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Dr. Fares bin Abdullah Al-Farsi, with his team, won the prize for the best innovative research project in a science marathon, in which more than 27 teams from various countries participated, during the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting.
Dr. Al-Farsi explained to Oman News Agency (ONA) that the winning project is concerned with using smart biochips to identify and resist bacteria that cause infections in chronic wounds, indicating that these slides contain microscopic antibodies manufactured in a laboratory, and linked to enzymes and sensors that help identify and eliminate bacteria as they approach the wound site.
He pointed out that the winning project was part of a research team consisting of young scientists from several disciplines, with the support of the “Max Planck” Foundation in the Federal Republic of Germany, adding that the participating research projects were evaluated by a scientific committee consisting of a number Nobel Prize-winning scientists, as well as global investors in the field of developing scientific research.
Dr. Al-Farsi pointed out that his participation in the 72nd Lindau Nobel laureate Meeting, which was held last June in the Federal Republic of Germany, came with the support of the Ministry of Higher Education, Scientific Research and Innovation to represent the Sultanate of Oman among the top 600 young scientists in the medical field, with the participation of more than 40 Nobel Prize-winning scientists.
An Omani innovator has won the Grand Prize in an international competition in South Korea among 353 innovations from more than 18 countries around the world, Oman News Agency (ONA) announced.
Omani innovator Razan bint Hamad Al Kalbani won the Grand Prize in the Korea International Women’s Innovations Exhibition and Competition (KIWIE) for her innovation “X-ray absorbing coating from a natural ingredient”, among 353 innovations from more than 18 countries around the world.
Razan Al-Kalbani told Oman News Agency that her scientific innovation is a coating that absorbs X-rays from a natural ingredient (lycopene), which is the red pigment found in tomatoes, watermelons, red fruits and vegetables in general.
She added “After extracting the lycopene, I carried out laboratory tests and mixed it with a coating with unique properties and techniques to ensure that the properties of the lycopene were not affected.”
She pointed out that the scientific innovation is the first of its kind in the world using a natural compound to shield rays, indicating that the paint absorbs rays by 97%, and is characterized by being 100% water and moisture resistant, and 95% heat resistant, and prevents the formation of mold and bacteria, and is non-flammable.
She pointed out that one of the most prominent features of this scientific innovation is the possibility of using tomato mold to extract lycopene, and in terms of mechanical advantage, it is less expensive than the lead currently used.
She stated that her participation in the Korea International Women’s Innovations Competition and Exhibition (KIWIE) came with the support of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth.
She stated that her scientific innovation achieved many achievements at all levels, whether global, regional and local, most notably her winning the first place in the Falling Walls Lab competition in November 2020, the silver medal at the Challenge and Innovation Forum in the State of Qatar, the gold medal at the Second Beirut International Innovation Exhibition.
She also won the silver medal at the level of the Middle East in the Mabaret Fayda Al-Saad competition in the State of Kuwait.
The University of Rhode Island neurotoxicologist and dean came to the U.S. for college in the 1980s.
Nasser Zawia hails from Al Bayda, a town in the south of Yemen, a country that has long been affected by war and is currently experiencing widespread famine. Zawia traveled to the U.S. in the 1980s to earn an undergraduate degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He stayed in America, obtaining a PhD in pharmacology and toxicology from the University of California, Irvine. But Zawia never planned to stay on in the U.S. permanently. “Like many students who came here in the 80s, the objective was to come to go to school and go back to your home country and serve there,” he told The Scientist. “However, I married an American citizen.”
In 1990, Zawia and his wife moved to Yemen, where he planned to take a job at Sana’a University’s medical school. But the first Gulf War broke out in 1991. “The war was between Kuwait and Iraq,” he said. “But at that time, the position of the Yemeni government was supportive of Iraq. The connections with the U.S. were being threatened. I left during a climate where there was a lot of uncertainty and fear and insecurity as to what might happen.”
Returning to the U.S. in 1991, Zawia used connections he had made in US universities to secure postdoctoral positions at the University of South Florida and then at the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. After studying environmental toxicology at NIEHS, Zawia landed a faculty position at Meharry Medical College, a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee, where he studied the developmental effects of lead exposure in minority populations. “I found that to be something where I could serve the underserved,” he said. “I stayed there for five years and then moved to the University of Rhode Island.”
Although he was successfully navigating the halls of academia and earning his citizenship in the early ’90s, life in the U.S. was not easy for Zawia. “The U.S. was not very receptive to people from the Middle East at that time because of the first Gulf War,” he recalled. “Those of us from that region of the world, our life is always punctuated by all kinds of events involving war. Every 10 years it seems like something big happens, which impacts us in many ways.”
The next big event that would have an effect on Zawia and countless other Americans happened on September 11, 2001. “Those of us who are Arab Americans/Muslim Americans in this country have always been dealing with wars and difficulties in our ancestral homes. But we didn’t ever think or expect that someone would come to the U.S. and cause such a catastrophe. And it changed our lives a lot. And everybody else’s,” he said. “But still we were Muslims in the U.S., and we had to deal with the Patriot Act and then the NSEERS [National Security Entry-Exit Registration System] registration for citizens coming from Muslim countries.”
