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Four centuries later, I wandered the labyrinthine streets of Toledo's old quarter and ended up, like most pedestrians, in the Alcaná, a name that comes from the Arabic al-janat, meaning "the (market) stands." It is still a bustling center of commerce, and a plaque, inconspicuously tucked beneath a second story window, commemorates the spot's connection to Don Quixote. Along my way, I passed historic city gates and buildings awash in horseshoe arches, decorative tiles and intricate plasterwork, all reflecting the medieval and early Renaissance Christian enthusiasm for designs that flourished in al-Andalus, or Muslim Spain. Overshadowing the lot loomed the massive profile of Toledo Cathedral, a glorious synthesis of Gothic and Islamic architectural styles. During the 12th and 13th centuries, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian scholars from various parts of Europe flocked here to translate philosophical and scientific works from classical Arabic into Latin, Hebrew, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) and vernacular Castilian. Centered in and around the cathedral cloister, the collective effort gained fame as Toledo's "School of Translators."
Given this long multilingual and multinational history, it comes as no surprise that Cervantes chose Toledo for what happens next in the novel. Stumbling upon an intriguing Arabic manuscript being sold for scrap among the Alcaná's warren of shops, the narrator seeks out a translator. Upon locating an obliging, Castilian-speaking Morisco—a descendent of Spanish Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity—he learns the author of the text is a fictional Arab historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli.
Here, as he does elsewhere, Cervantes signals links to Arab-Moorish identities. Cide is equivalent to Señor, derived from the Arabic sayyid, meaning "sir." Hamete comes from Hamid, a popular Arab name. Benengeli, or berenjena in Spanish, means "eater of eggplant," a vegetable associated with the diets of both Moriscos and Conversos, Spanish Jews who were likewise forced to convert. The narrator is further delighted to learn the manuscript is entitled History of Don Quixote of La Mancha, a purportedly historical account of the very book the narrator has been, thus far in the novel, describing to the reader.
Paying for the manuscript with a half-reale coin, the narrator then retires with the interpreter to the cathedral cloister and has him translate more. Ultimately, he hires the Morisco to spend the next month and a half under his roof, translating "the entire history, just as it is related here."
So from this point on, the primary narrator of one of Western literature's seminal masterpieces—a work the late literary critic Harold Bloom identified as the world's "first modern novel"—is in fact an Arab chronicler. While a figment of Cervantes' imagination, Cide Hamete Benengeli is equally the product of Spanish literary, political and cultural history. He is also not the only character with Muslim roots to appear in the novel. Throughout Don Quixote, Cervantes makes frequent references to Islamic culture, the Arabic language, and the longstanding relations that existed among Spain's various ethno-religious groups.
"The point Cervantes is making with the Morisco interpreter is that there are still people running around Toledo who know Arabic or Hebrew, and so he is pushing back against the idea that Spain has somehow become a purely Catholic country that doesn't bear traces of its long history of the presence of Jews and Muslims on the peninsula," Barbara Fuchs, professor of Spanish and English at UCLA, told me before I left for Spain. Controversially, Cervantes also took issue with the fate of the Moriscos, whose exile from the Iberian Peninsula in the early 17th century ended 900 years of convivencia, or coexistence. Yes, Don Quixote is a famously funny novel, Fuchs acknowledged. But it is also, in her opinion, "a very subversive book."
Published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote was written during a turbulent era of deeply divided loyalties. After the Nasrid emirate of Granada, the Iberian peninsula's last Islamic kingdom, fell in 1492 to Spain's King Ferdinand ii and Queen Isabella i, Muslims were initially promised they could continue their way of life "para siempre jamás," ("forever and ever"). But following local uprisings provoked by forced conversions and public burnings of the Qur'an, the Crown reneged.
Calamitously and practically overnight, Islam, Muslim dress, the Arabic language and even Arab names were outlawed. Muslims faced baptism as Christians, or exile. Many acquiesced to the former. They became "New Christians" and were labelled Moriscos, a pejorative indicating not only a former Muslim identity, but also inferior social status. Others defied the edict to varying degrees, outwardly professing conversion while covertly practicing Islam. These "crypto-Muslims" became a leading target of the church's Holy Office of the Inquisition, established under Ferdinand and Isabella. A second Morisco rebellion, from the Alpujarras mountains, in 1568 was brutally crushed and, in its aftermath, some 80,000 Moriscos were forcibly relocated north, mainly to the provinces of La Mancha, New Castile and Extremadura.
"The official way of thinking was that Moriscos were traitors and that they were hiding their religion and culture from the authorities," says Fernando Luis Fontes Blanco, director of Toledo's Museo de Santa Cruz. "On the other hand, there was a lot of tolerance of the Moriscos, especially in La Mancha, where many Morisco families were able to integrate into society."
At the same time, Spain was jockeying for New World dominance against a host of Old World colonialist rivals including England, France and The Netherlands, while waging war on European soil against all three. To the east, Spain faced Ottoman encroachment and hostility, especially to its maritime trade interests in the Mediterranean. The Crown's fears of collusion (not entirely unfounded) among the Ottomans, European Protestants and aggrieved Moriscos meant the latter became an even greater target of suspicion and bigotry. This gave Spanish Christian nativists opportunities to spread rumors that all Moriscos not only imperilled national security but also threatened to overwhelm Spain's Cristiano Viejo (Old Christian) majority and contaminate what they believed to be its purely Spanish-Christian limpieza de sangre (purity of blood).
Between 1609 and 1614, over the objections of landowners who had come to rely on Morisco labor and even The Holy See, which regarded Moriscos as Christian souls, the Crown rounded up and deported some 300,000 Moriscos. The Crown further decreed that children under 7 years of age should be separated from their families at the deportation centers and handed over to Cristiano Viejo families throughout Spain to be raised as domestic servants and Christians.
Like the times he lived in, Cervantes' own relationship with Islam, Moriscos, and the idea of limpieza de sangre was complicated. He was born in 1547 in the university town of Alcalá des Henares in Castile, about 35 kilometers northeast of Madrid. He achieved fame, though not necessarily fortune, as a freelance writer, poet and playwright. Freelance writing being what it is and always has been, he supplemented his income with stints as a farmer, accountant, bureaucrat, and tax collector, most of which proved dead ends. If there was one endeavor at which he excelled, aside from writing, it was doing time in jail.
In 1575, after fighting the Ottomans in the Mediterranean crippled his left arm, Cervantes was captured by Barbary pirates. He endured five years in prison in Algeria, where he was beaten, tortured, and, after numerous unsuccessful attempts at escape, eventually ransomed and released. Yet in Algiers he also experienced another layer of multiethnic, multicultural existence, one in which Muslims, Jews and Christians were more or less coexisting—in contrast to what was happening back home in Spain.
"During his years in captivity … [Cervantes] had the opportunity to get to know first-hand the life and customs of the Ottomans, of the Moors, of the Jews, of the renegades (and) of the Christian prisoners," observed the University of Navarra's Celsa Carmen García Valdés in her 2005 article, "Life and Literature: Tolerance in Cervantes' Work."
Back in Spain, Cervantes was jailed for embezzlement, a relatively understandable offense since skimming off the top was often the only way a collector of royal taxes could get paid. In between jail and work, he wandered: Rome, Madrid, Valladolid, and Esquivias in Castile-La Mancha, where he lived on his wife's family farm with Moriscos as neighbors. He also spent time in Seville, where, in addition to working as a purchasing agent for the Armada, it is also said he began to write Don Quixote—in jail.
A plaque on the bank where the Royal Jail in Seville once stood commemorates the spot as the birthplace "for the amazement and delight of the world of the ingenious nobleman Don Quijote de La Mancha." Opposite lurked the more menacing local prison run by the Inquisition. Upon his release, the story goes, Cervantes walked through the alley separating the two jails, holding in his hand the first draft of his most famous work.
Gracious palm trees now shade a nearby bust of the author clutching a manuscript on which is inscribed the novel's memorable opening line, "En un lugar de La Mancha" ("Somewhere in La Mancha"). I gave the statue a respectful nod on my way to meet with the University of Seville's professor of Arab and Islamic Studies, Rafael Valencia, one of Spain's most eminent scholars of al-Andalus. (Tragically, Valencia suffered a fatal heart attack just four months later.) We sat in a cafe sheathed in vibrant azulejo tiles, boisterous testaments to the city's historic fame as a pottery and ceramics center. Traditionally produced by Moriscos just across the Guadalquivir River in Triana, a busy commercial neighborhood, the tiles harken back to the multiculturalism of al-Andalus.
"An important thing to understand is that Cervantes and Don Quixote were living among two worlds. On the one hand, Don Quixote is the most Christian, the most Spanish figure in Spanish literature, but he is also the most open to the Moors, to the Arabs," says Valencia.
Cervantes, like his characters, may have occupied two worlds himself. Scholars speculate that he was perhaps of Converso ancestry. Even though he was a devoted Catholic, the Cervantes name was among those discovered in an official 15th-century document listing families with Converso bloodlines. His grandfather's work in the cloth industry and his father's profession as a barber and surgeon put them among trades dominated first by Jews and subsequently by Conversos. This background may have stymied Cervantes' career, at least in the civil service, where ancestry carried political clout. Thus, his obsession with limpieza de sangre and the challenges and frustrations of what it is to live outside looking in—be it as a Converso, a Morisco or a silly old man who thinks he is a knight in armor—became important subtexts of Don Quixote.
"When the Moriscos were expelled by Philip iii, Cervantes had to take the official position that they needed to be expelled. He never publicly objected to the edict. But secretly, he felt sorrow and sympathy for them," says museum director Fontes Blanco.
When viewed from this angle, the dualities running throughout Don Quixote—where windmills are giants, country inns are castles and barber's basins are magic helmets—shift from comic effects to social commentaries. Like the Moriscos, crypto-Muslims or any of those whose pedigrees were iffy, Cervantes, on a personal level, was aware of what it was to inhabit multiple worlds in an era dominated by a monolithic and orthodox Hispano-Christian ruling class that called all the shots. And what's more, he decided to push back.
"What is original, what is the genius of Don Quixote, is that it wasn't a work devised to protect the prerogatives of those in power. It was written to appeal to the maximum number of people and offers a positive, sympathetic view of those on the margins of society," said Cervantes scholar Jose Manuel Lucia Megias, professor of philology at the Complutense University of Madrid.
In Part Two of the novel, Cervantes dedicates Chapter 54 to Moriscos, a chapter he composed even as the convulsive deportations were still taking place. Ricote, a wealthy Morisco and former neighbor of Don Quixote's companion Sancho Panza, has been expelled from the country, but he returns in disguise to retrieve some buried treasure he was forced to leave behind in Spain. (Again, Cervantes is playing with the names and language: Ricote translates as "rich man.") Ricote is noticed by Sancho, who embraces him and expresses concern for his safety. "[I]f they catch and recognize you, it will go hard with you," Sancho warns his old friend. Later, Ricote tearfully recounts the injustice of the expulsions.
"You know very well, O Sancho Panza, my neighbor and friend, how the proclamation and edict of His Majesty issued against those of my race brought terror and fear to all of us," Ricote says. Yet despite the harshness of the edict, he concludes: "No matter where we are, we weep for Spain, for, after all, we were born here, and it is our native country."
As he speaks, Ricote gives voice to the hundreds of thousands of Moriscos who were similarly banished from what they considered to be their ancestral homes, an injustice Cervantes went out of his way to call out.
"Ricote is not necessary to the plot of the story, but Cervantes put him in there because he wanted to address the positive aspects of Moriscos, who have an important presence in the novel," said Megias.
But with the Inquisition looking over the shoulders of writers during his era, Cervantes had to choose his words carefully to portray Moriscos in any positive light, often relying on double entendre and subtle, inside jokes.
When introducing us in Chapter 1 to the character of Alonso Quijana, the aging hidalgo whose immersion in too many "books of chivalry" delude him into believing he is a knight—Don Quixote de La Mancha—Cervantes catalogs the old fellow's humble diet: hash most nights, the occasional stew, lentils on Fridays, and, on Saturdays, duelos y quebrantos.
This last phrase has posed particular challenges to translators. Literally, it means "trials and sorrows" or "trials and wounds," of which Don Quixote certainly had his share. But it has also been variously interpreted as "scraps," "tripe and trouble," and "eggs and abstinence." This last translation references Saturday Christian semi-fasts in Spain that commemorate the Spanish defeat of the Muslim Almohads at the Battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212, which marked the beginning of the Christian Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule.
Yet, as scholars believe Cervantes was keenly aware, among Moriscos and Conversos, duelos y quebrantos, in the sense of "trials and sorrows," was also a euphemism for bacon (or ham) and eggs. This staple fare among Christians in La Mancha was used as a way to force Moriscos and Conversos to prove the sincerity of their conversions by eating the dish in public—or face the Inquisition.
Such issues were on the mind of chef Paco Morales in 2016 when he opened the Noor restaurant in Córdoba. Offering diners modern interpretations of historic Andalusian dishes, the ingredients on Morales' carefully curated menu all date to an age when what you ate (recall Cide Hamete's cultural identification as an "eggplant eater") pinpointed who and what you were.
"Food was an important part of culture and a way to manifest religious beliefs," Morales said as I sampled delicate eggplant fritters with cane honey, sautéed spinach and sheep-milk cheese with basil, and an emulsion of pistachio, smoked herring roe and green apple. While it all tasted heavenly now, it was the "devil's food" to the Inquisition owing to its historically Muslim associations.
"For example, we have on the menu a dish called caldillo de perro that in English means 'dog gravy.' This sauce, made with whiting and bitter orange, got this name because it was eaten by Muslims who the Christians called 'dogs,'" Morales said.
Moriscos indeed had to publicly endure duelos y quebrantos of many kinds. When the Morisco translator in Toledo's Alcaná randomly opens the pages of the manuscript by "Cide Hamete" and begins to translate for the first-person narrator, he is amused at a notation in the margin about one Dulcinea of Toboso. This is the high-society lady whom Don Quixote, in his distracted mind, has fabricated from the true object of his affection, a peasant woman named Aldonza Loronzo.
"This Dulcinea of Toboso … they say has the best hand for salting pork of any woman in all of La Mancha," the Morisco reads aloud with a chuckle. The inside joke here is that Dulcinea/Aldonza is actually a Morisca whose reputation at curing ham was her way of deflecting suspicion away from her Muslim ancestry.
Toboso was one of the many towns in Castile-La Mancha where significant numbers of relocated Moriscos settled in the wake of the 1568 rebellion. Once a busy commercial crossroads, today it is a sedate, agricultural town surrounded by livestock and vineyards. Dulcinea may have been based on the real-life Doña Ana Martínez Zarco de Morales, whose stately, 16th-century farmhouse is now the Dulcinea del Toboso House Museum, where Fontes Blanco also serves as director.
On a tour through the meticulously restored villa, filled to its exposed wooden ceiling beams with authentic 17th-century furniture, he guided me to the estrado on the second floor, where ladies of the era would have gathered to talk, read, sew, and simply pass time sitting on a broad, raised platform strewn with pillows and Oriental rugs. It all still looks very Arab.
"It was a very important part of the house," Fontes Blanco said. "Even as late as the 18th century in Spain, women sat in the Muslim fashion on carpets and cushions on the floor."
Other references to Morisco and Arab culture throughout the novel are less subtle. "Blessed be almighty Allah," Benengeli declares three times at the opening of Part Two, Chapter 8. At a time when Arabic was a forbidden tongue, toward the end of Part Two, Chapter 67, Don Quixote offers Sancho a linguistics lesson in various "Moorish" words "that begin with al" common to the Castilian vernacular. In Part Two's Chapter 26, Don Quixote interrupts a puppet show based on the medieval Spanish ballad "The Romance of Don Gaiferos," about a knight who storms Sanseuña (Zaragosa) to rescue his kidnapped bride-to-be. When the boy narrating the show declares the city was "flooded with the sound" of bells ringing in alarm "from all the towers of the mosques," Don Quixote interjects, "the Moors do not use bells but drums and a kind of flute" to raise alarms. Aware that no minaret has a bell, he adds that "ringing bells in Sanseuña is a great piece of nonsense."
Don Quixote also enables Cervantes to probe contemporary, often paradoxical attitudes toward Islam, Islamic culture and Moriscos. Idealized stories and ballads of noble, knightly "Moors" and their ladies from the medieval past—a genre collectively known as romancero morisco—were widely popular during Cervantes' time, "even as Moriscos were increasingly persecuted," Fuchs pointed out. Cervantes' genius was to cash in on the familiarity of that genre while modernizing it and, along the way, demonstrating how fluid identities could be.
In Part One, Chapter 37, Cervantes introduces what is known to scholars as "The Captive's Tale." Perhaps the most autobiographical section of the novel, it tells the story of the fictional Ruy Pérez de Viedma, a Christian soldier who escapes an Ottoman prison in Algiers and returns to Spain with Zoraida, the daughter of "a wealthy Moor named Agi Morato." Agi Morato was based on Cervantes' own experience with the real-life Haci Murad, a renegade Dalmatian Christian who rose to power through service to the Ottoman sultans in Algiers and who was instrumental in saving Cervantes' life. Murad's real daughter Zahara never eloped with a Christian captive—let alone Cervantes himself—but she did marry Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik, who was none other than sultan of Morocco.
Cervantes writes that Viedma, wearing a "short blue woollen tunic … breeches of blue linen … ankle boots the color of dates and a Moorish scimitar" strapped across his chest—enters a tavern with Zoraida, who is similarly dressed in Muslim attire, "her face hidden by a veil." He speaks to her in Arabic, but she knows enough Spanish to declare that now that she is on Spanish soil, she wishes to be addressed as "Maria." When questioned by the innkeeper's wife if she is Muslim or Christian, Viedma responds that she is a "Moor in her dress and body" but in her soul desires to become a Christian, and has delayed her baptism because she has not yet been properly instructed in "all the ceremonies" required for the service.
Here Cervantes jabs at the hypocrisy of both church and state: When Muslims were forced to convert, many were simply rounded up and baptized in churches (many of which were formerly mosques) with little or no theological instruction in the Christian faith. Under such circumstances, conversion rings hollow. Furthermore, if society can find a place for "the exotic Zoraida," as Fuchs observed, "whatever her ethnic and cultural differences," then it can surely find room for the far more proximate Moriscos who were at the time being herded onto ships and deported.
