Boris

Boris Akunin at the PEN Literary Cafe (Photo credit: englishpen)

One thing Boris Akunin, a man who considers his words, said during our LitFest session popped into my head this morning. I had asked him why on earth a man who had sold 25 million books (In Russian alone) and was living in France would want to return to Russia and take a leading role in the popular movement against Vladimir Putin's vice-like grip on Russian politics.

That took the conversation down the line of repression and civil movements, with a dash of bloggery thrown in (Akunin used his blog to draw a crowd of 10,000-odd people to perform an act of quiet civil rights assertion).

"A writer is a thermometer. If you don't like the temperature, don't break the thermometer. It won't change the temperature, just your ability to measure it."

I liked that.

Watani

She was gentle, but insistent. She wanted her views known and I had a sense there was real anger beneath the polite, genteel exterior. She had come up to me with her friend after my session together with Kamal Abdel Malek at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

Her family name was Dajani and she wanted to make her protest. I shouldn't have used her family name in my book, Olives - A Violent Romance. I should have made up a name rather than sully her family's good standing by involving them in questionable morality and terrorism.

Did I not know the family was an old and respected one?

I had talked about the controversies of Olives during the session - the discussion around the behaviour of my characters in their setting and the confusion between fact and fiction. I told my visitor family names are commonly used in fiction, that books all over the world contain characters with real names not made up ones. She didn't believe me; her friend assured her that yes, books did indeed use real names. But her family name is respected. It has standing, watani.

Watani is a funny thing. It's sort of nationalistic, a passion for one's country. As a quality, it could be part of whatever it is that goes into a 'good name'.

But this is fiction. It is precisely because it was a big and common name, found in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, California and Brisbane. Would you really balk at calling one of your characters Smith in case the Smiths felt slighted? But this is not just a name. It is a family. And actually, I think my Dajanis are rather admirable. That's what they are in the book - the heroes of it. They represent a narrative, that of the Palestinians. Pick another Palestinian family to bear the burden of your book. Have you read it? Part of it (this is Arabic for 'No I haven't'). You should change the name. But it's pointless. If I made up names, I'd be the English author who doesn't know any Arab names and makes up silly sounding ones that aren't realistic. If I renamed the family Dalani, everyone would still know it was Dajani. Besides, there are Dajanis who thoroughly agree with the book and are proud their family name is in it. And I think they're just as guilty of conflating fact and fiction as my interlocutor.

It's no use, I'm never going to convince her, neither she me. She made her protest and I accepted it.

The Blogging Panel at The Emirates LitFest

It was always going to be an interesting mixture, the rationalist historian with a fascination for one of the world's most ordered cultures meeting the columnist and socialite who pops and splutters with all of the glorious, random panache of Bollywood. Boris Akunin and Shobaa De were at loggerheads within seconds flat and this moderator's work was cut out trying to ensure that respected journalist Caroline Faraj and novelist Kathy Shalhoub weren't just buried in the fascinating conflict developing between the forces of chaos and those of order.

Akunin's blog pulls anything up to and beyond 1,000 comments a post. It's in Russian, but you can use Google translate to render his words into a strange quasi-blurt of odd and disconnected semi-English. With that amount of engagement, you're looking at a lot of space for trolls and fights breaking out and Akunin, a man with a deep distaste for contemporary Russian rudeness, has a tough rule for dealing with violent disagreement. He makes combative commenters play Russian roulette. Each of the combatants is offered a number, even or odd. Akunin chooses blind and the loser is blocked from the blog. It's certainly an effective way to settle debate!

We had fun. Shobaa is certainly a character and wasted no time toasting a young starlet who had dissed 'Shobaa Aunty' in a Bollywood spatette over a whitening cream endorsement, rolling out an amusing take on the role of conroversy in her life (key) and blog (even more key). We talked about CNN Arabic and its role in promoting Arab bloggers, about blogging in disapora, about pitting yourself against Putin and using blogs to promote books.

Today I'm co-hosting a show with Siobhan Leyden on Dubai Eye Radio from 1-3pm and then I'm on stage myself in what is undoubtedly going to descend with great speed into a glorious hour of mayhem, because Kamal Abdel Malek, that well known international criminal, is on there with me.

And then, dears, I'm going home for a Martini...

ADNOC Mixes Up Diesel And Petrol. Woopsie.