Despite anti-Muslim sentiment spawned by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Zawia chose to stay. Since setting up his University of Rhode Island (URI) lab in 2000, he’s made seminal discoveries, including research that pointed to a developmental basis for Alzheimer’s disease. He and his colleagues found that early exposure to lead increased the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease–related pathologies later in life. Zawia is now working on the epigenetics involved in this phenomenon, and said that his team is pursuing clinical trials of a repurposed drug to treat rare types of neurodegenerative disorders in Europe.
Although the Trump administration’s executive orders on immigration have restricted some travel for people from several countries in the Middle East, including Yemen, the policy has not directly affected Zawia, a naturalized US citizen. But both as a scientist who attends international conferences and as an administrator who seeks to entice talented students from all corners of the world to come to URI, he said he is seeing the damage the restrictions are having. “It is a concern for faculty here that were born in one of those seven countries,” he said. “Even though the law might be clear, how it’s applied may have an impact on our mobility.”
Zawia noted that the effects of the new immigration policies appear to be restricting the flow of students to URI and other US academic institutions. “In graduate education—especially in the STEM disciplines . . . we’re very heavily dependent on international students—it looks like huge drops in applications, a lot of concerns among our students on campus,” he said. “It just sends the wrong message. Graduate education is a strategic asset for the United States. Having the best minds come for an education here, staying, and interacting with our faculty and researchers is the secret to us always maintaining our leadership position.”
On top of the uncertainty surrounding his life as an immigrant researcher and administrator in the U.S., Zawia is grappling with an increasingly unstable situation in his home country, where some of his family still live: 19 million Yemenis are on the brink of a catastrophic famine in a country besieged by civil war. “My personal life and my connections to the country and my family have been upside down, to say the least,” he said.
With all that Zawia has witnessed in the U.S. as a Muslim Arab-American, he views the current political and social climate as the most damaging he’s seen. “I feel the impact of what’s going on now is much greater than what we experienced in the ’90s, with first war in Iraq or 9/11,” he says. “What’s going on right now is really very unsettling and very worrisome. Past events and past wars had more of a selective impact on us as Middle Eastern people and Muslim Americans. But the changes this administration is bringing about in many different facets of life is really . . . disrupting a lot.”
source/content: the-scientist.com / bob grant (headline edited)
Dubai holds lots of Guinness World Records from being home to the world’s tallest tower, the world’s deepest swimming pool and the world’s tallest landmark sign.
And now, the city can add another accolade to its impressive list of world records as Expo City’s Al Wasl Plaza has secured a Guinness World Record.
Al Wasl Plaza – Expo City’s dome – has won the Guinness World Record title for the largest interactive immersive dome.
Alwaleed Osman, Official Adjudicator at Guinness World Records, said on the unveiling of the award: “Al Wasl Plaza stands as a testament to architectural excellence and a distinguished structure that resonates with those who have had the privilege of experiencing it.
“Its recognition in Guinness World Records underscores the commitment of Expo 2020, and the subsequent Expo City Dubai, to innovation and excellence.”
The beating heart of Expo City, it’s 130 metres in diameter and over 67 metres tall (that’s big enough to fit the Leaning Tower of Pisa beneath it) and visitors can see immersive 360° videos projected onto the surface of the dome.
Up to 252 laser projectors are used to put images on the architecture that can be viewed from inside or outside of the dome.
Designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, Al Wasl Plaza has been built using unique materials that ensure it can be used year-round.
The semi-outdoor space has a trellis framework made out of steel and the pattern is inspired by the logo of the Expo 2020 exhibition. Fun fact: The logo is fully visible at the apex of the dome.
During Expo 2020 Dubai, Al Wasl Plaza was a hub for events from concerts to performances and, next year, it will host the UNTOLD music festival.
Al Wasl Plaza hosts daily projection shows and, upon news of its latest award, has opened the new Al Wasl Plaza Café – a homegrown brand that offers Arabic fusion cuisine.
In her historical novel Cotissica, Ghada El-Absy depicts the story of the Greek adventurer and entrepreneur Theochari Kozzika (Egyptians pronounce the name in an Italian manner) and – in contrast – the life of a working-class Egyptian family.
Overwhelmed with dreams of wealth and prestige, Theochari arrives in Alexandria just after the Orabi Revolution (1879-1882) to live with his uncle Yanni and his wife.
Yanni does not help Theochari much except to give him advice, the most prominent is “middlemen are the new [Greek] gods.”
Theochari’s insatiable desire for money is evident when he allocates his uncle’s ships to repatriate Greeks from Alexandria during the bloody civil strife that erupted between foreigners and Egyptians in 1882 that culminated in the British bombardment of Alexandria and their ensuing conquest of Egypt.
El-Absy describes in detail an incident in which the British Consul’s Maltese servant, Francisco Zamit, starts a fight with an Egyptian coachman, stabbing him and taking shelter with the Maltese and the Greeks.
This is followed by fighting between the foreign communities in Alexandria, armed with pistols and guns, and Egyptians, carrying cudgels and sticks. The foreigners were driven by hatred and arrogance towards Egyptians, who in turn, felt humiliated in their own land until the Orabi Revolution awakened their wounded dignity.
