Using a gentle two-finger pinch, Emilie Savage-Smith turns a page of an 800-year-old manuscript on display at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. She leans forward and pauses, carefully reviewing each illustration.
“This entire treatise is one of the universe,” says Savage-Smith, professor of the history of Islamic science at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford, describing the Book of Curiosities, a 13th-century compendium of Islamic maps. “It starts from the very outside where the stars are, and works its way down to the Earth. And then, when you get to the Earth, you get the diagrams of the winds, etcetera. This is the only treatise I can think of where the two are combined.”
The last few years of her three-decade tenure at Oxford has been dedicated to researching the Book of Curiosities, whose actual author remains unknown.
Savage-Smith, like other scholars in her field who have researched the book’s contents since its discovery and acquisition by the Bodleian in 2002, asserts that its maps and Arabic texts offer new insights for understanding the ways people understood the world at that time.
Its original title, transliterated from Arabic, is Kitab gharaib al-funun wa-mulah al-‘uyun (Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes), and it was first produced around 1200 ce. The Bodleian acquired this 13th-century ce copy through a London antiquarian dealer, and the library has since translated its texts into English and posted its images on the library’s website. In its day, the oversized book would have been placed on a lectern or tabletop, as it is too large and heavy to fit across one’s lap for casual reading. In front of Savage-Smith, the book appears larger still, its cartographic illustrations spanning a full 23 by 33 centimeters across the faded, brown pages.
Maps inside the book boast expertly inked, black contours supplemented by brilliant blues, reds, yellows and greens in seemingly abstract, schematic renderings of lands and seas, fairly bursting with additional grids, charts, diagrams, inset illustrations and travel routes.
Savage-Smith notes that some of the book’s cartographic illustrations are particularly important—especially its large, rectangular map of the world. Its shape, she explains, is the only one of its kind to predate the Renaissance. Other maps in the book detailing rivers—the Nile, Euphrates, Tigris, Indus—and islands across the Mediterranean incorporate details that refer to culture, daily life and trade.
“One of the things you look for, for approximate dating, is the nature of the ink,” she explains. With Arabic manuscripts “it’s the red ink. The color of the red ink changes with time,” she says, adding that some of the map dating process requires scrutiny of materials.
In a time before the printing press, copying was done by hand. Maps in the Book of Curiosities were frequently copied, leading scholars to ask, “How did one prevent errors in the copies?”
Over time, with scholars examining multiple copies of the same text and maps, Savage-Smith says it has become easier to know which copies remained truest to their originals.
“You don’t know what possible changes the copyist might have introduced,” says Savage-Smith. “You have to guess. Obviously if a place didn’t exist at the time of the original, that would be clear. And that’s about all you can do. You can compare copies.”
There are other methods, too—including scent: “If a person is forging manuscripts or maps, it will have a different odor,” she says.
The Book of Curiosities offers its greatest breadth of information about Egypt, with many pages dedicated to the Nile Delta and, in particular, the town of Tinnis. It also makes positive references to the rulers of Cairo. Its script, ink and materials are consistent with those known from 13th-century Egypt. All suggest that the book’s unknown author was likely an Egyptian schooled in the geographical traditions of the time, which were flourishing most brilliantly in Baghdad, and that drew also upon earlier Greek work, notably that of Ptolemy.
“It is beautifully structured,” Savage-Smith says of the book.
It was in Baghdad that what is known as the Balkhi school of classical Islamic geography developed, named after the Baghdad-based, 10th-century CE polymath Abu Zayd Ahmad ibn Sahl al-Balkhi. His use of a world map and 20 regional maps supplemented with explanatory texts became a kind of template in the field. Other geographers of the Islamic Golden Age followed, including al-Istakhri, Ibn Hawqal, al-Muqaddasi and, in the 12th century ce, al-Idrisi.
Elements of Balkhi-style map models can be seen even in the Ottoman maps of the 16th and 17th centuries. They influenced early rectangular European atlases. But these and other Islamic styles of mapping generally declined after the Renaissance, and they virtually disappeared with the onset of European colonialism and advances in survey tools. Mapping standards shifted to European ones.
New research of Islamic cartographic illustrations, both in the Book of Curiosities and beyond, however, reveal how these maps demonstrate previously underestimated understandings of the Earth and the cosmos, and how maps were used for more than maritime navigation.
“Maps did not function as practical travel aids in the medieval Islamic world,” explains Zayde Antrim, professor of history and international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and author of Mapping the Middle East, published in 2018. “People sought written or oral directions. They consulted guides. They traveled in groups. They observed landmarks and celestial bodies. Maps, instead, emerged from travel. They were produced after the fact and for a different purpose,” which was to describe someone’s perception of a world traversed.
And maps in most medieval Arab atlases were not intended to stand alone, Antrim adds, pointing to the Book of Curiosities. With often elegant composition and texts using expensive materials such as silk and gold, these were made for those with enough status to read and study their importance.
“The written text constantly refers to the accompanying map, and authors clearly considered word and image to be complementary vehicles for conveying information. These were maps for book owners and book readers, not for a saddle bag,” Antrim says.
Another scholar ushering in new interest in these maps is Yossef Rapoport, reader in Islamic history at Queen Mary University of London. Together, he and Savage-Smith coauthored the 2018 volume Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo; Rapoport is also the author of Islamic Maps, published this year.
Soft-spoken and deliberate, Rapoport notes the insights the pair have gained from the Book of Curiosities.
“Maps of places we haven’t seen in maps before; places outside Africa, places in central India and in China, the routes of trade and propaganda, a maritime route that goes down the east coast of Africa. And more about waterways,” he says. He notes that the book’s maps often included secondary information, such as environmental descriptions of the rivers, for example, which would be of importance to sailors returning to the areas on the map.
Rapoport carefully turns to the Western Sea map, a depiction of the Mediterranean Sea that would not look familiar to anyone looking at a map of the sea today.
“Here we see a completely different view of the Mediterranean space in a couple of ways,” he says, noting the map is the oldest-surviving example of a map with a geographic perspective looking at the coast from the sea, which was typically drawn the other way around in earlier maps. “It sports 118 islands in a dark green sea and 121 harbors and anchorages on its coast, each carefully labelled in Arabic script,” Rapoport says.
The Western Sea map is an important point in the history of navigation, as it presages the portolan charts of the later Middle Ages. It also depicts a correct sequence of harbor points, each describing the offerings of the area, such as water sources or, for example, how the port of Gaza can protect someone from the north wind. Other details show the capacities of the harbors, or how many boats can pass or dock.
“Its abstract nature is precisely because it is for mariners. It is clearly made for sailors, especially before the compass,” he says.
Rapoport turns to a map of Mahdia, the second capital of the Fatimid caliphate and today a city on the coast of Tunisia. It too was designed for sailors, he says, and one like this would have helped them recognize buildings as they approached the port.
“This would have been at the entrance of the harbor, but not the actual shape of the harbor,” he says, pointing to a trio of buildings drawn in detail on the map. “This appears to be the guard tower overlooking the harbor. These are the two palaces of the Fatimid king. They no longer exist, but we do know they were located around this area. We also know the gates of the city are in the right place. They were famous double gates. And the topography is right—here is a hill.”
Other maps cover much broader territory. The Indian Ocean map features much detail on the Horn of Africa, which Rapoport notes is “very distinctive. It tells you the name of the bay. This one is actually a translation of a Greek name. Here it says the bay begins with such number of miles,” he explains.
He turns to another map, this one in its own customized box: a map by al-Sharif al-Din al-Idrisi, known simply as al-Idrisi. Its leather cover and spine are cracked and worn, but inside, it has weathered the centuries well. The map colors remain brilliant—lapis lazuli blue for water, leaf green for salt water. The paint is still thick.
No matter how often Rapoport and Savage-Smith examine the maps, they say, they continue to discover new information about how these early Islamic maps set a standard for the geographic world.
