Doha, Qatar — If blame for domestic violence rests in part with neighbors who sit idly by, then the slaughter of 400,000-and-counting Darfuri African Muslims in Sudan is a pan-Arab disgrace. Governments throughout this region have turned a blind eye to atrocities perpetrated by Janjaweed Arab horseback raiders, Sudan’s Ku Klux Klan. Two Arab states in particular, Egypt and the Gulf emirate of Qatar, have done even worse: They have provided diplomatic cover for the genocidal junta in Khartoum that arms and equips the Janjaweed.

When, by contrast, a man stands up in either country and struggles against the deafening Arab silence on Darfur, he follows in the tradition of Gentiles who rescued Jews from the Holocaust—the “righteous among the nations.” He deserves to be recognized.

I meet Khartoum native Abu Bakr al-Qadi by chance in an air-conditioned office at Qatar’s Ministry of Justice in downtown Doha. He’s hard to miss: In sub-Saharan-spiced Arabic dialect and an operatic tenor voice reminiscent of Roy Orbison, he’s chewing out two Qatari officials at the top of his lungs.

“You’re hypocrites!” he cries. “The blood of Muslims isn’t cheaper because they happen to be African!”

One of the turbaned Qataris appears taken aback. An unwritten rule in this oil-rich sheikhdom calls for guest workers to show deference and decorum when addressing the native population. “Are you talking to me?” he asks.

“You and all the rest of you!” Qadi replies. “And why am I the only one? Why isn’t there a single Qatari raising his voice about Darfur in this whole country?”

The tension mounts as the two argue whether mass murder in Darfur is even taking place. The Qatari maintains that Western journalists are exaggerating or fabricating reports of carnage. It’s an “American-Zionist” propaganda tactic, he asserts, to destabilize Sudan and draw attention away from the real genocide in Palestine. “Just go downstairs to the street and anyone here will tell you where the true tragedy is,” he says. “Even the African on the street could tell you!”

“Even the African,” Qadi seethes. The two men look as if they’re about ready to take their dispute outside.

“Forgive our Sudanese brother his passion,” the other Qatari cuts in. “He’s speaking from his gut.” A deep breath thaws the irate African’s icy stare, and he excuses himself.

As Qadi leaves the room, I tag along on the pretext of bumming a ride in his SUV. He turns on the ignition, and car speakers pipe in a vaguely familiar African choral chant, which stokes my curiosity. It’s a CD recording of listen-and-repeat religious hymns by a legendary Sudanese Muslim mystic, Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, who espoused the oneness of humankind and a radical reinterpretation of Islamic law before his execution in Khartoum in the mid-’80s. His egalitarian movement, the Republican Brothers, reportedly survives in Sudan—but only barely, and only in secret. Qadi, it turns out, was one of Taha’s disciples. And though Qadi has now spent eighteen years in Doha, where he works for a Western company, Taha’s philosophies still shape his worldview.

“Mahmoud Muhammad Taha had the answer to our problems in Sudan,” he tells me. “He foresaw this disease of ethnic cleansing, this lethal chauvinism; and his prescription was love, justice, and equality.”

Qadi moonlights as a weekly op-ed columnist for the liberal Qatari daily Al-Watan. Over t
he past months, he has used the column as a platform from which to raise alarm bells about the Darfur genocide. His writing takes Arab élites to task for tacitly endorsing what he calls a “violent campaign of Arabization” that targets Sudan’s non-Arab “marginalized peoples.” In one unpublished Arabic lecture, which he gives me to read, Qadi envisions a transnational “coalition of the marginalized,” including Africans, Kurds, and Jews in the Middle East. Coming from a Sudanese Arab living in the heart of the Gulf, these heretical ideas require off-the-charts chutzpah.

Over the next few days, I gradually learn that Qadi is no crank. To the contrary, his activism is sustained and fairly broad-based. Once a month, he holds a political salon in the living room of his house, where he brings together Sudanese intellectuals from the Arab north, the African south, and the beleaguered Darfur region in-between. I attend one, joining the local journalists and photographers who show up to write about the evening’s discussions. The two most popular Sudanese online discussion forums, including one that’s hosted in Khartoum, heatedly debate the published reports.

Qadi serves as a point of contact for Darfuri dissidents who pass through the Gulf, often in search of philanthropic capital and logistical help from well-heeled Sudanese exiles. These activities have earned him a personal warning to cease and desist from the Sudanese ambassador in Doha. It speaks well of the relatively permissive political environment here in Qatar that Qadi feels comfortable thumbing his nose at the ambassador.

