Category Archives: Blog

This ancient Greek terracotta rhyton is one of my favorite objects in the National Museum of Beirut — a destination I picked as one of my favorite locations in Lebanon for this beirut.com feature.

This place is a dream only a sleeper considers it real
then death comes like dawn and you wake up laughing
at what you thought was your grief…

— Rumi

When I was excavating Islamic archaeology last summer in Turkmenistan near the mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar, I often wished that I could excavate the thousands of poems that travelers recited along the Silk Road in medieval times. In fact, even Sultan Sanjar himself appeared in the celebrated verses of the epic poet Nizami (d. 1209 CE), a giant of the Persian literary tradition. Since I was living at the time in a yurt in the desert, I decided to host a poetry festival in my yurt–to honor the poetic history of the Silk Road, and pepper the landscape with poems in many tongues.

In Nizami’s Khamsa (Quintet), he relates an allegory about “Sultan Sanjar and the Old Woman.” Medieval illustrations of this tale from Herat and Shiraz can be found today in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Morgan Library, Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard, Brooklyn Museum, and Hermitage.

In the section entitled “Treasury of the Secrets,” an old woman falls to her knees and clings to the hem of Sultan Sanjar’s cloak. Pleading for his attention, she recounts how the sultan’s soldiers physically and mentally mistreated her. She says:

What good is it to conquer territories,
if you do not control your own soldiers?

The old woman then warns the sultan that his tyrannical behavior and miscarriages of justice will inevitably lead to his downfall.

Today, many verses from Nizami’s moralizing tale ring as true as ever:

In our time, justice can no longer be found.

— Nizami

When I saw this tent on the beach this week-end in Beirut, it reminded me of a tent-city I passed by a few months ago on another beach just a few miles down the road. It was midnight when my friend and I hopped off his bike to enjoy the waves crashing under the moonlight–after driving through numerous checkpoints since a bomb had exploded earlier that day. As we began strolling down the beach, we noticed a small tent city set up ahead. We both stopped in our tracks, when we realized that those tents had been pitched by desperate Syrian refugees–unable to afford shelter in Beirut. How long, we wondered, had they been living on the beach? How were they keeping warm through the winter? So when I saw the tent above this week-end, I wasn’t sure if it was assembled for a regular family day at the beach, or if maybe some Syrian refugees were starting to set up tents on this beach too…

Several of my students asked for a groupie, when we left the classroom behind to take a field-trip outside Beirut…

Here is a piece by beirut.com about the places I like to frequent in Beirut–from tai chi to the National Museum…

I spotted this graffiti tonight on my walk home from the Children’s Cancer Center of Lebanon/St. Jude in Beirut…

Here is a song from the popular (and classically trained) Syrian rock band Tanjaret Daghet–now based in Beirut…

What shall I do?
Oh, what shall I do
Against this endless solitude
It is located in the bottom of my heart
And lives on it every moment
My friends, do you know
What could cool my boiling heart?

And shall your flame or your smoke burden the wind?
Think you the spirit is a still pool which you can trouble with a staff?

— Khalil Gibran

When I traveled with family from Bamako to visit friends who live just a few miles from the Ivory Coast border, we were warmly greeted with spirited welcoming songs–as we pulled into their village…