One of the most unforgettable scenes in the novel is when a brave Egyptian man kills one of his countrymen who menaces a group of female Greek swimmers. The man leads the girls to safety, only to be shot by both the father and brother of one of the girls, who think that he is the one threatening them! One of the girls he saves, Angeliki, becomes Theochari’s wife later on and does charity, hoping to compensate the countrymen of this unknown hero.
Following the British occupation of Egypt, Theochari is joined by his younger brother, Polichronis.
Soon, Polichronis proved to be an indispensable partner for his elder brother through his exceptional skills in influencing and persuading people. Thus, Theochari decided to lay the plans and leave the execution of them to his younger brother.
Theochari took charge of providing the British troops with supplies during their Sudan campaign (1881-1899). He leaves Alexandria, establishing two factories in Tora, Cairo. One is for making alcohol for medical uses and the other is a brewery for making beer.
He makes the decision to move to Tora in order to be far away from both the greedy eyes of the British, who insist on taking a cut from every big business, and from the big Greek competitors, such as Gianaclis, owner of the famous wine factory.
El-Absy also provides a narrative from another universe, that of the family of Abdel-Alim, an Egyptian who works in Kozzika’s brewery.
This profession is a source of conflict within Abdel-Alim’s family. Whenever a male baby dies, his wife, Sabra, pours curses on him due to his profession, which is prohibited by Islam. In order to appease her, he gives her false promises that he will stop working in the brewery. He swings between staying and leaving until his best friend and co-worker takes him to hear a budding songstress, none other than Oum Kalthoum!
Abdel-Alim’s family is mired in superstitions and ignorance. For instance, Sabra asks a young man to put alms money, which she begged for, in a bundle and throw it in the street after walking for a while in order to make her son Talaat live, unlike his previous brothers.
El-Absy, who is a medical doctor, narrates an unbelievable story in which the jealous mother-in-law of Shawqia, Sabra’s most intimate friend and midwife, pays another midwife to let Shawqia’s baby die during delivery and then inserts a weasel into her womb to make her bleed and give her a hysterectomy.
Theochari and his brother begin to accumulate wealth, and all the while Abdel-Alim and his family are in a state of misery.
This misery is compounded by the inexplicable death of the husband of Abdel-Alim’s eldest daughter, Wedad, just ten days following the marriage. Following this calamity, Wedad resigns herself to sit beside the window for decades to become a clairvoyant. The rest of the daughters feel that their house is damned and join their mother in asking Abdel-Alim to stop working in the brewery so they can get married.
Throughout the novel, the author excessively merges Greek mythology with the minds, ideas, and words of Greek characters. For instance, after two and a half pages of engaging with and projecting mythological figures, the author says that Theochari was not that romantic!
El-Absy provides two friends and co-workers for Abdel-Alim: the Christian Anton and Samaan the Jew (this name is actually an error, as the Jewish name for Samaan is Sham’oon). These three characters are meant to convey the multi-confessional character of Egypt, with the three different religions working in the brewery in spite of it being taboo, at least for Muslims and Jews.
El-Absy, who is also a singer, devotes pages to Oum Kalthoum’s singing and the lyrics of her songs. It is this music that helps Abdel-Alim enter a phase of transcending intoxication and overcome his marital troubles.
However, one unconvincing scene is when Abdel-Alim, who is apparently illiterate, compares the establishment of the Tora Prison to the big prison in which Egypt is incarcerated.
The story of the Kozzika brothers continues through Theodore, Polichronis’ son. Theodore proves more than capable of managing the family business. He also has a much-publicized romantic affair with the American silent star Pearl White for the last ten years of her life.
Meanwhile, two of Abdel-Alim’s daughters marry, while the youngest, Set Abooha, shuns marriage, pursuing her studies and becoming a medical doctor. However, the only surviving son grows up, becomes a drug addict, kills one of his sisters, and steals her jewelry.
There are two scenes that were absolutely unnecessary. The first depicts Saad Zaghloul, the leader of the 1919 Revolution, in a dialogue with Sir Reginald Wingate, the British high commissioner. The second depicts Ahmed Aboud Pasha, the prominent Egyptian industrialist, talking to an unseen interlocutor about his career and his ambitions to seize the Kozzika brewery.
By this time, the winds had changed and the majority of foreigners had left Egypt after selling their businesses. This includes Theodore Kozzika, who sells his brewery and alcohol factory to Abboud Pasha, who converts them into a starch and glucose factory.
The novel consists of 35 chapters that are devoted either to the Kozzika or Abdel-Alim families, except in the final chapter where both families are mentioned together.
From the very first page, the author focuses on the mania of giving birth to male offspring among the Egyptian working classes represented by Sabra and her husband Abdel-Alim.
Ironically, the same tendency was also found in the Greek upper classes, albeit for totally different reasons, namely because the bride’s father paid the dowry.
This is demonstrated in a scene where Theochari’s wife, Angeliki, boils with jealousy when she learns that Polichronis’ French wife has given birth to a boy, while she gave birth to a girl.
Saudi engineer Rakan Al-Shammari has left an indelible mark on the railway industry in Germany.
His journey began with the pursuit of electrical engineering studies and he later taught at several German universities.
Al-Shammari’s path to success began while working as a project manager at Rail Power System GmbH. His dedication and passion for trains led him to excel in the field. The journey was not without its difficulties, as it required him to learn German, pursue bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and eventually take on teaching responsibilities.
