#failakaisland

[esisco]

It was nice trip… 🏝#failakaisland (at Failaka Island) https://www.instagram.com/p/CRjB3W3LklYK8qpzANgKgkKChR4eUXY1R8kdC40/?utm_medium=tumblr

[cshafimon]

| Failaka island 🇰🇼 |⁠ 📸 @cshafimon Story 📖: Shooting startrail is one of the fun filled shoot for me. It has many challenges. I try to overcome the challenges in many ways.. choosing foreground is one of it.. abandoned places and vehicles are good to be in FG. The tank is the decayed remains from 1991 gulf war. And abandoned in the island Failaka. ⁣⁠▪️ ⁣⁠▪️ exif 🎛️ :⁠ 📷 : @canonme 5D mk iii 🔭 : @sigmaglobalvision 14mm Art 🕶️ : no filter 🎞️ : 500 ⏳ : 350x 15swc 👁️‍🗨️ : f/2 🪜 : @benrousa Gotravel2 ⁣⁠. ⁣⁠************************ ************************ @aabworld @sigma.aab @canon.aab @alphapro.aab ............................... @nikonasia @nikonindiaofficial @nikonasia @natgeo @natgeowild @bbcearth @natgeoindia @natgeoyourshot @natgeotravellerindia @natgeo @discovery @bbcearth @frame @varietymedia_ @photo_hub__ @discoverychannelin @official_photographers_hub @moodyframes_ @moodygram_kerala @asprins.of.insta @travelrealindia @travelandleisureindia @kuwait.towers @failaka__island @failaka_h_village @startrailchasers .⁣⁠ .⁣⁠ .⁣⁠ .⁣⁠ .⁣⁠ #failaka #failaka_island #failakaisland #kuwaitinstagram #kuwaitphoto #kuwaitlandscape #kuwaitnightsky #cshafimon #kuwaitcity #longexposurekuwait #longexposhots #landscape_photography #longexpoelite #longexpo #slowshutter #longexposureshots #longexposureoftheday #longexpohunter #longexposure_shots #longexposures #landscape_capture #startrails #landscapephoto #longexposure_world #longexposure_photos #startrailchasers (at Failaka Island) https://www.instagram.com/p/CPbnGeyJpFD/?utm_medium=tumblr

[aneesaprice]

This popped up in my FB memories. Our visit 2 years ago to Failaka island in the Persian island. One of the stops we made was at a camel farm. 🐪 🐫 They camels weren’t shy for the camera. Hubby and my youngest bravely tried the warm, frothy camel milk and found out afterwards that it’s a diuretic! 😜 It was a fun experience though and the baby camels were of course absolutely adorable. #camelmilk #camelfarm #failakaisland #persiangulf (at Failaka Island) https://www.instagram.com/p/B9Q5r9lpNSI/?igshid=1q6rekiaus31a

[find-artancientarabia]

Liane Al Ghusain on Immortality and Al Khidr in Ancient Arabia

More and more it seems that anything you can't google is gold. As a writer and fetishist of the cultural sidestream, into which I’m pulled by personal stories, creative analyses, and fountains of kitsch, it's an almost spiritual pursuit - bringing to light the unknown, the unexamined. The question that continues to haunt me is: what ideologies and beliefs are toppled whenever a building is demolished?

Last week our Searching for Ancient Arabia team arrived in Bahrain armed with bits of mysterious and often incomplete information on our pet topics – Al Khider shrines and fertility rites, Sufi mysticism, pre-Islamic and pre-Arabic scripts, and the eating habits/ruling MO of the Carmathians. With the generous help of Al Riwaq gallery and NYU Abu Dhabi, we were able to view historical sites and artifacts as well as have meetings with Bahraini historians and anthropologists.

  The author in front of the Bahrain Fort Museum. Bee sculpture designed by Dina Mahmoud for Bokja.

Background:

As someone who is first and foremost interested in storytelling, the way our shared stories change over time is of particular interest. Karen Armstrong, in A Short History of Myth explains that myths and storytelling came about as a response to the anxiety of hunting, with storytelling existing as a viable survival technique in the Paleolithic period:

“the hunter, the shaman and the neophyte all had to turn their backs on the familiar, and endure fearsome trials…the old ideas that have nourished his community no longer speak to him. So he…fights monsters, climbs inaccessible mountains, traverses dark forests and, in the process dies to his old self, and gains a new insight or skillset, which he brings back to his people.

These age-old initiations ring remarkably true for anyone who has ever left home. Going to college in the US I definitely had to kill parts of myself to survive, shedding my inhibited self-expression and previously unexamined beliefs to make room for new ones. The ruthlessness I took on as cut precious sentences from my writing and ending draining relationships are the kind of skills I’ve brought back to the Middle East as a teacher and cultural practitioner, where stagnated status quos reign supreme and as a response, thankfully, all kinds of education initiatives are attempting to breathe fresh life into young artists and thinkers.

