Five Pillars of Islam

The five calls to prayer echo the five main components or pillars of the Islamic faith. Daily prayers are recited at dawn, midday, afternoon, evening, and night.

The first pillar is the statement of faith, the shahada. It says, "There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah." This is whispered into a baby's ear right after he/she is born and is the first thing she/he hears.

The second pillar is salat, daily worship. Observant Muslims pray five times daily, facing toward Mecca.

The third pillar is zakat or charitable giving.

The fourth pillar is fasting, or sawm. During the holy month of Ramadan, one should fast during daylight hours. The end of Ramadan is celebrated with the festival of Id al-Fitr.

The fifth pillar: the Hajj, or the pilgrimage to Mecca. It is expected that all healthy Muslim men and women make the journey at least once in their lifetime.

from World Faiths Islam by Trevor Barnes.

Zaha Hadid, Iraqi Architect

Here is an article on Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid. She was born in Baghdad in 1950 and now lives in London.

"ZAHA HADID: THE FIRST GREAT FEMALE ARCHITECT"

by Jonathan Meades

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Summer 2008

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/story/zaha-hadid

Zaha Hadid's practice occupies a former school in Clerkenwell, an area of London that still bears the scent of Dickens. It's an 1870s building designed by the London School Board architect E.R. Robson, who, typically of his profession, was unquestionably formulaic. Still, his was a sound enough formula. Today the high, plain, light rooms are crammed to bursting with Hadid's 200 or so employees. Though they are of every conceivable race, they are linked by their youth, their sombre clothes, their intense concentration. They gaze at their screens, astonishingly silently. There is little sound other than the click of keyboards and a low murmur from earphones. They don't talk to each other. It is as though they are engaged in a particularly exigent exam. It feels more like a school than a former school. And it feels more like a factory than a school. If there is such a thing as a physical manifestation of the dubious concept called the knowledge economy, this is it. This is a site of digital industry.

"What is exciting," says Zaha, "is the link between computing and fabrication. The computer doesn't do the work. There is a similar thing to doing it by hand..."

"The computer is a tool," I agree.

"No. No, it's not..."

What then?

The workers on the factory floor--my way of putting it, not hers--are, she says "connected by digital knowledge...They have very different interests from 20 years ago."

Sure. But this does not make immediate sense. It is a matter to return to, that will become clear(ish) in time.

Ten minutes' walk from the practice is Hadid's apartment--austerely elegant, a sort of gallery of her painting and spectacularly lissom furniture. It's a monument to Zaha the public architect rather than Zaha the private woman. It occupies a chunk of an otherwise forgettable block. Her route from home to work might almost have been confected as an illustration of the abruptness of urban mutation. Here is ur-London: stock bricks and red terracotta, pompous warehouses, run-down factories, Victorian philanthropists' prison-like tenements, grim toytown cottages, high mute walls, a labyrinth of alleys, off-the-peg late-Georgian terraces, neglected pockets of mid-20th-century Utopianism, apologetic infills, ambiguous plots of wasteground. It is neither rough nor pretty, but it has sinewy character. It may be ordinary, but it is undeniably diverse. The daily stroll through this canyon of variety is surely attractive to an artist whose aesthetic is doggedly catholic, each of whose buildings seems unsatisfied with being just one building.

If Zaha is offended by the suggestion that constant exposure to such a typical part of London might, however indirectly, impinge on her work, she doesn't show it. But she is faintly bemused. It is as though such a possibility had never occurred to her. This is absolutely not the sort of proposition that gets mooted in the world of Big Time Architecture which Hadid has inhabited all her adult life (she is 57), for many years as a perpetually promising aspirant, a "paper architect" who got very little built but still won the Pritzker prize--the Nobel of architecture--which raises the questions of whether architecture is divisible from building, of where the fiction of design stops and the actuality of structure starts. Today she is this tiny, powerful milieu's most singular star, and its only woman, its only Zaha.

So distinctive a name is useful. It's a fortuity which might just grant her effortless entry to the glitzy cadre of the mononomial: Elvis, Arletty, Sting. The first architect to be so blessed since Mies (van der Rohe).

Architecture is the most public of endeavours, yet it is a smugly hermetic world. Architects, architectural critics and theorists, and the architectural press (which is little more than a deferential PR machine) are cosily conjoined by an ingrown, verruca-like jargon which derives from the cretinous end of American academe: "Emerging from the now-concluding work on single-surface organisations, animated form, data-scapes, and box-in-box organisations are investigations into the critical consequences of complex vector networks of movement and specularity..."

They're only talking about buildings. This is the cant of pseudo-science--self-referential, inelegant, obfuscatingly exclusive: it attempts to elevate architecture yet makes a mockery of it. Zaha, however, has the chutzpah to defend it. She claims to be not much of a reader of anything other than magazines, so the coarseness of the prose doesn't offend her. The point she makes is that this is the lingua franca of intercontinental architecture. A sort of Esperantist pidgin propagated by the world's major architectural schools--the majority of which happen to be notionally anglophone, yet whose pupils and teachers come from a host of countries--and the world's major architectural practices which are international and polyglot. When Zaha talks about architecture, about urbanism, about the continuing exemplary importance of the Architectural Association (AA) in London, where she studied after a childhood in Baghdad, boarding school in England and university in Beirut (reading maths), she uses this pidgin, and studs it with syntactical mishaps.

