Why would someone deny themselves food and water during daylight hours for the entire month of Ramadan, one might ask?  One word.  Qateyef. (pronounced something like (guh-TAH-yuf). When Ramadan starts, these qateyef grills spring up like mushrooms all over Jordan. Here is the shop of Abu Ali, the best qateyef maker in all of Amman, and the line waiting for his qateyef that stretches five floors down a stone staircase.

And here is how to make them.

Buy a package of freshly made qadeyef at your local Arab store (the mosques ladies make them at home with Aunt Jemima pancake mix).

Put your favorite filling–okay, “favourite”– on half of the qateyef.  Fold it over and pinch the edges together (they are a little bit sticky). On the left is cheese “mostly ricotta” mixed by the bakery (but with a little extra sweet and salt flavor) and on the right is chopped walnuts.

At this point, some Jordanian cooks will float the qateyef briefly in a boiling attar bath.  I don’t do this because 1) they come out too sweet and 2) I can’t keep them from falling apart in the pot.  So I heated these in a pan in the toaster oven. Here is the attar that will get poured over them:

The ingredients are sugar, water, orange flower water, and lemon juice. I guessed at the proportions and it came out perfectly.  Put the warm qateyef on a plate and drench them with the attar. Then enjoy.  Many like to smoke an after iftar argila. This one has apple flavored tobacco (tufaa تفاحة ). The tobacco goes in the top, covered with aluminum foil with holes poked in it.  A glowing piece of charcoal is placed on the top.  In the U.S., argila charcoal is hard to come by, so many use self lighting charcoal that comes in commercially prepared rolls wrapped in aluminum foil.  All you do is remove one perfectly round piece of charcoal, hold it over a lighter or a burner until it is glowing, then put it on top of the aluminum foil.

I am still missing a couple details for Ramadan.  For one thing I haven’t done any charitable works yet, so I will have to start sorting my clothes and find something to donate. The other thing is that one-thirtieth of the Koran is usually read every day, but it is done in a special mosque service called taraweh. The mosque is really too far away to participate in that–on a regular basis at least–so I may have to find a substitute reading activity. Already I have some ideas.

Iftar إفطار means “breakfast” in Arabic (pronounced “IF-tar”).

During Ramadan, when the sun sets, it is traditional to break the fast with dates and water. (From sunup to sundown, one abstains from food, water, sex, and tobacco.) Then comes iftar–the evening “breakfast”–often served to large crowds as part of the daily charity requirement of Ramadan.

Here is a traditional Arab meal: pita bread “hobez” خبز , felafel فلافل , hommous حمّص‎ (with olive oil–zait zaytoon زيت زيتون and sumac السماق , a red powder–sprinkled on top), and black tea with fresh mint (shai na-na شاي بالنعناع ), the mint having been pilfered from my nicely spreading Jordanian mint plant (thank you, nameless mosque ladies) the last time I went across the street to my old landlord’s building to mow the lawn.

There will be desert حلويات heluwayat, oh yeah.

I have finally gotten around to making a Ramadan Kareem image for my side bar.  This image of the moon is courtesy of NASA.

The best coffee in the world is bedouin coffee ground with cardamom. You can still get it custom ground in Arabic grocery shops, but today I used the commercial Najjar brand to make it.

While this may be the best tasting coffee there is, the effects may not always be desirable. The coffee itself is a fine powder similar to espresso, and with similar effects.

I always find myself unable to sleep after drinking this coffee, which for some reason always happens late at night while having a spirited conversation with some Arab who is trying to learn English.

Paradoxically, today I drank the coffee early in the morning and found myself lying down for “just a minute”–and waking up three hours later.

Drink this coffee at your own peril!

