July/August 2015 aramcoworld.com aramcoworld.com July/August 2015 Vol. 66, No. 4 @aramcoworld July/August 2015 aramcoworld.com Commuter boats pack a river- bank upstream from Suriname’s capital, Paramaribo, serving towns and villages where residents might be recent 2 immigrants from almost anywhere, or descendants of slaves, colonists or indigenous Six Degrees tribes. Art by Norman MacDonald. of Suriname Illustrated and written Publisher Administration by Norman MacDonald Saudi Arabian Sarah Miller Oil Company Publisher InternPrint Design Independent since 1975, Publisher ActingAramco PresidentServices Company Suzanneand Production Bader Aramco Services Company Suriname began as an English and CEO Graphic Engine Design 9009President West Loop South Print Design Amin H. Nasser and then a Dutch colony. Houston,Basil A. Abul-Hamayel Texas 77096 andPrinted Production in the USA Now among the western hemisphere’s Vice President GraphicRR Donnelley/Wetmore Engine Design DirectorUSA Corporate Affairs most culturally diverse countries, it also PresidentPublic Affairs PrintedDigital Designin the USA Nasser A. Al-Nafisee lays claim to the hemisphere’s highest percentage NabeelJamal K. M. Khudair Amudi RRand Donnelley/Wetmore Production General Manager eSiteful Corporation of population identifying as Muslims: 14 percent. DirectorEditor Digital Design Public Affairs PublicRichard Affairs Doughty andOnline Production Translations Our Canada-born, Amsterdam-based, award-winning Essam Z. Tawfiq eSitefulTransperfect Corporation AssistantAli M. Al Mutairi Editors illustrator-author paid a visit to sketch and listen. Manager EditorArthur P. Clark OnlineContacts Translations Public Relations RichardAlva Robinson Doughty TransperfectSubscriptions: Haifa I. Addad [email protected] AssistantDigital Media Editor Editor Contacts Editor ArthurJohnny P. Hanson Clark Subscriptions:Editorial: Richard Doughty [email protected]@aramcoservices.com Circulation Assistant Editors EdnaMelissa Catchings Altman Editorial:Mail: Arthur P. Clark [email protected] AlvaAdministration Robinson Post Office Box 2106 Sarah Miller Mail: Digital Media Editor Houston, Texas AramcoWorld JohnnyIntern Hanson 77252-2106 USA Post Office Box 5000 Suzanne Bader Circulation DhahranISSN 31311, Melissa Altman Saudi1530-5821 Arabia ISSN 1530-5821 Back Cover Braided and pressed in the center with a bread stamp, this round of bread dough in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, is ready to be slapped by hand onto the wall of a clay oven, where it will bake to gold-crust perfection. Photo by Eric Hansen. 12 We distribute AramcoWorld to increase cross-cultural understanding by broadening knowledge of the histories, Ferozkoh:F k Renewing the Arts cultures and geography of the Arab and Muslim worlds and their global connections. In print, AramcoWorld is of the Turquoise Mountain distributed six times a year, without charge, to a limited Written by Lee Lawrence number of interested readers; online, it is archived and indexed from 1960 to the present. Photographs courtesy of Turquoise Mountain Institute After 15 woodworkers, painters, calligraphers and jewelers from Afghanistan visited the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, they produced an exhibit in which the classical inspired the modern. Now, the artists themselves are helping to inspire the renewal of a deep—and too-little-known—artistic heritage. Saudi Aramco and Aramco are trademarks of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company, a leading, globally integrated energy and chemicals company. 20 ViaVi EgnatiaE to Rome and Byzantium Written by Louis Werner Photography and video by Matthieu Paley Paved with stones that, according to one Roman writer, “give the appearance not simply of being laid together ... but they seem to have actually grown together,” the Via Egnatia joined East and West under empires both Roman and Ottoman. Much of its 1,100-kilometer length can still be walked and driven, from original-stone footpaths in Albania to a superhighway in Greece. 3232 The Fabled Flatbreads of Uzbekistan Written and photographed by Eric Hansen Stamped with patterns that beautify, identify and aid baking in a clay oven, the flatbreads—non—from the heart of Central Asia make art of one of the world’s most ancient staples. 