"I Am Jealous Of My Senses. The Air Is The Colour Of Gardenias, Your Smell On My Shoulders Like Laughter

« That whole time, six years, I had always been in love with someone. It was the only thing that made it feasible to live that way, getting up at six and remaining conscious until late at night. It was like religion had been, for medieval people: it gave you the energy to face a life of injustice, powerlessness, and drudgery. The guys I was in love with always ignored me, but were never unkind. There was something abstract and gentle about the experience of being ignored—a feeling of being spared, a known impossibility of anything happening—that was consonant with my understanding of love. In theory, of course, I knew that love could be reciprocated. It was a thing that happened, often, to other people. But I was unlike other people in so many ways. »

Elif Batuman, Either/Or

« Growing up, I read a lot. Partly because I loved it, and partly because there wasn’t much else to do as a teenage girl in Aligarh. Given the tacit boundaries of my conservatively liberal Muslim family, the world outside my door was as distant as a faraway continent. I ventured into it like a tourist. To school, family outings to the cinema, a few social events with friends. All of these expeditions were monitored and supervised. Crucially, they all required reasons – a sanctioned purpose that permitted my presence on the streets, which could never be aimless. My male cousins roamed the thoroughfares of Aligarh freely, spending late nights at buzzy tea shops, leaping over walls, gazing at the stars. I cultivated a fluency in occupying interiors. Reading, then, was a path into possibilities; it offered a parallel terrain which I could stride through boldly. »

« Books were thus my private continent, providing both excitement and safety. They were my maps to navigating the world, and also the way I created a sense of belonging, of being at home. They opened up worlds for me, without my leaving the house. »

Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul, Taran N. Khan

Beirut’s stony Melkite Greek Catholic cathedral of Saint Elias.

It was initially built towards the end of the 18th century and reconstructed in 1849.

Style: Byzantine, baroque, Islamic

The only remaining Mameluke building in Beirut, Zawiyat Ibn Arraq.

Once a complete private madrasa, only the zawiya (prayer corner) remains of it.

Today, someone seemed to have made it their own prayer corner and unrolled a prayer rug inside.

Date: 1517- used till Ottoman times

Beautiful to see what we treat as “monuments” being reused as such. Do we glorify what is historical only because we know it’s historical? Do we love these stones only because we know they’re hundreds of years old? What’s so intrinsically beautiful about what’s historical?

Can we even call them monuments? Is it history? Is it present?

Zhoorat - Lebanese herbal tea made of dried herbs and flowers

when they say pledge allegiance, I say // by Arab-American poet Hala Alyan

My Women are Tabla & Qanoun by Nur Turkmani

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

— Sarah Bakewell, from “Sarah Bakewell on Posthumanism, Transhumanism, and What it Actually Means to be ‘Human’” (via LitHub)

Tomorrow We will See

« I have a complicated relationship with walking. This has a lot to do, I suspect, with having grown up in Aligarh, a city in northern India, where walking on the streets came with intense male scrutiny, and the sense of being in a proscribed space. As a woman stepping out into its thoroughfares, I needed a reason to place my body on the street. I learned to display a posture of ‘work’ while walking, and to erase any signs that may hint at my being out for pleasure, for no reason at all other than to walk. All this means I see walking as a luxury, not something to be taken for granted. It is an act of autonomy and mobility I learned early to seize as a form of pleasure. I also grew adept at the allied skill of reading my terrain, looking out for signs that told me if it was open, or off-limits.

Being told not to walk was another way in which Kabul felt familiar. To map the city, I drew on the same knowledge and intuition that had helped me navigate the streets of my home town. Which is why, unlike the maps of guidebooks that seek to make checklists and establish authority, the routes I took were wandering and idiosyncratic. They were not trajectories of efficiency leading to a predetermined destination, nor were they maps of authority or delineation, offering control or explanation. These were routes of discovery – maps of being lost. To be lost is a way to see a place afresh, a way to reimagine a terrain that feels known. To be lost in Kabul is to find it – as a place of richness and possibility. »

Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul, Taran N. Khan