Ruth, my late mother-in-law, was an avid birdwatcher. With her trusty binoculars, she pursued her interest wherever she settled and wandered. She did her rounds in UK, New Zealand (where she finally settled down), Singapore, Malaya, Hong Kong, Fiji and and most remarkably in Australia when she was in her 70s.
Lely, my former student from Jurong Secondary School is another bird enthusiast. She would spend many, many hours of her weekends in Singapore, her visits to our abode in KL and Leicester, as well as her overseas trips (with Darby and Joan) to New Zealand; taking umpteen photographs of birds. From Lely, I learned to recognise the names, the songs and the plumage of some birds, especially the ones in our garden at Setiawangsa. She has a stockpile of thousands of photographs of birds, flowers, iguana, bats, lizards and all sorts of creepy crawlies and even of our dumb domestic cats - in fact, all of God's creatures that she loves and respects. Part of her collection is located at :
Though deprived of her ability to continue this great pleasure of her life, she retains her chirpy, optimistic self, just like her beloved birds! She's still - in her spirit - flying free, joyous and rejoicing despite being in a wheelchair, just like her celebrated birds!
However, I must admit I am not a good student. If I were Lely, I would give Ash just 3 marks out of 10!!!
During the PKP ( Movement Control Order), I am beginning to appreciate even more the peace that our feathered friends bring: their morning chorus, the tweetings during brunch and lunch time and the busy chirpings before bedtime in the evenings.
Also, during the PKP I began to sort out my Stamp Album and opened a folder on 'Birds in Stamps' from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Here's part of the folder - on birds of Malaysia and Singapore.
Left to Right : Hornbill (48 inches long), Argus Pheasant ( 29 - 39 inches), Barred Ground Dove ( 9 inches )
Left to Right : Resident Paradise Flycatcher (7-8 inches ), Tern, Chamar ( 13 inches), Pittas (8 inches)
Left to Right : Common Shama, Murai Hutan, Murai Batu (10 inches), White-breasted Kingfisher, Pekaka (10 inches), Yellow-breasted Sunbird, Kelichap ( 4.5 inches)
NOTE : On Malaysian Stamps, the country's name is firstly written in JAWI. So why the vociferous opposition to learning Jawi in schools in 2019???? Birds I have seen and/or heard in our garden 1. Perenjak/Tailorbird
But here is my pride and joy - my very own discovery in our garden in Kuala Lumpur.
The Nest of the Tailor Bird or Perenjak.
It had dropped(?), fallen(?) into the garden. I can't believe my luck, to be able to touch (and revere) this serindipity-find. But I feel so sorry for the mother-bird who had worked so hard to sew this nest. My joy is this poor bird's sorrow! Fortunately, there was no egg or baby bird in the nest. The mother-bird must have just started on this little home of hers.
" The nest, which is similar in all the lowland Tailor Birds, is a very remarkable structure. Most usually a single large, living leaf is curled round by twisting strands of spider's web silk round it, so that the opposite edges come together. These are then joined by a method usually described as sewing, but really more like riveting. Holes are punched opposite each other near the two edges, and tangled spider's webs or tree-cotton (kapok) is pushed through and teased out on each side so as to hold the edges together. ........ In the resultant pouch the nest is built of vegetable fibre mixed with kapok or lalang down, and firmly anchored by stitches or rivets pierced through the leaf. "
(From 'Common Malayan Birds' by M.W.F. Tweedie, Longmans of Malaysia, 1960; pg 49)
The Tailor Bird is just one of God's creatures making use of its God-given skills to live and survive on this earth with the minimal damage to its surroundings. But this is not my first nest.
The first time was in 1952/1953 when Ash discovered a little nest on the ground, in the grass-shrubbery patch not far from our local kedai Seng Teow at Kampung Abu Kassim, Pasir Panjang. It was about 5 inches in diameter, made up of layers of tiny bits of dried leaves, grass and twigs woven into a kind of cup-shape. It was just about 2-3 inches deep, enough I suppose for a mother bird to sit on comfortably, while hatching her little clutch of eggs. I gasped at its incredible design, so simple and fragile and yet so practical for the pro-creation and continuity of life on this earth. I can't remember seeing any eggs in the nest. I let it be, and kept my discovery a secret. I was fairly certain that this nest would be safe because no kids would find this semi-belukar a good place to play in and thank goodness, in those days, motorcycles and cars were rare in our kampung.