Nadja Danilenko, too, is surveying the impacts of early Islamic maps focused on the practice of copy making over centuries. Now a fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin’s Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, her doctoral dissertation was the first in-depth study of the oldest-surviving cartographic work from the Islamic world, the Kitab al-masalik wa al-mamalik (Book of routes and realms) by al-Istakhri. Like al-Balkhi, he lived in Baghdad in the 10th century ce and hailed from Persia; his cartography, too, produced a world map and 20 regional maps.
“I looked at the entire book, basically looking at the way he organized and arranged things and how he translated his ideas of space into the maps,” says Danilenko. “A combination of textual and visual.”
Then she set out to gather as many manuscripts as possible based on al-Istakhri’s work worldwide—she found about 60, the most recent dated 1898—to establish how the transmission changed through a millennium of copying.
Throughout, she found very few differences from the early versions. But that’s not always the case with map copying in general, she says.
“Al-Istakhri used lines that probably marked administrative borders and water bodies such as rivers and seas to delineate each region. Within the region, he used circles and polygons to represent cities,” she says, noting the cloudlike and triangular shapes he used for mountains and large circles for deserts. Blue bars represent rivers, and larger circles are seas. He captioned every item.
“As al-Istakhri arranged most items in a regular fashion, some symmetrically, some aligned etc. He aimed to communicate a sense of order through his maps.”
The maps were, she concludes, designed for anyone to use without needing expertise. Al-Istakhri used common icons for buildings and cities, for example, and he kept the references to other material easy to understand.
Illustrators as well as copiers had leeway sometimes to adjust the material if they were unable to read it properly or struggled to find the names of places they were not familiar with, she explains. Comparing details repeated from the early copies over time can get close to al-Istakhri’s original. Danilenko emphasizes, however, that differences do not always indicate mistakes.
“It is always important to realize the changes can come from new contexts, too,” she says. She found that previous studies of Islamic maps often tended to judge the maps’ scientific value rather harshly, in later, Western terms, and so she searched for ways to understand the maps on their own.
She turned to the fields of not only historical cartography, but also semiotics, the study of culturally determined signs.
“Usually you differentiate between three things: symbols, icons, and indices,” she explains. “Symbols are the most complicated because they draw on cultural connotations of things. For instance, if I use a flag, you have to be familiar with the concept of flags to understand what it means. So in using symbols on maps you presuppose a lot of knowledge—that’s crucial in deciphering maps.”
The way mapmakers have designed maps has always been informed by their own cultural, social or scientific perspectives, and that is what makes analyzing these maps so interesting, she adds. “Because you actually try to get into the head of the person designing the map to see what he’s trying to communicate.” Her investigation determined the al-Istakhri map system was intentionally a simple one.
“We don’t find any flags or religious symbols or anything like that in his maps. Nothing representing a North African kingdom or an Andalusian kingdom. You only see topography and cities.”
This allowed the maps to carry through time, and still be read and understood today.
“Once you figure out the first regional map, you would easily understand the others. If you compare it to the other 19 regional maps, you realize that he depicted every region in the same fashion,” she says.
This simplicity and continuity, however, raises its own questions. For example, how representative of its own time is the information on a given map? Karen Pinto, an Islamic maps specialist, cautions that the maps “can tell us about the time period in which they were copied, and lead to greater knowledge of the period in which they were originally conceived,” she writes in her 2016 book Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration. “The problem is that with the exception of Balkhi virtually no biographical information exists on the other authors.”
“Maps are not territory,” she writes. “They are spaces, spaces to be crossed and recrossed and experienced from every angle. The only way to understand a map is to get down into it, to play at the edges, to jump into the center and back out again.”
As each map is newly questioned and appreciated, new insights follow, with each turn of the page.
“They are a rich source of historical data that can be used as alternate gateways into the past,” Pinto writes.
From the Babylonian clay tablet of 600 BCE to Katip Çelebi’s map of Japan drawn in 1732, geographers and cartographers of the Islamic world drew upon Greek, Babylonian, Syriac, Sassanian, Indian, Chinese, Turkic and European knowledge to produce a new, atlas-like genre of detailed maps of the world known to them. Until recently these maps lay virtually untouched, often ignored on the grounds that they are not mimetically accurate representations of lands and seas.
This perspective overlooks the great contribution of Islamic maps to the development of the history of cartography. The maps show how Muslims perceived the world from the time of the first civilizations until the late Renaissance. The abundance of copies produced in many places across the Middle East, North Africa, Anatolia and Central Asia over a millennium testifies to the enduring importance of these cartographic visions—as laid out in this resplendent calendar of images, medieval Islamic and Ottoman.
Starting in January with the famous Babylonian clay tablet, we see on display the concern with mapping the lands of Mesopotamia, its empires, rivers and sea. Beyond lie mysterious triangular islands shrouded in the mist of myths about Gilgamesh and others. All are encircled by a conjoined ocean, known as the Bahr al-Muhit (Encircling Ocean), which was the most basic marker of world maps up through medieval periods. For many Muslims, it held the footprint of the throne of God cited in the Qur’an, and it thus became a divine band protecting the world.
With the start of the caliphate and the conquests of the mid-seventh century, we hear of commanders commissioning maps for military and jizya (poll-tax) purposes, but none of these are known to have survived the passage of time. The earliest-surviving examples of Islamic mapping comes in fresco form, from an early-eighth-century Umayyad hammam, the unesco World Heritage site of Qusayr ‘Amra, a desert retreat of the prince and future caliph al-Walid ii. Tucked away in the sand and sun of the desert that separates Jordan from Syria and Iraq, the hammam is capped with a painting of a Ptolemaic star fresco. Less well known is the earliest-surviving mimetic depiction of the moon: At the entrance to the hammam, this small image precedes the earliest-known European efforts by at least seven centuries. February lays out this moon map of Qusayr ‘Amra with a special focus on georeferencing, for comparison, a contemporary image of the moon.
With March we get one of the earliest-known maps depicting the Nile. This is also an example of one of the earliest Islamic maps produced on paper. This one was part of an 11th-century manuscript copy of al-Khwarizmi’s Kitab surat al-‘ard (Book of a picture of the earth) published in English under the title The Oriental Geography of Ebn Hawqal (1800). Al-Khwarizmi shows how the Nile emerges from the mythical Mountains of the Moon (now Ethiopia), flows through multiple cataracts and heads north, crosses the equator to pass through the lands of Nubia, Aswan and Beja toward Fustat (medieval Cairo) and finishes in the Nile Delta near Dumyat (Damietta), where it empties into the Mediterranean Sea. Cartographers replicated this depiction of the Nile in various ways in every cartographic manuscript thereafter for centuries. As copies proliferated throughout the medieval Islamic Middle East, this helped establish what became, in effect, the world’s first geographical atlas series.
The maps pictured for the months of May and August are by different authors from that “Islamic atlas series” spawned by al-Khwarizmi. May shows the exceptional, three-folio map of the Mediterranean Sea from a late-11th-century copy of Ibn Hawqal’s Kitab surat al-‘ard. It is the earliest-known copy of the most-mimetic map of the Mediterranean. On it one can see the outlines of the Iberian Peninsula, the Calabrian Peninsula, the Peloponnese, Constantinople, the Bosporus, southeastern Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt and North Africa; it shows key cities, mountains and rivers, along with major islands of the Mediterranean.
August displays two magnificent maps from Leiden University Library’s regally sized and lavishly illustrated Ms. Or. 3101. One shows the province of Sindh, with the Indus River running across the land of Buddha and Hind to al-Mansura (present-day Multan) and the land of medieval Sindh before emptying into the Indian Ocean. The second map depicts the Caspian Sea between the mountains of Daylam and Samarkand along what was then the central Silk Road. These are among the earliest examples of al-Istakhri’s Kitab al-masalik wa al-mamalik (Book of routes and realms), which dates from 1193 CE. Al-Istakhri’s geography went on to become the most heavily copied work of the Islamic atlas series, with copies surfacing even from mid-18th-century Mughal India. Depicting a highly stylized world of symbolic shapes, the manuscript was likely produced as a wedding gift for Constance, daughter of Norman King Roger ii. It was perused by many a European dignitary, including and especially Constance’s son, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick ii.
