Arab Love Quotes

Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.

Language is the key to the heart of people.

When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.

نادراً ماكنا نخرج من البيت ، لم يكن أحدنا يحتاج غير الآخر .. حتى طفلنا لم يكن ثالثنا في البيت بل كنا كلانا فيه معاُ ، لم يكن في دنيانا غيرها وغيري

...and he laughed a laugh she loved more than the warmest of fires on the coldest of nights.

I created you from one soul, and from the soul I created its mate so that you may live in harmony and love.

keep silent . . the most beautiful voice , is the talk of your hand on the table. قليل من الصمت . . ياجاهلة فأجمل من كل هذا الحديث حديث يديك على الطاولة

I hadn't told them about you, But they saw you bathing in my eyes. I hadn't told them about you, But they saw you in my written words. The perfume of love cannot be concealed.

ولأنني رغم القبور.. ورغم موت الأرض أرفض أن أموت

All words In the dictionaries, letters, and novels Died. I want to discover A way to love you Without words.

لكي لا يموت الحب علينا ان نحب و نقلل من الاسئلة و التهم . الحب ليس تهمة و لكنه رغبة انسانية حرة . نحتاج لجهد كبير لندرك سموها و عنفوانها

The beauty that withstands all. Stubborn in the harshest of atmospheres.

A flower. White and whiskered in a fringe of ice. Silken petals held together in a loose grip

People who worry that nuclear weaponry will one day fall in the hands of the Arabs, fail to realize that the Islamic bomb has been dropped already, it fell the day MUHAMMED (pbuh) was born.

روعة الحياة في العشق و لعنة العشق الإدمان فإن غاب أحد الحبيبين توقف قلب الأخر عن الخفقان فمهما تراسلوا أو تحدثوا فالقرب وحده لهما الأمان قلوباً في الشتات تتألم و أشجان تصيب بالهذيان حزن مستمر بلا مسكنات لا منه هروب أو نسيان

Until the stars burn out, and all worlds end, until the planets collide, and the suns wither, until the moon’s light dies, and the rivers and seas run out, until I grow so old that my memories fade away, and my tongue cannot say your name, until my heart beats for the last time, only then .. will I maybe stop, maybe.

ولن أَكْسِبُ شَيئًا إذا خَسِرتُ نَفْسي And i will gain nothing if i lose myself

Ya’aburnee is Arabic for you bury me. It is the hope that you will die before your one true love because you cannot bear to live without them.

Ego Tripping I was born in the congo I walked to the fertile crescent and built the sphinx I designed a pyramid so tough that a star that only glows every one hundred years falls into the center giving divine perfect light I am bad I sat on the throne drinking nectar with allah I got hot and sent an ice age to europe to cool my thirst My oldest daughter is nefertiti the tears from my birth pains created the nile I am a beautiful woman I gazed on the forest and burned out the sahara desert with a packet of goat's meat and a change of clothes I crossed it in two hours I am a gazelle so swift so swift you can't catch me For a birthday present when he was three I gave my son hannibal an elephant He gave me rome for mother's day My strength flows ever on My son noah built new/ark and I stood proudly at the helm as we sailed on a soft summer day I turned myself into myself and was jesus men intone my loving name All praises All praises I am the one who would save I sowed diamonds in my back yard My bowels deliver uranium the filings from my fingernails are semi-precious jewels On a trip north I caught a cold and blew My nose giving oil to the arab world I am so hip even my errors are correct I sailed west to reach east and had to round off the earth as I went The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid across three continents I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal I cannot be comprehended except by my permission I mean...I...can fly like a bird in the sky...

Your departure is not a tragedy: I am like a willow tree That always dies While standing.

تَظاهَر بالحُبِّ حَتّى يُمكِنُكَ الصُمود Pretend to love, so you can survive

This is my last letter There will be no others. This is the last grey cloud That will rain on you, After this, you will never again Know the rain. This is the last drop of wine in my cup There will be no more drunkenness. This is the last letter of madness, The last letter of childhood. After me you will no longer know The purity of youth The beauty of madness. I have loved you Like a child running from school Hiding birds and poems In his pockets. With you I was a child of Hallucinations, Distractions, Contradictions, I was a child of poetry and nervous writing. As for you, You were a woman of Eastern ways Waiting for her fate to appear In the lines of the coffee cups. How miserable you are, my lady, After today You won't be in the blue notebooks, In the pages of the letters, In the cry of the candles, In the mailman's bag. You won't be Inside the children's sweets In the colored kites. You won't be in the pain of the letters In the pain of the poems. You have exiled yourself From the gardens of my childhood You are no longer poetry.

كان الوطن الذي اجتاح كل ابتساماتي في الغربة.

أشهد ألّا رجلاً استطاع ترويضي الّا أنتَ..

Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come clean? The magnificence of Genet’s last great work, The Prisoner of Love, lies in his willingness to be wrong: a seedy old white guy jerking off on the rippling muscles of the Arabs and Black Panthers. Isn’t the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong?

I don't know what falling in love for me is. The concept of romantic love arose in the Middle Ages. Now remember, the Arabs don't even have a word for love—that is, a word for love apart from physical attraction or sex. And this separation of love and sex is a western concept, a Christian concept. As to what falling in love means, I'm uncertain. Love, well, it means simply physical attraction and liking a person at the same time.

The two years You were my lover Are the two most important pages In the book of modern love. All the pages before and after Were blank. These pages Are the lines of the equator Passing between your lips and mine They are the measures of time That are used To set the clocks of the world.

للسماء طريقةٌ أخرى!

Through his eyes she was made of stardust.

There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel. While most of us are led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory. If every love affair adds a certain weight to the camel’s load, then we can expect the soul to slow according to the significance of love’s burden.

دعني أحرق الماضي بجمر عينيك.. دعني أحرقه ورقة ورقة..

A turquoise given by a loving hand carries with it happiness and good fortune." Arabic proverb

I'm a spiritual person, she said. "I believe in Allah, you know, though I don't always call It 'Allah' and I pray the way I want to pray. Sometimes I just look out at the stars and this love-fear thing comes over me, you know? And sometimes I might sit in a Christian church listening to them talk about Isa with a book of Hafiz in my hands instead of the hymnal. And you know what, Yusef? Sometimes, every once in a while, I get out my old rug and I pray like Muhammad prayed. I never learned the shit in Arabic and my knees are uncovered, but if Allah has a problem with that then what kind of Allah do we believe in?