But given all we’ve learned and all we’ve had to overturn to learn it, there’s still a place for honoring the skins we’ve shed and preserving the past so we can see how and why we’ve come this far. And that’s where the epic of Gilgamesh comes in.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is a story of trying to return to old ways, only to find they’re too far gone. The story takes place as Mesopotamian civilization turned from an agrarian society into an urban one, with the city of Uruk at its center (modern day Iraq). At the time the spiritual landscape was changing so that there was less room for old Sumerian gods and less trust in their divine hand in determining people’s destinies – with more active belief in free will and the importance of building cities that would last forever.

King Gilgamesh, who is a totally modern man for his time,[1] has anxiety about dying and being forgotten, so he journeys to modern day Bahrain to find the immortal Utnapashim and receive his advice. Gilgamesh fails the first and only challenge that Utnapashim sets for him which is to stay awake for 7 consecutive days. Thus we can characterize immortality with vision – the ability to keep one’s eyes open.

Utnapashim is the only survivor of the Great Flood,[2] later cast in the Abrahamic religions as Noah, and in the Quran as Al Khider, the servant of Moses (and perhaps also in the Alexander romance as the servant of Alexander the Great, and he is even thought to be a stand-in for St.George).[3] Among the alternative spellings of his name are: Khidr, Khodr, Khoder, Khadr, Khader. The Wikipedia entry on Al Khider would also have one believe that he is a figure linked to the mythologies of a number of ancient cultures including those of Phoenicia, Ireland, Greece, and India, appearing across cultures as a boat-builder, mason, miller and presiding wise man. [4]

  A found image of Al Khider.

  In the Quran’s Surat Al-Kahf (18) Al Khider is a guide who remains one step ahead of Moses at all times, often knowing how actions in the present, (such as making a hole in a ship), will affect the outcome of the future (saving the ship and its owner from being possessed by a greedy king). Al Khider’s prescience of what is to come, and his connection to water and hence fertility has mythologized him all around the Arab and Persian Gulf to this day.

  Cults of Infertility

A number of shrines dotted around the Gulf in Iraq, Iran, Bahrain and Kuwait as well as in the Levant have been erected in the name of Al Khider, although many have been demolished. Women hoping for health and fertility arrive at these sites with talismans, stitched flags, and bottles of rosewater, which they sprinkle as they pray for children.[5]

Al Khider’s legacy in Kuwait is a troubled one – shrines built in his name were demolished three times – once in 1937 and two more times in the seventies (the latter being in 1977) – after a fatwa was issued by Sheikh Al Jarrah claiming that the shrine and the famed site of Al Khider’s footprint on Failaka island drew a kind of reverence that was tainted with polytheistic blasphemy or sherek. Although it isn’t mentioned in the fatwa, polytheism had been central to Failaka island for thousands of years, where there was a shrine dedicated to Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt by followers of Alexander the Great.

  The first demolished shrine of Al Khider on Failaka Island. Courtesy Tareq and Jehan Al-Rajab.

  The social attitudes towards the Al Khider shrine are perhaps best modeled in Khalid Al-Faraj’s short story Muneera, where the protagonist’s husband considers her a “hollow beauty…[with] a brain stuffed with superstitions and delusions” due to her attachments to the Al Khider shrine…and by the answer given to me at an office of older men who gather at souk el mubarakiya in Kuwait when I asked him how the shrine functioned as a part of daily life. He described how attached women would get to the site, spending all day picnicking there. “Who were these women?” I asked. “The old ones” he replied, making a gesture with his hand that went up into the air, indicating ascension of age. “The old ones,” he repeated, and the same hand began to spiral by his head in the universal indication of craziness.

 Families in front of the second demolished shrine of Al Khider on Failaka Island. Courtesy Tareq and Jehan Al-Rajab.

But who is to judge what is a crazy pursuit of posterity? Why shouldn’t women with anxiety about childbirth and motherhood gather and share experiences at the site where stories about immortality reign supreme?

Living Forever In Bahrain:

Having begun to grasp the reasons for the shrine’s annihilation in Kuwait, my interest was piqued when Searching for Ancient Arabia presented the opportunity to further study fertility rites and Al Khider in Bahrain.

The subject of Al Khider was even harder to broach in Bahrain. On our first day at Qalaat Bahrain, or Bahrain fort, I encountered a small, colorful compound that was composed of a few buildings covered in drawings, dedicated to Shia burials and charitable donations. When I asked one of the caretakers of the place about it, he said it was going to be torn down soon. We got to talking and he told me about the Al Khider mosque in Bahrain, located in a region called Askar – trying to go pray at that mosque after the government crackdown on the Shia population could be extremely difficult, and perhaps could have dangerous consequences.