-
I don't know which came first - this unforgettable first encounter with a bird's nest or this reading passage from my primary school text-book; The Radiant Way.
The Chapter - The Lark's Nest
The above extract is taken from ...
It's a shame that the names of the authors were not in the book. However, on the Internet, I found out the authors were Jane Brown and Elizabeth L. Sinton. You can, with a bit of difficulty, just locate the illustrator's name, Rene Cloke, from the little notation on some of the really beautiful colour-drawings. This series was first published in 1933. Other editions were made in 1953 and 1960. I guess I must have been taught with the 1953 Reprint. I have in my keeping the 1963 Reprint which I excavated from a little bookstore at Chowrasta Market, Penang in 1992. Another epic discovery!!
The Perenjak / Tailor Bird is a very common bird in our kampungs and gardens. It is a very noisy - and I can vouch for it - and secretive bird. Look out or rather, keep your ears open for this little (only about 5 1/2 inches in size) bird. Here's a video by Azlina Abdul on this seamstress-chatterbox.
This is what the Perenjak/Tailor Bird (D) looks like.
Plate 15 A. Magpie Robin, B. Common Shama, C. Chestnut-Backed Fork-Tail, D. Long-Tailed Tailor Bird
It's taken from .....
Although Tweedie's book was first published in 1960, it remains the main reference book for this wannabe twitcher since 2007.
I shall begin with an apology. We old geezers are prone to repeating ourselves; with our stories and experiences. We are inclined to slide into reminiscences, beginning with "Aaah, I remember the time when I ... blah, blah, blah ........." and we fail to see the faces with their eyes rolled up and the silent voices saying, "Here we go again."
However, it's not my intention to foist upon my readers the tales of past times and old writings.
The trouble is, man's bigotry and ignorance tend to echo the sins and stupidity of their forefathers ; from one generation to the next. And so you get the same old replay - with the codgers and the whippersnappers, the eminences and the hoi polloi at loggerheads over the same old bile and prejudices.
For this part of the AAF (Anglo-American Fetish) I cannot add any new revelation about the mouthings of the present PM of Great Britain. They will be merely repetitions and extensions of the old Islamophobe chestnut that his progenitors expounded on. There is, for example, the legacy of their hero and national pride like Sir Winston Churchill.
In his 1899 book 'The River War" relating to the British war in Sudan Churchill had this to say :
There's also the four times British Prime Minister William Gladstone (1809-1898) who called the Quran an "accursed book" and held it up during a session in Parliament, saying: " So long as there is this book there will be no peace in the world."
I suppose one could find excuses for such contempt: those were different times, an era when white Christian Britannia ruled the waves. We cannot expect them to know better!
But old habits die hard.
********************************* The Bottom Feeders
We are well aware of right-wing extremists in UK like the BNP and others.
From Wikipedia
And this list is only partial - think, for example, of LibertyGB and the English Defence League. Such groups may be variously categorized as nationalists, far-right, white supremacists, hard-right, radical right, fascist right, ultra-right, xenophobic - and they target (so the pundits say) foreigners, coloureds, blacks and Jews.
We are bombarded with terms like Islamists, jihadists, Muslim extremists, Islamo-fascists in the print and electronic media. However the label religious/Christianist Extremists hardly ever sticks to white (and non-white) Christian affiliated groups - Anders Brevik, for example, and the Klu Klux Klan are merely lone rangers and aberrations of white/Christian culture. Christianity is likewise absolved of ungodly practices like slavery, the Holocaust, apartheid and imperialism.
Feed your eyes on these images of the Right Wing Christian Extremists "Britain First".
Note the non-white participant - a genuine True Brit.
Britain First is also reported by Channel 4 - A bona fide mainstream news channel.
East and West - Never the Twain shall meet. (Kipling)
If ISIS are breeding an international group of followers - so is this German anti-Islam Fascist mob Pegida.
Pegida = the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident.
**************************** Feeders at the High Table They are quite a hallowed lot ranging from Saints, Presidents, philosophers, novelists, Prime Ministers, and some women too! Here are some names you can throw into the hat : Theodore Roosevelt, St Thomas Aquinas, Bertrand Russell, Stephen Harper, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wole Soyinka, Francois Gautier, Taslima Nasreen, Narendra Modi, Naipaul and Rushdie and of course Trump and Cameron.