All these efforts by a lone man in the Arabian Gulf may do little, in the grand scheme of things, to remedy the destruction and suffering in Darfur and beyond. But we celebrate the “righteous among the nations” precisely because their individual acts of courage are so rare. Here in Qatar, I pray that Qadi’s bravery and chutzpah inspires countless others to take action.

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Manama, Bahrain — The Jewish community in this micro-kingdom of 35 islands in the Arabian Gulf was never more than a few hundred strong. Now there are 30 left. One is an advisor to the king, a second is in line for an important diplomatic post, and a third runs the largest electronics dealership in the country. Let’s just say that the rest don’t struggle to earn a living. Wealth, however, does not a vibrant community make.

“When our sons go looking for wives,” says community leader Ibrahim Nunu, “they can offer them many things in Bahrain—but a synagogue isn’t one of them.”

For all their affluence, the Jews of Manama lack the most basic feature of Jewish communal life—a functioning house of worship. The absence is unusual among today’s Middle Eastern Jewish communities, and it bespeaks a poverty not just in the life of Bahrain’s Jews but in Bahraini society as a whole.

Over the past few years I’ve dropped in on lantsmen in Iraq, Iran, and other Middle Eastern nations where dwindling Jewish communities face problems that make Bahrain look like Tel Aviv. But from Saddam’s Iraq to revolutionary Iran, there was always a functioning synagogue.

The scene in Isfahan on Rosh Hashanah in 1998 was hopping—thanks to a crew of local carpet merchants devoted to the sanctuary’s upkeep. At a more modest house of worship in the Iranian town of Hamadan, the custodian of a shrine purported to be the burial place of Esther and Mordechai welcomed occasional visitors, passing out prayer books and skullcaps.

In Baghdad, after a Palestinian gunman opened fire on Jewish worshippers in the mid-’90s killing two, Saddam gave firearms to members of the minyan so they could protect themselves from intruders.

During the lootings that followed the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, a young Muslim friend of the community stood on the roof of the synagogue in Baghdad’s Karrada neighborhood and fired shots in the air to warn bandit gangs to keep their distance. Ninety-three-year-old Tawfiq Sofer had camped out in silent vigil inside, on a cot beside the rostrum. “We had God to protect us, and young Muhammad” Sofer told me, patting his devoted gunman friend on the head.

So if these struggling and besieged Jewish communities maintain houses of worship, why can’t the successful and well-connected Jews of Bahrain do so?

I meet Nunu, the Bahraini king’s Jewish advisor, and he tells me about the old synagogue. Built a century or so ago by Iraqi and Iranian immigrants, it was torched in the ’50s by rabble—as were so many Arab Jewish installations in the aftermath of Israel’s 1948 war. A Torah scroll and other valuables were stolen, and most never resurfaced.

“Years later, in the late ’70s,” Nunu says, “someone in town came by the house of a member of our community with a large thing wrapped in cloth. It was the Torah scroll. He said there had been so many deaths, accidents, and misfortunes in his family over the past 20 years that they knew they couldn’t afford to hold onto it any longer.”

The scroll was sent to London for safekeeping in an Iraqi synagogue.

“Why not restore it to its historic place?” I ask. “Rebuild the thing. Start again.”

Nunu sighs. He did, in fact, rebuild the charred house of worship a few years ago on the very spot in old Manama where it used to stand. “But it’s just an empty, locked building now,” he explains. “If we put anything in it, it’ll be stolen again. And look at the graffiti on the wall. It’s a warning of sorts.”

I hail a cab to the part of Manama where the synagogue stands. The driver knows only that there’s “one empty building on that street—my parents always told me there was something scary about it, like ghosts.” When I reach the neighborhood, I find the locals are less spooked. Every person knows precisely where the old synagogue is.

“That’s it, that’s the Jewish synagogue,” says the owner of an Islamic bookshop across the street from the synagogue. “We torched it in the ’50s but Nunu built it again.”

“So it was a Jewish synagogue.”

“Was and still is.”

The nondescript, tan-colored building across the street may not be a standing synagogue by Jewish standards, but for at least some of the neighbors, it is and always will be.

The building has “Death to Israel and Sharon” spray-painted in Arabic on the front wall. A bumper sticker urging support for the Palestinian Intifada is plastered on the padlocked front door.

Among liberal Bahraini Muslims I’ve visited all week, there’s a shared wish, stridently expressed, that Jews come back to Bahrain and help restore the spirit of pluralism and tolerance that once reigned in the island kingdom. But so long as the thought of a synagogue invokes fear in some Bahraini Muslims and hostility in others, cosmopolitan Bahrain will remain only a fond memory.

