I’m plagiarizing myself here just a bit, since I actually wrote this for another venue, but it’s not actually on the Web anywhere, so … here goes.

I spent more time over the winter holiday than I probably should have playing Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception on the PS3 (I actually forbade my partner from taking the PS3 with him when he went to visit his family so that I could keep going).  If you’re not a gamer, you might just want to skip this post. Unless you’re a history geek like me.

Kill the bad guys, but stop blowing up the historical treasures!

This third installment in the Uncharted series, an Indiana Jones-style series of adventure games that follows anti-hero Nathan Drake and his companions as they venture off to the far corners of the globe in search of lost treasure, has earned stellar reviews and several awards, including the top spot on several “Best of 2011″ lists.

Drake’s Deception puts players on a trek to find the real lost city of Ubar—believed to be Iraam of the Pillars of antiquity, mentioned in the Qur’an and 1001 Nights–deep in the Empty Quarter (Rub’ al-Khali) in Saudi Arabia.  On the way, the story takes a surprisingly accurate voyage through a few Middle Eastern locations.  And, being the history nerd and Middle Eastern-ist that I am, I thought to myself, “Wow, someone should put together a resource guide to all the stuff in this game.”

And then I realized that I’m probably one of the best qualified nerds for the job.

Making allowances for the fact that this is a video game and that the action has to move forward in a suspenseful manner–not every dark alley in Sana’a leads to a secret chamber of secrets waiting to be discovered–the overall plot outline incorporates an impressive corpus of research on topics near and dear to the Middle East historians’ hearts: Players read through excerpts from T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom and learn about his career for British intelligence in World War I; explore nearly every inch of a crusader castle in Syria (clearly based on the Crac des Chevaliers near Homs); chase bad guys across rooftops in an painstakingly accurate digital re-creation of a Yemeni souq (complete with locals who engage you in Arabic); solve puzzles that incorporate old Sabaean script and pre-Islamic South Arabian civilizations; and finally find themselves on a sun-baked trek across the sands of eastern Arabia before finally landing in what is the least accurate part of the game for the climax: the lost city of Ubar itself (fortunately, this most fantastical part of the plot resolves itself somewhat satisfactorily for the nit-picky among us, but I won’t spoil it).

Below, I’ve compiled some resources to offer up for anyone else whose curiosity about the people and places visited may have been piqued over the course of game play.  Naturally, this effort came entirely out of my dedication to research <he says, looking innocent>.

This isn’t an actual walkthrough — there are plenty of those out there if you just Google it.
(more…)

Hey, look, it’s Christmas!

It’s been ages since I posted anything of substance. As I suspected, being in school all of the fall semester seriously put a dent in my desire to spend more time being creative and writing anything, what with all of the non-creative reading that goes along with that.

So, the fall went pretty well. I took six hours worth of courses (that’s two graduate seminars), which impressed the graduate coordinator in the History department; she had been expecting me to do the coursework one at a time. If I can keep this up, I’ll be able to get the courses done in another two years, at which point the real work begins, but we’ll focus on that later.

It was weird being back in school, not least because I feel like a dinosaur among my history cohort; several of them were born the year I entered high school for God’s sake! They’re a pretty affable group, though. Class didn’t really get started each week until someone pronounced the readings “bullshit,” or we had an extended argument about whether it was possible for someone to be racist in the 15th century when the modern concept of racism wasn’t invented until the 19th. (Yes. My answer, and I’m sticking to it, dammit.)

The other class I took was a classical Arabic course, that reduced me to tears a few times at the beginning of the semester when I had to read through some 10th century poetic verses, and not because the poetry was so beautiful. All in all it came out well, but at the end of the day, what I learned in the class was to try to avoid reading poetry when and where possible. I kind of saw this coming, though — I mean, I’m not a huge fan of poetry in English.

And so.

Tomorrow, the parents and I are going to Puerto Rico for a few days – just long enough to get away from the unseasonably cold weather, then zip back here for New Year’s Eve … and back to work. And then the next semester begins.

I may need a few more days off.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

I had an interesting realization not too long ago that I have, inadvertently, been keeping a secret on this blog. It’s not that it’s an actual secret, you see, it’s just that most of it came to fruition during a hiatus from blogging that started in September and lasted until the Egyptian Revolution. Since I hadn’t been to Tunisia at that point, the Tunisian revolution wasn’t of much interest to me — as I confessed from the heights of the Atlas Mountains, I actually went back and re-read a book I’d bought on the Arab Spring because the first time around I just skipped all the parts dealing with Tunisia.

None of this is neither here nor there, but the reason I’m bringing it up is that it’s about to become a huge theme in these pages, either because I’ll be referring to it frequently, or actively trying not to.

I am starting graduate school next week. Again.