How easy was it to just grab a handful of you before you dissolved? If someone asks you tell them loving you was the closest I came to seeing God.

يعبر العامُ ويأتي العامُ، لكن .. أنت تبقين وجوداً.. وأمل وطريقاً نابضاً باللمسة الأولى، عميقاً كالأزل وشعاعاً ثاقباً أفق حياتي .. ساكباً في عمق ذاتي قطرة الضوء .. الوحيدة .. وأمان الأرض .. للنفس الشريدة وهي ترتاح إلى شاطىء دنيانا الجديدة وهي تهتزُّ إلى لَوْنِ المسافات المديدة لحظة تولد فينا، كانهمار السيل ، كاللمحِ المُشعِّ الضوء، كالرؤيا العجيبة.. يعبرُ العامُ، ولكنْ أنت تبقينَ حياتي وسنيني القادماتِ ، في غدي، والذكريات!

In one sense, the Qur’an regards the Torah and the Gospel as older siblings— and looks on with dismay at the family feud tearing apart Abrahamic cohesion. In another sense, the Qur’an exists as an orphan. It presents the first Abrahamic scripture in Arabic, delivered by an Arabian prophet. Claiming a lineage back to the Torah yet revealed in a thoroughly pagan society, the Qur’an enjoys an insider-outsider status—one that empowers it to look lovingly yet critically at its ancestry. This complex inheritance means the Qur’an is aware of its roots yet free to develop its own identity without being confined by parental oversight.

و ككل صبيحة، أنتظر الشروق لعله يزف لي اشراقة، فلا هي أشرقت بما أريد، و لا هي أشرقت من مغربها ........

It is not enough to say 'love' in Arabic. You must say 'be the thing that buries me.

أنّك أتٍ من هناك ما بين موجةِ تسامر خصري وموجةٍ تلّفني وشمس حزيران البرتقالية.. دمعة تحرق خدّي وتغرقني.. لأنني لوهلةٍ تخيّل لي أنك آتٍ من هناك.. ماشياً حافياً على الماء لتلقي عليّ التحية.

Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.

ما الحب إلا سقام في القلوب، ياتي بعشق وبعدها تنهار الهموم

I have an ability - that I haven’t seen in my life - to imagine and see you. And when I see something or hear a word and comment on it in my mind, I hear your answer in my ear, as if you were standing next to me with your hand in mine. Sometimes, I hear you laughing, and sometimes I hear you refusing my opinion and other times you’re the first to make a comment, and I stare at the eyes of those standing in front of me to see if they saw you with me.

And though he continued never to express a single word of love for me, not in any way of his several languages, I could not take a hint. Let the hint be written across the heavens in skywriting done by several planes - I was dense. Even skywriting, well, it wasn't always certain: it might not cover the whole entire sky, or some breeze might smudge it, so who could really say for sure what it said? Even skywriting wouldn't have worked! Several years later, I would wonder why I had thought my feelings for this man were anything but a raw, thrilling, vigilant infatuation. But I still had called them love. I was in love. I had learned the Portuguese and the Arabic for love, but all for naught.

إذا شكوتُ قليلاً، فلأنني لست سوى قلب إنسان. وهكذا هي قلوب الناس، تخاف من تحقيق أحلامها الكبرى، لأنها تعتقد أنها لا تستحقّ بلوغها، أو أنها فعلاً لا تقدر على بلوغها. إننا نموت، نحن القلوب، خوفاً من حالات الحب الذي ولَّى إلى الأبد، ومن الأوقات التي كان يمكن أن تكون أوقاتاً رائعة، ومن تلك التي ليست كذلك، ومن الكنوز التي كان يمكن اكتشافها، ولكنها ظلّت، إلى الأبد، مدفونةً في الرمال، لأننا، متى حصل ذلك، نتألّم كثيراً من هول المعاناة التي تسبق النهاية.

In Arabic, the word fitna, meaning “hardship,” stems from the word fatanah, which means “to test gold, burn with fire.” Just as gold is heated to extract valuable elements from the useless surrounding material, it is through the fire of our trials that our golden essence is unearthed.

He who has never hunted, never loved, never sought out the fragrance of a flower, and never quivered at the sound of music, is not a human being but a donkey. —Arab proverb

فكت العقدة من شعرها، وأفلتته، فتناثر كليْل يجمع سحابه حول البدر، وقد غطّى عورات النهار من نحر الشمس إلى أودية الجسد

It was a little like Into the Sands, with Claude Barron, which she'd seen a couple of weeks ago. In that picture Claude Barron enlists in the Foreign Legion because Rita Carrol marries another guy. The other guy turns out to be a cheater and drinker, and so Rita Carrol leaves him and travels out to the desert where Claude Barron if fighting the Arabs. By the time Rita Carrol gets there he’s in the hospital, wounded, or not a hospital really but just a tent and she tells him she loves him and Claude Barron says, “I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sky was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn’t be you.” And then he dies. Tessie cried buckets. Her mascara ran, staining the collar of her blouse something awful.

رجلٌ في خريف العمر شعره رماديّ وأشعث كحياتي... يقف تحت شمسٍ لا تمسّه تحت مطرٍ لا يبلّله وفي عيونه مئات الغيوم مئات الغيوم كي يمطر كلمة ولا يقولها داخل نظرته التي تلوح للحزن كباب مخلوع ترقد حياتي.

Oh, but once my memories had pulsed with the blood-heat of life. In desperation, I forced myself to recall that once, I had walked with kings and conversed in languages never heard in this land. Once I had stood at the prow of a Sea Wolf ship and sailed oceans unknown to seamen here. I had ridden horses through desert lands, and dined on exotic foods in Arab tents. I had roamed Constantinople’s fabled streets, and bowed before the Holy Roman Emperor’s throne. I had been a slave, a spy, a sailor. Advisor and confidant of lords, I had served Arabs, Byzantines, and barbarians. I had worn captive’s rags, and the silken robes of a Sarazen prince. Once I had held a jeweled knife and taken a life with my own hand. Yes, and once I had held a loving woman in my arms and kissed her warm and willing lips...Death would have been far, far better than the gnawing, aching emptiness that was now my life.

Women in America read 'lifestyle' pages which are really glorifications of shopping. They teach us we must veil ourselves in make-up to be loved. And we willingly take the veil, thinking ourselves freed by it. Make-up is no more optional for us than the veil is for Arab women: it is our Western version of the chador.

