This review appeared in the Guardian.

The Mujaheds, if somewhat more privileged than their neighbours, are a typically itinerant Palestinian family who have learnt to attach sentimental value “only to the small things, the ones that could be thrown into suitcases and scurried away with.” Originally from Jaffa, now returned from Tunis, Beirut and Scandinavia, the novel’s opening finds them living in Gaza in the early years of the second intifada.

One of the many strengths of Selma Dabbagh’s writing is its unerringly precise sense of place. Gaza, imagined from inside with the mental aid of satellite images, is “like dried-out coral, ridged, chambered and sandy.” It contrasts with Israel, “the other side, that side, the place they came from, that had been theirs,” which, studded by solar panels, swimming pools and irrigated fields, looks from above like “an elaborate blanket of modernist design.”

Life in the Mujahed apartment, between the noise of nearby families and the louder noise of warplanes and helicopters, may be like “camping under a flyover”, but it’s better than living in tents as the neighbours – refugees from house demolitions – are forced to do.

The details of dispossession and siege are relentlessly accumulated: the rotting flowers and fruit blocked off from the market by the ‘closure’, the targetted killings, incursions and arbitrary arrests, as well as the increasingly violent internal competition between the religious parties and the corrupt Palestinian Authority whose luminaries are “yearning for cheap suits and desks with name plaques.”

In such an environment, hope is “the thing that could devastate them all.” Yet each family member aims, in some way or other, to escape their predicament, to get ‘out of it’. The mother, to save her skin, has eluded an earlier political identity (a secret which is teased out as the novel progresses). Her son Sabri escapes nostalgia for his baby son and his Christian, Jerusalemite, activist wife, and for his own legs – all destroyed by an Israeli bomb – by recording and analysing the oppression around him. He hopes (that dangerous word) that his efforts will one day sway the world towards recognition, and justice.

His younger brother Rashid’s way ‘out of it’ is via the winged leaves of a marijuana plant called Gloria, and then by travel. His visa documents for London, and reunion with his girlfriend Lisa, are “certificates of release”. London is the setting for a fine comedy of cultural difference: the home of Lisa’s parents, to whom Rashid is shown off  “like a gaudy piece of jewellery”, is a realm of small portions, meagre eye-contact and trapped air.

Rashid’s sister Iman, meanwhile, is briefly tempted by the escapist dream of dramatic, putting-an-end-to-it-all action. “We have a role for you,” a hyper-religious co-worker ominously intones. Iman is not the type to blow herself up – not until one of her students is killed by Israeli bombing: “Deaths of children changed everything. Resistance movements started with dead children.”

But the attempt to recruit her is observed by Ziyyad, an orphaned fighter and an old family friend. He arranges to have Iman safely packed off to join her father in his bolt hole in the Gulf, a consumerist nightmare of malls and maltreated migrant workers. Here attempts are made to straighten Iman’s unruly curls and to depilate her skin. Suzy, Iman’s father’s girlfriend, instructs her to ‘develop herself as a woman.’ This is precisely what Iman does when she too arrives in London, although not in the way her father would have chosen. The benign influence of Ahdaf Soueif whispers through this section.

The final drama – back in Gaza now – hinges on the mysterious (and Shakespearean) pairing of Rashid and the fighter Ziyyad, his lookalike.

This is a very successful debut novel from a British Palestinian writer who has already notched up successes with her short stories. Like a good short story, “Out Of It” manages to fit a great deal in without feeling crowded: Gaza’s collaborators, heroes and dope dealers, and London’s restaurants, bedsits, demonstrations and police cells. Dabbagh does group scenes best of all, finely observing and analysing power relationships. When, for example, the chairwoman leaves a Women’s Committee meeting which has stretched on through an entire night of bombing, “the room’s centrifugal force was released and a panic spread through the women” who ask each other for the first time where the bombs have fallen. In the same way Dabbagh masterfully evokes the complex web of family relationships, a tangle of love, jealousy, resentment, intimacy and distance.

One negative point is the overuse of Arabic phrases followed by translation. This technique may be helpful for the language student but risks alienating the general reader and exoticising material which Dabbagh has so carefully depicted from within as (horrifically) ‘ordinary.’