This episode is one of many throughout the novel that emphasize why dialogue, said Megias, is a key to understanding Cervantes and his most famous characters, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. They are figures from different classes and backgrounds, one educated, one not; one practical-minded, one not so much, who nonetheless find common ground by journeying together and, most importantly, listening to one another.
"Don Quixote is a minor noble who reads books. Sancho Panza is a laborer who has never read a book in his life, and whose understanding of the world comes from street smarts," said Megias.
But as the novel progresses, they are each transformed. As they travel through the Spanish countryside, Sancho learns from Don Quixote just as if he were reading a book, and Don Quixote learns from Sancho what he would never find in his library.
What Cervantes is telling us, in an unintentionally modern way, said Megias, is that "change happens when we are willing to listen to and can accept and look positively upon someone who is different from you. And that's why people of other cultures and other times have been able to read and identify with this book."
The author gives special thanks to Duane Alexander Miller for research and translation and to Ana Carreño Leyva for logistical support.
Nasi goreng (fried rice) features in both Malaysian and Indonesian cuisine. It has an interesting blend of tastes and textures. In the Far East, the dish generally includes a dried shrimp paste, called blachan in Malaysia and terasi in Indonesia, but this recipe substitutes bean curd/tofu. Some recipes have an omelet added. This is cooked first, then cut into strips and added to the dish at the end.
Cook the rice in boiling water for 10–15 minutes, and then drain.
While the rice is cooking, season the beaten eggs. Heat some oil in a frying pan and, when hot, pour in the eggs and swirl round to make an omelet. Cook for a few minutes until golden and then tip it out onto a plate. Roll it up, leave to cool and then slice into strips.
Now heat some more oil and sauté the shallots, scallions / spring onions and ginger for 1–2 minutes. Then add the carrot, cabbage and sultanas and continue to stir-fry for 3 minutes until tender.
Next, put in the cooked rice and bean curd / tofu and toss with the vegetables. Combine the soy sauce, sesame oil and curry paste or chili sauce. Pour this over the ingredients and mix well. Adjust the flavorings to taste.
Arrange the omelet strips and cucumber slices on top and scatter the cilantro / coriander over before serving.
Reprinted with permission from
One World Vegetarian Cookbook
Troth Wells 2011, Interlink Books, 978-1-56656-834-0, $35 hb, www.interlinkbooks.com.
Troth Wells is an Oxford-based food writer and author of cookbooks including also The Spices of Life (2001), Global Vegetarian Cooking (2010) and Small Planet, Small Plates: Earth-Friendly Vegetarian Recipes (2012), all published by Interlink Books.]]>
Everything is different this year.
Including my father Waleed's birthday. He works in Oman and comes home to Bahrain every weekend. As expected, his routine changed this year. When travel was banned he was stuck in Oman. But when a plane was set to travel back to Bahrain, he was on it. Under the rules implemented by the government of Bahrain, any person who flew into the country needed to quarantine for two weeks. A few days after his return, April 12 was his birthday.
This picture shows him inside his room at our family home. My mother, who is carrying the cake, and my brother and grandmother and I surprised him. We accepted that the family reunion was without hugs and kisses, but it is enough that he is with us now.
To me, this picture depicts love and a family bond. It's an image that one day I might show to my kids when I tell them about 2020, and maybe they will understand through this picture that no matter what circumstances the world takes you through, a family bond stays strong.
—Khalid Alabbas
The bones of my kin were found in jars some 4,300 years old buried in a temple at Qal'at al-Bahrain. I invite you to recall my noble role as Mucalinda, Buddha's half-human, half-cobra Naga. Do not forget I am the rainbowed Aidophedo of the Ashanti of West Africa, the many-headed Shesha of Hinduism and the cosmic Quetzalcoatl of Meso-america, and that for centuries I gazed from the brows of the pharaohs as the sacred serpent-goddess Uraeus of Egypt. I was the wise Wadjet of the Nile Delta and the silent Meretseger, guardian of the dead at Thebes. I was the good serpent Mehen who fought off the evil Apophis every night when the sun god Ra sailed through the dangers of dark. I attended dear Isis and, so the Egyptians have said, fathered Alexander the Great. And still, I crawl accused of killing Egypt's last great queen, Cleopatra vii.
As if it could not be worse, you cultivate this calumny early in the lives of your whelps. Toy Cleopatras come accessorized with plastic asps as do most Cleopatra Halloween costumes. Video games cast me in the vile role of venomous assassin of a voluptuous queen; misguided marketers launch ad campaigns for "Just Bitten" cosmetics featuring a stand-in Cleopatra with lips its wearers will "die for." More dangerous are your cigarettes, sold in art deco boxes embellished with a bust of Cleopatra, who clutches me with more than a touch of defiance. At the risk of seeming a pompous asp, I call out all these hucksters for their slanders against my kind.
Your high culture, alas, is no better than your consumer culture. Canvases depicting poor Cleopatra's demise, with me as the obvious villain, clutter your museums. Painters Andrea Solari and Peter Paul Rubens showed me long and writhing; Guido Reni and Giovanni Lanfranco painted me wormishly tiny. Claude Vignon and Augustin Hirschvogel gave me the head of a dragon, and Benedetto Gennariand Giovanni Francesco Barbieri brushed on red to show blood dripping from my fangs. But this is not the real me.
This staged demise of Cleopatra and her handmaidens is part of a larger plot to ruin me. Even Shakespeare's stage directions stated for Antony and Cleopatra that Cleopatra "applies an asp," as if I were some inanimate apparatus. I find these stage directions as demeaning as the dialog that calls me a "poor venomous fool."
You see, I, the Egyptian asp, Naja haje, am the victim of overwrought imaginations. I did not kill Cleopatra. Not in Shakespeare's way or any other.
Let's examine the facts. Her Highness ruled Ptolemaic Egypt at a time when the Romans were just beginning to take over the eastern Mediterranean world. The mighty queen began as a humble pawn in this inexorable game of Roman imperialism, and civil war and forced her to take sides, first with Julius Caesar and then with his general Marc Antony. She even married Antony to secure the preservation of Egypt, if not as an independent nation, then at least as an equal partner. You may not realize how close she came to success. But in a single battle all was lost. Caesar's adopted son Octavian, who would become later immortalized as Emperor Augustus, prevailed at the Battle of Actium in the Ionian Sea in 31 bce against the combined forces of Antony and Cleopatra, spelling the end of both the Hellenistic period and Ptolemaic Egypt. Upon losing, Antony committed suicide, whereas Cleopatra was captured and held as a prisoner of war by Octavian's forces in Alexandria. It is somewhere in this part of their story I usually make my entrance.
According to the Greek geographer Strabo, who may have been in Egypt at the time, the queen killed herself secretly while in Octavian's custody. Strabo reports that two versions of her suicide were circulated: one, that she suffered at my fangs, while the other claimed she poisoned herself. Strabo himself made no choice between these two theories. Then a few Latin poets, unhindered by facts, scribbled some lines on the subject. They all preferred the more sensational asp story, of course. Patriotic and well-paid by Octavian, these Romans maligned Cleopatra too, calling her regina meretrix, harlot queen, and dedecus Aegypti, shame of Egypt.
In the second century ce, the Greek writer Plutarch penned a detailed rendition of Cleopatra's last days. Plutarch states that he consulted the published memoirs of Olympus, Cleopatra's personal physician. Now this sounds promising, until you realize that this doctor was permitted to live—and write—only because he served Octavian. This is the testimony of a tainted witness who claimed that after the death of Antony, Cleopatra became as unhinged as a serpent's jaw. As her captor, Octavian allegedly did everything in his power to keep the queen, whom Plutarch insists grew demented, from hurting herself. When she tried to starve herself, Octavian could find no other remedy than to threaten her children. This was powerful leverage: Cleopatra had a son with Julius Caesar and three younger kids with Antony.
Plutarch relates that these threats convinced Cleopatra to cooperate. A few days later, Octavian paid her a visit. He found her sickly, unkempt, and still a bit wild-eyed. Yet despite her condition, she hoped to sway Octavian with her beauty and charm. This naturally failed with a man as incorruptible as Octavian (I would wink here if I had an eyelid), so Cleopatra caved and claimed that everything was Antony's fault. When Octavian countered her excuses, she next tried pity, prayers and promises. In the end she managed only to convince Octavian she wished to live. This made it easier to arrange her own death, having suddenly forgotten the threats against her children.
Octavian had no suspicions when Cleopatra asked whether she and her female attendants might offer a sacrifice at Antony's tomb. Clutching the ash-urn of her beloved Antony (other sources say he was embalmed), Cleopatra supposedly confided to his cinders her trepidation at becoming a trophy in Octavian's triumphal parade. She could not bear the humiliation of marching in chains through the streets of Rome. Here, at last, Plutarch gives us a motive for her suicide, thanks to a supposed confession heard by no one who lived to reveal it.
Next, we need means and opportunity. The crafty Cleopatra bathed, dined and then sent Octavian a suicide note while awaiting delivery of a little basket of figs for dessert. This request for room service provided the opportunity to smuggle past her derelict guards the means of her crime—me. Plutarch declares that Octavian's sentinels checked the basket and did not notice me inside. Now look at me and pay heed to my sinuous swaying swagger and large, unblinking black eyes. We asps average a meter and a half in length. Our heads are large and our snouts broad. Not see me in a snack basket? Yet there I reportedly lay undetected, curled tightly at the bottom, waiting patiently to wipe out three adult women in a locked room? Does that make sense to anyone?
I could not have done it. Though large, we Naja haje do not store enough neurotoxin to kill three of you upright mammals in quick succession. Death could take hours, yet Cleopatra had only minutes before her suicide note brought Octavian running to the scene. Furthermore, Plutarch admits that no trace of me was ever found inside the sealed room—there were no smoking gums. The suggestion that I somehow crawled out a window and escaped along the beach toward the sea is ludicrous.
Even crazier are the specific reports of what Cleopatra said and did inside that closed room, where the only witnesses died with her. Who could have known that I was ever there, that the queen spoke to me before I bit her arm or that she had to provoke me with a golden spindle before I would lunge at her? No woman intent on suicide would entrust her death to me. I could bring nothing to the occasion but a hundred possible misadventures. And for what? She was already a deity; I could do nothing to render her more so.
No matter, my accusers could not push my writhing image out of their minds. When Octavian paraded an effigy of the queen in his triumphal parade, the crowds fixated on a copy of me clinging to her body. Onlookers assumed this to be an official reenactment of her demise, but it may simply have been an Isis snake bracelet. No wonder, after spinning this gossamer of lies Plutarch confesses, "Nobody really knows what happened." He adds that a concealed poison may have actually done the deed.
A gossipy contemporary of his, a writer named Suetonius, introduced the bizarre anecdote of the Psylli (pronounced, appropriately, like your word "silly"). These were a North African Berber tribe of professional venom suckers who could be summoned to save snakebite victims. Though it was considered heroic work, the job training was brutal. Only men who as children had survived being tossed into a snake pit could take up this trade, so there never were many of them around. Suetonius says Octavian deployed the Psylli in a vain effort to revive Cleopatra.
A century later the Roman Cassius Dio embellished the story even more. He describes with increasing detail the queen's efforts to seduce the ostensibly virtuous Octavian, who knew better than to look directly at his alluring captive. According to Cassius Dio, she shamelessly tried everything: provocative clothing, sweet looks, a lilting voice, some tender weeping and even old love letters from Caesar, Octavian's adoptive father.
Spurned and fearing the ignominy of his triumphal parade, Dio's Cleopatra plotted suicide as Octavian posted guards and a Psylli rescue squad to stop her. Now think about that. Having these venom-suckers on standby would mean that Octavian antici- pated not only me, but also my getting past his guards, who were therefore on alert for a smuggled snake. Since I alone could not have quickly killed all three women inside the chamber, several of us would have needed to slip past Rome's equivalent of the Keystone Kops—coming and going. Yet Dio casually admits that no one could really know what happened to Cleopatra.
The medical writer Galen mentions the possibility that Cleopatra bit her own arm and then smeared the wound with smuggled venom. This way, I get blamed even in absentia for her death by self-fangulation. Galen must have liked the idea that Cleopatra never actually handled me, for he suggests that if I were there on the scene, I would have been a spitting cobra. What an imagination! The good doctor also claims to know that Cleopatra had her hair and nails done by two attendants, both of whom I spit to death before turning my wads on the queen.
One murder rap apparently deserves another and another. In the 10th century ce, the Baghdad-based historian al-Mas'udi expanded my killing spree beyond Cleopatra and her female servants. At least he didn't mutilate her character like the Romans. As with many scholars of the medieval Arab world, he does sing her praises, calling her a "princess versed in the sciences, given to the study of philosophy … [having] composed on medicine, charms and the particulars of other natural sciences." But al-Mas'udi cruelly paints me as a merciless savage, even claiming I murdered Octavian as well. That's an especially interesting fantasy, a bit of alternative facts in which the familiar Western obsession with Octavian's triumph and empire-building is cut short by yours truly. For you see, al-Mas'udi alleges me to be a rare two-headed serpent from Hijaz (in western Saudi Arabia) that could spring so fast and so far that my victims never knew they had been bitten. So, after instantly dispatching the women in Cleopatra's chamber, I hid among the ornamental plants until Octavian entered the room. My stealthy attack paralyzed his right side, giving him just enough time to dictate a Latin poem before his demise. The Romans always get the last word.
Well, not always. One of your poets, Ahmad Shawqi of Egypt, is one of the few who ever came to the queen's defense. In 1927 he turned the tables—better late than never—charging the Romans of recording history "in a fictive style, in which the Caesars of Rome got all the glory … while the poor Egyptian queen, Cleopatra … got nothing but a heap of accusation, sins and curses."
Here's what I think really happened. Start from the fact: In August 30 bce Cleopatra died in the custody of Octavian, her enemy. I would not be surprised if he executed her and clumsily covered up the crime as a suicide-by-asp. Octavian controlled every source of information about Cleopatra's fate. He shaped his official version with loyal assistance. He had no fear of contradiction or correction. All the Psylli stories about his efforts to save the psychotic queen masked his true intentions—he wanted her dead. Why? Quite simply because Ptolemaic queens were a dangerous commodity and very difficult to be rid of safely. She—the mistress of his father, the wife of his enemy and the mother of his last rival—must never tell her side of the story or be given the chance to charm a world that might be prone to forgiveness. Octavian's alleged urge to display the captive Cleopatra in his parade was a ruse; he wanted no such thing. Just a few years earlier, Julius Caesar had held such an event in Rome. The spectacle, as anticipated, delighted the crowds—until they saw a Ptolemaic queen marching in chains among the prisoners. That was Arsinoe iv, Cleopatra's half-sister, and the Romans reacted so vehemently against her humiliation that she had to be released to placate public sentiment. Could Octavian risk a similar outcome with Cleopatra? He had made his fortune fighting to save his world from her, and it would be devastating to his ambitions if she appeared in Rome as anything less than the evil, crazy, seductive monster of his propaganda. Letting her live was an indulgence he could not afford.
But killing Cleopatra had to be carefully arranged. Octavian had ample opportunity, means and motive to eliminate the queen of Egypt before she could arouse anyone's sympathy. To launder his image, he had to sully hers. His plot achieved its purpose so well that even now, thousands of years later, your visions of Cleopatra—your stereotypes as you call them—voluptuous, vain, promiscuous, treacherous, manipulative, excessive and need I go on—were fostered by Octavian to advance history. His victory rested upon her villainy in the court of public opinion.
That is the same court that has been convicting me of murder over two millennia. Only a few experts, mostly new ones over the past decades, have come to my defense, declaring my innocence with almost unhuman fairness and reason. Still, not many of them are willing to point an accusing finger at Octavian as I would do if I had one. Murder is a hard charge to prove when a suspect owns or eliminates all the evidence. So be it. Believe what you want about Cleopatra's last moments. Just leave the hiss out of history. Like you, I have my suspicions. And like you, I wasn't there.
He was 18, he says, and three months after arriving to take English classes at Notre Dame of Maryland University in Baltimore, he was already nearly broke. The few thousand dollars he had brought with him was going fast. His student visa didn't allow him to work, and his family was not in a position to help.
"I had no idea where I was going to sleep," says Azamovich, who prefers to use his middle name. Now 30, he is cofounder and ceo of the fast-rising online housing service 4stay, which specializes in furnished room and apartment rentals on flexible terms, especially for students and educational institutions in the us and, increasingly, beyond.
Azamovich, however, had grown up amid adversity. He was 2 years old in 1991, the year Tajikistan achieved its independence as the Soviet Union was dissolving. This was followed by a seven-year civil war, during which Tajikistan's economy collapsed. After the war, his father, an engineer, and his mother, a seamstress, worked hard and invested in a popular local furniture business. It was enough to send Azamovich to a private school in Khujand, but not enough to help him pay the rents in Washington, dc, one of the most expensive cities in the country. Yet he credits his parents' resilience during their crises with fueling his own resolve.
Soon he found a way to sell toys and Christmas ornaments at a nearby mall. Then he worked at a pizza shop for minimum wage. He worked on his English, and he cut his expenses by transferring to Northern Virginia Community College (nova). He struggled to make ends meet and pursue his studies for three years.
One evening during Ramadan in August 2010, Azamovich attended a neighborhood iftar, or fast-breaking dinner. Also attending was nova Vice President Paul McVeigh, who told Azamovich he was looking to hire recruiters to bring more students to the college from Central Asia. Would Azamovich be interested in drafting a proposal for the job?
Azamovich invited a friend from high school who had also come to nova, Faridun Nazarov, to collaborate. McVeigh took them on, and they soon began helping prospective students from not only Tajikistan but also Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan come to the college.
He earned enough to rent a two-bedroom apartment. There, he realized that with the landlord's approval, he could sublease the extra room. This he says was the idea that ultimately led to 4stay: a furnished room he could rent out with no separate deposit, no separate utilities—no surprise costs, and only for the time needed.
Azamovich and Nazarov began connecting the students they were recruiting with furnished rooms for rent, and they soon founded stp (Studying The Planet) Housing Solutions. Word spread, and they also began helping students from Africa, Europe and other parts of Asia come to schools in 15 states. They were finally making enough money to cover more than their own rents.
"We tried to rent out empty spaces using Airbnb. I also used Craigslist and business-to-business partnerships, targeting students and scholars and filling that gap for medium and long-term housing," he says.
He earned his associate degree in business from nova in 2012 and transferred to Strayer University for a bachelor's degree in economics with a minor in information technology. He graduated in 2015.
Stp, too, was finished.
