Iraqi Americans live in Houston, Archaeology Now said in a grant application for the project to the city. Of those, “six or seven” are Marsh Arabs, said Aqeel Alazraqi, a volunteer who grew up in Nasariyah on the western edge of the marshes and whose family owned a mudhif.
The city gave $10,000 for a Rice University film student to document the project. It will go into a Rice archive “to preserve knowledge of mudhif construction—currently only known to elders in Iraq—helping to preserve heritage, cultural identity and community cohesion,” according to the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs.
The AAEF viewed the project as a way to ensure that “accurate information about Arabs, Arab civilization and religions of the Arab world is portrayed to children, students and adults—the public at large,” said Ruth Ann Skaff, AAEF secretary and a volunteer. “It’s been electrifying to see people from all sectors of Iraqi life work together on the mudhif project. It was a collective effort, a labor of love.”
Volunteer Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi American civil engineer who has worked to protect the marshes through his nongovernmental organization Nature Iraq, said something similar: “The Iraqi hands that built this mudhif are not Sunni, not Shi‘a, not Turkoman. They all came together to preserve a symbol of Iraq.”
Project organizers teamed up with Alwash early on to help bring the effort to fruition. He called the reed buildings examples of “sustainability before sustainability was a word.”
They are living examples of “Sumerian engineering, determined over eons of trial and error,” he said. “They knew how to live with their environment. … If we want to live in our environment as the world changes, we need to relearn our history because the blueprint for our future is rooted in our history.”
The reeds in the marshes grow up to 7.5 meters (24.6 feet) tall, and bundles of reeds make up the thick columns that form the mudhif’s arches. The bundles are aligned in facing pairs set in meter (3.28 feet)-deep holes that are slanted slightly outward. Then they are bent toward each other and bound together at the top, creating a pretensioned arch that gives the building stability—and a spacious, cathedral-like interior.
The ropes that bind the reeds into columns are made of crushed reeds, as are the mats that form the roof and sides of the mudhif. This latticelike work is done mainly by women.
A few families in the marshes ply the mudhif-construction trade. The lifespan of a mudhif is about 15 years.
Project organizers had to clear some daunting hurdles to keep the undertaking afloat, almost from its inception.
When they couldn’t locate a local builder or clear a path through government bureaucracies to harvest enough reeds as originally planned, Alwash came to the rescue.
“We’re going to do something that’s never been done before,” he said. The reeds would be gathered in Iraq and shipped to Houston, and a master builder would come from the marshes to guide construction.
Then, just after the paperwork for the builder to fly to Texas was completed, he decided he did not want to leave the marshes. Alwash volunteered to manage mudhif construction. Although he’d never built one himself, he had commissioned three in Iraq.
Next, the ship carrying the container of reeds from Iraq caught fire in the Suez Canal and its cargo had to be transferred to another vessel. That snag and other delays meant the start date for construction had to be pushed back.
Finally, when the container arrived in Houston, Customs agents tore apart its contents. The reeds had been packaged in components “like a box of Legos,” said Lao, but what arrived was “basically a container of sticks.”
Last June, despite heavy rains and scorching heat, the work got going. The task lasted about five weeks, or twice the time it takes skilled builders in the marshes. “We’re a bunch of amateurs,” Alwash said with a grin. But he still gave the project a “90 percent” grade.
British explorer and writer Wilfred Thesiger would immediately have recognized even the “90 percent” mudhif. “Kicking off my shoes, I passed between the pillars. Eight feet in girth, each pillar was formed by a bundle of giant reeds, the peeled stems bound so tightly together that the surface was smooth and polished…,” he wrote in The Marsh Arabs, a book about his time in the region in the 1950s.
“We considered the mudhif kind of a sacred place, a very special meeting place, not just a place for chitchatting,” said volunteer Alazraqi. For him it represents the center of the community and a symbol of the tribe. “If you have a problem you have to go to the mudhif to discuss it and the elders would make a decision,” he said.
The mudhif has no door; thus, it is never closed, and the entryway is low so that anyone coming in “must kneel … as a sign of respect to the mudhif.”
No one lives in a mudhif, but villagers in the marshes reside in smaller versions of the reed structure called surefas, Alazraqi noted.
The structure is built aligned with the prevailing winds, said Alwash. That helps keep the inside much cooler than outside, where the mercury can exceed 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) in the summer.
The mudhif and the culture it represents are severely threatened.
The project screened the 2011 BBC film Miracle in the Marshes of Iraq, which focused on the work led by Nature Iraq to revive the wetlands after Saddam Hussein’s campaign to drain them—to deny rebels a place to hide after the Gulf War—in the early 1990s. He built dikes that shut off water from annual spring floods that replenish the marshes.
That dried up 90 percent of the 20,000 square kilometers (12,400 square miles) of marshes, turning them into deserts of cracked mud. Close to 200,000 people were displaced, according to a Human Rights Watch report in 2003.
The marshes partially recovered after Saddam’s ouster in 2003 when, along with Iraq Now, the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organization and several countries launched projects to revive them.
According to the UN, by 2005 the marshes had been returned to some 40 percent of their total original size in three locations that have been made national parks and regained some of their population. The overall marsh region was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016.
Work to protect the marshes continues, but it’s dangerous. Nature Iraq’s project manager was kidnapped early last year. He was released after two weeks and had undergone torture. Alwash last visited the marshes early in 2023 but considers it too dangerous now to return.
The drought and upriver dams are still endangering the marshes. Lao fears they “might disappear” soon.
Alwash was more upbeat but stoic: “There is hope. There are solutions [for protecting the marshes] when the political will is available. My fear is that the culture that took thousands of years to develop around the marshes is disappearing.”
He told the volunteers that they can keep an ancient heritage alive.
“What makes this project important is spreading knowledge, but more important is the preservation of what it takes to build a mudhif,” he said. “Everybody who participated in that work has the knowledge. We preserved it. You are now the custodians of this knowledge, and it’s your job to pass it to the next generation to keep it alive.”
With no family members at his side, once he made it to southern Italy, he embarked on a journey to the United Kingdom that took several months.
He found a way to reach Milan. Soon he took off again, hidden in a lorry, heading toward France. When the driver discovered him, he ended up in a refugee camp near Calais.
Three months later, Bledar entered the UK clinging to the undercarriage of an 18-wheeler. He was injured—his jacket briefly caught when he dropped himself from the moving vehicle—but he’d made it.
At the time, in 1999, Albania’s economy had been in free fall for nearly a decade and its citizens could not travel to the European Union without proper paperwork. For Bledar, this was the only way to pursue a better future.
His older brother, Nikolin Kola, who had already joined thousands of their countrymen living abroad, was waiting in London.
Bledar found a job washing pots in a restaurant near London. Soon he stepped up to making sandwiches, salads, pommes frites and anything else the chefs assigned him. “I rushed through the dishes to do this part that wasn’t my work,” he said.
Two of the chefs encouraged him, and he managed to obtain some culinary training. Over the next decade, he worked his way up, scoring positions at some of London’s most celebrated restaurants, including Le Gavroche, a famed French restaurant, the first in the UK to earn three Michelin stars. He even did two stints as a stagiaire (an intern) at Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that World’s 50 Best Restaurants’ annual list has dubbed the best in the world five times.
Seventeen years later, in 2016, Bledar returned to Albania with a clear objective. He was going to open one of the country’s first gourmet restaurants, Mullixhiu (“the mill” in Albanian, so named because Bledar mills his own wheat).
Working with his brother, Nikolin, who’d moved back to the capital, Tirana, in 2015, Bledar intended to draw on the Eastern European country’s 500-plus years of culinary heritage to reinterpret traditional dishes. Yet, with few recipe books available to guide him, that proved to be challenging. Although he knew his homeland had a long culinary history, Bledar kept coming up empty, a situation chefs and culinary aficionados across Albania discovered in the early 2010s, according to Nutritional and Health Aspects of Food in the Balkans.
Albania’s loss of culinary traditions partially happened because of nearly half a century of communist rule. With government restrictions on consumption of dairy, meat and fat, Albanians often found themselves unable to replicate the dishes that had been passed down through generations, as Albanian American food writer Rose Dosti noted in a 1999 review of one of the first Albanian cookbooks produced in decades.
With shorelines stretching along the Adriatic and Ionian seas of the Mediterranean and the Albanian Alps (Bjeshkët e Nemuna, or Accursed Mountains) sweeping across its inland terrain, Albania boasts 2.8 million citizens, as per government statistics. They live in a region that has been the crossroads of empires for a millennium.