Wisdom is really the key to wealth. With great wisdom, comes great wealth and success. Rather than pursuing wealth, pursue wisdom. The aggressive pursuit of wealth can lead to disappointment. Wisdom is defined as the quality of having experience, and being able to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting. Wisdom is basically the practical application of knowledge. Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs. Become completely focused on one subject and study the subject for a long period of time. Don't skip around from one subject to the next. The problem is generally not money. Jesus taught that the problem was attachment to possessions and dependence on money rather than dependence on God. Those who love people, acquire wealth so they can give generously. After all, money feeds, shelters, and clothes people. They key is to work extremely hard for a short period of time (1-5 years), create abundant wealth, and then make money work hard for you through wise investments that yield a passive income for life. Don't let the opinions of the average man sway you. Dream, and he thinks you're crazy. Succeed, and he thinks you're lucky. Acquire wealth, and he thinks you're greedy. Pay no attention. He simply doesn't understand. Failure is success if we learn from it. Continuing failure eventually leads to success. Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly. Whenever you pursue a goal, it should be with complete focus. This means no interruptions. Only when one loves his career and is skilled at it can he truly succeed. Never rush into an investment without prior research and deliberation. With preferred shares, investors are guaranteed a dividend forever, while common stocks have variable dividends. Some regions with very low or no income taxes include the following: Nevada, Texas, Wyoming, Delaware, South Dakota, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Panama, San Marino, Seychelles, Isle of Man, Channel Islands, Curaçao, Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Monaco, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Bermuda, Kuwait, Oman, Andorra, Cayman Islands, Belize, Vanuatu, and Campione d'Italia. There is only one God who is infinite and supreme above all things. Do not replace that infinite one with finite idols. As frustrated as you may feel due to your life circumstances, do not vent it by cursing God or unnecessarily uttering his name. Greed leads to poverty. Greed inclines people to act impulsively in hopes of gaining more. The benefit of giving to the poor is so great that a beggar is actually doing the giver a favor by allowing the person to give. The more I give away, the more that comes back. Earn as much as you can. Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can. Give as much as you can.

I have a lock of his hair, a handful of his ashes, a box of his letters, a goatskin tambourine. And in the folds of faded violet tissue a necklace, two violet plaques etched in Arabic, strung with black and silver threads, given to me by the boy who loved Michelangelo.

هُوَ الرجل الذي لن يكرِّره هَذَا الدهر مرّتين..

Ya'aburnee. In Arabic, it's hoping you die before someone you love because you can't bear to live without them.

That's when it hit me; my sunglasses were buried in the grave where my Talal lay. Yes, my sunglasses were buried with him. But oh, how I wish my eyes had gone with him instead.

دعونا ليكن لدينا الإختيار لأن نصبح مواطنين في الإنسانية عوضا عن أن نكون مواطنين في الكراهية. لربما الوحدة الإنسانية تجمع القلوب لتخلص الإنسان من شر نفسه....

The image of Kurdish blood pumping through the heart of a little Arab boy like Ahmed was not lost on anyone.

My phone always autocorrects I love you to I live you and what is love if not living the other person.

I love Israel, I go back all the time. I just love New York a little more. My workers are Arabs, my best friend is a black man from Alabama, my girlfriend's a Puerto Rican, and my landlord is a half-Jew bastard. You know what I did this morning? I read in the paper yesterday that the circus is setting up in the Madison Square Garden, they said the elephants would be walking through the Holland Tunnel at dawn. I'm a photographer a little too, you know? So I get up at five o'clock, bike over to the tunnel, and wait. It turns out the paper got it wrong, they came through the Lincoln, but still, you know? This is a hell of a place.

Within the history of lesbianism from the archaic Greek poet Sappho from the Isle of Lesbos, who is the symbol of lust, passion and sensuality between women, to Sister Benedetta Carlini’s deeply erotic love affair with another nun, to the 10th century Arab erotic work, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, which gives the account of a love affair between a Christian and an Arab woman, to modern day same-sex marriages and Pride parades, there is certainly place for Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

Golda Meir once said, ‘I fear the war with the Arabs will go on for years because of the indifference with which their leaders send their people off to die.’ She also said, ‘Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.’” Kayla gestured at the people eating their lunch.

I don’t love those who love me. I love those whom I love. Do you know why?” He did not wait for a response but continued as if to himself: “Whoever loves me places fetters around my neck. Anyone I love gets shackles around his neck.” “Amazing! I’ve always thought we fell captive to those we love, not to those who love us.” “That’s the logic of the masses. That’s the language of weaklings, who don’t know why they love the ones they love. They have no strength or ability to stop loving those they loved when they realize the truth about them.

Jindagi bhar gadhe ki tarah slog marane se aur kuchh din rich Arab Shaikh ki tarah paisa bahane se quality of life change nahi ho jaati. We only remember one week of good time, but never go back to what we scarified for that one week.

Yes indeed, both Muslim and Jewish!I, her father, am Muslim, at least on paper; her mother is Jewish, at least in theory. With us, religion is transmitted through the father; among Jews, through the mother. Therefore, according to the Muslims, Nadia was Muslim; according to the Jews, she was Jewish. She herself might have chosen one or the other, or neither, she chose to be both at once...Yes, both at once and more. She was proud of all the bloodlines that had converged in her, roads of conquest or exile from central Asia, Anatolia, the Ukraine, Arab, Bessarabia, Armenia, Bavaria...She refused to divide out her blood, her soul.

I don't think I ever fully understood before now the old saying that goes: "A mother's heart loves her young one until he grows; her ill one until he heals; and her traveler until he returns." I have experienced all kinds of waiting; I've waited for my young to grow and the sick to heal, but I am still waiting on my little traveler and I do not know how long it will be until I see him again.

أعشق اللغة العربيّة، أعشق اللحظات الّتي أندمج فيها بالعربيّة، لا أبالغ إذا قلت أنّني أقف طويلًا أمام كلمة، فقط لأنّها عربيّة. هي كلمة بالنسبةِ لكم، أمّا بالنّسبة لي فهي أكثر من كلمة، أكثر من كتاب، أكثر من مكتبة، أكثر من مدينة، أكثر من وطن، حقًا هي أكثر من مجرد أربعة حروف أبجديّة.

