Ramadan in Beirut

Ramadan, considered the most holy of Islamic months, is now in full swing.

Those who wish to follow the recommended path should fast from dawn to dusk each day, giving the money that would otherwise be spent to those in greater need; if preferred, food prepared for meals not taken can be given away instead.

It is not a gentle routine to follow, fasting means not letting anything past the lips, not solid, nor fluid, other than the air for breathing from sun-up to sunset. That means water is out, and so is smoking. It must be difficult enough when Ramadan falls in the winter months, as it did when I first came here, the implication being an abstinence of some ten hours, but now, in August, sixteen hours of no sustenance of any kind is indicated and it’s seriously hot as well. Denial on such scale needs stamina.

So what’s the coping strategy?

Start the day with a good breakfast; Lebanese breakfasts are described elsewhere in this blog, so I won’t do it again, just be sure to finish it before sunrise. Stay out of the sun, conserve energy, take a siesta if you can, oh, and be born with the right genes. I like to have a cup of tea, coffee or glass of water beside me during the day, but for many in this region, a drink before leaving home in the morning keeps them going till the evening meal.

Talking of the evening meal, it’s known as Iftar during Ramadan. It’s usually of a celebratory nature, involving either the extended family or business group. For about an hour before sunset, you see people running hither and yon with bread, cakes, skewers of meat, and warm bags of I don’t know what in preparation for the event. I’ve never dared ask how someone can cook without tasting! Cannons are fired to mark the hour of sunset, at which point the first fluid, in the form of a fruit drink laced with nuts, is taken. Called a jellab, it shares etymology with the American South’s julep, but the ingredients are rather different! And then the meal is served.

For about an hour after sunset, shops are closed and the roads deserted, then the district comes alive again as shops open late, sweets and ice-cream are purveyed on street corners, friends and relatives are visited and the streets are filled.

Yet the general daily rhythm doesn’t appear to me to have suffered, businesses operate more or less as usual, restaurants open for lunch, banks stick to their usual hours and the sounds from the street stay much the same.

I remember, some years ago now, seeing a banner across a street in Hamra, a mixed business, retail and hotel district in Beirut. It said, "Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Ramadan Karim", Ramadan was running over the Christmas and New Year periods then. Perhaps, now the feasting is separated by months, each festival will help to inspire us all to embrace diversity. I certainly hope so.

T-shirts and a wallet combat Global Warming

Never really been a T-shirt man myself. It’s always been shirts and jackets with going casual implying discarding the tie.

Messing about in boats in British waters meant being prepared to combat hypothermia in June or staying dry in a downpour. T-shirt and shorts doesn’t really cut it for that sort of duty.

Chaps carrying handbags is a continental thing. I once asked a Glaswegian friend, living in Paris and having taken up the Gallic man-bag habit, how he’d get on it if he tried going out with the same appendage in his native city: “if I were lucky I’d be abused” was the response. So wearing shirts and jackets brings another advantage, the pockets offer somewhere to put your stuff. “Stuff” in my case used to include, cigarettes and lighter, money, mobile phone, house keys, car keys, business cards, credit cards, receipts for things, car park tickets, sweets, pills and old cinema tickets. At least.

Now I’d like to show you chaos theory in action. If you haven’t come across Chaos Theory before, it’s also known as the Bermuda Butterfly effect. The idea is that very small changes can lead to huge consequences if the circumstances are right, for example a butterfly flapping its wings in Bermuda could conceivably be the trigger for a later hurricane rampaging around the Caribbean.

A friend’s daughter opened a discount clothing and accessories shop. I went during the opening week and felt I had to buy something, mainly out of courtesy. Not having used a wallet for some time (well, I had my jackets, didn’t I) I bought one that I rather liked. Liking it, I put all my credit cards, business cards, cash money and driving licence into it. No longer addicted to cigarettes, what did I now need pockets for? Well, a mobile, keys and said wallet. Mobile and keys can go in a trouser pocket and I can carry the wallet, so jacket no longer required, nor the breast pocket in the shirt: wow - I can start wearing T-shirts.