Take your pick!! ***********************
But getting back to the British Prime Minister David Cameron. How his heart bleeds for the salvation of Muslim women. He reckons they should be made to learn and speak English so that they are better enabled to absorb and live up to British values .....
...... or else .... get out of Britain?!??
He had referred to this nagging problem of Muslim integration on 14 June 2014.
..
He was adamant that :
It bemuses me as to why Western men and women are so up in arms about the rights and plight of Muslim women. There's no denying that the integrity, equity and propriety of women of all faiths and colour and shapes require more attention than ever.
Let me quote these from Femmes d'Islam (Women in Islam) by Assia Djebar, translated from French by Jean Mac Gibbon.
1. Interesting though it is to see what swamps of uncertainty lie in wait for those who think they know most about the problem of the evolution of Moslem women because they are its victims, we should also turn our attention to those who, for a variety of different reasons and on a number of different levels simply pontificate on the problem. (page 11) 2. But there are worse forms of curiosity than these - more infuriating and laughable because more pretentious or naive. I mean the well-intentioned, ignorant stranger who is convinced beyond proof that the benighted Moslem woman must be 'rescued' from her misery. And those less disinterested persons - among them learned scholars - who claim that Moslem women have inferior status in Moslem society because they are excluded from its public activities.(page 12) And this book was written 55 years ago in 1961!!! For your information, David Cameron, a descendant of King William IV was born in 1966. For me, the most telling part of Assia Djebar's book is found in the first paragraph of the first chapter. The story goes that there was once an old Arab who arrived in a European city straight from the wilds of his own land and was amazed at the pictures of women he saw everywhere : on the films, on shoe boxes, on cheese cartons - on everything that was for sale. He left the town the same day, or so they say, greatly pitying the women who lived there; in his simplicity he believed that some terrible nameless form of punishment lay behind this exploitation of their likeness.(page 5) In 1961 David Cameron was just a twinkle in his pater's eyes and I very much doubt if he had been told this little story by his nanny !!!!!! ..... or even got any inkling of such a book or such a subject when in 1988, he graduated First Class in PPE at Oxford !!!!!!! But, finally, let us indulge Cameron's angst about Muslim women in UK - and ask what the future holds for them. What is the "right" and the "wrong'' of their future status ? Is it this?
Or this?
"Showing off. A woman crosses the road wearing a skimpy outfit on Birmingham's Broad Street." From Mirror Online 1 January 2016.
What about this one? Hmmmm .... not good enough. That burka doesn't fit into our culture.
Next .. please. Maybe this is the ideal non-white, non-Christian British citizen.
From AsH's posting of 6 years ago.
Now that's our cuppa tea!!!! **********************************************
What have I been up to since arriving in the spouse's kampung 10 days ago?
It has been a leisurely and peaceful stroll, without (well, not as much as in KL) a care - an absolute lenggang kangkung! The spouse had a nasty cough and cold for the last 5 days but he's picking up sans any medication, just a good dose of sleep and rest. As people in Malaysia like to put it - 'no sweat'- literally and figuratively.
This photograph shows the reflection of my refuge on the outside world at 5 am.
I took this photograph just an hour ago, at 5 am. The rest of Leicester is still asleep but AsH treasures such solitary moments.
So, what have I been up to this winter?
1. I gave myself a present - a beautifully embroidered picture of clouds, greenery, apple trees in Spring and the top of a stone wall - sewn by our best friend and master embroiderer Jack Marlowe. Jack is almost 80 and despite his arthriticky fingers, he perseveres with his embroidery and gardening and spoiling his four cats Allegra, Gingerlation, Ichabod and Schtanley.
And, talking about cats - I miss our three cats very, very much - they define our raison d'etre in Kuala Lumpur.
Rusty - splendour in the grass.
Socks - the reluctant researcher
Comot loves to take a nap on the printer.
Comot - tired out after helping me with my printing.
2. Indulging Myself.
My self-indulgent Comestible Corner.
3. Feeding my mind as well, on my cosy couch.
Book 1: Hundreds of programmes, but less than ten are worth watching. My latest fad is gratifying myself with old koboi programmes like The High Chaparral, Gunsmoke, Alias Smith and Jones and Star Trek. Wottalife!!
