A Green Butterfly

The shawl was knitted from mohair on a size 6 needle. I began this scarf near the end of June and finished it the second week of July.

At one point while I was knitting the main pattern, I had to keep saying to myself "one stitch, one stitch" to stay focused on the shawl and not other things.

The yarn is two strands -- mohair and linen. It has a wonderful loft and lightness but it is quite itchy. Not something to wear over bare shoulders.

This is also the first scarf where I have ever knitted nupps, which are a kind of Estonian bobble. A nupp is created when you knit 5 or 7 stitches into a single stitch and then on the purl row, you purl all the stitched together. A rather pretty effect. Also I learned that Estonian knitters used nupps to make their shawls heavier because they were paid by the weight of the shawl. Random factoid.

This was a shawl made in June while I spent a great deal of time waiting and worrying. The center rectangle is knitted from cotton and wool. The outer edge is knitted from silk which I hand spun. The silk is single ply and rather bumpy but that gives the lace edge more character.

The scarf became a gift for the wife of a doctor as a token of appreciation and gratitude for all her husband had done for mine.

I have never before given away any item that represented so much time and concentration, but under the circumstances, no other course felt right to me.

This is a scarf knitted from a pattern in Nicky Epstein's book "Over the Edge."

It was knitting on a size 7 needle with yarn handspun and dyed by my mom.

Knitting the circles and the tubes was a new technique for me and took lots of time. Before I started the scarf, I thought of only having 5 instead of 7 circles on each end, since the idea of making 14 of these circles seemed rather intimidating.

This scarf will be a gift for a dear friend (a red-head and very sophisticated) who came to my rescue (and my children's) during a tough time this summer.

Lace

This piece of lace was begun 20 years ago when I took a trip to Ireland to learn Gaelic.

I used a size 0 needle and wool yarn that was no thicker than a thread.

This past weekend, I found the lace, and instead of adding a third row of arches, took a crochet hook and crocheted off the stitches. That took 8 hours of quiet sitting and concentration on Saturday and Sunday.

Then on Monday, I blocked the lace after soaking it in warm water. My son and I pinned the lace out on a quilt, stretching it ever so gently until the diameter reached 52 inches.

I have knitted many things in my life, but this is truly an exceptional piece.

Glogster

My Forbidden Face -- initial response

I have started to read a memoir written by a teenager who lived through the Taliban occupation of Kabul in 1996. The memoir is called My Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban: A Young Woman's Story by Latifa. This is not her real name, but a pseudonym which she used to protect her family -- still living in Afghanistan.

The picture at the side is from Flickr and was uploaded on January 3, 2009
by cidimuzio. I want to be careful to give credit to the photographer. I selected this photograph from all the others after searching chadri because it was taken recently. I also like the picture because the woman is balancing a cage with two birds on her head and it reminds me of an episode in the memoir.

After the Taliban established itself in Kabul, they took over the radio station (renaming it Radio Sharia) and started broadcasting their edicts and rules. One of the rules includes "It is forbidden to keep dogs or birds" (41). The narrator and her family have a yellow canary and a greyhound. The greyhound is secretly taken out of the city and given to their uncle who has a country house. The canary has a different fate. The narrator lets the canary fly away -- saying that at least one member of the family will be free from the Taliban.

The narration is powerful and immediate and direct. The writer uses a journalistic style -- which suits since her ambition was to become a reporter until the arrival of the Taliban made that impossible because women were forbidden to work, to study, to walk alone. All women had to be accompanied by a male relative, called a mahram in order to leave the house. This means that even just to go shopping for groceries or to run an errand, a woman must have a male escort. How inefficient! That would mean everyone would have to stop work to get a loaf of bread or vist a friend. Nothing would get done!

Latifa also made quite real the long-term consequences of such constrictions and systematic suppression. Her mother, a trained nurse, a professional, an educated woman, could not work in a hospital finally because she reported malpractice (when a Russian nurse used the same needle to innoculate multiple children), because she argued for women's freedom. Now after the invastion of the Taliban, Latifa's mother just stays in the couch, ignores her daughters, and takes drugs to sleep soundly and deeply through the night.

The Taliban also forbade pictures, music, bright colors, high heels. Latifa and her family packed away all forbidden objects, hiding them in boxes in closets or in cupboards. Latifa's father had to surrender an old World War I weapon and saber of his father in accordance with the Taliban edict that all weapons must be surrendered. Her father wraps both in a blanket and leaves them in the mosque.

The Taliban take away symbols of freedom and autonomy in the name of religion. According to the narrator, they say their authority derives for the Koran but she insists that the edicts misrepresent and distort the Koran. She advers that her family follows the Koran and Islam faithfully.

