Thirty

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It was thirty years ago when I first travelled to the Arabian Gulf (Wikipedia says Persian Gulf, but then Wikipedia has a distressing tendency to say tomayto, faucet and German Shepherd Dog) - on business, as it happens. Few, back in the day, were intrepid enough to travel to the peninsula for touristic purposes and most of those were Germans seeking exciting new ways to get skin cancer.

It was thirty years ago I was head-hunted by a strange, balding suspected megalomaniac and pitched into a world I could never have imagined; a world of madness and oddity beyond belief. If the end of days was to be filled with cats barking and men walking backwards, I was severely underwhelmed, because Saudi Arabia in 1986 was a great deal weirder than all that Dantesque nine circles of hell stuff. You want dystopia? Welcome to the Gulf, my friend. We have too much dystopia. How much you like pay?

I was to sell things. To this end, a strange attempt was made to put me through a thing they called 'Sales Training'. Basically, you pretended to be interested in people, asked them lots of questions to find out what they wanted and assured them your product was just what they needed. They agreed, signed the form and you ran away with all of their money, a small percentage of which you were allowed to keep.

What could possibly go wrong?

Pal and colleague Adel thinks I should document my life in the Gulf. This sort of advice is usually to be avoided, because friends and family always think you sound more interesting than you really are. But it was he convinced me to go Prado over Infinity and he was so very right about that. Let's face it: if you want advice on car buying, Emiratis are unfailingly sound. But memoir? Really? The diary of an expat nobody? Who in their right mind cares?

And then it hit me on the drive home yesterday. It's been thirty years. 30. The big three zero. I've turned into some of those crusty old bastards I met when I first arrived. They were legends those people. They had seen strange things, could tell strange tales. And I cast my mind back to those first experiences in the sand pit and I must confess, I amused myself greatly.

This is always a dangerous sign. It means I'm about to write something everyone else thinks is shit.

So here's the deal. I'm going to have a go at dredging it all up and posting it. God knows, the blog has been missing posts badly enough recently. I might get bored and just give up - and I start the exercise with that caveat. I might carry through with it and turn it into a book, although Middle East Memoir is arguably the genre which gave 'vanity publishing' its bad name to begin with. But then I've made something of a speciality of publishing books that don't make much sense. Why stop now?

In the spirit of the wonderful Dubai As It Used To Be and even Facebook's Dubai - The Good Old Days, I'll have a go at remembering the anarchy and madness that made me fall in love with the Gulf, and the wider Arab World. For this is the place I still call home today and for which, 30 years on, I retain a genuine and abiding love...

School's Out...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Running in a new car on the Dubai-Al Ain highway is not something I'd recommend, people. It's deadly boring. Nevertheless, this is what I done today as I made my way to Al Ain based Brighton College to appear as an author courtesy the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

I spoke to two classes, senior boys and girls respectively (the school's segregated) and the girls were generally more amused and proactive than the boys, who were a little reserved.

The staff members were understandably a little nervous, given the content of my books and my own inclination to go off on the deep end. They have to tread a fine line between tradition and the exploration of international literature, at the same time managing a number of bright, sparky and inquisitive minds. Needless to say, I had a blast. We talked about narrative and its importance, the characterisation of the Middle East by Hollywood and the impact of technology and the Internet on publishing, heralding the inevitable doom of the print run/sales team model of publishing.

After the classroom sessions with the seniors, we were joined by the 8-11 year-olds in the auditorium. This, I was not prepared for. They'd asked me to prepare some readings to give the kids and I gazed down at small, angelic girls with missing teeth beaming up at me and on the instant junked the lot. I couldn't really see my reading from A Decent Bomber helping the 8 year olds sleep that night...

The torture was methodical. Quinlan shrieked himself hoarse, flailing around tied to the kitchen chair until he hurled himself to the floor. They righted him and beat him as dispassionately as they’d pulled out his thumbnails.

And not one word. Not a question. It made it all worse, to think there was nothing they wanted he could give them to make it stop.

They started on his fingers. He called to God, he called to his dear, dead mother. He begged them. Dear Jesus, how he begged. They beat him again to shut him up. His mind slammed down to buy him respite.

A gentle tapping on his cheek. A wipe of wet cloth on his forehead. The awareness of light though his swollen lids. An insistent voice, deep, repeated his name. ‘Mister Quinlan, Mister Quinlan.’ Accented, the title sounded more like mist air.