4040 Travelers of Al-Andalus, Part IV: Al-Ghazal: From Constantinople to the Land of the Vikings Written by Jesús Cano and Louis Werner Art by Belén Esturla Good looks and a fleet wit gave Al-Ghazal his name, which 44 Classroom Guide Written by Julie Weiss means “gazelle,” and in later years the poet and courtier of Córdoba proved a reluctant though dutiful envoy both east and, 12: LEIGHTON HOUSE MUSEUM 46 Events & Exhibitions more notably, north. URINAME IS A COUNTRY Paramaribo is six degrees above the it seemed, from all over, the results of so the size of Florida with a half million Equator. Your shadow at noon is under many migrations. Asia, Africa, the Ama- souls living with Guyana to the west, your feet. The city is 23 kilometers from zonian interior; Indonesian and Indian; French Guiana east and giant Brazil the mouth of the Suriname River and foreign students on bicycles and Creole south. Paramaribo, its capital, gives the the Atlantic Ocean, and two-thirds of women in patterned dresses. The 2012 impression of a peaceful coastal town back the country’s population live there in census showed just under half the coun- in the 1950s—until new cars and pickups the city. The heart of this metropolis is try identified as Christian, 22 percent as bring you back to the present. Road signs commended on the UN’s World Heritage are in Dutch, but driving is on the left, List, as it “reflects the multicultural just as it was in the Netherlands before society of Suriname.” Napoleon invaded and switched it, but his I went out to stroll through the decree never reached this Dutch colony. downtown, where men and women were, Hindu, 14 percent as Muslim and maritime trade. The Dutch told their two percent as Winti (an indigenous navy to conquer all the English colo- religion), with just 200 Jews. That nies they could. They sailed down the means this country has the high- Suriname River, and after an hour of est percentage of both Muslims and cannon fire, Willoughby surrendered. Hindus in the hemisphere, kind of a The war ended in 1667 with the living diversity model. The wooden, Treaty of Breda, under which each colonial-fusion architecture may have country kept the territories it con- caught the UN’s gaze, but to me peoplee quered: Suriname became Dutch, and were the best sight. The street languagege the British kept New Amsterdam, is called Sranantongo, from the time which they renamed New York. when slaves from different backgroundsnds Labor at the time mostly meant had to find ways to talk with each other,her, slavery. As in much of South Amer- so it uses words from African lan- ica,ic from the beginning in Suriname, guages as well as English, Dutch slavessla ran away into the rainforest and and Portuguese. The official lan- organizedorg sabotage and rebellions. guage, though, is Dutch. BackB in Paramaribo, a city of wooden Travel away from Paramaribo, houses,hou 400 were lost in a fire in 1821. In and it becomes a quiet country himselfhimself fromfrom headhead 1832183 a group of slaves wanting to escape lifestyle. People sitting on their to foot with gold.gold. to tthe forest stole food for the journey porches wave as you pass. A SSirir WalterWalter and,and to mask the theft, set a fire. They hundred kilometers ahead, the RaleighRaleigh publishedpublished a werewer arrested, and three of them were road ends abruptly at a river bus bookbook in 15961596 withwith sentencedsen to death and burned alive at stop. There is a petrol station, a thethe longlong title,title, TheThe the spot where the fire started. Today, convenience store and boats to DiscoverieDiscoverie of the everyeve school kid in Suriname can tell you take you farther upriver into the Large,Large, Rich,Rich, andand theythey were Cojo, Mentor and Present, and mystical jungle. Evening around Bewtiful Empyre they are official national heroes. the oil lanterns, and the conversa- of Gviana, with a Another example of how much tion goes from the coming election to the relation of the great and Golden Citie Suriname has changed starts with the corruption scandals to the dry season of Manoa (which the Spanyards call first theater, built in 1775. No Jews or that “must end soon.” El Dorado). On a 17th-century map slaves were allowed inside. Then move As darkness falls, the conversation drawn by the mapmaker Willem Blaeu, up to January 1943, when the state maneuvres to stories of snakes and Manoa appears somewhere between announced to the world: “Every Jew insects as big as animals that creep the Orinoco River to the north and the who can escape Europe is welcome in around in the dark. “When I was up- Amazon south. The gold rush was on, Suriname.” They built houses for them river the last time,” one man says, “a and it’s mined to this day. and waited. Jewish refugees came, set- local caught a huge snake in the dark By the mid-1600s, the British governor tled, worked their trades and sent their with his bare hands. Don’t know how he of Barbados, Lord Francis Willoughby, children to school. did it.” Then the drums started. It was wanted to expand his sugar plantations. Emancipation from slavery came on a funeral celebration in a nearby village, He sailed into the Suriname River, made July 1, 1863, but independence not until and it beat on until after dawn. a deal with the Arawak Indians to stay, 1975; this June there will be elections. Spaniards came to what is now Guyana and started building a fort at the river. Historian and writer Cynthia McLeod about 1500. Pizarro listened covetously Behind it, natives and 3,000 slaves built tells it this way: “Slavery was a terri- as Indians—probably Arawaks and Car- sugar plantations.