"It couldn't be sustained," he says, mostly due to the lack of flexibility in the lease terms of its rentals.
"I failed four times," he says. "However, all those mistakes became an asset for me, as experience."
In 2017 Azamovich put up $150,000 of his own cash to launch 4stay.com as a flexible-terms online marketplace designed to connect students to furnished apartments or rooms in multifamily settings, family homes or apartments, all on terms that avoided upfront security deposits while providing renters' insurance and utilities.
Today, 4stay boasts more than 200,000 listings, 80 percent in the us. The company has relationships with more than 400 mostly educational institutions, including 260 colleges and universities. Among 4stay's corporate backers is Plug and Play, which has also invested in Dropbox and PayPal. His revenue scheme is a simple 10 percent fee per transaction.
This year, when covid-19 hit and sank reservations on major hotel and private accommodation sites such as Booking.com and Airbnb, 4stay has remained above water thanks to its focus on medium- and long-term accommodations.
"We are literally left with almost no competition," says Azamovich.
Other online businesses that serve a similar population, such as Off Campus Partners and MyRentHero, are doing reasonably well also. Azamovich credits 4stay's flexible, one-stop approach as key to its growing edge in the industry, but also calls attention to the company's core commitments "to take care of students," and now to connect and pair them with "older generations unable to pay for the constantly increasing costs of living alone."
At present, 4stay has fewer than 20 employees, most of whom work from home, and last year the company clocked $26 million in booking requests. It has also raised more than $1.7 million from angel investors. Its recent partnerships include New York's Columbia University, the Kaplan International chain of language schools and StudyPA, which runs on- and off-campus housing for state universities throughout Pennsylvania.
Syedur Rahman, nova's current vice president who manages the international student program formerly headed by McVeigh, describes Azamovich as a "young but very enterprising young man" who helped nova expand its program quickly and efficiently.
"We take a lot of underserved and underrepresented students and make them aspire to dream big," Rahman says. "Akobir was one of those students. He took the initiative and expanded it into a major operation."
In addition to life as a busy, young ceo these days, Azamovich has worked with the American Eurasion Congress—a nonprofit he helped establish—to provide medical supplies, food relief and education to people in need in Tajikistan through MoBoVatanem (We Stand with our Motherland), administered through the Embassy of Tajikistan in Washington, dc. It's from these good deeds, as his late father once advised him, that the "blessing of others will flourish you, like the water flourishes a flower."
The Potomac River can still remind Azamovich of the Syr Darya and of one of his earliest dreams, "to serve humanity through technology." It took, he says, "perseverance and desire—qualities you get from your parents." With that, he reminds himself and others to "follow your heart and prove to yourself that you can accomplish your goals while doing what you like."]]>
I didn't grow up with biryani, and for those who have, the only real biryani is the one made in his or her own city, neighborhood or, more likely, family kitchen. Biryani's power lies not only in its wildly diverse, complex flavors that make first-timers wonder what they have been missing all their lives, but also in its connection to place, perhaps even more so in an era when so many of us live far from where we grew up.
Case in point: Bilal Lakhani, a columnist for Pakistan's Express Tribune, grew up in Karachi, on the coast, and he went to business school at age 18 in Lahore, in the northeast. He recalls how at the time he and his Karachi buddies were really missing biryani. Having little money, they thought they would find a wedding to crash because weddings, he says, is where you can always find biryani. Pretending, as needed, to be friends of one family or the other, they staked out a wedding and got in the food line.
"Our daring plan was a disaster," Lakhani recalls. "The biryani didn't have aloo (potatoes)! How can you have biryani without aloo? That's an abomination."
He speaks like a poet of the savory spices that infuse aloo in a good biryani, yet in other places—such as Lahore—the very presence of aloo is, well, anti-biryani. The feelings run deep.
A common biryani origin story begins in the early 1600s with Mumtaz Mahal, wife of Mughal emperor Shahab-ud-din Muhammad Khurram, better known as Shah Jahan. While visiting soldiers at their barracks and seeing them underfed, the story goes, she ordered the cooks to prepare a dish of rice and meat, which they prepared over a wood fire with aromatic spices. "Soldiers had to have their stomachs filled to have the energy to fight," says Chef Raman Khanna, who learned to cook biryani in the 1980s at the Oberoi Hotel in New Delhi alongside the Oberoi family's personal chef, Baba Lul. The way the legends go, he says, "at night, military cooks would prepare a big pot of meat and rice and bury it and place coals on top. The next day, the soldiers who survived would come back and dig out the pot and eat."
The general speculation about the dish's origins among chefs and food historians includes a belief that Ottoman allies of the Mughals brought pilaf (rice with meat and other ingredients) to the subcontinent, where chefs infused it with local spices and experimented with its method of cooking. Others maintain that a more sophisticated version of the soldiers' cooking was already popular with the the Mughals themselves when they came from Persia to what is now Afghanistan and that the spice trade that so enriched India's ports also gave birth to biryani's flavors. From the imperial palace to the estates of local landowners, those who could afford it employed cooks who refined and even personalized the dish with combinations of saffron, cardamom, rosewater and a host of other spices and aromatics.
"That's why there is always this feeling of something royal in eating biryani," says Khanna.
Two fundamental cooking methods for biryani emerged from the palaces of two regions of India.
The first is Kucchi biryani, which is considered Hyderabad-style, he explains. Here, raw meat is marinated for hours, placed in a dum (pot), "layered with rice in varying degrees of doneness" and then steamed.
"The flavors rise and impregnate the rice," says Kripal Amanna, host of the YouTube show, Food Lovers TV.
The second is Pukki biryani, which is considered Lucknow-style. "Meat and spices are cooked separately until almost done, then layered with rice that is almost cooked, then placed on the dum."
In both, the biryani is made with equal parts meat and rice, and in the case of potato biryani, 25 percent meat and 25 percent potato, according to Lakhani's mother, Najma Rafiq. Traditionally, the top of the dum is lined with dough before ingredients are placed inside, and then the biryani takes a half hour to an hour to cook, depending on the size of the pot and biryani type, she says.
Khanna adds that regional biryani chefs may top the pots with coal, wood embers, charcoal or coconut husk, creating additional flavors specific to each region.
"The beauty of this in the Nizam and Nawab Palaces was that when the biryani was ready, the dough was lifted off and the whole dining room was filled with the aroma of the spices. That revelation is what made it into a signature item of India," Khanna says.
In Lucknow, some versions cook the rice in milk, says Amanna, which makes it "subtler in their flavor notes."
"The Hyderabad biryani is a brash, grab-your-palate biryani, whereas the Lucknow biryani is shy and more demure. You have to make more of an effort to know it," Amanna says, explaining also how the Lucknow versions include essences like pandan extract that enhance aroma. "They are like a lady splashing on some perfume, as opposed to that robust Hyderabad biryani with its aggressive onion, garlic and ginger, which let the other spices play second fiddle."
The variations of these two methods have expanded across the subcontinent. Amanna has filmed 25 shows that revolve around biryani, but that's not nearly enough, he says.
"Biryani travels every 100 kilometers that you travel. I could easily do 200 episodes on biryani across India and not repeat a particular style," he says.
He finds the best way to encounter new biryani culinary styles is when he's traveling by motorcycle.
"You have to take a break every 100 or 150 kilometers. So, you stop and take in the sights and the aromas. You smell some rice and you follow it," he says, pointing out how this method has allowed him to access hundreds of biryani establishments and recipe variations.
Amanna favors family-owned restaurants that have been making biryani for decades, if not more than a century, including the Rahamaniya Briyani Hotel in Ambur in the state of Tamil Nadu, which adds homemade curd to the meat and spices. He also highlights the Shivaji Military Hotel in Bangalore, where every day about 200-300 kilograms of meat are turned into donner (boat) biryani, which is served in a banana leaf basket that softens to flavor the dish.
Long before the motorcycle, there were ships, and that is how spices came to the Indian subcontinent, often via Arab traders. Pakistani cookbook author Sumayya Usmani spent much of her childhood on the ship her father captained, and her first memory of biryani is her mother stirring together the ingredients in an electric frying pan in the boat's galley kitchen. Traveling by sea, Usmani's mother took short cuts with the dish to preserve the limited number of ingredients that could survive the long journeys. Preparing biryani at sea also offered opportunities to add squid, mussels and prawns. Seafood variations often include a green masala of mint, coriander and chilis.
"When I think of making it or even eating it, the fundamental thing about biryani is that it speaks to love, time, patience," Usmani tells me. "That is why it is such a celebratory dish."
Usmani now lives in Scotland, where she teaches others to make biryani, including her 11-year-old daughter. Her own mother, Usmani says, taught her to use only basmati rice aged one to two years, because it fluffs, separates and tastes better.
"My mother has drilled this in my head. Unless your rice, after cooking, isn't as long as one segment of your finger, it's not worth cooking," she says, laughing.
Khanna, too, agrees the best biryani cooking class is in a family kitchen.
"Indian chefs do not like to share their recipes," Khanna says, remembering his early cheffing days at the Oberoi Hotel working for chef Lul. "I had to peel up to 60 kilos of onions every day and pound pastes until my knuckles actually bled in order to get his trust."
Khanna says the two most important things he learned from Lul were to grind the spices the day they're used and to wash the rice several times, whether short- or long-grained, so that every single grain will stay separated when cooked.
Meat also varies by region. Goat—often called mutton in India—is the most traditional for biryani, but lamb and chicken are also used. In India's south, in the state of Kerala, beef biryani is also a specialty. Kerala's biryani was also much influenced by centuries of trade with the Arabian Gulf.
I asked Khanna, who has catered biryanis for royal weddings and vip events in the uae for a decade, including cooking the dish in the middle of the desert for 2,500 people during the first World Cup of Horse Racing, why so many people in the Gulf think of biriyani as a local dish.
"The spices and rice came to India through the Arabian trade routes, and we brought them back as biryani," he says, noting that many chefs throughout the Arabian Peninsula hail from Kerala.
The dish continues to vary through time and across regions depending on environment, culture and availability (or lack) of ingredients. With some 30 percent of India eating vegetarian diets—and the popularity of meatless recipes in restaurants worldwide—meatless biryani is increasingly acceptable to biryani purists. But it comes with challenges: Vegetables, Ammana says, struggle to survive the heat of the dum. There are solutions though, like frying the vegetables first or adding them in at the end.
"The beautiful thing about biryani is that everyone can stake claim to it," he says. "Biryani is one of the very few dishes in which people across the world can say, 'This is our biryani.' Everyone can make it their own."
With land made spectacularly productive by the Mississippi River on one side and the Ohio River on the other, one can understand how the southern tip of the state of Illinois came to be known as "Little Egypt." In 1818 a charter for incorporation was secured for the town sprouting up where those great arteries of the North American continent joined.
Unlike the Nile, which flooded annually, the Mississippi and Ohio, arriving settlers learned, flooded capriciously and often catastrophically. One of the first major building projects was a system of levees that surrounded the ambitious, water-bound city dubbed "The Gateway to the South." Cairo's strategic location came to aid the Union during the us Civil War, when in 1861 General Ulysses S. Grant directed construction of Fort Defiance on the west side of the town, near the precise point where the rivers met. From there in 1862, he staged the attack downriver on Vicksburg, Mississippi, which helped put the Union on its long path to victory.
After the Civil War, Cairo aspired to rival St. Louis as a commercial and transport hub along the Mississippi. In 1868 more than 3,500 boats tied up along its docks. Steam huffed trains across the rivers on bridges built in 1889 and 1905. The city supported a burgeoning class of landowners and speculators as well as merchants, entrepreneurs and laborers who worked the land and the river. The post-Civil War years were boom years, and the population grew also from the northward migrations of formerly enslaved individuals and families seeking opportunity outside the defeated Confederacy. By the turn of the 20th century Cairo had a population of 12,566, of which approximately 5,000 were African American. (The indigenous Potawatomi had been forced to move west of the Mississippi following the Indian Removal Act of 1830.)
In 1910 Cairo was designated as the seat of Alexander County, and its 14,548 inhabitants, according to the census that year, would never be exceeded in later years. An electric trolley plied the main street, Commercial Street, lined with department stores, hotels, auction houses, furniture showrooms, restaurants and taverns, drug stores, specialty shops and entertainment venues including the state-of-the-art, 600-seat Gem Theater. Many of these were depicted in a cornucopia of dozens of picture postcards. Even us President William Howard Taft paid a visit to Cairo on October 26, 1909.
Two weeks later an event took place that stalled the rise of Cairo's fortunes and sent them into the tailspin from which the city has yet, to this day, to recover. On November 11 an angry crowd of white residents, estimated at 10,000, gathered downtown as William James, a Black resident accused (wrongfully, it was shown later) of killing a white woman, was publicly lynched. Although not the first racially motivated murder in the city, its exposure of festering racism, segregation and political corruption began 110 years of economic and social decline. A century later the census in 2010 counted only 2,831 residents.
But Cairo may yet have another chapter to write. This year the state of Illinois approved the first significant investment in the town in decades: a $40 million grant aimed at reviving Cairo as a 21st-century riverport.
"We strive to always see the positive side of situations and work toward betterment of our small but solid community," says Monica Smith, director of Cairo's historic Safford Library, which was inaugurated in 1884.
According to newspaper accounts of the time, it was the postmaster who in 1835 chose Cairo from the two names presented to him by the us Post Office for the new settlement in Georgia. It was incorporated as a town in 1870 and as a city in 1906, at which time it was also named seat of the newly formed Grady County, named after Henry W. Grady, the prominent editor of the Atlanta Constitution and a respected orator.
Located on the edge of the coastal plain, just north of where the state of Georgia meets the Florida Panhandle, this region has been home to Native American tribes including those collectively known as Creeks as well as early traders, settlers and both free and enslaved laborers.
It is a land abundant with small streams, and its European settlers found that its long growing season and rich soil could produce diverse fruits and vegetables including beans, peanuts, pecans and cucumbers that were affectionately named "Cairo Beauties." Wheat, rye, sorghum and oats grew well. Sugarcane thrived and in 1862, a Cairo farmer named Seaborn Anderson Roddenbery began producing the first cane-based syrup in America. It became a town industry, and to this day the high school sports teams are known as The Syrupmakers.
During the Civil War, the town was not much harmed and, at the turn of the 20th century, counted 1,505 residents. Small in population but long enough on pride to put out postcards, Cairo's images touted its agriculture and pastoral landscapes as well as its county-seat role that underpinned an increasingly diverse economy that also included fishing and forestry.
In 2019 the us Postal Service stepped again into the town's story when it issued a centennial commemorative stamp in honor of the birth, on January 31, 1919, of the town's best-known son, Jack "Jackie" Roosevelt Robinson, who in 1947 made us sports history as the first Black athlete to play major league baseball in the modern era.
Still considered rural 150 years after its birth, Cairo today boasts an active public library, a history museum, and a restored movie theater that claims to be Georgia's oldest. With 9,607 people counted in the 2010 census, it is the largest Cairo in the us. It is increasingly tied to Tallahassee, the capital of Florida 50 kilometers to the south.
With a population of around 300 today, Cairo, West Virginia, perches amid the gentle hills along the North Fork of the Hughes River. It's a region that was inhabited by Iroquois and Shawnee peoples until the 17th century, when diseases came in advance of settlers, and conflict with other tribes and settlers followed. The town's formal history began in 1856, when it became a railroad station along the B&O (Baltimore and Ohio) Railroad line. Its first settlers, all Scotch Presbyterians, gave it the name, having found the river ample and the soil good.Just a few years later, oil and gas were discovered below the topsoil, and postcards from the late 19th and early 20th centuries show Cairo speckled with the towers of wooden oil rigs. The town was incorporated in 1895, during the height of the West Virginia oil boom, which supported the town's two banks, two hotels and two oil and gas companies. There was also a post office, a planing mill, feed stores and sundry other concerns including an opera house that cost $1,500 to build. Not bad for a town that at its peak in 1910 counted a population of just 668.
The oil boom faded with World War i and the development of more productive and accessible wells. A world war later, a new industry came to Cairo: marbles. The local sand, it turned out, was ideal for glassmaking, and the natural gas to melt it was similarly plentiful. In 1946 Oris G. Hanlon built the Cairo Novelty Company, which produced distinctively colorful glass marbles known as West Virginia Swirls, among them a popular brand called Cairo Christmas. Just four years later though, a flood destroyed the factory, and today, marble collectors still come to scour the site in hopes of finding overlooked, original marbles. Likewise, a steady stream of hikers, cyclists and horse riders frequent the tranquil town while trekking the winding, scenic, 116-kilometer North Bend Rail Trail.
Iroquois and Esopus peoples once fished in the streams, hunted in the forested hills and farmed in what, shortly after the American Revolution ended in 1783, became a new home for some 200 New Englanders moving westward in quest of opportunities. Around this time, the Susquehanna Turnpike opened along the Catskill mountains on the west side of the Hudson River, presaging today's tollways by charging for the movement of goods and people headed to and from upstate and western New York. The settlement that in 1808 became the first Cairo in the newly independent United States of America quickly profited from this prime location by offering the travelers hospitality and a variety of roadside services.
Local history maintains that it was businessman Ashbel Stanley who christened it Cairo in honor of its Egyptian namesake and in hopes the name would conjure beneficial associations. The population grew steadily over the 19th century amid an economy based on small family businesses in town and farms set amid the richly arable land of stream-fed valleys. In 1910, 1,841 heads were counted in the census; a century later there were 6,670, and projections for 2030 estimate there could be 9,000.
At about 200 kilometers due north from Times Square in New York City, Cairo's rolling Catskill and Hudson Valley scenery proved a tonic to those city dwellers who could afford a getaway to the country and summer fun and entertainment with family and friends. Looking to supplement the income derived from agriculture, farmers began to accommodate boarders. This proved profitable, and it set off a boom in residents converting homes into boarding houses. Some gave up farming altogether to turn their land into full-fledged resorts. The peak of the town's leisure economy came in the 1920s and 1930s, as reflected by the many idyllic postcards depicting scenic environs. Today, the town of Cairo sports five major resorts along with a host of small bed-and-breakfasts and vacation homes that lure 21st-century travelers with farm-to-table menus, personal hiking guides, forest yoga and—always for free—fresh, clean air.