He took a deep, juddering breath and tried to focus. His hands flared pain. He tasted blood, his mouth dry. Cool ceramic touched his lips and he leaned forwards to sip gratefully at the icy water. His shattered ribs grated and forced him to cry out, bubbling the water. He spilled a pink dribble down his sodden, spattered shirt.

And it went downhill from there fast when we started looking at readings from Birdkill and Shemlan...

So instead I showed them how to write a book using Frank L. Baum's Wizard of Oz as a template and then answered their questions. What a bright bunch they were, too!

Which book is your favourite? Why do you write books? How much money do you make? How do you build characters? Do you favour direct or indirect characterisation? You mentioned protagonists but what about antagonists? What are your books about (very carefully answered, given the question was from one of the 8 year-olds!)? What do you do about writer's block? What inspires you to create characters?

The questions came in rushes, arms across the auditorium waving in the air. And then I signed pages of A4 paper for the kids who were too young to be let buy my books. Thousands of them. The longest signing line of my life and nobody from the LitFest to see 'Mr Three Signers' doing a serious session. Emiratis, Brits, Pakistanis, Jordanians, South Africans, Indians. A real rainbow. My hand hurt by the time the last grin disappeared away off the stage.

I do love the dear old LitFest. Really.

Book Review: Jamila's Thread And Other Stories

Jamila's Thread is a lovely little book to hold in your hand, it truly is. It's almost enough to make me give up my 'a book is about the words, not the physical form' argument in favour of ebooks. As booky books go, it's very sweet.

It's a tiny little thing, really - we're looking at 100 pages of pocket-book format set in large type. It's a collection of ten short stories that set out to rediscover the beauty of the traditional folk tales of the Middle East and North Africa and comes from Project Pen. With illustrations as richly Arabesque and fantastical as the stories they adorn, it's truly a pleasure to read.

 

Project Pen is a Jordanian collective - incubated by Oasis500 - that aims to create a next generation of storytellers and encourage the development of new forms of narrative and literary expression. They've got up to all sorts of shenanigans in their journey to challenge, explore and discover the somewhat moribund world of story-telling in the Middle East. This, their latest project, is probably the most culturally valuable because, in my humble opinion, it has the power to inspire others to follow in its path.

The stories are simply told and themselves are simple enough. Jamila, the star of the show, is an ill-fated little girl, the most beautiful of seven lovely daughters born to a cursed family. The only way to lift the curse is to banish Jamila and so her fate is set, to be eventually determined by two reels of thread, one gold; one silver.

The resolution of her story is clearly set from the first word: this is a world where wrongs are righted and justice is done. Cynics will clearly need to leave their shoes at the door. But every one of these tales has a wealth to offer that you won't find in the empty, research-driven world of Frozen or Tangled. These are stories from a world where the magical is a wide-eyed possibility, not a revenue opportunity from an untapped demographic.

This is a book to enjoy if you want to find a few moments of serenity and spend a while in a Middle East we've all left behind - a world of ogres and djinn, fairytale princes and envious neighbours who have the power to turn boys into bulls. It's a beautiful little collection to read to your children at night and a tiny inspiration for story-tellers in the Middle East who thought there was no outlet for their work, for their first steps into a new world of imagination shared - a baby step in the direction of rediscovering the region's love of narrative and creative story-telling.

In its Arabic edition, it's called 'Abou Alfoul'. It should be on the shelves of all good booksellers in Dubai in February, as well as on Kindle and iBooks.

And I really would commend it most highly...

Book Review: Desert Taxi

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You'll find it hard to find a copy of this. Amazon's selling one - if I were you, I'd rush over and snap it up. It's out of print - a gem that deserves SO much more than oblivion.

I love this book. It's a treasured possession. My copy's not worn well, the paper's yellowed and brittle, dried out to the point where one page has simply cracked apart and is nestled loose, torn from tip to toe by an unknown hand - likely that of of gravity or being boxed up for a house move.

Anyone selling a mint copy? Hit me up - I'm a buyer.

I've just re-read it. Yes, I even put my Kindle aside to read a booky book. Having finished Alexander Frater's Beyond the Blue Horizon, I was ripe for another travelogue. And I slid this out of the shelf as I realised I hadn't read it in 20 years.

And what a read it is.

Mike and Nita embark on a madcap journey from London to Nigeria, where he has a posting, using an 18 year old Hackney Carriage. The kicker is this book was written (and the journey undertaken) in 1956. So the taxi's a sort of pre-war Model T sort of thing, not the Black Cab we know today.