June also reflects Sicilian-Norman influence, this time with the earliest map depicting medieval Sicily, which was found in the recently discovered 13th-century copy of the Book of Curiosities manuscript. It lays out Sicily’s key cities of Palermo, Messina, Syracuse and Trapani so clearly that it could have served as a conqueror’s roadmap.
Rounding out the symbiotic intellectual relations of Muslims and Christian Normans in Sicily, September shows the work of the Arab cartographer best known in the West, al-Sharif al-Din al-Idrisi. In the mid-12th century, King Roger ii commissioned al-Idrisi to produce an illustrated geography of the world called Kitab nuzhat al-mushtaq fi’kh tiraq al-afaq (The book of pleasant journeys into faraway lands). The 70 individual maps that accompany the copies of al-Idrisi’s manuscript are extremely detailed representations of the world, well ahead of their time. Not only are the al-Idrisi maps ranked among the most mimetic world maps of the later Middle Ages, but they also include regional maps that show an astounding understanding of topography for the 13th century.
April takes us to Inner Asia, to the start of Turkic influences, with a rare and very early map from the late-11th-century ce Arabic-Turkic dictionary Diwan Lughat al-turk (Compendium of the Turkic Dialects). It presents an Inner Asia-centric view of the world, with Turkic tribes dotted all around. The date and style of this map leave us wondering whether Turks brought the world-envisioning mapping tradition to the Middle East from their vantage points atop the high steppes.
Through the Ottomans, Turkish influences dominate the second half of the history of Islamic mapping, beginning with October’s sample of the unique, bird’s-eye topographical views that the 16th-century cartographic illustrator Matrakçı Nasuh developed to depict the territorial passages of Ottoman military campaigns. Each image from Nasuh—in what could be described as the first attempt at 3D—is a visual feast. We chose to show Nasuh’s image of Baghdad—its earliest-extant city view.
November depicts the legendary portolan chart map fragment credited to Ottoman naval admiral Piri Reis, who was born in 1470 and died in 1554. The subject of many controversial studies, the Piri Reis map shows astonishingly accurate coastlines not only for Central and South America but also Antarctica.
December depicts Katip Çelebi’s map of Japan, which effectively signals the close of Islamic cartographic originality, as copies and techniques of European atlases take center stage in the field. While translating Gerardus Mercator’s Atlas Minor into Ottoman Turkish in 1653–1655, Çelebi also made copies of Mercator’s maps, which he labeled in Ottoman Turkish.
There is yet one distinctively Islamic cartographic-copying tradition that continues even into the modern era: the depiction, in cartographic forms, of the holy cities of Makkah and Madinah, as shown in July’s Hajj certificate scroll map. Often elaborately illuminated in gold, these scrolls certify the holder’s completion of Hajj, or pilgrimage.
Together, all of the maps produced over this unfathomably long era share one thing in common: They were made on the basis of sketches, accounts and myths; views from hills, mountains and the masts of ships; supplemented by tradition on the one hand and carefully accumulated data from increasingly sophisticated navigational and geometric tools on the other. Although these maps do not display the forms of the world in the way ours do today, modern atlases and GPS maps turn out to have much in common with the maps in this calendar: Systems of shapes, lines, labels, patterns and colors all help us understand the world and invite us to explore it.
To request a free 9”x12” wall calendar, email aramcoworld@aramcoservices.com, subject line “Calendar”. Be sure to include your full, correct postal mailing address. Calendars are available while our supply lasts. Requests from the USA will be sent by first class mail; all other requests will be sent by airmail. Multiple copy requests (i.e., for a group of classrooms, etc.): Tell us how you plan to use them, and we will be pleased to send them to you, as long as our supply holds out.
I stand nearby as her cheese poem moves closer to eternity with each swirl, her hair and shoes covered in protective mesh, her waist wrapped in a pinafore as white as the curd. As she hovers in front of the cumbersome vat, I am beguiled by white: this basement room of all-white tile flooring and walls, the white tables covered with ingredients, all white, in organized rows.
Nisreen is not merely a cheesemaking traditionalist producing mainstream dairy varieties. She is a guardian of a centuries-old tradition of Arab cheese, a staple throughout the Middle East and North Africa to this day that is, almost without exception, white. In Nisreen’s kitchen, making cheese is an expression of Arab culinary culture. And because each cheese creation is unpredictable in its formation, she executes dual roles as maestro and spectator. Cheese, she explains, is complicated.
Nisreen is one of many milk poets in Jordan. They are not only cheesemakers, but also food activists, chefs and shepherds. Together they taught me how to love these monochrome cheeses, how to appreciate their complexity in spite of their limited color wheel. When one thinks of a cheese deli in Europe or the us, it’s a palette of yellows, oranges, blues and a few whites. But cheese at any grocery throughout the Middle East is as white as an artist’s blank canvas, with only the occasional spattering of nigella or sesame seeds. Call it minimalist at best. To outsiders it’s bewildering. Or boring.
“Just calling it ‘white cheese’ is offensive to cheese,” Nisreen warns me as the sweet aroma of warm milk envelops her kitchen.
Every Saturday Nisreen runs an open workshop in the basement near her cheese cellar, where she sells her cheese and encourages customers to sniff and taste to give their senses a chance to appreciate the complexity of Arab cheeses. The most-asked question by the often-European visitor: Why is every Arab cheese white?
Her explanation circles back to the environment and the land as many of her cheese lessons often do. The hot weather of Jordan, she says, creates a fast fermentation process. This prevents cheese from aging slowly, which is what changes the color.
There is no official count of how many cheese varieties are produced in the Arab world. However, one can break them down into three types: yogurt-based, fresh and fermented. Whether it is 20 or 200, these cheeses are often nearly impossible to tell apart at the deli counter. There is no off-white or ecru, no pearl or soft gray. There is only white cheese—and each offers its own unique flavor, shelf life and appropriate culinary pairing.
Nisreen begins to teach me the intricacies. My first lesson: Assuming that varied colors of cheeses indicate grades of quality is a sure mark of an amateur.
And Nisreen is no amateur. Educated and entrepreneurial, she views cheesemaking as one of the original farm-to-table experiences, and her craft underscores a greater mission to reinforce sustainability opportunities throughout the Levant by maintaining close ties to the land and its milk-yielding animals.
My second lesson: To experience the mystique of Arab cheeses, one must understand its relationships with other foods. Cheese is tethered to savory pastries and flatbreads, grilled appetizers and gooey deserts. It’s a staple of breakfast and supper tables, where it is often served among a tableau of cucumbers, tomatoes and olives. While it is true each cheese has its own flavor profile, truer still is that each cheese has its own texture profile that determines its purpose: some are eaten with bread, while others are exclusive to dessert. Yogurt-based cheeses, such as jameed, are most often used for sauces and stews.
Sometimes, two cheeses have the same purpose, but a slightly different texture, she explains.
Take, for example, the two most popular cheeses in the Levant: halloumi and nabulsi. These are both firm, salty cheeses that are often soaked in water for several minutes before being eaten to lessen the saltiness.
“Both are fresh cheeses. Neither melt. Both are preserved in brine,” explains Nisreen, describing fresh cheese as one that doesn’t ferment and, thus, over time its taste doesn’t change. “But with halloumi, when you boil the milk and the curds start to separate from the whey, you cut up the curds before pressing. That is what gives halloumi its unique squeak. With nabulsi, you just scoop up the curd and press.” (She really says “squeak.” Halloumi is, well, rubbery.)
While halloumi is generally assumed to have originated in Cyprus, some research indicates it more likely started in Egypt. Nabulsi gives away its origins in its name—the city of Nablus, Palestine, from which it came to Jordan with the country’s large Palestinian population.
After many hours with Nisreen, I’m prepared for the next lesson: to set out further across Jordan to learn about the ties among cheese, land and people.
Later, I arrive in Madaba, a bustling town surrounded by picturesque fields about 30 minutes outside of Amman. The small city is known for its fresh cheeses, as well as the Orthodox Byzantine Church of Saint George, in which a sixth-century mosaic map is credited as the oldest surviving cartographic illustration of the eastern Mediterranean. Tourists come to view the mosaic, and Jordanians come to sample local cheese.