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The day I stop by Kuwait’s High Institute of Musical Arts, veiled Kuwaiti women and men in white dishdashas shuffle in and out of the austere, echoey front foyer, clutching their instruments. The conservatory occupies a nondescript, one-story building tucked away between an Islamic charitable trust and a chicken rotissomat in the coastal suburb of Salmiya. Its obscurity is appropriate. For every 3,000 Islamic seminaries in the Arab Middle East today, there is one institute of music—an outrageous imbalance for the part of the world where melody was born.

I’ve come to the conservatory to learn more about the musical history of the Muslim world. Many Islamists detest this history, because it threatens their vision of a homogenous Islamic past and opens the door to a more pluralistic future. In the late 1930s, when 40 percent of Baghdad was Jewish, the Iraqi National Orchestra was stocked mostly with Jewish performers—a fact to which many of the old timers I met in Baghdad readily attested. (My maternal grandparents used to share recollections of those performers, some of whom they counted as friends.) Arabic music has also been influenced by minorities hailing from Africa, India, Turkey, Iran, and the Kurdish mountains. If the Arab world wishes to acknowledge minority cultures’ rightful place in the mosaic of the Middle East, it might start by remembering their distinguished contribution to the region’s culture. For now, those memories survive in places like Kuwait’s High Institute. “We can trace our musical heritage back a thousand years to Abbasid Baghdad,” says Institute chief Bandar Ubayd, nursing a 13-stringed fretless oud on his lap. “But for the more urgent question of how we sing and play today, we have to look at local history and the movement of peoples immediately around us.” His eyes widen as he recalls a time, long before he was born, when Muslim clerics had persuaded area tribal leaders that music and visual arts were haram, or forbidden—making it unsafe to sing, sculpt, or paint except in secret. He backs up his speech with lean, meandering riffs on the oud, brushing the double strings with a plastic pick shaped like a nail file. They’re desert licks, humble but edgy, stripped of the showy flamenco frills often strummed by oud players along the eastern Mediterranean shores. “This instrument reached us relatively recently,” he explains. “It was in the nineteenth century that Abdullah al-Faraj first brought one here from India.” Faraj, a merchant’s son, came of age in India, where he spent over 40 years as a trader. Before returning to Kuwait, he learned to sing Hindustani ragas from local performers and picked up the oud from Yemeni émigrés in Mumbai. Faraj came home at the end of the nineteenth century, and started a clandestine school for Kuwaiti artists. Some senior oud players in Kuwait today are pupils of pupils of Faraj’s secret students. I watch Ubayd, himself a third-generation protégé, show off his pedigree by imitating the old master’s singing style. He performs a love poem set in an Arabic scale, ornamenting the angular melody with distinctively Indian-style pitch-bending.

“This sort of influence is natural,” he says, “when a person spends a lot of time in a place and is influenced by it. Faraj brought India’s artistic wealth back with him to Kuwait and spread it around. Much of what Khaliji music sounds like today stems directly from him.” Ubayd and his oud conjure Kuwait’s diverse sources of musical inspiration. Seve
n-tone Arabic scales give way to the more earthy pentatonic—a staple of African music—and Ubayd’s voice remembers the seafaring chants of east African slaves and sailors who settled in Kuwait. He taps out the complex polyrhythm of the lewa, a traditional dance that originated in East Africa, only to segue into the desert warrior drumbeats of indigenous Bedouin tribes. He recalls having participated as a child in Ardha performances—a men’s sword dance originally devised to instill courage before a fight—then demonstrates how Bedouin chanting and African rhythms eventually merged into the region’s first patriotic anthems. It’s enough to make an Iraqi Jew feel nationalistic about Kuwait. “What can you tell me about the performing brothers Salih and Daoud al-Kuwaiti?” I ask him. I can guess the answer, but I’m curious to hear how Ubayd spins it. “They were, of course, Jews,” he says. “They settled in Kuwait in the 1920s and lived here for years. They were influenced by our voices. They loved Kuwaiti art. But Baghdad was a city of art, and it had recording studios in the ’30s, so the brothers emigrated and found their home there.” His fingers fiddle for an elusive sound and eventually register a line or two, on the oud, of one of the brothers’ signature numbers. The music restores another memory: “There was a Jewish market here once,” he says. “We used to hear about it from our fathers. They had a place. They were present in Kuwait. Back then, there was not this stridency and chauvinism that there is now. All religions are from God.” Ubayd’s acknowledgment of our common Creator is also frequently uttered at the Islamic seminaries I visited last spring. But I haven’t met any man of God in the Arab East who felt it as deeply as this Kuwaiti music teacher, scion of a cosmopolitan Arabia that Islamists would bury forever.