Here are the instructions:

Start with cold water.
Put in a heaping spoon of coffee.
Then add an equal amount of sugar.
Stir. (The quantities shown are a bit skimpy.)
Boil. You have to keep watching this as it will boil over very quickly. Once it starts boiling, keep stirring it and continue to boil for a couple minutes. You will have to lift it off the flame and keep stirring.
Let it sit a few minutes to let the sludge settle to the bottom.
Pour it out into a finjon. An espresso cup will work fine.
Let settle again and enjoy.

A corollary activity is reading the coffee grounds in the bottom of the cup, but since Ramadan begins tomorrow, I hesitate to discuss this in depth.

This morning starts out with a series of disjointed religious observations about reconciliation.

Order of Worship.

The very format of a Christian service incorporates reconciliation in the order of worship, although there is some variation in the interpretation.  One contemporary writer places “confession and reconciliation”  together after the “approach”.  The order is

1. APPROACH (music, welcome, invocation, hymn, Old Testament reading)
2. LITANY OF CONFESSION AND RECONCILIATION (and Lord’s Prayer)
3. COMMUNITY: RELATING TO EACH OTHER (prayers)
4. LISTENING TO THE WORD (Old and New Testament readings, hymn, sermon)
5. RESPONSE (hymn, prayer)
6. COMMUNION (distribution of bread and wine, hymn)
7. COMMISSION [Dedication to commitment and service for week ahead, benediction, music recessional]

In case anyone is not sure about the “sins”, they are spelled out:

For the greed which exploits others and wastes the good earth…
For wanting more and more while so many have less and less…
For our indifference to the suffering of the poor: the hungry, the homeless, the tortured and the oppressed…
For the lust which misuses others for our own selfish desires…
For the pride which leads us to trust too much in ourselves and not in You…

It is these sins, or perhaps merely being in the physical world instead of the spiritual one, or perhaps just not having been able to resolve all the social problems and issues of our day, that distances us from God. The ritual acknowledges the distance, and brushes off the dust of whatever ugliness we’ve encountered during the week for the purpose of putting aside barriers to spiritual closeness with God.

Another writer places confession of sins further on in the order as part of the conversation with God and as a response to hearing the words of God:

Consider the flow of our worship: gathering; hearing God’s Word; responding to God’s Word by an expression of faith and confession of sin; making our offering to God and lifting up our prayers of Thanksgiving.

I could quarrel with all those semicolons and especially with the omission of the Harvard comma, but this particular writer’s historical musings are an interesting tangent.

Communion.

I suppose this is the ultimate reconciliation with God; killing God, tearing apart God’s flesh, eating God, and drinking God’s blood to achieve a numinous merging with the deity.  The Biblical basis for communion is in John 6:56 “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him”.

Islam.

This means submission to God. The Islamic worship of God is simple.  A call to prayer, several repetitions of postures (called “rahkans”) including leaning at a 90 degree angle with hands on knees, on hands knees with forehead touching the ground, and standing, either looking at the palms of the hands or with one hand over the other. But what is the God being submitted to?  A God you can carry in your stomach in the form of bread? I admit I don’t know all the Islamic conceptions of God, but for sure the Moslem god, like the Jewish god,  is one who sends rules, lots of them, and expects them to be obeyed, but at the same time is regarded as being merciful and compassionate. (most verses of Koran begin “bismallah al-rahman al-raheem, “in the name of Allah the merciful, the compassionate.”)

Before the prayer is a washing ritual, each area being ritually washed three times.  There are areas in the mosque for ablutions, or some people do it at home beforehand.  The bedouin in the desert is also allowed to ritually wash with sand before praying.  It’s a physical religion and it’s impossible to miss the grounding symbolism of kneeling on the ground and touching the forehead to the earth. More subtle is the circle created by looking down and at the open palms of the hands that serves to short-circuit sensory inputs, quiet the crowd, and focus the worshiper.

Whatever the Islamic notion of the nature of God, one reaches harmony with God  by submission, by blind acceptance of dogma, by erasure of all individuality and critical thinking.