*********************************
.
Book 2: "Ziauddin Sardar was born in Pakistan and grew up in Hackney. A writer, broadcaster and cultural critic, he is one of the world's foremost Muslim intellectuals and author of more than fifty books on Islam, science and contemporary culture, including the highly acclaimed Desperately Seeking Paradise."
I've got only as far as Page 91 but here's an excerpt from one of the most touching parts of the book (Page 39-40).
A select group called on Abu Talib again. How could he allow his nephew to curse their gods, insult their religion, mock their way of life, and accuse their forefathers of error? Abu Talib was left in no doubt: "Shut your nephew up or we will." We now know that the relationship between Abu Talib and his nephew is crucial to the success of his mission and yet curiously paradoxical at the same time. Everything we know about it indicates a warm bond of affection. In accordance with the custom of his clan, Abu Talib took Muhammad in as a seven-year-old orphan. He raised and nurtured the boy, taught him the rudiments of trade and commerce, and exposed him to the wider world by taking him on trading expeditions. It is thanks to his uncle that Muhammad secured his place in Meccan society. ...........He summoned his nephew. "Do not put a burden on me greater than I can bear,' he told Muhammad.. 'Spare me and spare yourself.' Muhammad feared he was about to lose his uncle's protection. With tears in his eyes, he replied: 'By God if they put the sun in my right hand and the moon on my left on condition that I abandon this course, I would not abandon it until God has made me victorious or I perish.' As he turned away from his uncle, Abu Talib called Muhammad back: 'Go and say what you please, for by God I will never give you up on any account.' Abu Talib was not declaring himself a convert. He was a fond uncle accepting the sincerity of his nephew's cry of conscience, no matter how troublesome or disconcerting that might be to the rest of society. And what is the paradox? What Muhammad preached sought to overturn, indeed to replace entirely the ethos and conventions of tribal solidarity. Yet it was this very principle extended and guaranteed by Abu Talib that secured Muhammad's personal safety and hence his ability to continue his mission. It is a paradox of human dynamics, of how the progress of new ideas often rests on the survival of old ways. ******************************
Book 3
Yesterday (Tuesday) I made my usual foray into Leicester Animal Rescue (LAR) my favourite charity shop/shopping mall. I noticed this book "The Making of Britain - The Middle Ages" in a box marked '50p' just outside the shop. As I flicked through the pages, I came across page 24 which had the illustrations 'Medieval Islamic scholars at work in a library' and most fascinating of all 'A page from an Arabic translation of Euclid''! It was worth 50p and more.
I took it home, skimmed through the contents, and discovered more.
An eleventh century map of the world. (from page 8). In this map, the Mediterranean is the centre of the land mass and Jerusalem as the çentre of creation'.
This extract from page 9-10 elaborates on this - and provides an interesting facet about the First Crusade:
Intellectually, this view of the world linked medieval scholars to what they had read of classical antiquity, and to the world of St Paul and St Augustine. At the same time it shows us how, to them, Christendom seemed hemmed in by heretics and infidels. It makes us realise why, when Pope Urban II in 1095 called for volunteers from western Europe to go to the help of Christians in the East, it was interpreted as a call to liberate Jerusalem from the clutches of Islam. Yet the odd fact is that when the First Crusade set out, Jerusalem had been in the hands of the Moslems for over four hundred years ......... Crusading zeal for the expulsion of the infidel was something quite new in the eleventh century and it was profoundly shocking to native Christians and Moslems of the Near East who for generations had learned to live together in mutual respect.
Alas, history has a way of repeating itself. And who controls Jerusalem today?
***********************************
But with all my blessings : with my cats, my books and food on the table and all my home comforts. I cannot obliterate the sufferings of so many in the Middle East and especially in Palestine.
The following image and extracts are from Mondoweiss 13 December.