إلى العين وعودة (Photo credit: Abdulla Al Muhairi)

Some companies will do anything to get behind a trending topic these days, which means we're all confronted with the awful spectacle of Mike and Bob down the local hardware shop doing their really amazing and totally funny version of the Harlem Shake. Two weeks too late. Do click on that link, BTW. It's worth it...

But ADNOC (Abu Dhabi National Distribution Company) has gone for it in a big way. Clearly stunned by the amount of coverage the recent horsemeat in beef scandal has created (let alone donkey in South Africa and then pork in Waitrose Essentials meatballs and poo bacteria in Ikea's cakes), they've tried to get in on the act.

They've been filling petrol engined cars with diesel. This, as any fule kno, breaks them. Apparently someone filled the wrong reservoir at Al Ain's Al Yaher petrol station, resulting in the pump attendants blithely filling fifteen cars with the black stuff instead of the green stuff. You can only imagine they just kept going until the line of broken cars tailed back and blocked the forecourt so much they had to stop...

Abu Dhabi paper The National is a great deal more terse on the story than Gulf News, which rather appears to revel in it. ADNOC has offered to repair the damaged cars and pay for care hire in the meantime, which is fair enough I suppose. The station's been closed, presumably as they empty and clean the affected tank and pump.

Mind you, it's getting harder and harder to get the right thing in the right thing around here these days, isn't it? I think I might start slipping copies of Olives in Beirut covers and see if I can't drum up some coverage myself...

What's In My Food? Chicken Rib Meat Special!

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I occasionally do a post where I look at the content of some piece of food or other. Today, still reeling from the various horsemeat and food adulteration scandals, we hear that Ikea has recalled batches of chocolate cake from stores in 23 countries after samples were found to contain faecal bacteria. Yummy!

As I pointed out in this here post, we have accepted a dangerous principle here - that they're putting stuff in our food without us knowing what it is. It's a short step from 'improving' a natural product to 'adulterating' it. The industrialised production of food is all very well, but its when the principle of cutting corners becomes enshrined in business' approach to processing, you get horses or poo in your food. Or ground up bones.

One great example of this is chicken 'rib meat'. Take, for instance, the ingredients of a McDonald's Crispy Chicken Fillet:

Crispy Chicken Fillet: Chicken breast fillet with rib meat, water, seasoning [sugar, salt, sodium phosphates, modified tapioca starch, spice, autolyzed yeast extract, carrageenan, natural (vegetable and botanical source) and artificial flavors, maltodextrin, sunflower lecithin, gum arabic]. Battered and breaded with: bleached wheat flour, water, wheat flour, sugar, salt, food starch-modified, yellow corn flour, leavening (sodium acid pyrophosphate, baking soda, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, ammonium bicarbonate), wheat gluten, spices, corn starch, dextrose, xanthan gum, extractives of paprika. CONTAINS: WHEAT. Prepared in vegetable oil (Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness). Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent.

Quite apart from containing an awful lot of scary-looking chemicals, the list begs the question, what IS 'rib meat'? You won't get far by Googling it - in fact, you'll get a highly mendacious article titled "What's really in that chicken nugget?' penned by the US National Chicken Council that avers, "Rib meat is simply a natural extension of the breast meat. It is NOT an additive or a filler."

Ah, no. Rib meat is, in fact, MSM - or mechanically separated meat. Also known as 'white slime'. The meat and bone from an already-stripped carcass are pushed through a sieve under high pressure and the resulting bone-enhanced white gloop can be moulded into star shapes or whatever you fancy - dinosaur shapes, from the example photographed above. McDonalds labels its chicken nuggets as containing 'White boneless chicken', which may or may not be another way of saying 'rib meat' which is, of course, another way of saying 'Mechanically Separated Meat' or even, more deliciously, 'meat slurry'.

Interestingly, there would appear to be a regulatory requirement to label MSM as such in ingredients lists, but the regulations aren't global, aren't easy to understand and, obviously from the above example, aren't being adhered to. A certain amount of ground-up bone is permissible in MSM, typically about 3% - and pieces no larger than 0.5mm. That's the US regulation. The EU and other bodies will have their own versions.

And yes, Dimethylpolysiloxane is what it sounds like. They're putting silicone in your food.

The Emirates Literature Foundation - Formalising Literature?

Can you formalise literature? At least, the process of promoting and promulgating it? We'll see, with the new Decree No. 8 of 2013 from Dubai's Ruler, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum establishing the Emirates Literature Foundation.

