Iran/UAE: Is a Deal on the Islands Possible?

Can this be true? "Iran, UAE Close to Deal on Hormuz Islands"

The Gulf balance of power is changing in almost kaleidoscopic ways, but this would be astonishing indeed.  The dispute over Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunb Islands dates from the British retreat from East of Suez  in  1972, also the moment of the UAE's independence.  For the 42 years since, Iran and the UAE (Abu Musa is claimed by Sharja, the Tunbs by Ras al-Khaimah); I gave some brief background here).

Defense News is also reporting that Iran has withdrawn a squadron of fighters from Abu Musa.

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has said publicly that he is prepared to negotiate with the UAE on the basis of the 1971 agreement under which Iran and Sharja were to share Abu Musa. Is it possible that the deal reported above could be struck in which Iran keeps the seabed and the UAE gets the islands.

For four decades both sides have funded white papers, articles, and books defending their respective cases (including a recent one by a member of a ruling family), as well as occasional threats and saber-rattling. Could a breakthrough be possible?

I think this story needs to be taken with a reasonable dose of skepticism.

There's Good News and Bad News This Month for Farouq Hosni

Amid all the Sturm und Drang in the last couple of days, a reminder that there is still room for absurdity: The Sharja International Book Fair has announced that the winner of this year's "Cultural Personality of the Year" award — which comes with a 50,000 dirham prize — has gone to former Egyptian Culture Minister Farouq Hosni. Egypt is also the guest of honor at this year's Book Fair. The timing is interesting since only last week, Hosni was charged with corruption:

Mr. Hosni, who was made culture minister in 1987 and was close to Mrs. Mubarak, failed to convincingly explain how he had gotten about $3 million in assets, the state news media said, and has been referred to court for trial. In a slightly different account, Al Ahram, a semiofficial newspaper, said Mr. Hosni was asked to return about $1.5 million in state assets and was fined the same sum.

He claims he's innocent, but it is kind of interesting that, while he's charged with this, he's being given an award described as follows:

given to a distinguished person, organization or company whose cultural, literary or social contribution to society is found to be invaluable and of high caliber, deserving rightful appreciation and recognition.

Even before he was ousted in the revolution against Mubarak, Hosni was widely criticized as a Culture Minister in Suzanne Mubarak's pocket, while (allegedly) lining his own. The Sharja authorities emphasized that  they were rewarding Hosni for his tenure as Culture Minister, but as one Egyptian cultural figure noted:

Farghali said that, if the award was to honor Hosni’s tenure as culture minister, that time was hardly sterling, and that “most of the intellectuals have seen a lot of catastrophes during the twenty-something years he spent as culture minister, from the stolen work of Van Gogh to the burning of the Beni Suef culture center, where a number of our best theater artists, writers, and critics died.”

At one point he was forbidden to leave Egypt, so it's not certain if he'll be able to accept the award at the ceremony in November.

Next up: the Nobel Peace Prize to North Korea? 

Clues to Earliest Domestication of Camels Found in Sharja

There's been so much politics lately I'm glad my first post of the day, though an obit, was about a literary master, and my second is about archaeological/historical/cultural stuff and even better, camels.

The UAE Emirate of Sharja seems to have found major evidence of the very earliest domestication of the camel.

All I know about this latest discovery is what is in this article in The National, but it immediately reminded me of Richard Bulliet's 1975 masterpiece, The Camel and the Wheel. Dick Bulliet went on to run the Middle East Institute at Columbia for a long while and to contribute in many areas of Middle East studies from medieval to modern, not to mention writing four mystery novels set in the Middle East along the way, the earliest called Kicked to Death by a Camel.

But it's The Camel and the Wheel that's relevant here. I can't locate my first edition hardcover now, and mahy have loaned it out years ago and never got it back, which is why I'm glad to see (link in text above) that I can still get it through Amazon. It's a great work on the scholarly knowledge (as of 1975) on the domestication of the camel, but its real innovation is its emphasis on the fact that though, so far as is known, the wheel and wheeled vehicles first appear in the Middle East, the domestication of the camel led to the gradual replacement, at least in desert areas, of the horse by the camel, and since camels aren't draft animals, to the disappearance of wheeled vehicles where they had previously existed. Camels can bear burdens, but can't pull carts. Dick Bulliet has written on much broader topics since, but I will always remember him for this, and while I haven't seen him in several years, I have the sense it's still something he's profoundly proud of. He should be.

Nostalgia: The London-Sharja-Karachi Run

The National has a nice piece on "When London to Karachi was a Weeklong Trip." Sharja in those days was the most prominent of the "Trucial States" that now form the UAE because it was where Imperial Airways stopped over on its way to India from London. London to Karachi took nearly a week with many overnight stops. That's a Handley-Page 42 from the 1930s, a passenger-carrying biplane.