Albanian cuisine’s Mediterranean roots reach all the way back to the Illyrians, the Iron Age society from whom Albanians are believed to descend, according to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome. These tribes herded sheep and became renowned for olive and grape cultivation, still a point of pride today.
Albania’s natural harbors and position on the western Balkan Peninsula offered the shortest overland route to modern-day Istanbul, making it very attractive to foreign powers. Over the centuries, everyone from the Greeks to the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires dominated the region in turn, with each culture toting in ingredients, utensils and recipes that Albanians adopted, according to culinary anthropologist Arsim Canolli, a professor at the University of Prishtina in Kosovo.
The Ottoman Turks had an enormous impact. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, after conquering Albania in the 15th century, the Ottomans ruled for five centuries. They brought a new culture and faith, Islam, which remains a dominant religion in the country. The Ottomans also left their mark on Albanian cuisine. The empire brought Albanians iterations of dishes like shish kebab, moussaka and liberal use of phyllo dough in various recipes, as noted by journalist Nada Dosti.
Canolli suggested that the influences went both ways. “There is an Istanbul-centric image of Albanian cuisine, as if all [that] Albanians were eating during Ottoman rule were meals cooked by the sultan’s chefs,” he said. “The reality was quite the contrary. Culinary historians argue that Ottoman and current Turkish dishes were actually influenced by Balkan nations.”
Albanians, like other Ottoman-ruled populations, migrated across the empire, he said, bringing their own food practices with them. In addition, Albanians served in high-ranking positions under the Ottomans, importing Albanian food traditions to Istanbul and other major cities of the time, Canolli explained. “It’s right there if you look for it,” he said. “You have Albanian dish names in Turkey today such as Arnavut ciğeri (the name for this spicy fried lamb or veal dish translates to “Albanian liver” in Turkish) and Elbasan tava (known as Tavë kosi in Albania, in Turkish the casserole of roux, yogurt, eggs, lamb and rice is named for the central Albanian town, Elbasan). There was also periphery-center influence.”
Albania remained under Ottoman control until the early 20th century. After independence in 1912, new ideas flowed in, particularly from neighboring Italy.
Separated by just 45 miles across the Strait of Otranto at its narrowest point, Albania and Italy both enjoyed diets that drew heavily on olives, tomato-based sauce (believed to have become part of Italian cuisine in the late 17th century) and pasta in the form of pastice (a baked pasta with feta cheese). The Arbëreshë, Albanian Italians who left for Italy beginning in the 15th century, are also believed to have brought back jufka (an egg-based pasta similar to tagliatelle) and other dishes over time.
However, these new, post-Ottoman influences failed to fundamentally alter how Albanians cooked, according to Canolli. They were simply folded into the food culture that Albanians practiced in their own homes, where foodways were perpetuated and handed down, according to Nutritional and Health Aspects of Food in the Balkans.
The rise of a communist regime in Albania in 1946 marked an abrupt shift in how Albanians ate. In its efforts to make the country self-sufficient, the communist Albanian government canned, rationed and collectivized food, according to a 2001 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe report.
Dosti pointed out that cookbooks became scarce and recipes were lost, and suddenly many Albanians did not have access to the ingredients that shaped regional variations and individual interpretations of recipes. Over more than four decades, food shortages became widespread.
A 1997 NATO report indicated that the fall of communism in 1991 resulted in a surge in unemployment and subsequent emigration. Over the following decade, more than 600,000 Albanians left the country in search of work, according to the Albanian national statistics agency. “We didn’t have any farmers,” Nikolin said. “It was chaos.”
In the following years, Albanians seemed more interested in finally having access to Italian, French or Nordic cuisine, and the drive to revive their own lost traditions was low, according to Rexhep Uka, who served as Albania’s Minister of Agriculture in the early 1990s. Foreign food was deemed richer, newer and more exotic than Albanian recipes. “Albanians have a bit of an inferiority complex,” Uka said. “We always think foods from other countries are better.”
Both during and after communism, the country’s timeless cuisine was scorned, Nikolin said.
When Bledar started to move ahead with his plan to open a restaurant upon his return to Tirana, he struggled to learn more about Albanian foods.
Neither he nor Nikolin knew much. By the time Bledar and his brother were growing up in the plains of the Zadrima region in northwestern Albania in the 1980s, local foods bore little resemblance to the more ingredient-rich iterations previous generations had known, Bledar said. Families received wheat bread for three months per year and cornbread for the remaining nine. Because of its scarcity, wheat bread was precious. “We would save anything we didn’t eat, whether it was slices or crumbs,” Nikolin said. “Even old, stale bread was a commodity.”
Some Albanians even credit these bread rations as the inspiration for papare (“unseen”), a dish in which stale hunks of bread are soaked in milk, then fried with gjize, a salted curd cheese, Nikolin said.
Unable to make progress on their own, the Kola brothers began asking around. They needed a gjyshja, an Albanian grandmother, friends suggested, an older person who had the opportunity to learn about Albanian dishes as they’d been served during five centuries of Ottoman rule.
Soon Bledar found his gjyshja, Monda Kalenja. She was a daughter of a military cook, and she’d had access to foods and recipes not available to others during the communist regime. In the kitchen at her side, Beldar began crafting pastas and stews and a plethora of other dishes.
But that was just the beginning. While Bledar worked to learn his own country’s classic plates, Nikolin started finding other recipes, ingredients and cooking techniques that might help his brother glean a better understanding of Albanian food.
“How can our food survive if nobody knows how to actually make it?” Nikolin said.
Bledar opened Mullixhiu shortly after he connected with Kalenja. His interpretations of Albanian food have proved to be a hit, garnering his restaurant mentions in reputable publications and a recommendation by World’s 50 Best Restaurants list of new discoveries as the place to go in Albania’s capital. Kalenja is quick to own her influence on the famed chef. “I have been teaching Bledar for years,” Kalenja says. “The only thing I never taught him was [layered pancake-like dish] flija!”
Bledar’s efforts inspired Nikolin. Although he’d spent more than 20 years working in IT, increasingly he devoted weeks at a time to making trips around the country hunting for information about pre-communism Albanian cuisine.
In 2018, the two brothers started a nonprofit, RRNO, aimed at defining Albania’s cultural food heritage. That same year the nonprofit held an event in Tirana’s pazari (market district) with 12 gjyshet (grandmothers) and 12 chefs, Nikolin said. Within months the event had inspired a television show called 12 Chefs, which ran on Albanian television for two seasons.
“We gave chefs awareness to go back and revisit Albanian cuisine,” Bledar said. “A year later there were five morning TV shows that involved cooking with grandmothers.”
Later in 2018 the two brothers partnered with the Albanian Chef Academy to set up a traditional-food-inspired cooking program. Launched in 2019, they offered students there and at the Instituti Kulinar Royal an extra training module.
The bulk of both schools’ programs is devoted to establishing standard culinary skills needed to work in a restaurant, but for two weeks Bledar arranged to teach each class his approach to traditional food. He also brought in gjyshet to teach students to roll jufka, the ribbonlike pasta of fresh eggs, milk and durum wheat that is dried in the sun.
The school doesn’t lack students. Paula Bardhi is typical of many recent graduates. Like roughly 60% of the culinary institute’s students, she hails from a rural area, in her case Pogradec on the shores of Lake Ohrid near the North Macedonian border.
Bardhi decided to go to culinary school because she was almost certain she would be able to get a job. Bardhi likes Albanian food—her favorite dish is pispili, a crispy cornbread mashed with leeks and goat cheese.
However, most restaurants in Tirana hire culinary school graduates like Bardhi as pizza chefs, sushi rollers and chefs de cuisine (kitchen managers).
Last year at Mullixhiu, Bardhi cooked a variety of recipes Bledar created for his restaurant. He said it’s hard to pick a favorite from his menu, though customers have regularly praised the rosnica. It is a saffron-laced chicken and fried-dough creation inspired by the dish that originated in Përmet, a small town in southern Albania nicknamed the “City of Roses.”
The plates included tave krapi, a baked carp casserole reinvented with sliced radishes for scales, followed by dromsa, a lime-green porridge consisting of clumps of durum and whole wheat seeds that zings with a sour freshness.