Al-Shammari said: “In 2006, after graduating from high school, I applied for the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Foreign Scholarship Program. I spent a year studying the German language, followed by preparatory studies, and then I joined the University of Kassel to major in electrical and communications engineering. During my final year at university, I undertook practical training at the German Railways Company.”
He noted that after completing the practical experience, he pursued further education as a graduate student. “While studying for my master’s, I was offered a position as a lecturer at the university under a contractual arrangement, where I taught electricity to first and second-year students.”
He received a job offer in 2017 and joined a company specializing in railway project management in Germany. “This company managed new construction projects, particularly in infrastructure, as the German Railway Company itself does not execute such projects,” he noted.
Al-Shammari told Arab News that his educational journey began in the desert, where he studied until the third grade of primary school, living in tents and drinking well water. He later attended Al-Yarmouk Primary School in the city of Rafha for grades four to six and completed his secondary education in the city of Al-Uwaiqliyah.
Al-Shammari firmly believes that Saudi Arabia is on the cusp of a transportation revolution and is already reaping the rewards. He emphasized that the Kingdom will emerge as a developed country in the coming years, not solely reliant on oil and energy, but also due to the strength of its people and leadership, and their commitment to continual development and competition.
He expressed pride in having visionary leaders who invest in the talents of their citizens. He also noted Germany’s openness to creative minds and its support for them, attracting skilled individuals from around the world. He believes that effective resource management enhances the economy and strengthens Germany’s global position.
Al-Shammari acknowledged the initial difficulties he faced in studying in Germany, as it was his first experience living outside his familiar surroundings.
His advice to everyone is to embrace their sense of responsibility, seize opportunities, and pursue continuous learning in order to contribute to their country. He also emphasizes the importance of diversifying educational sources and collaborating with experts and scholars to develop a unique persona capable of competing on a global scale.
Finally, Al-Shammari expressed gratitude to the Saudi leadership, his family and friends, and the Saudi Cultural Mission in Germany. He acknowledged the mission’s continuous support, including increased stipends for Saudi students who excelled academically, enabling them to perform to the best of their abilities during their scholarships.
source/content: arabnews.com (headline edited)
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Al-Shammari said his educational journey began in the desert, where he studied until the third grade of primary school, living in tents and drinking well water. (Al-Shammari’s Instagram)
Libyan doctor Khairiya Ohaida has been awarded the title “Scientist of the Year 2020” in the “Medical and Health Sciences/ Clinical Medicine/ Oncology” category from the US International Achievement Research Center (IARC) for her scientific research on breast cancer medicine.
Dr.Khairiya, a Ph.D. in Tumor biology breast cancer and a faculty member at The Sirte University, told The Libya Observer that her research has been ranked as one of the world’s top 20 scientific papers in oncology.
Dr. Ohaida explained that her project was about discovering a primary breast cancer gene scientifically called galectin-7 in Ductal Carcinoma in-situ (DCIS) and its role in preventing cancer from spreading.
On the basis of her findings, Dr. Ohaida proposed a multi-step hypothesis for the progression of DCIS to invasive breast cancer, which could be used in the clinic to predict how likely an individual’s DCIS is to progress.
Her findings were considered a “very exciting and entirely novel finding” as it has the potential to stratify patients for a more tailored management of their disease, according to the (IARC).
“Research can make important contributions to scientists’ efforts in controlling oncologic diseases and finding new treatments, Dr. Ohaida said.
She expressed her desire to continue her scientific work, but this would require the interest of the authorities, and in this context, she called on stakeholders to support her in developing her research.
“There is a need to establish research centers throughout Libya, and my hope is to see such a facility in my hometown, Dr. Ohaida added.
It may be important to note that Dr. Khairiya Ohaida Ahmed is a medical graduate from the Department of Human Medicine of Sirte University. She obtained her master’s and doctorate degrees from the Queen Mary University of London in 2015.
Dr. Ohaida had also received an award from the Breast Cancer Conference held in Belgium in 2012, as her project was ranked among the world’s top 20 scientific papers on breast cancer.
Ines Zaidi, Professor of Immunology at the Higher Institute of Medical Technologies at the University of Tunis El Manar, received the science and technology award of the Francophone University Agency during her participation in the ninth edition of the Francophone Award for Young Researchers.
Dr. Inas, a specialist in blood cell biology, excelled in the competition which included 113 candidates from different continents, such as America, Asia and Africa.
Thanks to her immensely advanced research, which demonstrates intelligence, scientific and cognitive abilities. The scholar’s work has also been published in more than 40 international medical articles, which have provided many additions to humanity, health and medicine in general. Zaidi has been awarded the Sadiq Bessour scientific prize for research excellence in 2017, supported by the Sadiq Foundation in collaboration with the University of Montreal and the Ministry of Higher Education and Research in Tunisia.
Regarding the nature and importance of Ines Zaidi’s research, the piece of work highlights the inclusion and regulation of HASH-1 molecules in public health diseases, as an added value in the follow-up of pathological conditions, as well as in proposing new therapeutic strategies.
Only three other researchers in the world received the Francophone award from universities in Canada and Morocco, making them 4 international researchers with scientific recognition and utterly significant achievements.
Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Eng. Waleed Al-Khereiji emphasized that the Kingdom has never hesitated to harness all its capabilities to serve humanitarian causes. “The humanitarian aid provided by the Kingdom over the past 70 years has exceeded $95 billion and that benefited 160 countries around the world, making it at the forefront of donor countries for humanitarian and development aid,” he said.
Al-Khereiji made the remarks while attending, on behalf of Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, the meeting of the 160th regular session of the Council of the Arab League at the ministerial level, at the league headquarters in Cairo.
He reiterated the Kingdom’s emphasis on the importance of peace in the Middle East, as it is the strategic choice for the Arab countries, and the importance of encouraging accelerated negotiations to reach a just and comprehensive solution that meets the aspirations of the Palestinian people in accordance with international resolutions and the Arab Peace Initiative. He expressed the Kingdom’s condemnation of the attacks, unilateral actions and repeated provocations by the Israeli occupation forces, which undermine the peace process.
Al-Khereiji expressed the Kingdom’s backing on Syria’s return to the Arab fold, stressing that this will contribute positively to efforts to resolve the crisis there and restore stability to Syria and the region. He reiterated the Kingdom’s support for all efforts made to reach a political solution to the Syrian crisis in a way that preserves Syria’s unity, security, stability and Arab identity. He repeated the Kingdom’s demand for the withdrawal of foreign forces and armed militias from Syria.
Regarding Sudan, Al-Khereiji said the Kingdom voices its deep concern over the cessation of talks that are aimed at ending the conflict and reaching a permanent ceasefire agreement.
Al-Khereiji also led the Saudi delegation, on behalf of Minister of Foreign Affairs Prince Faisal bin Farhan to the third session of the ministerial meeting for the Arab-Japanese political dialogue. The meeting of the foreign ministers from the Arab and Japanese sides was held at the headquarters of the Arab League. The Arab side was headed by Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, while the Japanese side was headed by its Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi.
In his speech, Al-Khereiji expressed the Kingdom’s aspiration to advance Arab-Japanese cooperation to better levels in various fields. He stressed the importance of making the Middle East a safe, stable, and prosperous region that gives hope for a better future for all. “There is broad agreement with Japan regarding the importance of establishing peace, encouraging negotiated solutions, and strengthening security, stability, and development,” he said.
Amid the chaos of the First World War, a new pan-Arab empire was proclaimed. It faltered, but its historical lessons remain.
In December 2022, Abdullah II, the king of Jordan, gave an interview to the CNN anchor Becky Anderson. Sitting close to the Jordan River, not far from where Jesus is believed to have been baptised, this Muslim ruler expressed his concerns about the status of Jerusalem and the Christians under pressure from the new, extremist Israeli government. He emphasised that the ‘Hashemites’, his family, are the custodians of both Christian and Muslim sites in the holy city. Abdullah II cited his great-great-grandfather Sharif Hussein. It was from Hussein’s time, sometime at the end of the First World War, according to Abdullah II, that the Hashemite custodianship of Jerusalem’s holy sites originates. His ancestor even gave sanctuary to Christian Armenian refugees in Jordan, said the king proudly on CNN.
Abdullah II’s remarks presented him as a confident and reassuring monarch but they also refer to a history of modern Arab kingship and the modern Middle East that has mostly been forgotten. Wikipedia in English, for instance, tells us that the custodianship of the Muslim sites in Jerusalem by the Hashemites follows from a ‘verbal agreement’ of Hussein with the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine in 1924. The Indonesian version of Wikipedia repeats the claims of the English article. The Arabic version, however, tells us about the financial help Hussein gave for restoring the holy sites of Jerusalem and subsequent donations by the Hashemite dynasty for further improvements to the holy city. So, who was Hussein and what’s his relevance today?
Sharif Hussein is a legendary figure of the 1910s and ’20s. For some – certainly for Abdullah II – Hussein was the nationalist leader of the ‘Arab revolt’ during the First World War who won the war for the Arabs. In an alliance with Britain, he revolted against the Ottoman Empire in 1916 in order to establish a giant independent state that he called the ‘Arab Kingdom’. Others see him in less heroic terms. They blame him for ‘stabbing the Ottomans in the back’, the inability to stop the partitions decided by Europeans, and the Zionist settlement of Palestine – so, in a way, for losing the war.
The importance of Hussein and his Arab Kingdom for today is a forgotten experiment with state-formation exactly 100 years ago. Modern states do not originate only from nationalism. Abdullah II’s remarks at the Jordan River evoke Islam as a principle of government and Muslim rulers as protectors of Christians. This use of Islam is very different from what we usually hear about religion in the Middle East – for instance, ‘sectarianism’ (religion-based claims to institutionalised representation within nation states, often erupting in violence) or the fascist brutality of ISIS. But neither should we follow the king of Jordan into a monarchist-nationalist nostalgia. His great-great-grandfather Hussein was not born a nationalist. Here, I tell Hussein’s story as an exercise in unearthing ideas about Muslim government that we can call ‘imperial’. This is important because the imperial techniques of state-making defined the early 20th century in many regions of the world, and not nationalist or egalitarian revolutions.
