arabic - The Drafting Table

Aga and AGO

On a recent weekend I had a day-long layover in Toronto (deliberately). I took the opportunity to check out a couple of museums there: the Aga Khan museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario. The Aga Khan may be best known in Canada for controversy around gifting a vacation to

Movies & TV

Assorted Links (Fall 2017)

Last week I was in a conference in Chicago. I plan to write about it later this month, but for this week I just wanted to share some miscellaneous links (mostly related to things I've written about previously) that I've been saving up. It's quite rambling but hopefully you find

History

From the First Caliphs to the First World War

I wanted to understand the history of the Middle East better, so I made the following timelines. Hopefully some readers will find them informative, too. Introduction If you turn on the news, you can see ancient cities like Aleppo, Sana'a, and Mosul being ravaged by war. The present conflicts did

Book

"A Winter in Arabia"

This post is a review of the book A Winter in Arabia: A Journey Through Yemen by Dame Freya Stark. It was published in 1940 and describes a months-long visit she made to the Hadhramaut region of Yemen, a British protectorate at the time. Winter is coming. Seventy eight years

Math

Arabic Calligraphy

I recently got a very cool piece of art. So that's what this post is about. First things first, here it is framed and hanging on my wall: The design is Arabic calligraphy of the word al-Hurriyah (الحرية), meaning "freedom" or "liberty". The artist is Everitte

Water

Water and Wastewater Vocabulary in Arabic

First of all, my apologies to readers for being late with this post. When I was at the University of Waterloo, I took a couple of Arabic language courses at Renison College. I thought it would be a good exercise to look up translations for some of the vocabulary I