[Hmm, in the Christian example of the order of worship, the purification is an internal one, a questions of purity of heart.  In the Islamic example, purification is accomplished by external ritual washing, similar to the native American purification ritual of cleansing oneself externally by smudging with smoke then offering smoke to the four directions, sky, and earth. Does physical purification lead to spiritual purification--or are they even different? Ooops, pork.]

The image of submitting to communion bread in the stomach is irresistible.

So, give us this day our daily bread.  This is cinnamon bread.  I’ve never seen it before and it’s quite good.

Apparently the loaf has been sprinkled with cinnamon mixed with something sweet, folded over, and pinched shut before baking. I could smell the cinnamon in the bakery without opening the package. The shops in the Arab neighborhood are already stacked with cases and cases of dates in preparation for the start of Ramadan on Saturday.  I have mine and this year will probably fast at least one day of Ramadan.

So back to the religious background of reconciliation…

Contemporary theologians like to cite John 6:56 for the cannibalistic backstory of the communion ritual, but to me that’s like reading one entry in a thread without taking the whole context into account.  The context of ritual cannibalistic communion is none other than the story of the loaves and fishes.  After that miracle Jesus retreated, walking on water, to another area where the crowds eventually found him out.  Here is the rest of the story, told in the fusty 1901 translation of the American Standard Version:

²⁵And when they found him on the other side of the sea, they said unto him, Rabbi, when camest thou hither? ²⁶Jesus answered them and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye seek me, not because ye saw signs, but because ye ate of the loaves, and were filled. ²⁷Work not for the food which perisheth, but for the food which abideth unto eternal life, which the Son of man shall give unto you: for him the Father, even God, hath sealed. ²⁸They said therefore unto him, What must we do, that we may work the works of God? ²⁹Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent. ³⁰They said therefore unto him, What then doest thou for a sign, that we may see, and believe thee? what workest thou? ³¹Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, He gave them bread out of heaven to eat. ³²Jesus therefore said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, It was not Moses that gave you the bread out of heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread out of heaven. ³³For the bread of God is that which cometh down out of heaven, and giveth life unto the world. ³⁴They said therefore unto him, Lord, evermore give us this bread. ³⁵Jesus said unto them. I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall not hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.

So, 1) the crowds were fed with the loaves and fishes miracle–that is, they had bread in their stomachs 2) then they searched for Jesus on account of the loaves and fishes. 3) Jesus gave them bread as a ritual, to satisfy them.  I’m sure the answer to the reconciliation problem is in here somewhere.  Or not.  Or, it just might be in the story of the Lightbringer whose fall from heaven is the result of his refusal to worship Adam (or was that James), the image of God. Instead of eating and/or submitting, maybe I should be getting ready to “march into hell for a heavenly cause.”

The planet Venus is the lightbringer, the first radiant beam that does away with the darkness of night. It is a symbol of the development of the divine light in man, for the first awakening of self-consciousness, for independent thinking and the real application of free will. It means the bringing of the light of compassionate understanding to the human mind.

At any rate, the bread does not satisfy, give me something more circular.

Note: This last photograph bothered my a lot and I almost changed it. The reason? I’m taking the photo with my right hand–the camera is very difficult to operate any other way, and that only leaves the left hand for breaking the bread. But it is also ingrained in me, for some reason, that bread must be taken with the right hand. Bread and water. They are both sacred. Money and tobacco can be accepted with either hand, and the bread is actually broken with both hands, but bread and water must be accepted with the right hand. When a child drops bread (or chips) on the floor, the adult says “haraam”–forbidden. it would be easy enough to use some utility to flip the photo right for left so it looks like the bread is being taken with the correct hand, but I’m leaving it as it is, as a reminder of the bedouin and Christian regard for bread as sacred and as a demonstration of the cognitive dissonance that can be set up when we don’t observe taboos.

Yup, it’s that time again. Time for the summer Arab festival. Last year was excellent. My evil eye pictures are here, and more (clickable) below.

The official website also has a little video montage of last year’s festivities.