In 1872 six men left Kentucky and joined the wave of settlers heading west to claim land on the plains of Nebraska. Pawnee tribes, pressured from the north by rival tribes and from the east by the settlers, had recently ceded eastern Nebraska and, increasingly destitute, were beginning to migrate south to reservations in Kansas. It was in this former Pawnee heartland, west of Omaha and not far from the new Grand Island and Wyoming Central Railroad line, the men from Kentucky found their land. Others came, too, and in 1886, town historians say a railroad survey engineer peered across the vast prairie and remarked that to him it looked like the Sahara, "so why not call it Cairo, only he pronounced it Karo, and that's how it is known today," notes the town's centennial history, Cairo Community Heritage 1886-1986.
By 1900 Cairo had a population of 200, a school, a general store, two churches, two banks, a brick factory, a flour mill, a lumber yard, an ice plant, a saloon, stables, a confectionary, a modest opera house and a sprinkler wagon to water down the dirt streets when they got dusty. Which was often: One visitor noted that when it was incorporated as a village in 1892, Cairo was referred to as "an oasis in the bosom of the Great American Desert."It was, the village history records, "a lady at the Lincoln Land Company" who built on the Egyptian name by labeling the original map with street names Egypt, Mecca, Medina, Nile, Suez, Thebes, Nubia and Said as well as Syria, Oasis, Harb and Berber. In the early 20th century, Cairo was flourishing enough to publish a modest handful of picture postcards. In 1910 the population had risen to 364. After World War ii it topped 500, and today stands just under 800.
To this day, it is the only Cairo in the us that continues to play on its namesake. It still proclaims itself "The Oasis of the Prairie," and it welcomes traffic with a roadside silhouette of a pyramid and a nearly life-size metal sculpture of a camel, which stand alongside a baseball diamond and, beyond it, fields of corn, wheat and alfalfa.
The railroad tracks that prompted Cairo's founding, owned now by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe line, clatter day and night with freight trains up to 200 boxcars long, ferrying coal, oil, lumber and, on Sunday mornings, aircraft fuselages. But no passenger trains stop in Cairo anymore.
While studying for a diploma in tourism, Diego crisscrossed the entire province of Almería, in Andalusia, Spain, and as a result, there is very little he doesn't know about local specialties. This dish combines delicious textural contrast with subtle, sweet Moorish flavors. You need to complete the final stage just minutes before eating. Add whipped cream as an extra hit of sweet.
Reprinted with permission from Andaluz: A Food Journey through Southern Spain,
Fiona Dunlop , 2018, Interlink Books, 978-1-62371-999-9, $35 hb, www.interlinkbooks.com.
Fiona Dunlop is a food and travel writer, blogger and photographer. She has globetrotted for decades from successive home bases in Paris and London while regularly retreating to her house amid the olive groves of Andalusia. After writing widely on travel, art and design, her passion for food led her to create her first cookbook, New Tapas (2002), followed by The North African Kitchen (2008) and Mexican Modern (2013). Her articles have appeared in the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, CNN.com and numerous magazines. She is the author of National Geographic's guides to Spain and Portugal, and she has worked as a guest lecturer on their expeditions as well as on other tours.
I have many memories of road trips where the possibility of stopping for a casual photo was impossible. I've passed by landscapes, seascapes, storefronts, bazaars, people and events where I didn't have the time to capture images. But this day, now 20 years ago, I didn't let that happen. Writer Lou Werner and I were traveling through Hombori after completing our story for AramcoWorld on elephant conservation, on our way to our next assignment to the north in Gao, Mali. This meant buses, bush taxis and, this afternoon, hitchhiking. The mountain in the background of the photo is named The Hand of Fatima, and it served as the most beautiful backdrop for this part of our trip. Lou kept one eye on our baggage and another alert for our next ride, while I took about 10 minutes to wander into this open landscape. I wanted to make sure I photographed this place, where camels, goats and donkeys are shepherded by the Tuareg residents of the area. Minutes later we packed into a car with a man and his two sons, and thanks to him, we arrived in Gao by dusk.
—Kevin Bubriski
Up on the roof of Masjid Abu Ghuweileh, Yousef al-Shayeb looks around and smiles, gesturing to an array of solar panels tilted south toward the sun. The masjid, or mosque, is located in Tlaa al-Ali, a thriving district in northwestern Amman, Jordan, where he heads the building's management committee.
"This was stage one—44 panels. Over there was stage two—64 panels. Now we are all set—for the next 20 years at least," al-Shayeb says, mentioning the pride he feels for leading the project to install the solar panels. "I served the military, and now I serve the community, this house of God and everyone in this neighborhood."
An electrical engineer by trade, al-Shayeb spent 22 years with the Royal Jordanian Air Force before retiring in 1990 as a brigadier general. Then he transferred his professional and technical expertise to his community in Tlaa al-Ali.
Masjid Abu Ghuweileh is not a large building. A recent extension allows up to 650 worshipers for the Friday midday congregational prayer, though average attendance is fewer. The mosque is a mainstay of the neighborhood, says al-Shayeb, who moved to the area in 1986; even then it was a cornerstone of community life.
Until a few years ago, the mosque's monthly electricity bill ran upward of 1,000 Jordanian dinars (about us $1,400). Today, thanks to solar panels on the roof, the bill is zero, al-Shayeb says.
The upgrade forms part of a Jordanian government initiative to retrofit mosques across the country with solar photovoltaic (pv) panels. These convert sunlight—abundant hereabouts—into electricity. The initiative is administered through the Jordan Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Fund (jreeef), established in 2012 as an office of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources.
The project at Masjid Abu Ghuweileh is among a number of "green mosque" schemes in Jordan and elsewhere around the world intended to help meet conservation and climate challenges at a grassroots level.
"Electricity and energy consumption is a very big issue in Jordan," says Lina al-Mobaideen, an engineer who heads project development at jreeef. "The heaviest worries are about how we can reduce demand, and so reduce the overall energy bill. This led the government to [formulate policy] encouraging individuals to reduce their consumption."
Al-Mobaideen highlights a partnership established in 2016 between jreeef and Jordan's Ministry of Awqaf (religious endowments) to focus on places of worship as nodes of influence within every community.
"Energy consumption at mosques is very high," she says. Islam's five daily prayer times—at dawn, midday, afternoon, sunset and evening—mean that worshipers tend to flow in and out of mosques all day long. Lighting, as well as equipment for cooling in summer and heating in winter, often stays on throughout.
"The mosque is the most appropriate place to encourage people to change their behaviour and introduce them to renewable energy," al-Mobaideen adds.
In 2017 jreeef began launching tenders, area by area, to install solar pv systems in many mosques throughout the nation. By 2019 about 500 mosques were running on solar power, with the intention of extending the project to most of Jordan's 6,500 mosques (the smallest have energy usage so low that conversion is often uneconomic) as well as Jordan's smaller number of churches. Parallel schemes have been launched in educational institutions.
"It's an awareness tool," says Samer Zaway-deh, an independent consultant on renewable energy in Jordan and long-time educator for the Association of Energy Engineers, a us-based nonprofit organization that coordinates training for the sector worldwide. "Mosques and schools are places where people visit a lot. If people see solar pv, ask what it is, and learn more, then maybe they will choose it for their home or office."
The project works through direct grants from the Jordanian government. Each mosque submits a proposal for a solar pv system, with size and capacity based on the building's electricity consumption over the previous 12 months. Contractors, who are all Jordanian, then source components on the open market. One-quarter of the cost is covered by jreeef and one-quarter by the Ministry of Awqaf, which disburses the grant. The remainder must be paid by the mosque community, usually by donations from members.
"People are continuously donating," says al-Shayeb. "The community already paid 300,000 dinars to renovate and extend this building. Then we gave priority to solar panels, because we were paying such high bills every month. People started donating right away."
The Abu Ghuweileh mosque was one of the first in Jordan to install solar panels, as early as 2013. By 2018 the two-stage installation was complete. Total outlay came to around 35,000 dinars, of which the government paid about 7,000—a lower-than-usual amount because the mosque began its conversion independently.
Al-Shayeb calculates that with shifts in the energy market and other economic considerations the community will recoup its investment in about a year and a half, while Zawaydeh estimates a payback period of between two and three years for solar pv systems of this type. But that's still a remarkably attractive proposition and it shows that prices have fallen substantially, even in the last few years. A 2014 study in Kuwait to convert all of that country's 1,400 mosques to solar power suggested a payback period as long as 13 years.
"Solar makes a big difference," Zawaydeh says. "It's a fantastic opportunity [and the benefits] can be realized fairly quickly. It makes financial sense."
The switch to solar power for mosques in Jordan is running alongside programs to reduce water use—the Islamic requirement for ablution before each of the five daily prayers can create heavy demand—and replace incandescent lighting with led bulbs, which use much less energy and last much longer.
Such concerns are rooted in budgetary prudence but can be corroborated in religion—a vital connection the government is making to encourage mosque communities.
"One of the things Islam teaches is not to overspend or exceed our consumption," says al-Mobaideen. She points to verses in the Qur'an, including Sura vii:31, which is interpreted in English as, "But waste not by excess, for God loveth not the wasters," and Sura xxv:67, which names the righteous as "Those who, when they spend, are not extravagant … but hold a just (balance) between those (extremes)."
"Conservation in spending and consumption—that's what we use to bring awareness to people," she adds. "It is both a financial and a religious imperative."
This reflects the difficulty governments around the world have often faced in delivering either clear messaging or effective policy on the obvious long-term benefits of conserving energy and expanding use of renewable resources. Jordan's approach demonstrates a holistic way forward, with environmental concern and religious direction anchored in, but secondary to, the main point: economic benefit.
Al-Mobaideen emphasizes that energy conservation is spurring debate at the supranational level within the League of Arab States, where committees exchange best-practice knowledge among countries. She identifies Morocco as the Arab world's leader in renewable energy.
"Morocco already has the legislative framework, the institutional framework and action plans. [It has] implemented many large projects," al-Mobaideen says.
In 2016 Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs launched a project to install solar pv, led lighting and solar water heaters in the country's 15,000 government-funded mosques, with technical support from the German international Gesellschaft fur Züsammenarbeit (giz). Government grants cover up to 70 percent of initial costs, and as part of the scheme, imams and other clerics are being trained in issues around renewable energy and sustainable technology in order to pass the message to their congregations and communities.
"What we want to do is inform people," Said Mouline, director of Morocco's National Agency for the Development of Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency, told cnn in 2016. "Energy efficiency is not only a matter of technology, it's also a matter of behavior."
In 2016 Marrakesh's 12th-century Jami'a al-Kutubiyah became one of the first in Morocco to be fitted with pv, owing to its status as a symbol of the city. Its solar panels are hidden out of sight on the roof, while a digital display set up on the street outside reminds passers-by how much energy has been generated and the associated reduction in carbon emissions.
In the capital, Rabat, the large Masjid Assounna has cut its energy bill by more than 80 percent, saving around 70,000 Moroccan dirhams (about us $7,000) a year. The scheme has now reached Masjid Hassan ii in Casablanca, the largest mosque on the African continent, with capacity of more than 100,000 worshipers. Renovations there, under way throughout 2020, will introduce pv among a range of other measures, reducing the building's energy consumption by more than half as part of a national transformation. That program aims to improve energy efficiencies across the Moroccan economy and create 150,000 jobs over the next decade.
Similar projects are sprouting across the Islamic world. Analysis in 2019 of a pv test system installed at a large mosque in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, calculated an annual energy bill reduction of more than half. The authors of the study, led by Amro M. Elshurafa of the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center, wrote: "If some prior planning were incorporated in the early stages of the mosque's construction, pv can bring down the electricity bill to zero." Other studies are commencing on pv for mosques in Libya and Malaysia. Tunisia and Egypt are both investing heavily in solar power.
Indonesia, the country with the world's largest Muslim population, is also on board. In 2011 the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (mui), or the Indonesian Council of Scholars, the country's top Muslim clerical body, launched the ecoMasjid initiative. This places Indonesia's 800,000 mosques at the center of a national public-education effort spotlighting the environment.
"It started with the understanding that environmental degradation is not technical or technological, but a moral issue," says Hayu Prabowo, who heads mui's environment unit in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. "The government approached us to complement their approach to the public. We are closer to the people because of how people congregate daily at mosques—and Islam is very rich in teaching on environmental issues."
Hayu, who devised and oversees the ecoMasjid program, lists the criteria by which mui assesses each mosque, from the appropriateness of the site and energy efficiency, to recycling, education and effective management. He sees mosques as nothing less than a vector for empowerment.
"Empowerment is not only about economics," he says. "It's about safeguarding people's health and livelihood. It's a very complex issue. We cannot manage it alone, but neither can government. It's about translating the language of environmental activism into more practical aspects of people's lives."
Of Indonesia's 50 or so participating mosques, the flagship is Masjid Az-Zikra. Built in 2010 in Sentul, around 45 kilometers outside Jakarta, Az-Zikra became ecoMasjid's national pilot project in 2014.
Driving south from Jakarta into the province of West Java, the highway climbs toward Bogor in the shadow of the Mount Salak volcano, nicknamed "Rain City" for its damp climate and high humidity. Amid foliage of cassava, bamboo and banana, the white domes and minarets of Az-Zikra rise above an organized grid of suburban streets under tropical thunderclouds.
The mosque stands as the centerpiece of a planned neighborhood that is home to around 150 Muslim families, founded by the late cleric Muhammad Arifin Ilham. He was formerly the mosque's figurehead and noted across Indonesia for his tv sermons until his passing last year at age 49.
"We want to lead by example, not by talk," says Khotib Kholil, who heads Az-Zikra's management. "Besides coming here to learn about religion, we would like people to come to learn about the environment."
Khotib emphasises Az-Zikra's close working relationships with universities, technical institutes and agricultural colleges in and around Jakarta, which provide expertise on energy conservation and sustainability. One national priority is improving sanitation and water management.
Khotib identifies 10 large tanks at Az-Zikra, which hold around 50,000 liters of rainwater channeled from the mosque's roofs. All the building's water, sourced from wells and the rainwater tanks, is recycled three times—diverted on the fourth cycle to the surrounding gardens—and he explains how a simple adjustment to faucets has reduced the mosque's water usage for ablutions before prayer from 14 liters per person to four.
A biogas tank buried under the courtyard generates cooking fuel from human waste, but the mosque is still spending more than 30 million Indonesian rupiah ($2,000) a month on electricity and gas. The next step, says Khotib, is pv.
On Fridays Az-Zikra hosts around a thousand worshipers at midday prayers, though for special events that number may increase 10 times or more.
"This is seen as the most complete eco mosque," says Az-Zikra's secretary, Arief Wahya Hartono. "It's something we are very proud of, even if most people still don't understand what it means."
Back in Jakarta, Greenpeace campaigner Atha Rasyadi faces challenges from plastics in the oceans to chronically congested roads. But getting across the message of environmental conservation is, he says, perhaps the biggest of all.
"We want mosques to be talking about environmental issues. They have strong influence over their people and we want to make use of that," he says, describing how Greenpeace Indonesia is building strategic alliances with Muslim civil-society organizations.
Hening Parlan, environment coordinator for Aisyiyah, Indonesia's largest women's ngo, speaks even more plainly.
"There are more than 250 million people in Indonesia, and over 80 percent of them are Muslim," she says. "If we are not educating Muslims about the environment, we are achieving nothing. ecoMasjid is the key to making [knowledge of] climate change mainstream."
The efforts to move toward an eco-friendly congregational environment are starting to bear fruit. Arifin helped give Az-Zikra a nationwide profile. Addressing issues around wildlife conservation, forest preservation and energy efficiency, mui is partnering with Indonesia's Ministry of Environment and Forestry on training courses for mosque leaders across the country, beginning in Aceh and Riau on Sumatra island, West Kalimantan on Borneo island and Lombok. And at Jakarta's Istiqlal Mosque, the largest mosque in Southeast Asia, which can hold as many as 200,000 worshipers, new pv is expected to halve the current 200 million rupiah (about us $13,000) monthly electricity bill. In another green initiative, a water-treatment plant channels wastewater to a new, highly visible fountain and public park around the mosque flanking the Ciliwung River.
The next step is to move beyond retrofitting wastewater recycling or solar pv in existing mosques to including such technologies at the start of building projects.
That's an idea that has come to life in Tadmamet, a small village in the High Atlas Mountains in southern Morocco where the only public building is the newly built mosque. Its construction has been carried out almost entirely by the villagers themselves, with support from a government initiative to include solar and other green upgrades in the architectural plans. In addition to cavity walls that optimize insulation and small windows that keep interiors cool, the mosque has a preinstalled pv system, led lights and a solar water heater. It now doubles as a schoolroom for the village children, and it even feeds surplus energy back into the local electrical grid to power new streetlights.
Tadmamet is now a leading small-scale example, says Rachid Naanani of Cluster emc, a Moroccan nonprofit promoting energy efficiency in construction materials. "Beyond energy efficiency, [Tadmamet] aims to show that we can offer a mosque model which is self-sufficient in terms of energy supply," Naanani says.
One of the larger such examples opened last year in Cambridge, England, where the Central Mosque marks the first purpose-built eco mosque in Europe. Constructed mostly from sustainably sourced Scandinavian spruce, it is one of the only buildings in the world to use cross-laminated timber on a scale more commonly achieved using steel. Its forest of 16 arcing, tree-like columns create an interlaced vault over the main prayer hall—designed for 1,000 worshipers—that is reminiscent of Gothic fan-vaulting designs used in English medieval church architecture. During the day, skylights above each column suffuse the space with natural light; after dark, energy-efficient leds take over.
Those columns support a roof that is sowed with sedum, a flowering perennial, which introduces biodiversity and improves insulation. Even under moody English skies, the mosque's rooftop pv array generates enough electricity to cover around a third of the building's energy needs. Storage tanks harvest rainwater and gray water from ablutions for reuse in bathrooms and gardens. Bird boxes encourage local swifts to nest.
"We wanted to add beehives too," muses Tim Winter, the mosque's chair of trustees. "The East London Mosque produces its own honey from hives on the roof, but we didn't have enough space up here."
In addition, a heat pump exploits temperature differentials between outside air and the interior to keep the building comfortable, eliminating the need for more costly air conditioning. Insulation ensures that warmth from underfloor heating is conserved in winter, and in summer, rising hot air is vented passively through ceiling louvers. The parking area, tucked underground beneath the building, offers charge points for electric vehicles and racks for up to 300 bicycles.
On a balcony above the prayer hall, Winter, who is also dean of the Cambridge Muslim College and known as Abdal Hakim Murad, speaks passionately about a building that is both beautiful and significant.
