To start with, here’s a portrait that just magically happened while on vacation (not a word I get to use very often) in Cairo. These three bakers just lined up in front of their wall of bread sticks and I managed to get one frame before they got self-conscious and started giggling.

and

was given an Honorable Mention in the FotoVisura Grant for Outstanding Personal Photography Project

More photos and stories coming soon…

Madrassa

The CNN Photoblog has just done a lovely feature on Ali Arkady’s work on their website. Check it out.

“By the end of this month, or at any rate in the first days of October, Iraq will have been elected a member of the League of Nations and the British mandatory regime in that country will have come to an end.

To the mass of the British people this consummation seems to have been too long in materializing. For the opinion, derived in the main from the ‘popular’ Press, still prevails that in Mesopotamia we have spent millions of pounds and have sacrificed hundreds of lives–and all to no purpose. The feeling is that we ought to have concentrated on interests nearer to the heart of the Empire and to have evacuated Iraq once we had beaten the Ottoman Empire there, years and years ago.”

Almost exactly 80 years later America is pulling its troops out of Iraq. In the last 8 years the US has spent billions (if not trillions) of dollars and sacrificed thousands of lives. Many Americans are asking, “To what purpose?” With a crippling financial crisis at home, many also feel it would have been better to “concentrate on interests near to the heart” of America.

Reading this clipping sends shivers down my spine because it holds up the mirror of history. We see that we are living out George Stanayana’s terrifying prediction: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

By the end of December the US will have withdrawn its military from Iraq, but who is to say that in 2090 they won’t be doing the same again?

In June he wrote to tell me that one of his brothers was killed by pro-Gaddafi forces on the outskirts of the city:

“My brother get killed at the southern front of the city 22 days back, after that event, suddenly I started to look to these things differently, now I can feel the exact pain the every family in Libya has felt. But even though, I have another 2 brothers also at the southern front, I hope they stay safe.”

I was really moved by his email; not only because my friend had just lost his brother, but because his reaction to the pain was not to turn inwards, but instead to reach out and empathize with others around him who had also lost family.

In the most recent email, 3 months later, Mahmud tells me how he and his family are coping with his brother’s death:

“Thank you, me and my family are fine. Although we still can’t accept the idea that our family has lost one member…. For instance, I cant delete my brother’s phone number, also if we all at home and my mother prepares a meal for us, she makes a meal for him too, and then she says, I forgut. but I know she didn’t. She just feels that she betray him, like he was nothing but a guest for a while, and then he left. I feel the same way when I attempt to delete his number.”

There’s been surprisingly little coverage of the human side of the Libyan conflict as journalists chase the ever-fluctuating front lines or pack into press conferences in luxury hotels.  Let us not forget that war, whether it is sectarian or revolutionary, is vile and nasty and indiscriminate in who it kills.  We’d all do well to follow Mahmud’s example and take a moment to turn outwards and empathize with those around us.