The 3rd Annual Chicago Arabesque Festival will be held free of charge from Wednesday, June 24th through Saturday, June 27th, 2009 in Daley Plaza,
the most central and vibrant part of downtown Chicago.

The festival hours are: 10 A.M. – 3 P.M. Wednesday through Friday
and from 11 A.M. – 7 P.M. on Saturday.

A book I once used for Arabic language study, Al-Kitaab, is in the midst of a political controversy.

Matthew Iglesias over at the Atlantic has been following the issues surrounding the Washington Post’s op-ed about the Arabic language textbook. I found out about it through ArabLing, which I found on the blogroll of Jabal al-Lughat, which I found a link to in a post about some esoteric point in Koranic Arabic from LanguageHat, which I keep meaning to take off of my feedreader since I always end up getting engrossed in it and spend too much time following the links. Apparently someone was offended because the maps in the textbook didn’t identify Israel as an “Arabic speaking” country.

Well, one picture is worth a thousand words, so I offer here some pictures of the maps and pages in question. Israel and Palestine are both all over the maps in question. The images here have been resized for faster page loading, but if anyone really wants to do a save to examine them closer, they should all be in a resolution large enough to read. (1) The first group of images is from the second edition of Al-Kitaab Part One published in 2004. (2) The next group is from an older version of the same text, the first edition of Al-Kitaab Part One published in 1995 and the companion workbook for the alphabet, Alif Baa, from the same year. As you will see, they changed the maps a little bit. Both versions list Israel in their glossary, and I throw that in too. Then I throw in a page from (3) Elementary Modern Standard Arabic, a text completely without illustrations which was the standard Arabic language text before the publication of Al-Kitaab. Oh, and the before and after picture of the “old” and “new” (4) Maha, since she has somehow gotten in the middle of the controversy for alleged whining.

1. The latest edition of Al-Kitaab:

2) First edition of Al-Kitaab and the companion wordbook Alif Baa:

3) Elementary Modern Standard Arabic, the previous standard Arabic text:

4) The old Maha; the new Maha with laptop:

Okay, what do I see?

First of all I consider monitoring textbooks for anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic bias to be a valid exercise. Monitoring for anti-Arab bias as well. I have seen translations of textbooks that shocked, but did not surprise me. In particular, it does not strike me as particularly honest to claim some other group is thinking something bad or wanting something bad or has evil motivations. The only way you can know someone’s motivations is by what they do and what they say. I also think the standard for, say a sixth grade text is different from the standard for a university text, which Al-Kitaab is, and has more leeway for political viewpoints instead of bare facts.

While the old Al-Kitaab textbook lists only Palestinian as a nationality, the old workbook shows Palestine/Israel together geographically. This is continued in the new textbook. Both old and new versions list Israel in the glossary. If the book was one of those “Israel-does-not-exist” advocates, which is pretty rare anymore, they would not print the name “Israel” in the text as an exercise and in the glossary. I would like to see the nationality “Israeli” written in Arabic. The Arabs I know refer to Israelis as “Yahood”–Jews–which I don’t think is either accurate or promoting the values I would like to see promoted. It would be nice to have an alternative word to inject into conversation.

Teaching about culture is a valid and necessary part of any language instruction.  When we come to the “How old are you?” lesson in my English classes, I always talk about “good questions” and “bad questions,” and when it is appropriate to ask someone’s age.  Students need to know that.  In many parts of the Arab world it is not wise to say the word “Israel” in public.  In my opinion the book does not go far enough in explaining these cultural cues, but I suppose like language, culture is also in flux and it will depend on who you ask.

The Al-Kitaab series is far, far better than the old chestnut Elementary Modern Standard Arabic. The one pictured here was published in 1999, but has been in continuous copyright since 1968.  It doesn’t have so much as one picture.  The page shown above is a story about a tourist trip to Lebanon. Those days are long gone.