Bardhi also worked at Artizani, the bakery Nikolin opened in 2020, learning to make lakror, a meat pie that is an Albanian staple, from two older cooks. This pastry is made of multiple layers of phyllo dough with ground lamb, onions and leeks. Each sheet of dough is oiled and laid according to a specific pattern, according to Kadenja. Due to the complexity, families often make it together, telling each other stories as they add layers to the dish.
Nowadays, Nikolin continues to take regular trips across the country looking for forgotten recipes, ingredients and even grains. He pays farmers to cultivate a particular native corn variety he recently discovered so that he can make boza, a drink of fermented corn meal, to serve at his bakery.
Nikolin says their nonprofit organization plans to develop an app to inform chefs what indigenous ingredients are in season, which farmers to buy from and ways to use each ingredient. “The app will help give young chefs a reference point about Albanian cuisine,” he said. “We don’t want chefs just throwing things together. We’re trying to create a framework for our food.”
More than 20 years after he set out to build a better life in another country, Bledar is grateful that his journey led him back to both his native land and his native food, he said. “At the time, I had no idea or emotion about it,” Bledar recalled. He never imagined anything like this.
He and his brother intend to continue their quest. They have a plan, Bledar noted. Their impact on reviving traditional Albanian cuisine is yet to be seen.
“I was one of a very small number of people actually looking at it. Everybody else stood with their back to the Leaning Tower of Pisa taking a selfie of themselves with that behind it. That was their experience,” says Naylor, a longtime publishing executive at the American University in Cairo Press and author of a pair of pictorial books about Egypt that aims to inspire travelers to take the opposite approach.
These oversights of orientation, driven by the speed and convenience of modern tourism, are what Naylor and photographer Doriana Dimitrova seek to remedy in their books, Cairo Inside Out (2017) and Egypt Inside Out (2020).
Egypt has long been a country where visitors fall into the rhythm of the tourist as they are toted from Giza’s pyramids to Cairo’s oldest mosques to Luxor’s temples on “15-day rattle-arounds.” But this approach comes at a cost, according to Naylor.
“That kind of tourism has always existed, and it exists now with the additional horror of people trying to capture it in their hands every minute and let everybody they know see they’re doing it 20 seconds later across the world,” Naylor says. “All of which reduces the amount of time you’re really spending looking at where you are.”
When exploring the country together for their books, the duo savors the ripe tension between Egypt’s unbroken antiquity and unbridled modernity. Their more recent book follows 2017’s Cairo Inside Out, a visual journey through a city Naylor has lived in twice and visited often since the 1980s, long before smartphones became the essential travel companion.
Both books invite readers to take a break from tour guides and schedules. Placed alongside Naylor’s prose, Dimitrova’s photos look outward, placing readers in the Anglo-Egyptian Bookshop in the heart of downtown Cairo one morning or on the Street of the Tentmakers, the only medieval covered market street left in the city, to take in the vibrant array of quilts, bags and other crafts, and get out of the sun.
“There were very few occasions when we took a photograph in a rush, and I think that shows through in the pictures,” Naylor says.
That, in fact, is the point of their work. Rather than just telling travelers where to go, the inside-out perspective evokes the experience of being there, inviting readers to embrace an almost meditative travel discipline of slowing down to take in the details and complexities of Egypt, moment by moment.
“I just like them to feel what I’ve been feeling when I was there,” Dimitrova says. “With Egypt, you either love it or hate it. There is no other way. I really, really love it, and I do hope that people see my love and feel my love for it.”
By the time Egypt Inside Out was published in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had forced digital wanderlust to stand in for physical experience, but Naylor knew the book would help tourists when they came flooding back.
At the outset of the crisis, tourism accounted for about 12 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, according to the International Monetary Fund.
On one hand, the more visitors post their curated photos and videos online, the more tourists they inspire to visit, who in turn bring their dollars, pounds and yen. But neat online narratives can also lead to the impression that Egypt’s more-than-5,000-year history and cultural weight can be encapsulated in a few fleeting moments.
Ahmed Abd Al Fattah, who founded Look At Egypt Tours in 2006—the year before the iPhone debuted—has seen the rise of the “Insta-traveler” firsthand. “He comes to take some reels and photos—he will never even listen to when the pyramid was built—he wants to take some pictures and go,” Abd Al Fattah says.
Even less digitally engaged travelers are affected by online reviews that can muddle expectations, misleading them about the time it takes to really see the country. The result is that many of these reviews steal the curiosity and spontaneity from the 11.7 million tourists the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities counted in 2022, he contends. “So much information kills the excitement.”
Naylor counts himself grateful to have experienced Egypt for decades before the ubiquity of smartphones. Working in sales and marketing for the AUC Press, Naylor surrounded himself with books about the country for years before he decided to create his own.
He first teamed up with Dimitrova in the early 2010s to create A Roving Eye, which paired black-and-white portraits of everyday Egyptians with expressive colloquial Arabic phrases and sayings.
During their travels for that book, while finding refuge from the heat and hubbub, Naylor shared with Dimitrova an idea that had long been percolating. Years before, he’d been seated at the legendary Café Riche in Cairo, a spot dating back more than 100 years and frequented by novelist Naguib Mahfouz and other key Egyptian figures of the 20th century. As Naylor watched people pass by on Talaat Harb Street from the cafe’s dimly lit alcove, the concept had come to him.
The idea focused on documenting specific places they knew while also offering a sort of blueprint—not a travel guidebook, he says—that might inspire others to explore the city with a less regimented approach. “What was missing was a book about how people really see Cairo, looking out at it from a cool or hidden place,” Naylor says.
He also wanted to preserve and document something of the Cairo he’d come to know. An old hand in the city, Naylor had found himself returning to El Horreya Cafe (literally meaning the freedom cafe) at the Windsor Hotel, which has little changed in interior or furnishings since it served as the British Officers Club during World War I. He came to treasure spending time in these places that seemed bathed in the grandeur of an earlier age. But development brings change, and as Cairo has evolved, the future of the feluccas plying the Nile, the houseboats along its banks and august institutions like the Egyptian Rowing Club has grown more uncertain.
Based on their previous travels together and her own years of living in Egypt from 2009 to 2016, Dimitrova understood why Naylor wanted to capture the character of such places before they disappeared.
“We figured out that we are a good team in that way—he didn’t really have to explain it to me,” Dimitrova says.
Upon its publication, Cairo Inside Out spurred inquiries from readers and bookshop owners about an expanded version focused on Egypt, not just on the city of Cairo. Egypt Inside Out was ready three years later, taking the reader on a picturesque journey northward along the Nile, from the Nubian culture and archeological richness of Aswan to the temples at Luxor and all the way to Cairo and Alexandria along the coast.
While Naylor conducted research on each destination included in the books, Dimitrova waited for Egypt’s variable light and shadows to inspire her.
“I wanted to keep it a surprise for me, to see what my visceral reaction would be, being in this moment, enjoying it,” Dimitrova says. “I take pictures more from emotion rather than thinking about the mechanics of photography.”
With both books, Dimitrova and Naylor pored over their captions, distilling descriptions to give even the casual reader experiential insight into shots of ancient temples, centuries-old mosques and street scenes captured from the windows of a moving train.
“Every moment of photography is a human moment; it’s not a static, painted picture to go into a travel brochure,” Naylor says.
That’s the message Naylor hopes people take away from both books, especially as there’s every indication that Egypt will continue to be packed with visitors. With the new Grand Egyptian Museum set to operate in 2024, and a recent spate of celebrity visits and pent-up pandemic demand, Egypt’s tourism wave could swell even beyond the 46 percent annual increase it saw in 2022, according to Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. Travelers should be ready for crowds—and to embrace the unexpected.
“(Egypt) can force you to slow down because it’s not an easy place to travel; things don’t happen quickly or on time. There are hurdles along the way, and you have to go with it and see the charm in that—or get frustrated,” Naylor says.
Going with a group may bring convenience, but it also might pull travelers toward a fast-food experience of a place that demands to be savored, Naylor says.
To avoid this pitfall, Naylor challenges travelers, in Egypt and beyond, to embrace the moments when things don’t go according to plan as opportunities to take a different approach.
“For everything that is fast, there is also a slow equivalent,” Naylor says.
In Arthur Clark’s first interaction with AramcoWorld in 1958, he immediately noticed its difference from the staid informational pamphlets he and his classmates received.
During a lesson on business-letter writing in elementary school, he'd penned a simple missive to its publisher, Aramco, hoping for a bit of intellectual stimulation.
