Art, Architecture and Arabia

I M Pei's architectural pedigree scales the heavens of all types of art on the world's most populated continents. A mix of cultural form and function wrapped in glass, steel and stone gives iconic meaning to some of the world's most prestigious museums, Louvre's inverted pyramid, Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the National Gallery of Art or the Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (MUDAM) in Luxembourg, all containing priceless works on display. At the age of ninety one, Ieoh Ming Pei, Pritzker Prize winner and a multicultural phenom put his imprimatur in Doha, Qatar on the newly opened Museum of Islamic Art (MIA). The magnificent spare no expense building sits astride one of the famed man-made islands as a modern wonder paying homage to the past. Showcasing the art pieces on two floors the curator paid attention to a span of a thousand years, across geography from the ancient Persia to a jade pendant from India to a multitude of art materials. Exhibits are exquisite after the impressive eye candy the symmetrical museum makes upon arrival with reflecting pools, a geometric main staircase hall with the Zen of an Islamic garden. It was a cool enough event that Robert De Niro attended the museum opening amongst the Gulf region's pantheon of royalty.

Ten years ago, this started with the Emir H H Sheikj Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thanki and Sheikh Hassan Al Thani family concentrating on the procurement of Islamic artifacts amidst Europe's established auction houses. London's art scene saw an influx of capital dedicated to filling a museum that was but an idea on a draft board as the final crown jewel in the stellar architectural career of I M Pei. Five stories of wonder encapsulating 382,000 square feet with a price tag of $300 million is the entry fee to establish Doha as a cultural destination for Arabian and Western tourism and pride of place in the hoity-toity art world. The collection features a $73 million dollar Mark Rothko abstract painting as well as the best of art from other cultures while featuring the works of little known Islamic masters. (Picture: Maher Attar)

Not long ago, the idea of culture being a reason to visit the Gulf would have made other Arabs laugh. No longer.

The Syrian cultural historian Rana Kabbani sees a political element to the museum, putting Doha on the cultural map.

"I think all the rulers in the Gulf see what they really lack isculture on a grand scale, as a kind of imperial identity. It's a political-cultural lack. They have the means, and they're going for it."

That's why along the coast, two museums are planned for Abu Dhabi - branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim.

Art in the Islamic world is taking a new resonance as the museum of the millennium opens and Saudi Arabia holds more gallery exhibitions albeit in embassies. To inaugurate the museum there is an exhibit and a conference Beyond Boundaries - Islamic Art Across Cultures. There was a Sunday special panel featuring the architect of the decade, I M, Pei on Islamic Architecture from Tradition to Modernity.

Women are painting, sculpting and creating their own art behind the veils and scrolled walls in Saudi society. A public showing is a cultural possibility with embassy exhibits more prevalent in the realm of the possible and where chances increase the art's exposure. The colors and compositions are arresting, more so because of who the people are that are trying new mediums are garnering attention for their sophisticated works. The Kingdom pledged to sponsor the best are culled from a competition in their own embassies as a furtherance of showcasing their people's talents with clay, camera or paintbrush.

One artist took advantage of the venue to hang an abstract painting of a woman, with one breast clearly depicted — a hint of nudity still taboo outside the diplomatic confines of the embassy, where Saudi Arabia's religious police cannot enter.

The Wednesday night showing in a small hall was packed with expatriates and, more significantly Saudis, whose presence was a reflection of the surge of interest in the arts in the kingdom in the past few years. Local artsshows have been on the rise, more Saudi artists are participating in overseas exhibits, and more universities and schools are offering arts degrees.

The first non-governmental arts society was established a year ago, with four women on its 10-member board. Saudis have become more accepting of abstract art, which, only a few years ago, was the subject of ridicule. And in many Arab cities, Saudi collectors are snapping up works by local artists, some of whom get special orders from their rich clients.

So many beautiful works to page through in Islamic Art and Culture: A Visual History. It was important to me to find a book written by an eminent Islamic scholar. Professor Nasser D. Khalili presents the full range of art possibilities and the meaning behind each selected piece. Great coffee table book sure to cause cultural discussion.

Middle East Theme Parks - An ACME Idea?

As a region, the Middle East comprises architectural and cultural history of humankind since inception while its still prone to violent outbursts by any number of aggrieved parties or grudge bearing nations. Adding a few loud mouth tourists in all the wrong garb with white tube socks is gratuitous next to adding a theme park based on American comics and cartoons in the area. The insurance on a capitalistic enterprise like that has got to be underwritten by a financially healthy firm that treats risk like the expectation of sun heating nearby Arabian deserts. Hooray for Hollywood - here comes their billions earned on the backs of a carrot eating, wise cracking bunny plus a wily coyote charged with babysitting a stalker cat named Sylvester and a yellow bird usually locked in a cage that need a skilled professional negotiator. Jimmy Carter is already booked in the area.



