All Strangers Are Kin

by Zora O'Neill

  Certain arcane schools of Quranic interpretation take the idea of paradoxical words to its logical extreme, contending that every word of the holy text has a hidden import contrary to its surface meaning—though these so-called Batinites (batin means inner or secret) usually leave camels out of it.

  94 more settled tribes were ’arab: Still more complicated: the term i’rab (إعراب), another word from the same ʼayn-ra-ba root, originally meant the correct use of the Arabic language—the form of the word literally meant “Arabizing.” Later, i’rab came to refer specifically to declension, the application of case endings.

  to settle an argument in favor of the payee: Kees Versteegh’s The Arabic Language provides a lot of this history concisely, and I have relied on it for many of the details about the development of Arabic in this book.

  95 outside the city, living out of doors: In many of the Gulf states, Bedouin are outside borders too. When the United Arab Emirates became a country in 1971, some Bedouin did not do the paperwork for citizenship. Now they are so-called Bedoun—a word that looks like Bedouin but is in fact unrelated. Bedoun (بدون) is a preposition that means without, as these people live without papers or national identity.

  the numbers-for-letters chat alphabet: The book, which is quite entertaining, is The Chronicles of Dathra, a Dowdy Girl from Kuwait, self-published in 2011 by the pseudonymous blogger Danderma (which means ice cream).

  103 “created every living thing from water”: This passage is from sura 21 (The Prophets), verse 30.

  115 the verse continues, a revelation: This translation is by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem.

  just as Muhammad had: For this insight, and much more on recitation, see Kristina Nelson, The Art of Reciting the Qur’an (American University in Cairo Press, 2001), which I found through an episode of the radio show Afropop Worldwide in which Nelson is interviewed. First aired in 2012, the show is part of the “Hip Deep” series, titled “Egypt 1: Cairo Soundscape” (http://bit.ly/CairoSound). Part of what makes Egyptian recitation so good is that reciters use some of the same modes of expression as popular singers. In particular, some say their goal is to induce tarab, a sort of emotional swoon, a feeling of grief and joy that is essential to Arab musical traditions.

  116 “taught man what he did not know”: This is sura 96, verses 3–5. The suras (chapters) of the Quran are presented not in the order they were revealed, but roughly by length, starting with the longest. So it happens that the rather brief first revelation Muhammad received falls near the end of the Quran.

  120 Halt, let us weep: This is my translation; for the full poem, along with other essential Arabic poetry, see Night and Horses and the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (Anchor Books, 2002), edited by Robert Irwin, who also provides engaging commentary on the works.

  121 Who you travel with is more important: Or, in the contemporary idiom, “Bros before roads.”

  129 as her tribe moves one direction: My Egyptian friend Ali El Sayed, a chef-philosopher in New York City, has a more practical take. “The Arabs created poetry because they’re just out there in the desert,” he explained to me one night. “It’s just them in the Sahara with the moon. They are bored motherfuckers. So they look at the moon and say, ‘It’s like her face.’ And they look at the gazelle and see its big black eyes. They’re describing the different parts of their lover and knitting it together. That’s the Arabs. That’s poetry.” Ali used the word “knitting” because the Arabic word for love poetry is ghazal, from a verb that means to flirt and woo, as well as to spin or weave.

  cheatin’ hearts and open roads: My essay dealt specifically with the David Allan Coe song “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” written by Steve Goodman and released in 1975. Midway through the song, Coe takes a break to point out that this would be a perfect country song except it hasn’t mentioned Mama, trains, trucks, prison, and gettin’ drunk—then proceeds to sing a verse incorporating all of these terms. Arab poets writing well after the Jahiliya often employed the same gambit, self-consciously checking off all the usual terms—campsites, storms, traveling companions—to establish their credibility. This became so common that Abu Nuwas, a famously debauched poet of eighth-century Baghdad, skewered the whole practice with a first line that reads, roughly: “One miserable guy stopped off to contemplate an abandoned campsite, while I stopped to contemplate the local bar.”

  138 a rant by Muammar Qaddafi: Spare a thought for Qaddafi’s interpreter. When Qaddafi addressed the United Nations in 2009, he spoke for an hour and a half, in a diatribe full of conspiracy theories and accusations. At minute 75, his interpreter reportedly shouted, “I just can’t take it anymore!” and collapsed. A UN staff interpreter stepped in to finish the job.

  139 quoted in the newspaper: Niloofar Haeri’s Sacred Language, Ordinary People has a great chapter on how copyeditors at magazines and newspapers in Egypt adjust the natural spoken language for appearance in print, according to the role of the speaker in society. Presidential quotes were the most frequently and heavily rewritten, to conform with Fusha standards, while the least tweaked were words from popular comedians. That is, politicians are expected to be formal and well educated in print, even if they aren’t fluent in Fusha in real life; essentially vernacular comedians can stay just as they are.

  145 used the standard Fusha word, tabeeb: Allow me to add here that an Afro, in Khaleeji dialect, is called a jaksan—or at least it was back when Michael Jackson had one.

  166 notorious for a grinding battle: The word for camp in Arabic is mukhayyam, related to the one for tent. On my first visit to Beirut, in 1999, I had driven through a refugee “camp” on the south side of Beirut and was surprised to see no tents in sight. It looked like the rest of the city, just a bit more jumbled. Decades before, canvas had given way to cinder blocks.

