Israel seems to consider its control over Jerusalem the symbol of its domination over Islam. And precisely that urge for control reinforces the Palestinian urge to destroy their enemy and at the same time deprives Palestine of hope of statehood.
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| Arabia: Dream of reality |
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 BREAKING NEWS |
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THE ARABS
In his classic History of the Arabs Professor Philip K. Hitti—a text from the time of my Islamic studies at Munich University—notes that of all the lands comparable to Arabia in size and of peoples approaching the Arabs in historical importance, no country and no nationality has received so little consideration in modern times. “What is not known about it is out of all proportion to what is known.”
Arabia is the fount of the Semitic family of peoples which later migrated to the Fertile Crescent and became the Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenecians and Hebrews. Arabia, Hitti recalls, is also the fount of the rudimentary elements of the three monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The great cities of Algiers and Cairo, Beirut, Damascus and once Baghdad, are emblematic of one Arab spirit, that of the townsfolk. Contemporary with Charlemagne in 9th century Europe, Baghdad under Harun al-Rashid was the world’s greatest city of culture and science and wealth.
Another Arab soul is the Bedouin, the nomad of the desert, about which the novelist Paul Bowles (b.Jamaica, New York, City in 1910; d. Tangier in 1999) in his Moroccan exile wrote so passionately. For many Arabs the desert is their real home. In the same way northerners cannot live without the sea, Arabs cannot live without the desert. The sands are their sea. The desert is the source of energy, oil and water, underground, and above, there is the wind and the sun. “The desert,” Hitti writes, “is the Bedouin’s first defense against encroachment from the outside world.”
The artistic world of the nearly forgotten Bowles, who lived 52 years in Tangier, is frequently set in Arabian deserts just on the edge of Europe. In the desert the Westerner is lost. Natural man defeats the neurotic product of technological society. Primitive man, Bowles believed, has retained things that western man has lost; he can operate in natural surroundings. And Americans, he noted, are less prepared than Europeans in such circumstances because they think everyone must do it the American way. Therefore it’s hard for Americans to establish contact with others. Self-subsistent primitive man is also more adapted for communal life than is dependent western man. Primitives have a communal life. No one owns anything. Everything belongs to all.
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