Otherwise, the novel is full of exact, unexpected images. A man falls asleep – “a boot nudging him into a trench backwards.” An old English house is like a cross-dresser, “sloppy thatch flopped like a lady’s hat and the climbing roses were like rouge.” The writing is both literary and accessible, fast-paced, passionate, exuberant and heart-lurching. We’ll be hearing much more from Selma Dabbagh.

It’s interesting to note that the Golan was occupied by Zionists in 1967, before most of the demonstrators were born, and illegally annexed in 1982. The very Syrian drama unfolding on these ‘Israeli’ streets proves – if proof were needed – the absurdity of Zionist hopes that Arab national identity on occupied territory will gradually evaporate.

by Ali Farzat

Many Syrians have been awaiting this moment with dread. A further step down into bloody chaos and incipient civil war, a further step into the dark. This morning two car bombs exploded at security installations in Kafar Souseh, Damascus. At least thirty people were killed and over 100 injured.

Who’s to blame? There is no evidence of anyone’s guilt, and there won’t be any credible evidence while the criminal Asad regime remains in power and continues to lie and to block journalists’ access. This means that pro-regime people will follow the regime line and blame al-Qa’ida, and anti-regime people will blame the regime. I make no bones about it: I’m firmly in the anti-regime camp. Those who followed my writing before this year will know that I was once willing to give the regime the benefit of the doubt. Not any longer. This year I’ve been forced to admit that the regime is a lot less intelligent, a lot less sophisticated, than I thought. Back in February it had enough popularity to lead a genuine reform process. It’s entirely possible that Bashaar al-Asad, had he played this revolutionary year right, could have won a real election. But he didn’t play it right. From the start his regime slaughtered peaceful protestors and subjected thousands to torture, including children, even to death. Worst of all, the regime instrumentalised sectarianism in an attempt to divide and rule. After months of attacks by armed Alawi gangs on predominantly Sunni lives and property there are now instances of ‘revenge’ attacks on innocent Alawis, and tit for tat sectarian killings particularly in Homs and its surrounding countryside. All of this could have been predicted months ago. Of course, the mechanics of these killings is as obscure as that behind the bomb attacks in Damascus today. Some revolutionaries believe the regime is behind the killings of Alawis too, because it aims to spark a sectarian war which it thinks it can win. And we must not forget that sectarian war is still – to the credit of the Syrian people – not the dominant strain in the conflict. There are thousands of defected soldiers, many of whom have seen their comrades gunned down. If they had chosen to they could have attacked the minorities in a coordinated fashion. They haven’t. And the Alawi actress Fadwa Sulaiman is still leading demonstrations in the Sunni heart of Homs.

It’s debatable whether or not the regime can win a sectarian war, but it’s certain that it can’t win its struggle against the revolution for dignity. In fact the signs are piling up that the regime is losing by the day. Three days ago 60,000 revolutionaries took to the streets of Meydan in central Damascus. Thousands took to the streets of central Aleppo. It can no longer be said, therefore, that central Damascus and Aleppo are not participating in the revolution (the suburbs of these cities have been demonstrating for months). The regime’s response to the awakening of the two largest cities has been to escalate. Reports from Jabal az-Zawiyeh in Idlib province suggest that at least 250 people have been massacred there in the last three days, defectors and civilians alike. And the daily death toll of civilians across the country has risen to between 20 and 50.

Now this double bomb attack on Kafar Souseh looks very much like part of the regime’s response. It certainly plays into the regime’s hands, reinforcing the terrorism narrative on the day that the Arab League observers (very worryingly led by Muhammad ad-Dabi, who was Sudan’s intelligence chief during the massacres in Darfur) arrive in Syria. Apparently it took less than twenty minutes for the regime to ‘discover’ that al-Qa’ida, backed by the United States and Israel, was behind the bombs. The regime’s ad-Dunya TV station even informed us that the exploding cars had pictures of bin Laden on their windows. Intelligent people will have as much trouble believing this story as they have believing Butheina Shaaban’s indignant insistence that torture never happens in Syria, or the lisping idiot-in-chief’s assertion that he would leave power if the people stopped loving him.