In the end both people realized something so utterly simple and yet horrifyingly distant- by removing the ‘otherness’ from their respective identification, they can embrace a land that animates their historical sense of purpose and direction. They can embrace fate by embracing each other as joint caretakers of a historical location that witnessed rivers of blood and the silent weeping of those who dream of a New Jerusalem.

You think this country returns our love? Nonsense! She vomits us up time and time again, sends us to hell, beats us down without mercy. With the Romans and the Greeks and the Arabs and the mosquitoes. So you think that someone here says, 'If she doesn't want me, I should go?' Someone here says 'There's no point in holding a country by force if she's been trying to get rid of you from the minute you came to her?' No. You hold on to her as hard as you can and you hope. You hope that maybe she'll finally look around and see you and say - that one. That's the one I want.

Why should they love us?Why do you think the Arabs are not entitled to resist strangers who come here suddenly as if from another planet, and take away their land and their soil, fields, villages and towns, the graves of their ancestors and their children’s inheritance? We tell ourselves that we only came to this land “to build and be rebuilt”, “to renew our days of old”, “to redeem our ancestors heritage”, etcetera, but you tell me if there is any other people in this world who would welcome with open arms an incursion of hundreds of thousands of strangers, and then millions of strangers, landing from far away with the weird claim that their holy scripture, which they brought with them also from far away, promise this whole land to them and them alone.

POEM FOR SOUKAÏNA” **** To tell of my new Moroccan Love, Ô, I court her everyday. But just as a pearl in the mud is a pearl, So is my Love just an Arab girl… in that I offer her constant, loving woos, but she’ll ask me in return that I give her flooze*. That’s when I kiss her and shrug, and I say, “Someday.” And she gives me her love free anyway. * * * Ô, my Love is a child of the souks. In Casablanca born. A gypsy thief, “Soukaïna” named. We met in the souks of Marrakech, It was here my heart she tamed. Ô, she came at nineteen to Marrakech, In search of wild fun. And she lived in Marrakech seven years, Before my heart she won.

This was before the importance of set and setting was understood. I was brought to a basement room, given an injection, and left alone.” A recipe for a bad trip, surely, but Richards had precisely the opposite experience. “I felt immersed in this incredibly detailed imagery that looked like Islamic architecture, with Arabic script, about which I knew nothing. And then I somehow became these exquisitely intricate patterns, losing my usual identity. And all I can say is that the eternal brilliance of mystical consciousness manifested itself. My awareness was flooded with love, beauty, and peace beyond anything I ever had known or imagined to be possible. ‘Awe,’ ‘glory,’ and ‘gratitude’ were the only words that remained relevant.” Descriptions of such experiences always sound a little thin, at least when compared with the emotional impact people are trying to convey; for a life-transforming event, the words can seem paltry. When I mentioned this to Richards, he smiled. “You have to imagine a caveman transported into the middle of Manhattan. He sees buses, cell phones, skyscrapers, airplanes. Then zap him back to his cave. What does he say about the experience? ‘It was big, it was impressive, it was loud.’ He doesn’t have the vocabulary for ‘skyscraper,’ ‘elevator,’ ‘cell phone.’ Maybe he has an intuitive sense there was some sort of significance or order to the scene. But there are words we need that don’t yet exist. We’ve got five crayons when we need fifty thousand different shades.” In

The Loneliness of the Military Historian Confess: it's my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary. I wear dresses of sensible cut and unalarming shades of beige, I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's: no prophetess mane of mine, complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters. If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror. In general I might agree with you: women should not contemplate war, should not weigh tactics impartially, or evade the word enemy, or view both sides and denounce nothing. Women should march for peace, or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery, spit themselves on bayonets to protect their babies, whose skulls will be split anyway, or,having been raped repeatedly, hang themselves with their own hair. There are the functions that inspire general comfort. That, and the knitting of socks for the troops and a sort of moral cheerleading. Also: mourning the dead. Sons,lovers and so forth. All the killed children. Instead of this, I tell what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I don't ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win. In my dreams there is glamour. The Vikings leave their fields each year for a few months of killing and plunder, much as the boys go hunting. In real life they were farmers. The come back loaded with splendour. The Arabs ride against Crusaders with scimitars that could sever silk in the air. A swift cut to the horse's neck and a hunk of armour crashes down like a tower. Fire against metal. A poet might say: romance against banality. When awake, I know better. Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that could be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right - though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them. It's no use pinning all those medals across the chests of the dead. Impressive, but I know too much. Grand exploits merely depress me. In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men's bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches. (The angels could just as well be described as vulgar or pitiless, depending on camera angle.) The word glory figures a lot on gateways. Of course I pick a flower or two from each, and press it in the hotel Bible for a souvenir. I'm just as human as you. But it's no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.

Love stories abound in all cultures: Romeo and Juliet, Orpheus and Eurydice, Tristan and Isolde, and in the Middle East, we find the stories of Yusuf and Zuleika, and Majnûn and Laylá. The story of Majnûn and Layla- was (and still is) widely known throughout the Islamic world. However, in the hands of Persian Sûfî poets, the story became transformed into a symbol of the love of a human being for Allâh. In Sûfîsm, questing for Allâh is similar to the European Grail quest in which the Knight quests for a Chalice (the cup being a symbol of the female sexual organ). Laylá, in Arabic, comes from the word layl meaning 'night'. The association of the Divine Feminine with Darkness and the Night is ubiquitous.

books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic.

I hope I go dreaming in Arabic because love there sounds like the wind passes through every vowel. somewhere buried in my voice there is asphalt singing as brothers build rooms for one another everyone gets a duaa to float across the lake and watch disappear/this is mine.

Abiding time is extravagant daily time with Jesus. This extravagant time is the center of abiding. Not legalism, not dry discipline, not manufactured spirituality, but joyous soaking in the presence of Jesus, lavish spending of time with Him who is most precious, Him from whom all life flows. In a world that is over-connected yet lonely, frantically busy yet accomplishing little of eternal value, super-informed but egregiously ignorant on what really matters, abiding gives Jesus the best of our time, in which He leads us to the best of times.

My trauma is no longer what I define myself by, and it has taken a lot of therapy, self-love, and depression naps for me to get to that point. I define myself by a set of different virtues: the fact that I am a decent writer, the fact that I am a resilient person who has found healing, the fact that I am goofy as hell, the fact that after decades of being understood by everyone as white, I’m finally beginning to explore what it means to be an Arab American, the fact that I was eating my grandmother’s hummus way before white people decided hummus was cool.