The new not for profit foundation gets Dhs18.7 million as share capital to underpin its work, with three co-founders of the foundation, Emirates Airline, Dubai Culture and the LitFest, the body that has come together around the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature over the past five years. Isobel Abulhoul has been the tireless figure behind the LitFest since it started, and one can only hope the new foundation gives her and her team better resources and backing for this remarkable event and the other projects they have started to launch around the core annual festival.

In fact, the foundation's aims are to:

...promote literature and to foster an environment which is favourable to literary intellectuals through: - Organising, managing and supervising the annual Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature; - Promoting literary output in Arabic, English and other languages, particularly literary works targeting children; - Attracting international and renowned authors to the Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature to present their literary works to the public; - Encouraging reading outside of the classroom; - Nurturing and providing a platform suitable for intellectual output and for local writers, poets and other literary intellectuals; - Inviting selected writers from among UAE nationals and residents to attend other international festivals of literature; - Liaising with the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority and concerned entities to establish a "Writers Centre" which will act as a nucleus for year round activities of a literary nature; and ensuring that the Emirates Airlines Literature Festival is comprehensive and accessible for all.

Those are pretty lofty aims, but anyone involved in the LitFest (and I suppose I have been, in one peripheral way or another, since it started five years ago) will recognise how much the event has done to create a burgeoning literary scene here in the UAE - something that really didn't exist before the Festival started.

Now they've got funding, the formal  backing of the country's leadership and a clear mandate to do more of the same.

What's perhaps interesting is that the LitFest started as one woman's barmy idea, one of those notions that hit people when they wake up one day ("I want to go to the moon") which slowly became a concrete scheme that people gathered around - critically, Emirates got behind it in a big way. The LitFest's growth has been organic and community-based, if people didn't want this, weren't interested in it, then it simply wouldn't have happened. Isobel's passion and drive for the whole thing, the determination of the team of people around her to grow it, make it better (and more inclusive) and create a world class event have done just that.

But that was all informal. Now it's got formal aims and goals, objectives to meet and oversight to answer to. You'd be forgiven for thinking that a tad scary. On the other hand, it seems a quite clear "That thing you've gone and done is pretty cool. Can we do more of that?".

The result should be the promotion of narrative, discourse and the codification of knowledge. The enhancement of a young nation's ability to learn, evolve and teach - to explore and find its voice and develop its inherent creativity and build stories and dreams. A counterpoint to thoughtless consumerism and a culture of passive entitlement and moribund privilege.

Let's see, eh?

The Emirates ID Card Confusion Continues

clarity matters"" (Photo credit: atinirdosh)

EIDA, the Emirates ID Authority, has established a remarkable track record of communication since its very inception. Many's the time I have posted about this deadline and that requirement being countered by that requirement and this deadline. Nothing has ever been terribly clear since the get go, if you don't mind me saying so.

And it remains oblique, opaque, obtuse and generally obfuscated. Today we have two reports in our newspapers. Well, news media - as one, Emirates 24x7, is not technically a paper anymore, having sublimed and become a being of pure energy.

Gulf News, then, is first to punch its grateful subscribers' eyeballs with a typically hard-hitting headline:

Millions of expat employees in UAE to save ID card costs biennially

The story, linked here for your viewing pleasure, is quite unequivocal:

"Millions of expatriate employees in the country can save the cost of over Dh200 for ID card renewal every two years, thanks to a new move by the Emirates Identity Authority (Emirates ID). Sponsors have to bear the costs of national ID cards of their expatriate employees, according to a top official."

And so on. It's quite clear, no beating around the bush. Our sponsors have to pay for our ID cards and take responsibility for the same - presumably extending to late renewal penalties (not cleared up in the story, but we can wait for clarity. God knows, we've waited since 2008.)

But what's this, in Emirates 24x7?

Rule to let sponsors bear expats' ID card cost under study: Eida

Hang on a cotton-pickin' moment there. 'Under study' doesn't mean 'new move', now does it? Emirates 24x7 goes on to add awful clarity to the assertion that this is no done deal but a 'move under the anvil' as Gulf News would have itself put it.

“We are considering the proposal to make it mandatory for sponsors to pay for the ID cards of their employee, but it has not been finalised. It is currently left for the companies to decide whether they want to pay the cost,” an Eida spokesperson told Emirates 24/7. No timeframe was, however, given on when the directive would be issued.

So has Gulf News jumped the gun, or Emirates 24x7 simply got it wrong? Or has EIDA told two different reporters two different things? Or perhaps told them both the same thing in terms so confusing they've come away with two different stories entirely?