“I was a third grader growing up in a little town in Iowa, and it was an opportunity to learn about people and places that I didn’t know about and receive colorful publications, which were interesting to the eye.”
Along with the magazine, Aramco sent a note saying that educators could receive free copies of each issue. Clark's mother was a teacher in a nearby town and he enrolled her so that they both could read AramcoWorld. That began what would become a decades-long love affair fueled by unquenchable curiosity, during which the magazine delivered, bringing exotic locales to life through vibrant pictorials and fascinating stories.
Nearly 10 years into its journey at that point, AramcoWorld had already blossomed from a practical intra-company newsletter into a full-blown magazine focused on external audiences. What started as an exercise in cross-cultural understanding between employees in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and the original headquarters of Aramco in New York had extended its mission to the world, building bridges through the sharing of knowledge.
As it celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, the magazine remains intent on continuing this legacy of drawing in writers, editors, artists and photographers passionate about the power of sincere storytelling to challenge stereotypes, open minds and alter perceptions.
This is the first in a series of articles celebrating this history—how in 1949, a company’s willingness to honor partners in the newly tapped oil fields of Saudi Arabia spurred a continuous effort to broaden the lens on a region (and religious heritage) often neglected or misrepresented in modern media.
For a young Clark, the magazine was an awakening.
“AramcoWorld was especially fun because it had more than just pictures and stories about products—it had stories about culture and economy and history, all kinds of things that were exciting and new.”
Alma Kombargi, who has held various roles in public affairs at Aramco Services Company for 17 years, had a front-row seat to the development of the magazine after its headquarters made a gradual odyssey. It hopped to various Aramco offices, first in Dhahran and then to Beirut, Lebanon, in the mid-1960s, to the Hague in 1975 and finally to Houston in the 1980s, where Alma landed and where the magazine remains headquartered today.
Her father, longtime Aramco public affairs executive Shafiq Kombargi, played a key role in ensuring that the magazine didn’t veer solely into self-promotion, working with strong editors like Rob Arndt to champion its cultural mission to balance out what he saw as unbalanced coverage of the Arab world.
A pet peeve of Shafiq’s was what he called the “TV Arab,” a caricature he saw as all too common in media and books, especially as relations with the West frayed during the oil embargo of the 1970s.
“He was trying to counter all that by showing the whole world the history, depth of language and the arts of the region,” says Alma. “He was very much an Arabist Palestinian and knew a lot about the whole region—there was so little information or magazines about the Arab world. That was a big tool that he used for public affairs.”
Alma is among the four out of five siblings who followed their father into working for the company, perhaps out of deep-seated loyalty, she said: Aramco flew the family to the United States after their father received a death threat during the Lebanese Civil War.
Helping oversee the magazine honors his legacy and makes sense of her immigrant experience, she says.
“Being Arab American—it was very therapeutic to be able to tell our story, especially because of the way we left,” Alma says.
That someone like Clark, meanwhile, would go on to become an assistant editor for the magazine is perhaps not surprising. As the son of a local news editor and graduate of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, he most likely would have found a career with an international outreach.
His passion for the Middle East and the Islamic world was not a given; rather he says the publication helped foster it.
After college, Clark joined the US Peace Corps in Morocco, then went to Egypt for a newspaper job and began writing columns for his hometown paper interpreting life in that part of the world for readers who grew up just like him.
Over the years, Clark says, he both adopted and shaped the unwritten formula of an AramcoWorld story as he tackled topics like how Middle Eastern archaeology influenced Agatha Christie or how a Saudi astronaut was changing the face of space exploration.
These stories, as he learned from longtime editors like Rob Arndt and writers like Paul Lunde, had to “breathe,” pulsing with life and energy and imbued with empathy.
“The beauty of the magazine is the broadness of its scope; there are so many subjects out there that represent the Arab and the Muslim worlds in interesting and exciting ways, and each of those areas is a wonder to explore,” Clark says.
Piney Kesting has experienced this for more than 30 years, during which she estimates she has averaged a little more than one freelance piece a year for AramcoWorld, starting with a 1989 feature on Saudi Arabia: Yesterday and Today, an exhibition about economy and society she followed as it toured cities across the US.
“I saw how interested people were in all the cultural aspect of Saudi Arabia, which to them was linked to oil in their minds,” she says, remembering how the inclusion of female artists opened the eyes of Americans. “It sort of plucked away at the misperceptions they had about Saudi culture.”
Like Clark, she sees the magazine as a teaching tool and enjoys highlighting human achievement and inspiring readers to be a little more engaged and culturally empathetic by foregrounding their commonalities instead of differences.
A few examples of many, she says, are her profile of California-born calligrapher Mohamed Zakariya and a look at a transformative literacy program started by molecular biologist Rana Dajani in Amman, Jordan.
“I love that you can pick the magazine up and disappear into other worlds and step back into your world and it has changed,” she says.
She has also traveled extensively for the magazine, first for a story on the last surviving Cold War sister-city relationship between Seattle and Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The piece transformed her thinking on Central Asia and showed demand for a broader international lens (she later returned to examine art in Tashkent’s metro stations).
AramcoWorld’s “eager audience,” she says, generates more feedback than anything else she has produced.
“I get emails from Africa, Europe and the Middle East from people who will write long thank-yous—‘Wow, I never knew about this, and I’m so interested.’”
For the magazine’s global shift, Kesting credits Richard Doughty, who joined via a similar path to Clark, intersecting with the latter at Aramco for many years. A photojournalist who supported himself in graduate school by teaching and writing, Doughty positioned himself as a dual threat who could win jobs by keeping publications from having to shell out travel expenses for two people.
In 1989 Doughty landed a photography internship at Cairo Today magazine, but before he left for his first Middle Eastern adventure, fellow photographer and “Aramco brat” Wendy Levine told him he should check out the magazine. He grabbed his first gig, photographing and writing a story on a French road rally that traversed Egypt.
As he continued to travel to the Middle East and prepare a thesis on how magazines covered conflict in Palestine, Doughty noticed a tendency, both within himself and other photographers and publishers, to “exoticize” or “other-ize” Arabs.
“They’ll wait until the modern-dressed person was out of the frame, and then they’ll take a pic of the old man in the robe smoking shisha because it looks like ‘old Egypt,’” he says.
Locals, he says, knew instinctively what journalists were doing, and they resented the way narratives were being shaped. The realization spurred a book project in Gaza where Doughty and his collaborators recorded and relayed subjects’ own descriptions of his photographs.
AramcoWorld, he would find out, shared an interest in providing context at this level.
“I saw AramcoWorld as the place where the Arab world and Muslim cultures were a priori part of an us and not a them, and I liked that very, very much,” he says.
Doughty joined the team as assistant editor in 1994, and went on to become editor in 2014, continuing to inculcate inclusion as the publication’s geographic scope, subject matter and readership began reaching even further into the Islamic world beyond the Middle East, from Bangladesh to Indonesia, as well as highlighting stories of migrants bringing their Arab or Islamic culture to third countries.
In the years since the publication marked its golden jubilee in 1998, world events have conspired to bring even more urgency to the task of understanding the Middle East and the Islamic world, yet a deficit remains.
Julie Weiss, a longtime consultant for AramcoWorld’s outreach to classrooms, noticed misconceptions about the Middle East and North Africa and a dire need to interpret the region for a larger audience.
“People were just hungry for information—they knew the bare-bones outline of stuff that you might get from the newspapers, but they didn’t know anything else,” says Weiss, who has switched careers but still works on what’s now called the Learning Center 20 years after she was contracted by Doughty.
The Learning Center transforms the magazine’s reportage into classroom lessons. With an apolitical bent, AramcoWorld articles provided updated yet timeless stories, presenting themes of migration, trade, history and economics that could be adapted to convey specific skills, Weiss said. It also had aesthetic allure.
“What took me was the photography, the visuals,” she says.
Evidence of Doughty’s fingerprints on the project, each lesson in the Learning Center still beckons readers to practice seeing things differently, peering into a photo to understand the decisions behind its composition.
“We pick a photograph and walk through students analyzing the photograph,” Weiss explains. “Why is it framed the way it is? What effect does it have on you as a viewer?”
It all stems from a sense of cultural accountability, both subjects and readers, Doughty says.
“AramcoWorld helps its readers widen their circle of inclusion,” says Doughty, who retired from the helm in 2023. “To me, the widening of our circles of inclusion is a profound spiritual task that is at the core of what it means to be a social human being.”