The horse was a pure-bred Arab. She came, bright and dancing, flaunting into the ring, her tail held high over her quarters, her silken mane flowing over the crest of her neck. Her head was fine-boned and delicate, with the concave line of the true Arab horse. Her dark, lustrous eyes were fringed with long lashes and the nostrils wrinkling her velvet muzzle were huge black pits. She moved around the ring like a bright flame, her pricked ears delicate as flower petals. Her legs were clean and unblemished and her small hooves were polished ivory. After the dull ache of the rosinbacks, she was all light and fire. Jinny sat entranced, hardly breathing, and then her breath burst out of her in a throbbing gasp. She loved the chestnut mare. As if all their long day's travelling had only been for this. As if she had come all the way from Stopton only for this, to see this sudden gift of perfection.

One other thing this skinny Arab knew: the power of hating the Jew. He could quote from the Holy Book chapter and verse the perfidy of Jews. He could show the dagger of Israel stuck in the soul of Jerusalem where Prophet Muhammad ascended to Heaven. And this son of Islam’s most holy places could wrap it all up in a tidy little conspiracy, the Jews in New York controlling America, the Great Satan, launching their crusades against Muslims everywhere. See, we Muslims are nursed on the mother’s milk of conspiracies. And unless you have a conspiracy to explain everything in one neat package, we simply won’t believe you.

The cold war was over, but all the little games persisted. It was a good thing those puppets in the Middle East had been too busy grubbing around in their deserts to play any serious role in international espionage ... She took a calming moment to visualize the entire Arab world as a giant parking lot. Lovely.

Lost In black as solid as a mire In a land no one would die for In a time I was lost To anyone who ever loved me The world set itself on fire And the sky collapsed above me In a place no one could call home In a place I breathed and slept In a battle no one understood That continued all the same I sat defenseless and alone With the insignificance of my name In the midst of the Lord’s birth On a night meant to be peaceful In a country of the Prophet Where women don’t live free I spoke to God from the shaking Earth And prayed my mother would forgive me In a city without power In a desert torn by religion In a bank between two rivers We added up the decade’s cost And glorified the final hour Of a war that everyone had lost In the dust of helplessness In a concrete bunker In a fate I chose myself I waited without remorse To fight again as recompense For wasted lives and discourse -an original poem about an attack on our base in Iraq during the Arab Spring

ا أنتظر عيداً أو ميلاداً كي أحبك أكثر.. لا أنتظر تواريخاً كي أبحث لك عن هدية أختبىء وراءها كي تغازلك بدلاً عنّي. كلّ الأيام أيّامك وتلك الرزنامة المهملة أذكّرها بك ولا تذكّرني! وفي ليالي الغضب، حين يكون الموت حائماً حول شرفتنا، تنبت داخلي أشجار الميلاد بقماشها الأخضر وزينتها الحمراء، فأغفر للحبّ كلّ خطاياه وأهرع اليك كي نولد مجدداً.. نجمة.

Solomon's suitors for myrrh and frankincense; Zeu's children in a royal hunt for the seat of the sun-god of the Nile; scouts and emissaries from Genghis Khan; Arab geographers and also hunters for slaves and ivory; soul and gold merchants from Gaul and from Bismark's Germany; land-pirates and human game-hunters from Victorian and Edwardian England: they had all passed here bound for a kingdom of plenty, driven sometimes by holy zeal, sometimes by genuine thirst for knowledge and the quest for the spot where the first man's umbilical cord was buried, but more often by mercenary commercial greed and love of the wanton destruction of those with a slightly different complexion from theirs.

كان ينبغي لي أن أمتنع. كان ينبغي لي أن أصمت. كان ينبغي لي أن لا أكتفي. أن أقول نعم على مضض. أن أردّد شكراً. وأتمتمها مطولاً. أن لا أحدّق في وجهك طويلاً. أن أدير وجهي بسرعة. أن أرتشف قهوتي ببطأ. أن أنظر داخل الفنجان. وأن أنده "ولكن". كان ينبغي لي كل هذا كي أحبك. وكي أذهب الى ليلك بقلبٍ صاخب وجسدٍ يرقص، كان ينبغي لي أيضاً أن أعيد ترتيب الوقت على طريقتي.

It is mere wishful thinking to imagine that the persecuted and the oppressed will unite out of solidarity and man the barricades together against a ruthless oppressor. In reality, two children of the same abusive father will not necessarily make common cause, brought close together by their shared fate. Often each sees in the other not a partner in misfortune but in fact the image of their common oppressor. That may well be the case with the hundred-year-old conflict between Arabs and Jews. The Europe that abused, humiliated and oppressed the Arabs by means of Imperialism, colonialism, exploitation and repression is the same Europe that oppressed and persecuted the Jews, and eventually allowed or even helped the Germans to root them out of every corner of the continent and murder almost all of them. But when the Arabs look at us they see not a bunch of half-hysterical survivors but a new offshoot of Europe, with its colonialism, technical sophistication and exploitation, that has cleverly returned to the Middle East - in Zionist guise this time - to exploit, evict and oppress all over again. Whereas when we look at them we do not see fellow victims either, brothers in adversity, but somehow we see pogrom-making Cossacks, bloodthirsty antisemites, Nazis in disguise, as though our European persecutors have reappeared here in the Land of Israel, put keffiyehs on their heads and grown moustaches, but are still our old murderers interested only in slitting Jews' throats for fun

By the time they'd finished their tea, they were almost in love with each other — not quite yet, because true love took time and memories, but as close to love as first impressions could take them. The days had not yet come when Ramy wore Victoire's sloppily knitted scarves with pride, when Robin learned exactly how long Ramy liked his tea steeped so he could have it ready when he inevitably came to the Buttery late from his Arabic tutorial, or when they all knew Letty was about to come to class with a paper bag full of lemon biscuits because it was a Wednesday morning and Taylor's bakery put out lemon biscuits on Wednesdays. But that afternoon they could see with certainty the kind of friends they would be, and loving that vision was close enough.

The desert is the natural dwelling place not only of Arabs and Indians but also of people who can't speak when they want to and of those others who, like Lymie Peters, have nothing more to say, people who have stopped justifying and explaining, stopped trying to account for themselves or their actions, stopped hoping that someone will come along and love them and so make sense of their lives.

