A Proud American

(With acknowledgment and thanks to anthropologist Ralph Linton’s 1936 book THE STUDY OF MAN and French writer Sigrid Hunke's “Le soleil d'Allah Brille sur L'occident: Notre Héritage Arabe" which means “God’s Sun Shines on the West, Our Arab Heritage").

Ginger Shaw, a busy mother born and raised in Cairo (known by everyone who lives there as “Kay-Ro” though named after the ancient Arab capital city of Egypt), Illinois, was slow to roll off her damask ("demashk," a colorful fabric invented in Damascus) -covered mattress (“matrah,” developed by nomadic tribes in what is now the Arabian peninsula) . She put on her satin ("sataan", a silky and shiny cloth devised in an ancient Arab domain now in Northern Syria) robe, and wandered into her breakfast nook where she took a cup of coffee ("cahwa", made of coffee beans called "Arabica" and grown for thousands of years in Yemen) with one sugar ("sukkar" first grown in the Jordan Valley and refined into brown sugar in Palestine), sipped it leisurely as she sat on her ottoman ("othman", a comfortable stool that originated in Turkey and aptly named after the Ottomans) covered with Moroccan leather. She was careful not to spill her orange (imported plants from China and domesticated in the plains around Jaffa, the City of Oranges in Palestine) juice on her Persian (designed and made for hundreds of years in what is now Iran) carpet. She next helped herself to a glass (first made over thousands of years ago in Palestine) of water.

She wanted to prepare a nice meal for her friend who was coming at midday. She had chosen a capon (roosters first neutered in Egypt for the purpose of turning them tender and plump), rice ("ruzz" domesticated in Indonesia and South China and imported into the Middle East by Arab traders thousands of years before European traders discovered it), and spinach ("sabanegh" , its Arab ancestry is so old it is common all over the Middle East) with an artichoke (domesticated and grown along the Fertile Crescent from Iran through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to Palestine and whose Arabic name "Ardi chokeh" means "spiny ground fruit") salad. She thought a little saffron ("zaafaran" a common Arabian delicate spice also used as a dye) would add a touch of color to the rice. Cumin ("cammun" first used in what is now Palestine long before the Christian era) would spice up the capon a bit. And dessert would be apricot (first grown in Persia) tarts with Pistacchios ('pfustuk" first grown near Aleppo in Northern Syria) and a spoonful of orange sorbet ("sherbet" invented in Jaffa, Palestine) on the side. Lovely, she thought.

She took a few minutes to check the algebra ("al jabr", a form of mathemetics expanded upon by Arab scholars between 523 and 1300 AD) assignments her ninth grade daughter had completed. She also checked the logarithm ("al-khawarism," invented by Arab mathematicians during that same era, the mathematical language still used in advanced mathematics and computer analysis) assignment that her twelfth grade son asked her to go over before he turned it in.

She looked at the astrology (a study of the interplay of stars – astronomy which was developed and originally used by sailors in Iraq and the Gulf States -- and human life, established and widely used by Arab astronomers) section of the morning paper to see what to expect for her day.

The paper’s headlines spoke of troubles in the Middle East and Ginger ("zanjabil" also a plant root used as a spice first domesticated in what is now Yemen and Southern Saudi Arabia) thanked God (who, alone among a number of deities the Hebrews worshiped in the Arab wilderness, chose them to be His people) that she had nothing in common with those people and was one hundred percent American.


(Special thanks to Hasan Hammami, Sid Glaser, and Bob Grumman for information and editorial ideas.)