"We are showing that religion is part of the solution to the big problems of the world," he says. The mosque "is making an important spiritual and humane statement that religion is here to counter waste, to encourage us to give thanks for the blessings of creation, to enable us to think collectively rather than selfishly about the problems that face us."
That is a statement that, more and more, is resonating globally. In Riverside, California, activist Nana Firman heads the Green Masjid program sponsored by the Islamic Society of North America (isna), which is taking the message of conservation and energy efficiency into mosques across the us and Canada. One participating mosque, the All Dulles Area Muslim Society near Washington, D.C., recently reduced its energy consumption by one-fifth as part of a community campaign that included recycling and tree-planting.
Firman has also worked on environmental initiatives at mosques in Indonesia, where she was born and grew up, in collaboration with Parlan of Aisyiyah. This year Firman and isna coordinated a Green Ramadan initiative during the holy month of fasting, which concluded in May, highlighting Islamic environmental teachings and encouraging congregations to conserve resources.
Other nations, too, are following. In 2014 and 2015, the British government funded its own Green Mosques project, supporting Muslim communities in London. In Toronto, Canada, a sustainability project dubbed "Khaleafa"—blending the Islamic principal of stewardship (khalifa) with the environmental symbol of a leaf"—spearheads an awareness called "Green Khutbah" (khutbah means sermon). Many more mosque-based ecoprojects continue to launch, from India to Tanzania, too many to list.
"The Qur'an is a book about nature," says Winter. "It challenges us to look around to see the order of nature; that's the basis of Muslim theology. Integration into the natural world is the essence of the Qur'anic summons to humanity."
One striking note shared by the messages generated around energy-efficiency schemes—whether in Jordan, Morocco, Indonesia, or the global South more generally—is positivity. The focus is squarely on saving money and improving community life in both practical and spiritual ways.
That can often contrast with how similar programs are promoted elsewhere. In many Western countries, conserving resources is still often seen as a technical issue linked to forecasts of global catastrophe.
Yet perhaps the path ahead can be as simple as these "green mosque" projects: Reduce consumption and invest in energy efficiency because it will save money and improve the quality of life for everyone.
For Jordanian energy consultant Samer Zawaydeh, it's obvious.
"I give training to 7-year-olds and 70-year-olds," he says. "The children know about climate change. Awareness in Jordan is growing. We understand the global issues, and we are doing our share, but here, the main reason for installing solar panels is economic.
"A very small amount is to do with social awareness and global climate change. People understand what other people are doing. If your neighbor [or] your mosque installs solar panels, you will ask yourself why—and the key reason is to get rid of the energy bill. During the past 10 or 15 years, energy costs in Jordan increased threefold. So solar is a move in the right direction."
The writer thanks Ihab Muhtaseb in Amman and Ahmad Pathoni in Jakarta for their help in preparation of this article.
"When we do this, we also cover our shoes, and when we leave the caves, we destroy everything we had on," Kayali says. "It all goes into biohazard bags."
It's an expedition that, as an epidemiologist, Kayali has carried out at least once a month until the covid-19 pandemic.
"Whenever you go sampling bats, you know you're going to come back with a positive sample," he says. "You can go into a bat cave and all the bats look healthy, but when you examine them in the lab, you find viruses."
Kayali, 44, is cofounder and chief executive of Human Link, a nongovernmental organization based in Lebanon and devoted to discovering the sources of viruses capable of spreading to humans.
Now, "in the coronavirus world," says Dr. William Karesh, an executive vice president of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, which has worked jointly with Kayali over the past four years, "Human Link is very highly respected, and at a regional scale, they're best in class."
Together the organizations assess the ongoing and future risks of spillover of infectious diseases, such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (mers), from animals to humans.
"We did anthropological studies to understand why some people are at more risk of catching disease than others. We tried to peel away the layers of the onion to understand what causes these diseases, and why not everyone gets sick," says Karesh, who calls Kayali an "ultimate professional" among a handful of world experts on both coronaviruses and influenzas. "His science is first-rate cutting edge," he adds. "People trust him."
Trust is, of course, a key element in worldwide efforts to encourage social distancing, wearing face masks and cooperating with contact tracers attempting to limit the spread of covid-19, he says.
Human Link is currently part of the global search for a covid-19 vaccine, a role similar to the one it played in 2012 when mers emerged in Saudi Arabia. Because Kayali is somewhat of a disease-expert celebrity, he is often invited to speak or appear on disease-related documentaries and news segments. Earlier this year he was featured in the Netflix docuseries, Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak, which aired mere months before covid-19 spread worldwide. In the film he spoke about measures virologists and epidemiologists had in place to combat the next global disease outbreak when—not if—such an event occurred. He was one of the many epidemiologists around the world predicting the imminence of a catastrophic pandemic. Kayali also appeared in a March segment of the abc program 20/20, examining global efforts to identify sources of covid-19.
Human Link's work has always been significant, Kayali says, but now its efforts to investigate and secure a vaccine are paramount.
Becoming an expert on infectious disease was not on Kayali's radar growing up. Lebanon's civil war erupted in 1975, the year he was born, and it made survival and "new normal" part of the daily conversation. It also stirred a feeling inside that he one day would serve his people, to help those who lost much, to leave the world a better place.
"My initial idea was to go into medicine, so when I was picking majors for my undergraduate degree, environmental health caught my attention," he says, remembering how he then felt a larger calling to serve large populations. "I started learning about public health, epidemiology and biostatistics, and then I thought that was a better way to go."
Kayali earned a master's degree in public health from the American University of Beirut, and he then served in the Lebanese army for several years. In 2008 he earned a doctorate in epidemiology from the University of Iowa, and he joined St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, which was receiving funding from the National Institutes of Health (nih) to research avian flu in the Middle East. At St. Jude, Kayali's mentor was infectious disease specialist Richard Webby, director of the World Health Organization's Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals.
"I came back from the States and set up a virology lab in Cairo with the Egyptian National Research Centre because at the time avian flu was a big thing," he recalls. "We studied how frequently h5n1 [avian flu] can jump from wild birds to poultry to humans. Then in 2012, when mers emerged in Saudi Arabia, we started working on that too."
Human Link also collaborated with a group of Dutch disease detectives who proved that archived camel serum had antibodies against mers. Kayali says the joint effort led to key findings and more trips into the field.
"We got the hint that camels might be involved and went out sampling. We were the first to show the virus in contemporary camels," he says.
The discovery allowed medical authorities to identify people exposed to camels as an at-risk population and go on to create targeted public health campaigns.
It was in 2014 that Kayali, along with longtime friend and colleague Jimi Goldstein, launched Human Link. Although its headquarters is in Beirut and it has a lab in nearby Zahle, most of its lab research is carried out in Egypt, where Kayali supervises 50 employees in the Cairo district of Dokki. In addition, Human Link also has done fieldwork in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Jordan, as well as Togo and Benin.
At present, the nih provides 95 percent of Human Link's funding through a research contract under the umbrella of the nih's Centers for Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance. The research also overlaps with the World Health Organization on efforts to develop pandemic preparedness for the Eastern Mediterranean.
"Conducting my line of work is very expensive. We're not only working with the virus, but with thousands of samples," says Kayali.
But Kayali and his team suspended field work in late January. On their last outing, they extracted virus samples from snakes, lizards and tortoises in the Cairo suburb of Giza.
"Right now, because of the restrictions, we're not going out to the fields," he says. "But as soon as the restrictions are lifted, we'll be hitting the field, because we have lost valuable time."
Justin Bahl, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Georgia, has worked with Kayali since 2015 on avian influenza viruses. Much of Bahl's work focused on Kayali's field research in Egypt, when Bahl was enrolled at the University of Texas. More recently, the two have been looking at how mers emerged and comparing findings to both sars and the current novel coronavirus.
"One reason our collaboration works so well is that Ghazi [Kayali] is trained as an epidemiologist, whereas with virologists, the science is very reductionist. So if you're a virologist working on influenza, you often work on one virus and one host," Bahl explains. Kayali, however, "is focused on how viruses transmit and persist within a population. Therefore, his strategies for surveillance and collection are really well-informed, with a solid study design."
Epidemiology fieldwork is not for the squeamish, Kayali says. Though bats rarely come into direct contact with humans, people are more likely to be exposed to the potentially lethal diseases they carry through remnants of urine and feces. And with fruit bats, like the ones Kayali researches, exposure to saliva on partially eaten fruits is another risk. The relationship among bats, viruses and the spread of disease, Kayali says, is "very intimate" and can begin in food markets.
"We've seen this happen multiple times before. People go into the field hunting for bats as food. In Africa as well, flying foxes are sold for meat in the markets. This is definitely how Ebola got started," he says, mentioning that while bats are not on the menu in the Middle East, they are in some areas of China, for example. The diseases they carry cause no problems for the bats, "but when you hunt for bats and you're exposed to their blood and carcasses, you're providing a chance for exposure."
All viruses that have caused trouble in modern times—Ebola, mers, h1n1 or Swine Influenza (siv)—he says, have already existed in wild animal reservoirs.
"Before h5n1, it was wild birds, and coronaviruses existed in bats. The virus jumps species occasionally, from bats to another animal reservoir," he adds.
Coronaviruses have already caused two major epidemics in the last two decades. In 2003, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (sars) infected 8,098 people and killed 774 around the world; in 2012, mers infected 2,506 people and 862 died.
"In sars-1, it jumped into civet cats, and in mers, camels. In covid, it jumped into some other animal, but we're not absolutely sure which," he says. "In the Middle East, and especially in the Arabian Peninsula, we have an intimate relationship with camels, which are treated more as prizes and pets. For covid-19, it would be something similar."
These experiences explain in part why, this time around, the Middle East appears to be somewhat better prepared, Kayali says. In Lebanon the covid-19 infection rate was relatively low, in part due to the government's swift closures of schools, restaurants and other public venues, according to the Arab Center Washington DC. In June Lebanon reported 1,495 cases of the virus and 32 deaths, according to Worldometer.
"Because they took people off the streets at an early stage and banned all gatherings, the virus didn't really have a chance to spread," says Kayali.
For now, Human Link's labs are working daily toward a vaccine for covid-19—as it did for mers—while looking at general immunity in the population.
"We're working with the Egyptian Ministry of Health," he says. "The initial steps start in labs like mine. You develop a vaccine, you test it in your lab animals, and if you see potential there, you produce a bigger batch and start human testing. Hopefully, we'll have some results in a couple of months."
Such mixtures of musical sounds can at times seem to infuse the very landscape in this village and throughout Kerala, reaching 600 kilometers up India's west coast nearly from the subcontinent's southern tip. Renowned for its coastal, beach atmosphere, plush greenery and abundant rivers, it is also one of India's most culturally and religiously diverse regions, resulting in communities where mosques, temples and churches can often appear on the same street. For anyone interested in vernacular musical traditions throughout the world, Kerala is sublime.
India as a whole is a symphony of sounds, and among the best known are those heard from the country's north: the plucking of a sitar, the rhythm of the two-part tabla drum and the hypnotic woodwind shehnai, all often played together. In Kerala, however, and particularly among the mostly Muslim villages along and around the 250 winding kilometers of the Bharatappuzha River, the music uniquely shares much with that of the Arabian Peninsula: Here it's a fusion of percussion, wind and string instruments in which tonal and vocal structures evoke moods and emotions in each transitional octave.
It was to this part of Kerala that Islam came in the seventh century, and the music of the region has since been one of traditional chants, both secular and sacred, reminiscent of the Arabian Peninsula, together with the hallmark percussion of classical Keralan music. The results are exciting even to the most novice of ears, an amalgamation of tones and improvised rhythms developed over centuries.
This musical tradition was made possible by the spice trade that serviced ports in what is now Oman, the uae, Saudi Arabia and more. Mariners largely followed coastal routes to traverse some 3,000 kilometers of the Arabian Sea, and some stayed on in the fertile deltas of Kerala, much of which was then known as Malabar. With them they brought music, religion, cuisine and other aspects of culture. Today Kerala is comprised of around 25 percent Muslims, 20 percent Christians and 55 percent Hindus. It's a diversity not seen in other states of India, where Hinduism remains dominant by larger margins.
Of the Muslims who do live in Kerala, however, most comprise the Mappila community, a name that means "the great child" or "son-in-law." Originally a respectful title given to foreign visitors, it came to be applied to members of the local population who became Muslims. As they maintained their ties with Arabia and points west through commerce, they evolved into a regional Muslim community known for its sophistication in trade. While Muslim communities exist throughout India, the Mappila remain prominent in Kerala, and most Muslims in the state identify as Mappilan. And like others in Kerala regardless of background, all speak the common South Indian language, Malayalam.
Mappila villages are mainly settled in the northern part of Kerala, many along the coast, where occupations in trade, farming and fishing endure. Because Kerala's landscape is so lush, it can feel a world apart from other faster-moving, more crowded parts of India. Here the land is forest green, dominated by coconut and areca nut palms, banana bushes and nut plants, especially the famed Kerala cashews. The "black gold" of the Piper nigrum vines—black pepper—did more than anything else growing here to inform the region's history, ever since Alexander the Great is said to have carried some back from India. In the 14th century, the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta described Kerala's coast as the "pepper country."
Vayali, a Kerala-based music and cultural preservation group, is now working to map distinct cultural expressions along Kerala's rivers, from their sources in the state's Western Ghats (hills) to the coast. Vayali's online resource shows cultural connections among communities, regions and even nations, with a particularly musical focus on the towns of Arangottukara, Ponnani, Tirurangadi and Kondotty—the latter three Mappila cultural centers.
Where the estuary of the river Bharatappuzha meets the Arabian Sea, Ponnani's dilapidated waterfront warehouses, well-worn fishing boats, and simple houses and sheds characterize one of Kerala's oldest ports. Town historian T. V. Abdurahimankutty says the importance of Ponnani grew with the rise of trade in local spices, most significantly pepper.
"With tiny wooden ships called dhows, the traders arrived in June and July and returned to their own places in December and January using the changed wind direction caused by the monsoons," he says. "Many Arabs or Persians created families with local people, and some stayed on permanently."
Abdurahimankutty says it was during the traders' long stays on the coast that they developed music "combining the laments of the Arabs with the percussive elements prevalent in Kerala."
In addition to the music, the 600-year-old grand mosque in Ponnani shows how Arab sailors and residents merged their culture with a new environment and local architecture. The mosque is made of natural stone and intricately carved wood, and it resembles one of the early royal palaces of the region.
Mohamed Haseeb of Ponnani is a master singer of the three main Mappila musical genres: Mappila pattu, kolkali and duff muttu, which all combine storytelling lyrics, hymns and poetry with intricate percussive patterns—but each for distinct purposes and each using distinct musical forms.
"I have played this exciting music from childhood onwards," Haseeb says.
Mappila pattu (song) is the most important genre performed in Tirurangadi, a town just north of Ponnani. Ethnomusicologist Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy, adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has described Mappila pattu's characteristically responsorial songs supported by handclapping as "reminiscent of their ancestors from the Arab world."
Haseeb says the genre may be more diverse.
"In this genre the topics vary from an invocation to God to one that marvels at the beauty of women," he says. "The song lyrics also deal with Mappila food, the anticolonial struggle and wedding celebrations. Each performance has its specific time and space."
As is common nowadays, the singers in Tirurangadi accompany themselves on instruments of the north, mostly tabla and the pumped-reed harmonium. Haseeb says these were introduced through the film industry of Mumbai, where together with western instruments, they support many of the singers in the Bollywood film scene.
At Pocker Sahib Memorial Orphanage College in Tirurangadi, students also learn the music and moves of the intricate kolkali (stick dance). It is performed by young men wearing traditional loincloths, white T-shirts, broad green belts and white knotted handkerchiefs on their heads; in their hands they hold stout wooden sticks.
The songs start with an invocation, after which performers whirl around, stamp their feet and bang sticks toward each other. The rhythm gets faster and faster, the steps more and more complex, and it ends in a crescendo. If in Mappila pattu the tabla is merely an accompanying instrument, the sticks in kolkali dominate the fast-changing rhythms. The intensity and seemingly wild patterns, and the ever-increasing speed, are typical for Kerala's drum orchestras too. If Mappila pattu is closer to Arab culture, kolkali belongs more to the Dravidian south Indian musical realm. Stick dances are performed in many villages along the coast of the Arabian Sea from Kerala to the north Indian state of Gujarat.
"This musical genre is truly devotional," says Haseeb. "It nearly always celebrates the life of the Prophet Muhammad and praises the almighty God."
The performers kneel, and they begin with an invocation. Then they beat their small, round frame drums, held in the left hand, and slowly sway as the rhythm accelerates.
"The lyrics of this genre are only in Arabic, and no other language is used," he says. "It is entirely religious."
A clear dichotomy of cultural influences exists in Mappila music: The Arabic language, the duff (frame drum) of Arab origin and the lyrics expressing Islam all point directly to the relationship and influence of immigrants from the Arabian Peninsula. The duff, with its rather broad wooden rim, is similar to the frame drum mirwas played in many Arab countries.
On this day of performances, each corner of the school building reverberates with Mappila songs, and students practice dance in several audience halls and classrooms. Dozens of girls and boys 7 to 18 years old arrive, then disappear, chatting in one of the nearby classrooms as they prepare for their performance. They emerge, and soon there are songs, clapping, drumbeats and roaring harmoniums.
In yet another town, Kondotty, north of Tirurangadi, the Mappila Academy is one of Kerala's leading cultural centers, and it emphasizes music and dance education. Here, seven teenage girls rehearse a fourth, more specific tradition: the oppana, a wedding dance whose name means "clapping together." The girls' teacher is Master Ahmet, who explains that when oppana is performed at a wedding, a girl is bedecked with gold and remains in the center of the dance, symbolizing the bride before marriage. She is lavished with all the attention. The other girls, each wearing a long, plain white sari and headdress, spin and dance around her as three vocalists position themselves to the left of the women, singing of the love and joy between husband and wife. Today, Ahmet's dancers are dressed in everyday clothes: jeans, long skirts and loosely knotted headscarves. Apologizing, he explains this is a dress rehearsal. In the past, he adds, all Mappila villages had oppana groups, but they are on the decline.
Ahmet, who is also the school's teacher for Mappila Pattu and a player of the harmonium, says the arts remain central to Mappila identity.
"To my experience, the Mappila have astoundingly well-maintained their specific Indo-Arabic traditions and belief system. This is mainly due to our strong fondness for music and dance," he says, noting it's important to carry on traditional music in Mappila schools, especially, he emphasizes, since much is now mixed with, or entirely replaced by, the popular sounds of Bollywood.