Witnesses claim that the streets around the bomb blast were closed off by security before the explosions. The oppositionist Muhammad al-Abdullah writes on his facebook page that “Reliable sources leaked the news that the victims of the bombings in the security services building were innocent people detained during demonstrations and were transferred from prisons and detention centers to the military and security buildings to use as victims in the series of explosions planned in the coming days after signing the death protocol (the Arab League protocol) and the presence of Arab observers to let the world think that the Syrian revolution is a terrorist revolution.” The regime claims it received information from Lebanon two days ago that 200 al-Qa’ida operatives were crossing the border. Lebanon’s ex-prime minister Saad al-Hariri (admittedly an anti-Syrian politician) says “this is fabricated by the Syrian ministry and some of its tools in Lebanon.”

So choose the narrative that fits you best. This is the confusion into which the criminal and traitorous regime has led us.

Fadi Azzam

A slightly shorter version of this review appeared in The Independent.

Places have moods, this novel reminds us. Sometimes Sarmada, a mountain village rising from the Hauran plain of southern Syria, is all “oblivion, dust and tedium”; at other times it’s a shimmering delight, each rock, tree, spring, cliff and cave owning rich meanings and histories. Sarmada is also “a Sheherazade”, a generator of tales, so many tales we can’t possibly hear them all. “I thought about telling her the joke about the overweight fortune-teller,” Azzam writes, “but..”

Like the Arabian Nights, “Sarmada” contains stories within a frame story. The frame and trigger is a meeting with Azza Tawfiq, an expert in chaos theory at the Sorbonne who (following the Druze tenet of transmigration) believes she lived in Sarmada in a past life as a murdered girl called Hela Mansour. Bemused, disbelieving, the narrator returns from “chasing dreams in Paris and delusions in Dubai” to excavate the village’s memories, at first on Azza’s behalf.

Hela’s crime was to fall in love with an itinerant Algerian. A double crime: “love is a disgrace,” for a start, and this love, to a non-Druze stranger, is considered a “defection.” The Mansour brothers purify their honour by butchering Hela, only to find their shame superseded by guilt and, in the youngest brother’s case, by desire for Farida, an assertive beauty and the second of three women to dominate the novel.

Farida marries herself to a gambler who dies on the second night of the wedding festivities. Her next husband dies of an immediate heart attack, and her third is killed in the 1973 war with Israel. Farida redeems her consequent ill-starred status by becoming the village’s foremost herbalist. She drains the monstrous swelling of an old woman’s breasts (the first in a series of Marquezian deformities) and concocts a crying cure for grief with the resulting milk. The entire village samples the brew, including the plants, which burst into sap and nectar tears.

Farida is thrown back into disrepute by her seductions of teenage boys. One such liason leads to the birth of Bulkhayr, who grows to become an ardent lover of Rimbaud. Bulkhayr’s earliest romance with words is played out in molasses juice on the voluptuous body of Buthayna, Farida’s erstwhile enemy.

If there’s a growing shapelessness in the novel’s last third, it really doesn’t matter. Brimful of magic, “Sarmada” is a book to be swallowed in a few rapturous gulps. It’s beautifully written and, save the rare, discordant plunge into cliche (“a boy who’d rocked her fourteen-year-old world”) beautifully translated. The treatment of its major theme – frustrated and unleashed libido – slides only once towards unimaginative porn mode.

It’s a very Syrian novel, illustrating sectarian co-existence and providing glimpses of the country’s mystical and literary wonders, as well as village ceremonies and coming of age rituals (including a startling use for a terebinth tree).

The beams in a cow shed stolen from the Ottoman-built Hejaz railway, the villagers’ steady emigration to South America, the consequent appearance of yerba mate, the ‘setback’ of the 1967 defeat, the raised hopes of the peasants and the esoteric sects when the Baath rose to rule “for an endless forever” – political history is integrated smoothly into the narrative. Fadi Azzam’s criticism of dictatorship is scathingly precise. There’s a devastating portrait of a Baathist faux-intellectual: a child-hating headmaster who arranges to have a boy tortured.

“Sarmada” is finally, indirectly, an early novel of the contemporary Arab revolutions. Liberty, Azzam hints, must break out as surely as smothered sexuality: “All it takes is one breeze to make dust the ruler of the place.”