Marriott writes brilliantly, observant and wry with a glorious command of language and an engaging style. The challenge they take on is clearly insane and his account of trawling through the Sahara in an ancient cab is peppered with scenes in which Foreign Legion and Touareg alike are left open-mouthed by the mad dogs and Englishmen puttering through their midday sun.

He's English - the sort of English of Empire and Evelyn Waugh. Nita - pretty and clearly possessed of a saintly demeanour (or a love of lunatics) beyond reason, is as bashed about in the journey as Bertha the taxi - but our self-deprecating and potty author makes everything come alive; you end up consuming the pages, rooting for these idiotic, impossibly hardy and resourceful people.

It's a book that deserves to be re-published, enjoyed and shared as a classic of travel writing. And it's been lost in the cruel mist of time - what a shame.

If you can find a copy, snatch it up. This book is charming, delightful, gripping and - yes - inspiring.

I wonder where Mike and Nita are today. If they've made the longer journey, they'll be in their eighties. I would so love to sit and sip a snifter and listen to them, creaky and smiling-eyed, tell me where their lives went next.

This book so deserves to be in print again...

Arab Media Forum Faces New Media Challenges. Shock Horror.

This is in no way a gratuitous plug for the 'book of the blog,' you understand.

This blog, as readers of Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years will know, started around The Arab Media Forum 2007. This was mere coincidence, not by any means a result of the forum which I have never attended and likely never will attend. In fact, as the first post attests, we were sitting at home eating Lebanese takeaway.

There seems to be even more intense debate at this year's forum (judging from the reports one sees on Twitter) about the 'role of new media' and all that. It's an interesting debate - some may argue taking place a little late in the day - particularly in this region, where reporting is so very dangerous and the conflicts so very real - and, as all conflicts necessarily are - polarised and messy. Making sense of these things is tough, dangerous and hard - journalism, true journalism, is a thankless and wearying job. But some people are just plagued with that need to delve down to uncover the truth and then get it out there into our hands so we can make more informed judgements about the world around us.

Shame there are all too few of these in the Middle East, but that's the breaks.

The Great Debate, of course, has moved on. It's no longer about whether digital media are relevant, but whether traditional media is relevant. You'd hardly have thought that from the Forum, which includes the session, "Digital Media: Authority Without Responsibility". Apart from a few 'digital heads' the debate at the Forum remains principally analogue and although there are nods to a process of transition, there is no sense that this transition could easily well take the form of disintermediation.

The Forum's first session was, in fact, "Conventional Media vs. New Media" - the program outlines the problem as this:

News industry is remarkably challenged by the emerging “new media” platforms. This synthetic prelim produced unprecedented dilemma for traditional journalism and undoubtedly added more complications.

Quite.

Of course, what the debate lacks is a sense of where humanity's eyeballs are going. Are people consuming as much local media as before? Does it carry as much weight with the public? Is the Arab News media seen as credible compared to online and first hand sources? Where are people going for news these days? Gulf News or the Daily Mail Online?

That research could have underpinned a viable and vibrant debate framed by the scale of the challenge facing print media and the practicses of print media journalism. Events in Syria and even the recent Beirut bombing which I posted about at length here, comparing Twitter to a Lorenzian water wheel, have shown that trying to adapt conventional 'big' media reporting to Twitter and YouTube can have disastrous effects - and have arguably eroded the weight we give to mainstream media. Never has there been more need for careful, considered journalism - and never have we seen so little of just that.

Instead, we have the same old ground being gone over - with a distinct under-representation of the 'new media' everyone is so upset about (although nice to see Maha from Google there). Although it's nice for everyone from the region's media to get together for a chat, I can't help but feel the actual eyeballs have, well, moved on...

TRA Calls for Innocence of Muslims Block

The TRA (Telecommunications Regulatory Authority) has directed the UAE's telcos, Etisalat and Du, to block access to the film trailer for 'Innocence of Muslims'. The trailer has been the cause of widespread and often violent protests around the world which have led to over seventeen deaths.

I checked just before mid-day but YouTube access to the film trailer wasn't blocked. Google has resisted suggestions it take down the content, although has supported legally backed blocking requests in Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt, Libya and India.

It's an unpleasant little film and, in my humble opinion, is quite clearly in contravention of Google's guidelines, which allow it to block content if it constitutes 'hate speech'. The film and its intentions are clearly hateful in the extreme. I for one would hate to be the person who decided this wasn't hate speech, because they have seventeen deaths - and rising - on their hands.

But the film, judging by the trailer, is also clearly the result of a deranged mind. It is laughably acted, woefully directed and amateurish in the extreme. It's quite, quite potty. However, it purports to depict the Prophet Mohammad, which is at the core of the anger the film has caused.

