Live from Saudi Arabia - Of Rituals, Other People’s Prayers, and what pilgrimage's all about (yep, all in one post)

Just back from Umrah, the minor pilgrimage to Mecca - and minor it truly is: it takes roughly 2 hours.
I am writing a second entry, about random aspects of life in Saudi (and plenty of photos!!) which I will post soon, but for now I ask you to kindly bear with today's somewhat more 'spiritual' entry...


I have been to Mecca a few times (well I do need to make up for my numerous vices, so...) and I usually enjoy performing the religious rituals of Umrah and Hajj. First because I'm usually accompanied by family, and it’s nice to share that experience, and of course for the religious value of it, a subject I surely won't address here.

But I have always been skeptical about the purpose of the rituals themselves. Why do we walk around the Kaaba - a block of brick that was built and rebuilt several times over the course of history - seven times, counterclockwise? What’s the deal with the Black Stone? Etc.

Skepticism is an old tradition in Islam - Omar Ibn El Khattab, Islam’s second caliph (3rd ruler, hence!) is recorded to have smirked at this whole ‘Black Stone’ business, and have said, addressing the stone - “I know that you’re nothing but a deaf and mute stone, and can do no harm or good; and had I not seen the Prophet kiss you, I would never have”.

Knowing Omar’s fiery temper, I’d bet much that he probably cursed, too, but historians wouldn’t report it... Oh well.

Omar had wifi in his tent. (found this when I googled his name...)

I realised today that rituals only serve insofar as they are just that: ’rituals’. No logical direct good can come as a repercussion for standing there or doing this.

The ritual, however, serves to focus this religious energy on something. Like your first love as a teenager - you just ‘had all that love to give’ and needed a personification for it, and you came up with that 12th grade hottie who doesn’t even know you exist yet haunted your diary and dreams. Well, pretty much the same here.

More importantly, its purpose is to provide a ‘Qibla’, which you may know as referring to ‘Mecca’ (because it’s what we pray towards) but linguistically simply means ‘target or concentration zone’ . (hence, you can say that Washington DC is the qibla for people who want to work in national politics, for example).

A shared qibla. And it is there that people from everywhere, meet to pray to the same God, to repeat the same moves, the same words, the same prayers of health and happiness and heaven.

Watching the Kaaba, and the crowds
(ya Balconera! This one's for you!)

I think that was God’s plan. He probably doesn’t care much whether we turn counterclockwise or hop on one foot. It’s about us coming together. That’s the beauty of the pilgrimage.

It’s not the Kaaba, it’s the people. Not the prayers, but those who utter them.
Not the accents, but the thoughts in a thousand languages behind them.
Not the verses sang in Arabic, but the heartfelt, nondescript, haphazard prayers in Urdu, Farsi, English, Turkish, or rural Algerian, sharing their love - or sometimes, anger - at God, or simply asking for happiness, a good job or a promotion, forgiveness, winning the lottery or the football cup, or something else altogether.

My pilgrimage is about them.

About the group of elderly Turks, with one person reading the prayers aloud in a slow, accented Arabic, with the others repeating.

The Syrian woman, who, dressed all-in-white, sports fluffy pink socks.

The Indonesian group - color-coded, as always. Today’s were checkered in white, black and red.

The child in his pilgrimage outfit, running against the crowd to skid on the shiny marble, laughing.

The Pakistani woman, sitting on the floor, lifting her hands up to the sky and praying, while her adorable but incredibly pesky 4-year old is whining and grabbing her fingers.

The Egyptian couple, from the rural south, holding tight to the perfumed cover of the Kaaba and weeping their prayers.

And - always, thank you God - that incredibly, incredibly beautiful Afghani green-eyed woman who makes you skip a breath.

This is what I believe in. This is, in large part, why I keep coming back - to eavesdrop on other people’s prayers. Which make me, I think - I hope - a better man.

Outside of the Kaaba complex

The Safa and Marwah walkway - part of the ritual of Hajj and Umrah is to walk that path, attributed to Hajar - Ibrahim (Abraham)'s second wife, mother of Ismail (Ishmael), and our great-great-granny (for Arabs, that is).

Dead Aid: Deadly Arguments (updated: link at the bottom)

Presenter, (smiling and ending the discussion): "Let's hope you're right. Thank you very much for talking to us".
Guest: "Thank you very much. And I AM right".