In Arangottukara, the rain continues its soft background rhythm as the members of Vayali, who participated in the exploration of music in Mappila villages, decide to include this village's songs and rhythms into their own group's repertoire. Without hesitation, Haseeb and his friends join the effort.
"We are excited to work with the bamboo band," he says.
On its own, Vayali's percussion group sounds like the rain becoming a thunderstorm, interrupted only by long lyrical sequences foreboding the next downburst. The bamboo xylophone and flute provide the melodies, while a huge wooden drum and tuned bamboo tubes provide bass and rhythm. The beats and sounds are so dense one can no longer distinguish individual instruments: Sound collages are their specialty. Although the instruments are new inventions made of bamboo, the music is entirely Keralan—just the latest fusion among traditions that continue to connect cultures and continents.
"I knew it would work," Haseeb says.
In Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, the subway system offers more than practical travel. Called Toshkent Metropoliteni, or the Metro for short, it also transports passengers on a symbolic journey through Uzbek history. Each of its 29 stations was designed by an individual artist, and together they honor a pantheon of cultural heroes—writers, composers, scientists and more—as well as historic resources such as cotton and almonds. As breathtaking as they are informative, each metro station is a chapter in a story told in tileworks, murals and mosaics amid elegantly thematic lighting and architecture.
In the heart of Tashkent, capital of the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, a group of tourists follow their guide into the Kosmonavtlar (Cosmonauts) subway station. Its modest street entrance gives little hint of what awaits them inside. Glittering ranks of dark teal columns straddle the station's wide platform, their tops supporting the high, dark ceiling, from which a long band of countless oblong-shaped "stars" dangles and shimmers, replicating the Milky Way. Along either wall, which fade from white to deep blue, large ceramic medallions pay homage to cosmonauts and early space explorers, including Uzbekistan's 15th-century astronomer and writer Mirza (noble leader) Ulugbek, creating a mesmerizing effect of deep space.
Kosmonavtlar is one of 29 stations in the capital's nearly 43-year-old subway system, called Toshkent Metropoliteni. Each station delivers a uniquely impressive, themed tribute to the heritage of a country whose roots date back to the second century bce. In recent years as Tashkent's metro has become a traveler's destination, the city's own commuters, as well as the tourists, are taking a new look.
Building a subway that would meet the needs of Tashkent's growing population began in 1964 as the brainchild of then-First Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan Sharof Rashidov. He envisioned more than a utilitarian transportation system: He wanted a metro that could reflect the history and culture of the Uzbek people and literally cement their cultural legacy.
During the 1960s this was a daunting challenge. Captured by Russian forces in 1865, Uzbekistan, along with its four Central Asian neighbors (Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan), had been ruled since 1917 by the Union of Socialist Soviet Republic (ussr), and approval for all projects ran through Moscow. Rashidov persisted through 18 trips back and forth between Tashkent and the Soviet capital before finally securing the necessary permissions. Gradually, all of Moscow's requirements were fulfilled, including studies of seismic activity, hydrogeological factors, geodesic and soil conditions. Tashkent's population had just topped a million when on September 26, 1967, Decree #495, "On the Design and Construction of a Metro in Tashkent," was signed.
"He did everything possible to get permission to build the Metro, and this should never be forgotten," insists Elmira Akhmedova, director of the Centre for National Arts in Tashkent. "He wanted the Metro to be ours with Uzbek national art [displayed] in each station."
Most of all, she adds, "he wanted our people to be proud of the Metro."
Rashidov personally supervised the selection of prominent Uzbek artists, sculptors and architects who would design the murals, artworks and architectural elements for the individual stations. The best young engineers from the Polytechnik Institut in Tashkent were employed, and all work was overseen by Metrogiprotans, the Soviet planning agency responsible for the design of the 1935 Moscow Metro, and Toshmetroloyiha, otherwise known by its English equivalent, Tashkent Metro Project.
In 1972 construction began in Chilonzor, the most densely populated district in Tashkent. Five years later, on November 7, 1977, to help commemorate October Revolution Day, the 10.5-kilometer Chilonzor line, with nine stations, opened.
"It was a huge event," recalls Tashkent resident Ilhom Miliyev. "The opening was covered by all the media, and suddenly everyone from around the region wanted to come to Tashkent and see the first metro built in Central Asia."
That historic day cemented Tashkent's role as the economic and cultural center of the region. Moscow's own metro, built in 1935, with its crystal chandeliers, wide, elegant platforms and murals depicting historic events and Soviet nationalism, had clearly set a standard. Between 1955 and 1975, five other cities would follow with their own metros: Leningrad in Russia, Tbilisi in Georgia, Baku in Azerbaijan, and Kiev and Kharkov in Ukraine. But Toshkent Metropoliteni became Central Asia's first.
After its construction, Toshkent Metropoliteni continued to expand as Uzbekistan transitioned from a Soviet Republic to an independent country in 1991. Between 1984 and 2001, two additional lines, O'zbekiston and Yunusobod, connected the city even more, and the number of stations climbed to 29—each one, as Rashidov had hoped, portraying a different aspect of the country's ancestry.
"This work was the greatest test of our skills," says Uzbekistan National Artist Vladimir Burmakin, 81. "We wanted to make the Tashkent Metro even better than the one in Moscow, which was like a fairy tale."
Burmakin recalls how he and fellow artists were instructed to incorporate traditional Uzbek designs into their work. It was essential, he remembers, that each station with its combination of angular Soviet elements and graceful Islamic designs should have its own distinct character.
Burmakin, whose works have been exhibited internationally, designed the massive copper relief that hangs above the entrance to Paxtakor (cotton farmer) station. A crop dating back 2,000 years, cotton is known as oq oltin (white gold) because of its critical role in the country's economy. It was also cotton that aided Rashidov's negotiations with Moscow for the Metro: At the time, Uzbekistan provided more than 70 percent of the ussr's cotton production. Rashidov increased Uzbekistan's offering to 5.5 million tonnes annually, an increase of two million, to sweeten the Metro deal.
"The Metro played a critical role in Tashkent's transformation into a capital city," emphasizes Burmakin, who says he feels honored to have been a part of the historic process.
As a child growing up in Tashkent, he used to watch camel caravans, as well as herds of sheep and cattle amble along rough, stone-paved streets. He had never envisioned he would one day be working on mural designs for an underground subway system.
"The Metro facilitated the growth of a new, modern citizen and evoked a sense of national spirit," Burmakin remembers. "It inspired our belief in Tashkent and its potential for growth. The educational part of the Metro as an underground history museum played an important role in that."
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, changes in the Metro reflected the newly independent country's desire to reclaim its national identity. Seven stations with Soviet names were changed, including V. Lenin, which became Mustaqillik Maydoni (Independence Square); Oktabr Revolyutsiyasi, commemorating Russia's October 1917 Revolution, became Amir Temur Xiyoboni, in honor of the 14th-century Chagatai leader. Construction slowed due to economic conditions throughout the 1990s, and it took 10 years before the six newest stations opened in 2001.
Muhammad Ali, former Chairman of the Writers' Union of Uzbekistan, recalls how before independence Amir Temur Xiyoboni station had a portrait of Karl Marx as well as murals depicting Russian and Soviet history. Those were removed as were other murals with Soviet themes.
"Today the Metro has an important role," explains Muhammad Ali. "It is teaching our younger generation about their heritage. Before the Soviets left in 1991, we never had a chance to openly embrace or learn about our rich history, which goes back 3,000 years. Now whenever I walk into the Metro, I am inspired by the art."
Muhammad Ali likens Tashkent's subway stations, its art and architecture, to entering a museum where one can view history and culture exhibited on the walls.
"People should feel like they are walking into the history of Uzbekistan," he says.
Nargis Kasimova, a Tashkent journalist, remembers when her father first brought her and three of her siblings from their hometown of Jizzakh, 200 kilometers southeast of the capital, to see the Metro. Only 12 or 13 years old then, she remembers the stations as palatial, majestic.
"The Metro unconsciously promotes a love of country," explains Kasimova. "Every design, every mural, whether it is depicting the significance of pomegranates or almonds, or the history of the cotton harvest, has a meaning in our culture."
Uzbeks are proud their Metro is not just a transportation interchange, Kasimova says, commenting on the beauty of each station as symbolic museums. Each station honors Uzbek heritage, most named after Uzbek poets, writers and composers, as well as other notable figures in the nation's history. They are essentially a popular destination offering lessons in history, she asserts.
Since its inaugural run in 1977, more than four billion passengers have used the Metro. Today, about 220,000 daily commuters, young and old, residents and tourists, purchase blue plastic tokens for 1,400 soms (about US$.15), descend into their station and encounter the history of Uzbekistan.
At Mustaqillik Maydoni station, rows of sparkling chandeliers dangle over an immaculate platform lined with grand marble columns stretching upward to a gilded, patterned ceiling. At Alisher Navoiy station, which honors the 15th-century founder of Chagatai literature, turquoise blue bas-reliefs line the entrance. Renowned sculptor Ahmet Shaymuradov spent four years creating the intricate details of the ceramic murals, each one depicting scenes from Navoi's epic Khamsa.
"I am very proud of this work," says Shaymuradov, 84. "Everything I did was for the people of Uzbekistan, and now thousands of people see my work every day in the Metro."
Shaymuradov is also pleased his work will be preserved for posterity.
"I am old now, but my work remains for the young people, and I think they learn a lot from the murals," he says.
Alisher Navoiy station is Diana Khaydarova's favorite. The 18-year-old artist commutes daily on the Metro, and she says she observes something new each day.
"We have so many beautiful stations, and each one has its own story, all of which are connected to our history," Khaydarova says.
As an artist, she is particularly fascinated by the Kosmonavtlar station, designed by architect Sergo Sutyagin. Today, it's regarded by many tourists and residents alike as one of the most beautiful of all.
"I wanted to recreate all the stages of exploring space," the 84-year-old Sutyagin says, recounting the challenges of finding just the right materials for his designs. Everything he created for Kosmonavtlar station bears traces of Uzbekistan's past.
Our work," emphasizes Sutyagin, "should feed the present generation and give birth to the future."
Khaydarova encourages younger subway riders to look up from their cell phones every now and then in order to pay more attention to the murals and architecture in the Metro.
"It's one of our nation's greatest accomplishments," she says. "I feel closer to our history when I am traveling underground in the Metro than when I am walking along the streets of the city."
The history she learns during daily commutes also helps with one of her new goals—to educate the tourists she meets in the Metro about Uzbekistan's heritage.
Her goal is easier now: Since 2018 photography has been permitted in the stations. Prior to that, it was forbidden, as the subways were considered strategically important because they doubled as nuclear fallout shelters.
"We realized how important it is to show the beauty and history of our country to outsiders, so we changed our tourism law," explains Zarina Mansurova, head of marketing for Toshkent Metropoliteni.
As a result, Khaydarova and other commuters often encounter enthusiastic groups of international tourists taking photographs as they huddle around local guides in some of the most popular stations.
"I once met a German tourist at Alisher Navoiy who told me she had been to Tashkent twice before and returned as soon as she found out that she could finally take photographs in the Metro," Khaydarova recalls.
Khojaev Muminjon was a newly minted Polytechnik Institut engineer in 1973 when he was hired to work at the Metro. Nearly five decades later, he is still employed at the Metro, which he uses to commute daily to and from work. Whenever he sees groups of tourists taking pictures, he notes, he is filled with pride. "I really am tempted to stop and tell them that I helped build the Metro," says Muminjon, smiling.
His pride is shared by many of the older generation, who remember what a momentous occasion it was when the Metro opened. Mansurova recalls how her grandmother made a point of taking her to the Metro when she was only 6 years old.
"It was very prestigious during the Soviet era for Tashkent to have the first Metro," explains Mansurova. "My grandmother took me to every station and taught me about the history of our country as well as the history of the Metro construction. It was very important to her."
"And look at me now," she says. "I am the spokesperson for the Metro."
Mansurova oversees programs intended to increase local use of the Metro, especially by the younger generations.
"We want to make the Metro a friendlier place so that commuters will be encouraged to use it every day," she explains.
This means comfy reading nooks with mini libraries have been set up in some stations along with kiosks that offer snacks and drinks; cash machines are available, as well as limited WiFi service, which is planned to expand.
Even more enticing are the cultural events held in the Metro throughout the year. On May 9, 2019, a military marching band performed to honor Uzbekistan's Memorial Day. Art stations for children had already been set up in Alisher Navoiy and Paxhtakor stations, and their paintings were later exhibited in the Metro for International Children's Day. In August 2019, 12 of the Tashkent Philharmonic Orchestra's younger musicians visited the Alisher Navoiy station and played several classical compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach. It was the first concert in the history of the Metro.
Today, as Tashkent's metropolitan population exceeds 2.5 million, new metro stations are under construction and plans call for a total of 74 stations by 2025, nearly four times its current size. Yulduz Saidova one of the Metro's original engineers hired in 1972, is working on the massive construction. She says the new stations will be as culturally and architecturally distinct as the first 29: Local artists are now submitting bids for the designs.
For the first time, one of the stations will include a mural of the Turkestan region, which, like Tashkent, was once an important trading center along the historic Silk Roads linking Europe and China. In 1918, before the creation of the Uzbek ssr in 1924, the Soviets designated Tashkent as the capital of Turkestan, expanding the city's footprint in Central Asia's history. "It's so important for the next generation to keep learning about their history," asserts Saidova.
Beyond functionality, the Metro has tunneled its way into the heart of the nation, which is approaching the 30th anniversary of its independence.
"The Metro helped change Tashkent's future," says Sutyagin. The sense of national pride it instilled in the people of Uzbekistan at a time when it was most needed has inspired generations.
More than 40 years later, Sutyagin still commutes daily on the Metro to and from his workshop in the city. It is a cherished reminder of all those who came together to build a culturally relevant, transportation-efficient city.
Smiling, he says, "Every time I see tourists taking pictures in the Metro, I say to myself, 'What a good job I did! What a good job we all did!'"
With every stitch of Hindamme, his ready-to-wear fashion line, 32-year-old Mohammed Khoja inches closer to a global spotlight. Khoja launched Hindamme—an Arabic word he explains refers to "perfect form and harmony"—in 2016 for the youthful, playful and heritage-aware. His most recent streetwear collection blends contemporary textiles with bright patterns inspired by Nabatean architectural and epigraphic motifs, as well as other patterns now visually synonymous with the Arab world.
Self-taught (he gives YouTube credit for teaching him to cut patterns), Khoja was born in al-Khobar, in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. At 6 years old, his family moved to Houston, Texas, and he returned to the kingdom with them at 13. His father's work relocated the family again during Khoja's teen years to Paris, where he enrolled in the American University of Paris and in 2011 earned a degree in business. It was there in Paris that Khoja received encouragement for some of his early concepts from the owner of a now-defunct boutique called clvii.
"It was my first real taste of the industry, and I loved the process of taking an idea and making it a reality," he says, noting his desire to launch a fashion line was years in the making, something he dreamed about as a child.
Khoja's latest collection of 23 pieces, Al Ula, was inspired, he says, by the history and desert colors around the city of that name in northwestern Saudi Arabia. There, starting in the sixth century bce, Nabateans—most famous for their carved-stone architecture in Petra, Jordan—founded a trading center at Mada'in Salih and there, too, carved distinctively styled architecture into the desert's abundant and dramatic sandstone outcroppings. Early this year Khoja showcased the collection on Instagram in connection with the Winter at Tantora Festival and the exhibition Desert X Alula 2020.
Vogue Arabia Editor-in-Chief Manuel Arnaut is a fan. Writing by email, he says Khoja "creates designs that are connected with the times we live in" and "capture what is in the air, [not only] style-wise but also socially."
I'm in the Eastern Province of Saudi, in al-Khobar. It's a small city, and I have a small studio in my own home, so that's where I basically work and design and prototype. I still live with my family—as you know, that's very common [here]. I was fortunate enough that we had this space, and they were like, "you can convert it to your studio." My production, unfortunately, has been disrupted. I currently can't produce anything. Everything's been put on hold.
It started off with painting, and looking back, I have old sketches of me attempting to design—not just clothes, but cars, homes and furniture—when I was really young. I was fascinated with the process of design and taking an idea and making it a reality. So I've always known I was a designer from a very young age. I grew up in different places across the world, so I wanted to challenge myself to create work that had elements that represented my culture but was also universal, something that could be worn by anyone in the world, that's contemporary but also had elements of my heritage.
It was, and just to put things into context, the fashion industry is relatively new in my region. It's starting to blossom now, but years ago it wasn't, and my parents never discouraged me from designing. It's competitive and risky, but it's definitely worth the risk. If you can do what you love, it never feels like a job.
I met her when I was a student in Paris. She knew how to communicate Arab culture in a way that was very intriguing to so many different audiences. I felt like I wanted to do something similar with my fashion table. I wanted to create something that was inspired by something that I grew up seeing but wasn't represented or being angled or packaged in a way that was made for international audiences.
The main challenge was producing some of my concepts. I hate to use this word, but it was very diy [do it yourself]. I learned everything I could. I Googled everything and tried to understand how to make a good pleat or how to color match the Pantone color with the printing. Production was also a challenge. Saudi is changing rapidly at the moment, so resources for designers such as factories will open up, but that still hasn't happened fully yet.
Yes, it would make things so much easier. But there are certain things that are hard to do here, like printing, and I use a lot of prints in Hindamme. We don't have the technology and machinery to do sublimation or digital printing yet. But it's going to happen soon because they're establishing different entities that are focusing on design. At the moment I produce between Istanbul and Portugal, and I've made a few local pieces that didn't require prints, so I think it just depends on the content I want to create.
That's a good question. With my last collection, Al Ula, I designed the collection within a week. So creativity for me comes in spurts. I need to be in a good place mentally to come up with ideas. It's important to surround myself with people that inspire and encourage me. Listening to different types of music and researching archival collections from different designers helps too. When I was in Paris recently, I got the chance to visit the Azzedine Alaïa studio. I was able to see his archival pieces and touch them. Being able to see the work of someone as iconic as he was and looking at what he did was incredibly inspiring to me as a designer.
It's been working out well for me so far, but I am looking to get on schedule. I think it's important. The industry is slowly changing, but in the past, fashion shows were shown to journalists, buyers and people in the industry six months in advance. Now a lot of people have the ability to quickly copy what they've seen so it doesn't make as much sense.