Sharif Hussein bin ‘Ali was the scion of an important family from the sacred city of Mecca. Sharif means ‘nobleman’. Individuals who claim that they are descendants of the Prophet Muhammad use the Arabic honorific terms sharif (plural ashraf) and sayyid (meaning ‘master’, plural sada). Tens of millions of Muslims today claim this heritage. Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator until 2003, was one of them, for example. The rulers of Morocco, too, are ashraf. (The Saudi kings are emphatically not.) Furthermore, among all ashraf and sada, only the Jordanian ruling family and their relatives are called ‘Hashemites’ publicly, after Hashim, a legendary ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad. So, yes, both Hussein and his great-great-grandson King Abdullah II, sitting next to the Jordan River talking to CNN, are also ashraf, descendants of the Prophet.
Yet Hussein was born not in Mecca, but in Istanbul, at the metropolitan centre of the Ottoman Empire, sometime in the 1850s. The Ottoman Empire, a vast, three-continental administration in Europe, Asia and Africa, existed roughly between the 14th century and 1922. This empire was the Mediterranean Muslim superpower. The Ottoman emperor – sultan – assumed the title of the caliph of (Sunni) Islam, too. Today, in its final former territory across Europe and Asia, we find the states of Turkey, Albania, Bulgaria, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian Territories and Saudi Arabia, as well as Egypt, Libya and Tunis in North Africa. In 1914, at the threshold of the First World War, its directly ruled population was estimated at around 25 million (at that time, the US population was about 100 million; Austria-Hungary was about 50 million).
For the Ottomans (a non-Arab, Turkic Muslim imperial dynasty), the most important ashraf were those in Mecca and Medina, the sacred cities in the Hijaz region of Arabia. Hence the value of Sharif Hussein bin ‘Ali for this Muslim empire. The loyalty of the Meccan descendants of the Prophet meant the symbolic recognition of the Ottoman caliphate. Since their conquest in the early 16th century, the Ottoman sultans usually appointed a sharif to serve as the emir of Mecca, its local ruler. From the mid-19th century, the descendants of the Prophet became closer and closer to Istanbul, literally. Hussein was born in Istanbul because his family branch in exile competed for the emirate of the holy city. He knew Turkish, his wife was Turkish-speaking, and his sons received Ottoman education. Hussein, known in the Ottoman administration as Şerif Ali Paşazade Hüseyin Bey (in Turkish transliteration), became quite an Ottomanised descendant of the Prophet.
The logic of the time was not to create nation-states but to transform empires into looser organisations
From the 1870s, the descendants of the Prophet received political roles in the Ottoman imperial capital. Many other more ordinary Arabs from the provinces also became part of the modernising imperial bureaucracy. Hussein and his sons (and the rival sharifian Meccan family members), circulating between Mecca and Istanbul, benefitted from this modern experiment fusing Islam with imperial patriotism. It’s helpful to think of this as an ‘unelected system of representation’, for the sultan suspended the imperial constitution in 1878 and substituted the parliament with these new practices. The ashraf ‘represented’ their regions (in a way, Hussein’s family stood for Mecca and the Hijaz region) but also in general the Muslim community. Many ashraf sat on imperial councils, travelled on steamships and the new railway lines, and so provided a symbolic cover for the empire. After the coup d’état usually known as the Young Turk Revolution to restore the constitution in 1908, Hussein’s sons became elected members of the new imperial assembly. And from 1908, Hussein held the imperial office of the emir of Mecca.
Being a descendant of the Prophet and an Ottoman imperial notable was a uniquely powerful combination in a city where a growing number of Muslims from all over the world came to perform pilgrimage in the age of steam. No wonder that the European empires (with large Muslim colonies and domains) were keen on gaining Hussein’s attention, and Hussein was also keen to gain their attention, especially the British. Hussein had been loyal to the Ottoman Empire before 1908 but hated the Young Turks and the restored Ottoman constitution. He thought that the Quran should be the only constitution in the empire; and he also feared losing his position as emir of the holy city. In the 1910s, Hussein and his sons made cautious contact with the British consul in Cairo. Intriguing, in early 1914 Hussein’s son Abdullah asked the British consul to consider a British protectorate over the emirate of Mecca like the British did with the subdued Afghan emir.
This 1914 intrigue of the Ottoman ashraf of Mecca in order to switch empires was part of a much more complex momentum of imperial transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea. We must understand that the logic of the time, despite the popularity of ethnicity- and language-based patriotic ideas, was not to create sovereign nation-states but to transform empires somehow into looser organisations.
By the 1910s, many faith- and ethnicity-based groups in the Ottoman Empire demanded reforms to transform the empire into a federation. Bourgeois Arabs were no exception as some Syrians started to imagine a decentralised Ottoman Empire with Arab autonomy. Other Arab groups – for instance, the religious entrepreneur-journalist Sheikh Rashid Rida and his activists, with some European encouragement – imagined a new empire as a Muslim association of emirs, and some other sheikhs even advocated for an Arab caliph instead of an Ottoman one. In many of these 1910s plans, the ashraf had a role and Hussein, as the ruler of Mecca, personally could expect a potential caliphate. European commentators imagined this would-be Arab caliphate as a type of papacy, restricted to the holy cities in the Hijaz. This would have ended the age-old Ottoman system of combining the emperor and caliph titles. In short, the spirit of the time was to create autonomous polities in some sort of federation as a better way to accommodate economic and political demands of ethnic groups, and to challenge the Ottoman leadership of Sunni Islam.