Everyone is complaining about climate change and global warming making for a stifling summer, but me, in my new short-sleeved-singlety coolth am more comfortable than in previous years, and the jackets are all resting until autumn. The implication of that is that, pandering to vanity, I have to take more exercise to flatten my T-shirt covered waistline. So, here we go, buying a wallet is making me swim more; now, if that isn’t chaos theory in action, I don’t know what is.

There’s even more chaos now though, ’cos I can’t remember where I left the damned wallet!

What's a lunar month?

What is a lunar month?

Well, you can have a quick look at Wikipedia and get thoroughly confused with unpronounceable words. Or we can have a little think and get some idea of what the problems are with trying to answer that question.

Start with the Sun, use an orange or a melon or a vase in the middle of your dining room table to represent it. If you want to be a bit more abstract stick a dot in the middle of a piece of A4 paper. Put an apple about half a metre from the Sun, this represents the earth. Finally following the fruit thing to the end, use a plum to represent the moon and put it about ten centimetres from the earth, sorry apple. This is NOT to scale, and has no intention of being, it just helps the ideas. Line up the three pieces of fruit, with the moon-plum between the earth-apple and sun-melon. This represents a new moon, that pretty little crescent visible just after sunset once a month or so.

Now move the earth round the sun a bit, about a twelfth of the total circle that would be made in a complete circuit. This would take about a month, so send the moon all round the earth at the same time until the three are back in line for another new moon. Can you see that the moon has done actually done rather more than a full orbit of the earth in that time, actually close to one and one twelfth? So in a full year, we’ll get twelve new moons but the moon has had to go round the earth thirteen times to achieve that. Is it just the planets and moons spinning or has your head joined in?

We do have a possible candidate for a lunar month though, the time from new moon to new moon. Is there another? Well, yes, there is. Whatever we may say we think of astrology, there are not many of us that don’t know the name of our birth sign, Aquarius, Taurus, Scorpio and so on, even though we may not actually recognize it in the night sky. As the year progresses, these are the constellations that the sun appears to rise in. A moment’s thought will convince you that the moon, when new, appears to be in each of these constellations in a year, at least to a first approximation. For example, the moon is in Leo at the moment, so tomorrow’s new moon will also appear to be in Leo. Another important measure of lunar progress is, therefore, how long it takes to be apparently (this word being used here in its literal sense) back in the same place, relative to the constellations or fixed stars. A little bit of playing about with the bits of fruit will convince you the moon will have to go round the earth about thirteen of these circuits in a full year. Each one of these circuits of the earth is called a sidereal month.

OK, I confess, it’s been simplified a bit, but we have two candidates for the title of lunar month, one about twenty-nine and half days long, the other about twenty-seven.

Actually, it gets more complicated yet, as the moon is subject to little bits of gravitational pull from the other planets in the solar system and it also appears to wobble in its orbit, for reasons way outside the scope of this little piece.

Now what has all this to do with living in Lebanon? Ramadan starts tomorrow, or at least is widely expected to, but the new moon being sighted is needed to confirm it. Perhaps this little discourse explains why that old fashioned method still holds sway.

A fatal border skirmish

Three Lebanese soldiers and a journalist died Yesterday in a “border incident”. My wife cried. “They’ve all got mothers” was her simple yet heart-stoppingly painful assessment.

Four years ago, I met my wife at Heathrow, off a flight from Damascus; she had no makeup, no luggage and had had little sleep and less to eat for twenty-four hours. She’d run from the bombs and rockets being rained on Lebanon by the Israeli war machine, after having first ensured her children and grand-children had been safely evacuated to Saudi Arabia. Two hundred thousand pieces of ordinance (the majority cluster bombs with multiple anti-personnel war-heads) were fired into Lebanon in the 2006 conflict, and, states a report on Mine Action’s web-site, many did not explode and are still causing casualties, in spite of significant and continued efforts to clear affected land. My wife didn’t run for nothing. In previous incidents (the Israeli invasion of 1984 for example), she’d retreated to Baghdad, to Riyadh and to London; and sometimes she’d stayed, like when the electricity power plants had been taken out about ten years ago, bombed by, yep, you've guessed it Israel.

Have a look at any of the news web-sites, the belligerent rhetoric has been ratched up a good few notches in recent weeks and many people here are wondering if this is merely sabre rattling or a pre-cursor to hostilities – certainly the verbal preparations are being made for the “I cannot tell a lie, I did nothing, it was all his fault, he started it” sort of statements, should the worst happen.