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Listen: To Iraqi oud player Ahmed Mukhtar's haunting composition Mantasaf-al-lil, which "describes a scene of Iraqi refugees…looking for a land to seek refuge in." (RealPlayer required) Watch: Video clips from Under the Olive Tree, a documentary about a Middle Eastern musical ensemble with Arab, Armenian Christian, and Jewish Israeli members.

The post The Beauty and Danger of Arabic Music appeared first on Jewcy.

To me, these sights and sounds feel like family, even though I’m the childless, American Jewish economy-class passenger who boards alone at the end. I’m no stranger to the raucous Emirates Airlines non-stop flight from New York to Dubai, which I’ve been flying on and off since the ’90s to get to various connecting destinations in the neighborhood. I once lived in Dubai as a graduate student for the better part of an academic year; and as a telecoms consultant in a prior career, I used to commute to Saudi Arabia and weekend in Kuwait.

For most Americans, the names of these countries call out news-flash associations involving oil, terrorism, or American troops. But for me they evoke New Jersey: strip mall after strip mall, soccer moms and dads, weird sex, and newly built mosques off the interstate.

My complimentary on-flight copy of a pan-Gulf Arabic newspaper features a typical front-page spread of government press releases, pointed coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and a smattering of urban legends. It’s the last of the three that has the passenger seated next to me engrossed—though why he should ignore the screaming headline about the Sultan of Sharjah’s decision to increase administrative salaries in the educational bureaucracy by 7 percent, I can’t imagine. He’s reading about a house in the emirate of Ras al-Khaimah that may be haunted, at least according to the police. How else do you explain several fires and a mysterious cat that appears at odd hours of the night only to vanish? The owner of the house, his four wives, and 26 children have evacuated and appealed to the authorities to build them a new one. Only in the Gulf.

To my eyes, the story smacks of an old cartoon involving a scheming bad guy who dresses up as a ghost to scare off the neighbors. I test my fellow passenger’s TV literacy.

“Doesn’t it read like an episode of Scooby Doo?” I ask him in Arabic.

“Bigtime,” he replies. Then he channels classic Americana: “And I would have gotten away with it too if it wazint for you keeds!”

There’s another reason why flights to Arabia feel, to me, like a journey home. Every pungent phrase I hear uttered by the Kuwaiti mother of four—from the disciplinary curse “Il’an Abuk!” to her righteous praise of God upon touching ground safely—is a linguistic blood sister to my mother’s native tongue, Iraqi Judeo-Arabic. I grew up tasting the cooking and hearing the melodic inflections of a Baghdadi Jewish woman, whose family dates back 2,700 years in Mesopotamia. All these Gulf states, their recipes, and their dialects, are variants of the Babylonian haute culture in which my mother was raised. That Baghdad—an axis of sophistication that lit up the surrounding deserts—no longer exists. But whenever I travel in the Gulf, I always catch a phrase, expletive, or hot sauce that brings me back to that place, at least as I imagine it, having caught a few rays of old Baghdad as a child in the remote Iraqi-Jewish diaspora of Providence, Rhode Island.

It was a modest Diaspora, to be sure, consisting of my mother, my younger brother, and another family of four that lived two blocks away. The vast majority of the Jewish community, including my father, grew up with an Eastern European notion of Jewish civilization that involved many helpings of pickled fish. Because Jews in the United States tend to assume that Jewish culture equals Ashkenazi culture, a person like me can feel a touch out of place amid gatherings of American Jews. And because Arabs in the Middle East tend to appraise all Jews through the prism of the Arab-Israeli conflict, my visit to Arabia is also front-loaded with emotional baggage. But often enough, over the past ten years, I have experienced the warmth of a genuine connection to the ancient hinterland of Semitic monotheism.

Over the next three weeks, I’ll make my way through Kuwait City, Bahrain’s capital Manama, the Qatari polis of Doha, and finally Dubai. This is not exactly a religious pilgrimage, however. I’m co-producing a couple of shows about Afro-Arabian music and history for Afropop Worldwide, a public radio program, and I’m meeting with various Arab intellectuals on behalf of an academic fellowship. In other words, I’m kibitzing through Arabia—and shvitzing, let me tell you, because it’s 93 degrees and muggy when I arrive in Kuwait City at midnight.

“Iraqi?” asks a mustached immigration official after I inquire about my visa. “Welcome home.”

Next dispatch: The beauties and dangers of Arabic music.

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Do: Think American Jews need to wake up and smell the couscous? Had it up to here with shtetl-mongering, Yiddish slang, and all the other fetishized trappings of Ashkenazi culture? Tell us about it below. Go: To the website of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA) Read: The Jews of Islam, by Bernard Lewis

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