A Song for My Mother

Salonique: La Princessa ye el Caballero
Constantinople; Francoise Atlan (voice)
Taken from the album Terres Turquoises
Atma Classique ACD 2 2314

Pass the port Stephen, here's to Boris!

"One could say that Islamic worship, education, and even legal codes were 'left alone' more than were those of any other religious systems in the colonial world. One consequence in some places was that by the time of independence, Muslim-majority regions lagged substantially behind others in the numbers of Western-educated, widely travelled, or highly qualified personnel they could command [...] Access to certain key skills and oppurtunities, one could almost say certain key aspects of transnational modernity, was greater, earlier for Hindus (especially West Bengali ones) in the former, members of Christian minorities in the latter, than among Muslims."
(my emphasis p. 102)
and rightly is our right and honourable friend Stephen puzzled by the following:
"It has also been argued that there existed in the West an especially intense prejudice against the Islamic world, different in kind and greater in virulence than that against other non-Europeans, operating across a broad historical period but persisting into the present. The problem with such a claim is the lack of comparative analysis which might test or validate the claim, measuring Western anti-Islamism against any other kind of prejudice, any other discourse of discrimination, hierarchy, stereotyping, or demonization. For that matter, it is hard to see just how one could quantify different kinds of colonial prejudice in that way, or assign them to a ranking order." (p. 103)

This is the end of Stephen Howe's chapter on Empire by Sea, in his OUP Very Short Introduction to Empire.
It sort of reminds me of the Monty-Python skit in which one of the actors dressed as a Tory MP says he will first make some general posh noises and then fall over backwards foaming at the mouth, which he does.

Ziauddin Sardar's "Orientalism"

Sardar describes Orientalism as Europe's surrogate intellectual field for self-definition, along with a will not to know the truth about the "orient" so that it can remain the mythical place where fantasies concerning the European self can be played out. Dating orientalism further back than Said does, he shows that orientalist accounts are deeply intermingled with anti-Islamic sentiment. Said also sees this thread, however, because his reading remains secular (by necessity) Said remains closed to some aspects of orientalism, indeed, because the responses to orientalism have usually come from religious scholars, Said does not find them interesting, and as a result, a whole set of scholarship remains closed to him- and he cannot come up with instances that respond to orientalism critically, which is the main criticism that he gets from not just Islamic but also secular writers. So Sardar's contribution is best when he does provide the genealogy of these Islamic responses to orientalism, and indeed, responding himself, especially to Satanic Verses, revealing that Rushdie takes crusade romances as his model, as revealed in his choice of moniker for Muhammad "Mahound", the name used in chanson de gestes. Thus does the orientalist tie himself to a tradition of orientalism, which has roots in crusader mentality. However, in parts the slim volume falls short, and you get the sense that Sardar is being superficial for the sake of brevity, to produce this slim volume. Good effort, leaves you wanting more.

Jaffa History

From wikipedia:
"The Arabs rejected the plan and on November 30, 1947, the day following the adoption of the UN resolution, seven Jews were killed by Arabs in Palestine in three separate incidents: at 8 o'clock in the morning, in what came to be seen as the opening shots of the 1948 War, three Arabs attacked a bus from Netanya to Jerusalem, killing five Jewish passengers. Half an hour later a second bus attack left a Jewish passenger dead. Later in the day a twenty-five-year old Jewish man was shot dead in Jaffa, where there were alleged attacks on Arabs by Jews."

and then the not so "alleged" attack, oh I see, it's called an "offensive" on Jaffa of course, not on real people:
"On April 25, 1948, Irgun launched an offensive on Jaffa, then the largest Arab city in Palestine, during which many of its Arab residents fled through the harbor. Haganah units took the city on May 14. Out of 70,000-80,000 Arabs, 3,600-4,100 remained."

So the 76,000 Arabs who may or may not have been twenty-five years old, who may or may not have been male must have just got on their luxury yachts waiting for them on the harbour, and left.