Latifa also asserts that many members of the Taliban are not true Afghans, but come from other countries under the pretext of establishing religious purity. She makes it clear too that Afghans hate outside influences and power and control and fight and will fight for indepedence and freedom. She says, "One thing, and one thing only, unites Afghans in spite of their ethnic divisions: resistence against all foreign invaders, be they British, Pakistani, Arab -- or Soviet, of course" (24). This makes me think how futile may be American plans to try and stabilize Afghanistan by sending in more troops. The soldiers will be viewed as an invasionary force. And what will be their stance upon the Taliban?

This memoir is raw and unvarnished. But it reads as truth -- from one girl's perspective.

Great Arab Conquests (again)

I have read a couple more chapters in this book -- which is thick with detail. I cannot honestly remember all the names of people and places. But what I take away is that the expansion of Islam was facilitated by unanticipated factors -- such as the weakness of Rome, the devastation of the plague, etc.
Also I find fascinating how far Christianity had spread by the mid 630s. At one point, Kennedy asserts that most of the people of the Sasanian Empire were Christian and only the ruling elite practiced Zoroastrianism, which was the state religion.

Pith and Wisdom

Football is a mistake. It combines the two worst elements of American life. Violence and committee meetings.
- George F. Will

An Initial Response to "The Great Arab Conquests"

As part of a course on Middle Eastern Literature that I am teaching -- or rather workshopping with the students, we all are reading one book independently.

I selected from our school library -- bless the librarians for ordering such wonderful books for us to read and enjoy -- a book by Hugh Kennedy called, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World.

I chose this book deliberately because I so seldom get the chance to read non-fiction. This one seemed well-written and well-researched and informative. Kennedy focuses on the period between 632 when the Prophet Muhammed died and 750 when the Umayyad caliphate fell. The book numbers of 400 pages and so I expect an exhaustively detailed recitation of the politics, history, and culture of the period.

So far I am only on p. 54, but I have learned quite a bit. I just want to highlight of few items.

First, Kennedy uses the term ""social memory" (5). This is a new coinage (or new to me) which roughly corresponds to the folklore idea that epics and myths contain representations of contemporary attitudes and traditions so that even if the epic tells of the feats of a semi-divine being, embedded in the seventh-century epic are seventh-century attitudes to death, kings, etc. So I rather like this term "social memory" because it elegantly encapsulates a rather clumsy academic assumption about how folk narrative is synthetic and syncretic.

Second, Kennedy describes the varied landscape of the Arabian peninsula so I better understand the differences between the nomadic Bedouin and the sedentary Arabs who lived in more fertile areas (particularly on the southern tip of the peninsula) or lived in towns located on trade routes. Suddenly it made sense how the geography dictated the differences between the tribes rather than the tribes themselves dictating the differences.

Third, that the term Muslim refers only to those people who practice Islam and that the term Arab refers only to those people who speak Arabic as their mother tongue. As Kennedy says, "If not all Muslims were Arabs, likewase not all Arabs were Muslims" (7)

Fourth, and this is more a stylistic reason, Kennedy does a masterful job luring the reader forward in his history through selected use of rhetorical questions and astute observations. He asks why the Arabs and later Muslims were able to conquer most of Middle Eastern world. He notes that conquer in Arabic is the word fath which means "opening" (6). So fath might mean opening by force or opening by submission and payment of a tithe. I like the way he discusses how a word in Arabic is given a rough equivalent in English which misses the nuances of the original Arabic word.

This book will not be a fast read and I am sure some of the details will seep from my memory, but if I can gain a more comprehensive and balanced understanding of this period of Muslim history, I will have gained.

A Warm February Day

Today is unseasonably warm and so while my husband bicycled to the lab to work, the children and I and the dog went to a park to walk and play tennis.

The dog found a lacrosse ball and got rather possessive with it. We'll have to work on that.

We also have to work on tennis serves and returns. Tennis lessons loom in the future.

A new dog?

We have added a dog to the family. A rescue dog.

Who knew this would happen?

But it all began when a stray dog followed my daughter into the house and we had to keep her overnight until the SPCA opened the next day. The dog was inquisitive, smart, curious, and independent. Rather like a cat and we love cats.

If the dog was not claimed by the owner, we were determined to adopt her. But she was.

And we were in quest of a Shiba Inu of our own.

We filled out several on-line applications for a rescue dog and were contacted by a man in New Jersey who runs the NJ Shiba Inu Rescue. We made the drive on Sunday to meet a possible dog and decided he was perfect and brought him home.

His name is Kanji and he is smart -- it took no time for him to learn that the cat Lemony is not a TOY.

Addendum: This dog did not last. He bit us several times. We had to return him to the shelter.