For a mix of contextual analysis and gripping reportage, the reader will find no better book than Nir Rosen’s magisterial “Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s wars in the Muslim World”.

Most Western correspondents were flown into Iraq unable to speak Arabic, largely ignorant of the context, to pass their time attending coalition press briefings or embedded with the US military. Their reports were heavy with simplistic labels (‘the Sunni triangle’, for instance) and ignored non-sectarian nationalism and class issues. Rosen’s writing on Iraq is the polar opposite of such parachute journalism. He speaks Arabic for a start, and blends in physically as a result of the “melanin advantage” bequeathed by his Iranian father. More to the point, he is courageous and energetic, going where few outsiders would dare, whatever their skin tone. He’s a reporter of the best kind, capable of locating pattern behind the copious detail. So he doesn’t merely report the mosque sermons he attended, or his encounters with militiamen and their victims, but accurately interprets and reads between the lines. His descriptions of time, place and personality are vivid, with not an ounce of orientalism added. His lack of sentimentality combined with his obvious sympathy for the people of the region make him the perfect candidate to voyage into the sectarian heart of darkness.

His regional experience is an obvious strength. It allows him to trace the momentum of sectarian-political discourse from one area to another, beyond state boundaries. The first part of the book is called “The Lebanonisation of Iraq”. The second is called “The Iraqification of the Middle East.” The section on Afghanistan feels a little like an afterthought, because the dynamics outside the Arab world are different and because Rosen doesn’t speak Pushto, but it’s still as perceptive and as dramatic as anything a newspaper can offer. (I have some reservations about the (nevertheless very good) series of articles he wrote on Syria for al-Jazeera’s website in September and October 2011; he seems to see the Syrian revolution through an Iraqi prism, perhaps oversensitive to sectarian aspects of the developing conflict and not sensitive enough to the fact that, unlike in Iraq in 2003, the trouble began with a popular mass movement against state brutality.)

Starting between the invasion of Iraq and the civil war, Rosen records the hardening of sectarian boundaries, the firming up of assabiya, or group identity. The sectarian Interim Governing Council of 2003 was replaced by an even more sectarian parliament in 2005. The elections were held according to proportional representation, with the whole country considered one electoral district. This weakened local-interest parties and strengthened ethno-sectarian blocks.

He describes – or allows his interviewees to describe – the Shia sense of liberation and the Sunni sense of horror when the Saddam regime dissolved. Shias poured into the streets to perform the mourning rituals they’d been forbidden formerly, to celebrate their repressed identity. Sunnis viewed these scenes with a distaste born of sectarian and class prejudice, and with very real fear. Why, many asked themselves, did ‘secular’ and religiously neutral Iraq suddenly look like south Tehran?

Beyond Iraq, there was not so much a Shia revival (that was 1979) as a revival of Sunni chauvinism. In Jordan, where King Hussein had given the Muslim Brotherhood control over the education ministry in 1970 in return for its support during the Black September massacres of Palestinians, the associates of Abu Musaab az-Zarqawi recruited suicide bombers to kill ‘apostates’ and ‘Safavids’ in Iraq. In Lebanon, where the civil war of 1975-1990 had opposed Christians and Muslims, Sunnis now turned against Shia. Saddam Hussain’s deposal by imperialist forces, then his execution at Eid to the sound of Shii taunts, had transformed him into a Sunni martyr. The assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, supposedly by Syrian (therefore Alawi) hands, did something similar.

This symbolisation didn’t happen naturally. Rosen describes a ‘reprogramming’ of Lebanese Sunni attitudes by combined Saudi, neo-conservative and right-wing Lebanese propaganda. The Hariri family’s Future movement, though led by secular billionaires and allied with Druze and some Christians, framed its political battles with Syria and Hizbullah as episodes in a wider anti-Shia struggle. Fearing Hizbullah’s popularity, the region’s pro-American regimes – Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan – joined in, tarring the ‘resistance front’, including even Sunni Hamas, as an expansive Persian-Shii crescent. Saudi backers and the Hariris funded and encouraged viciously sectarian Salafis who accused Hizbullah, the only power to have reconquered Israeli-occupied territory without granting political concessions in return, of protecting the Israeli border. “It seemed to me,” writes Rosen, “as though Lebanese Sunnis were becoming the new Maronite Christians, no longer interested in Arab nationalism but only in a narrow Lebanese chauvinism, looking to America for protection and hating the Palestinians to the point of sympathising with Israel.”