The theme park idea does have a few cha-ching things going for it. Youthful demographics dominates the Middle East. Petro dollars produced a surfeit of surplus incomes for the region's title holders on oil fields. For several years deals have been inked with Viacom/Paramount to do a fun place based on the Titanic and DreamWorks bringing diversity with the lime green Shrek and the lesser known Kung Fu Panda. Time Warner is sticking Bugs Bunny right out there as the front guy amidst an adult beverage Budweiser with Anheuser Busch snagging an island for their use to build a Sea World. Universal is so going to bring it with a giant ape, King Kong and who knows how the whole evolution thing is going to play out in 2012 when Jurassic Park, the T-Rex play park, opens as part of the Dubailand deal.

With their Spidey sense fully activated, Tatweer is the UAE government controlled company jumping on the web of opportunity by signing a mega deal with Marvel. Abu Dhabi already has luxury buildings construction out in the sea dredging up the sea bed to make multi million dollar sand castle islands that can be seen from space, Burj - the world's tallest skyscraper along with a Frigidaire snow & ski resort in the desert. Enter Marvel Comics main man, Wonder Woman sans burkha and a host of other characters to build the economic brand on its own island in the United Arab Emirates. Dubailand contains multiple resorts and facilities with in 3 billion square feet.

Investors, studios and park operators are all aiming to cash in on what some observers call the Middle East's decades-long fascination with American culture. Hollywood movies are popular in the region, and Western fashions are hot commodities among residents who travel abroad.

"On the one hand, they hate America. On the other hand they love America to the bone," said Michael Izady, an expert on Middle East culture who reaches history at Pace University in New York.

The theme park market is open — with no major facilities currently operating in the
Middle East.

The projects are no-brainers for the entertainment companies that have jumped at what amounts to free brand expansions with no capital at risk. Few details have been provided about the deals, which entertainment companies simply describe as licensing arrangements for intellectual property and help on designing the parks and attractions, with no mention of possible royalty payments.

Seems relentlessly pushy American characters, like Captain America, may get benched for the maiden voyage. One of my funniest moments was watching Porky Pig in Italian while on the Via Veneto. There is a time and a place to invite tourists and their bankrolls. But there is a time to say have you lost your mind to companies too. Keep looking for that 'Disney' treatment of Civil War battlefields on Hallowed Ground - Americans said no and they meant it. Too much is not a good thing on the cater to tourist front, especially with certain aspects of American culture deemed corrosive by many in polite Muslim society.


Rami Farouk Daher sets out to look at multiple aspects and implications of tourism throughout the Middle East. As always, scholarship on certain areas is not as deeply discounted for books as American works, but worth it to learn more from perspectives beyond the US. His offering is Tourism in the Middle East: Continuity, Change and Transformation deeply drawing upon his architectural background and familiarity with heritage sites.

Arab Book Market Potential Tantalizes Publishers

Book fairs are tremendous places to find gregarious introverted bibliophiles, secure interesting texts not offered by big retail chains or spot the next new and upcoming trend in the book world. This year is the hot new year for increasing reach into the rapidly expanding Arab Market. Earls Court Exhibition Centre in West London is the scene of a Book Fair this week, featuring new titles and new literary translations in Arabic. Demographics point the way for publishers as the media age in Arabic countries is younger than the more mature markets in North America & Europe, meaning more book buyers and an opportunity to make a long lasting publishing relationship with a new highly educated group with high disposable incomes.

Translated authors have a harder time gaining traction in Europe, especially those from Arabia, but it looks like times are changing. Part of the problem is the lack of diversity inside British, and for that matter American, publishing entities that can read in the original language and guide the book through the marketing and publishing process with an author seeking foreign publishing rights in English speaking countries. The US government still can not keep up with enough Arabic speakers and writers to translate materials with the same limitations now playing out into the marketplace where opportunity costs are making businesses take notice of a thriving market. London's Book Fair or LBF is interesting, as rather than vendors hawking wares in the stands, several nations and a Kingdom or two have set up booths to promote native authors. Yemen is a guest of honor at this years fair.

"The market is potentially very large" for Arab authors, said Margaret Obank, founder of the Banipal publishing house which sells English translations of Arabic books.

"After 9/11 people thought, my god we ignored that (part of the world)," she said.

"They now realise there is literature out there."

Despite all that, having to translate books remains a major barrier holding back greater literary exchanges between the West and the Arab world.

A 2003 report from the United Nations Development Programme estimated that just 50 Arabic-language books a year were translated into another language.

Culturally, readers and seekers of knowledge are venturing further afield in Europe and North America collecting writers that create a nonfiction context or set stories in places they know, not just visited for extended stays. On the flip side, the world of western literature and nonfiction is becoming more accessible to Arabic speakers with translations that increase each year due to popular demand.

