About Larkin - journal of the Philip Larkin Society - issue No 27, April 2009: poems and pictures by Pen Evans (Baily, nee Scott Stokes)

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FT's articles on Arab youth

There's an interesting series on youth in the Arab world on the Financial Times website (though there are restrictions for non-subscribers), focusing particularly on unemployment and the mismatches betwen education and the labour market. In an overview, Roula Khalaf notes that the picture is rather less gloomy than it was five years ago when a landmark World Bank report was published, which estimated that by 2020, 100 million jobs would need to be created in the Middle East and North Africa by 2020. At that time, economic growth was only 3.6 per cent, and the overall unemployment rate of 15 per cent was much higher among the "youth bulge". There has been something of a turnaround since: "The higher rates of annual growth – more than 5 per cent region-wide but nearly double digits in some Gulf states – have started to generate jobs, with regional unemployment estimated to have dropped to about 12.7 per cent."

However, "anxiety over youth unemployment remains the most nagging concern as experts find that new jobs are going to foreign workers in the thriving construction industry or tend to be in the informal sector, leading to seasonal rather than sustainable employment".

The countries featured in the package of reports include Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Algerian, Bahrain and Palestine. The FT recently co-hosted a conference in Qatar on youth.

patrick cockburn talks at SOAS on his book on muqtada

Journalist and author Patrick Cockburn of the Independent newspaper appeared at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University last night to talk about his new book Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq - published by Faber - at a gathering in the Khalili lecture theatre organised by the Council for Arab British Understanding (CAABU).

Cockburn spent around a quarter of an hour at the rostrum outlining his book and the reasons for writing it and then took part in an interview/discussion session with Dr Nadje Al-Ali, lecturer at SOAS's new interdiscliplinary Centre for Gender Studies. The talk was interesting and enriched by the observations of a journalist who has been reporting on Iraq since 1977 and who is one of the few reporters in the five years since the invasion to regularly report far from the relative safety of the Green Zone.

During the ensuing Q & A session, there were some surprising (to put it mildly) contributions from certain Iraq men of a certain age. Of course, as Dr Nadje Al-Ali pointed out in her conversation with Cockburn, and as she stresses in her book on Iraqi women, "history is open to contestation." But these particular Iraqi individuals were needlessly rude when commenting and asking questions. One of the things mentioned by Cockburn was the epidemic of honour killings in Kurdistan. He had been to one women's refuge in Sulaimaniya where a woman had been badly wounded and it was "chilling because it wasn't just someone going crazy with a machine gun. Somebody had found an empty house by this women's shelter, they'd climbed onto the roof, they had waited for a particular woman who appeared briefly at a window, and then shot her." One can produce reasons "why the position of women has deteriorated in in Basra, Baghdad and the rest - and then one also has to explain why it's happened in Kurdistan as well."

One man in the audience said: "This is because of the poverty, under the regime of Barzani and Talebani in the Kurdish area, to the extent that most women have resorted to prostitution to make a living...I am a Kurd...there are two streets in Sulaimaniya for prostitutes, one for Kurdish prostitutes and one for Arab prostitutes, the poor Arabs who have moved from the north to Sulaimaniya." When Dr Nadje Al-Ali, who is a leading expert on Iraqi women and author of Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present intervened to comment "Can I just say that the majority of Kurdish women are not prostitutes, although it has increased of course", the man who had made the comment denied he had said "majority".

This man and some others Iraqis in the audience claimed it was not Saddam's regime that had killed Muqtada's father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, and two of Muqtada's brothers in 1999, but members of the rival Al-Hakim or Al-Khoei families. Cockburn replied that the evidence, and his conversations with many people, convinced him it was Saddam who had done it. Another questioner accused Cokburn of issuing "three fatwas" in his talk: the first "fatwa" was that Shias make up 60 per cent of the population of Iraq. Cockburn replied that 60 per cent is the figure that is usually given, and was the figure that seemed to appear from the votes in the elections in 2005.

A man originally from Basra told Cockburn "you have distorted all the history of Iraq" and that "it was not a Shia 'intifada', it was an insurrection instigated by the Americans." He denied that the Iran-Iraq war had started when Iraq invaded Iran, and added that the reason Saddam's regime drained the southern marshes was that under sanctions "Iraq needed the land to feed the people, they do it here in Norfolk, they did it in northern Holland, so why was it wrong for the Iraqis to do it?" Cockburn replied that Saddam had drained the marshes "becuase it drove the marsh Arabs out".

london book fair and its arab world market focus

The Arab World Market Focus at last week's London Book Fair in the Earls Court Exhibition Centre provided a succession of treats over three days. Has such a large number of Arab writers, publishers, critics etc ever before congregated in London? I think not.

Photo above: Maya Jaggi in a "breakfast" conversation with the Egyptian novelist Bahaa Taher in the English PEN Literary Cafe at the fair. This was one of the highlights of the Arab World Market Focus. Taher was warm, eloquent and inspring and I can't wait to read the English translation of his novel "Sunset Oasis" which last month won the first-ever International Award for Arabic Fiction (IPAF - AKA "the Arabic Booker"). This may entail quite a wait: although the translation is being done courtesy of funding from Granta owner Sigrid Rausing, a publisher has yet to come forward.

Another memorable event was the Arab Authors Evening at Foyle's bookshop, Charing Cross Road. The celebrated Egyptian author of The Yacoubian Building Alaa al-Aswany shared the platform with two writers of Libyan origin: Hisham Matar ,whose first novel In the Country of Men has won a string of awards and was shortlisted for the Man Booker, and the US-based poet, translator, creative writing university teacher etc Khaled Mattawa. They were interviewed by Dedi Feldman of Words Without Borders, the online magazine for international literature. The photo shows Hisham Matar and behind him Al-Aswany, deep in conversation with fellow dentist and best-selling novelist Raja Alsanea, the Saudi author of Girls of Riyadh. The coincidences multiply: the second novel of Al-Aswany's to be translated and published in English, Chicago, is due to be published by Harper in October. Al-Aswany studied dentistry in that city, and Alsanea is currently a postgrad student in dentistry at the University of Illinois of Chicago.

Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa. He was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction with his novel In Praise of Hatred.




Ahmed Alaidy, the Egyptian author of Being Abbas el Abd





The Syrian poet Monzer Al Masri

Algerian-French literary sensation Faiza Guene



Cleo Soazandry

london cherry blossom