The English word Atonement comes from the ancient Hebrew word kaphar, which means to cover. When Adam and Eve partook of the fruit and discovered their nakedness in the Garden of Eden, God sent Jesus to make coats of skins to cover them. Coats of skins don’t grow on trees. They had to be made from an animal, which meant an animal had to be killed. Perhaps that was the very first animal sacrifice. Because of that sacrifice, Adam and Eve were covered physically. In the same way, through Jesus’ sacrifice we are also covered emotionally and spiritually. When Adam and Eve left the garden, the only things they could take to remind them of Eden were the coats of skins. The one physical thing we take with us out of the temple to remind us of that heavenly place is a similar covering. The garment reminds us of our covenants, protects us, and even promotes modesty. However, it is also a powerful and personal symbol of the Atonement—a continuous reminder both night and day that because of Jesus’ sacrifice, we are covered. (I am indebted to Guinevere Woolstenhulme, a religion teacher at BYU, for insights about kaphar.) Jesus covers us (see Alma 7) when we feel worthless and inadequate. Christ referred to himself as “Alpha and Omega” (3 Nephi 9:18). Alpha and omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. Christ is surely the beginning and the end. Those who study statistics learn that the letter alpha is used to represent the level of significance in a research study. Jesus is also the one who gives value and significance to everything. Robert L. Millet writes, “In a world that offers flimsy and fleeting remedies for mortal despair, Jesus comes to us in our moments of need with a ‘more excellent hope’ (Ether 12:32)” (Grace Works, 62). Jesus covers us when we feel lost and discouraged. Christ referred to Himself as the “light” (3 Nephi 18:16). He doesn’t always clear the path, but He does illuminate it. Along with being the light, He also lightens our loads. “For my yoke is easy,” He said, “and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:30). He doesn’t always take burdens away from us, but He strengthens us for the task of carrying them and promises they will be for our good. Jesus covers us when we feel abused and hurt. Joseph Smith taught that because Christ met the demands of justice, all injustices will be made right for the faithful in the eternal scheme of things (see Teachings, 296). Marie K. Hafen has said, “The gospel of Jesus Christ was not given us to prevent our pain. The gospel was given us to heal our pain” (“Eve Heard All These Things,” 27). Jesus covers us when we feel defenseless and abandoned. Christ referred to Himself as our “advocate” (D&C 29:5): one who believes in us and stands up to defend us. We read, “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler” (Psalm 18:2). A buckler is a shield used to divert blows. Jesus doesn’t always protect us from unpleasant consequences of illness or the choices of others, since they are all part of what we are here on earth to experience. However, He does shield us from fear in those dark times and delivers us from having to face those difficulties alone. … We’ve already learned that the Hebrew word that is translated into English as Atonement means “to cover.” In Arabic or Aramaic, the verb meaning to atone is kafat, which means “to embrace.” Not only can we be covered, helped, and comforted by the Savior, but we can be “encircled about eternally in the arms of his love” (2 Nephi 1:15). We can be “clasped in the arms of Jesus” (Mormon 5:11). In our day the Savior has said, “Be faithful and diligent in keeping the commandments of God, and I will encircle thee in the arms of my love” (D&C 6:20). (Brad Wilcox, The Continuous Atonement, pp. 47-49, 60).

He then said something in Arabic to Ali, who made a sign of obedience and withdrew, but not to any distance. As to Franz a strange transformation had taken place in him. All the bodily fatigue of the day, all the preoccupation of mind which the events of the evening had brought on, disappeared as they do at the first approach of sleep, when we are still sufficiently conscious to be aware of the coming of slumber. His body seemed to acquire an airy lightness, his perception brightened in a remarkable manner, his senses seemed to redouble their power, the horizon continued to expand; but it was not the gloomy horizon of vague alarms, and which he had seen before he slept, but a blue, transparent, unbounded horizon, with all the blue of the ocean, all the spangles of the sun, all the perfumes of the summer breeze; then, in the midst of the songs of his sailors, -- songs so clear and sonorous, that they would have made a divine harmony had their notes been taken down, -- he saw the Island of Monte Cristo, no longer as a threatening rock in the midst of the waves, but as an oasis in the desert; then, as his boat drew nearer, the songs became louder, for an enchanting and mysterious harmony rose to heaven, as if some Loreley had decreed to attract a soul thither, or Amphion, the enchanter, intended there to build a city. At length the boat touched the shore, but without effort, without shock, as lips touch lips; and he entered the grotto amidst continued strains of most delicious melody. He descended, or rather seemed to descend, several steps, inhaling the fresh and balmy air, like that which may be supposed to reign around the grotto of Circe, formed from such perfumes as set the mind a dreaming, and such fires as burn the very senses; and he saw again all he had seen before his sleep, from Sinbad, his singular host, to Ali, the mute attendant; then all seemed to fade away and become confused before his eyes, like the last shadows of the magic lantern before it is extinguished, and he was again in the chamber of statues, lighted only by one of those pale and antique lamps which watch in the dead of the night over the sleep of pleasure. They were the same statues, rich in form, in attraction, and poesy, with eyes of fascination, smiles of love, and bright and flowing hair. They were Phryne, Cleopatra, Messalina, those three celebrated courtesans. Then among them glided like a pure ray, like a Christian angel in the midst of Olympus, one of those chaste figures, those calm shadows, those soft visions, which seemed to veil its virgin brow before these marble wantons. Then the three statues advanced towards him with looks of love, and approached the couch on which he was reposing, their feet hidden in their long white tunics, their throats bare, hair flowing like waves, and assuming attitudes which the gods could not resist, but which saints withstood, and looks inflexible and ardent like those with which the serpent charms the bird; and then he gave way before looks that held him in a torturing grasp and delighted his senses as with a voluptuous kiss. It seemed to Franz that he closed his eyes, and in a last look about him saw the vision of modesty completely veiled; and then followed a dream of passion like that promised by the Prophet to the elect. Lips of stone turned to flame, breasts of ice became like heated lava, so that to Franz, yielding for the first time to the sway of the drug, love was a sorrow and voluptuousness a torture, as burning mouths were pressed to his thirsty lips, and he was held in cool serpent-like embraces. The more he strove against this unhallowed passion the more his senses yielded to its thrall, and at length, weary of a struggle that taxed his very soul, he gave way and sank back breathless and exhausted beneath the kisses of these marble goddesses, and the enchantment of his marvellous dream.

Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply. I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés. Yet I have a lock of his hair, a handful of his ashes, a box of his letters, a goatskin tambourine. And in the folds of faded violet tissue a necklace, two violet plaques etched in Arabic, strung with black and silver threads, given to me by the boy who loved Michelangelo.

A woman of Samaria approached, and seeming unconscious of His presence, filled her pitcher with water. As she turned to go away, Jesus asked her for a drink. Such a favor no Oriental would withhold. In the East, water was called “the gift of God.” To offer a drink to the thirsty traveler was held to be a duty so sacred that the Arabs of [184] the desert would go out of their way in order to perform it. The hatred between Jews and Samaritans prevented the woman from offering a kindness to Jesus; but the Saviour was seeking to find the key to this heart, and with the tact born of divine love, He asked, not offered, a favor. The offer of a kindness might have been rejected; but trust awakens trust. The King of heaven came to this outcast soul, asking a service at her hands. He who made the ocean, who controls the waters of the great deep, who opened the springs and channels of the earth, rested from His weariness at Jacob’s well, and was dependent upon a stranger’s kindness for even the gift of a drink of water. The

Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil.... Pretty soon all twenty of us - our class - would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I'd been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other's socks.... The poems I loved were in French, or translated from the Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek. I murmured their heartbreaking sylllables. I knew almost nothing of the diverse and energetic city I lived in. The poems whispered in my ear the password phrase, and I memorized it behind enemy lines: There is a world. There is another world. I knew already that I would go to Hollins College in Virginia; our headmistress sent all her problems there, to her alma mater. "For the English department," she told me.... But, "To smooth off her rough edges," she had told my parents. They repeated the phrase to me, vividly. I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag?

[O]ur segment of the picture consists only of tired and dirty soldiers who are alive and don't want to die; of long darkened convoys in the middle of the night; of shocked silent men wandering back down the hill from battle; of chow lines and atabrine tablets and foxholes and burning tanks and Arabs holding up eggs and the rustle of high-flown shells; of jeeps and petrol dumps and smelly bedding rolls and C rations and cactus patches and blown bridges and dead mules and hospital tenets and shirt collars greasy-black from months of wearing; and of laughter too, and anger and wine and lovely flowers and constant cussing. All these it is composed of; and of graves and graves and graves.

ابيضّ شعر يوسف في عمر السابعة حين شاهد الثلج يهدم حجرة أخيه الأكبر، فيسقط السقف عليه وزوجته وتوأميه، الأجساد الأربعة يراها يوسف بعد ذلك ممدة على السرير الحديد في القبو. وتظلّ تزوره في أحلامه حتى عمرٍ متقدّمة. كان يقضي يومه متأملاً ويفكّر إمّا مُعلّقًا على غصن التينة ومأرجحًا أحد ساقيه، أو تحت ظلّ شجرة التوت بجوار قبر أمّه سارة.تعلّم يوسف إبراهيم خاطر جابر الكتابة، أراد أن يشغله والده عن ساعات التفكير الطويلة. “تعلّم يوسف كيف يكتب اسمه، تعلّم كيف يكتب الأرقام، تعلّم كيف يكتب “الله جلّ جلاله” تعلّم كيف يكتب إبراهيم بالألف الطويلة كشجرة في الوسط، تعلّم كيف يكتب سارة بالراء التي تكرج كالمياه من “هارب قناة المير” وبالتاء المربوطة التي نلفظها كالألف بعد راء إبراهيم، تعلّم كيف يكتب نور الدين، وأحسّ حين كتب اسم أخيه الصغير أنه يسمع صوت بكاءه خارجًا من الحروف”. كان يمرر يده على الحروف بعد أن يكتبها فيشعر أنها تتنفس تحت أصابعه.

THREE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER JESUS DIED ON A ROMAN cross, the emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Christians, who had once been persecuted by the empire, became the empire, and those who had once denied the sword took up the sword against their neighbors. Pagan temples were destroyed, their patrons forced to convert to Christianity or die. Christians whose ancestors had been martyred in gladiatorial combat now attended the games, cheering on the bloodshed. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. On July 15, 1099, Christian crusaders lay siege to Jerusalem, then occupied by Fatimite Arabs. They found a breach in the wall and took the city. Declaring “God wills it!” they killed every defender in their path and dashed the bodies of helpless babies against rocks. When they came upon a synagogue where many of the city’s Jews had taken refuge, they set fire to the building and burned the people inside alive. An eyewitness reported that at the Porch of Solomon, horses waded through blood. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Through a series of centuries-long inquisitions that swept across Europe, hundreds of thousands of people, many of them women accused of witchcraft, were tortured by religious leaders charged with protecting the church from heresy. Their instruments of torture, designed to slowly inflict pain by dismembering and dislocating the body, earned nicknames like the Breast Ripper, the Head Crusher, and the Judas Chair. Many were inscribed with the phrase Soli Deo Gloria, “Glory be only to God.” Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. In a book entitled On Jews and Their Lies, reformer Martin Luther encouraged civic leaders to burn down Jewish synagogues, expel the Jewish people from their lands, and murder those who continued to practice their faith within Christian territory. “The rulers must act like a good physician who when gangrene has set in proceeds without mercy to cut, saw, and burn flesh, veins, bone, and marrow,” he wrote. Luther’s writings were later used by German officials as religious justification of the Holocaust. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.