As far as Maha, a lot of language texts use a Dick, Jane, and Sally character to try to generate interest for the language.  The Jordanian Petra English language series has a “TV Presenter” (yes, it was written by a Brit) and also a boy named Marwin who whines a lot about food he doesn’t like.  Marwin is quite useful for learning negatives. I didn’t connect with either Maha. The second Maha reminds me of some urban Arabs I once worked with who we nicknamed Gucci and Channel, for the range of their interests and professional capabilities. At least she covers her arms down to the wrist.  The first Maha seems to be showing a lot of skin from the elbow to the wrist. In my experience this is maybe marginally okay in the city when the temperature is over 100, but definitely not okay in the country.

My real beef with the series, and with Arabic language textbooks in general, is that they only teach Modern Standard Arabic–”foos-ha”.  No one in the world actually speaks Modern Standard Arabic.  It is an artificial language–a construct.  Probably someone was hoping for some Arab Unity, but of course they got some Arab nationalism instead. Now the language has snob appeal and some countries will only print newspapers in that language, forbidding even common words like yalla (“let’s go”) from being printed in advertisements. If someone would print a serious textbook in Colloquial Levantine Arabic, which is what they speak from Syria to Saudi Arabia to Palestine to Iraq, I would buy it. Unfortunately the Arab concept of language acquisition consists of presenting charts of those awful conjugations and what they call “vocabs”–lists of out-of-context words with unfathomable meanings.

~~~~~~~~~~

Note: This post has been sitting in my “drafts” since last summer. I’m only dusting it off now because my beloved LanguageHat blog is currently experiencing technical difficulties and I have not had my Linguistics Chew Toy fix for today. I will have it even if I have to write it myself.

Since in the post I also complain about the lack of colloquial Arabic resources, let me also reprint a subsequent comment from LH himself after a similar lament on a thread there. So any LHers who might also peek in here from time to time can get one of the Hat’s past Oracles as well:

There’s an excellent Reference Grammar of Syrian Arabic by Mark W. Cowell if you can find it (I got it at the French & Spanish Book Shop in Rockefeller Center in 1991, but it was published in 1964), and an equally excellent Dictionary of Syrian Arabic: English-Arabic by Karl Stowasser and Moukhtar Ani; Routledge has a short but useful Colloquial Arabic (Levantine).

UPDATE 12/9/09: For some unknown reason, the textbook images here have become unclickable. I have now made the first one (of the textbook cover) clickable (linked to it’s original file) again.  It’s a somewhat time consuming, but if anyone is interested in seeing a closer view of certain images, leave a comment and I’ll start re-editing the images.

Can’t take time to cook? This lunch took exactly four minutes to prepare, including washing and drying the bowls. Before and after: hummus with sumac (from the bagged spice section of the Arab store–or you can skip this part) sprinkled on the top, sage tea (ordinary black tea bag and sage leaves), cracked green olives, frozen pita bread (defrosted in toaster oven), and labna (middle eastern style thick yogurt). Put the water on to boil and pop the bread in the toaster oven while you put everything else in the bowls.   To eat, break off pieces of the bread and use it to scoop up the hummus and labna. A small bowl is for olive pits. The tea, with meremiah (Jordanian sage) and sugar, needs to sit for a few minutes before drinking from an everyday Arab casset shai (tea glass).  Zacky!

If you put it on a tray you can carry it to put on the floor, so all your bedouin friends can sit with their farshas in a circle on the floor and eat family style from the same dish, or you can put it beside your computer to eat with all your imaginary blog friends.

Some things in the Arabic language are counterintuitive. In English, if someone offers you tea, “thank you” means “yes, I’ll have some, thank you for bringing it.” In Arabic,  shokrahn is a polite refusal: “thanks, but no thanks.”  The correct affirmative response in Arabic would be izlamoo idayk (masculine) or izlamoo idaykee (feminine), meaning “Allah bless your hands”. In other words, may Allah bless your hands so you can continue to offer tea with them–the ability to be generous is a gift from Allah.