The very humble guest in question is Ms. Dambisa Moyo, talking about her book ‘Dead Aid’ on Australian television.

‘Dead Aid’ is the new development book en vogue, which offers unsophisticated analysis to come up with an unusual conclusion: aid is the cause of everything that’s wrong in Africa. Not ‘associated with’, not ‘exacerbates’: is THE cause.

Her devil is the ‘aid industry’, apparently a cabal of academics, NGOs, governmental and multilateral organisations whose apparent raison d’être is to spend aid money, purposefully or inadvertently harming their recipients to maintain them in poverty.

Let’s dig deeper into her arguments.

Before I comment on the book though, allow me to underscore that I cringe when an author is supposed to be read just because they are African (or Arab, or Muslim, or Faroese). A claim, truth be told, never made by the author, but repeated by her supporters, including even in the foreword to her book.

Especially that she spent her early childhood, and has lived since college freshman year - from 1990 until today - between the US and the UK. (doing the math, she must’ve spent her teens, perhaps 10 or 11 years, in Zambia). A fact that I would never hold against her if she weren’t brazen enough to criticize foreign aid fundraisers for ‘not even living in Africa’ - which she doesn’t either.

When someone is presented as giving the ‘Arab view’ or a ‘Bengladeshi perspective’ or such thing, unless they are indeed the foreign minister of Bangladesh or actually represent a view we have no access to - say, Burmese opposition - they’re just seeking a legitimacy they would never hold under solid academic scrutiny.

And this is what this book seems to me.


Past the first two introductory chapters, I decided to add ‘Dead Aid’ to my pile of toilets readings. This is no insult: it’s just a categorization. Said readings need to have certain characteristics, namely be enjoyable, simply written, light-headed, and not require much mental effort.

It does ask a good, albeit often asked question: why hasn’t aid fulfilled its promises in the past years.

But that’s almost all the book’s worth. Save for a few recommendations straight from an Ec-Dev 101 class, the rest is either useless, flawed, or seriously harmful.

The author begins with her conclusion - that aid is a horrible horrible thing - and works her way backwards, attempting the build her case, but only succeeds in making shady correlations and passing them for straightforward causality. Her counterfactuals simply aren't. (diamond-rich Botswana? Really?)
I lost track of the number of times sentences are introduced by ‘may be explained by’... (the real answer to which is consistently - “no, it isn’t, stop bullshitting’).

Or, since we’re looking at introductory locutions: her “there was a sense in some quarters that...” and builds upon the belief of those unidentified ‘some quarters’ to make her point, reminding me of the joke PhD rules: writing ‘there is agreement that...’ in your thesis means ‘two guys at the bar agreed with me’; ‘widespread agreement’ means ‘the bartender agreed, too’. Ms. Moyo seems to operate on the same principles.

Of course, if any graduate student actually referenced and footnoted their paper like she did, they’d be fired for plagiarism.

I happen to have read Collier’s “the Bottom Billion” shortly before I read ‘Dead Aid’, and while she borrows many of his arguments and research (there’s very little original research in ‘Dead Aid’) she reaches different conclusions than he does; while Collier’s recommendations usually involve highlighting the detailed point that needs reform - reform is the name of the game for the man, a reasonable position indeed - Moyo’s conclusion is invariably that aid is the devil.
It gets frankly ridiculous after a few chapters.

Added to this her inability - rather her unwillingness - to differentiate between types of aid or to acknowledge that aid has been successful when properly targeted. And not just humanitarian aid, which she hints at as being ok at some point before falling back into the 'all aid' mantra.

Aid critics before her generally fell into two categories: either they assumed that aid is yet insufficient (Sachs, UN Millennium Development Goals...) or, such as Bauer and Easterly, whom she references, called for an in-depth reform of the aid system.
Oh, and they all did their own research...


Her recommendations?

The author advocates the recourse to world market bonds, with such convoluted mechanisms - including pooled credit ratings, which the better rated countries will never agree to anyway - that simply won’t happen.

Ditching cheap World Bank loans in favour of more expensive bond markets - because they entail ‘credibility’, and, quote "more credibility equals more money, equals more credibility, equals more money and so on".

Imagine you’re a graduate student: following her logic, you should refuse a scholarship and get a commercial bank loan instead, because it would push you to work harder.
Which it might, sure. But this expensive money will have to repaid: Hmm. That’s not a concern for her, it seems.