....... in the last few weeks I find myself preferring to keep away from printed and electronic news and views. I know that in the razzmatazz-culture of software and hard disks and facebook and twitter; books and the appreciation of books are not coooool. Well, as a card-carrying member of the dinosaur generation I've been indulging myself again, leafing through my collection of books - books I've been accumulating since the 1960s, books that were bought brand-new from MPH, Donald Moore, Peter Chong and University bookshops during the 1960s and 1970s - as well as second-hand books scavenged in Singapore, Batu Pahat, Muar, Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Kangsar, Chowrasta in Penang, Brunei, India, and New Zealand. The cream of the crop came from forays to jumble sales, charity shops, library book sales, car boots and second hand book shops in England. Because it's such an oldy-woldy country there's such an abundance of antiquated and nostalgic stuff to amass - from stamps and spoons to books and writing bureaus. But I digress.
In the old days when books had pride of place in many homes, books published by Penguin were as common as mobiles and televisions and computers today. Remember this ?
Fig. 1
I first read this in 1960 and again a few months ago. The detective-hero is Albert Campion and I was unaware until just recently, that Margery Allingham's stories had been made into a BBC TV series in 1989-1990.
Penguin Books were first published in 1935 - making inexpensive paperback books available to the public. Penguin was responsible not only for producing fiction but also books on serious themes in the sciences, arts and politics.
Back in the 1930s, Noel Carrington met up with the founder of Penguin, Allen Lane and suggested a series of fiction and non-fiction paperback books for children. And so Puffin Books was born. Puffin grew in leaps and bounds stretching from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis to Roald Dahl, Janet and Alan Ahlberg and Richard Adam's Watership Down (which I read many times over and which made me cry buckets of tears each time!).
Here are a couple of Puffin books in my keeping.
Fig. 2 . First published 1937. Published in Puffin Story Books 1955.
Fig. 3 -1980s Fiction.
As for the Puffin logo it had had several makeovers.
Fig. 4 - 1940s
Fig. 5 - 1970s
Fig. 6 - 1980s
In keeping up with technology, Puffin now produces Puffin Virtually Live - a series of interactive webcasts.
But give me the paper-back version any time - one I can read in the bus, behind the door to escape my mother looking for me to buy her kelapa parut from the one shop (about 1 mile away from our Pasir Panjang kampung) that had the hi-tech (for the 1950s!) machine for grating raw coconut. Best of all I can tuck away my book - all dog-eared and mucky - under my pillow.
But this is my most precious Puffin, nicked from the spouse's book shelf 31 years ago!! He tried to reclaim this Puffin but as it doesn't have his name in it - too bad, mate!
Fig. 7
Fig. 8 - Note the flags of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Transjordan.
"The Arabs" was published in 1947, written by R. B. Serjeant and illustrated by Edward Bawden. Because I had a thoroughly colonial education, and learned very little about the non-Christian/Caucasian world, this book would have been a real change from imbibing the history of Imperial India, Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand, UK the Motherland, Europe and China. For someone who is fascinated with maps, this book provides wonderful maps to show the location of the Arab world in 750 AD and the Arab world 'today' between 1919 up to the end of the Second World War as well as a map of pre-Israel Palestine.
Map 1 - The Arab World in AD 750
Map 2 - The Arab World between 1919 (the end of the Ottoman Empire) and 1945.
Map 3 - Palestine before the creation of Israel in 1948.
The world tends to regard the Arabs (and Muslims for that matter) as a homogeneous group of people. But Serjeant made this very clear when he wrote this in 1947.
Fig. 9 - From page 3.
He then went on to describe Arab life in the villages, of the freer life in the desert, of mountain Arabs, Marsh Arabs and Arabs of the sea coast. Serjeant made a "sincere effort to present the history and culture of the region". In school we all learned about Vasco Da Gama as the first European to reach India by sea, linking Europe and the East. But we were never told about his Arab pilot Ibn Majid ...
Fig. 10 - From page 14.
......... which Serjeant did!
The rest of the book touched upon the birth and growth of Islam, the Arab conquests, the Ummayad and Abbasid Caliphates and just a cursory reference to the Crusades.
When Serjeant moved on to the topics of the decline and the awakening of the Arabs, then we see the workings of the imperial designs of the British, the French, the Italians and the Germans to carve up the post-Ottoman Muslim Middle East into their little fiefdoms. Compare Map 2 and Map 4 especially the division and creation of smaller Arab states like Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan (Trans Jordan), Iraq, Sudan and Egypt and of course Saudi Arabia.
Note how Serjeant ( a Scottish 'Arabist' and traveller, who lived from 1915 to 1993) dismissed the mighty Ottoman Empire ......