I made a vague reference some months ago to submitting an application to a doctoral program, but I seem to have never actually mentioned that it was successful and that I’m one of about twenty five students (out of an applicant pool of around three hundred) who have been accepted to the graduate program in the History department. I don’t plan to quit my job — in fact, the staff educational benefit pays for three credit hours per semester, and I don’t think I can realistically enroll for more than six hours in any given semester while working forty hours a week.

The orientation started yesterday. One of the lighter moments involved a young man whose name I don’t remember (most people know that I’m absolutely terrible with names — I’m good with faces, but not names. I have, given my office’s location outside the reading room in my own department, had genial conversations with people I’ve seen every day for six months and I have no idea what their name is).  We had been asked to introduce ourselves to the group, say where we’re from (I decided that after thirteen years I’m allowed to say I’m from Austin), and what we’re interested in.

“Well,” he said, “I’m not a nudist, but I’m interested in 19th century German social movements like nudism.”

I can already tell that he will be known as The Nudist for the rest of his time here.  The things people say!

Yesterday, after three hours of orientation, I came back to my office and thought to myself, “What the frak am I doing?”  Even as a full time student, it would probably take me at least five years (six or seven, more realistically) to finish this degree all the way to fruition. Theres goes my evenings and weekends. So long, free time! And then, of course, were the nagging little doubts as I watched the graduate adviser and coordinator talk: “Can I really do this? I don’t know …”

This morning, during a roundtable of grad students in the program, one of them said that for three years she suffered from what she called “imposter syndrome.”  “Basically, I spent the entire time thinking, ‘What am I doing? Can I really do this? I don’t think I can do this … ‘ Then I finally said something, and it turned out that everyone else in the program was having the same thoughts!”

So, at least I’m all set there. But it’s a little weird being all the way back at square one and starting something from scratch…again.

So … posts may get a little scarcer…er…than they’ve been, but I’m still plugging along.  See you soon … or in December, once the semester ends!

I haven’t blogged since I got back from North Africa — this isn’t news to either of my remaining readers, I’m sure!  Needless to say, I did get back from North Africa, relatively successfully (the only ceramic casualty occurred on a flight from Tunis to Casablanca; ironically the flight from Casa back to New York was Royal Air Maroc’s only on-time venture the entire trip…then it turned out that JetBlue was having a bad day and I didn’t get back to Austin until 1:30 in the morning).

After a weekend of “rest,” I promptly moved into the vortex that I knew would be waiting for me on my return. Two days after I got back to the office, I gave probably one of the most rambling talks I’ve ever delivered (it wasn’t quite as bad as the Tina Fey version of Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric, but it wasn’t much more focused. And also.)  Then there was a workshop that I was responsible for co-running (kinda; others had to do all the work since I wasn’t around for the organizational phase), that … well, I’m not actually sure I could tell you what we did. Others were responsible for delivering the actual content and it was pretty unfocused. Made me feel better about that earlier talk, let me tell you.

I’ve gotten through the first pass on the photos from the summer–I have more (a lot more), but this will suffice for now.

Other than that, I sit at my computer and stare at it.  The orientation for my doctoral program starts a week from tomorrow — and I won’t lie, I do keep having those thoughts of “what the hell am I doing?” So much for summer!

At any rate, I’ll try to be a better blogger and post more soon…

On the road in Tunisia.

I won’t say much about our time in Tunis other than first impressions: I really want to avoid forming an opinion for a little while since we’ll be back next week for an extended stay, but on first impression Tunis is the most developed city I’ve been to in a non-oil producing Arab country (with the possible exception of Amman, but that’s cheating since Amman has all been built in the last 60 years).  The hour we spent on a stalled suburban rail train with no air conditioning in the sun will serve as a story to be told over cocktails some time.

We were only in Tunis a day; the idea was that we were supposed to get our bearings and visit some of the most ancient sites, then progress in chronological order down the coast to sites from various layers of history in this country that most people ignore. Tunisia was home to Numidian Berbers, then to Phoenecian colonizers – these are the guys who founded Carthage. Rome came and went, Christianity came and went, Islam arrived, but Tunisia, being on the border between the orderly East and the wild, wild West, came and went between various and sundry factions: the Shi’ite Fatimids got their groove on here before they went on to conquer Egypt and found Cairo with the aim of eventually conquering Mecca and bringing their vision of Islam to the rest of the world; unfortunately for them they got rich and lazy in Egypt and never went any further. The Turks were here as well: unlike Morocco, Tunisia was part and parcel of the Ottoman Empire until the late 19th century when France took over.

None of this is here nor there, but just a flavor of the complexity in this country that doesn’t get a lot of attention in the press, or, rather, didn’t until Mohammad Bou Azizi set himself on fire and ignited a revolution last December.

