Around the Arab World in 4 Minutes.

In late October 2016, the pan-Gulf superstar, Balqees Fathi, released a video clip for the song “Wyak Khidhni", combining several countries’ popular and traditional cultures in one clip, representing the current state of cultural pan-Arabism. In this clip, the Emirati-born, Yemeni-origin, Saudi-married Balqees, presents six scenes representing the most important Arab sub-cultural stereotypes. The clip begins as her husband leaves her for the weekend and leaves her stuck at home with their two sons. Before she can turn around, the kids are missing from the couch and “kidnap” her into a dream. The first stop in this dream is in Egypt, where Balqees works as the sassy “Bint al-Beled” (Daughter of the Country) in a neighborhood cafe. In the next scene, she is whisked off to the Maghreb, in full Moroccan style dress and decor. Before we know it she is in the Gulf, wearing a Kuwaiti-style Burga’ for a split second, at a Kuwaiti-style Majlis preparing tea for her “men”, in the traditional way over a coal fire, before they break into a short eight-count of Khaleeji style footwork and hair flips. 

Between short interludes of Khaleeji style and Egyptian Stick or ‘Assaya dancing by the boys, we get to a Shaami-style BBQ, complete with a French-style chef and roasted rubber duckies. We are then taken to the land of the song’s dialect, Iraq, to a Baghdadi cafe. Balqees dresses in drag as a young Iraqi boy from yesteryear sipping on tea and cheering on a sports match. Finally, in an homage to her father of Yemeni descent, the last Arab cultural scene is a traditional Yemeni wedding, complete with Yemeni dress, jewelry and dagger dance. In a final, somewhat random scene before being brought back to reality from the dream, is a modern dance party complete with electric guitar and a rave audience. 

Balqees represents a new style of the young Arab pop star. In this clip, she is not provocatively dressed, she has no musclebound Turkish or Lebanese model love interest and is in keeping very much in line to the social and culturally created norms of society while still being innovative, artistic and fun. While the lyrics are simple and catchy, they are not foolish. Balqees knows her audience on several levels. As one of the most prominent wedding singers in the Gulf, Balqees’s immediate audience is young Gulf youth, especially girls. While the boys go to her public concerts all over the Gulf for national festivals and concerts, it is the girls who hire her to perform at their weddings. On the grander scale of the audience is the pan-Arab connection. 

This relatively short clip represents the current state of cultural pan-Arabism and cross-cultural exchange on a pop culture stage. Here is the link to the video: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0Srp-n6C888

Baghdad: The City of Peace and of Blood. A Quick History.

As I gear up for a graduate student conference next month at UCLA, I am reading anything and everything I can sink my teeth into on Arab capital cities. This week I finally finished Justin Maroozi's hefty chronicle on Baghdad. City of Peace, City of Blood- A history in Thirteen Centuries. I have always been fascinated by Iraq and due to the city's importance as one of the historic capitals of the Arab world, along with Cairo and Damascus, I took to reading it. Just as the title claims, the author begins with a clear historical background to the establishment of the city under the Abbasid caliphate and why Baghdad was chosen as the capital city.

To make a very long and gruesome story short, the descendants of the Prophet's uncle Abbas gained traction against the descendants of Muwawia, the Prophet's brother-in-law and governor of Syria who established the Umayyad caliphate in Damascus. The supporters of Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law and cousin, were numerous in the province of Iraq and were unhappy with the tribal inclinations the Umayyads had showed towards the initial Arab converts to Islam. The Abbasids promised a revival of Islam where Arabs and non-Arabs would be equal and united regardless of their origins and the like. The Abbasids spread their message of revolution to the supporters of Ali and his descendants, the Shia, of Kufa in southern Iraq and Khorasan on the eastern ends of Iran and gained military traction to raise a rebellion against the Umayyads. In 750, Damascus fell. In 754, Abu Al Abbas, great-great-grandson of Abbas, the Prophet's uncle, died to smallpox. His brother, Abu Jafar, who took the name Al Mansour (The Victorious) was proclaimed the first caliph of the world-changing Abbasid dynasty which would last for 500 years with its extraordinary achievements, celebrated to this day.

In order to displace the residual loyalty of the Umayyads in Damascus and to preserve his independence from Basra and Kufa in southern Iraq, the two Arab cities that had been founded as military garrisons in the first centuries of the Arab conquests, he established Baghdad in 762 as his capital. Twenty miles to the south of his new capital, lay the ruins of Ctesiphon, the once glorious imperial capital of the Persian Parthian and later Sassanid Empires. Ctesiphon was founded across the river from the even more ancient capital of Seleucia, one of the great cities of the Hellenistic and later Roman eras. The name Baghdad is Persian in origin with several legends attributed to its derivative. A thirteenth-century Syrian author attributed it to Bagh, meaning garden, and Dad, the name of the man who owned it. The twentieth-century Orientalist Guy Le Strange, "laid the matter to rest" that the etymology of the word was indeed Persian, however meaning "Founded by God," Bagh meaning God and Dadh meaning founded or foundation. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of the city, who flocked there in droves, representing one of the most astonishing and rapid urbanizations in history, preferred the name Madinat al Salam, the City of Peace.

It was under the patronage of Haroun al-Rashid of Arabian Nights fame that Baghdad and the Abbasids were at their peak. He had started a club for scientific and medical discovery. The great works of classical Greek, Hindu and Persian were translated into Arabic and disseminated throughout the Empire under official royal and wealthy private patrons. Knowledge was transmitted from East and West to the central capital of Baghdad, which would later be translated back to the West for Europe's birth (not rebirth) during the Renaissance. Science, scholarship, bloodshed, conquest, palatial building in Baghdad and Imperial expenditure was expended in ways never to be repeated in history. On his death in 809, it is said by the Islamic chronicler Tabari that 900 million dirham were left in the treasury. Lest we forget Haroun's staring role in the Arabian Nights both for his scholarly and sexual successes. While it's not the most accurate historical account of Baghdad during this period, it nevertheless provides a vibrant picture of what once was one of the most extravagant, civilized and grand cities in history.

After 500 years of Abbasid rule and severe internal strife that finally took its toll on the fledgling empire, the Mongols invaded and leveled the city to near apocalyptic destruction in 1258. As if Hulagu's devastation in 1258 was not enough, another Mongol leader, Tamerlane, swept in only 150 years later to again annihilate the city to ruin. With the exception of a few Persian conquests of Baghdad under the Safavids in the early to mid-sixteenth century, Baghdad and modern-day Iraq were ultimately under the control of Ottoman Pashas until the dawn of the British in 1917. The early twentieth century was a time of great excitement and rebirth in modern Iraq under the British-backed Hashemite Kings. The Jews, who constituted one-third of the city's inhabitants, especially thrived and helped to raise Iraq's status from a forgotten backwater to a flourishing center of Arabic culture and economic growth. Baghdadis returned to their great heritage of literature that had not been seen since the destruction of the Dar al-Hikma or House of Wisdom under the Abbasids at the hands of the Mongols, where the Tigris was said to bleed black from the ink of all the books tossed into it.

This is where the immortal Arabic quip on literature finds its place: Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads. This statement will be dissected further in coming articles.