In an area of scattered houses and gardens just off Madaba’s main road, Amubarak Abu Qoad, a local tribal leader, and his wife, Manal, run a women’s cheese cooperative in a small room built near their family’s large main house. Manal escorts me to the cooperative and offers a welcoming glass of yogurt-based jameed made from sheep milk. It’s pungent, to say the least. But it’s traditional, so I sip politely.
Even with limited lighting, it is easy to see the sheets of bright-white nabulsi cheese running the length of the room. Each sheet of cheese is drying on a large cake pan, readying to be sold and eaten. Half of the cheeses are peppered with black nigella seeds, which impart their subtly licorice-like flavor to the cheese.
“Nigella seeds have magical medical powers,” Manal tells me, listing the qualities of the seeds that include the prevention of stomach ulcers, relief from inflammation and many others. She tells me as if I had never heard this before, but I smile and listen, enchanted by her hospitality.
With a long knife, Manal lets me help her cut the tender sheets of cheese into cubes. These will later be placed in brine, then into five- to 10-kilogram tins called tanakats, in which the cheeses can keep for a year without refrigeration. The tanakats preserve the flavor, too, and this allows the cheeses to travel farther to potential buyers.
One buyer is Hazem Malhas, owner of a popular, Amman-based vegetarian café called Shams El Balad. He buys his cheese from Manal’s cooperative to help support sustainable agriculture.
“Nablus, along with Damascus, used to be the industrial center of this region, so the tanakats are probably a product of that,” he says. In his opinion cheese quality began to decline for larger cheese enterprises as cheese began being mass produced. In nabulsi cheese, for example, salt and mastic—a refreshing resin from the mastic tree that originally was added to sheep-milk cheese to remove the gamey animal flavor—are now used to mask poor quality, he says.
Hazem is also the founder of al-Hima, a not-for-profit dedicated to preserving an agricultural heritage that is also a throwback to the historic process of cheesemaking.
“We traditionally had the hima system here,” Hazem says, describing it as a sustainable grazing method in which shepherds rotated sheep around open, common pastures so vegetation would not be overgrazed.
Hima has been mostly lost in recent decades, however, in this region. A modernizing state is no longer as concerned with its shepherds, let alone its hima, even in a region celebrated as “the land of milk and honey.”
“We don’t have a history of drinking milk here,” he adds. On its own, he explains, milk was not easily digestible for Arabs throughout the centuries. Therefore, it was used for cheese and yogurt. So began the early tradition of white cheeses.
After several hours with Manal and her Bedouin assistants, her husband, Amubarak, drives me about 45 minutes to a mountainous grazing region. The land is open, vast and dotted with hundreds of sheep scattered across the green and brown expanses. His herd includes about 600 head of sheep, he says.
“This area is the home of the oldest sheep breed in the world, the Awasi,” he says with pride, adding that Awasis are most numerous in Syria, and probably originated in Iraq.
Spring, when the lambs are born, is the start and peak of the cheesemaking season, and it continues until August. The udders of the females (ewes) are at their fullest this time of year, and the land is at its most lush for grazing.
“In Lebanon and Syria, you have more rain, so there is one spot that a sheep can graze for a season. But Jordan is not so green. So sheep wander and eat different things on the ground, like olive leaves and seeds. The milk, and thus the cheese, will have different flavors, depending on what the sheep eat,” he says.
Amubarak maintains the hima system on this land that adjoins the east coast of the Dead Sea. Sheep are milked twice a day, and they are herded around the land by shepherd families from Syria, some of whom have been with his family for more than 60 years. Witnessing the intricacies of caring for the sheep, selecting the milk and understanding how it all plays into the land-based essentiality of the cheese, is revelatory. It is now that I could see all the ingredients coming together, many steps before the ingredients will be ushered into the kitchen. I spend a few hours with the sheep. Amubarak and I talk about hima. As the sun sets, Amubarak announces our departure.
Returning to Madaba, we approach a small, roadside house. It is another cooperative, and I immediately catch a whiff of the acrid jameed. Jameed is the Bedouin cheese, originally made centuries ago to be transported across the desert for long periods of time. It is reconstituted with water to form the sauce for mansaf, a lamb stew that is Jordan’s national dish.
Inside, Bedouin women are busy stirring cauldrons of milk in the crowded room. They have been working in shifts, all day and all night, to make enough jameed to serve the high customer demands throughout the year.
Drying yogurt is not solely a Bedouin concept. The closest example to jameed is shanklish, dried yogurt balls rolled in zaatar, the region’s popular mix of thyme, sesame seeds and sumac. With bread, the yogurt balls are broken up with a fork and mixed with tomatoes, parsley, onions and olive oil to temper its strength.
Because Jordan is comprised culturally of both Eastern Mediterranean and desert, parts of its culture favor Levantine ways, while other parts favor Bedouin ones. Jordan has also been a long-time haven for refugees, and through the years, with new influxes, new varieties of white cheeses have emerged.
Back in Amman, I visit Tamrkhain “Taymour” Shisani and his business partner, Dalal Shoumen, who own a specialty-cheese shop nestled in the back of an Amman industrial zone. Before taking me to the tiny kitchen upstairs, Taymour assists a customer who is sampling three kinds of labaneh, a fresh yogurt cream cheese. The difference in the labanehs is the amount of water removed from the yogurt, and Taymour’s customers have discriminating palates. I overhear a 30-something American Jordanian tell him while buying the driest of Taymour’s labanehs that his cheese is the best in town.
Taymour is only three years into his cheese business following a lengthy career as a civil servant followed by a stint in tourism. He’s now committed to his shop and to expanding his knowledge in cheesemaking, which currently includes learning to smoke cheese—a novelty in the Middle East.
We enter his kitchen, and he shows me his favorite blend of white cheese: the Circassian. He has two pots on the stove, one of whey from an earlier session and one of fresh milk that was hand delivered by a farmer earlier in the day. We wait for the milk to boil, making small talk in the interim.
“I like the patience making cheese takes,” he says, “and the precision. If you are two minutes late, it’s all over. Same for too much or too little salt.”
When the milk has curdled just right, he ladles it into individual sieves. These give the cheese its recognizable pattern. Then he mixes in the salt, and he covers the cheese with a plate, leaving them to drain. They will be ready in three hours, he tells me, and in the refrigerator they will last up to two weeks. Taymour also makes berm, a Chechen cottage cheese, and informs me he’s considering making the Arabic ricotta cheese, aaresh, later in the day by boiling the whey again and adding some yogurt. Unlike Nisreen and Manal, Taymour uses cow milk, even though it requires seven kilograms of cow milk to make one kilo of cheese as opposed to four kilos of sheep milk.
Taymour, like other cheese artisans, struggles to win over every customer because, like everywhere, many would rather buy inexpensive cheeses, unaware the quality is markedly less when they pay a cheaper price. I observe several customers enjoy his cheese, comment on its superiority and yet remain dissuaded by the price tag.
“I have a responsibility to you and myself to sell a pure, clean product,” he tells one customer. “I can’t stay in business if I charge less.”
He turns to me and sighs. “Everyone wants quantity, not quality,” he says, as the customer keeps trying to negotiate the price.
After venturing among the kitchens, shops and fields, I feel like I am beginning to hear the rhythm and rhyme of the milk poets. Though limited in appearances, these cheeses are anything but limited in taste and experience: sweet and salty, spicy and stinky, firm and supple—and everything in between. It is appropriate for breakfast, lunch and dinner; it pairs heavenly with dessert. Mostly, I learned the land, its milk producers and those shepherding the ingredients to the kitchens play no peripheral role. Arab white cheeses have thrived through the ages because of their ties to the land. It’s a culinary mythos that will stay safe as long as Nisreen and others like her continue to serve as its guardians. Maybe all the way into eternity.
“Nature leads you to the best cheese for you,” says Nisreen. “Most cheeses are accidents. They are serendipity for a particular environment.”
Office workers eat lunch at an eclectic café whose chairs and tables are made from car tires and packing cases. In front of art gallery windows, young professionals browse for one-of-a-kind home decor. A family, mom and dad with kids in tow, exudes high excitement about a day out. They’re all here for what Alserkal Avenue brings to this city in the desert.