A flag of Hijaz, also known as the flag of the Arab revolt, presented by Sharif Hussein, King of Hijaz, to King George V of the United Kingdom in 1918. Courtesy the Royal Collection, London
And in October 1914, the Ottoman Empire joined the Great War as a member of the Central Powers. Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans fought together against the Allied Powers, the British-French-Russian alliance. The Ottoman caliph declared jihad on the Allied Powers (not, to be noted, on his own Central Power allies, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians). For the Allied Powers, Hussein, the emir of Mecca, was the most useful symbol against the Ottoman caliph. As a descendant of the Prophet, as an Arab, he was a potential challenger of the Ottoman claim to the caliphate (and, for the better, this emir of Mecca had already requested British protection). After an exchange of letters with the British High Commissioner in Cairo (this correspondence came to be known as the Hussein-McMahon correspondence), Hussein declared his revolt – the ‘Arab revolt’ – against the Ottoman government in June 1916. Ever since, there has been a debate over what the British promised exactly, what a promise means in informal diplomacy, and whether the British betrayed their promises later.
Bedouin Arabs with the flag of Hijaz during the Arab Revolt in 1917. Courtesy the Library of Congress
Despite the assurances about a large Arab polity in the correspondence with McMahon, no Allied planners really expected that the emir of Mecca would want something more than a small emirate with the holy cities in the Hijaz. When, in October 1916, Hussein and his sons announced their claim to a giant polity, with Hussein as ‘King of the Arabs’, it took the Allied Powers by surprise. The ‘Arab Kingdom’ was an idea about a new empire stretching from the Levant (what is today Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon) to the Iraqi regions, even Arabia, thus including most of the Arabic-speaking Asian Ottoman provinces (but not the North African ones). Overcoming their surprise, in January 1917 and later repeatedly, the Allied Powers recognised Hussein as king only over the Hijaz, a small portion of Arabia. But this new ruler and his sons were not satisfied with a kingdom of the Hijaz. They maintained their claims to a much larger state, a new Muslim-Arab empire. This is why, when the sharifian troops entered Ottoman Damascus in October 1918 under the orders of his second son Faisal, many Damascenes understood that they are now in the ‘Arab Kingdom’, being the subjects of Hussein, a new Muslim sultan.
Empire is often a rhetorical term to mean something evil. Think about the empire in Star Wars. But we historians use ‘empire’ as an historical-analytical category of government, whose organising logic differs from the ideal of the nation-state. Empire is a large organisation that uses all available means (violence, dynastic marriage, religion and ethnicity) to establish political and economic claims on diverse regions with diverse peoples. As Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper call to our attention, empires welcome and embrace ‘diversity’; it is nation-states that require a homogeneous population. Historical empires subjugated and colonised peoples, but the important issue for our purposes is that empire is a different way of subjugating and organising peoples from that of the nation-state.
At the end of the Great War, the political visions about the future of what became the Middle East – the Allied agreements about partition, the well-known 1917 British promise of Palestine to Zionists as ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’, Hussein’s Arab Kingdom, some bourgeois Syrian federative visions, and the very much existing Ottoman loyalists – were not about sovereign nation-states. These plans and visions all implied some type of empire. Perhaps, the most fitting for post-Ottoman Arabs was a federative polity, with or without a dynasty. The imperial logic of organising peoples and territories dictated the political imaginations up to about 1922.
During 1918 and 1919, the sharifian advocates of the Arab Kingdom projected Islam and Arab ethnicity as the founding norms of a new political order. From early 1918, the official journal in Mecca and his sons called Hussein ‘the Commander of the Faithful’ in Arabic (amir al-mu’minin) while the new king craved for the title of caliph. Both the sharifian and British propaganda started to advertise Prophetic descent as an important quality for Muslim rulership. The Arab Kingdom was to be ruled by Hussein and his sons, the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. Islam, Prophetic genealogy and ethnicity were to serve as the constitutional foundations of Hussein’s Arab Kingdom. We can call this idea of a state a ‘genealogical empire’.
Using religion in state-formation is considered today outside of international norms
Hussein’s genealogical empire was the first of many post-Ottoman Muslim imperial projects in the 20th century. Like the case with Christian, Hebrew and Buddhist imperialisms, there had been various kinds of Muslim empires in history, from the late-antique Muslim-Byzantian caliphates to the last great empires of the Mughals in India, the Qajars in Iran, and the Ottomans in the eastern Mediterranean. In a way, the Arab Kingdom was to contain recycled Ottoman institutions: the caliphate, a monarchy, Islam, the ashraf, and of course the ex-Ottoman peoples, such as Arabs, Turks, Armenians, Jews and Kurds, some of whom were Christians and even Shi‘i Muslims. The Ottoman politics of diversity had to be transformed into a new Muslim framework.
Using religion in state-formation is considered today outside of international norms. In 1919, the sharifian makers of the Arab Kingdom had to face the Ottoman Arab urban bourgeoisie who were rather advocating some type of federation, perhaps preserving an association even with Istanbul. For instance, in Ottoman Damascus, the sharifian occupiers had to compromise for a constitutional, federative ‘United States of Syria’, in which Faisal, the son of Hussein, was declared king in March 1920. But Sharif Hussein was not a federalist. In his imagination, this unrecognised Syrian princely polity was still part of his larger Arab Kingdom.