"You know, space is an interesting endeavour...you create an interesting...the impact you have on the cityscape. The whole life of a city can be in single block...Break the block, yeh? Make it porous...Organisational patterns which imply a new geometry...The idea of extrusion...One thing always critical was idea of ground, how to carve the ground, layering, fragmentation..." Perhaps being "connected by digital knowledge" is just a way of circumventing the problems inherent in a polyglot workforce, given that verbal expression plays only a minor part in architectural creation. The gulf between clumsy, approximate jargon and precise, virtuoso design is chasmic. And it has some important ramifications. Despite its practitioners' fastidious, perhaps delusional protests that it is a creative and scientific endeavour, architecture is a very big business, one that is involved in the creation and sale of one-off objects: it is a trade dealing mostly in the bespoke.

Now, one consequence of being "connected by digital knowledge" is an enforced internationalism--at the highest tier. So take, for example, the Basque provinces where Santiago Calatrava has built Bilbao's airport, where Frank Gehry has famously built a Guggenheim Museum, where Rafael Moneo has built the (better) Kursaal at San Sebastian, and where Zaha has no fewer than three projects: a new quarter of Bilbao; a sleek, partially buried railway station in Durango, and government offices in Vitoria.

This region, whose paranoiac sense of itself and of its blood-drenched individuality need hardly be emphasised, is becoming a testing ground for exercises in a globalised aesthetic entirely at odds with its vernacular idioms of distended chalets and Hausmanian pomp. Zaha is enthusiastic about this sort of dissonance. She is opposed to new buildings which nod allusively--she would say deferentially--to their ancient neighbours. She regards such buildings as sops to populism.

"It would be interesting to do a large project without looking backwards."

"How large? "

She grins. "A city. A city! Without looking backwards. Vernacular building... it's like minimalism." (I take it that she means neo-vernacular building.) "People can handle minimalism, vernacular. It doesn't disturb them."

Hadidopolis, the dreamed city, would, paradoxically, be less disturbing, less astonishing than a single building by her in an already established environment where the clash of idioms is potentially deafening.

"They still talk about contextual. Ha!"

"They" are her bugbear, the (now rather old) New Urbanists, the begetters of crass, kitschy, retro-developments such as Seaside and Disney's Celebration, both of them in Florida. Her distaste for their twee, anti-modernist escapism is total.

In Zaha's lexicon, contextual might be synonymous with compromised, which is the last word that could be applied to her own work. Bloody-minded, unaccommodating, serious, joyful, emotionally expressive, intellectually engaging: these are more apt. Yet, no matter what she says, each of her buildings is sensitive to its context. Being sensitive does not mean being passive. It is not a question of taking a cue from the immediate surroundings, but of making an appropriate intervention that changes those surroundings, which creates a new place and better space. She has 25 projects either completed or under construction, and even the most cursory scrutiny of them reveals an exceptional versatility and a multitude of responses. She has eschewed the temptation to develop the signature that afflicts high-end architects, prompting the accusation that Libeskind or Calatrava or Gehry merely plonk down the same lump of product time and again across the globe. Zaha has style all right, but not a style.

The Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati is blocky, grounded, cubistic; it is unrecognisable as being by the same hand as, say, the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, which is taut, dynamic, horizontal and looking to make a quick getaway. The Museum of Transport on the south bank of the Clyde in Glasgow has a silhouette that might be a child's depiction of a city's skyline. Of her cable railway stations in Innsbruck, one is sleek and reptilian, a second fungal, a third an homage to a species of bird that never existed.

Sometimes she seems to be working in steel, other times in butter; here she is chiselling wood, there she is twisting chocolate. A university building on the Barcelona waterfront recalls a poorly shuffled pack of cards. Her winning entry for the new Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in the already architecturally rich city of Vilnius might be an exquisite example of the patissier's art which has melted under a merciless sun. The A55 motorway's descent into Marseille, one of the most thrilling in Europe, will be further enhanced by the headquarters for the cma-cgm container company, built in the cleft where raised carriageways bifurcate. This 147-metre tower will be the highest in the burgeoning city. It is a perhaps reproachful complement to the effortful wackiness of neighbouring projects, such as Massimiliano Fuksas's Euromed Centre: Zaha's tower is as stately as a duchess's ballgown, and again very different from anything else she has done.

How do she and her collaborators, chief among them Patrik Schumacher, manage to avoid the besetting architectural tic of self-plagiarism?

"Don't draw on computer. Don't draw and then put it onto computer...I have five screens...Different projects...You work on developing, oh, a table while at the same time you're developing masterplans. It's like you have different information coming from different directions. Like photography. Out of focus... then you zoom in. I'll have a sketch--it'll take a few times before it takes. Sometimes a few years. You see, not every idea can be used right then. But nothing is lost. Nothing."

So a shape or form devised initially for a piece of furniture may be fed a course of steroids and become a building?

"No. That's not what I'm saying. Doesn't work like that."

I rather suspect that Zaha has an ancient fear: that to discover how her processes work would be to jeopardise them.

*****

The idea that London comprises a series of villages--an estate agent's vulgar conceit--goes lazily unchallenged. Villages are small, hick, inward-looking. London is not. London pioneered sprawl: it was a horse-drawn precursor of Los Angeles. It is a city of stylistic collisions and astonishing juxtapositions. Which might be reckoned to make it susceptible to imaginative and unorthodox architectural interventions. There is, after all, no classical homogeneity to rupture, no defining idiom which must be adhered to.

Yet Zaha Hadid--an architect who is nothing if not imaginative, nothing if not unorthodox, who is feted throughout the world as, ugly word, a starchitect--still does not have a single building to her name in London, despite having lived and worked here for three and a half decades. There are, to be sure, schemes--the 2012 Olympic Aquatic Centre, and a building for the Architecture Foundation in Southwark; but the former's budget is being persistently called into question and pared, and the other has not progressed since it was first mooted several years ago.