It’s especially lively because it’s spring, Dubai’s “art season,” which includes not only Alserkal Avenue’s Galleries Nights, but also the much more well-known Art Dubai festival, Art Nights at the Dubai International Financial Centre (difc), and the SIKKA Art Fair.
Green Art Gallery is one of the district’s most prominent venues. It was founded in 1987 in Syria and it has been part of Alserkal Avenue since 2011. It’s a white cube of space hidden behind a flat concrete facade.
“You’re building a scene from scratch,” says Green Art’s director Yasmin Atassi. It’s the task of building a sustainable art scene in a city not well known for art and culture, she adds. “Artists love to show in Dubai. It gives them access to art markets—contacts, shows, agents and more—over the whole of Asia.”
Alserkal Avenue is not, strictly speaking, a road: It is a labyrinth of narrow streets, a self-contained district. Its 90 warehouses offer a palette of mixed-use creative spaces, a dozen contemporary art galleries and 60 creative businesses, from architectural firms, chocolate makers, free coworking and nonprofit arts spaces to an independent cinema. All helped the Avenue attract 570,000 visitors last year.
But one does not just move in: Alserkal Avenue is itself a kind of grand, curated metagallery whose members have been selected.Many are enterprises that might struggle to take root amid the commercial rents of Dubai’s high-traffic shopping districts. Alserkal Avenue, however, is privately funded by Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal and the Alserkal family to create a self-sustaining community. Additionally, Alserkal Avenue offers grants, and it supports artists to publish and attend global art fairs.
“The support of Alserkal Avenue has been wonderful,” says Atassi. “They are very kind with support when we need it. They make everything possible to make sure we don’t have extra overhead.”
Street artist eL Seed, famous for his public “calligrafitti” art, is one of the Avenue’s most acclaimed residents. His studio, open since 2015, is far larger than what he could have in his former Parisian base. He keeps it open to the public for most of the year.
“Alserkal offered me a dream space,” he says. “The great advantage to be in a space like this is the fact that I am able to have such a large footprint.”
eL Seed’s artworks can be very large, building on his early days as a graffiti and street artist, combining the style and scale of spray-paint murals with the traditions of Arabic calligraphy to express messages of peace and unity.
“Throughout the year, I invite school children to come to my studio to experience what a day at the studio is like. It is important because when I was about 16 years old, an artist came to my school in Paris, and I was very influenced by him. I owe him for the inspiration,” he says.
Art pulled eL Seed out of the streets of 1980s Paris, away from a life that might have turned out very differently. Because his life was transformed by contact with art, eL Seed is using his Avenue studio to offer that to young people today—just as the Avenue does for the entire city. It’s a pattern of transformation, and it’s one that takes place in many cities across the globe, each in its own way.
First come artists and creative entrepreneurs, usually to low-rent, often formerly industrial areas. Along with the color and life of painting, dance, fashion and digital arts, they bring that elusive-but-essential quality that defies easy definition: the arts make the place cool.
Then things follow. Educated, high-skill people come to live in the cool places. They draw in businesses that want to hire top talent. Prosperity brings services, with more people. Arts and culture become the foundations for an economic ecosystem. The city becomes a better place to live.
The most dramatic example is 1950s San Francisco, a port city whose low rents and mild weather drew artists of the Beat Generation, and then the counterculture creatives of the 1960s. The city developed its legendary aura of cool that, in turn, attracted the thinkers and technologists who built the computer age. Seattle, New York, Berlin, Istanbul, London, Beirut, Shanghai and more can all tell similar stories.
But the cool that art brings soon skyrockets rents, and today few artists can afford the creative neighborhoods of San Francisco, London or Paris. Cool moves on. It’s a cycle seen across the globe, and it presents a challenge to politicians, planners and property developers: how to keep cool sustainable.
It’s to this challenge that Alserkal Avenue brings its own unique cool to the desert of Dubai, just as cultural districts have become parts of the growth strategies of ambitious towns and cities worldwide. Most reflect growth trajectories that are somewhere between unplanned, or “bottom-up,” and centrally planned, or “top-down.”
The top-down model can be seen, for example, in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, an area that had been famous for heavy industrialization that was redeveloped into a world-class cultural district. Similarly, in East London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, greenfield land and nearby neighborhoods are being developed with government funds following the 2012 Olympics.
The bottom-up model is the more prevalent. The Village Underground Lisboa has developed, in the past decade, from a cooperative of creative businesses seeking a shared space for events and coworking. Established with little support from the city of Lisbon, it has more recently attracted major government funding.
In 2013 cultural district developer Adrian Ellis founded the Global Cultural Districts Network, which he currently leads.
Success in any cultural district development, he says, “is an essentially contested concept. Is it the often epic task of just getting it built? Is it the global reach of the art it showcases? Or is it the impact on the social and economic development of the area in which it is located?” Does it raise property values? Has it enhanced the neighborhood, the city—and by what does one measure that?
Essential, Ellis adds, is local consensus on the criteria. It may seem unduly risky to invest large amounts of time and money if the objectives are fuzzy, he explains, but it’s common. Alserkal Avenue’s success so far has come from a blend of gradual experimentation with a factor Ellis is keen to emphasize: supportive leadership.
As the sun sets overhead, Alserkal Avenue takes on some of the atmosphere of a movie studio backlot during the golden age of cinema. The architecture may be industrial, but it’s studded with painted scenery from art installations and unexpected blooms of color, light and activity. One of its newest landmark constructions, the graphite-gray box exhibition and forum space called Concrete, stands out, and was a finalist this year for an Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
It’s all a long way from its roots in merchant families who have, in less than a half century, built Dubai, explains Abdelmonem Alserkal, who founded the Avenue in 2008. The physical core of the Avenue, he says, was once a marble factory, one of Dubai’s major imports in the days before its boom. When the factory came to the end of its utility, the Alserkal family saw a chance to build something new in its place.
“The city had reached the stage of growth where it was ready for new development. For culture,” says Alserkal. In 2015 Alserkal initiated the next phase of the district’s development, which added the warehouses that became Concrete. “The Avenue is a promise and statement of belief in the creative talent of the region. But the credit for Alserkal’s success must go to the art galleries, to the creative businesses, to the artists that took the risk of coming into this former industrial area. Through them came the momentum,” he says.
Vilma Jurkute, Alserkal Avenue’s director since 2011, has witnessed and guided the creative flourishing. Under her direction the Avenue’s sense of community and identity has matured, starting from a shared website to orchestrating Avenue-wide events and global partnerships with major arts and culture brands.
“It would have been very easy to create an outpost of Western arts and culture. To grow an authentic culture of Dubai requires tenacity. It requires a belief in your own regional talent.”
As the evening deepens, audiences begin to arrive at Concrete for “Fabric(ated) Fractures,” an exhibition curated by the Samdani Art Foundation, based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The experience of global, high-end cultural venues, long taken for granted in the world’s established “capitals of culture,” is still relatively new in Dubai. While Alserkal Avenue has much in common with other world initiatives, its success story so far stands on its partners and leadership sharing both its aspiration and its practical mission—to bring cool to Dubai and, with it, further economic vitality, even sustainability.
Together, they deeply trust the value of art. The result blends both the consumption and production of the arts, offering a home to makers and to their market, to venues and to audiences. As obvious as these might sound, a healthy balance among these is much to the Avenue’s credit. It bodes well for its future.
Alserkal Avenue shows that risks taken on the work of artists and culture can be worthwhile investments in long-term sustainability and quality of life—even in a city that since just 2016 has added no less than $80 billion to its economy.
“We took a risk on the risk takers,” says Alserkal. “And we have all become richer for it.”
Today, smart is no longer a word used exclusively for people. From cars to vacuum cleaners to fully automated factories, robots—or programmable machines that accomplish tasks generally reserved for humans—are increasingly ubiquitous. Some are ai-enabled refrigerators that can order food for you; some are “digital assistants” such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. Others are humanoid, such as Sophia, designed by Hanson Robotics with a face modeled on mid-20th-century actor Audrey Hepburn and equipped with ai and facial recognition to interact with humans. (In 2017 Sophia became the first robot ever to be granted national citizenship—by Saudi Arabia.)