    Shiite funerary association next door to the Bahrain fort.

  Talking to Ali Akbar Bushiri, historian and writer of the book “Dilmun Culture” he informed me of the island of “Chawchab” where an Al Khider shrine had once existed. Ali described the site of Chawchab, which was constantly littered with eggshells offered to Al Khider by hopeful mothers– a ritualistic holdover from sacrifices to the goddess Ishtar and the practice of decorating eggs for Nowruz (the Persian New Year).[6] Chawchab has been destructed at the expense of Bahrain’s ongoing coastline expansion project, the rocky island being covered by manmade beaches. Fertility rituals of all kinds persist all over Bahrain, however.

We learned from Dalal AlSherouqi, a food anthropologist and eating heritage cookbook author, about a wide range of contemporary Bahraini food lore, traditions and proverbs.[7]

Most compelling was a recipe for male virility called “lukhma,” from the word for “hit” or “sting,” which is composed of steamed sting ray and rice! Another nice tidbit of information had to do with alfalfa sprouts or “barseem,” which are native to Bahrain and grow in large quantities in the months of March and April. According to AlSherouqi, when brides come to their marriage home for the first time, the threshold of the home is covered with alfalfa – this is to signal wild, unfettered growth, for as the proverb goes about barseem, “the more you pick it, the more it grows.” Barseem is also thought to make the milk of cows and goats creamier and the soil of the earth richer with potassium. Hence the bride’s first steps over the barseem are thought to bode fertility.

Bridal customs illustrated at the Bahrain National Museum.

Ali painted a picture of his wife, whom he called his very own fertility goddess, after she had their first child and was being bathed by midwives. He sat there on a chair in the doorway, lovingly taking notes as they washed and oiled her. Afterwards, dates stuffed with ghee were placed in the north, south, east and west corners of the house to attract sweetness and prosperity – for people from Persia, which is where a lot of Bahrainis today originally came from, the combination of sugar and oil is tantamount, he explained.

What was often exciting was to find the overlap and commonalities in all of our topics – some patterns emerged in regards what is most likely to contribute a subject being obscured by the hegemony of history and the master narratives of the Arab world. The recent conflicts in Bahrain played a role in our process of discovery and more often than not in our persisting ignorance about the minutiae of our chosen research topics. It often seemed like information about Al Khider, the Carmathians, and pre-Islamic scripts was advertently covered up or lost.

The censorship of Shia-related histories makes for a palimpsest of artifacts and a confusing collage of claims – interestingly this makes my research journey take creative diversions. Sadly, it makes for a tense daily living situation in Bahrain. Throughout my time in Bahrain I remained grateful to people who spoke freely about their knowledge, memories and opinions. The way that populations deals with the demolition of their heritage is exemplified by graffiti of the Pearl roundabout – though it was demolished only once, the protest site continues to be reiterated all over Bahrain with cans of spray paint.

  A graffito in the area of A'Ali pictures the demolished Pearl roundabout and claims "we are returning."

Skepticism towards Paganism and wide dismissal of it as a legitimately charged religious practice also makes conversations about the history of sexuality and fertility to be quite a trial. It seems a shame that almost nobody bats an eyelash at scantily clad models on billboards, yet most people sneer at the word “goddess.” Learning from the protestors in Bahrain I continue to wonder: how can we consciously and conscientiously honor the spiritual impulses of our ancient civilizations in our daily lives?

NB: The research for the blog post was collected orally as well as from a number of texts including: Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth, the Quran, Wikipedia, and The Epic of Gilgamesh. Any comments or corrections will be received with appreciation and gratitude.

[1] having initiated his servant Enkidu into modernity by sending him a prostitute, Gilgamesh then turns down Inanna (also known as Ishtar, the ultimate sex goddess - rejecting a goddess had been previously unheard of).

[2] In the text of Atrahasis, the Great Flood is sent by Enlil because the laborers of the new city are disturbing his peace. This is an interesting allegory for labor in the Gulf, and their callous treatment.

[3] There’s something to be said for how interchangeable the figure of Al Khider seems to be across cultures – perhaps this is the truest form of immortality?

[4] Al Khider is a prominent figure in Sufi mysticism, functioning according to Sufi scholar Henry Corbin as a “person-archetype” whose teachings allow Sufists to each discover their own, individual spiritual identity.

[5] See Khalid Al-Farraj’s short story Muneera  (1929).

[6] Eggs as emblems of fertility are also a part of Easter and pre-Passover rituals

[7] The proverbs we learned from her translated to the likes of “give him the seed of peace, give it to him and send him to Manama”