Doughty says it’s clear that support from the company, first from the American-founded Aramco and later from its successor, Saudi Aramco, has given space for a deeper examination of cultural topics.
That’s part of the allure for Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, a writer, art collector and commentator based in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
“You have a higher quality of writing, and in many cases, the pieces cut through different disciplines,” says Al-Qassemi, whose dream came true in 2018 when he was profiled as “The Modernist” in the magazine after 25 years as a reader. “You might read an article about art that also mentions architecture, tourism and archaeology—cross-disciplinary pieces that you don’t see in other publications.”
In a part of the world where neglect has led to the closure of daily newspapers and art is often a casualty of war, AramcoWorld’s seven-decade archive is an invaluable resource for researchers and groups like Al-Qassemi’s Barjeel Art Foundation, which protects, restores, exhibits and promotes works from throughout the Middle East.
Al-Qassemi has personal proof from working on his book Building Sharjah. Uncovering a brief reference to Gordon Ivory, a British architect active in Lebanon and around the Gulf in the 1960s, kept him from “a wild goose chase” and helped him attribute three to four new buildings to which he could find no other extant reference. That the article was still relevant was fitting for the publication, he says.
“If you pick up a copy of AramcoWorld, you can easily come across an article about Ottoman Cairo, Syria, civilizations from a few hundred years ago or read about contemporary art. What I like about AramcoWorld is that there aren’t timelines. You can read it in a year or two or three, and it is like a time capsule.”
Barnaby Rogerson, who runs the small travel imprint Eland Publishing in London, says it’s refreshing that AramcoWorld can show such “fearless enthusiasm” for the Arab and Muslim worlds while examining impactful legacies of Western travelers and the educational institutions founded by foreign powers.
AramcoWorld, he says, is “up with the angels” when it comes to centering local voices globally.
Rogerson first encountered the magazine many years ago at a since demolished British consulate in Tunisia.
“The consulate had a library on the ground floor much used by students, and there, much to my delight, I came across an article on the great historian Ibn Khaldoun,” Rogerson says.
Since then, he has been a reader and frequent contributor, to the point where he wanted to meet up with an AramcoWorld team member in London.
With the magazine headquartered in Houston, he expected to rendezvous with a loud and proud Texan. Instead, Clark showed up.
“It was a surprise that when I met my first AramcoWorld staff member for a coffee at a street café near the British Museum, that Arthur was a thin, book-loving, scholarlike sage,” Rogerson recalls.
Ever since the third grade, AramcoWorld has fed Clark’s curiosity in the easy, entertaining way that he would dare say nourishes all its readers. “It’s educating people without telling them that you are educating them.”
Making positive connections has been the mission of AramcoWorld since its first edition 75 years ago. In the words of former Aramco President Bill Moore in Volume I, No. 1: “We hope this publication will enable us to get better acquainted with ourselves.” While early editions contained much community and company news for employees, from its first decade, AramcoWorld also published stories of cultural interest—seeking out the histories, achievements and ideas from around the globe that remind us we are all truly connected. As this calendar shows, AramcoWorld’s editors have always understood the importance of showcasing connections through photography. These dynamic images of people engaging with food, music, art, history, science and more, bring our readers closer to people and places near and far.
Our 75th anniversary marks a celebration of these connections—and the stories yet to be told. We hope to have sparked your curiosity over the years, ultimately to make the world feel a bit smaller. Connections. Stories. Cultures. That’s been our focus for 75 years. And that’s exactly how we will continue to build our legacy.
We hope you have a blessed 2024.
—AramcoWorld Editorial Staff
In this calendar, the caption for each month’s image includes the AramcoWorld story headline and edition in which it was published. The photos highlight the commitment of the company and its photographers to show positive interconnections among people from various cultures. AramcoWorld continues that tradition 75 years later.
“When I sing with my soul and it goes well, I tear up,” Shehu says.
More than 1,200 artists and thousands of folk-music lovers travel across the globe to attend the 2023 National Folklore Festival, an eight-day celebration of Albanian iso-polyphony and other folk music that is held in Gjirokastër, the ancient “stone city” in southern Albania, every five years. Due to COVID-19, it has been eight years since the last festival. The audience buzzes with excitement.
Yet backstage a threat hangs in the air. This music that records Albania’s history is being forgotten by younger generations who continue to leave the country in record numbers or who show little interest in learning from Shehu and other celebrated artists, even if they do stay in Albania.
This must change, says Vasil Tole, an Albanian composer and ethnomusicologist who doubles as head of Albania’s Department of Cultural Heritage in the Ministry of Culture. Otherwise, these societal songs that have been “the autobiography of a nation” may pass into oblivion, he warns.
Shehu and other musicians share Tole’s concern.
The interest is there, Tole says. The challenge is getting the younger generations to not only enjoy the music but to engage with it and learn its history. “Our songs record profound things in life like lamentation, respect for the dead, love, emigration and heroes,” says Tole. “Polyphony is vital to Albanian culture.”
Backstage, a festival organizer yells “pesë minuta!”—five minutes—as a young female group of about 20 races to pull on gold-trimmed boots, blood-red headscarves and floral petticoats that took 12 months to embroider. When the women gather on the stage, they, too, are greeted by hundreds of cellphones held aloft. These recordings will soon be uploaded, shared and even remixed by Albanian enthusiasts here and around the world.
This unique singing style consists of a lead singer calling out a sort of recitative and two-, three- and four-part harmonizing around him. Historians believe this tradition dates back to the Illyrians, an Iron Age society that inhabited the western Balkan Peninsula for more than a thousand years. “The hypothesis is that iso-polyphony predates the Romans or any other of Albania’s many invaders,” Tole says.
Over the centuries, Illyrian shepherds and farmers, from whom Albanians descend, honed the craft. They would holler across valleys of the eastern Balkans, covering much of present-day Albania and bordering Greece, North Macedonia, Kosovo and Montenegro. The group’s iso-polyphonic chant is initiated by the “starter,” or ia merr, who passes her tune to a second singer known as a “turner,” creating a harmonious polyphony. She “turns” her solo to a third “thrower,” or a fourth or fifth shepherd who would join in the iso, or drone, which completes a pitch-perfect note struck by a backing ensemble.
Nature evolved the music further. Harmonies mirrored gushing rivers. Iso drones mimicked thunder. Cowbells copied the sound of grazing animals. Although iso-polyphony predates musical instruments and uses a pentatonic scale, the simplest five-note schema, their slow introduction—including bagpipes, accordion and violin—added extra “voices” to the mix over the centuries. “The instruments generally imitate sounds from nature,” explains Tole.
Albania’s lofty topography served to protect the art form from the cultural impacts of lowland invaders, while further influencing the style. For example, singers from mountainous areas like Gjirokastër tend to influence the style with louder and deeper tones that help the melody carry farther. And vocalists from seaside destinations like Vlorë, Albania’s third-largest city, tend to sing at a quieter yet higher pitch.
Before Albanian written history, a recent occurrence, iso-polyphony became a millennia-old chronicle as the songs were vital to weddings, funerals, harvests, festivals and other social events. “It served as a means for the preservation and transmission of different stories, tales, narratives,” Tole says. “For example, some Muslims sing the history of their religion in polyphonic songs.”
After Europe’s strictest form of communism took hold in Albania, with a communist government ruling the country from 1946 to 1991, iso-polyphony became even more popular. Authorities deemed singing folk music a positive national pastime while banning foreign music—alongside beards, long hair, overseas travel and Western movies. For decades the capital’s music station, Radio Tirana, played only traditional Albanian music. In a land devoid of The Rolling Stones and Bon Jovi, iso-polyphony thrived.
Shehu made his performing debut at the Gjirokastër National Folklore Festival in 1978 at age 16. Born in Gjirokastër, Shehu was inspired to take up singing by his mother and father (his father was also a singer of some repute). The experience of standing onstage that day transformed the then-teen’s life, when all the hours of listening and harmonizing with other singers in his community really paid off. “At the castle of Gjirokastër, for me, it was a special moment,” Shehu recalls. “Since then, I never missed any festival.”
Communism collapsed in Albania in 1992, sparking a cataclysmic revolution. The effect on iso-polyphony was twofold. “Teenagers could suddenly listen to any pop music,” remembers Edit Pula, a music producer and artistic director who grew up under communist rule. Though iso-polyphony had been used for two millennia, it vanished from [Albanians’] ears. “We even danced to Arabian music—anything that was different,” she says.
