ComingAnarchy.com

Last year, I wrote about how Jordan’s King has an English mother. Now, we see a somewhat similar reversal — the newest member of the British Royal Family, and the likely future queen, spent two-and-a-half years as a young child in Jordan.

In May 1984, Mr Middleton was offered a posting to Amman, the capital of Jordan. Kate was two years old and Mrs Middleton was on extended maternity leave with eight-month-old Pippa.

“They lived in a two-storey rented villa, close to a park and the nursery where Kate went. I remember she was a very beautiful little girl.”

While Mrs Middleton looked after Pippa at home, Kate was enrolled in Assahera nursery, one of the most expensive nurseries in the area with an annual fee of about US$1,000 at the time.

From Sunday to Thursday, the nursery day began at 8am and ended at 12.30pm, recalled the founder of the now-closed nursery, Sahera al Nabulsi, 67, in Amman.

Kate was in a class of 12 children and the nursery as a whole looked after close to 100 children between 3 and 5 years of age. As well as British nationals, Jordanians, Japanese, Indian, Indonesian and American children were enrolled in the nursery. In the morning, the children were brought together and taught in both Arabic and English, before separating into different classes.

“The morning routine was to have all the children sitting in a circle where they would all sing, Incy Wincy Spider, both in English and Arabic,” Mrs Nabulsi said.

The singing was then followed with a short verse from the Quran.

I recently had a discussion with a Coming Anarchy reader as to whether or not America was an “international” country or not. My view has long been that America is international in the origins of its people — but not in its outlook of the world. Certainly President Obama has faced criticism and suspicion for years that he attended a “Muslim Madrasa” in Indonesia and that he is a secret Muslim. I have not yet heard — and do not expect to hear — the same type of ludicrous comments about the soon-to-be Princess Catherine/Kate for spending her early years in a Muslim country, learning Arabic and reciting verses from the Koran.

This is a story from more than six months ago being noticed in the Middle East — how a lone hen turkey on Bush’s ranch saved our relationship with then Crown Price and Regent of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz — now King of Saudi Arabia.

During the second intifada in 2002, when relations between the two countries were at a critical low point, George W. Bush tried to charm the Saudis. He first tried to win them over with an earnest conversation about religion — which, for some reason, did not go down well. But on learning that the Crown Prince liked his farm, George Bush decided to invite the regent of the Kingdom to Crawdord to share his farm with Prince Abdullah, which they toured on Bush’s Ford pickup.

I point out the different kinds of hardwood trees, the native prairie grasses that Laura had planted, and the grazing cattle. The crown prince sat silently. I wasn’t making much headway.

Then we reached a remote part of the property. A lone hen turkey was standing in the road. I stopped the truck. The bird stayed put.

“What is that?” the crown prince asked.

I told him it was a turkey. “Benjamin Franklin loved the turkey so much he wanted it to be America’s national bird,” I said.

Suddenly I felt the crown prince’s hand grab my arm. “My brother,” he said, “it is a sign from Allah. This is a good omen.”

I’ve never fully understood the significance of the bird, but I felt the tension begin to melt…The next day, I got a call from Mother and Dad. The crown prince had stopped in Houston to visit them. Mother said he had tears in his eyes as he recounted his time in Crawford and talked about what we could achieve together. For the rest of my presidency, my relationship with the crown prince — soon to be king — was extremely close. I had never seen a hen turkey on that part of the property before, and I haven’t seen one since.

Benjamin Franklin was right after all!

Reuters has as one of its “pictures of the day” a photo of Sunil. Sunil is a 14 year-old working at a brick quarry in western India. He is paid two Indian rupees ($0.04) for each brick he carries out of the quarry. Each brick weighs about 40kg. He carries out about 100 bricks per day, making him daily wage of US$4. He has no safety gear, no protective clothing, likely has no health care if he is sick or injured, and probably has to work our and pay for his commute, residence, and food out of his own pocket. This type of labour sounds brutal — but these type of conditions are probably not unlike what many of our ancestors were doing between 100 and 200 years ago.

Sunit is one of tens of millions — maybe even hundreds of millions — of laborers in the subcontinent who would do significantly better if he came to Dubai (although that option is probably not open to him until he is 18 years old). He would likely be paid a minimum of US$200 a month (around AED600-800), and would probably live in a labour camp, be provided with meals, and be transported to his job, which would likely be in construction, but which could also be in mining, drivers, or other general labour. He would have one month of paid leave every year or two years in which he would fly back to see his family. And he would be provided with a uniform and safety gear — he wouldn’t be scrubbing around a quarry in shorts and sandals.