  173 “What side are you on?”: As it happened, not too much later in my trip, I found a book that addressed these issues, Etiquette in the City: Beirut, by Sonya Sabbah. From this I learned that it was inappropriate to ask about religion, village of origin, or political opinions. Even sports were out, as a favorite team could reveal certain allegiances. Unrelated to identity issues, the book also advised that it was inappropriate to take a gun or any other type of weapon to a nightclub.

  194 the Syrian troops rolled home: The Lebanese called this popular uprising the intifadat al-istiqlal, the Independence Intifada. But apparently this made the U.S. State Department too jumpy, as intifada—a poetic word conveying the shiver before waking—was too evocative of the Palestinian cause. And so the movement was dubbed, in the American media at least, the Cedar Revolution.

  215 the Aramaic alphabet, via Nabataean: Aramaic, in turn, came from Phoenician, the culture on the shores of the Mediterranean in what is now Lebanon. The Phoenician alphabet was also the basis for the Greek and Latin alphabets, so as foreign as Arabic looks, it is actually a cousin, if several times removed, of the alphabet we use for English.

  217 strapped a reed pen to his stump: Ibn Muqla’s colorful life is expanded in Rafik Schami’s novel The Calligrapher’s Secret, translated from the German by Anthea Bell (Interlink Publishing, 2011). Schami suggests that Ibn Muqla was secretly developing new letters for the Arabic alphabet, considered heretical at the time. I think this is purely Schami’s invention, but it’s a great story.

  219 the general-use font she named Mirsaal: Mirsaal is the font used to spell Lebanon on page 151. The full font is published in Rana’s book Cultural Connectives (Mark Batty Publisher, 2011), also a good basic introduction to how the Arabic alphabet works.

  they never became standard on Arabic keyboards: Some readers may have noticed in the Egypt section that Medo’s mother’s name, Neveen, incorporates a non-native sound, v (written ڤ, an adapted fa, ف). I marveled at this, but Medo didn’t think it was remarkable. It is in fact a Turkish name—more evidence of Ottoman influence in Egypt.

  228 a bride’s
accessory, a belly dancer’s frippery: I suspect this failure of English leads to some confusion, as there is little consistency in how it is used in the media. I have read some stories in which “veil” refers to a headscarf; in others, to a full-face veil. Many times, even in stories about legal efforts to ban “the veil,” it’s unclear just what form of head covering is being discussed. Although hijab and niqab are both in most English dictionaries, they are not widely known. We would do well to use them more often, for clarity.

  240 The dual was a Fusha eccentricity: My English friend Carole, a longtime student of Arabic, makes a good case for the dual, as a kind of shibboleth: “It lets them know that you really know what’s what,” she says. A couple of other nifty details about Darija, for the grammar-obsessed: Darija doesn’t bother with feminine adjectives for nonhuman plurals; if the noun is masculine, so is the adjective. Darija also uses a more sensible conjugation for first-person verbs: naktab (normally the third-person plural form) is “I write,” and naktaboo is “we write,” which is more consistent with second- and third-person plural verbs—even if it does make you sound like you’re using the royal “we.”

  264 common Turkish foods like chicken kebab: My teacher Si Taoufik exemplified the cultural gulf. “What is all that Lebanese food?” he said with a disgust I had never once heard applied to this cuisine. “I never ate this, what is it, tahini, until I went to Paris. Yecch!” That something so universally loved as Lebanese food could be disliked, and that something as common as sesame paste could not be found in Morocco—that boggled my mind. Sesame is essential all around the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Ali Baba even yelled, “Iftah, ya simsim!” (Open, sesame!) to cleave a mountain.

  266 Nerdy SpongeBob SquarePants: Children’s TV Fusha leaves a lasting impression. To Arabs of a certain era, the theme from the Japanese space saga Grendizer is as moving and uniting as any nationalist speech by Nasser. More practically, words absorbed at a tender age can pop out unexpectedly years later. An Egyptian-Canadian acquaintance was once in a tense altercation in Cairo, and when the fight threatened to turn violent, he found himself bellowing in Fusha, “Here are my powers! Let us compare powers!” Then he raised his arm menacingly, conjuring super-strength. “I will deal you a devastating blow!” It was all dialogue from Power Rangers episodes he had watched as a kid, enunciated with full case endings. His opponent was so startled, he could ask only, “Would you like some tea?”

  285 You’re in Morocco, don’t be surprised: If you look up this phrase on YouTube in Arabic (it’s also written ما دمت في المغرب فلا تستغرب and simply في المغرب لا تستغرب), you’ll find a treasure trove of illustrative videos.

  295 a relatively rare morphological form: Comparative and superlative adjectives actually have the same form, which at first sounds easy (none of this “easier” and “easiest,” as in English). But then gender gets involved. So, for kabeer (كبير), which means big or great, the comparative-and-superlative form (grammar books often call this elative) is akbar (أكبر) in the masculine—as seen in the expression Allahu akbar, God is the greatest. Kubra (كبرى) is the feminine form. Then you have to decide whether to use the masculine or feminine, and of course it doesn’t depend just on the gender of the noun you’re modifying. Suffice to say, the rules almost always call for a masculine elative, and that’s just the way it is. Why? Allahu ʼalam: God is the most knowing.

  302 classical Arabic brain teasers: Write the vowel marks on the following letters so they mean something: ان ان ان ان ان اوانه. It’s a poem, and the first half of the line goes الم الم الم الم بدائه.

  About the Author

  Zora O’Neill is a freelance travel and food writer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, and Condé Nast Traveler, and she has written or contributed to more than a dozen titles for Rough Guides, Lonely Planet, and Moon. She lives in Queens, New York.

  Visit Zora O’Neill’s website