In post-communist Albania, the youngest of Albania’s three million population went abroad to find work. According to the United Nations International Organization for Migration, by the following decade, more than 700,000 Albanians had emigrated.
At the same time, long-standing singing ensembles separated, music schools shut down and even teaching methods started to be forgotten. “Our system broke along with all our industries,” Pula says. “There was a bit of a gap where youngsters didn’t understand or care about iso-polyphony.”
The fight to safeguard iso-polyphony began in the mid-2000s. Realizing the form was in decline, Tole prepared a dossier comprising every facet of the music style, from its techniques to its history, helping secure a place for Albanian iso-polyphony on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list by 2008. He compares it to jazz in America. “Both are communal forms of improvisatory music,” he says.
The UNESCO status raised the music’s profile, and soon tourists began showing up in towns specializing in iso-polyphony. “When foreign tourists come and visit Butrint or Gjirokastër,” only an hour’s drive apart, explains Tole, “what do they ask to see? A group of polyphonic singers.”
At the same time, the advent of YouTube, smartphones and other technological innovations made it possible for anyone to begin preserving the music. Streaming has evolved the art electronically, with Albanian deejays like RDN mixing ambient dance beats to help modernize and popularize iso-polyphony tracks for a lost generation. This practice is not without controversy, however. “Iso-polyphony is the voice of our ancestors,” warns Tole, “so you can’t kick it too much.”
While deejays are remixing, others like septuagenarian singer Shkelqim Beshiraj have begun uploading YouTube videos of themselves bellowing from rural mountaintops, with some logging as many as 1 million views. He traveled from Italy, where he is based, to join the 2023 Gjirokastër festival. “This year is the biggest festival yet,” he says.
Orion Demirxhiu, aged 13, also records videos of himself performing and looks forward to his own performance at the festival later in the evening. “This tradition is important,” asserts Demirxhiu, who claims that iso-polyphony beats Netflix any day. “Every time we go on a family gathering, in a car or a cafe, we always sing the most beautiful songs you’ve ever heard.”
Pula, the music producer, presides over the most recent beacon of hope. In 2022, she opened an iso-polyphony museum beneath Gjirokastër’s Bazaar Mosque, an 18th-century mosque that sits directly below the castle alongside a network of subterranean Cold War-era bunkers. One section has been turned into a sound tunnel that streams iso-polyphonic tunes into a dark, dank chamber. The museum and its tunnels are all part of her quest to spark people’s interest by making music more accessible.
Pula admits that preserving the traditional musical style remains a challenge. “Twenty-year-olds are streaming what’s in fashion like Dua Lipa,” the British-Albanian pop star whose Kosovo Albanian parents fled the Balkans in 1992. Meanwhile, the songs of Shehu and other master singers are on a few youngsters’ playlists. Pula hopes at least her visitors “come out of the museum knowing an Iso-polyphony for Dummies.”
Of course, not everyone is positive about the music’s digital evolution. One of the principal themes of iso-polyphony is expressing lamentations for times gone by. For some, even the videos proliferating online signal something has already been lost.
As Gjirokastër prepares for night two of the festival, Shehu is in a lamentable mood. Sitting on his balcony terrace looking across to the Gjirokastër fortress, he explains the sorrowful expression of iso-polyphony comes out of life experiences. “Perhaps you’re at a wedding,” he says. But instead of lyricizing happy thoughts, “you see a mother crying as her daughter moves to a new home. Everyone who feels their soul can write verses.”
The pairing of modern music with iso-polyphony distresses Shehu. In 2023, the grand master came across a TikTok video through one of his daughters (two of his other children have emigrated to the US) that spliced his songs with contemporary beats. “The new generation hears remixes and copies things,” he says. “I dedicated my life to creating 500 new pieces of music. This next generation is copying, not creating.”
So, the art, as Shehu sees it, cannot develop via technology alone. But it continues on in other ways.
In the Gjirokastër fortress, Ilir Loku is warming up for night two of the festival. He is dressed like a handsome brigand from Hollywood’s central casting and carries a broadsword and a bow. Aged 40, Loku is part of the roughly 30,000-strong Albanian diaspora in Montenegro, where his ethnic group once faced discrimination. This only made Loku and the other performers in his troupe more determined to preserve the tradition. “We could only sing these songs at home,” he says. “People fought for us to wear these costumes.”
Kristaq Gerveni, a 64-year-old submariner from the city of Vlorë, some 130 kilometers northwest of Gjirokastër, has experienced firsthand how this music survives in the Albanian diaspora. His family originated in the Korçë region, along the Albania-Greece border, he says, before his Aromanian-speaking community was deported during a Balkan conflict over two centuries ago. Twenty family members are present this evening, with several about to go onstage. The reason is simple: “Our iso-polyphonic songs are in the language of our ancestors.”
Near midnight an impromptu group unites in song outside Gjirokastër mosque. After the starter and turner sing the polyphonic verses, anyone can join in the chorus, even if they don’t know the words. “The magic of iso-polyphony is that it doesn’t have a lot of verses,” Tole says.
For Shehu, the magic resides in the very timelessness of this age-old art form. He has a theory that tradition comes from a place everyone understands. Maybe it started with a single Albanian walking alone at night, he imagines. When others joined in, that first person would know they had an entire community at their back. “You’d sing when you’re scared,” he says. “And your song was reassured by a second person.”
Although Shehu worries about the future of iso-polyphony, he tries to focus on the music. “For the next generations it’s difficult,” he explains. “But it is part of me, and as long as I have my eyes open, inshallah, I will do it.”
The dish has a long and illustrious history; it was thought even the Prophet Muhammad enjoyed it. More importantly, this simple no-bake, one-bite dessert was said to “fortify the traveler” in the days when travels, especially the arduous journey to the Hajj, were often perilous. The original recipe says to “make into cabobs,” which I took to mean small balls, but you could roll into finger-shaped sweetmeats or spread the mixture onto a baking sheet and cut into squares. Any which way, they are yummy and energizing.
Whiz the dates, almonds, pistachios and oil together in a food processor until ground and the mixture is resembling breadcrumbs.
Tip into a large bowl and shape into balls roughly the size of a walnut (they don’t need to be the same size). If still crumbly, dab your palm with a little vegetable oil to help bind the mixture. Place the balls in the fridge to set.
To finish, roll each ball in sesame seeds, coconut or pistachio slivers, if desired—the options are endless.
Adapted and reprinted with permission from Sun Bread and Sticky Toffee: Date Desserts From Everywhere
Sarah al-Hamad.
Interlink Books, 2013.
interlinkbooks.com.
Sarah al-Hamad grew up in Kuwait and lives in London. She worked as an editor for Saqi Books and is the author of several cookbooks, including the award-winning Cardamom and Lime: Flavours from the Arabian Gulf. She recently completed her master’s degree in creative nonfiction at the University of East Anglia.
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On a warm June evening, people gathered at a park in Bethesda, Maryland, for a community potluck dinner welcoming the start of Ramadan. This image is part of a project called Everyday American Muslim, documenting the daily life of Muslims in the US. As part of an effort to share what I see and experience as a practicing Muslim and an American, it challenges some of the stereotypes prevalent in mainstream media, including the notion that one cannot be both Muslim and American.
A lot of the images in this project depict Muslims practicing their faith. Many more also show experiences that we collectively share in daily life. At this event there was a father carrying his son; children and adults roasting hot dogs, corn and marshmallows over an open fire; people mingling at a buffet table while enjoying a variety of food; children chasing each other, laughing and playing games.
Rather than focusing on differences in culture and faith, my hope is that anyone looking at these images of everyday moments can find something that feels familiar, that connects all of us as people.
—Zoshia Minto
@zoshiaminto
@everydayamericanmuslim
www.zoshiaminto.com
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Mendoza has never actually met Honduras’ first filmmaker, who died in 1996, years before Mendoza began making his own films. But the ghost of Kafati, who was born in Palestine, is present in Mendoza’s aspirations—and throughout the story of Honduran cinema.
Kafati’s body of work includes many Honduran firsts. His masterpiece, No hay tierra sin dueño (There Is No Land Without an Owner), is considered Honduras’ first feature film. It is the only Honduran film to have had significant play outside Latin America, debuting at the Cannes Director’s Fortnight. But copies have deteriorated—which is why it also is the first film a new archive has chosen to restore. Saving it for future generations.
