BIRD-WATCHING IN YEMEN

Excerpt from Chapter 5: No Mocha in Mocha

That evening I found two tourists in the hotel restaurant. The first I had seen on either visit to Yemen, they were male, middle aged and sipping soup.

‘We're from the Suffolk Birdwatchers Club,’ said one, his broad grin revealing a gap in his teeth.

‘I’m Herb and this is Norman,’ he indicated his sandy haired companion.

‘We`ve been doing avifauna checks on the Tihama,’ said Norman. ‘The rest of our group has left, but we want to do some spotting on the plateau. You’re welcome to come.’

I met Herb and Norm in the lobby next morning. They were wearing khaki safari gear, multi-pocketed gilets, and canvas hats. I was in brown linen trousers and a cream high necked shirt, as worn by Meryl Streep in Out of Africa. The taxi-driver had on jeans with a sleeveless sheep’s wool jacket and a black baseball cap with Baltimore Orioles on it.

‘Siddiq, friend America,’ he said clearly pleased I had noticed.

The rugged central plateau of Yemen abounds in birdlife. Creeping about the giant euphorbias with expensive Luger binoculars, Herb identified Arabian babblers, amethyst starlings, rollers, shrikes, warblers and weavers for Norm to record in a log-book.

The driver looked on as though they were mad. A task for small country boys in Yemen is to scare birds off the crops. Beginning at dawn, they spend all day seated in the fields firing stones at them from homemade catapults. The iridescent throat of the grey rock pigeon makes it an easy target.

‘Look!` said Herb, whistling through his teeth as a beautiful bird alighted on a fig tree. It was a shimmering paradise fly-catcher which our driver, deftly miming the action, explained will nip off its tail in order to confuse a predator.

After an hour’s bird-watching, Herb and Norm spread out a tartan blanket and sat down with a thermos of tea. It was still too soon after breakfast for me and I wandered off along a track where a tall woman was climbing up from the ravine.

She wore a smock over black harem trousers embroidered at the ankles, gold bracelets and a piece of muslin wound around her head securing a bunch of marigolds. A goddess of the coffee terraces, showing no sign of astonishment at our meeting, she walked up and kissed my hand all in a single movement, and continued striding up the hill.

Travels With my Hat for publication 2012.

A SAD DAY FOR CHRISTIANITY

The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams has described the decision not to allow a female hospital worker to wear a tiny cross at her neck as “bureaucratic silliness” but even more - it shows just how loony life in Britain has become.

Muslims may wear the niqab, Sikhs may wear the kirpan (a short bladed traditional dagger) but a Christian has been ordered by an employment tribunal not to wear the symbol of her faith.

I hold nothing whatsoever against religious minorities in the United Kingdom - indeed the contrary - but as a Christian citizen, I`m appalled. This decision is nothing less than madness, yet no one dares speak up for fear of being classified as either a religious bigot or a racist. Or both.

Management at the hospital concerned have suggested a compromise where the woman, 54 year old Mrs Shirley Chaplin would be allowed to pin her tiny cross to her uniform, or to wear it on a lanyard. What utter rubbish is that!

The Christian Legal Centre plans an appeal.

Praise the Lord!

Image: www.worldreligions.co.uk

BURQINI MAKES WAVES IN PARIS POOL

The Oz `burqini` creating controversy in Paris is only the latest ridiculous idea about how Muslim women should dress.

In the first century of Islam, Muslims were relaxed about what women wore.

The hijab is mentioned in the Qur`an only in the concept of a barrier - like a Victorian screen- to shield wives from male visitors to the house. Khadija, the wealthy, independent wife of the Prophet, did not herself veil.

Unfortunately over the years, a pseudo-religious concept of the burqa arose in some Muslim countries, requiring women cover themselves from view.

But in western societies, the burqa and the downright anti-social niqab, is merely power play by women of whom many are Muslim converts. That they adopt this attire does no favours to women FORCED to wear purdah by dominant men, emphatically in the Pathan tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. And also in Saudi Arabia.

I agree that this `Carole` (now petulantly threatening to leave France) should not be allowed to wear the `burqini` in a public pool. And comments by many Muslims indicate their agreement.

The Lebanese-Australian who designed the `burqini` for Sydney`s beaches claims it fosters integration, but it does the opposite because the wearer stands out as being Muslim.

Better to build a `women only` swimming pool, or to allocate a beach (not only for Muslims, but for all modest women) like those which exist in Alexandria and on the Caspian Sea in Iran.

Women only bathing beaches would also be a good idea in the GCC states where Arab women swim in their black abayas which float around them like an oil slick.

c.Christine Osborne.

Image: Pathan women on a carriage outing in N.W.Pakistan.

Source: www.copix.co.uk

SUDANESE WOMEN WHIPPED FOR WEARING TROUSERS

In 1993, I was invited to a WTO conference in Bali, but was refused admission at the door because I was wearing trousers. Not just any old pair of trousers, but a fashionable trouser suit. As a result I did not attend at all, because I had brought no dresses on the long flight from London.

Now I`m appalled to learn that the well known Sudanese journalist Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein is to be flogged for wearing trousers in a restaurant in Khartoum. And that women whipped earlier this month included some from the animist and Christian south where the Muslim north's sharia law does not apply.

Sudan is not high on most lists as a holiday destination, but potential women visitors should take heed. Remember, too, the British teacher Gillian Gibbons, arrested in 2007 for calling a toy bear Muhammad.

Is it any wonder that regimes such as that of dictator Oman al-Bashir give Islam a bad name?

His own punishment should be to be brought forcibly to London to see the shortest of shorts being worn this summer. Perhaps he would suffer a heart attack when the world would have one criminal less.

More power to your arm Ms.al-Hussain. I shall watch your trial with interest and wish you all the best.

c.Christine Osborne: former editor Two Niles/Sudan Airways flight magazine.

Image: Scene in Omdurman, Sudan

Source: www.copix.co.uk