We await, with a feeling of remorseless, crushing deja vu, clarification.

A Proper Author

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm not a proper author, but I'm feeling like one this month. I've just finished our Umbrella Series workshops at The Archive and now it's the LitFest week of madness. I'm going on Dubai One TV today to record a programme for tomorrow, radio tomorrow to talk about the blogging panel on Thursday, then I've got the LitFest moderator's briefing later in the day followed by the author's dinner.

Flash! Flash! Flash! Sweetie!

Then there's the blogger's panel Thursday, with its highly luminary guests. I'm co-hosting a special show on Dubai Eye Radio from the LitFest on Friday from 1-3pm directly following that, Kamal Abdel Malek and I are hooning around onstage in our own session (followed by - ha - a signing session!). Saturday I get to interview Anissa Helou. Following all that I'm giving a talk at Zayed University on the role of narrative next week and then in April I'll be doing a 'More Talk' about telling stories at More Cafe and then joining a panel on self-publishing at the Abu Dhabi Book Fair on the 25th.

You'd almost think I was a proper author, but I'm merely masquerading. It's a load of fun, for sure, but a proper author would be making money out of all this. I'm just losing the stuff. Don't get me wrong - not a shred of regret in the air around here.

Scratch An Al Fahidi Cultural Neighbourhood, Find A Bastakiya

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There's been a rash of renamings over the past couple of years. Satwa's Al Diyafah Street has been renamed December 2nd Street (December 2nd being the UAE's National Day, marking the establishment of the Emirates, formerly British protectorate the Trucial States, in 1971), the Emirates Road has been redubbed the Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Road. And Bastakiya is no more.

Changing nomenclature is part of the scenery around here. Business Bay Bridge was originally called the Ras Al Khor Crossing and, of course, the Burj Khalifa was long intended to be the Burj Dubai.

Sometimes the name changes mark new futures or obliterated pasts - Jumeirah Beach was long known as Chicago Beach after the Chigaco Construction Company, which had its compound there - and Sharjah's Mothercat Roundabout was similarly named after a company compound, although the usage has largely lapsed. Naming places after nearby landmarks is part of the tradition of directing people by sending them from landmark to landmark, a habit born of the lack of early street names. National Paints, for instance, has lent its name to the infamous roundabout/interchange much as Staples Mattresses lent their name to London's Staples Corner. There's less and less need for that kind of thing these days as we use our mobiles to search for places and get directions from dispassionate avatar voices. Which is a shame, it was all part of, well, the colour of living here.

Now Bastakiya, with its crumbling barjeels now restored to their former glory, has been renamed the Al Fahidi Historical and Cultural Area. Home to the Emirates Literature Festival's Dar Al Adab, the area is a little warren of adobe buildings and paved walkways, barasti roofs and cool rooms lined with cushioned diwan seating, funky little hotels, tea shops and galleries. In this weather, it's a delightful place for a stroll in the sun or a cold fruit juice in the shade.

Shame about the name, but then that's progress, isn't it? Or something like that...

Come With Me From Jerusalem

Kamal Abdel Malek and I are sharing the stage at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in a session entitled 'Tales of Two Cities' on Friday the 8th March from 3pm. The session's name reflects the fact Kamal's novel is set in Jerusalem and my latest is, at least in part, set in Beirut. Tickets for that session are moving fast I'm told and can be got here. We're both pretty lippy, so it's going to be fast, furious and fun for sure.

I first met Kamal a couple of years ago at the LitFest. He's an intelligent, engaging and thoroughly likeable character who loves nothing more than good-natured disputation and banter. He's also a talented writer - published conventionally as an academic author, he took the decision to go straight to self-publication with his first novel, Come With Me From Jerusalem - a love story recounting the adventures of Egyptian Copt Sami, who becomes the first Egyptian student to study in Jerusalem after the 1979 peace treaty and  falls in love with American Jewess Lital. When Sami is accused of murdering a call-girl, his and Lital's love is tested beyond reason.

I'm still reading it - it's an amazing book I am thoroughly enjoying. Kamal's work mixes elegant prose and strong characters with real 'voice' and a narrative that hooks you by the nose and drags you forwards. It's wilfully different, witty and well observed and, thank God, avoids those 'obvious' pitfalls of books that attempt to give a new treatment to the Arab/Israeli narrative.