Eventually, some futurists expect that some robots will look more and more like us, having synthetic skin and hair, individual (or not) faces and bodies. They will increasingly become androids, or virtual humans. Others will remain disembodied but capable of complex tasks (“Alexa, if it’s raining this afternoon, arrange a ride for the kids from school.”) And ever since the dystopic Metropolis in 1927, movies and television have asked whether robots would someday try to overthrow us (Bladerunner; The Terminator; I, Robot; Ex Machina) or whether they would be nice and helpful (Commander Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation; C3PO and R2D2 of Star Wars)?
Surprisingly, our ideas about robots being so futuristic are built on ones that began long, long before electric circuits and computer processors. The field of robotics began centuries—millennia—before the digital era. Ancient Egyptians built automatons that gave not just form but motion and voice to deities. Greeks speculated in early biotech. Muslims of the medieval scientific Golden Age devised complex automatons that helped inspire the drawings and designs of Renaissance polymaths like da Vinci.
Around the world, animated statues and automatons have appeared in early legends from the Americas to Africa to east Asia, often as minions or representatives of gods. And of these, the most influential to our world today were those that began in Egypt, in the second millennium bce.
French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero (1846–1916) tells us the Egyptians had “speaking statues,” images of their deities, made of painted or gilded wood with jointed limbs and voices operated by temple priests. The statues responded to questions and sometimes made lengthy speeches. One statue in the temple of Amun in Thebes was said to raise its arm and select the next pharaoh from among male members of the royal family. Maspero tells us the priests saw themselves as intermediaries between gods and mortals, and they firmly believed the souls of divinities inhabited the statues and guided them in producing voices and movements.
Asim Qureshi, an Oxford-educated tech entrepreneur who writes about the history of engineering, notes that Egyptians of that time “had enough knowledge of mechanics to develop a non-digitized [robotic] machine based on a system of ropes and pulleys.”
This Egyptian tradition appears to have passed north across the Mediterranean to Greece, where it infused myths and legends—and eventually science. Ian Rutherford, classics professor at the University of Reading, points out that “Egyptians and Greeks are known to have been in contact already in the second millennium bce, though we don’t know much about it. The picture becomes clearer from about 600 bce, when the sea-faring Greeks were frequent visitors to Egypt.”
Greek intellectuals of the day developed a solid understanding of Egyptian culture, according to Rutherford: “[They] saw it as a source of knowledge and esoteric wisdom. Some of them believed that Egypt had influenced Greece in the distant past; for the historian Herodotus, Greek religion was mostly an Egyptian import.”
Perhaps the oldest Greek tale involving ai and robotic figures is Homer’s eighth-century epic about the Trojan War, the Iliad. The inventor Hephaestus, god of metalworking, creates intelligent female automatons, made of gold, to assist him in his forge: “In them is understanding in their hearts, and in them speech and strength, and they know cunning handiwork.”
In the fourth century bce, Apollonius of Rhodes penned the Argonautica, the epic poem about Jason and the Argonauts, in which Hephaestus constructs a giant bronze automaton named Talos to protect Zeus’s beloved Europa from pirates on the island of Crete. Talos—in effect a “killer robot”—patrolled the beaches of Crete, circling the island three times a day.
Greek mythological notions of robots evolved into more-detailed (and practical) engineering concepts. Greek scientists and inventors developed techniques for simulating the actions of the human body.
Greek inventor Ctesibius of Alexandria, in the third century bce, pioneered compressed-air and hydraulic devices. He built an automaton operated by cams, or rotating mechanical links that transform rotary motion into linear motion. His robotic statue could stand and sit, and was used in processions. Though Ctesibius’s writings have not survived, later inventors and engineers adopted and improved upon his techniques.
Inventor Philo of Byzantium, who died around 220 bce, was known as “Mechanicus” for his engineering skills. His book Compendium of Mechanics describes a female robotic servant that could mix different liquids to make a drink when a cup was placed in her hand.
In the first century ce, Hero of Alexandria was influenced by Philo. He designed vending machines, automatic doors and an early steam-powered mechanism called the aeolipile, developed 1,700 years before James Watt’s engine, which used steam ejected through angled nozzles on a metal sphere to set the globe spinning. In his treatise On Automaton-Making, Hero describes an automated puppet theater that employs a combination of weights, axles, levers, pulleys and wheels to enact an entire stage play. A programmable robotic cart carried other robots on stage to perform for the audience. Falling weights pulled ropes wrapped around the cart’s two independent axles. Noel Sharkey, professor of ai and robotics at the University of Sheffield, compares this control system to modern-day binary programming.
The collapse of the Roman Empire and onset of Europe’s so-called “Dark Ages” created an atmosphere in which fantastic tales spread. Among them were stories of lost Roman treasure, hidden in hoards buried beneath hills and guarded by golden automatons.
These European stories were echoed later in an Arabic version, “The City of Brass,” an adventure tale in the One Thousand and One Nights. In this story—based on a historical account by Ibn al-Faqih—a military expedition sent by the Umayyad caliph finds an abandoned, walled city in the deserts of northwest Africa. With its lofty walls of brass, the city was reputedly built by King Solomon, and it was once a thriving capital until struck by an unknown catastrophe: All the inhabitants died, and they were mummified where they fell. The city’s beautiful queen, embalmed and dressed in elegance, was seated on her throne and guarded by two sword-bearing automatons. When an explorer tried to remove the queen’s jewels from her body, the automatons came to life, beat the man and beheaded him.
As Bryn Mawr historian E. R. Truitt describes in Medieval Robots (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), it was first the Byzantines and then the Arabs who preserved the mechanical arts in the Middle East following the fall of Rome. Around 850 ce, three Mespotamian brothers known as Banu Musa published The Book of Ingenious Devices, an illustrated work with designs of about 100 automated devices, including a water-powered organ. The Banu Musa, or “Sons of Musa,” were Ahmad, Muhammad and Hasan ibn Musa ibn Shakir, brothers from Khorasan who worked in Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), Abbasid Baghdad’s great center of higher learning. While their book did not deal with humanoid automatons, many of the technologies and automatic controls they developed were adopted and refined by Abu al-‘Izz ibn Isma’il ibn Razzaz al-Jazari, a towering engineering talent of the 12th-century ce.
Between the time of Banu Musa and al-Jazari, Arab and Islamic science flourished. A few manuscripts by the Banu Musa and al-Jazari have survived, but for many other engineering accomplishments, we must rely on accounts by historians, travelers and visiting diplomats.
Robotic achievements building on the works of Alexandrian scientists continued in Egypt during the Islamic period. One historical account tells us about 12th-century Fatimid vizier al-Afdal Shahanshah, whose guest hall featured eight robotic statues of singing girls, four made of camphor and four of amber, clad in fashionable clothing and jewelry. When the vizier stepped into the chamber, the statues bowed; when he sat down, they straightened up. This report, by Ayyubid historian Ibn Muyasser, is preserved in the writings of another Egyptian historian, al-Maqrizi.
The evolution of automatons grew in engineering sophistication over the ages, from the simple temple statues of ancient Egypt, employing basic levers and ropes for moving limbs and tubes for speaking from hidden locations, to the Greek robots, which used hydraulics, compressed air and basic cams to move body parts, to the automatons of the medieval Islamic world, which enabled more realistic movement with sophisticated cams, camshafts and even crankshafts, as well as advanced hydraulics and pneumatics.
An early cam was built into Hellenistic water-driven automatons from the third century bce. Both cam and camshaft would later appear in al-Jazari’s robotic creations. The cam and camshaft began appearing in European mechanisms in the 14th century.
The crankshaft, the next stage in this technology, translates rotary into linear motion, and it is essential to much of today’s machinery, including the automobile’s internal combustion engine. Acknowledged as one of the most important mechanical inventions ever, the crankshaft was created by al-Jazari to raise water for irrigation while he served as chief engineer of the Atuqid dynasty. Written in 1206, al-Jazari’s Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices includes developments in the use of pistons and valves, as well as some of the first mechanical clocks driven by water and weights.