Sustainability and climate change, and the fashion-week model seems to be very wasteful. I don't think it's going to be as relevant anymore. I'm curious to see what will happen going forward. As people can't travel, then brands are going to have to do online or closed shows. It could change the industry completely.
I like how presentations showcase the clothes as a form of art and form of culture. It makes it looks like an exhibition, and it's a museum setting. Fashion design is a very similar process to art in terms of generating ideas and translating them, and I love how presentations and exhibitions elevate the clothes. So far I've been focusing on presentations. I'm fortunate enough that some of my pieces have been acquired by museums. The V&A in London bought a jacket they plan to display, one of the driving jackets.
It was very organic. I was genuinely inspired. It wasn't something that I did for marketing. I wanted to create a tribute in my own way to mark the occasion. Funnily enough, a lot of the orders for this jacket came from the United States and the United Kingdom, which I was happy to see. There's another major exhibition that's going to be displaying the collection I recently launched inspired by Al Ula, but I'm not able to share the details yet.
Not a lot of us grew up knowing the [Nabatean] history of al-'Ula, and I think efforts like the Winter at Tantora Festival in December were incredibly important because they highlighted the area. I found it inspiring and I started studying. It took a while to read about the Nabatean civilization because there aren't too many sources on it. I contacted the festival, and a few researchers there were very helpful, and I decided I wanted to pay homage to it. I'm proud to say that a lot of the clients that bought into the collection were European and American. It's cool to see people around the world wanting to wear something inspired by al-'Ula in New York City. It's an East-meets-West moment for me.
I want to emphasize the word interpretation. There is currently an argument surrounding cultural appropriation, so we need to be mindful of that. As a designer I need to be very conscious, and I think that it's very personal. It's my perspective of how I'm inspired. I think you just need to be very respectful of it and you need to interpret it in your own view. You need to be genuine about it. I think the key word is interpretation.
I'm very influenced by streetwear. Growing up, I wore the latest nba Nike sneakers with Versace or Armani, and I love the idea of both those worlds. It's incredibly interesting to me. In my collection, Season iii, I combined both, so I used a lot of sequins on bomber jackets. I wanted to create something that was current but also had an element of craftsmanship and luxury.
I try not to overproduce because I don't want to be wasteful. As a business I want to sell, but your question brings me to a perfect point because I wanted to talk about my next collection I'm currently designing. With everything that's going on with covid-19, I'm looking into becoming more sustainable by way of using different innovative materials. I've been looking at antimicrobial materials that are antibacterial. I was designing something completely different but then I shifted the theme.
For sure. I think our global mindsets are going to shift. We're going to be more conscious of the environment and look to ways to create something more meaningful. I think now more than ever people are looking for value. That's incredibly important to me as a designer—to present value and have some kind of message, to create pieces that spark conversation.
I'm definitely inspired. It's a glorious time to be in Saudi because there's such a growing appreciation of the creative field and of designers and artists.
My work being taught at universities, because I've always wanted to inspire other people, and my pieces being acquired by museums. I've always wanted to bridge the gap between fashion and culture. I don't want fashion to just be a consumable retail business. I want to be able to generate business, but I try to balance that with something that's meaningful.
Petite, iridescent bottles and bulk household products filled with or using pungent, concentrated, natural "essential" oils have become so common on retail shelves and websites that they are almost unremarkable features of the modern consumer landscape. Essential oils are increasingly part of a lifestyle—like yoga or organic foods—that appeals to young and old, men and women. As recently as a decade ago, anything infused with the sweet-smelling fragrances of essential oils may have been associated more with patchouli-redolent bohemians. But today, buying, wearing and diffusing essential oils is nearly as commonplace as the online shopping that has helped popularize them.
According to market research firm Statista, the global market value for essential oils is projected to reach $27 billion by 2022, based on estimates done before the covid-19 outbreak. The market in the us alone is currently worth $4 billion, and essential oils now help scent perfumes, soaps, cosmetics, flavorings, cleaning products, lotions, candles, aromatherapy products and even aerosols such as "Sleep Serenity Moonlit Lavender," a "bedroom mist" by Febreze. Mixed with jujube bark extract, they are also found in Sephora's Christophe Robin shampoos. The list could go on.
The growing popularity of essential oils is the latest chapter in a history of use and fascination that dates back more than 3,000 years. Used through the centuries for staying healthy, worshipping, sleeping well, de-stressing, making dinner and just smelling nice, what were known in classical Greece and Rome as "odiferous oils and ointments of the Orient"—as the late organic chemist A. J. Haagen-Smit alliterated in 1961—have wafted west. Along the way they have infused not only scents but also dollars into major retail chains such as Carrefour and Walmart, as well as independent specialty companies, from boutiques to multilevel marketers that now rank nearly alongside Avon and Mary Kay Cosmetics. The passage of essential oils from East to West is a story of encounter and exchange, invention and inquiry, trade and transcendence that continues today.
Bethany Brubaker, a mother of three from Los Angeles, says she attended a class on essential oils in 2013 when she was pregnant with her second child. The class was sponsored by Utah-based doTERRA, one of the largest essential oils companies in the world. As of 2015 doTerra had surpassed $1 billion in sales.
"I was desperate for natural remedies to help me combat migraines induced by a prescription of mine," she says, adding that she also was seeking to provide a healthy environment for her children and natural ways to relieve regular aches and pains.
In oils, Brubaker says, she found not only a remedy for her migraines but also relief for her daughter's allergies and "answers for joint pain and natural ways to support my little family through so many situations."
"It's not surprising to me that more and more people are using essential oils," says Lisa Bollinger, a homemaker in Michigan who sells oils for one of doTerra's competitors, Young Living. Founded in 1994, Young Living imports many of its oils from the Middle East and Asia, especially Oman, the Philippines and China, and it sells mainly across Europe and North America.
"They're gaining more positive attention," says Bollinger. "People have incredible testimonies of how they have helped them overcome huge sicknesses and health issues."
The us Food and Drug Administration (fda), while not contesting the appeal of oils for their scents of beauty, has cast a skeptical eye on medicinal claims that remain debated among medical and pharmaceutical communities.
Bollinger invokes history.
"It's what we used to use before pharmaceuticals took over," she says, "and if that's what we always used for centuries and it works, we should keep doing it."
In all their varieties of scent, origin and use, essential oils all have this in common: They are naturally distilled by either steam or cold pressure from plants, and this includes combinations of seeds, stems, roots, leaves and blossoms.
Trygve Harris, originally from California, now lives in Oman, home to Boswellia sacra, the frankincense tree whose resin and oil once brought centuries of riches to the southern Arabian Peninsula. Founder of New York-based essential oils boutique Enfleurage, Harris says her distillery in Oman's capital of Muscat allows local shoppers to experience the natural method of making and using essential oils.
"When you buy an essential oil, you are buying beauty, serenity, posterity," she says, noting that in particular, Frank—that is her affectionate nickname for it— allows buyers to connect with Oman—its history, its people, its geography, its national soul. "That's why people are drawn to it," she says. "That's why people come on pilgrimage to Dhofar. They go out and sit with the trees."
It was only after traveling through the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa and studying aromatherapy in Australia, Harris says, that she decided to launch Enfleurage in 1997 in New York's SoHo. In her company's early years, Harris sold a variety of wellness products and essential oils, her own and those made by others. She found that frankincense in particular, already among the best known among a family of oils that include lavender, cedar, eucalyptus, orange, peppermint and dozens of others—offers many uses in each of its drops and earns many claims of wellness among those who use it. While each oil offers unique benefits, Harris says that over time, she began to lean more passionately toward Frank—so much so that she now even offers frankincense ice cream.
"When people ask me, 'What can this oil do for me?' I am at a loss at what to say!" she says, because to view them in only utilitarian ways can overlook the sensual pleasure of their delightful, evocative scents which are, well, their essences. "I try to help them recognize the beauty of the oils themselves."
"Miraculous," Harris calls them, noting that like many other essential-oil enthusiasts, on a typical day she might use oils for sleep, headache, a burn or a cold.
This year, as the world faces the pandemic of covid-19, such wellness concerns and interest in the purported healing properties of oils have sharply increased. Some representatives of Young Living and doTERRA have been active on social media claiming that blends containing clove, cinnamon bark, eucalyptus, rosemary and lemon—all traditional medicinal plants—could help "boost immune and respiratory function" and that a range of oils could help "balance emotions" and "keep your family healthy and strong" in a time of stress and uncertainty.
And looking back, it turns out that if one follows the history of essential oils and their journeys, uses and prestige as they traveled west, it is apparent they have been deemed valuable—indeed essential—elements and accoutrements of comfort, wellness and belief in their efficacy.
The earliest records of essential oils point to around 3000 bce when botanists and physicians in Egypt, China and India were using essences and oils for perfumes and medicines. Actual human practice, however, probably began far, far earlier. When oils crossed into classical Greece and Rome, Greek physician Hippocrates of Kos, of "Hippocratic Oath" fame in the fourth century bce, drew on sources from Egypt and India to document the effects of lathering patients and research subjects in oils and essences from more than 300 different plants. Hippocrates and his contemporaries believed the pungent smell of the oils had effects beyond powerful perfumery. Theophrastus, born a year before Hippocrates passed away, in 371 bce, became the successor of Aristotle, and he wrote that "It is to be expected the perfumes should have medicinal properties in view of the virtues of their spices."
Later, other Greeks produced materials on plant oils and essences, including Dioscorides who, in 70 ce, wrote De Materia Medica, whose insights informed Romans, including Galen in the second century ce, as well as later Byzantine and Arab physicians. The Romans built upon Greek aromatic practices and expanded their application of the uses of oils, bathing in them, perfuming their beds and bodies and using them in massage. One of the Roman favorites was frankincense, and the trade from the southern Arabian Peninsula was so great the path from there to the Mediterranean ports became "the Frankincense Road."
Following the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 ce, the oils continued to be distilled and widely used from Constantinople (now Istanbul) to Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad and across North Africa to Córdoba. Preeminent among the scholars of the scientific flourishing of the 10th century was Abu-'Ali al-Husayn ibn-'Abdallah ibn Sina, who was called Avicenna in the West. Born near Bukhara, in modern-day Uzbekistan, Ibn Sina was a polymath—philosopher, poet, physician and more—with a wide grasp of his Greek, Indian and Persian predecessors. Part of his oeuvre included detailed commentary on the therapeutic applications of more than 800 plants, and he is often credited with the discovery of the distillation process by which essential oils are extracted still today.
In the early 13th century, Ibn al-Baytar of Damascus, author of Kitab al-jami' li-mufradat al-adwiyah wa-al-aghdhiyah (Compendium on simple medicaments and food) expanded to various applications for 1,400 plants and oils, with a particular focus on the popular orange and rose waters of his day.
It was from these scholars that much knowledge of plant-based medicines, essences and oils emanated to Europe, where often it was monks who tended to the sick with herbal extractions. Oils were burned in attempts to ward off pestilence, such as when frankincense and pine were burned in the streets against bubonic plague, whose first wave appeared in 542 ce and killed more than 25 million people. In the later Middle Ages, perfumes and oils were carried back to Europe by returning soldiers of the Crusades, and later, Renaissance European herbalists, alchemists and spiritual leaders, such as Hildegard von Bingen, Nicholas Culpepper, Hieronymus Braunschweig and Paracelsus, all borrowed from the knowledge of Islamic forbears to begin dabbling in distilling oils such as lavender, rosemary, nutmeg and clove.
This set the stage for the Western fascination with using essential oils for aromatherapy in the early 20th century, widely credited to René-Maurice Gattefossé of France. Alongside his brothers, Gattefossé inherited an essential-oil business from his father in 1907, where they produced oils for the popular French perfume and medicinal industries. It was during the First World War that Gattefossé developed his method of using essential oils to aid injured soldiers, and modern aromatherapy was born.
Of the more than 90 types of essential oils on the market worldwide, frankincense remains among the top five, and among them it is the most historically referenced. Sourced from Boswellia sacra trees not only in the southern Arabian Peninsula, frankincense can also be found in the Horn of Africa. Its sap is still tapped, collected and sold on to global markets. Valued for its fragrance, taste and remedial effects, frankincense once was worth more per pound than gold throughout the Middle East, and it was sold as far as India, other areas in Asia and throughout Europe. Rather than being sold as resin, it is now most often distributed in the form of essential oil.
"The trade in frankincense has been going on since before the time of [the Great Pyramids], and people from outside Oman have long prized it," says Ashad Chaudry, co-owner of Salalah Frankincense Oil, llc, which is one of doTERRA's suppliers. Chaudry has been in the business for more than 40 years.
In Oman itself, says Chaudry, frankincense remains most popular in its resin form, which is burned for insect repellant and relaxation. It is also used as a base for oudh, pure perfumes, or blended in attar (aromatic sprays). Chaudry's wholesale customers in the us and Europe "use them for a variety of purposes," he says, including blending, reselling, cooking, cosmetics, perfumes and more.
"The uses of essential oils are endless," says Chaudry, and despite mixed reviews from science, the mythos of essential oils only continues to move around the world and deepen its appeal. On blogs and social media, in pamphlets and advertisements from companies, the historical uses of these oils—factual and semilegendary—are being told and retold. Yet the science on essential oils remains mixed at best. A few have shown some antifungal or antibacterial properties, but evidence that essential oils can do all that some claim is anecdotal and lacks in clinical evidence.
But science does not deny that of our senses, the most powerfully memorable is that of scent. In that may be a clue to the enduring perception, the personal and often very individual experience that there's much more to essential oils than what they do for one's ailments.
Bollinger says she often shares the history of oils with her clients as they peruse the oil selections or oil combinations. She notes her own enthusiasm for the oils grew when she began noticing that "there are hundreds of essential oil references [in early religious writings], and we don't even realize it."
Brubaker had a similar experience.
"They're not just old accounts of random plants," she says, but "plants with specific purposes in mind for our well-being."
Companies see this too. DoTERRA spokesperson Timothy Valentiner says it is "extremely important" to provide historical education to both salespeople and consumers. This education, he says, includes both "historical uses and benefits" as well as "scientific research and evidence."
That potent promise—venerable wisdom and research-based results—explicitly advocated by leading essential oils companies, makes oils a kind of "soft science" for anyone today looking for natural paths to wellness.
It might come pure in an iridescent, apothecary-sized, hand-labeled bottle in a boutique, or it might come mixed as an ingredient in a family-sized bottle of what-have-you in a hypermarket. Either way, they come from one of the world's oldest traditions for good living, one that still thrives where it began, and that still moves not only west, but to the world.
The narrow lane passed under a vaulted passageway and emerged back into the bright sunshine as it wound through Tozeur's Ouled el-Hadef quarter. The houses in this centuries-old neighborhood open privately onto interior courtyards, offering the narrow streets only tall exterior walls with high, slitted windows and stout doors made of palm wood. The walls, though, are not smooth and whitewashed as in much of the country. Protruding and receding bricks form intricate geometrical patterns around windows, above doors and on many of the walls, creating contrasts of light and shadows.
Standing at a distance from a smattering of earthen, brick mosaics in this Tunisian southern city, the walls come alive in patterns, dancing and shape-shifting in the light of midday. In the fore, the small bricks appear bland, yellowish-green, and unadorned. But one only needs to move back a few steps and put distance between their eyes and the 15th-century Berber edifices to relish the complexity of the intricate masonry emerging from the walls.
Amid the Sahara, Tozeur's famed brick mosaics are as celebrated as the town's safari excursions, sunset camel rides and guided tours to the nearby Star Wars sets of Tatooine, the fictional original home of the movie's hero, Luke Skywalker. But the bricks, arranged in their many unique geometric patterns—they delight the residents and tourists alike.
"They're beautiful," Tozeur resident Imed Chorfi says, gazing at the familiar walls.
Motioning to a row of inverted Vs situated across the top of an archway in the mosaic, he says, "This is a camel train." He then points out stylized palm trees and a zigzagging snake design.
"We represent what is around us."
Only a small number of brick artisans remain, keeping alive a tradition of brickmaking that hasn't changed much through the centuries. Chorfi has seen the local artisans using the same method of brick creation and design as the town's Berber predecessors did, including setting afire the abundance of fronds from the local date palm orchards, which are used to fuel the brickmaking ovens. Tozeur became prosperous through its plenty of dates, even referenced by 11th-century Andalusian historian and geographer al-Bakri, who wrote: "There is no other place in Ifrikiya that produces so many dates; almost every day a thousand camels, or even more, are loaded with this fruit."
Today the date orchards of Tozeur, or palmeraie, spread some 15 square kilometers and contain 400,000 palms, famous for their amber-colored, near-translucent dates, or deglet nour. The region is known as the "Land of the Palms," or in Arabic, Bled el-Djerid. Without the numerous palms, the brick ovens could not burn—the bricks could not be.
Antar Chorba, an eighth-generation Tozeur brickmaker, is from one of the families in the region that continues the tradition of the early brick masons. Chorba explains that structures erected in the Djerid, or southwest region of Tunisia, in the early days were originally made of sun-dried bricks, molded of mud and straw, and in Arabic called fankar. The clay was dry enough to be cut into blocks, he says, but was vulnerable to the powerful rainstorms that often swept the area. The fankar also tended to erode from wind and sandstorms and the intense heat of the Saharan sun. Soon locals began experimenting with firing the clay in handmade kilns, which overtime the masons observed improved durability. Baked bricks were a response to what the Berbers and the desert lacked—stone—but also what they had in abundance: clay-rich soil, water from 200 natural springs, and ample fuel from the cut palm fronds. Simply explained, Chorba says, "because there were no quarries."
As in the tradition of those who came before him, Chorba uses two types of soil to prepare the bricks: a reddish clay, which is excavated near El Hamma, about eight kilometers away from the city, and a lighter shade of sand-like mix brought from an area near the brickworks. Put into a bathtub-size trough, the soils are sunk to absorb water for 12 hours before being mixed by hand into a paste.
Working quickly, Chorba can form over 600 bricks a day. With the paste ready, he scatters ash from the kiln across a patch of courtyard. This prevents sticking and absorbs moisture. He then sets a simple bottomless wooden mold on the ground and works a handful of clay into one of the rectangular holes until there are no air bubbles. He then repeats the process to form more bricks. After filling a section of the courtyard he's working on, he generously tosses more ash over the top of the freshly molded bricks. Along with blotting up excess moisture, the protective layer of ash stops cracks from forming on the surface of the bricks as they dry.