Next to the Arab federalists and the still-strong Ottoman loyalists, the sharifian imperial project also bumped into the intentions of the Allied Powers. This is the more familiar story about the modern Middle East. The French and British (and Russian and Italian) governments aimed at partitioning the Ottoman provinces. Just think about the Balfour Declaration in 1917, given by Britain’s foreign minister Lord Balfour to the Zionists to establish a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Ottoman Palestine, practically a promise for settler colonisation, a typical imperial gesture. The Covenant of the League of Nations in 1919 codified these agreements in the new international system. Hussein remained to be recognised only as the king of the Hijaz. There thus existed in 1919 a split situation – while the ‘Kingdom of the Hijaz’ was a minor Allied Power and as such participated in the Paris Peace Conference, the Hijazi (sharifian) representatives and administrators in the occupied regions projected the idea of the ‘Arab Kingdom’ with full force.
And even more complicated was the fact that Hussein’s polity was to be a subordinate to the British Empire. For instance, Hussein had no problem with a British appointment of his minister of war and often repeated that the British gave him power over lesser rulers in Arabia. Even more importantly, the British treasury financed the Hijazi (the sharifian) army and their occupation administration in Damascus, and in December 1919 the British government gave over the financing of this occupation zone to the French treasury. The French army did not trust Faisal, a would-be sharifian monarch in Damascus, who was too closely tied with his father Sharif Hussein, a potential caliph in Mecca, and with British politics. Besides, the French colonial empire had their own sharifian monarch in Morocco. In July 1920, the French army invaded the internal lands of Syria, expulsing the Hijazi sharifian regime and Faisal, the new king of the United States of Syria, and killed the Ottoman Syrian general Yusuf al-Azma. Thus, accidentally, the French army also ended the hopes of the local Syrian Ottoman loyalists about returning to Istanbul’s umbrella.
The possibility of a large Arab kingdom was not yet crushed as sharifian troops still held the Ottoman Hijaz railway stations in Transjordan, the mountains above the river Jordan. This is where Hussein’s third son Abdullah arrived in November 1920 to represent his father and establish his own emirate within the sharifian empire. The British planners agreed to this arrangement in April 1921 and at the same time transferred the defeated Faisal to rule a new country, the Iraqi kingdom. Thus emerged a chain of sharifian monarchies (the Kingdom of the Hijaz, the Emirate of Transjordan, the Kingdom of Iraq) in a loose association, under British control. This modular association of three Muslim rulers was still an empire, with Mecca as its centre. In 1921, British officials were astounded when Sharif Abdullah presented them with a constitutional draft of his new emirate that derived his authority over Amman from his father, Sharif Hussein, in Mecca. The operation of recycling the Ottoman Empire into a series of emirates held together by Prophetic genealogy, Islam, ethnicity, a railway, and dynastic claims was the defining project of the Middle East until 1924.
Abdullah II’s remarks today about the Hashemite protection of Christians and Jerusalem’s holy places originate in this moment and in this project. Muslim emperors had offered protection to persecuted communities in the past, and possibly Sharif Hussein was also glad to exercise this imperial gesture when his troops found Christian Armenian refugees in the occupied Syrian provinces. Furthermore, as a potential ruler of Jerusalem and a caliph – in fact, in March 1924 he did assume the caliphate in public – Hussein and his sons got in touch with the Jerusalem Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities. A Jerusalem delegation arrived in Amman in March 1924 to acknowledge Sharif Hussein as caliph (and another Jerusalem group to anxiously express their doubts). About this time, the Hashemites started to act as protectors of the holy sites in a symbolic competition (but also cooperation) with interwar Zionists.
But the core of the imagined Arab Kingdom – Mecca and the Hijaz – was gone by the end of 1925. Capitalising on the general dissatisfaction with King Hussein’s politics, a new conqueror, Sultan Abdulaziz of Najd in Central Arabia (‘Ibn Saud’) conquered the holy cities and expulsed the sharifian family. A new, this time Saudi, kingdom started in the Hijaz. King Hussein lived in exile – he was pointedly buried in Jerusalem near the Al-Aqsa mosque in 1931. So, when today Abdullah II claims protection over the holy sites, in fact he also claims his own ancestor’s grave.
In this story about the rise and fall of the sharifian Arab Kingdom – although never entirely gone, as Jordan is still with us – we have observed that religion, genealogy, federative ideas, ethnicity and monarchy were fundamental in the local making of modern Arab polities. While the Allied Powers partitioned peoples and regions, there was significant local involvement in the political furnishing of new states. The mixture of constituent fictions was not created by the Allied occupiers; instead, it emerged from how societies that succeeded the old Ottoman order continued to carry out imperial programmes in lieu of radical revolutions. At the same time, these successor societies were to be integrated into new European imperial orders, Greater France and Greater Britain, respectively. Western and Arab politicians, Orientalists, artists and the press further entrenched the essentialisation, racialisation and feudalisation of post-Ottoman Arabs in the 1920s and ’30s. The local and external logics of the imperial imaginary about Arab politics with its centrality on religion retained their force well into the second half of the 20th century, and, as we could observe in Abdullah II’s interview to CNN, even until today.
source/content: aeon.co / Adam Hestyan / edited Sam Haselby (headline edited)
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Sharif Husein and the campaign for a modern Arab empire