“It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of al-Jazari’s work in the history of engineering,” says Donald R. Hill, English historian and translator of al-Jazari. “The impact of these inventions can be seen in the later designing of steam engines and internal combustion engines, paving the way for automatic control and other modern machinery. The impact of al-Jazari’s inventions is still felt in modern contemporary mechanical engineering.”
As a result, some historians call al-Jazari the “father of modern-day engineering.” Salim al-Hassani of the University of Manchester, who chairs the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation, notes that al-Jazari’s invention of an early programmable robot qualifies him further as “the father of robotics.”
The Islamic world’s robotic designs found their way west to Europe. “Throughout the Latin Middle Ages,” says historian Truitt, “we find references to many apparent anachronisms, many confounding examples of mechanical art. Musical fountains. Robotic servants. Mechanical beasts and artificial songbirds. Most were designed and built … in the cosmopolitan courts of Baghdad, Damascus, Constantinople and Karakorum. Such automata came to medieval Europe as gifts from foreign rulers, or were reported in texts by travelers to these faraway places.”
Western scientists of the Middle Ages pushed these engineering concepts even further. Today, their accomplishments sometimes reach us only through the filter of legend, where the technical overlaps with the preternatural.
Gerbert of Aurillac, a 10th-century French priest who studied science in Islamic Córdoba, was a pioneer in astronomical observation, introducing the armillary sphere and star sphere. He brought arithmetical calculation with the abacus and Arabic numerals to northern Europe. His scientific accomplishments resulted in legends that thrived a century after his death, including one claiming he had built a robot of sorts—a talking humanoid head—that could track celestial phenomena and foretell the future. Gerbert, a scientist and humanist long before the Renaissance, became the first Frenchman to head the Roman Catholic Church (999–1003 ce) , adopting the name Pope Sylvester ii.
Other medieval European scientists, too, were said to have created such “talking heads.” Scholars suspect the speaking-head concept originated in Arab folk tales. It became a powerful image in Europe and was linked in popular imagination with leading scientists such as Germany’s Albert the Great and England’s Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon.
The tale of Bacon’s “brazen head” is the best known of these, and it was featured in Robert Greene’s 16th-century play, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Bacon made a human head of brass that could speak and function as an oracle. While the scientist slept, Bacon’s apprentice tried to question the brazen head. It spoke three times, saying, “Time is,” “Time was” and “Time is past.” It then fell to the floor, broken and evermore silent.
Al-Jazari’s influence among European Renaissance scientists was particularly visible in the work of da Vinci, who was fascinated by mechanisms of the human body and investigated ways of simulating actions of living beings. In 1495, he built a humanoid robot with pulleys and gears allowing it to move its arms and jaw, and to sit up and stand. The automaton, dressed as a knight in bulky German Italian armor, could also lift its visor, revealing its face and its moving jaw. Da Vinci’s robot employed a four-factor mechanical operating system integrated in its upper torso, and a separate three-factor system in the legs. It made its public debut at a gala event hosted by da Vinci’s patron, Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan.
Mark Rosheim, a us roboticist whose company develops robotic systems for nasa, built a working version of da Vinci’s automated knight in 2002 using da Vinci’s own drawings.
Rosheim says he was inspired in his youth by da Vinci. He developed a robotic serving cart from da Vinci’s sketches, which moved in programmable directions thanks to internal wooden cams. During a video interview in 2011, Rosheim revealed the workings of the cart in his company lab. Its intricate gears and cams not only served to transport viewers back to the 15th century, but also, for those familiar with al-Jazari’s influence on da Vinci, carried them even further back to the crucial Golden Age of Islamic science and engineering.
It was a tangible example of not only how far we have come, but also of how far back we go, to where the unexpected richness of our past seeds the unimaginable potential of our future.
These words journalist Anthony Shadid wrote in April 2003 in accepting the annual George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting. He was 34 years old, an Arab American from Oklahoma City, and he wrote them from Baghdad, where weeks earlier he had begged his editors at The Washington Post to allow him to remain to cover the us invasion even as most global media personnel evacuated.
His focus in Iraq was on Iraqis—in homes, neighborhoods and workplaces. “Our responsibility as journalists to cover events is to witness historic events and bring meaning to them, to see how they impact ordinary people,” Shadid later recalled.
The next year, he would receive a Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting, the first Arab American to achieve the honor. He would earn a second in 2010 for work at The New York Times. Two years after that, crossing the mountains between Turkey and Syria, he would suffer a fatal allergic reaction to horsehair.
“Anthony showed us—reminded us—how a lone reporter can transform our understanding of history by revealing something true of human experience,” said Phil Bennett, one of his editors. Leading us media publication Columbia Journalism Review called Shadid “the most honored foreign correspondent of his generation.”
To gather a full picture of Shadid’s craft as well as his impacts on his profession and the role of Arab Americans in media, the American University of Beirut in 2017 began to study his personal papers and has conducted more than 50 interviews with Shadid’s friends and colleagues. These now offer records of both Shadid’s mind and his mechanics: why he insisted on covering the Mideast region so deeply from ground-level, human perspectives; how he captured what proved to be the trajectories and fates of countries in the words of ordinary people.
In many ways, his life was a story of an Arab American seeking connection to his roots while also seeking to tell an authentic story. During his youth in Oklahoma City and as a student first at the University of Oklahoma and later at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he explored the legacy of his family that had migrated from Lebanon to the us in the 1920s. From that age he knew he wanted to become a correspondent in the Middle East. He recalled in 2001, “I got into journalism because I didn’t like how people wrote about the Middle East.” Explaining his approach, he said, “Understanding people’s humanity and keeping it at the center of stories is the most important thing in the way I work.”
In college he taught himself Arabic from cassette tapes. In his junior year, he spent the summer of 1989 as an intern at Al Fajr newspaper in Arab East Jerusalem. He spent a year in Cairo studying Arabic. After starting with the Associated Press (ap) in the us, he reached his goal in 1995 when the ap sent him to its Cairo bureau.
He referred often to how his draw to the region also was about “how gentle it could be in many ways. When you walk into a room anywhere in the Arab world, there is always a hello, always a sense of community, almost intimacy in how you deal with each other.” But in most reporting, he added, “I think this is often lost.”
He then moved in 2000 to The Boston Globe’s Washington, dc, bureau, and from there covered Arab- and Islamic-world politics in the capital and abroad. A story from those years particularly foreshadowed the profound impacts of his people-centered style.
Leila Fadel, now a National Public Radio (npr) correspondent, recalls how a story Shadid wrote from Ramallah, Palestine, explored how ordinary Palestinians felt living under Israeli occupation. It so struck her that she turned to journalism as a career. “I was 19 years old and in college, and had never, ever, read anything like this. I had never known exactly what I wanted to do until I saw this person doing it so boldly in this article.”
In her first job after graduation from Northeastern University, McClatchy news sent Fadel to cover Iraq—where she met Shadid. “He was a great mentor who was always ready to take a few minutes to answer a question or offer suggestions,” she remembers. “He was like a guide to us. He changed so many lives.”
Other young Arab American journalists whom Shadid assisted include Alia Ibrahim of Al Arabiya television; Hannah Allam of npr; novelist Alia Malek; Nour Malas of The Wall Street Journal; Ayman Mohyeldin of msnbc and Ashraf Khalil at the ap. They recall his tips: Focus on getting the essence of a story right; don’t waste time chasing big quotes; scan culture and arts pages of Arabic newspapers for story ideas and characters. Allam recalls Shadid telling her, “If you can say it better than the people you report on, then say it. Otherwise, let people speak for themselves.”
Colleague Anne Barnard says Shadid “looked at all people’s lives as having equal value…. His early work in Afghanistan for The Globe and then his Iraq reporting for The Washington Post opened the way for other correspondents to cover the region from all perspectives.”
Analysis of Shadid’s work shows three keys to his success: time, attention, and sincere caring. He spent hours and hours, sometimes days and weeks, listening to people—in a village in Iraq, in a café in Casablanca, in a struggling neighborhood in Cairo. People trusted him. People shared their innermost feelings with him.