And, apart from that - foreign direct investment, and trade.
Hallelujah.

We’ve been hammering the same two topics for the past two decade, if not longer. We know that this should be the path out of poverty for the developing world. Ms. Moyo is twenty years late.
And while she candidly blames the fall of export revenues on Western protectionism - which is harmful, I agree - she is euphoric about China’s investment in minerals and primary goods - the price of which are unstable and generally decreasing, making her key solution a very temporary one.

She celebrates AGOA and EBA (preferential trade concessions by the US and the EU, respectively, aimed at the poorest countries) while we’re already thinking about the phasing out of least developed countries’ preferences under WTO.

Oh. And microfinance. Sure. I think Muhammad Yunus is a god, but Grameen Bank loans won’t pay for civil servants salaries. Nor for physical infrastructure.
‘Okay, you 12 million people, you’re a nice lending group now and are all in charge of monitoring one another or you’re not getting the second half of your bridge!’

And to convince, or scare her ‘Western’ readers into following her ‘Dead Aid proposals’, she uses, in the same breath - I kid you not - global terrorism AND “the Chinese are coming”!

Why the hype, then?

Normally a book like that would fall into oblivion very rapidly: it hasn’t (yet). Why is that?

Well, looking around the development arena it is true that Africans, and women, are underrepresented, and an articulate African woman makes a great talk-show guest. Great for ‘Young Global Leaders’ listings, for Time Magazine to profile. It's silly but it's true.
Compare her, for instance, to aid-skeptic Bill Easterly, a remarkable scholar but a much less televised persona.

More importantly, Moyo’s recommendation will be very appealing to many aid-fatigued observers: ‘cut all aid to Africa within 5 years’, she says. Fantastic election material for wannabe politicians: “we will save all the money we send to Africa - and save them in the process” sounds like a great sound bite in a speech! In these times, particularly, when aid programmes are expected to be curtailed with the current world economic crisis, this plan is music to many ears.

I’ll add to that some great marketing, and embarrassing mistakes on the part of those who disagreed - chiefly the One campaign, whose internal emails were leaked and allowed for a mini-scandal to be exploited by the ‘Dead Aid’ publishers.


Ms. Moyo must be challenged - in an academic arena, not on Oprah. That should easily put her arguments down once and for all. It is sad that it has come to that, and I am confident she could’ve contributed positively to the aid debate, rather than hammer her damaging one-point plan. Because anyone who has worked in foreign relief knows that, very often - aid saves lives.

Less than we want, less than it should; but we’re working on improving it. ‘Dead Aid’ isn’t.


*UPDATE - Jeffrey Sachs has a word to say about Moyo's 'ideas' - and he is pissed. A short and good read.

Life's for Sharing

13,500 people getting together, in the middle of Central London, just the time of a song. "Hey Jude". If it doesn't make you smile...




It's not a fully spontaneous event, of course - but it nevertheless remains very touching. All those people, sharing a mic and a good laugh with complete strangers..

Isn't it grand??

It's the latest spot in the T-Mobile campaign, "Life's for Sharing". Back in January, they also did this fantastic ad, where 350 people suddenly start dancing at Liverpool street station. Passers-by joining in, people taking photos to 'share' with others...

(Fans of such impro and flash-events will also remember the one at NYC's Grand Central station last year, when 207 people simply froze in the middle of the main hall.)


It sounds silly, but little things like that make me think that our world might not be completely going to hell after all.

Swine Flu: World Roundup, and what to do now that we're all going to die

I’m not quite sure how the first swine flu patient contracted it. Especially that ‘patient zero’ is a cute Mexican 4-year old so it’s unlikely he’d have doinked Miss Piggy.
You never know though, at his age, I thought she was pretty hot, but then again I was a very precocious boy.

But that’s irrelevant now, since we’re all going to die anyway. Like we died of SARS and of bird flu. And foot-and-mouth disease. You know.

(by Carlos Latuff)

It’s been fun though. Here's is what the world has been doing:

- Some people have been panicking. (D'oh).

- Some have been raiding drugstores for hand sanitizers.

- Plenty of people have been wearing those masks, making Michael Jackson pass for a visionary.

- Israel decided to call it “Mexico Flu” because pigs aren’t kosher. (though they’re doing it wrong. It’s a disease therefore it’s supposed to be associated with something bad, so the few children that will survive the world epidemic will remember to never eat pork. Right?)