About half of the population in the UAE — and more than 70% of the population in Dubai — are from the subcontinent. These Indian, Pakistani, Nepali and Sri Lankan workers work in the Persian Gulf and send money to their families in their home country. You can easily meet South Asians in Dubai who have lived here a year, or two, or five, or even ten or more.

I see this as an opportunity for these workers. And while there are certainly issues — which are being addressed at various paces — overwhelmingly Dubai (and other states of the Persian Gulf) present an opportunity for these workers. But the situation of laborers in Dubai is generally reported in Western media as a scandal. Certainly there are real problems — delayed wage payments being one that was a real problem during the financial crisis — but Dubai, and the rest of the UAE, should not be judged by the labour standards of developed countries. There are already too many people trying to get into Dubai from South Asia as it is — were conditions much better, illegal immigration would be even worse problem.

Kuwait is not well known for its tourism. Indeed, I have heard it called one of the most boring countries you can visit. (When I visited, I was most excited by the ruined oil fields.)

Yet one of the country’s hidden gems is the “Kuwait House of National Memorial Museum” — a small house converted into a museum in the western part of Kuwait City regardgin the Gulf War. Open intermitently, you are most likely to get in if you show up in the morning. Admission is KD1 (US$3) and you walk through a brief introduction on Kuwait’s founding and early history, and you are then greated by a narrative of the Gulf War, played out with toy miniatures and full audio-visual affects — although the experience feels very early-1990s.

Here is the narrative of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait:

And here is the narrative of Desert Storm:

In my trip to Lebanon last year, I spotted in an Arabic language school this timeline of the Arab world since the growth of Islam. The chart was published in the late 1980s, and the timeline goes up from 530 until 1986.


Click image to enlarge

The timeline is a fun way to see the history of the Arab world, and I spent some time looking at the timeline. But without being seen as a critic, I do have an issue with the accuracy of some of the information.

Granted, the chart is many decades old, and accurate records (and the Internet) may not have been so available to the authors of the chart. But if I were to amend the chart with regard to just the UAE in recent years, I think the image on the right reflects some amendments that correct some of the years, and are the minimum amendments that would have to make. (The lefthand timeline reflects the original map, and the righthand timeline reflects my amendments.)

I previously posted on the pages of these blog an explanation of the enclave of an enclave (or is that an enclave of an exclave?), by which a small part of the UAE, called Nahwa, is located in a small part of Oman called Madha, which is itself located in the UAE.

Some European readers of this blog made a visit to the UAE and asked if it would be possible to visit Nahwa — to which I responded, why not? We rocked up into Curzon’s Jeep and made our way east from Dubai, north of the the mountains of Fujairah, then turning south along the coast, looking on our right for the road into Oman.

The road to Narwah is by no means obvious. Driving down the eastern coast of the UAE, there are no clear signposts for either Madha or or Nahwa, so looking at the map, we guessed which was the proper turn. We knew we were on the right path when suddenly, all the buildings had Omani flags. There were no checkpoints, border crossings, or fences as we drove into Oman.

It took more time to get to Narwah, as this small town was truly hidden at the end of a maze of roads, and was made up of just a few houses, a palm oasis, a police station, and a large school, on which an enormous UAE flag was draped.

It was my hope that we could drive through Nahwa and head west back into the UAE, and maps indicated that a small road might exist. But it soon became clear that no such route was possible, as the paved road gave way to gravel, which gave way to makeshift route, which ended at a mountain face. We ultimately turned around and headed back the way we came.

Why does a small piece of Oman survive in the UAE, and why does a small piece of the UAE (of the Emirate of Sharjah) survive inside that enclave of Oman? It probably originates in the ethno-cartography carried out by the Trucial Omani Scouts in the 1960s that set the borders of the Emirates before the UAE was founded — but I must admit that I’ve found precious few reliable sources on this topic and would always welcome educated readers that have access to better sources (or memories).

This is rather amusing.

Britain has warned all of its citizens to evacuate, and flights have been chartered to evacuate citizens back to Britain. Enough flights have been chartered to bring 17,000 nationals back to the motherland.

Now let’s look at Bahrain. Here also, Britain advised its citizens to leave — but a seat on a chartered evacuation jet is ￡260 – 310! The result? The chartered flight left empty – probably difficult to justify such a seat when that price is not very competitive with commercial airline alternatives.

But I’ve spoken with friends living in Bahrain and things sound relatively fine — as long as you stay out of the Pearl Square where the centre of the violence is.

Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld are the two most reviled men to have served in the position of Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. Yet the irony — and majestic genius — of the careers of both men is that they have, and will, each do more to educate the public (and academia) about the conduct of US foreign policy than any other men in their respective positions.

Henry Kissinger made the bold step in 1976 to turn over his entire personal papers to the Library of Congress under a special deed that would keep the papers private from the public (but accessible to him for the purposes of continuing his books) until after his death. A law suit resulted in him turning over many of the transcripts of his meetings following a court ruling in 2001 (which, much to the frustration of many people, did not prove the criminal activity they so expected to find in the “secret” papers). But Kissinger’s complete personal papers — his handwritten notes, personal letters, and meeting memorandums — are to be made public five years after his death. The disclosure of so many of his personal files to a public government archives is a move made by very few (if any) persons who served in the positions he did, and this is made all the more remarkable that Kissinger’s tenure was so controversial and he is hounded, even to this day.

But what makes Kissinger unique is that in all his books, he has placed a special emphasis on educating the public about foreign policy, and frequently warns that when it comes to foreign policy, the American public — and as a result, their elected representatives — just don’t get it. They are excessively optimistic, assume that every problem has a solution, and apply their own cultural values to other societies where they are not compatible, often with disasterous consequences. Kissinger hopes with his papers to give academic and the public access to all his papers so that historians can understand the history of what took place in the Nixon White House — and what made it one of the most successful foreign policies of any US presidency in history.

Yet as extraordinarily transparent as Kissinger’s move was when he did it back in 1976, Donald Rumsfeld has gone a step further with his book Known and Unknown. At his own personal expense, he spent four years digitizing his entire personal files from his time at the Pentagon from 2001 – 2006 and made them available online at rumsfeld.com — together with many other documents from his political career with the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. All of his endnotes in his new book are listed exhaustively — and almost all of them (all that are not copyrighted material) appear on rumsfeld.com, often as original documents. You can read the State Department Cable following on Rumsfeld’s visit with Saddam in 1983 or his memorandum to Bush following on his visit to the ME/CIS region a month after 9/11, unedited, showing an exact snapshot of the information that was available at the time — a key issue that Rumsfeld has always focused on and which forms the title of his book, the phrase: “known and unknown.” I have never heard of another statesman going to the lengths to inform his readership of his sources.

Like Kissinger, Rumsfeld is keenly interested in educating the public so that they know what was behind the decisions at the Department of Defense during his tenure there — something he recently explained on C-Span’s Q&A (watch here).

Say what you will about both men. Maybe you don’t like their personalities. Maybe you don’t like their policies. But their legacies in making public information that was previously critically confidential viewed by only a few people in government. That’s why I call these men the Educators — and know that history will show that both of them were unfairly reviled.

In 1867, a jar was found in a Paris pharmacy with the inscription “Remains found under the stake of Joan of Arc.” The jar contained a blackened human rib, carbonized wood, a piece of linen and a cat femur–the later being explained by the practice of throwing black cats onto the pyre of witches. For more than a century and a half, they were believed to be genuine relics of Joan of Arc, until 2006 when scientists performed spectrometry and carbon tests on the relics. They found that the remains were not from 800 years ago, but from an Egyptian mummy from the sixth to the third century BC. Ordinarily, a fake relic from the distant past would be something newer, not older — and how did pieces of an Egyptian mummy end up in a Paris pharmacy anyway?

It turns out that starting in the 15th century, Mummia — a powder taken from the bodies of Egyptian mummies — was a major part of medieval European pharmacopeia, with a particular emphasis on extending life and preserving the body. The practice apparently originated during the Crusades (possibly with King Fulk of Jerusalem), when Crusaders were reportedly amazed to see the dead bodies that had perished so long ago remain in such a preserved state. It remained part of European medicine for many centuries — the French king Francis I (1515-1547) took a dose of “mummy” daily, and the English King Charles II (1630-1685) rubbed ground up mummy powder on his skin as he believed this would turn him into a ‘Pharaoh’.

By the 16th century, exporting mummies to Europe was a big business — to such an extent that a French physician visiting Egypt at the time found that fresh corpses were dug up to meet market demand. The practice of using even domestic fresh corpses to make mummia may have been rather common, as is suggested by English Renaissance literature. Indeed, the particular jar discovered in 1867 may have been renamed either during a time of French nationalism, or because the body of a saint may have believed to have special powers — as “Egyptian Mummies” may have gone out of style at some point.

We can be horrified by the morbid practice and consuming mummified corpses. But we can also be appalled at the lose to history. How many Egyptian mummies disappeared due to this practice?