Lebanon has long consigned its Palestinian refugees to apartheid confinement. Right-wing Maronite Christians worried by swelling Sunni numbers were the historic enemies of Palestinians in Lebanon, insisting on their marginalisation and slaughtering them in their camps during the civil war (Syrian troops helped out in 1976). Palestinians and Sunni Lebanese were allied in the war, armed Palestinians frequently acting as the militia of the Sunni community. Yet by 2007, many Lebanese Sunnis blamed Palestinians en masse for the presence of Fateh al-Islam, an armed Salafi group, in the Nahr el-Barid camp outside Tripoli. The fact that Fateh al-Islam counted more non-Palestinians than Palestinians among its ranks, including many Lebanese from Tripoli, did not affect anti-Palestinian attitudes. In the full-scale assault launched by the Lebanese army on the camp, many were killed and 40,000 were made (and in most cases remain) homeless.

Back in Iraq, Rosen examines in detail the rise of the Mahdi Army and al-Qa’ida and the long battle to ethnically cleanse Baghdad’s Amriya neighbourhood. He describes how Sunni resistance fighters came to see the Shia militias who were driving them out of Baghdad and al-Qa’ida, who had turned Sunni towns and suburbs into a brutal version of Qandahar, as greater enemies than the Americans, and how they worked with the Americans in the ‘Awakening’ movement. He studies the American ‘Surge’ of military forces and how, in the new context, it brought an end to the worst violence. He also examines the intra-Shia civil war which pitted the middle classes represented by the Iraqi Islamic Council against the working class Sadrists.

Samar Yazbeck

Novelist, screenwriter and journalist Samar Yazbeck in interview: “The regime has indeed destroyed the Alawite religion, a peaceful religion, as it engaged in things foreign to the faith, leading some to become its Alawite thugs. But many of us are opponents, in jail, in exile, or banned from travel. The regime is playing with sectarianism to terrify “its” minority and get support. A game that will end, but first, I fear, there will be clashes between the communities. ”

In this interview an Alawite member of the Syrian Revolution General Council based in Homs argues, “We need to break down the myth that the regime is the defender of Alawites and other minorities. It is just defending itself, and using us for its own ends.”

And in this interview actress Fadwa Sulaiman explains why she’s thrown her lot in with revolutionaries in a besieged area of Homs (she’s currently on hunger strike): – “I just wanted to go just to say we Syrians are one people. I wanted to contradict the narrative of the regime.“

Egyptians in Solidarity with Syria

The Syrian regime’s blanket ban on journalist access has some carefully selected exceptions. Robert Fisk, for instance, who seems to be compensating for the naive anti-Syrian and pro-March 14^th line in his reporting of Lebanon over the last years by treating the statements of Syrian regime figures – professional liar Boutheina Shaaban is one – with great naivety. At least he didn’t apply the ‘glorious’ epithet to her which he used to describe Walid Jumblatt’s wife. Fisk’s book on Lebanon “Pity the Nation” is a classic, his account of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila remain fresh in the mind (the blood-footed flies clambering over his notebook), and for many years he was one of the very few English-language journalists with some real knowledge of the Middle East. Sadly, his knowledge doesn’t extend to a working familiarity with Arabic. In several recent articles he has informed us that that the slogan of the Ba‘ath Party – umma arabiya wahda zat risala khalida – means ‘the mother of the Arab nation.’ In fact it means ‘one Arab nation with an eternal message’. Fisk is confusing ‘um’ – mother – with ‘umma’ – nation. It’s a rather disastrous mistake. Someone ought to tell him about it.