It would be disingenuous to feign surprise at this absence of a work by her in her adopted home. A catalogue of circumstances militates against her. She is extraordinarily engaging but equally obstinate. She has never pretended to be anything other than an artist. An artist moreover of a particularly dogged sort, one who has kept alive, or revived, the unfashionable notion of the avant-garde. And who has created her own fashion rather than blindly following the herd like, oh, 99% of architects.

She is, evidently, not English; her sensibility is not English; her lack of timidity is not English; her earnestness is not English; nor her resolute ambition. Then there is the question of her sex.

*****

Architecture is dominated by men to a degree that no remotely kindred endeavour is. This has always been the case. The history of architecture can be written, often has been, with no mention of women save, perhaps, of monarchs, aristocratic grandees, philanthropists: patrons, not makers. The contention that women are less adept than men at three-dimensional thought doesn't begin to account for their acutely disproportionate position in British architecture. According to a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) survey in 2007, only 14% of practising architects in Britain are women. The percentage of qualified women architects is 38%, but women drop out at an alarming rate--so alarming that the former RIBA president George Ferguson commissioned an investigative study.

He need hardly have bothered. Its conclusions were thoroughly predictable: low salaries and long hours (which equally afflict men), lack of preferment and office machismo (which probably don't). The outstanding woman architect of the generation before Zaha's, Georgie Wolton, opted for a (successful) career as a landscape architect having designed just one major building, a studio block in the north London district of Holloway. Sarah Wigglesworth (whose most celebrated building is also in Holloway), Amanda Levete and Cécile Brisac are London architects currently producing work of the highest order, much of it outside Britain, in cultures where there exists less bias against women. The volume and prestige of commissions received by such practitioners as Manuelle Gautrand in France or Tilla Theus in Switzerland is unthinkable in Britain.

Of course, the British bias is not merely against architects who happen to be women. It is against architects who happen to be architects.

British architects who aspire to anything more than polite apartment buildings or self-effacing, production-line offices have to prove themselves abroad. That is where creative reputations are made. This has been the case since the early 1970s, when public confidence in architecture plummeted and architects came to be regarded as licensed vandals committing a sort of aesthetic trahison des clercs.

"No! Later," Zaha corrects me. "It was 1975, six. Definitely." By that time, she had been at the AA for four years. It is telling that popular antipathy towards the discipline took so long to breach that institution's carapace of ivory exclusivity.

She is certain of the date. For that was when, incredulous and indignant, she witnessed the transformation, the near-apostasy, of some of her dogmatically modernist teachers. "Between one term and the next," she says, Leon Krier became a former modernist, literally a post-modernist. Krier lurched, in the bipolar way that fundamentalists will, from preaching the rhetoric of imaginative, technologically based rationalism, to becoming a groupie of the then still incarcerated Nazi war criminal Albert Speer, an architect whose formidable banality was matched only by the megalomaniac scale of his (mostly, thankfully) unbuilt projects. Krier would, frighteningly, go on to become the Prince of Wales's architectural adviser, and thence the brain (if that's the word) behind such volkisch excrescences of the New Urbanism as Poundbury, the cottagey slum of the future disgracefully dumped on a greenfield site on the edge of Dorchester.

"By 1978 he is god of historicism...You know--that attitude that you can't go forward without looking back, that's the historicist position, post-modern position." It's one she deplores, to put it mildly. Zaha seems to consider post-modernism a sort of betrayal. Which may be going a bit far. Surely, I suggest (adapting Duke Ellington's maxim about music), the question is not taxonomical, not what style a specific building belongs to--post-modern or any other--but whether it is good or bad. She appears not to hear. She asks for more tea. She snuffles. She has a cold.

But then I too would develop a cold if someone had put to me a proposition that impertinently questions the very core of my aesthetic. She is contemptuous of the sort of relativism that even hints that the often infantile, mostly eager-to-please idiom of the Thatcher years is serious architecture. She is, perhaps, right. Accessibility merely means lowest-common-denominator populism, commercial opportunism, the subjugation of the creator by market researchers, and of originality by second-guessing what the "people" will find acceptable. Zaha has been fighting all her professional life against the architecture of the marketplace, struggling to assert the paramouncy of the artist, ie, of herself, of an uncompromised vision. She had to bide her time a long while.

She was the victim of a shift in taste. She could, chameleon-like, have followed Krier and many of her AA contemporaries and near-contemporaries, who discovered themselves suddenly sympathetic to upside-down diocletian windows, playground colours, bluto columns, oafish pediments: the components of a new architectural "language". On the other hand there were those who invented with aplomb.

She tells me she doesn't want to talk about other architects' work before I have even broached the matter. Happily she isn't as good as her word. An architect with a detailed knowledge of architectural and urbanistic history is, astonishingly, a rarity. Yet the living and the dead constellate her discourse. They are not the figures one might expect. Despite the status she has achieved she still, implicitly, considers herself an underdog rather than a star. There is something heartening and generous about the way she enthuses about the work of Douglas Stephen, an unacknowledged genius who designed less than a dozen buildings in a lifetime of scrupulously high standards and absolute integrity. She is enthusiastic about the Italian rationalist Aldo Rossi, whom she describes as forgotten. Forgotten by whom? I wonder.

"Forgotten," she insists.

I point out that his rationalism was hardly all-encompassing and that whenever he was in London he would go to gaze at the clunkily historicist War Office in Whitehall. She smiles, as though to acknowledge the disparity between the architect and the man. She admires Rodney Gordon, maybe the greatest of the British brutalists, a sculptor in concrete whose finest buildings (the Tricorn in Portsmouth, the Trinity in Gateshead) have been or are about to be demolished.