There’ve been more or less successful efforts to divide and conquer the Lebanese on previous occasions, but there’s something different about the climate this time. Today, the country’s President called on all Lebanese to be prepared to make “huge” sacrifices in resisting attacks, and the head of Hezbollah “put all its resources at the disposal of the army”, both according to the agency LibanCall. This comes only a couple of days after a highly visible mini-summit of the heads of state of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), Syria and Lebanon, held on Lebanese soil. Solidarity seems to be breaking out.

The economy is enjoying a healthy growth rate, tourism alone seeing an increase of 27% in the first five months of this year according to one major bank’s weekly reports. Tower cranes abound, Beirut real estate prices are still rising rapidly and a massive new shopping centre has appeared in the downtown area, host to Vivienne Westwood and Stella McCartney labels amongst others. Is there some truth in the oft repeated suggestion that there is jealously from Lebanon’s southern neighbour whenever success threatens? I’ve always dismissed this as paranoia before, and yet, and yet …

It is vital to differentiate between a state and its government. Germany has recovered from Hitler, Russia from Stalin and China from Mao Zhadong and his little red book; all have learned to live with, even embrace their neighbours and thrive. Is it too much to hope that Israel may one day learn from their examples?

An Israeli soldier died too in yesterday’s clash. And the whole incident was about a tree. Let’s all recognize that each death is not just a statistic but a tragedy. Every single one is one too many: remember that in peace sons put their fathers to rest but in war fathers mourn their sons.

Post-modern white man's burden

Mediterraneans like the sun and claim to be happier in summer than winter. The Frenchman who coined the simile “a meal without wine is like a day without sunshine” must at least have come from the south of that country; the basic assumption is that both are good things.

Lebanon claims to be a country with four proper seasons, certainly the weather changes around the quarter days, but I would describe the seasons as early summer, high summer, late summer and then there are finally a couple of months of cool-and-a-bit-rainy-rather-like-Springtime-in-Yorkshire making up the fourth.

The first full summer season spent here, I noticed that the sky was blue. Yes, we all know that, but what I mean is unrelieved, “not a cloud in the sky”, blue in all directions, for day after day after day. After a few weeks I used to get up in the morning and immediately go from one side of the apartment to the other, looking hopefully out of the windows for the hint of a fluffy white thing in the sky, even a little one would have done. As the days clicked past, I began to feel more anxious, checking morning, lunchtime and in the evening. Finally, after four months, I saw one, a little whiff of cumulus out over the sea to the West. It seemed that every cell in my body screamed “YES!” at the same time.

This year things are different, I see clouds every day, and from all directions. For example, today’s were altocumulus coming in from the North East, the result presumably of Turkish moisture condensing over Lebanon's mountains. I think it is just as well since so many are saying that it’s the hottest summer they can remember and asking me how, in my white skinned Englishness, can I possible stand it. Well I’d rather be here than in Moscow with the temperature there standing at thirty-nine (yes, in Centigrade) earlier this week.

I stand it fine thank you very much and the reasons are simple. I play at being a vampire during the day, trying not to let a single ray of sunlight hit my body. In years gone past, this was achieved with an ‘Englishman abroad’ linen jacket, over a white shirt with linen slacks. Now I just wear T-shirts and stay in the shade. Oh and I don’t go to the local swimming pools and beaches very often either. This is not completely the result of eccentricity, but rather a bit of a scare that an oh-nasty had to be removed from my right hand; the biopsy confirmed the suspicion that sun-damage was the root cause. But I digress.

Now I used to be embarrassed about the whiteness of my skin. I wanted the olive complexion and the easy tan rather than the freckles with the pink-stained alabaster look. But I’ve made a discovery, albeit a bit late. Oh how I wish I’d known this as a young man. Women worry and fuss over me, they strike up conversations, ostensibly to be sure that I’ve got enough factor 500 in all the right places, they want to make sure the umbrellas are giving enough protection and that my hat is shading not just my face but neck, shoulders and, well, wherever. Apparently all that paleness in strong sun-light brings out the motherly, big sisterly concern for my welfare.

Well, guess what, if I’d known that forty years ago, maybe I’d have been better able to share the Mediterraneans’ love of sunshine.