Nir Rosen is an excellent journalist who clearly does speak Arabic and who makes the effort to talk to ordinary people rather than just politicians and PR people. His book “Aftermath” is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the American occupation of Iraq catalysed an outbreak of Sunni-Shia sectarian hatred across the Arab world. His recent visit to Syria (see here and here and here and here) seems to have been both above and below regime radar. While he appears to have been smuggled in to certain locations he also interviews such regime figures as the state Mufti Hassoun – someone once known for his touchy-feely liberalism and his campaign against honour killing now making absurd threats about armies of pro-Asad suicide bombers lying low in Western countries. Unfortunately, Rosen sees Syria through the prism of Iraq’s sectarian war. He expects to find expressions of sectarian hatred, and he finds them aplenty. He can’t be blamed for making it up, because sectarian hatred certainly does exist in Syria, and because he honestly reports what people say to him. The danger of this method, however, is twofold. First, his selection of informants necessarily reinforces his bias. He does interview some pro-regime Sunni figures (like Hassoun) but chooses not to interview Alawi, Christian, Ismaili or secularist figures who support the revolution. He doesn’t consider such people to be representative of the revolution because he’s decided that the dynamic must be sectarian, even if the Ismaili town of Selemiyeh has been demonstrating for months and secularists like Suhair Atassi are very prominent in the revolution’s Coordination Committees. (Indeed, Burhan Ghalyoun, the head of the umbrella Syrian National Council, to which many demonstrations have proclaimed allegiance, is fiercely anti-clerical).

The second danger is the lack of context. To take a small example – an informant from an area of Homs where Beduin have settled tells Rosen that Beduin women wear only the hijab headscarf whereas non-Beduin Sunni women wear the niqab face veil. Anyone who knows Syria will know that this is untrue; only a small minority of Sunni women (Beduin or non-Beduin) wear the niqab. But Rosen simply reports what he is told, and a reader who does not know Syria will come to a false conclusion. In the near-civil war which the regime has brought the country to, after months of armed Alawi villagers terrorising Sunni cities, after non-stop sectarian propaganda from the regime, there do seem to be increasing incidents of sectarian killing. Rosen doesn’t give us a sense of how Syria arrived at this point. Neither does he attend to the countervailing revolutionary current which stresses national unity. His reporting does not explain the Alawi actress Fadwa Sulaiman leading the crowd in besieged and blood-soaked Homs in chants of ‘No Muslim Brotherhood, No Salafis, We All Want Freedom.’ If a journalist used Rosen’s method for a story on Israel-Palestine, interviewing some ordinary men in a cafe in Gaza and some other ordinary men in a cafe in Sderot, but ignoring secularist and Jewish anti-Zionists, and paying scant regard to historical events, he could easily bring his readership to the false conclusion that the conflict is an inevitable one between ‘the Jews’ and ‘the Arabs’.

Then there are the scribes of the counter-revolutionary Left, who fortunately have far less relevance than mainstream journalists like Fisk. Just as some retrospectively saw the Libyan revolutionaries as NATO plants and (at the very same time) al-Qaida operatives as soon as Britain and France began bombing, so they believe the Syrian revolution is managed by imperialist forces because Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the West have come to the end of their patience with the Asad regime. It took months and months of carnage for them to lose patience. The reason they have done so now is because they can see what is obvious: that with the army splitting and the demonstrations growing, the Asad regime cannot survive. Until the regime falls, Syria will slip further into a civil war which will torment the entire region. For this reason these powers are now working to bring about the regime’s fall. Of course they don’t want a democracy in Syria (although Turkey, the only outside power which may take military action at some point, would be pleased with a democratic conclusion), but they are not ‘managing’ the revolution – nobody is – and it’s hard to see how they could impose a solution on the country after Asad.

The worst example of counter-revolutionary leftism has been Joseph Massad’s Jazeera article, in which he advises Syrians to give up on their revolution for the greater anti-imperialist good. Not only is Massad’s analysis plain wrong, his advice is remarkably unrealistic. Syrian revolutionaries cannot afford to give up even if they wanted to. If they give up they will be living on borrowed time, until the regime locates them and tortures or kills them. Very usefully, Massad offers them his “condolences”. (Massad’s former contributions to Middle East progress have been to attack Walt and Mearsheimer’s excellent work on the Israel lobby and to paint Arab homosexuals as pawns of ‘the Gay international.’)

With nothing except the very welcome rhetorical support of the Turks and the Arab League to help them, against the opposition of imperialist Russia and sectarian Iran, and in the face of the tanks and gangs of a brutal torture state, Syrian revolutionaries are continuing their fight.