Would we burn a Bacon? Take a hammer to a Gormley? No. But in Britain architecture is peculiarly expendable. British short-termism is expressed in two ways. Buildings, notably those of the 1950s and 1960s, are wantonly torn down before they have been allowed the chance to come back into fashion. This, of course, is not exclusive to Britain. Even in France, which has a much greater appreciation of modernism, Claude Parent's space-age shopping centres at Reims and Sens have been disfigured. We rue the loss of High Victorian buildings of the 1860s. Why will future generations not rue the loss of those made in the 1960s, during another of those rare periods when British architecture abandoned its habitual timidity?

Secondly, buildings used to outlive humans, not least because the process of construction was so long and laborious that permanence was a desirable aim. Today's corporate presumption is that a building's duration will be hardly longer than a few decades. Its lifespan is in inverse proportion to our own continually stretching sentence. This is disposable-building syndrome, and one consequence of it is that quick delivery and low cost are valued above all other considerations. Much architecture is, then, increasingly concerned with the provision of what are in effect temporary structures. Zaha has an unfashionable distaste for such ephemerality. She must, like any architect, worry about what will become of her buildings. One of her earliest completed projects, a pavilion for the study of landscape at Weil am Rhein on the German-Swiss border, is already looking as tatty as a sink estate, while the fire station she built nearby for the furniture manufacturer Vitra's factory was considered inappropriate for that role and has been turned into a museum of chairs.

A consequence of short-termism is standardisation. "London is becoming more and more even. I don't like current work here. I'm not against new projects, obviously I'm not. But there's no planning here, no critique about what is coming next. There is a responsibility on the city to impose--not, not, ah, rules but...quality. The state should invest in architecture like in Spain, Holland. But the dynamic here, it's all corporate..."

Again, it always has been. Aesthetic dirigisme is as alien to Britain as economic dirigisme. Public building is the exception: the long third quarter of the 20th century--the years of abundant social housing, of new hospitals, theatres and libraries, of the new universities and their architecturally enlightened chancellors--were atypical.

"Yup," she sighs and shakes her head. "London: city of lost opportunities."

That's largely because London lacks the sort of patrons the city needs: wilful, vain, philanthropically inclined plutocrats with a taste for self-advertisement, endowment and high-art museums rather than for football grounds. Collecting buildings is a very expensive hobby. There is no Getty, Guggenheim, Whitney, Vanderbilt or Rosenthal here.

Zaha doesn't seem embittered but, rather, wearily resigned. As well she might be, for while London is unquestionably enjoying a building boom, it is equally suffering a blandness boom. The private-finance initiative does not encourage audacity. Indeed, it is infected with an almost totalitarian conviction that architecture should be useful rather than beautiful or striking or marvellous. And most architects duly oblige, for they know who calls the tune. It is as though they pride themselves on the design of risk-free buildings whose primary attribute is that no one will notice them, so no one will take offence. (They are wrong. Blandness on a massive scale is offensive: just look at Southwark Street, across the river from the City of London, where the prolific commercial practice Allies and Morrison has committed some sort of crime against streetscape which Zaha loyally refuses to condemn.)

Why then does she base herself in a city that, if not professionally antagonistic to her, has been hardly welcoming?

"I was teaching here."

But she was also teaching at Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Hamburg, Vienna...

"Vienna has the same problems as London."

What are they?

"It's historic city."

But many of the cities in which she has buildings under construction are equally historic. Naples, Madrid, Strasbourg, Barcelona, Seville. And as for Rome...

"I'm in London because the best civil engineers in the world are here."

Civil or structural engineers are unquestionably the scientists without whom architects would not exist. But, given the internationalism of both architects and engineers, it is a truly bizarre reason. One is inclined to suspect that it's a professional disguise that masks a private inclination.

"I don't know if I'll ever do a big project in London...But I do have a take on the city."

That take is as much a flâneur's as an architect's. Over 20 years ago, Zaha envisaged a linear city down the Lea Valley and another around the Royal Docks. The latter has come to pass, but in typically London manner--piecemeal, unco-ordinated, scrappy, unambitious. And the Lea Valley is being cleared, cleansed, to host the Olympic games, a trophy coveted by emerging tyrannies, tinpot totalitarians and third-world dictatorships. Tactfully, and atypically for so opinionated a woman, she refuses to diverge from the party line and mutters some right-on stuff about the games' "legacy". Maybe she believes it, maybe not.

I wonder, because Zaha the flâneur has an immense appetite for a very different London, an insatiable curiosity which she reveals only obliquely. She palpably appreciates the very oddities of the area that the Olympic site will occupy, the atmospheric terrain vague of abandonment, dereliction and toxic canalisation.

*****

When Zaha talks about anything other than architecture, she employs an urbane vocabulary, a flourishing grammar, and even the definite and indefinite articles. She is fun. On how London has changed socially: "The kids cannot believe it when I tell them about the King's Road in those days, cannot believe it." She is eloquent about parties, friends, flu remedies, clothes (she nearly always wears black, though she professes to pine after the days of colour), a tardy florist, a driver whose limited comprehension of sat-nav prompts him to put in "crescent" rather than the name of the crescent. Her word-power expands miraculously.

You might deduce that a different part of the brain is activated, that architecture is confined to a ghetto that is actually cut off from language--pre-verbal or extra-verbal. Zaha is neither dyslexic nor left-handed, two conditions which afflict a number of extravagantly gifted architects.