'Kalima means business when it comes to filling gaps in the Arabic library and we are working with publishers from all over the world to achieve that goal. We have already completed nine titles despite only launching late last year,' says Karim Nagy, Chief Executive of Kalima. 'It is great that publishers are now recognising the opportunities in the Arab world. Organisations like Kalima can help the international publishing industry access this largely untapped market of 300 million Arabic speakers.'

At its official launch last November, Kalima announced a list of the first 100 candidate titles to be translated and published in Arabic, with the following titles now completed:

• Il Segno (The Sign), Umberto Eco
• The Halo Effect, Phil Rosenzweig
• The Future of Human Nature, Jurgen Habermas
• A Briefer History of Time, Stephen Hawking
• Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
• The Arab Roots of Capitalism, Gene Hec

With an attendance pegged through today at 23,000 publishing professionals and industry mavens, the LBF was a perfect place for the United Arab Emirates to discuss and promote its 'Oktub' programs for original authors and 'Tarjem' for translation that are part of a $10 billion, (b as in book), endowment to nurture young Arabian writers from the region.

A best selling work from the region feted in London is the controversial The Yacoubian Building now out in paperback with great cover art. It features the writing of an Egyptian dentist, Alaa al Aswany that caused great controversy due to its straight forward treatment of sex. Great reviews.

Sliced Cables Spawn Conspiracies from Gulf to Asia

One accidental slice on Flag Telecom, leagues under the seas, could be construed as an unfortunate accident taking out the Middle East and crippling communication with Italy. Two, seems unlikely as the cable between Dubai and Oman severed communications. In a week, the third and fourth incidents occurred involving sliced/cut sea cables affecting the same regions, crushing web traffic to frozen molasses or ancient turtle speeds. While cut cable 1 and cut cable 2 are practically on top of each other, no one knows whether it was one giant slice at the same time or two separate incidents to cut off millions of users. The fourth received a hurried explanation as a power supply problem to the United Arab Emirates.

A supposed undersea cable caper brings out the latent conspiracy theorist in the young, old, Hindi, Muslim, seasoned technologists and casual users. Godzilla or Governments as the creepy cause are each popular theories in the Gulf Region and South Asia. The internet cable cut mystery - Who did it - How and Why? One note of caution is cables break, snap, come apart for a multitude of reasons; ships with anchors, friction or marine life with a hankering for copper dental floss. A dedicated group of ships or submarines exists to perform daily repairs just like the cable guy that schedules between 2 -4 pm at your house.

Only the first two cuts had any serious impact on the internet, says Beckert. Those cables near Alexandria, Egypt account for 76 percent of the capacity through the Suez canal -- connecting Europe with the Middle East, North Africa and the India sub-continent.

Once those failures sensitized a conspiracy-happy net, it was natural that other cable failures would be found to feed the frenzy, because they occur all the time.

Repairs to two key cables carrying 3/4 of the traffic between Europe and Asia are in full swing and so is the wired internet chattering class - well, those that can still easily get online. Egyptian repair crews decided to map a new sea route as they repair the cable. Built into the architecture of these cables is the ability to reroute traffic to distribute the load across other networks. Most of the time it is seamless and the end user happily clicks away without knowing. Cue music from Jaws, this time that did not happen. Cyberwarfare is not off the table in the conspiracy realm.

In the past five years, both fiction and nonfiction treat cyber warfare with more respect, as it is a major tool in sophisticated governments arsenal as well as those that use terrorist means. A good primer is useful. This one entitled Black Ice: The Invisible Threat of Cyber Terrorism allows the budding conspiracy theorist to get grounded in facts before spouting off on the recently repaired interweb.

How Bush Failed to Get His Peace Groove Back

George Bush is doing everything but grabbing the mic and belting out All I Am Saying is Give Peace A Chance when in front of his Middle Eastern audiences. Out of the other side of his mouth comes - Iran is bad, does bad stuff and see Iran is creating tension with their tiny speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz. Bush dashed about the region trying to sway leaders to his view of peace from the United Arab Emirates to Jordan and across the Sinai Desert into Egypt's capital where he was Captain Supportive to quasi democratic President Hosni Mubarak amid major protests of his visit. Bringing up Egypt's well documented history of torture would be just bad form because the US of A renditioned its own prisoners there at his direction. Meanwhile, the Bush administration's top diplomacy fashionista, Secretary of State Condoleeza, took a heavily protected detour into Iraq where she pronounced signs of life returning to the streets of a blown up Baghdad.

“I appreciate very much the long and proud tradition that you’ve had for a vibrant civil society,” said Mr. Bush, whose joint appearance with the Egyptian leader was unannounced and, according to the White House, had been uncertain until the last minute.