Amal Hanano’s excellent analysis of Rosen, Fisk and others on Syria is absolutely essential reading.

The Thursday of the general strike in Homs.

Districts are being raided since last night, searching for me. People are being beaten to reveal my hiding place. In case I get arrested by the security or army forces, who might force me to appear on Al-Dunia channel to make me to admit that I am part of the conspiracy against Syria the way they did with the honourable Sheik Al-Sayasneh and the brave officier Hussein Harmoush. If they hurt me or any members of my family in any way, then I hold the government and its security apparatus and thugs fully responsible.

And I declare that I will continue to take part in the protests and keep the hunger strike that I started the day before yesterday to break the siege on the districts of Homs, and to prove to all our partners in the homeland the lies of this government when it claims that there are armed gangs, Salafis and Islamic extremists who want to overthrow the regime and exterminate the minorities.

I urge the great Syrian people to continue their peaceful struggle until they topple the regime and achieve the democratic civic state that all Syrians dream of. And I invite you to unite and stand together to overthrow the regime which lost its legitimacy the moment the constitution was changed to accommodate the appointment of Bashar Al-Assad as president of Syria, for no reason other than being the son of the late president.

I urge you to come out to the streets and squares today and every day to declare civil disobedience and hunger strike until the withdrawal of the security and military forces from the streets and the release of all the political and opinion prisoners which are currently in the oppressive jails and to spare the blood of all Syrians.

I urge all the Syrians around the world, and all people to support us and stand in front of our embassies around the world declaring hunger strike to express the right of people to express their opinion about their regimes without being killed by these regimes.

Free people of Damascus! Free people of Qaboon, Barzeh and Meedan! Free people of Duma, Qadam, Darayyah, Mu’addamiyyah, Harastah, Zamalkah and ‘Irbeen! Free people of Mleha, Rukn el deen and Zabadany! Free people of Dar’a, Banyas, lattakia and Tartous! Free people of Hama, Aleppo, Idleb and Deir el-Zor, Raqqah, Qamushli and Hasakeh! I urge you to declare civil disobedience and hunger strikes in all the squares and streets in support of the prisoners of the central prison in Homs who are on a hunger strike, and to lift the siege on Baba Amr, which has been under siege for over a week now, and is under continuous bombardment and is now isolated from the world, and no one knows what is happening in Baba Amr. Baba Amr is living a real humanitarian disaster. Stand by Baba Amr, because no district or road in Syria is exempt from a fate similar to that of Bab Amr, as long as the Arab league is providing the regime with one extension after another so that it continues repressing the Syrian people, and depriving them from their freedom, dignity and life, and peace be upon Syria and its people.

Peace be upon Syria and its people.

Peace be upon Syria and its people.

Thursday 10 November 2011
Thursday of the general strike in Homs

(translation by Laila Al-Attar)

The Arabian Nights (or the Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights Entertainments – there are so many versions) constitute, in Marina Warner’s words, “a polyvocal anthology of world myths, fables and fairytales.” The antecedents of these Arab-Islamic texts are Quranic, Biblical, Indian, Persian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Turkish and Egyptian. In them, oral and written traditions, poetry and prose, demotic folk tales and courtly high culture mutate and interpenetrate. In their long lifetime the Nights have influenced, amongst many others, Flaubert, Wilde, Marquez, Mahfouz, Elias Khoury, Douglas Fairbanks and the Ballets Russes.

The frame story, in which Shahrazad saves her life by telling King Shahryar tall tales, is only one such ransom. More than simple entertainment, then: throughout these stories within stories, and stories about stories, and stories metamorphosing like viruses, endlessly generative, narrative even claims for itself the power to defer death.

Although oral versions of the Nights had long percolated through Europe (elements turning up in Chaucer, Ariosto, Dante, Shakespeare), the tales were established in the mainstream of European popular and literary culture with Galland’s early 18^th Century French translation. Galland purged the eroticism and homosexuality, added tales from the dictation of a Lebanese friend, and perhaps invented the two best-known and seemingly most ‘Arabian’ tales of all: Aladdin and the Magic Lamp and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

Warner quotes Jorge Luis Borges (a guiding spirit in her book) approving the belle infidele approach to translation. “I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.”