No hay tierra sin dueño centers around a ruthless rancher, Don Calixto, who kills or otherwise destroys anyone who questions his authority over the land. The film took 22 years to make, and eventually released posthumously. It tackles often unspoken issues, including agricultural practices (Honduras’ most important industry), class, race, religion and gender. “When it was released in the cinema here in 2003, it played for two weeks, and I kept coming back to watch it every day,” recalls Mendoza, who has seen the film some 75 times. “It was in black and white and set in the 1980s, but it was very relevant to the time, and it is still about us today. Every time, I still discover something new. I have understood since I first saw it that Sami was a grandmaster of cinema—and of Honduran society.”
At Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras (UNAH), in the capital city of Tegucigalpa, Mendoza co-founded Honduras’ first film program. The campus is also home to the new Cinemateca Enrique Ponce Garay, the film archive that safeguards Kafati’s surviving work. A poster of Kafati behind the camera is the first thing one sees upon climbing the three flights to the cinemateca. That poster is also the cover of the first book the cinemateca has published, a collection of essays about Kafati in 2018. The cinemateca’s founder is Rene Pauck, a jovial French documentary filmmaker who was Kafati’s friend. He and cinemateca manager Luis Griffin are overseeing the restoration, which could take years. In the meantime, they excitedly share other work from Kafati, including rare documentary footage he shot in Managua, Nicaragua, after the 1972 earthquake that nearly wiped out the city. “Sami was drawn to those suffering,” says Pauck.
The subjects of the cinemateca’s next two books are Honduras’ other two film pioneers, Jorge Asfura and Fosi Bendek. The two share one more thing with Kafati: They, too, are of Palestinian descent. Arab Hondurans comprise less than 2 percent of the population, but most Hondurans know their family names because of their pioneering success in business.
“Asfura opened the first film lab in Honduras in the 1940s,” says Griffin. “The Asfura family was also hired by the government and private companies to make documentaries and commercials—or they filmed just because they liked to. So, they have provided a very important historical memory for Honduras.”
Bendek was one of Kafati’s closest friends. Beloved in local lore, Bendek often hosted screenings at his ice-cream shop, sometimes delighting attendees with his footage of the neighborhood, including people in the audience. He directed El reyecito (The Little King), shot by Kafati in 1979. As a soliloquy, the film addresses the wrongs and hardships of the world, including in Palestine.
Kafati’s work focused on Honduras—with subtle odes to his heritage and hope that the “turcos,” a derogatory name for Arabs, be seen as part of Honduran society. Midway through No hay tierra sin dueño, Don Calixto visits a general-store owner, the Arab stereotype, played by Bendek. In a comedic Arab accent, Bendek’s character shares news of his wayward adult children and then cradles the belly of his new Honduran wife, saying, “This is the future.” It is a touching scene, a rare light moment in the film.
“This was Sami’s way of showing his wish to merge his two identities, Palestinian and Honduran, as one,” says Katia Lara, a Honduran filmmaker whose first documentary, Corazon Abierto (Open Heart), made in 2005, was about the making of No hay tierra sin dueño. “My conscious interest in Honduran cinema began while I was studying film in Buenos Aires [Argentina]. The first name that came up was, of course, that of Sami. I felt proud but also sad I would not meet him. But he came back from death transformed into energy, impulse, spirit—whatever you want to call it—to see the film completed.”
Indeed, No hay tierra sin dueño was released in 2003, seven years after Kafati passed away. The saga of the making of the film, which he began writing in the mid-1980s, is as dramatic as the film itself. There are many milestones on the way to that story, starting with his first 10 years in Palestine.
Soon after Kafati was born in 1936, his father, Jacob, set out for Honduras to seek work “At the beginning of the 20th century, there were less than a million people in Honduras. The government welcomed immigrants, promising them good futures, because there was a labor demand,” says Jorge Amaya, professor of Iberia American history at UNAH and author of Palestinians and Arabs of Honduras. “Arabs were particularly welcome, as they had a reputation for being hard workers. Today we are 10 million people, about 175,000 of whom are of Palestinian descent.”
But before Jacob reached Honduras, World War II started, and he got stuck in Italy until immigration resumed. His wife, Maria, stayed in Palestine with her two toddler sons, the elder of whom was Sami. During that time, rheumatic fever damaged Sami’s heart. This would shape the course of his life.
Parts of the Kafati clan, like other Palestinian families, grew wealthy in Honduras. A branch of the Kafati family owns the upscale café chain Espresso Americano, with franchises across Honduras, Costa Rica and Guatemala, and, most famously: They own Café el Indio. “We all grew up drinking Café el Indio. This brand of coffee is consumed in every house in Honduras,” says Amaya.
But not all Kafatis had such financial cachet. “My father used to say my grandfather was irresponsible,” Samia Kafati, Sami’s daughter, says with a smile. “His favorite business was a musical-instrument store…And he used to lend money to anyone who asked. He didn’t care about saving.”
Jacob for a time also owned two cinemas. “My father and his brother would go from one cinema to the other on their bikes, delivering reels and watching films,” says Samia. “My grandfather later gave my father a camera, and that’s when he started filming. Before he passed away, when my father was a teenager, my grandfather gave him a projector.” Samia still has the projector, the rare piece of equipment the family did not have to sell for financial reasons when Kafati died. “My grandmother did not want her son to become a filmmaker because she did not see how he would make money.”
Eight of Kafati’s siblings were born in Honduras, many of them providing the music for his films, but all would heed their mother and study engineering and chemistry, among other things, while Kafati pursued his dream.
“He was like a bohemian when he was young…he used to smoke a lot,” says Samia. “His health deteriorated quickly. The relatives who owned Café el Indio helped my grandmother to take him to Philadelphia, where he a received a mitral valve transplant. It was a successful surgery, and he became very disciplined after that. Like an American.”
Kafati, then 23, started to make money producing commercials and documentaries for hire. He used his earnings to buy equipment that couldn’t be found in the country, most notably a Moviola, the world’s first movie-editing machine. In 1964, he completed Honduras’ first narrative film, Mi Amigo Ángel. The 32-minute black-and-white film follows a 10-year-old shoeshine boy, Ángel, as he searches for his alcoholic father and witnesses a violent attack on his mother. Shot in downtown Tegucigalpa, it opens with the first-ever aerial shot of the city. Ángel’s walk through the streets is also a walk through the city’s social and ethnic groups. Like all of Kafati’s films, it stars amateur actors, including his youngest brother playing Ángel’s Arab friend, and a man playing the owner of a fabric store, another stereotypical Arab business.
One afternoon last summer, Mendoza showed the film to his students as well as 15 middle school students, the age of Ángel. All were mesmerized to see their city critically observed. They marveled at what still looked the same—the busy town square, the cathedral, the bridge across the river. Also in the audience, in a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt and beaded necklaces, was Roberto Bude, a journalist and close friend of Kafati who had a small role in No hay tierra sin dueño.
“Sami asked a relative to screen Mi Amigo Ángel in one of his theaters. But no one understood taking such a dark look at the plight of children in our country,” Bude told the students.
At this point, Kafati had met his future bride, Norma, whose Palestinian family owned a store. Mi Amigo Ángel was essentially Kafati’s portfolio piece to apply to Rome International Film School to formally study Italian Neorealism, the style his filmmaking already resembled. He worked at an auto-sales shop to pay for his travel—and a ring for Norma. “Her photo is the only thing he took to Rome,” says Samia.
Today, Norma and Samia still live in the house the couple moved into when they married, which Kafati mortgaged to make No hay tierra sin dueño. Kafati planted most of its small, lush garden. Missing now is his olive tree, the symbol of Palestine, not native to Honduras. “The olive tree died right after he did,” says Samia.
A kitchen refrigerator is where Kafati stored his films. The living room appears untouched from when it served as Don Calixto’s living room. The house feels like a photo museum, including a shot of Kafati filming a documentary with Pablo Neruda in Chile. Samia pointed out family memorabilia, sometimes laughing at what she came across, like a note in her mother’s handwriting: Dear teachers, I am begging you to excuse my daughter Samia Valezca Kafati for not attending class on Monday and Tuesday because her father is making a movie and she has to perform in some of the scenes.
In No hay tierra sin dueño, Samia, then 9, played a child whose suicidal father kills her after his life falls into ruins because of Don Calixto. “It was kind of traumatic,” she shrugs now. “I didn’t really know how death worked.”
Mendoza and Samia were able to coax Norma out of her room. She was drawn to knowing this writer works in film and speaks Arabic, the sound of which made her smile, though her knowledge of it is limited.