While you’re sitting around drinking tea, one thing you might do is compare hands with your companions. Some people are said to have a mark of the “ninety-nine names of God” on their palms.  On one hand is written the Arabic symbols for the numbers eight and one (the sum being nine):  ۸۱ with the reverse pattern written on the other hand:۱۸. So the numbers add up to nine on each hand; reading both hands side by side gives the number ninety-nine.

“Siama?” the little girl asked me, quite shyly asking a question of the foreign teacher. So far the Jordanian children had tried to touch my blond hair on the bus, or asked other parents why I wasn’t wearing a head scarf while the parents tried to shush them, or even thrown rocks at me, but this was the first time a child had acted like I was just another Jordanian. I had graduated. They say if you live with a people and eat their bread for 40 days you will be become one of them. The child had spoken a deeper truth. I gave her the only possible answer, “Iowa.” Yes, I was fasting.

When I was picking up pita bread in the Arab neighborhood the other day, I saw the guidief and dates and realized it was Ramadan already. Today I have no responsibilities or anyone who will question what I do or don’t eat. Today I will remember that a part of me is still Jordanian and I will fast.

Why fast? “To remind us that Allah asks us to do difficult things,” the religion teacher at my Jordanian girls’ school told me. After bumping into a catholic friend who invited me to church, I listened to a Jordanian priest with different advice, “A lot of you will be fasting along with your neighbors” he said, “If you fast, do it for your own reasons.”

I have watched the fasting traditions of Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox and Ethiopian friends. They might fast from all food and water, only certain types of meat, or only on certain days. My own religion does not follow any fasting tradition now, but John Wesley once belonged to a devout university group that fasted on certain days. Unfortunately I don’t know anything more about that tradition. So the fast I am following today is from all food starting at sunrise–okay, I cheated by a half hour–and okay, I had pork on my breakfast sandwich, but wahada u wahada (one thing at a time). I will limit water, but not absolutely. I no longer smoke, so that part won’t be as difficult today.  I am unlikely to come in contact with a male I might have to shake hands with or touch in the course of social interaction, so no danger there. And then I will think about my reasons for fasting.

Reasons for fasting.

1. Tradition. None of us is born is a vacuum. We inherit traditions and religious beliefs from the generations that preceded us. At first we follow blindly, then we keep the useful traditions. Tradition gives us a link to the past and a link with other cultures.

2. Awareness.  How much of what we do is by routine?  Ramadan breaks the routine, yes, but we also go back to follow a different routine we already know from previous Ramadans. Are you used to having coffee or tea available next to your laptop? Now you become aware of what you have been putting in your mouth.  Do you accidentally brush against strangers on the street when it’s crowded?  Now be aware of who you bump into and what gender they are, as Jordanians are constantly aware of who is next to them on the street. Do you lose track of whether it is light or dark outside? If you can’t eat until the sun goes down, now you will have reason to ask for the time of sunrise (Fajr) and the adhan or call to prayer a half hour before, and the time of sunset (Magreb) and to be aware of the sun’s transit. As I think about fasting in other years, I wonder if the reason I was finally able to break the smoking habit was because of the Ramadan fasts.   We will see how many of the temporary Ramadan habit changes will carry over.

3.  Iftar.  Yes, the food.  Iftar (breakfast at sunset) after a day of fasting is one big party in Jordan.  It’s not a party that happens in sleazy clubs either, it’s a family party. And Christian Arabs have absolutely no problem eating the guidief and other Ramadan sweets that come out at this time. I have my dates (Tunisian and not the premium Saudi dates) ready to break the fast, and I have my guidief pancakes ready for tonight’s meal. Today I will stuff them with the walnut/coconut/ cinnamon mixture or the sweet cheese–yes I have soft cheese (Danish!) in a can. Oh, and I have to boil the syrup made from water, sugar, lemon, and orange flower water.  Yum.