Winston's Hiccup. Borderlines explores the global map, one line at a time. “I think I’ll write a book today,” the writer Georges Simenon was said to tell his wife at breakfast. “Fine,” she would reply, “but what will you do in the afternoon?” Winston Churchill was similarly prolific, and not just in the field of letters [1]. In his later years, he liked to boast that in 1921 he created the British mandate of Trans-Jordan, the first incarnation of what still is the Kingdom of Jordan, “with the stroke of a pen, one Sunday afternoon in Cairo” [2]. Also like Simenon, Churchill wasn’t averse to the odd tipple, and according to some, that Sunday afternoon in Cairo followed a particularly liquid lunch.
As a consequence, the then colonial secretary’s [3] penmanship proved a bit unsteady, allegedly producing a particularly erratic borderline. Joe Burgess/The New York TimesCLICK TO ENLARGE The resultant Saudi triangle sticking into Jordan’s side is one of the more remarkable features on the map of the Middle East. Bringing Mecca to the British Museum by Malise Ruthven. Over the next two months the great domed interior of what used to be the British Museum’s reading room, where Marx researched Das Kapital and Bram Stoker (creator of Dracula) was a reader, is host to Hajj, a remarkable exhibition that celebrates the most sacred event in the Islamic calendar, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The exhibition seems more than a cultural event—a milestone, perhaps, in the public recognition and acceptance of Islam at the heart of British life.
Conceived by British Museum director Neil MacGregor and the museum’s Islamic art curator Venetia Porter with assistance from the Saudi Arabian government, it is an unusual collaboration between a museum dedicated to secular learning and the current rulers of Islam’s holiest sites, who have lent many important works. Presiding over its opening in late January were Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah, deputy Saudi foreign minister and son of the Saudi King, and Prince Charles—the heir to the British throne.
Women and Islam: A Debate with Human Rights Watch. To Kenneth Roth: In your Introduction to Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2012, “Time to Abandon the Autocrats and Embrace Rights,” you urge support for the newly elected governments that have brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Tunisia and Egypt. In your desire to “constructively engage” with the new governments, you ask states to stop supporting autocrats. But you are not a state; you are the head of an international human rights organization whose role is to report on human rights violations, an honorable and necessary task which your essay largely neglects.
You say, “It is important to nurture the rights-respecting elements of political Islam while standing firm against repression in its name,” but you fail to call for the most basic guarantee of rights—the separation of religion from the state. Nor do you point to the one of the clearest threats to rights—particularly to women and religious and sexual minorities—the threat to introduce so-called “shari’a law.” Teaching the Middle East: A New Online Resource for Educators. Wendy Ennes, Associate Head of Public Education and Project Director of Teaching the Middle East: A Resource for Educators, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago Teaching the Middle East: A Resource for Educators was created by the Oriental Institute, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and eCUIP, Digital Library Project with high school and college World History teachers in mind.
In our work with local educators, high school teachers tell us how difficult it can be to make sense of historical and current events in the Middle East and link those events to required curriculum. The political unrest currently reverberating across Northern Africa and the Middle East is no exception. High school World History teacher Mike Shea of Kenwood Academy in Chicago observes, “Two typical curriculum problems in teaching World History are finding concrete ways to link different curriculum units together and finding excellent but concise readings on topical issues. 1) Writing and Literature. How to unfreeze a Middle East stalemate.
The Obama administration and the other members of the Quartet — the Middle East mediating group that also includes envoys from the European Union, Russia and the United Nations — want to resume direct talks and this past week held a preparatory meeting with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in Amman, Jordan. There may be more such meetings, and that is good, because ultimately there will be no peace without negotiations.
But there should also be no illusions about the prospects of a breakthrough any time soon. The psychological gaps between the parties make it hard to resolve their differences and have bedeviled all the work for peace talks over the past few years. I have been intimately involved in peacemaking efforts over the past 20 years under Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Obama, and I know that Abbas and Netanyahu carry the weight of their peoples’ history and mythology, and face enormous political constraints. Outlook@washpost.com.