The awkward struggle to describe the products of her capacious imagination is hampered by her disinclination to employ simile, which, though it might clarify, would undermine her achievement. To compare her work to something already existing would be to detract from it. For me to state that her buildings are like something--frozen napkins, or origami in a hurry, or squeezed-out tubes of ointment, or a carnival dame swaying in a frock, or a flock of starlings cartwheeling like iron filings subjected to a magnet, or baroque drapery--is explanatory shorthand. It is not to debase them, far from it. But I didn't make them. They are admirable for a load of reasons.

Her work derives, she says, not from observation of extant architecture. Nor from formalism. She claims to take nothing from organic morphology. No ammonites, no sharks, no petals. It all begins with painting, with pure abstraction.

But a few moments later she changes her mind. She contradicts herself and attributes her inspiration to landscape, topography, sedimentology, geological patterns...Indeed, one of her pieces of furniture is called Moraine, and there is an unmistakable acknowledgment of a badlands roster of folds, prisms, hoodoos and organ pipes, a nod to the shifting shapes of dunes and drifts. European architects such as Lars Sonck, Antoni Gaudi and Gottfried Boehm have represented rock formations with differing degrees of naturalism. Zaha goes further. Buildings are static objects. Throughout the 20th century, architects vainly attempted to imply that structures were on the move, to invest them with speed, one of the essential properties of modernity but one which is, alas, necessarily absent even in borax buildings that are streamlined or googie ones which borrow the imagery of aero-planes or rockets. Much of Zaha's work implies a different sort of speed--the slow passing of millennia, the gradual attrition of wind, the grind of the sea on stones, the way rain turns chalk into pinnacles and spires. There is a scent of erosion, of time's inexorability, of future fragmentation. Of mortality.

Image Source: Zaha Hadid Architects, Steve Double

(Jonathan Meades writes and broadcasts on culture, architecture and food. His programme "Magnetic North" has just ended on BBC2)

The Afterlife

Taking a page from Lisel's book, this excerpt is from a book intended for children, covering the basics of the Islamic faith.

Excerpt from World Faiths Islam: Worship, Festivals, and Ceremonies From Around the World by Trevor Barnes

Heaven and Hell
Muslims believe that while death is the end of earthly life, it is the beginning of eternal life. They believe that faithfulness to Allah in this life will be rewarded in the next and that wickedness will be punished.

Angels and messengers
God is everywhere in Creation but cannot be seen. However at points in human history it is believed that God sent special people to bring important spiritual messages. The first of these is said to be Adam, the first man, and the last was Muhammad, the "Seal of the Prophets." In addition, Muslims recognize the prophets of Judaism and Christianity, including Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus.

The righteous sit forever in the presence of God in one vision of Paradise. Heaven is seen as a garden.

Death and Judgment
Muslims about to die say the shahada—the profession of faith in one God and belief in his final prophet, Muhammad. [...] The dead are buried as soon as possible. The body is placed in the grave, with its head facing toward Mecca, where it will wait until the Last Day, when it is believed that the dead will rise and be judged.

Heaven
Heaven is the eternal reward for those who have followed the will of Allah. Heaven is described in the Koran as a beautiful garden where the righteous can eat fruits and drink juices while reclining on comfortable couches and waited on by heavenly servants. [...] Some interpret this literally, while others say it is an image describing the joy of being eternally in God's presence.

Hell
Hell, in contrast, is an ugly place reserved for the wicked and the unbelievers. It is described as a place of everlasting fire, boiling waters, scorching winds, and black smoke. The punishments of Hell are believed to be eternal. [...] Although they are described as physical tortures, many Islamic scholars argue that they are dramatic images that powerfully describe the pain of separation from God. (16-17)

From CITY OF WIDOWS

From City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman's Account of War and Resistance by Haifa Zangana

"The blunders of the US administration in Iraq [...] may be located in [a] colonial policy, uninformed by a real understanding of the Iraqi people. The main misconception is to perceive Iraqi women as silent, powerless victims in a male-dominated society, in urgent need of sexual and political liberation. This image fits conveniently into the overall picture of the Iraqi people as passive victims [... .] The United States confused the need of a people to get rid of a tyrannical regime with the right to impose a new colonial order" (10-11).

"[...] the promotion of Iraqi women's rights as a justification for the invasion has proven to be the mother of all failures. Instead, Iraqi women have lost all they had achieved as activists before the invasion, and they comprise thousands of the 650,000 casualties" (16-17).

Haifa, like our character Huda, left Iraq because she and her family were persecuted by the Ba'athist regime. She left in 1974. As she notes in her introduction, the Ba'athist period "invokes for me the images of tortured and executed friends [...] and the abuse and harassment of my family and me" (16).

Bedouin Women

Israel-APRIL9 Bedouin Women Embroider a New Path in the Desert from kobi on Vimeo.

The last couple of minutes of this video features three Bedouin women speaking to the camera. One is quite animated and passionate about her point of view.
Shifting Sands @ Yahoo! Video

Below is some stock footage of Bedouin women dancing at a wedding.

Mourners

Some strong imagery of mourners, courtesy of Janet...

New Yorker Article on Abu Ghraib Prison

Annals of National Security

Torture at Abu Ghraib
American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go?

by Seymour M. Hersh May 10, 2004

In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, twenty miles west of Baghdad, was one of the world’s most notorious prisons, with torture, weekly executions, and vile living conditions. As many as fifty thousand men and women—no accurate count is possible—were jammed into Abu Ghraib at one time, in twelve-by-twelve-foot cells that were little more than human holding pits.

In the looting that followed the regime’s collapse, last April, the huge prison complex, by then deserted, was stripped of everything that could be removed, including doors, windows, and bricks. The coalition authorities had the floors tiled, cells cleaned and repaired, and toilets, showers, and a new medical center added. Abu Ghraib was now a U.S. military prison. Most of the prisoners, however—by the fall there were several thousand, including women and teen-agers—were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints. They fell into three loosely defined categories: common criminals; security detainees suspected of “crimes against the coalition”; and a small number of suspected “high-value” leaders of the insurgency against the coalition forces.