“He never closed his notebook or put it down,” said one editor who worked with him in Iraq. Shadid ignored most press conferences. He preferred to wander, work local leads, because he knew that stories lay everywhere people lived and worked. He looked people in the eye, repeated their names several times, nodded to acknowledge their thoughts and wrote down every word they uttered while also cataloging physical items—clothes, beads, religious symbols, artwork, garden trees—that spoke to their identity. Nothing was too big or too small to mention—a discarded cigarette box, a vase of plastic flowers, old newspapers and faded books, broken windows, chipped paint, dried patches of blood on the sidewalk, a row of bmws in front of a trendy café.
When he finished reporting, he transcribed his notes and interviews, identified the theme and chose the words, gestures and actions of the main characters who would tell the story along with the settings. From these he scripted a detailed outline, along the way adding more comments, glances, hand gestures, or a long sad sigh or a laugh that would produce a short film of human actions, clothes, home decor, memories, worries, music and poetry. “We chronicle; we tell stories, and we try to understand,” he said.
When Shadid’s colleagues discuss what struck them most about his work they make references to no fewer than 10 art forms. His methodology mimicked oral history, one journalist said. Several colleagues described him as a poet. Some said he used the tools of a novelist or an author of vignettes. Others saw in his depictions the hand of a painter, or a photographer. In stories’ drama and action, there lay the work of a dramatist, a filmmaker, or a documentarian.
Shortly after Shadid’s death, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism Dean and former colleague Steve Coll wrote: “Anthony was always interviewing, nodding, and scribbling. He was respectful and humble, determined, sympathetic, emotional, clear, and professional. I remember thinking, ‘this is how a journalist should be.’ He taught us all, and he taught us about the things that matter most.”
A glazed ceramic vase that dates from 300 bce; a blue glass pitcher made in Hebron around 1960; worn identity cards marked “Palestine;” a crisp sheet of orange postage stamps; and an intricately embroidered silk dress, all from the early 1900s—these are a few of the evocative artifacts on view at the Museum of the Palestinian People, or mpp.
One of the newest cultural attractions of Washington, dc, the mpp is home to dozens of cultural items collected and donated from around the globe. Together they tell a story of a diaspora and the determination and pride of Palestinian culture scattered across nearly every country in the world.
Located along 18th Street in the eclectic and fashionable Adams Morgan neighborhood, the mpp’s neighbors offer a similarly global mix of food, music and art.
Businessman Bshara Nassar, 31 and a native of Bethlehem, came up with the idea for the mpp shortly after moving to the capital in 2011.
“I was really astonished by all the museums, memorials and monuments here. So many immigrants have come to Washington and built institutions that would tell their stories,” says Nassar, who also serves as the mpp’s director. “But I could not find a museum or space that would share our story as Palestinians, so I started working on the idea and questioning what it would take.”
In June, Nassar opened the mpp to the public as one of only three museums in the world dedicated to the history and culture of an estimated 13 million Palestinian Arabs. The Palestinian Museum near Ramallah in the West Bank and the Palestine Museum us in Woodbridge, Connecticut, are the only other locations where comparable artifacts are on display.
To showcase the range of Palestinian artistic expression in addition to historical artifacts, Nassar invited donations from Palestinian artists around the world. Among those who contributed is mixed-media artist Ahmed Hmeedat, who grew up in Dheisheh, a refugee camp south of Bethlehem, and holds degrees in human rights and international law. Other artists include Manal Deeb, Mohammad Musallam, Dalia Elcharbini and Haya Zaatry, each of whom offer colorful, thoughtful interpretations of Palestinian culture.
Nassar says the mpp began with an exhibition in 2015 in Adams Morgan that featured photography, paintings, stories and videos of Palestinian life. A couple of weeks later, universities and churches throughout the us began asking about sponsorship.
It expanded, and it became a traveling exhibit that visited more than 50 locations across the us before returning—permanently—to the neighborhood where it debuted.
The mpp’s home is now a multistory brownstone at the corner of 18th and T streets. It was donated, Nasser says, by an anonymous us family who “really cares that Palestinians have a voice in Washington.” Other donors have contributed some $200,000, and Nassar is already considering expansion. “That’s our future goal.”
Nassar’s drive to share Palestinian heritage and narratives is both longstanding and a family concern. He earned a master’s degree in conflict transformation from Eastern Mennonite University, not far from dc. In 2014 he founded the Nakba Museum Project of Memory and Hope, which became another catalyst for the mpp.
The Nassar family runs an educational farm in Bethlehem called Tent of Nations, which aims to “build bridges between people, and between people and the land,” he says. It hosts volunteers and runs camps that teach land-and-soil-centered approaches to conflict resolution.
When visitors come to the mpp, they are greeted with traditional Palestinian designs and an interior in distinctive Jerusalem stone. The exhibits are in sections: “A Remarkable People,” “Nakba and the Diaspora,” “Occupation” and “A Resilient People” look at history. (Nakba is Arabic for disaster, and Palestinians use the word to mark the 1948 war that resulted in the flight and expulsion of some 700,000 Palestinians.) The final section, “Making Their Mark,” honors Palestinian scholars, historians, poets, entrepreneurs, feminists and comedians.
Ari Roth, founding artistic director of the nearby Mosaic Theatre Company and one of the mpp’s leading supporters, called it “a space for sowing seeds of transformed perception and empathic connection.”
Nassar hopes mpp will prove inspiring to new generations of Palestinians and others around the world.
“It’s hard for us to imagine a future that’s different from what we’re living right now,” he says. “So we want to challenge Palestinians and visitors to look at the future in a different way.”
So, this freekeh-stuffed poultry dish is definitely good for you. Palestinians love adding spices and herbs to food, especially nearer the coastal areas where they are in abundance. Freekeh is used in many stuffings and food combinations because it is filling, hearty and packed with nutrition. It works really well with chicken, but I prefer Cornish game hens. The herbs in this dish are bursting with flavor, and whether serving your family or dinner-party guests, this dish is sure to be a fan favorite.
Preheat the oven to 400ºF (200ºC). In a bowl, combine all the ingredients, except your poultry and yogurt dip, and taste for flavor. Place the mixture into the cavities of your poultry of choice and place in a deep baking dish.
Season your poultry with extra salt and pepper, and drizzle of olive oil on top. Add water to the bottom of the dish so the lower half of the chicken is submerged. Cover dish with aluminum foil and roast for about one hour or until cooked through. The liquid will combine flavors from the poultry, herbs and freekeh, creating a delicious sauce.
Once cooked, ladle sauce over each hen, or whole chicken, and serve with a little yogurt dip alongside.
Reprinted with permission from Baladi Palestine,
Joudie Kalla, 2019, Interlink Books, 978-1-62371-981-4, $35 hb, www.interlinkbooks.com.
Joudie Kalla has been a chef for over 20 years. She trained at Leiths School of Food and Wine, London, and worked in many prestigious restaurants before going on to run her own successful catering business. She opened a Palestinian deli, Baity Kitchen, in London, from 2010–2013 to much acclaim before turning her sights to writing her first bestselling cookbook Palestine on a Plate. She runs cooking classes, catering events and pop-up supper clubs, and she consults on food projects.
I have held onto one, though: My mother kneels down to lift me off the ground, and as she does, the sheer fabric of the scarf covering her hair shifts in the summer breeze that smells of jasmine. She caresses me, and I remember the glint in her eyes and the light hitting just the right spot on her face.
To this day, wherever I go, the covers women use over their hair feel like odes to my mother. It is impossible for me to look at the women in my life as people defined by anything other than their ambition, determination, independence and ultimately their choices, their individuality. When I think of all the ways women through centuries have covered and adorned their hair, all the way from Asia to the Middle East to Europe, I see customs that can bring women and cultures together, not ones that have to divide us. Although the women in this photograph are in India, and I grew up in Egypt, it’s an image that brings me close to that moment with my mother.
—Laura El-Tantawy
www.lauraeltantawy.com
]]>