So I thought I might have a chat with Kamal prior our session and perhaps take the opportunity to highlight  that today's McNabboGram emailer carries a FREE copy of the ebook of Come With Me From Jerusalem - even before its official launch! There are more specials in store, so if you didn't sign up before, you might want to get clicking on this here link to sign up to the McNabboGram!

Onto a chat with Kamal:

What made you decide to put your heart and soul into a work of fiction after a lifetime of academia? 
I have two answers: one modest and the other arrogant. The modest answer is this: the life of the academic is austere in many ways; he spends years poring over research topics, writing papers and books in as objective a manner as is humanly possible. These writings are by and large of interest to him and at best a handful of other academics, so he decides to try his hand at something else, something less objective and more personal, something that is not engendered from the brain cells but from the folds of one’s own guts. This can be a liberating exercise.

The arrogant answer is this: well, Kamal, my man, if you are so good at chess, you can be equally good at swimming, besides, you’ve got a talent in the use of the English language; glib and quite the raconteur at parties, impressive and attention-grabbing as you exhibit with ease your storytelling wares. Yes, English is not your native tongue but English was not the native tongue of Gibran and Nabokov, and before them Joseph Conrad, and look how they fared! So one day three years ago, I said to myself, “Kamal my man, just do it!”

What is Come With Me From Jerusalem about? Not the plot, but the substance, the essence of the book. What are you trying to achieve through this story? 
Come with Me from Jerusalem tells the story of Sami, the first Egyptian student in Israel, who falls in love with Jewish classmate Lital. Sami’s life is shattered when he finds himself arrested and tried for the murder of a Tel Aviv call girl. Only a miracle can save him from a certain life sentence as he and Lital come together, offering hope for reconciliation and a shared future.

So what does this really mean? As an Arab novel, Come with Me from Jerusalem is unique in many ways. It is perhaps the first novel by an Egyptian author which presents a Christian Copt and a Jewish woman as the main characters; minority figures are all of a sudden placed in the center of action, in the spotlight of drama. The setting is Jerusalem, not Cairo or Alexandria, not an Egyptian village or an oasis, and in the novel Jerusalem is viewed in a different light, not as a holy city but as a livable city with streets and cafes and rundown houses with TV antennas burgeoning on their roofs like alfalfa sprouts.

Besides, Sami and Lital, lovers from opposite sides of the conflict, are ideally placed to constitute a microcosm representing divergent views of the Arab-Jewish conflict and the desire to achieve genuine reconciliation.

Come With Me From Jerusalem is about an Egyptian in love with an Israeli. Now you've lit the blue touch paper, how far back do you intend to stand? 
Technically, Lital, Sami’s beloved, is not Israeli but a Jewish-American woman planning to immigrate to Israel. Well, now that I’ve lit the blue touch paper, I intend to stand as far back as I can. This is bound to be a huge explosion, figuratively speaking, of course. In our Arab world we are not used to reading novels in which a Jewish or Israeli character is a real flesh-and-blood human being with feelings, let alone an object of love and sympathy. There is something disarming about a reference to a handicapped Israeli child. Have we Arabs ever thought that an Israeli can be handicapped? We are more used to him as a predatory soldier, an aggressive land-grabbing settler, a religious fanatic of one stripe or another. But a handicapped child? So I better get myself a good medical insurance policy because the explosion is bound to be a huge hellhole. 

There's a danger of 'conflict fatigue' with Arab/Israeli conflict books. Having read Come With Me From Jerusalem, I know this is a vividly original, smart and fascinating story. How are you going to get over that 'oh, another Middle East Arab/Israeli book' attitude? 
I stand by my work of fiction. I pitch it to the readers and let them decide. I say “Listen folks, this is not part of the usual stuff written about the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is first and mainly a love story.”

“Hatred stirreth up strife;” the Bible tells us, “but love covereth all sins,” (Proverbs 10:12)

Arabic literature has produced a scant volume of works of fiction dealing with the sensitive topic of interethnic and interreligious liaisons. The most celebrated love story between a Palestinian man and a Jewish-Israeli woman is the story of Palestine’s national poet Mahmud Darwish and his Jewish beloved, named “Rita” in some of his poems. I find it strange that Arab audiences in musical festivals such as the one in Jarash, in Jordan, would listen with rapture to the tuneful song “Rita” as sung by the Lebanese Marcel Khalifeh, and not show awareness that the “Rita” of the song is really a Jewish-Israeli beloved and that their rapture is focused on the taboo love between a Muslim-Palestinian and a Jewish-Israeli. Can love conquer all, really? Well, I urge readers out there in the real or virtual world of cyberspace to read Come With Me From Jerusalem and judge.