- France, too, has occasionally used “Mexican Flu” and “North American Flu” in the press.

- So the European Commission, in all its might and glory, suggested a new name: "Novel Flu virus". Thank you, Europe.

- In France also, television is flooded with seriously insipid advertisements for pork meat, and since they didn't have the time to think out a good marketing campaign it's mainly a guy wearing a pink suit carrying a tray of cold cuts jumping all over the screen. They titled the campaign 'we're all crazy about pork'.

- In the USA, Republicans decided to blame it on Democrats. Yes, really. And some even decided to name it after one.

- Jon Stewart decided to make fun of them all.

- In Canada, apparently, pigs will be complaining soon: a sick farmer has infected his pigs. Yep. They're that powerful. (will Canadian pigs be rounding up humans anytime soon?)

- And apparently the World Health Organisation decided to rename the virus “Influenza A (H1N1)” , under pressure of the pork industry and to save the animals from the same draconian measures that faced chickens two years back, especially that there is no proof of animal-to-man transmission.

- Egypt has been slaughtering its pigs anyway, which was funny enough because apparently the government first turned to the Egyptian church for permission (because it’s mainly a Christian business, seemingly) and the Church replied “Dude, I dunno, you’re in charge of public health, not me” - but pig farmers are angry, and there are conspiracy theories that the government wanted to hurt Christian businesses or, even better, that they’re killing the local livestock because it benefits some foreign companies of which - get this - the head of the Egyptian church is a partner.

Anywho.

Here’s what you need to do now.

- First, check if you’re infected by taking this very scientific test.

- Then, and knowing that you’re really dying now, go and infect many many people with this awesome game. Believe me, after the first level, you’ll actually enjoy passing on the virus.

- Then you can go and join other people on Twitter who have been trying to come up with better names for the disease. My favourite so far? “The day the pigs flu”. (and while you're there, follow my Twitter updates).

- If you care about facts and all that crap, you can check the WHO's dedicated website.

- You can also read Peter's post about how many people die of 'regular' flu every year, and laugh at yourself for panicking.

As for me, I considered stocking up on Tamiflu but then realised that I live in a socialist country (by now, don’t we all?) and that the government will give it to me, free of charge. (except if you're in a developing country, then you're screwed).

I also considered buying hand sanitizers and packing on tissues every time I leave the house. Then I realised it was stupid because preventing my infection would necessitate sanitizing OTHER people’s hands, not mine. And if I do get swine flu, I’m taking as many of those healthy bastards as possible with me.

This post will be updated as new funny stuff around the world happens.

Happy epidemic!

The smell of the Métro

The Paris subway - the Métro - isn’t just where every Parisian spends on average 15-20 hours every month. It’s a full, multi-sensorial experience.

And it has a very distinctive smell, which seems to run along the rails of all fourteen subway lines.
It’s an odd mix to say the least..

It's the breath of a million people,

It’s the wet hair of the women who just showered, and the sweat of the men who didn’t have the time to. Those guys are easy to spot, they are also trying to comb their hair in their reflection in the window;

It’s the too-sugary perfume of the college girls, laughing loudly as they chatter the distance away;

The strong coffee from the travel coffee cup with the guy in a suit - the cup he brought home from his semester in the US: the French aren’t into taking their coffee to go;

The Romanian homeless guy, smelling like smoke and dust, who just stepped in, intoning his habitual ‘bonjour-messieurs-dames-desolé-de-vous-déranger... une-petit-pièce-ou-un-ticket-restaurant...’;

The cheap ink of all the free newspapers people read to pass the time of the long ride, and which they often leave on the seat before getting off, just like... a newspaper on a train! Yet they take them, sometimes - either because their job is less interesting than a subway newspaper, or they want to take it home for the televisions listings on the back page;

Maybe even a hint of pheromones from this young couple diligently kissing - the 'public' in PDA is taken very seriously around here. Most memorable were the couple kissing - nay, making out, inside the Notre Dame cathedral.. ;

Oh, and some spilt beer from yesterday’s late night commuters. A green bottle might even roll from under the seats and hit your foot as you sit; you’ll look down, raise your foot, and let the bottle continue its trip to the other side of the carriage, until the train stops and it goes rolling all the way back again;

And it’s the captive mass of air renewed only by giant ventilators, and those industrial air fresheners which, rather than neutralizing the smells, add to the entire olfactory mélange.

God, I really hate this city.