You can clearly hear dialogue spliced in, supporting the actors' claims that the anti-Muslim content was jacked in at post production. The result is a school project gone wrong - but crucially, a film that has met the desires of its maker. Because, of course, we have that reinforcement of Islam as a violent, antipathetic religion - certainly at odds with my twenty six years' experience of travelling, working and for the past twenty years living in the Arab World. And the many, more reasoned, online objections expressed by Muslims all over the world to the trailer have, of course, not made the headlines.

Is blocking it the answer? I suspect not. Supporting its takedown is one thing, but stopping people accessing content that is having such a profound effect on our world means stopping people being able to make up their own minds and make informed judgement while others around the world continue to enjoy that privilege. Even if that content is hateful to us.

Libro Non Grata

Image via Wikipedia

As I shared over on the Olives blog last night my debut novel, Olives - A Violent Romance, is not to be available on sale in Jordanian bookshops after distributors have declined to stock it.

The reason for their reticence appears to be my choice of name for the female character in the book, Aisha Dajani. The name is a common one all over the Levant, and the name of a large family originally from Jerusalem. The name was appropriate to the character for that precise reason, given the book itself is set in Jordan and deals with a Palestinian family and their history.

I've been shut down before, in a former life as a publisher of magazines (for a negative review of a computer in a PC magazine. The computer company CEO turned out to have 'wasta'). I've spent countless hours in various Ministries of Information (before they were all given more 'user friendly' names). I've been passed by numerous censors in one form or another but I have never actually been censored, in print or blog. I learned early on how to do that for myself. This would appear to be one instance where I've got it wrong.

As Kamal BinMugahid points out in his thought-provoking post today, honour is paramount in the Arab World. A family's good name is taken very seriously indeed, sometimes to the point where the mania spills out into murder, the so-called honour killings which tarnish the whole Arab World's good name to save the 'good name' of single families.

I have seen my work rejected by many people over the years, for a variety of reasons. But never before has someone knocked me back because of fear. Fear of the reaction of people with the same family name to a character in a work of fiction.

Olives is, indeed, libro non grata in Jordan...

Nostradamus

Image via Wikipedia"A Facebook group on the conflict between the army and Fatah Al Islam in Lebanon grew a membership of 8,000 in a single week: an average of two new members every minute. The movement of people, of opinions and debate in the new social networks can take place with incredible rapidity. This debate is taking place in a region where public debate, assembly and the mass publication of opinion have traditionally been discouraged. There is a new egalitarianism in the air and it’s a heady scent for many.

A flash survey of 100 Middle East based Facebook users tells us that 93% of them are using broadband connections. And 89% of them have laptop computers. 73% of those Facebook users are between 25 and 35 years of age. The survey took less than 1 hour to conduct.

There is a strong and growing Arab community using broadband technologies to move video content across the Internet, often as part of participation in social networks. The video featuring King Abdulla II of Jordan produced by the One Voice organisation, calling for peace and understanding between Palestinians and Israelis, has drawn over 279,000 views in Youtube. Video clips on Lebanon have consistently drawn above 150,000 views, while other topics and productions from the Arab world have consistently driven between 60,000 and 1 million views. Few FTA channels in the region could claim such viewership.

Social networks, the core aspect of the thinking that has been characterised as Web 2.0, are driving the adoption of broadband services in the Middle East. Perhaps interestingly this is not a technical audience of technology early adopters. That the growth in adoption has not been stronger is almost undoubtedly a product of prohibitive pricing strategies among the region’s operators."

That was all written early in 2007. Not bad, huh? I recently had reason to revisit a white paper I'd written together with Spot On bright spark Mai Abaza to support my presentation at the Arab Advisors Convergence Conference in Amman. The above text is part of the argument we were making that regional telcos needed to bring down the price of broadband and stop considering it a service for shifting big files and start looking at it as a way for many people to shift many files quickly.

I recall asking the conference how many had heard of the phrase Web 2.0 or social media and getting a show of eleven hands from an audience of hundreds of operators. That's telcos for you.

Re-reading this reminded me there's a line that connects Nahr El Bared with Occupy Wall Street - those Facebook groups that sprang up contained debate and discourse we had never before seen in the region - passionate and sometimes violently abusive, the adoption rate of these groups and the way they brought people together were stunning to watch. Of course, Mai and I were so busy examining the implications for the broadband market we missed the wider implications that here was a new platform for discourse and organisation that would grow to have the ability to bring down governments.