Mr. Bush’s remarks reflected some of the contradictions evident in the issues he addressed during his trip.

The Bush Peace Tour is ending with thousands of miles logged to six different nations or kingdoms with Peace no closer in the region and no new champions of his idea to put Iran in the bad behavior timeout corner. Like Barbra Streisand, this is the penultimate farewell tour - Bush is stating his intentions for a final return in May to check on his current goal of increasing support for the Israel-Palestine peace process. Consider the real accomplishments of this tour, a young Israeli girl sang a beautiful but ironic Hebrew rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Bush spoke in Abu Dabi, the crown prince in Saudi Arabia let him hold his prize pet falcon while Bush begged the King to lower oil prices for US sakes by turning on the taps full blast, and finally his painful peppering of I MEAN IT statements at every opportunity.

"When I say I'm coming back to stay engaged, I mean it," said Bush, who added he'll return to the region in May. "When I say I'm optimistic we can get a deal done, I mean what I'm saying."...

"So the Iranians ... better be careful and not be provocative and get out there and cause an incident," Bush told reporters. "Because there's going to be serious consequences. What I said in my statement was, if they hit one of our ships there's going to be serious consequences. And I meant it."

For seven years, the Bush administration allowed the fields of peace to lie fallow or dropped cluster bombs and munitions in a nineteenth century vision of Manifest Destiny on Iraq. Now, Bush is eager to be the bearer and bringer of peace while not developing the relationships necessary to have influence and credibility in the tempestuous region. Iran is solidly in his missile and gunboat sights. That he dared to try a Peace initiative at all says the distortions under which his warped world view operates. Under the devastation of preeminent war doctrine and failures of intelligence, the incompetent Bush administration, Peace has gone from Mission Accomplished to Mission Impossible.



An Arabic speaking former diplomat in both Clinton 42 & Bush 43's administrations, Dennis Ross, wrote an interesting and highly recommended book on the Middle East peace process. It is appropriately entitled, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace.

Construction Destruction in Dubai

Dubai is a United Arab Emirate's city wonderland with a bustling commercial port, vast wealth defying the imagination and out of this world real estate ventures involving construction of the world's tallest skyscraper and expansive bridges. Yesterday, a bridge connecting developments in the Dubai Marina, collapsed killing at least 7 workers. Dubai relies heavily on procuring manual labor from other nations. Most of the Wade Adams Group workers that perished in this accident were from India. Fifteen other workers have light to severe injuries.

"We tried to put a huge piece of metal in a wall when it collapsed," said Muthu Raj, one of the workers interviewed by the media

"I saw colleagues trapped inside, but I managed to jump back and stepped on the road."

The bridge was being built over a small canal in the man-made marina complex, which is close to the showpiece Palm Jumeirah resort, a massive artificial palm-shaped island.

A spokesman for the Wade Adams Group, NM Naushad, told the Associated Press that the company would compensate the families of the dead with a total of 10 years wages each.

He estimated the workers earned on average 9,600 dirhams ($2,615; £1,240) a year.

Dubai's ongoing labor issues are causing project delays and cost overruns, even at the record setting Burj skyscraper. The government is ordering its own ministers and construction companies to review and adopt minimum wage guidelines and other safety measures for its laborers. South Asia is a popular recruiting region for low wage jobs in Dubai, the fastest growing city on earth. Strikes are becoming more prevalent and lasting longer as wages shrink and on the job safety risks expand.

The 40,000 Asian workers vowed not to leave the 26 labor camps scattered around seven semiautonomous Emirati states until their salaries are raised by at least $55 a month. The company pays unskilled workers $109 a month while skilled ones get $163.

The workers also complain of delayed salaries and randomly deductions from their pay for transportation, vacation or sick days.

"We are fed up with these conditions. We need an immediate pay raise," said Mohammed Aslam, 28-year-old worker from Bangladesh.

Dubai is built on the coast and surrounded by a blazing hot blowing desert sands with no natural body of fresh water. It is now an ultra chic Middle Eastern luxury resort fulfilling the needs for indoor skiing, manmade urban developments in the sea that are seen from space and outdoor air conditioned frolicking spots without peer in many developed nations. Tourists flock to the city to see the famous sailboat hotel and wealth on display in vast sums. Into that comes a desperate worker not understanding why the wealth is not shared with those who risk life and limb to do the work that makes Dubai possible.


Dubai's amazing architecture is on display on the cover and images contained in this excellent design and history book from daab entitled, Dubai: Architecture & Design. It captures the history of design in the Middle East. The cover is from the famous hotel buit in the form of a sailboat that is even more impressive in person - but have a megaton of cash with you. The indoor fish tank is well, spectacular.