Last June, Janis Karpinski, an Army reserve brigadier general, was named commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade and put in charge of military prisons in Iraq. General Karpinski, the only female commander in the war zone, was an experienced operations and intelligence officer who had served with the Special Forces and in the 1991 Gulf War, but she had never run a prison system. Now she was in charge of three large jails, eight battalions, and thirty-four hundred Army reservists, most of whom, like her, had no training in handling prisoners.

General Karpinski, who had wanted to be a soldier since she was five, is a business consultant in civilian life, and was enthusiastic about her new job. In an interview last December with the St. Petersburg Times, she said that, for many of the Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib, “living conditions now are better in prison than at home. At one point we were concerned that they wouldn’t want to leave.”

A month later, General Karpinski was formally admonished and quietly suspended, and a major investigation into the Army’s prison system, authorized by Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq, was under way. A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community. (The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski’s brigade headquarters.) Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

There was stunning evidence to support the allegations, Taguba added—“detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence.” Photographs and videos taken by the soldiers as the abuses were happening were not included in his report, Taguba said, because of their “extremely sensitive nature.”

The photographs—several of which were broadcast on CBS’s “60 Minutes 2” last week—show leering G.I.s taunting naked Iraqi prisoners who are forced to assume humiliating poses. Six suspects—Staff Sergeant Ivan L. Frederick II, known as Chip, who was the senior enlisted man; Specialist Charles A. Graner; Sergeant Javal Davis; Specialist Megan Ambuhl; Specialist Sabrina Harman; and Private Jeremy Sivits—are now facing prosecution in Iraq, on charges that include conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty toward prisoners, maltreatment, assault, and indecent acts. A seventh suspect, Private Lynndie England, was reassigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, after becoming pregnant.

The photographs tell it all. In one, Private England, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, is giving a jaunty thumbs-up sign and pointing at the genitals of a young Iraqi, who is naked except for a sandbag over his head, as he masturbates. Three other hooded and naked Iraqi prisoners are shown, hands reflexively crossed over their genitals. A fifth prisoner has his hands at his sides. In another, England stands arm in arm with Specialist Graner; both are grinning and giving the thumbs-up behind a cluster of perhaps seven naked Iraqis, knees bent, piled clumsily on top of each other in a pyramid. There is another photograph of a cluster of naked prisoners, again piled in a pyramid. Near them stands Graner, smiling, his arms crossed; a woman soldier stands in front of him, bending over, and she, too, is smiling. Then, there is another cluster of hooded bodies, with a female soldier standing in front, taking photographs. Yet another photograph shows a kneeling, naked, unhooded male prisoner, head momentarily turned away from the camera, posed to make it appear that he is performing oral sex on another male prisoner, who is naked and hooded.

Such dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture, but it is especially so in the Arab world. Homosexual acts are against Islamic law and it is humiliating for men to be naked in front of other men, Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at New York University, explained. “Being put on top of each other and forced to masturbate, being naked in front of each other—it’s all a form of torture,” Haykel said.

Two Iraqi faces that do appear in the photographs are those of dead men. There is the battered face of prisoner No. 153399, and the bloodied body of another prisoner, wrapped in cellophane and packed in ice. There is a photograph of an empty room, splattered with blood.

The 372nd’s abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine—a fact of Army life that the soldiers felt no need to hide. On April 9th, at an Article 32 hearing (the military equivalent of a grand jury) in the case against Sergeant Frederick, at Camp Victory, near Baghdad, one of the witnesses, Specialist Matthew Wisdom, an M.P., told the courtroom what happened when he and other soldiers delivered seven prisoners, hooded and bound, to the so-called “hard site” at Abu Ghraib—seven tiers of cells where the inmates who were considered the most dangerous were housed. The men had been accused of starting a riot in another section of the prison. Wisdom said:

SFC Snider grabbed my prisoner and threw him into a pile. . . . I do not think it was right to put them in a pile. I saw SSG Frederic, SGT Davis and CPL Graner walking around the pile hitting the prisoners. I remember SSG Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its [sic] ribcage. The prisoner was no danger to SSG Frederick. . . . I left after that.

When he returned later, Wisdom testified:

I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was right . . . I saw SSG Frederick walking towards me, and he said, “Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.” I heard PFC England shout out, “He’s getting hard.”

Wisdom testified that he told his superiors what had happened, and assumed that “the issue was taken care of.” He said, “I just didn’t want to be part of anything that looked criminal.”

The abuses became public because of the outrage of Specialist Joseph M. Darby, an M.P. whose role emerged during the Article 32 hearing against Chip Frederick. A government witness, Special Agent Scott Bobeck, who is a member of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, or C.I.D., told the court, according to an abridged transcript made available to me, “The investigation started after SPC Darby . . . got a CD from CPL Graner. . . . He came across pictures of naked detainees.” Bobeck said that Darby had “initially put an anonymous letter under our door, then he later came forward and gave a sworn statement. He felt very bad about it and thought it was very wrong.”

Questioned further, the Army investigator said that Frederick and his colleagues had not been given any “training guidelines” that he was aware of. The M.P.s in the 372nd had been assigned to routine traffic and police duties upon their arrival in Iraq, in the spring of 2003. In October of 2003, the 372nd was ordered to prison-guard duty at Abu Ghraib. Frederick, at thirty-seven, was far older than his colleagues, and was a natural leader; he had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia Department of Corrections. Bobeck explained:

What I got is that SSG Frederick and CPL Graner were road M.P.s and were put in charge because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge of how things were supposed to be run.

