Last night I was walking along the Charing Cross Road and I saw in the window of a bookshop a little book I did not recognize, called A Moorish Calendar. I bought it, and it has proved quite enchanting. A tiny, beautifully illustrated, collection of extracts from the enormous Kitab el-Filaha of Yahya ibn al-‘Awwam al-Ishbili, much … More Coriander from a goat’s testicle and other farming lore
Years ago in Cairo there was a joke: “What’s the definition of an expert?” to which the answer was “Anyone within a mile of Talaat Harb Square carrying a Samsonite.” One of the emerging themes of modern British political life seems to be a similar disdain for expertise. Michael Gove famously declared in the course of … More Einstein, Iraq and the Samsonite
It is a Libyan-flavoured revolution, a mixture of spice and salt and light that smells like the blessings that come from the lanterns of saints. I find this lovely sentence, haunting in its sensual eloquence, scribbled down in my commonplace book, the first small footprint left there by Hisham Matar. I was acutely conscious as … More A Mixture of Spice and Salt
I am slightly off-piste, writing about Brexit – but it’s a hard subject for an Englishman to avoid today, and I’m returning to this blog after three months off. Reflecting this morning on the referendum result, I took down from the shelf George Orwell’s essay, The Lion & the Unicorn, in which he wrote of England: … More Brexit: the most expensive tug of all
Coming out of my hotel near the Ecole Militaire in Paris a few weeks ago week, I found myself directly behind a large bronze statue. From each side of its – his – face sprouted a luxuriant and wonderfully curly moustache, silhouetted against the sky well beyond each cheek. “That,” I thought idly to myself … More Lyautey’s whiskers and sexual predation
A few years back, as part of a film package that was sent out from London to show in Rabat, we received Chris Morris’s funny, cynical Four Lions, and it went off for approval by the censors. Back came all the films, cheerfully approved, and it was only when my ambassador telephoned me a little … More Several Lions and an Ottoman Miniature
I published a working paper recently under the title Immunising the Mind: How can education reform contribute to combatting violent extremism in which I commented on the fact that the recruitment of jihadis in the Middle East and North Africa seems to correlate to some extent with their choice of subject at university. Diego Gambetta of … More The Two Cultures and the Jihad
A year or so ago I was very struck by an account of the way aeroplanes navigated across the desert between ‘Amman and Baghdad in the 1920s. There was a furrow ploughed into the land surface all the way, and the pilot simply followed it. This struck me as quite funny, an unexpectedly primitive way … More Biffy, the Bombers and Disorganised Morale
Several years ago I wrote a novella for Christmas about a series of rather fantastic happenings in Rome, which involved a long-dead astrologer, a papal election, the appearance of a comet, and five long-buried Philistine artefacts – the five golden haemorrhoids of the Second Book of Samuel, since you ask. (If you didn’t know that … More Comets, eggs and haemorrhoids
Four days ago Niger surrendered to the International Criminal Court a Malian man called Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, who has been indicted by the court for the destruction of religious buildings in Timbuktu. This man, who calls himself Abu Tourab, insists on being addressed in Arabic by the Court, though he was born about 100 kilometres … More “There’s no ‘Yo man’ any more. We’re into religion”
Martin Rose 