You're the professor of Arabic Literature at AUD, so your deep literary expertise is rooted in Arabic. How did you manage to write a novel in English - and why English not Arabic? 
Arabic is my mother tongue but English is my step-mother tongue. In the world of languages, and as it happened in my case, step-mothers can be and at times are kinder and more affectionate. We don’t choose our mother tongues, do we? They’re imposed on us; they are like our names and our facial features. Like a mother, our mother tongue often yells at us; she’d wag her figure in our face and harshly reprimand us when we make mistakes, when we use the wrong end-vowel, when we replace the nominative noun with the accusative, when our verbs are in the jussive instead of the subjunctive.

But step-mother tongues? They may be at times introduced to us as part of our school curriculum but to continue to live with them and to adopt them as our own mother tongues is a voluntary act. We do this of our own accord, as an act of volition, an act of love. I am speaking for myself here but I bet you 1001 Emirati Dirhams that writers whose step-mother tongue was English must have felt the same way, writers like the Polish Joseph Conrad, the Lebanese Gibran, and the Russian Nabokov, or the Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif.

You're a published author of non-fiction works in your academic capacity - did your work on Arab/Israeli literary portrayal inform the way you managed the characters and their interplay in Come With Me From Jerusalem? 
Undoubtedly. How people from different cultural backgrounds relate to one another without losing their authentic selves is what has preoccupied my scholarly and fictional work alike. America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature, 1688 to 9/11 and Beyond (2011), examines Arab images of America: the unchanging Other, the very antithesis of the Arab Self; the seductive female; the Other that has praiseworthy and reprehensible elements, some to reject, others to appropriate.

But my passionate interest is in the historical and cultural encounters between Arabs and Jews as depicted in literature and the cinematic art. You could say that The Rhetoric of Violence: Arab-Jewish Encounters in Contemporary Palestinian Literature and Film (2005) was a prelude to my fictional work, Come with Me from Jerusalem, in which I tell a story of star-crossed lovers caught up in the vortex of Arab-Israeli conflict.

As I mentioned, you're already conventionally published. Did you look for agents and publishers or go straight to self publishing? And why? 
Finding publishers for one’s academic work is far easier than for one’s creative writing. I think that some literary agents out there are darn harsh in their prejudgment of authors’ samples, sending off rejection letters as cowboys shoot from the hip in a Western movie. It is time to challenge these guys whose agencies have become virtual abortion clinic for literary talents.

Have you ever seen their storage areas of rejected MSs? A graveyard of human creativity as a result of wanton death sentences, uttered in the absence of jury and the city folks. I say it is time to revolt against this oppressive oligarchy. Time for the Authors’ Spring! Let my outcry here be the first drum-roll in our holy crusade against the talent-abortionists.

What are your hopes for the book? And are you truly ready for the controversy? 
Will there be controversy surrounding my novel? No doubt and I say Ahlan wa Sahlan! I am ready with my bullet-proof jacket and my helmet, and my F-16 fighter plane is being now equipped with laser-guided verbal missiles. So this is a fair warning to the Tatars at my city gates. So much for war and battlefields.

On a happier and more optimistic note this is what I want to add: I used to say to my erstwhile beloved, “My sweet kattousa, ‘lana l-ghadu wa l-mustaqbalu l-wa’du’ - Tomorrow is ours; we are bound for glory!” Ever since I watched this wonderful movie, “Bound for Glory” about the life of singer Woody Guthrie, I’ve always felt it in my guts that someday, somewhere somehow there’s going to be a dramatic turn-up, a big breakthrough in my fortunes. This book is bound for glory because it is an eloquent dream of a brave new world where love rules as a supreme but benevolent sovereign.

GET YOUR COPY NOW!

Come With Me From Jerusalem is available from amazon.com as both a Kindle book and printed book and also from Smashwords for iPads, Android tabs and other ebook readers. It'll soon be available on other platforms such as Kobo and iBooks and a UAE print edition will be available in stores soon. If you've got $95 going free, you might be interested in Kamal's 'Rhetoric of Violence' or for a mere $105, his America in an Arab Mirror.

If you're REALLY fast and sign up to the McNabboGram today, you might be in time to get today's mailer and get Come With Me From Jerusalem for FREE! :)