Bobeck also testified that witnesses had said that Frederick, on one occasion, “had punched a detainee in the chest so hard that the detainee almost went into cardiac arrest.”

At the Article 32 hearing, the Army informed Frederick and his attorneys, Captain Robert Shuck, an Army lawyer, and Gary Myers, a civilian, that two dozen witnesses they had sought, including General Karpinski and all of Frederick’s co-defendants, would not appear. Some had been excused after exercising their Fifth Amendment right; others were deemed to be too far away from the courtroom. “The purpose of an Article 32 hearing is for us to engage witnesses and discover facts,” Gary Myers told me. “We ended up with a c.i.d. agent and no alleged victims to examine.” After the hearing, the presiding investigative officer ruled that there was sufficient evidence to convene a court-martial against Frederick.

Myers, who was one of the military defense attorneys in the My Lai prosecutions of the nineteen-seventies, told me that his client’s defense will be that he was carrying out the orders of his superiors and, in particular, the directions of military intelligence. He said, “Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own? Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have them walk around nude?”

In letters and e-mails to family members, Frederick repeatedly noted that the military-intelligence teams, which included C.I.A. officers and linguists and interrogation specialists from private defense contractors, were the dominant force inside Abu Ghraib. In a letter written in January, he said:

I questioned some of the things that I saw . . . such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell—and the answer I got was, “This is how military intelligence (MI) wants it done.” . . . . MI has also instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days.

The military-intelligence officers have “encouraged and told us, ‘Great job,’ they were now getting positive results and information,” Frederick wrote. “CID has been present when the military working dogs were used to intimidate prisoners at MI’s request.” At one point, Frederick told his family, he pulled aside his superior officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Phillabaum, the commander of the 320th M.P. Battalion, and asked about the mistreatment of prisoners. “His reply was ‘Don’t worry about it.’ ”

In November, Frederick wrote, an Iraqi prisoner under the control of what the Abu Ghraib guards called “O.G.A.,” or other government agencies—that is, the C.I.A. and its paramilitary employees—was brought to his unit for questioning. “They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately twenty-four hours in the shower. . . . The next day the medics came and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away.” The dead Iraqi was never entered into the prison’s inmate-control system, Frederick recounted, “and therefore never had a number.”

Frederick’s defense is, of course, highly self-serving. But the complaints in his letters and e-mails home were reinforced by two internal Army reports—Taguba’s and one by the Army’s chief law-enforcement officer, Provost Marshal Donald Ryder, a major general.

Last fall, General Sanchez ordered Ryder to review the prison system in Iraq and recommend ways to improve it. Ryder’s report, filed on November 5th, concluded that there were potential human-rights, training, and manpower issues, system-wide, that needed immediate attention. It also discussed serious concerns about the tension between the missions of the military police assigned to guard the prisoners and the intelligence teams who wanted to interrogate them. Army regulations limit intelligence activity by the M.P.s to passive collection. But something had gone wrong at Abu Ghraib.

There was evidence dating back to the Afghanistan war, the Ryder report said, that M.P.s had worked with intelligence operatives to “set favorable conditions for subsequent interviews”—a euphemism for breaking the will of prisoners. “Such actions generally run counter to the smooth operation of a detention facility, attempting to maintain its population in a compliant and docile state.” General Karpinski’s brigade, Ryder reported, “has not been directed to change its facility procedures to set the conditions for MI interrogations, nor participate in those interrogations.” Ryder called for the establishment of procedures to “define the role of military police soldiers . . .clearly separating the actions of the guards from those of the military intelligence personnel.” The officers running the war in Iraq were put on notice.

Ryder undercut his warning, however, by concluding that the situation had not yet reached a crisis point. Though some procedures were flawed, he said, he found “no military police units purposely applying inappropriate confinement practices.” His investigation was at best a failure and at worst a coverup.

Taguba, in his report, was polite but direct in refuting his fellow-general. “Unfortunately, many of the systemic problems that surfaced during [Ryder’s] assessment are the very same issues that are the subject of this investigation,” he wrote. “In fact, many of the abuses suffered by detainees occurred during, or near to, the time of that assessment.” The report continued, “Contrary to the findings of MG Ryder’s report, I find that personnel assigned to the 372nd MP Company, 800th MP Brigade were directed to change facility procedures to ‘set the conditions’ for MI interrogations.” Army intelligence officers, C.I.A. agents, and private contractors “actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses.”

Taguba backed up his assertion by citing evidence from sworn statements to Army C.I.D. investigators. Specialist Sabrina Harman, one of the accused M.P.s, testified that it was her job to keep detainees awake, including one hooded prisoner who was placed on a box with wires attached to his fingers, toes, and penis. She stated, “MI wanted to get them to talk. It is Graner and Frederick’s job to do things for MI and OGA to get these people to talk.”

Another witness, Sergeant Javal Davis, who is also one of the accused, told C.I.D. investigators, “I witnessed prisoners in the MI hold section . . . being made to do various things that I would question morally. . . . We were told that they had different rules.” Taguba wrote, “Davis also stated that he had heard MI insinuate to the guards to abuse the inmates. When asked what MI said he stated: ‘Loosen this guy up for us.’ ‘Make sure he has a bad night.’ ‘Make sure he gets the treatment.’ ” Military intelligence made these comments to Graner and Frederick, Davis said. “The MI staffs to my understanding have been giving Graner compliments . . . statements like, ‘Good job, they’re breaking down real fast. They answer every question. They’re giving out good information.’ ”

When asked why he did not inform his chain of command about the abuse, Sergeant Davis answered, “Because I assumed that if they were doing things out of the ordinary or outside the guidelines, someone would have said something. Also the wing”—where the abuse took place—“belongs to MI and it appeared MI personnel approved of the abuse.”