"In the summer, when the temperature is over over 45 degrees [Celsius], we can make them in the morning and be ready to stack them in afternoon," says Chorba, mentioning in the winter bricks may take three or four days to complete.
While Chorba molds bricks, an assistant patiently scrapes with a knife each of the six sides of the bricks, which were formed a few days before, to remove the ash and give them their final shape. Then, the bricks are stacked in harsai, pillars of 10 or 12, allowing for ventilation as the bricks dry. This method also helps the masons keep count of production. At the final stage, they are stored until there are enough to fill the oven, which can hold between 10,000 and 20,000 bricks.
The open-top, updraft kilns measure upward of 3 meters, with a narrow, door-like gap for loading bricks. The fuel pit is subterranean and directly beneath the oven, and between the two parts of the kiln is a wheel-like chamber floor known as a sieve, an eight- or nine-spoke platform supported by vaulted arches. Loading takes four or five workers a full day to complete.
"Stacking needs to be done in a way that the heat can get to all the bricks," Chorba says. Once the kiln has been filled, the loading gap is plugged with clay and the ovens set ablaze.
Nasri Chabani, another of Tozeur's brickmakers, works in a nearby oven. He explains the importance of drying the clay molds before placing them in the ovens, "Drying is the most important step because if not done right the bricks will break in the kiln."
As he feeds a 3-meter-long palm into a firing kiln, Chabani also mentions how the brick production in Tozeur has created an opportunity for date palm cleanup.
"It can be said that brickwork is the waste disposal industry created by the date industry," he says, describing the annual trimming of palm trees which are then sold to the brickmakers for the kilns.
To fire a load of bricks, it takes around 6,000 fronds and 24 hours with temperatures inside the oven reaching nearly 1,000 degrees Celsius. It takes three to four days for the bricks to cool. Then the bricks are removed through the temporarily plugged loading door, which is broken open; each brick is then sorted.
Both Chorba and Chabani describe the original brickmaking process that took place centuries ago. In those early years, the masons pushed fired bricks into the adobe of each structure to protect the walls on the outside. But they soon discovered by using this method, it created a natural barrier from the sun's heat, leaving the structures cooler inside. This region has the highest average temperature in Tunisia, and walls thickened with bricks helped insulate against extreme climate, Chorba says.
Deposits of clay and an abundance of palm fronds were not the only reasons local masons turned to using baked bricks in wall construction. They are highly durable, in part due to low density that allows them to absorb and expel water.
"It is also an extremely resistant material," says Nidhal Hedfi, an engineer from Tozeur, explaining why the bricks rarely crack. "(A brick's) low expansion rate allows it to withstand large thermal amplitudes."
But the bricks also offered something else—decoration. Maghrib historian and professor at Université de Sousse Abdellatif Mrabet opined in his L'art de Bâtir au Jérid (The Art of Building in the Djerid), as an authority on the region's architecture, the use of baked bricks as a "coating ensures a whole panoply of decorative patterns." French historian, geographer, and traveler Augustine Bernard in 1924 was also beguiled by the bricks, describing a "checkerboard of the recessed bricks" with "all combinations of diamonds."
For masons, the bricks were infused with possibilities. Placing them horizontally or vertically, lengthwise or crosswise, masons could coat facades to create decorations inspired by weaving, carpets and local motifs to achieve total originality.
"The solid bricks are meticulously arranged in a sort of ornamental grammar with the possibility of infinite combinations of decorative motifs," Hedfi says, mentioning the local Berbers who were a likely source of the brick decor.
The decoration itself also added another level of protection from heat.
"The sets of recesses which characterize the arrangement of bricks allow the creation of minimal fractions of shadow on the entire facade, which minimizes the surface directly exposed to the sun's rays and consequently reduces the heat that penetrates the wall," Hedfi explains.
These gradually shifting patches of shade generate convection currents, lowering the surface temperature by creating a naturally ventilated wall. Hedfi's observations are not merely based on his credentials as an engineer. He was born in Tozeur and spent his childhood in a traditional brick house.
Hedfi's beloved Tozeur takes its name from the Latin Tusuros, bestowed by the Romans when they built a citadel fortress as part of their chain of fortified outposts meant to contain nomadic Berber populations, the original inhabitants of Tunisia. The city soon became a major trading post and important stopover for caravans traveling from the Sahara to the Tunisian coast, as well as those in transit to Makkah from the Maghrib region of Africa.
Tozeur's antiquity and lasting importance through the centuries can still be seen in the city, through its kilns and brick mosaics. The city and its residents demonstrated technological sagacity even centuries ago. On Tozeur's outskirts, where a bumpy dirt road opens toward the desert, some 35 cylindrical ovens jut up like large termite mounds. Beside each oven are smooth courtyards for molding and drying bricks with rudimentary frames of palm trunks that can be topped with fronds for shade, and a simple area to rest and store tools.
The lack of archeological digs makes it difficult to pinpoint when Tozeur shifted toward baked bricks. Oral tradition points towards Mesopotamia—including Iraq, but also parts of modern-day Iran and Syria, where a long-held tradition of ornate brick structures remain—somewhere between the 9th and 11th centuries.
Thirty minutes' drive west of Tozeur, near the Algerian border, sits the town of Nefta, population 25,000. Mekki Khnissi, whose family has been making bricks there for 300 years, says it was settlers from Kufa, Iraq, who brought the tradition a millennium ago. "We still call it `Little Kufa,'" he says of the town.
Not everyone, though, is fully convinced. Mrabet says the brickmaking tradition could have begun before Islam arrived in Tunisia the seventh century.
"We talk about Iraq as well as Iran, but there is no more evidence there than to the contrary," he says, pointing out a 2018 discovery near Tozeur of a late-Byzantine church, dating between the fifth and seventh centuries, with a north facade built of brick, and to a brick oven he discovered amid ruins of the ancient city of al-Halbah, which lies on the edge of Tozeur. The Djerid has long had a diverse population, drawing travelers, merchants, and, from the earliest days of Islam, pilgrims.
Equally ambiguous is why this beautiful and particularly effective architecture in such a hot, sunny climate is almost exclusively found in these two oases. Perhaps the prevalence of quarries in other areas, which did not offer an abundance of date palm fronds for fuel, allowed for differing variations of styles. Across the Algerian border, some buildings in two places—Tamacine and Tamellaht—do share similarities with the Tunisian towns, though. Mrabet surmises, "there is no doubt that Djeridian brick was exported to Tamacine and Tamellaht," but the brickwork, he adds, shows a lack of mastery.
Until some 30 years ago, brickmaker Khnissi says Nefta's kilns were in the center of town. Tunisian officials moved them because of pollution, and the large weekly suq now gathers on the flat expanse where they once stood. Before then, there were 20 families making bricks.
"Now there is just two. No one wants to do it. It's tough," Khnissi says.
Yet, the tradition of artisanal masonry continues in Tozeur and Nefta. New houses are erected using the bricks, and an area luxury hotel ordered 1 million of the bricks to use in its recent construction. Brickmaking is a cherished gem for those who grew up in the region, and those visiting for the first time. So, while tourists may come to experience the desert and its many timeless offerings, the bricks underscore the history of two towns and centuries of residents who have cemented their identity in the patterned facades of their homes.
Sitting in his Pennsylvania workshop, surrounded by hanging tools and worktables, Najib Shaheen cradles a hand-crafted, wooden 'ud (oud) in his arms. As he strums and picks, the nylon strings resonate along an Arab musical scale. Similar in size to an acoustic guitar but far different in shape and sound, the 'ud is to many the most iconically Arab of all musical instruments. And Shaheen, whose expertise has earned him the nickname "Oudman," would know.
Growing up in the Mediterranean coastal city of Haifa in the 1950s, the instrument has never been far from his reach. As a boy, he learned to play the round-backed, half-pear-shaped instrument amid an extraordinarily musical family. This included his father, Hikmat Shaheen, a well-known music educator, composer and 'ud performer, and his younger brother Simon, who is today a virtuoso on both 'ud and violin.
"Hundreds and hundreds of 'uds passed through our house in those days. Every day there were four or five musicians coming and playing 'ud," Shaheen says, remembering how his father also made minor instrument repairs and that his uncle crafted 'ud picks from goat horns. "And in the evenings, when the radio stations had to fill time between programs, the Shaheen house would stop to listen to a few minutes of 'ud improvisation by the era's great players."
Soon he began learning the basics of woodworking after school at his grandfather's carpentry shop, which would later beget a decades-long career.
When he arrived in New York in 1967, he says, players of his beloved instrument were mostly of Turkish and Armenian backgrounds.
"There was a vibrant nightclub scene with excellent singers and musicians," he recalls, though outside of his musician's community, "nobody knew what an 'ud was."
Shaheen spent years honing his craft, studying under 'ud-maker Eddie Berberian, father of the well-known Armenian American 'ud player John Berberian, before later apprenticing with New York-based luthier David Segal. Today, the Oudman is known for perfecting the acoustics on his clients' 'uds, and he is one of a few in what has become a much larger, much more diverse cultural scene committed to preserving and advancing the instrument's craftsmanship and the sounds fast-plucking, virtuoso fingers can make.
For more than a thousand years, musicians across the Middle East, North Africa and southern Europe and Central Asia, much like members of the Shaheen family, have played the 'ud for audiences large and small. It is frequently compared to the lute: Encyclopedia Britannica refers to the 'ud as the "parent of the European lute" because of its fretless fingerboard, short neck and bent pegbox, as well as its similarities in pitch range. But its true derivation is quite an independent journey, and like most instruments, its history involves many varieties of 'uds that have been developed through the centuries. These include the half-sized tuhfat al-'ud as well as the narrower, longer-necked sister of the 'ud, the kuwitra, which offers a smaller and shallower sound, four double strings, and it remains more common across the western regions of North Africa. The name lute itself, however, likely came from Arabic: al-'ud, which rhymes with "food," may have moved into Spanish as laud, and from there the change to lute would have been easy.
"It's earthy and rounded, close to the cello," Shaheen says. "And in a great instrument, there is an evenness of sound among all the strings."
Shaheen says the Middle East has long embraced the instrument as culturally emblematic, so much so it is often called amir al-tarab, "the prince of enchantment," in a musical sense. Today, the instrument has a global following of avid listeners and dedicated musicians, including popular stars such as the late Farid al-Atrash of Syria, the late Egyptian-born Mohamed el-Qasabgi, Simon Shaheen, and Iraqi composer Naseer Shamma, who currently resides in Cairo.
But the greatest achievement of the 'ud perhaps has been its own longevity. It has enchanted listeners through more centuries than perhaps any other stringed instrument. Its range spans three octaves, but that is a technical view, one that belies the deeper power of the 'ud, the range of expression those octaves can achieve in the right hands. "It makes [people] weep when it sings, as though it / repeats to us what the doves have murmured in its ear," wrote al-Hilli, a poet of the late 13th and early 14th century. Two hundred years earlier, poet al-Husayn praised its ability to express the pangs of the soul, "the pain of tribulation."
At the same time, says George Sawa, an Egyptian-born and now Toronto-based scholar of Arab music history, "its sound is so warm, gorgeous and gentle, especially the low notes. There's something about it that's just magical."
In addition, each design of the 'ud is often a unique celebration of fine woodworking. For 'ud builders like Shaheen, the 'uds are opportunities to express creativity not only through acoustic design, but also through choices of wood and ornamentation.
The distinctively pear- or egg-shaped soundboard, he explains, is made from softwoods like spruce. One or three sound holes adorn it: The large one in the center is called shamsiyah (meaning from the sun) and it is often—but not always—flanked by two smaller ones called qamara (from the moon). These were traditionally decorated with elaborately carved bone rosettes, but today, wood and plastic do the job just as well. The bowled back frame is constructed from thin strips, or ribs, of hardwood. Above its unfretted neck, the tuning pegs for the strings are offset at an angle. The result is a remarkably lightweight instrument, averaging about a kilogram.
The 'ud is picked with a rishah, a long, narrow plectrum often made of plastic or animal horn, though in the past an eagle quill was regarded as ideal. Rishah in Arabic means bird feather. Strings were once made from silk or gut, but most now are made with durable nylon, steel or silk covered in copper wire.
Rachel Beckles Willson, a professorial research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies University of London, is currently working on a book about the history of the 'ud. She explains the challenges of the undertaking.
"The 'ud has become a significant cultural icon, which means that many groups of people want to claim it," she says. "It's caught up in national and regional historical claims, so its historiography carries those tensions."
She continues, "Its name has a history that begins long after its existence, and its name encompasses many similar, but not identical, objects."
The earliest forms of the 'ud appeared in the second and first centuries bce. A commonly recited story about its origins, according to ninth-century ce scholar Abu Nasr Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Farabi, attributes its invention to Lamech, an eighth-generation descendant of Adam. Al-Farabi says Lamech was inspired to build the instrument after seeing a vision for its shape in the bones of his deceased son, which were hanging—as in a period of mourning—from a tree. A more likely explanation may be found in the 14th-century writings of Abu al-Fida and Abu al-Walid ibn al-Shihnah, who placed the origins of the 'ud between 270 and 240 bce, during the reign of Persian King Shapur i, though this, too, is mostly speculative.
Instruments with long necks with one or two strings do appear in early Mesopotamian and Egyptian iconography, though the first known image of a pear-shaped, short-necked, 'ud-like instrument dates from a first-century ce relief in the Graeco-Bactrian city of Gandhara in present-day Afghanistan. In the centuries that followed, another short-necked string instrument, the barbat, took hold in Persia.
The 'ud came to prominence in al-Hira, in what is now central Iraq, just south of Kufa. Capital of the Arab Lakhmid Kingdom from 300 to 602 ce, al-Hira gained a reputation for its literary and musical culture. In the late sixth century ce, when the 'ud arrived in the Hijaz, in present-day western Saudi Arabia, musicians there were already playing other short-necked string instruments such as the kiran, the muattar and the mizhar, which were covered with animal skin.
In Arabic, 'ud means "piece of the tree" or "piece of wood," which may refer to its wooden sound board, its stem-like neck or to the wooden plectrum first used to play it. This may account for a description by 11th-century poet al-Qayrawani, who wrote, "From which branches grew and groves were fragrant … When the 'ud was green birds sang on it … When the 'ud became dry, maidens sang on it."
Though musicians continued playing the earlier instruments, the 'ud gradually became the favorite, and further varieties followed. In eighth-century Baghdad, a musician named Zalzal introduced the 'ud al-shabbut, perhaps referring to an 'ud shaped like a large river fish of the Tigris and Euphrates. This was around the time the 'ud was playing a leading role in the flowering of Arab music and culture that peaked beginning with the reign of Caliph Harun al-Rashid. 'Ud players also provided entertainment for the wealthy.
It was also around this time that Muslim scholars approached the 'ud using Greek musical concepts to explain Arab music theory. They studied the mathematical relationships among the notes and the maqamat (modes or scales) from Arab, Persian, Greek and Byzantine sources, proposing tunings and fret placements that used movable gut or string.
Over the centuries, scholars have classified 'uds according to the numbers of strings on them. Some early instruments offered four, while modern ones offer six. The 'ud al-qadim (old 'ud), for example, had four strings. It was this design that was popular in ninth-century Baghdad, where the musician Ziryab added a fifth to make the 'ud kamil (perfect 'ud). Habib Hassan Touma, author of Music of the Arabs, explains that the four well-known strings were named after the Greek concept of the body's four "humors," but the fifth string "symbolized the soul, since the four body humors, as [Ziryab] maintained, could not exist without the soul."
Later players added a second string to each of the five, creating a course, or a set of double strings, tuned identically, which added volume. By 1500, a six-course, 'ud akmal (more perfect 'ud) appeared, followed by the yet more-extended 'ud mukamal with seven courses. In recent years, even an eight-course 'ud has popped up. Today, however, most have five courses and a single bass string, for a total of 11 strings.
The stories of surviving antique 'uds link to the instrument's recent past, and Beckles Willson champions their stories in her research. A classically trained musician, composer and saxophonist, the professor traveled to Israel and Palestine in 2006 to research classical music in Arab communities. There she met Nizar Rohana, a musician and instrument collector.
She was thus introduced to the 'ud, she recalls, "as something rich historically and also variegated, so every single instrument was different in size, shape, story, sound and type of decoration."
She connects 'uds with her experience in the region, equating their little-known musical stories with both the larger stories of the cultures of the region and more personal family stories like Shaheen's.
Beckles Willson's research led to 'ud lessons, and also to founding oudmigrations.com, a website for sharing stories on historic 'uds and musicians.
Oudmigrations.com collaborator Karim Othman Hassan writes about what may be the oldest existing 'ud, now housed in the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels. The Egyptian instrument arrived in Brussels in 1839, and it is an example of the seven-course 'ud mukamal.
Well into the late 19th century, the 'ud persisted in popularity as Arab music blossomed and, in the 20th century, transitioned into recordings and film. Virtuoso 'ud players rose to celebrity on the airwaves, and 'ud makers flourished too. Today, musicians and collectors have their prized 'uds, and among them, the highest reputation is accorded those made by the Nahat family of Damascus from the 1870s to the 1980s. Their 'uds are considered some of the best around, combining exquisite craft and outstanding sound. Over the generations the Nahat family made thousands of 'uds, and many still exist. Shaheen attributes part of the Nahat family's success to their proximity to high-quality instrument makers in Turkey and Europe.
"The Nahats set up the structural sound bracing of the 'ud, and that's what most Arab 'ud makers use today," Shaheen says.
To achieve their preferred range of sounds, 'ud players consider a combination of features. And 'ud makers will also customize instruments to the changing sound preferences of their clients. For example, Shaheen notes that some Arab players prefer Turkish 'uds, while some Turkish ones prefer Arab 'uds. Turkish 'uds he explains, tune one note higher than Arab 'uds, and Turkish 'uds are built to withstand that higher tension, thus bringing out bright, higher tones. Arab 'uds, which often feature elaborate inlay decorations around the sound holes and on the neck, can be wider and larger, and offer warmer, richer tones than their smaller counterparts.
'Ud makers around the world now post videos of themselves working in their shops and playing their creations as part of a movement online that has aided the instrument's long popularity. Teachers of the 'ud share technique tips on YouTube, and dedicated students study with teachers continents away. Even for Shaheen, as he sits in his workshop, so far from his homeland and so many years removed from his childhood living room, where he once listened to stoppers-by playing the 'ud, he continues to connect with other 'ud enthusiasts worldwide. He is one of many Arab musicians carrying the story of the 'ud into the future, and with every song his fingers direct, the tradition lives on another day.