“Did my dad teach you how to use the Nagra [sound recorder]?” Samia asks.
“Oh, the Nagra, of course,” Norma nods.
“I was telling them that you used to cook for everyone on set and at production meetings,” Samia says.
Norma turns to her guests. “Oh, I miss those days. I loved cinema a lot. When Sami passed away, I wanted to keep doing that, but there was no one to support me. I’m envious of you because you’re still making films.”
“But Mom, you have never been back to a cinema. We no longer watch movies as much as we did before,” Samia says.
Norma sighs. “There is no good filmmaking now.”
Norma has refused to accept the acknowledgement many people think she deserves, “Honduras’ first female filmmaker.”
“We hear about Sami, but we don’t hear about Norma,” says Laura Bermúdez, a documentary filmmaker who in 2018 co-founded the Honduran Women’s Film Cooperative. “When I learned Norma did the sound on his films and was essentially producing, I wanted to recognize her. Everyone told me, ‘Don’t bother. She won’t allow it.’”
In all his films, Kafati taught everyone everything—acting, camera operations, lighting, set design. With No hay tierra sin dueño, everyone volunteered their time over three years of periodic filming.
“Sami even did my makeup,” recalls Marisela Bustillo, who played a woman trying to hide she has been beaten. Bustillo was a student while Kafati was preparing to shoot and met with him several times for career advice. He offered her the position of executive producer, a job she learned along the way. The acting happened because they couldn’t find any other woman willing to play such a role. “He was a perfectionist, very demanding. But he was patient. For my scene, he waited until I would naturally cry rather than have fake crying,” she says at UNAH, where she now heads the communications department. “I named my second son Ángel in honor of Sami.”
“We revere Sami, but it’s also important to be critical,” Bermudéz says. “For example, while the violence against women here is very real, it does not have to be shown so graphically.”
Kafati’s heart began to tire during shooting. He died two years after completing filming, leaving behind only a rough cut. As Lara chronicles in her documentary, his loved ones thought that was the end of No hay tierra sin dueño. Samia, who, like her brother, Ramses, is a full-time engineer—despite a passion for animation and music—says her father did not want his children to become filmmakers because it was too difficult. But two years later, coming out of their grief, Ramses, Samia and Norma decided they would finish it. They reached out to Carmen Brito, a Chilean editor and friend of Kafati. She agreed to take his film reels, but Norma and Ramses did not hear from her for two years. That is because Brito could not find the original footage in the cans.
“One night, Carmen yelled out to Sami,” says Lara. “She said, ‘If you don’t want us to finish your work, then I leave it as is.’ The next day a miracle occurred.” Brito opened one of the cans called “unexposed film,” and there was the original footage. No one knows why Kafati put the footage in a can with that label, but Ramses went on to oversee the editing, rejecting any change that did not match his father’s rough cut. The rest is legend.
It’s hard to imagine how Honduran film would be defined today without Kafati. Norma has given Mendoza Kafati’s book collection, in which he wrote extensive notes. “These books are my opportunity to keep talking with Sami,” says Mendoza. “I write little notes from his notes...One day we will make a film that exceeds his work, but that hasn’t happened yet.”
What was your childhood like?
We were a generation born just after World War II. There was a spiritual fog—Britain was very gray, and people were anxious that World War III might happen. My parents were believers, in their own way, and I realize now, looking back, that my grandfather was nurturing me. He would sit me down and show me his collection of stamps from around the world, introducing me to the wonder of travel, and the wonder of images. I was always putting a frame around things with my fingers: Excluding everything outside the frame let me see the object inside for what it really is.
How did that early interest in images develop?
I always knew I would work with pictures. I was a music DJ, I did a bit of modeling and acting, then I was lucky to get a tax refund, which meant I could buy a camera. By chance, I also inherited darkroom equipment and just started taking pictures. I knew a lot of people in the music industry, so that was the next step. I went to them and they commissioned me to shoot gigs. It happened very organically. I’ve never studied photography. Everything I do is by intuition.
What was London like in the 1960s?
It was a really interesting time, quite spiritual. As the sixties progressed into a cultural revolution of peace and love, the fog began to clear. We’d seen the effects of war and wanted no part of it. We just wanted to be free, to escape the heaviness. That set me off on my own quest.
Around 1967, I was sharing a house with the legendary radio DJ John Peel. There were always people coming and going, and one day this guy—Artie Ripp, the head of Buddah Records—turned up, handed me a silver box full of lenses and cameras and said, “I don’t need this right now. You keep it and give it back to me later.” That’s when my work started seriously.
A few years ago, I did a retrospective show in Istanbul, which forced me to make sense of my journey from music photography to photographing the Islamic world. Back then, Bob Dylan and The Beatles were heroes, the poets and sages of the time. Photographing them was a way for me to see them one to one. When you put a lens on someone, you see them as they really are; you’re stripping away all extraneous details, and you’re just concentrating on this one person in front of you. Then I realized it’s the exact same process photographing the sages of Islam. They are teaching the culture in the same way musicians in the sixties were teaching us the culture. Spirituality is what links it together.
After a while, as I got more successful, I met Artie Ripp again and was able to thank him and give him his box of cameras back.
But then you turned away from popular culture. What happened?
I can explain it through one of my pictures. In 1969, I discovered a street of derelict houses in London that had been painted black, where someone had graffitied “We Teach All Hearts to Break.” While I wondered what it meant, I lifted my camera and took the shot, just as a boy ran in front. From then, for the next two years, my life completely changed.
I started reading Emerson, and then I found Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, an Indian spiritual master who brought meditation to America. Not long afterward, I photographed Jimi Hendrix a week or two before he died. Selling those pictures meant I could travel to India. I accepted Islam, I spent Ramadan in Morocco learning from Sheikh Muhammad ibn al-Habib, then I arrived in Makkah for the Hajj in January 1972.
Looking back, that slogan was a sign to me that I was going to go through some huge upheaval, that my heart was going to break open to accept bigger things. Sometimes you are shown signs and you don’t register the deeper meaning until later.
Now the world has changed, and everyone has a camera. Photography has become a universal language, like music was a universal language in the sixties.
Since then you’ve traveled widely and have been called the pre-eminent photographer of the Muslim world. What does that mean to you?
I always hoped I could be a bridge. In my early years, very little was known in the West about Muslims and Islam. I went to places that were not well known about—Mauritania, Sudan—wanting to find a pure, natural version of these traditional societies. It feels like God sent me around the world to capture pictures before the beauty vanished. Part of it was about seeking fusion. I remember being at the old mosque in Xi’an, China. The “moon gate” there has an inscription in Arabic—it’s a meeting of two worlds. Those worlds are so different, but there is fusion. That is so beautiful. It really inspires me.
My book The Art of Integration tried to do the same thing, showing ordinary Muslim people integrated into British society. That came out of respect, and respect for who’s in front of the lens is one way the great war photographer Don McCullin influenced me. I met him the first time in Iran, in 1979, and he’s taught me so much. I sent him Meetings With Mountains, my book about Muslim scholars and sages, which I’d been working on since Yogananda’s book planted the idea in my head that on a spiritual journey you need a teacher. Many of these people had never been photographed before, and Don’s first question to me when he saw it was, “Are you Muslim?” It’s so important in photography that the person needs to feel they can trust you. Don understood that and saw that trust in my pictures.
Who are some other influences?
[Henri] Cartier-Bresson was very important. Irving Penn, Platon, Jimmy Nelson. The great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, with his philosophy of light and color influenced by Rembrandt.
But Roland Michaud was the sheikh of photography for me. He and his wife, Sabrina, both Muslims, photographed in Afghanistan before the wars. His work is so painterly. I love it. I met him not long before he died in 2020. We talked about his early realization that photography takes time. Every trip, they would spend months living very humbly with the people. One picture would take hours.
Islam definitely teaches about patience, taking your time. As a photographer, it also teaches you empathy, which I think is essential.
What do you think your legacy will be?
I have no idea! I’m waiting for someone to tell me. Meanwhile, I still feel I’m on a journey. I’ve spent decades as a loner, hiding behind my camera, trying to show people as authentically as I can. We live in a time when it’s all about selfies, but the spiritual people I’ve photographed don’t put on a second face for the camera. When they’re in front of you, there’s no ego. They are just themselves.
There’s a heron in my local park. He just sits quietly, observing everything. When anyone gets too close, he flies away. I really relate to him.