Map 4 - The Ottoman Empire in 1683 (Wikipedia)
...... as " backward Turkish rulers"
Fig. 11 (from page 31)
The Ottoman empire, founded in 1299, ended in 1922 because they "could not resist the advance of modern western states like Britain and France". It was one of the world's most powerful states in the 15th and 16th centuries. Extending from the Middle East to Hungary, the Balkans, Greece and parts of the Ukraine, it was regarded as a transcontinental empire, and a meeting point between east and west. But like all empires it could not last for ever.
This was how Serjeant (and the Caucasian-Christian powers) laid out the future of the Muslim-Arab world after the First and Second World War.
Fig 12 - from page 30
Fig 13 - from page 31
A striking feature of this Puffin book is the lack of photographs. It is illustrated completely by sketches and drawings by Bawden (1903-1989) a well-known English illustrator and painter. Lovely for a children's book, but I remembered other ways of recording history....
So let me try to link Bawden's sketches with some photographs - and with some stamps from the spouse's childhood stamp album. The spouse himself has a hazy memory of the Middle East (he remembers seeing the banks of the Suez Canal in 1947). But his childhood was scattered with images of Middle Eastern politics nevertheless - in his stamp album..
1. King Abd al-Aziz of Saudi Arabia (1876-1953). In 1915 he allied himself with the British and Arabia became a British protectorate from 1915-1927. In 1932 he declared himself as King of Saudi Arabia. In Map 1, there's only 'Arabia' and it became 'Saudi Arabia' in Map 2.
In 1937 American explorers discovered oil in Saudi Arabia , "more oil ....... than in the United States itself !" (Serjeant)
2. King Faisal I of Iraq
King Faisal I ( 1883-1933). Reigned from 1921 - 1933.
King Faisal had a very complex background. He was the son of the Sharif of Mecca (the then guardian of Islam's holy places). His association with T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt are all too familiar. He was at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Even though Syrian nationalists had installed him as their ruler in 1920 (with the blessings of the British), the French threw him out and Faisal was given the second prize by the British - they planned a new throne for him in Iraq. We all know how this game of musical chairs is still being played out in the Middle East, this time with new goons on the block like the USA and Israel!
His reign was fraught with problems but he managed to maneuvre some kind of independence for Iraq in 1932. In the end, his role in juggling the various anarchic factions in Iraq ended only in tears and he died in 1933 in Berne - poisoned according to some sources.
He was succeeded by his son Ghazi I (1912-1939) but his reign was short (1933-1939). Ghazi was killed in a mysterious car crash and his son Faisal II (1935-1958) the boy-king was installed ......
Faisal II (1935-1958). Reigned from 1939-1958.
........ guided by the Regent, his uncle. Faisal's reign was cut short mainly because of the Regent's and his decision to allow UK to retain control of Iraqi affairs. Iraq was tied up to the British Empire by a 25 year military alliance with the British maintaining her military bases. The Iraq Petroleum Company, a conglomerate of British, French and US interests were ensured concessions for oil exploration and production. There were massive protests against these so-called alliances with Britain and the West and hundreds of demonstrators died. As a result the relationship between the King and the people deteriorated. In 1958 Faisal II was deposed and killed in the July Revolution of 1958. Iraq became a Republic and was ruled by various secular leaders culminating in the rise of Saddam Hussein as President of Iraq in 1979.
3. Sidi Idris al-Sanusi or Idris of Libya (1889-1983)
Idris of Libya (1889-1983) . Reigned from 1951-1969.
....and from the spouse's stamp album:
Libya was seized from the Ottomans and she became an Italian colony from 1910-1947.
Idris allied himself with the British during the Second World War to get rid of the Italian colonists. He was the first and only king of Libya and was deposed in 1969 in a coup led by Army Officers.
Muammar Gaddafi became President of Libya from 1969 until he was "defeated " and murdered during the "Arab Spring Awakening" of 2011. Gaddafi was, for many years, a thorn in the side of the West and the "Arab Spring" was a god-given opportunity for NATO countries to break up and weaken this belligerent and oil-rich Arab nation.