Those groups showed people in the Middle East, for the first time, that they could not only talk to each other, but broadcast opinion to tens of thousands. It took four years' growth in adoption, but the seeds sown as the Lebanese army blasted the Nahr El Bared camp using helicopters carrying bombs in home-made cradles would lead to something a great deal bigger...

Steve Jobs. Tossing A Pebble

Image via CrunchBaseThis will get lost in the ocean of comment on Steve Jobs. It's almost pointless writing it, but sometimes you just have to jot the moment down.

There's little doubt Steve Jobs was an arrogant bastard. I've never met him (the closest I've got to true techristocracy was Ballmer) but the absolute certitude shone through in everything he did. Yet his drive and utter self-belief drove the people around him to create some wondrous things. I first encountered The Apple IIe microcomputer when I went to work for a startup computer music company back in the UK. That machine, the fruit of Jobs and partner Steve Wozniak's early 'home brew computer club' innovation, helped to create a revolution. It brought millions of people into the information age - it was the first 'proper' personal computer system. In 1981, Apple was to welcome IBM to the desktop computer age with its cheeky and iconic advertisement, followed soon after by the iconic Macintosh, launched with Ridley Scott's iconic TV spot.

It became all about icons. Jobs saw the work going on at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) and immediately grasped it was world-changing stuff. Xerox, in a moment of monumental knuckle-headedness, didn't and closed the lab. Jobs hired the talent - and so did Gates. The two were each others' nemeses, both utterly driven men who knew they were right. It's just that Jobs ended up being righter. But now he's dead, so it really doesn't matter, does it?

PARC was where the WIMP (windows, icon, menu, pointing) interface was developed. Before PARC, all computing was text based. The world of mice and arrows brought a graphical way of interacting with computers and Jobs was the first to realise the significance of this new approach. Apple released the cludgy Lisa and then the stunning Macintosh. I remember my first encounter with a Mac, the little box with a screen in it happily reciting 'Simple Semen met a peeman' for me. The early text to speech software was not always brilliantly successful. But, again, Apple was way ahead of its rivals in even supporting such technologies.

Oddly, for a company that has always shunned any direct involvement in the Arab world, Apple was also a massively influential company in Arabic language computing and graphics. It would be years before Microsoft matched Apple's Arabic language capabilities - and by then, every publishing house and graphic design studio in the Arab world was Mac based. It wasn't to last: the Mac's strong domination of design and desk-top publishing was eroded by the sheer weight of the Microsoft/Intel alliance and the IBM PC architecture. Scully came, Jobs left and Apple started its long, inevitable dive towards the heart of the chapter eleven sun.

Cast into the wilderness, Jobs pursued his certitude and created NeXT, a high-end workstation system with its own innovative operating system. Too expensive, too 'out there' for its time, it failed and yet the NeXT operating system was to be acquired by Apple and form the heart of the Mac OS X. Incidentally, the World Wide Web was developed on a NeXT system by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who put the hole in the toilet seat that was the internet.

In his forty days in the wilderness the graphically-obsessed Jobs also acquired the animation studio that was to become Pixar, selling it on to Disney for a cool $7.4 billion. He was many things, but our Steve was rarely hard up. You can perhaps start to understand how he got by on that famous $1 salary as Apple's CEO.

But his crowning glory was his return to the company he co-founded. Jobs' triumphal return to Apple must have felt like the ultimate vindication to the man who had all the answers all the time, but the company was on the very brink. In 1997, Apple was the Sick Man of Computing and it was arguably Steve's old enemy Bill Gates who saved the day when he pumped $150 million into the seemingly lost cause that was Apple Computer Inc.

And then Jobs did something wonderful. He turned Apple into the world' most successful company. Starting with the iMac, going on to create the iPod and then the iPad, Jobs' mania for graphics and design were translated into products that were to revolutionise the way we consume what used to be called culture and today is called content. The iPod decimated the music industry, taking Apple from being a computer company into the mass consumer market. The iPhone toppled Nokia. The iPad has redefined the way millions of people consume information and entertainment. From a no-hope bankrupt, Jobs turned Apple into a company so successful its cash reserves eclipsed those of the US government.

The man who popularised icons, first with the Mac then with the iPhone and the iPad, Steve Jobs was himself an icon. His increasingly gaunt figure, wearing his trademark black turtle-neck sweater and jeans, became synonymous with smart, funky, minimalist innovation. I truly believe he is one of the most influential figures of the last century, a man whose impact on our society and culture will be felt for many years to come.

But I still think he must have been a total git to work with.