The imperialist found it useful to incorporate the credible and seemingly unimpeachable wisdom of science to create a racial classification to be used in the appropriation and organization of lesser cultures. The works of Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Buffon, and Georges Cuvier, organized races in terms of a civilized us and a paradigmatic other. The other was uncivilized, barbaric, and wholly lower than the advanced races of Europe. This paradigm of imaginatively constructing a world predicated upon race was grounded in science, and expressed as philosophical axioms by John Locke and David Hume, offered compelling justification that Europe always ought to rule non-Europeans. This doctrine of cultural superiority had a direct bearing on Zionist practice and vision in Palestine. A civilized man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it meant something to him; on it, accordingly, he produced useful arts and crafts, he created, he accomplished, he built. For uncivilized people, land was either farmed badly or it was left to rot. This was imperialism as theory and colonialism was the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of Europe. It was this epistemic framework that shaped and informed Zionist attitudes towards the Arab Palestinian natives. This is the intellectual background that Zionism emerged from. Zionism saw Palestine through the same prism as the European did, as an empty territory paradoxically filled with ignoble or, better yet, dispensable natives. It allied itself, as Chaim Weizmann said, with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The so-called natives did not take well to the idea of Jewish colonizers in Palestine. As the Zionist historians, Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel, have empirically shown, the ideas of Jewish colonizers in Palestine, this was well before World War I, were always met with resistance, not because the natives thought Jews were evil, but because most natives do not take kindly to having their territory settled by foreigners. Zionism not only accepted the unflattering and generic concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually populated not by an advanced civilization, but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominated. Zionism, therefore, developed with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if Palestine had been occupied by one of the well-established industrialized nations that ruled the world, then the problem of displacing German, French, or English inhabitants and introducing a new, nationally coherent element into the middle of their homeland would have been in the forefront of the consciousness of even the most ignorant and destitute Zionists. In short, all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of native people in Palestine; institutions were built deliberately shutting out the natives, laws were drafted when Israel came into being that made sure the natives would remain in their non-place, Jews in theirs, and so on. It is no wonder that today the one issue that electrifies Israel as a society is the problem of the Palestinians, whose negation is the consistent thread running through Zionism. And it is this perhaps unfortunate aspect of Zionism that ties it ineluctably to imperialism- at least so far as the Palestinian is concerned. In conclusion, I cannot affirm that Zionism is colonialism, but I can tell you the process by which Zionism flourished; the dialectic under which it became a reality was heavily influenced by the imperialist mindset of Europe. Thank you. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel located in the Jordann District and after lunch in a café went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert’s Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar, long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows, bicycles parked outside every house, street furniture displaying a certain demographic scruffiness, an absence of ostentatious buildings, straight streets interspersed with small parks…..In one street lines with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there. Above me, on the second floor, I could see an apartment with three large windows and no curtains. The walls were painted white and decorated with a single large painting covered with small blue and red dots. There was an oaken desk against a wall, a large bookshelf and an armchair. I wanted the life that this space implied. I wanted a bicycle; I wanted to put my key in that red front door every evening. Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements my seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. My love for the apartment building was based on what I perceived to be its modesty. The building was comfortable but not grand. It suggested a society attracted to the financial mean. There was an honesty in its design. Whereas front doorways in London are prone to ape the look of classical temples, in Amsterdam they accept their status, avoiding pillars and plaster in favor of neat, undecorated brick. The building was modern in the best sense, speaking of order, cleanliness, and light. In the more fugitive, trivial associations of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and change-from finding camels where at home there are horses, for example, or unadorned apartment buildings where at home there are pillared ones. But there may be a more profound pleasure as well: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide. And so it was with my enthusiasms in Amsterdam, which were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, including its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, its resistance to urban life and its net-curtained mentality. What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Let’s apply this pithy observation to Jewish identity. While it is tempting to equate Judaism with Jewishness, I submit to you that my identity as someone who is Jewish is far more complex than my religious affiliation. The collective inventory of the Jewish people rests on my shoulders. This inventory shapes and defines my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The narrative of my people is a story of extraordinary achievement as well as unimaginable horror. For millennia, the Jewish people have left their fate in the hands of others. Our history is filled with extraordinary achievements as well as unimaginable violence. Our centuries-long Diaspora defined our existential identity in ways that cannot be reduced to simple labels. It was the portability of our religion that bound us together as a people, but it was our struggle to fit in; to be accepted that identified us as unique. Despite the fact that we excelled academically, professionally, industrially, we were never looked upon as anything other than Jewish. Professor Said in his book, Orientalism, examined how Europe looked upon the Orient as a dehumanized sea of amorphous otherness. If we accept this point of view, then my question is: How do you explain Western attitudes towards the Jews? We have always been a convenient object of hatred and violent retribution whenever it became convenient. If Europe reduced the Orient to an essentialist other, to borrow Professor Said’s eloquent language, then how do we explain the dehumanizing treatment of Jews who lived in the heart of Europe? We did not live in a distant, exotic land where the West had discursive power over us. We thought of ourselves as assimilated. We studied Western philosophy, literature, music, and internalized the same culture as our dominant Christian brethren. Despite our contribution to every conceivable field of human endeavor, we were never fully accepted as equals. On the contrary, we were always the first to be blamed for the ills of Western Europe. Two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Spain in 1492 and thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal four years later. By the time we get to the Holocaust, our worst fears were realized. Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated by the traumatic memories of this unspeakable event. No people in history have undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality, a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall, a mystical belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these, together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews who have grown up under its shadow. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

I used to be a roller coaster girl" (for Ntozake Shange) I used to be a roller coaster girl 7 times in a row No vertigo in these skinny legs My lipstick bubblegum pink As my panther 10 speed. never kissed Nappy pigtails, no-brand gym shoes White lined yellow short-shorts Scratched up legs pedaling past borders of humus and baba ganoush Masjids and liquor stores City chicken, pepperoni bread and superman ice cream Cones. Yellow black blending with bits of Arabic Islam and Catholicism. My daddy was Jesus My mother was quiet Jayne Kennedy was worshipped by my brother Mark I don’t remember having my own bed before 12. Me and my sister Lisa shared. Sometimes all three Moore girls slept in the Queen. You grow up so close never close enough. I used to be a roller coaster girl Wild child full of flowers and ideas Useless crushes on polish boys in a school full of white girls. Future black swan singing Zeppelin, U2 and Rick Springfield Hoping to be Jessie’s Girl I could outrun my brothers and Everybody else to that reoccurring line I used to be a roller coaster girl Till you told me I was moving too fast Said my rush made your head spin My laughter hurt your ears A scream of happiness A whisper of freedom Pouring out my armpits Sweating up my neck You were always the scared one I kept my eyes open for the entire trip Right before the drop I would brace myself And let that force push my head back into That hard iron seat My arms nearly fell off a few times Still, I kept running back to the line When I was done Same way I kept running back to you I used to be a roller coaster girl I wasn’t scared of mountains or falling Hell, I looked forward to flying and dropping Off this earth and coming back to life every once in a while I found some peace in being out of control allowing my blood to race through my veins for 180 seconds I earned my sometime nicotine pull I buy my own damn drinks & the ocean Still calls my name when it feels my toes Near its shore. I still love roller coasters & you grew up to be Afraid of all girls who cld ride Fearlessly like me.