4. Emir Abdullah of Transjordan / King Abdullah I of Jordan
Abdullah 1 of Jordan ( 1882-1951)
Emir of Transjordan from 1921-1946
King of Jordan from 1946-1951
Brother of King Faisal I of Iraq, he worked with the Brtish agent T.E. Lawrence against Ottoman rule during the First World War. The Jordanian royal family, up to the present, have been close allies of the British. In fact the mother of the present King Abdullah II was the daughter of a British military officer.
King Abdullah I was assassinated at Al Aqsa in 1951
5. Imam Yahya of Yemen (1869-1948) Reigned from (1918-1948)
Imam Yahya came from the al-Qasimi dynasty who had been ruling "most of Yemen proper and South Saudi Arabia for 900 years" (wiki). Today Yemen, like Libya and Iraq, is awash with violence and bloodshed - caught up in a maelstrom of political machinations by the West and its proxies, and the fractured and divisive legacies of post-Ottoman, post First World War policies.
Certainly Serjeant's summation has come to naught.
Fig. 14 - Page 31
Fig. 15 -Page 32
Imam Yahya was assassinated in February 1948 by a member of the Bani Murad tribe.
6. King Farouq of Egypt (1920-1965) reigned from 1936-1952. The Egyptian monarchy was set up by the British in the 1920s and Farouq succeeded his father King Fuad I in 1936. He led a "scandalous and grotesquely self-indulgent lifestyle and the belief that some of his closest associates had profited by supplying defective weapons and munitions to the forces had eroded the army's loyalty" - he was "despised at home and abroad as an ineffectual playboy", (Richard Cavendish in History Today.2002).
(1920-1965)
King Farouq ruled from 1936-1952
He was overthrown in a coup led by Army Officers in 1952 and Egypt was declared a Republic.
As Serjeant was concerned only with the British fiefdoms in the Middle East; Syria and Lebanon which were part of the French booty after the end of the Ottoman empire were not included in his purview. Still, I shall insert those stamps from the 1930s that celebrated the hegemony of the Christian-Caucasian Europeans before the coming of the mighty Empire of the United States-cum-Israel.
Lebanon
Syria
And the most pulverized people in the world - Palestine.
Us and Them: Ethnocentrism and Racism As any demagogue will tell you, if you want to instill a certain belief in a population, get 'em while they're young. Children are generally short on life experience, and must rely on adults for much of their information about the world. This provides the perfect opportunity for a culture to pass its worst qualities - racism, xenophobia, etc - to the next generation. A Malaysian Postscript
How would my view of Arabs and Arab history be tainted if I had read Serjeant's and Bawden's book when I was 10-11? In those days, of course, my perception of the non-white/Christian world was effectively perverted by my colonial education. However, as we can observe around us here in Malaysia and in other parts of the Islamic world, we are doing to ourselves what the West worked so hard to achieve, in brainwashing our fathers and forefathers.
Here's a video of our Arab brothers making their annual hijrah to London to escape the heat in Arabland and to swagger their wealth - and this time it coincides with Ramadan 2015! Was this what their forefathers fought for nearly a hundred years ago?
Eid Mubarak!
Today the Arabs in the Middle East have not "fallen behind the West in scientific and technical progress." (See Fig. 10, from page 31.) But they now have unremitting wars and bloodshed. Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Palestine have become an inferno of chaos and violence and deaths. I wonder what Serjeant would write about the Syrian refugees fleeing in desperation for safety and succour.
Here in our part of the world, we have our version of 'Young Turks' - eager to be The Other, to rise above the colour of their skin and the framework of their culture, to deny their ethnicity and to claim 'we are all the same'.
Well, just last week we found ourselves sitting at breakfast in our local makan shop with a Malaysian academic, He had a Ph.D and as he is a Malay in his late 50s, I guess he must be one of those beneficiaries of the NEP during the reign of his much-hated UMNO - paid for by the rakyat. He is very knowledgeable in western science and Islam. Over our plates of tosai he expounded to us about al-Qada' wa'l-Qadar (Divine Will and Decree), and to conclude his pontificating he declared that he preferred to be regarded as a Muslim and not a Malay. (And this Muslim male, by the way, tended to look away - or down his nose -whenever I had something to add to the conversation.)
What experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. ( Hegel 1770 - 1831) Et tu Malays? [Even you/And you Malays ?]
But then - I'm only a woman! And this post is just a female's jaunt into escapism.
