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.

ASHURA: THE BLOODY FRENZY OF GRIEF

Ya! Ya! Husayn! Ya! Ya! Husayn!`

The procession approaches where Mehdi and I stand outside a bank which has its shutters down. Normally Bunder Road bustles with buses, cars and camel carts going to and from the harbour, but today the street is sealed off and is thronged with thousands of people, wearing black, the sign of mourning.

The occasion is Ashura, the tenth of Muharram (the first month in the Islamic calendar) when devout Shi`a Muslims remember the martyrdom of Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet, at Kerbala, in AD 680. A tall, young doctor working at Karachi Eye Hospital, Mehdi has agreed to accompany me, but although a Shi`a Muslim, he does not participate in the frenzied manifestations.

As the shouting intensifies, a white stallion splashed with red dye and prancing like one of the famous Lipizzaner horses at the Spanish School in Vienna, appears at the head of the marchers. It symbolises Zuljana, Husayn`s trusted steed, which returned alone from the battleground on the banks of the Euphrates, after his master was slain: ( it is said those who found the horse swore it had tears rolling down its face).

`Ya! Ya! Husayn`!

Now I can see the first marchers slashing their backs with small finger knives attached to chains. Swish! Swish! The blades whistle through the air, but there are no cries of pain: this is the point, Husayn had suffered for Islam, so what`s a few slashes between true believers?

As the procession draws level, I watch in horror as the marchers whirl about lacerating their naked torsos. An intense youth rakes his back spattering my Armani shirt with spots of blood: his own baggy trousers are saturated.

Mehdi looks uncomfortable at the self inflicted wounds. For days the local press has urged people not to get too emotive, but the Red Crescent tents set up along Bunder Road are tending scores of walking wounded.

I manage to photograph dressers, stitching a nine inch gap in someone`s back, before soldiers hustle me away...

Excerpt from: Travels With My Hat: by Christine Osborne for publication in 2010

Images: www.worldreligions.co.uk

Photography: N.Roberts and C.Osborne

Muharram 2009 will begin on 18th December.

THOUGHTS ON FRANKINCENSE TRAILS 2

' I entered a world unchanged since the frankincense trade,' said Kate Humble, the engaging presenter, of the desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia. To wit, the iconic tower in Riyadh owned by Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal who made million dollar deals, on his mobile, while chatting to her..

The appellation 'His Royal Highness' has long annoyed me for addressing eminent sheikhs. Can someone put me right with the Arabic equivalent?

I would dispute the veracity of a script claiming that incense caravans took only two weeks to cross the 'Empty Quarter' a 225,000 square mile sand sea occupying central Arabia.

Miss Humble cried in the first programme, when she put on a niqab in Sana'a. In last evening's programme, her tears were flowing on hearing the prayer-call in Jeddah. Does she cry at the sound of church bells, I had to wonder?

At one point she told us 'you must advance certain causes that you believe in.' but we were never told what they were.

Behind the glamour of Frankincense Trails 2, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia remains, the most misogynist regime in the Middle East.

Miss Humble had the opportunity to rant about inequality, but the remark by her humourless guide, 'I don`t believe in women playing sport` (of women playing netball) said it all.

But it was an attractive film and no doubt divers will eat their heart out for the pristine wreck of a ship carrying frankincense, embedded on a Red Sea reef.

C.Christine Osborne

Images: www.copix.co.uk