We’re making a swing down along the coast, which is richer and more developed than the rest of the country (Bou Azizi was from the heartland, which is underdeveloped and much poorer), and also, weather wise, much more pleasant this time of year thanks to sea breezes coming off of the Med.

Our first stop ex-Tunis was the legendary town of Kairouan (properly: Qairawan, or, in Tunisian, Karwan), which was the first Arab capital built here in this former Roman province of Africa Novus. They named it for a group of Berbers here, the Freigs, and the Arabs called it Ifriquiya, and from this the entire continent was named. Kairouan dates from the mid 7th century; it’s not much younger than the initial Arab settlements in Egypt. Our first stop in town was yet another in the long list of self-proclaimed “Third Holiest Site in Islam” that I have visited over the years (others include: al-Azhar in Egypt, the Hala Sultan Tekke in Larnaka, Cyprus; the Rumi complex in Konya; the mosque of the Qarawiyiin in Fes, and the mausoleum of Moulay Idriss in the town that bears his name in Morocco) where we got to see a young boy become a man when he got his circumcision done in a shrine to one of the companions of the prophet. And I do mean we got to see the whole damned thing – the kid clearly had no idea what was coming.

The heart and soul of this holiest of North African towns is the Grand Mosque of Kairouan (another Third Holiest Site in Islam contender). The mosque dates from either the 8th or the 9th century and us infidels can go in as far as the courtyard, but can’t enter the prayer hall itself. I find this frustrating, for I enjoy entering mosques and looking at the architecture and the faithful.

And it was here that we got a glimpse into the complexity of the new Tunisia.

Over the years, I have had many a conversation with well meaning young men (and the occasional young woman) who want to know about my interest in the Arabic language and Islam, and occasionally the question comes up as to why I’ve studied so much but haven’t converted. There are, of course, certain things that shouldn’t be introduced into the conversation: “Your religion doesn’t look so kindly on the gays” is one of them, nor is my general distrust of organized religion of any shade; in the Islamic worldview it’s better to be on the wrong track (i.e., a misguided Christian) than on no track at all. The conversations are usually friendly in tone, if somewhat serious, and generally quite genial.

The conversation at Kairouan began when our group approached the barriers that block off the prayer hall for the faithful only. A young, bearded man in a T-shirt zipped over and began accosting our guide about us taking photos (for which we had all coughed up 1 Tunisian dinar, about 73 cents US).

Paul, our bright and dapper young academic escort for the trip, whose Tunisian Arabic is excellent, decided to weigh in. I find Tunisian easier to understand than Moroccan, and I think my physical stance probably gave away that I could follow what was going on, but I kept my mouth shut and just listened and watched.

“You know,” Paul said, “I’ve been coming here for years, I’ve visited many times, and no one has ever asked me that question.”
”This is a place of worship,” the young man said. “Do people enter Christian churches and start taking photos?”
”Actually,” Paul said, “Yeah, they do. Especially important and famous ones like this mosque.”

This set the conversation now on a different track, one that was more political. The young man asked where Paul was from, and when Paul told him, he was subjected to a barrage of the usual complaints coming from Islamic parties: why does America consider itself the world’s policeman, why are we invading Muslim countries, why does our president who has an Islamic name attack Muslim countries.

I’ll give Paul credit: he’s been pretty unflappable thus far and didn’t lose his cool here either.

Then we got to the heart of the matter: How did Paul know Arabic? And if he learned the Holy Tongue, why was he not an adherent of the True Faith? And here we lingered for some time. Unlike conversations I’ve had that are more general, this guy put on his best Mormon missionary and was determined to save Paul’s soul or at least know the reason why not. Eventually the conversation came to an end, there was an exchange of handshakes, and we all went our separate ways.

Our guide was more than a little alarmed—not, I stress, because we were in any danger at any point, but because these young men represent the new Islamist power in post-revolutionary Tunisia. Most of them had been imprisoned under Ben Ali for their religious convictions, and since the revolution had been freed to organize politically, and many of them had taken up residence in mosques with nowhere else to go. In Tunisia as in Egypt, the lifting of political restrictions means that these guys are ready to go and, in a country that’s probably second only to Turkey in this part of the world in terms of its near-militant secularism, the Tunisian intelligentsia are worried about what this means for the future of their country.

I found the whole process fascinating, myself. Our guide-a journalist who only escorts academic groups-has repeatedly expressed his frustration that the Tunisian revolution has stalled and wishing that it was progressing better, like the one in Egypt. “Funny,” I said, “The Egyptian press is saying the exact opposite: they wish their revolution was progressing more like Tunisia’s.”

It’s tense times here in the new Tunisia. Only time will tell how it’s going to work out. And it’s quite interesting to watch.