Another witness, Specialist Jason Kennel, who was not accused of wrongdoing, said, “I saw them nude, but MI would tell us to take away their mattresses, sheets, and clothes.” (It was his view, he added, that if M.I. wanted him to do this “they needed to give me paperwork.”) Taguba also cited an interview with Adel L. Nakhla, a translator who was an employee of Titan, a civilian contractor. He told of one night when a “bunch of people from MI” watched as a group of handcuffed and shackled inmates were subjected to abuse by Graner and Frederick.

General Taguba saved his harshest words for the military-intelligence officers and private contractors. He recommended that Colonel Thomas Pappas, the commander of one of the M.I. brigades, be reprimanded and receive non-judicial punishment, and that Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the former director of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, be relieved of duty and reprimanded. He further urged that a civilian contractor, Steven Stephanowicz, of CACI International, be fired from his Army job, reprimanded, and denied his security clearances for lying to the investigating team and allowing or ordering military policemen “who were not trained in interrogation techniques to facilitate interrogations by ‘setting conditions’ which were neither authorized” nor in accordance with Army regulations. “He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse,” Taguba wrote. He also recommended disciplinary action against a second CACI employee, John Israel. (A spokeswoman for CACI said that the company had “received no formal communication” from the Army about the matter.)

“I suspect,” Taguba concluded, that Pappas, Jordan, Stephanowicz, and Israel “were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuse at Abu Ghraib,” and strongly recommended immediate disciplinary action.

The problems inside the Army prison system in Iraq were not hidden from senior commanders. During Karpinski’s seven-month tour of duty, Taguba noted, there were at least a dozen officially reported incidents involving escapes, attempted escapes, and other serious security issues that were investigated by officers of the 800th M.P. Brigade. Some of the incidents had led to the killing or wounding of inmates and M.P.s, and resulted in a series of “lessons learned” inquiries within the brigade. Karpinski invariably approved the reports and signed orders calling for changes in day-to-day procedures. But Taguba found that she did not follow up, doing nothing to insure that the orders were carried out. Had she done so, he added, “cases of abuse may have been prevented.”

General Taguba further found that Abu Ghraib was filled beyond capacity, and that the M.P. guard force was significantly undermanned and short of resources. “This imbalance has contributed to the poor living conditions, escapes, and accountability lapses,” he wrote. There were gross differences, Taguba said, between the actual number of prisoners on hand and the number officially recorded. A lack of proper screening also meant that many innocent Iraqis were wrongly being detained—indefinitely, it seemed, in some cases. The Taguba study noted that more than sixty per cent of the civilian inmates at Abu Ghraib were deemed not to be a threat to society, which should have enabled them to be released. Karpinski’s defense, Taguba said, was that her superior officers “routinely” rejected her recommendations regarding the release of such prisoners.

Karpinski was rarely seen at the prisons she was supposed to be running, Taguba wrote. He also found a wide range of administrative problems, including some that he considered “without precedent in my military career.” The soldiers, he added, were “poorly prepared and untrained . . . prior to deployment, at the mobilization site, upon arrival in theater, and throughout the mission.”

General Taguba spent more than four hours interviewing Karpinski, whom he described as extremely emotional: “What I found particularly disturbing in her testimony was her complete unwillingness to either understand or accept that many of the problems inherent in the 800th MP Brigade were caused or exacerbated by poor leadership and the refusal of her command to both establish and enforce basic standards and principles among its soldiers.”

Taguba recommended that Karpinski and seven brigade military-police officers and enlisted men be relieved of command and formally reprimanded. No criminal proceedings were suggested for Karpinski; apparently, the loss of promotion and the indignity of a public rebuke were seen as enough punishment.

After the story broke on CBS last week, the Pentagon announced that Major General Geoffrey Miller, the new head of the Iraqi prison system, had arrived in Baghdad and was on the job. He had been the commander of the Guantánamo Bay detention center. General Sanchez also authorized an investigation into possible wrongdoing by military and civilian interrogators.

As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba’s report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.

The mistreatment at Abu Ghraib may have done little to further American intelligence, however. Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as a C.I.D. agent, told me that the use of force or humiliation with prisoners is invariably counterproductive. “They’ll tell you what you want to hear, truth or no truth,” Rowell said. “ ‘You can flog me until I tell you what I know you want me to say.’ You don’t get righteous information.”

Under the fourth Geneva convention, an occupying power can jail civilians who pose an “imperative” security threat, but it must establish a regular procedure for insuring that only civilians who remain a genuine security threat be kept imprisoned. Prisoners have the right to appeal any internment decision and have their cases reviewed. Human Rights Watch complained to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that civilians in Iraq remained in custody month after month with no charges brought against them. Abu Ghraib had become, in effect, another Guantánamo.

As the photographs from Abu Ghraib make clear, these detentions have had enormous consequences: for the imprisoned civilian Iraqis, many of whom had nothing to do with the growing insurgency; for the integrity of the Army; and for the United States’ reputation in the world.

Captain Robert Shuck, Frederick’s military attorney, closed his defense at the Article 32 hearing last month by saying that the Army was “attempting to have these six soldiers atone for its sins.” Similarly, Gary Myers, Frederick’s civilian attorney, told me that he would argue at the court-martial that culpability in the case extended far beyond his client. “I’m going to drag every involved intelligence officer and civilian contractor I can find into court,” he said. “Do you really believe the Army relieved a general officer because of six soldiers? Not a chance.” ♦