It’s this changing aspect of the Nights as a time-travelling, trans-civilisational cooperation which fascinates Warner. She sees in it “a unique key to the imaginary processes that govern the symbolism of magic, foreignness and mysterious power in modern culture.”

“Stranger Magic” is a post-Saidean endeavour to uncover “a neglected story of reciprocity and exchange.” One of Warner’s central intentions is to show that while Christendom and Islam were politically and religiously in a permanent state of hot or cold war, science, philosophy and art recognised no frontiers. This openness closed somewhat, however, from the Enlightenment on, when Europe sealed magic off from science, imagination from reason, and also east from west, black from white.

The Enlightenment, of course, was the point at which the Nights was translated to such rapturous European reception, and not by accident. The “home-grown practice of, and belief in, magic was set aside to be replaced by foreign magic – stranger magic, much easier to disown, or otherwise hold in intellectual or political quarantine.”

So to the orientalisms of Lane and Burton’s English translations, which not only presented the medieval fantastic as a documentary resource for understanding the ‘unchanging’ and now colonially subjected Arab culture of the 19^th Century, but also projected onto the exotic foreign screen fantasies and fears which would have been taboo in a domestic context. Burton famously resexualised the Tales with his own copious notes on the east’s supposed perversions and genital enormities.

“Stranger Magic” is an enormous work, 436 densely erudite and eclectic pages plus almost another hundred of glossaries and notes. In its relentless connecting up of diverse stories, from the “Inferno” to “His Dark Materials”, it’s reminiscent of Christopher Booker’s brick-sized “Seven Basic Plots”. Warner’s chapters are allocated into five parts, are beautifully illustrated, and interspersed by fifteen Tales concisely retold.

Part one focuses on the jinn – whose special narrative benefit is that, like the Greek gods, they can behave badly, capriciously, illogically – and also on the figure of Solomon, a master of the jinn in his Islamic version, here located in the white wizard tradition somewhere between Gilgamesh, Merlin, Prospero and Gandalf. One of the book’s many delightful discoveries enters the discussion here – a 14^th Century Syrian treatise on the legal status of  jinn-human marriages.

The second part attends to the Arab and European habit of attributing foreignness to evil magicians. The dark enchanters come from dark places (Africa and India) and profess dark (pre-Islamic) faiths. “The Orient in the Arabian Nights,” Warner writes, “has its own Orient”. During the Enlightenment, black magic became inevitably dark skinned; necromancy (to employ two words investigated by Warner) became inseparable from nigromancy.

Part three examines how the stories “test the border between persons and things” and how severed heads which speak, books that kill and carpets which fly link to our 21^st century objects, not only cinema’s animated objects but also the prosthetic goods of everyday life, the designer labels, gadgets and vehicles by which we project and define our personalities.

In this section, Warner moves from considering the derivations and meanings of the word ‘talisman’ to reflect on her own attachment to talismans in her Catholic girlhood (her personal appearances in the book are apt, easing the academic tone) before launching into a fascinating discussion of the talismanic properties of paper money.

The fourth part reflects on writerly responses to the Nights, including Voltaire’s contes, Goethe’s “East-West Divan”, and (a great chapter) the neglected Gothic novelist and Islamophile William Beckford.

The fifth deals with flight, cinema, shadow play, and Freud. Warner describes the Hampstead cave of wonders which was the final consulting room, “a darkling mirror of the furnishings of his mind”, and the iconic analytical couch draped in oriental cushions and rugs. Specifically a Ghashgha’i tribal rug, which leads by glorious digression to Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s rug-themed Iranian film “Gabbeh”, and to a reminder that oriental rugs, the Nights and psychoanalysis are all narrative forms.

“Stranger Magic” is a labour of love, an academic work which often reads like a fireside conversation. It’s encyclopediac, a book to be savoured in slices, yet (inevitably) it’s easy to think of further potential topics – giants, for instance, or dervishes, or magical realism from the Arabs via La Mancha to the Latin American Boom. But Warner’s conclusion reminds us of her organising principle: the uses of enchantment to open new possibilities of thought and sympathy, indeed the necessity of magic, especially in a self-consciously ‘rational’ and secular world.