Ahlan wa Sahlan

I hope one day the rail network in Egypt is connected to Saudi Arabia. There has been talks about a bridge across the Gulf of Aqaba, but maybe that won’t be necessary.

Lyin’ Blinken

As far as I know, economy seats are still sold at a loss. They make up for it in the higher classes. I don’t fly through Doha often but when I do, I do like getting on Qatar Airways.

perfetta

Gorgeous. Two of my favorite things.

This is a map for whales

Interesting, not a projection that I have seen before.

As long as she falsely claims Israel has the right to defend itself, everything else she says is noise.

English is confusing and before making this post I had to double check that I am using the correct word and not the other one that you mean here.

The dishes made with them are prepared in a similar manner. Rice in Mashreq replaced bulgur sometime over the past century or so.

The map doesn’t include Iran or Turkiye.

Is bread a processed food? It doesn’t grow on trees. Bread can also be a staple food.

The loss of the Hejaz Railway is still a great tragedy. There are planned railroads that will connect to Iraq, and it is possible to go to Jordan from Saudi Arabia by train, but nothing like what has been lost so far.

The line is a bit more blurry on the East side than the West but this might just be my own bias coming from Lebanon.

I always thought Urban Hejaz and the Levant [and Egypt] share in a dialect continuum or at least a sprachbund, I don’t know a lot of dialects that say مرق to mean pass except those two. Urban Hejazi dialects also drop the use of interdentals like in Lebanese. In the same way Bahrani dialect Bahrain/Eastern Saudi Arabia shares with Mesopotamia in having Akkadian and Aramaic influences.

Here’s a fun comparison between Hejazi and Najdi dialects https://youtube.com/shorts/Fi9_bNiazOA

More aggressive in tone on average.

Only the Bedouin and Najdi dialects which happen to be over represented. Jeddawi in particular and other Urban Hejazi dialects are seen as effeminate https://youtu.be/AHWbA0b9bK4

1. Arabs at the rise of Islam already were speaking different dialects and so they took those differences with them.
2. Different regions have had different influences, e.g. Coptic and Greek in Egypt, Punic, Latin and Amazigh in North Africa, Nubian in Sudan, and so on.
3. 1400 years of divergent history, including different foreign rule in different regions.

the Sahel countries too have a significant Arab minority but aren’t part of the Arab League and not included in this map.

I thought this was going to be about the Linux distro

The highest point in Europe is actually in Asia, interesting…

She wasn’t right about a lot of things, specially relating to the Middle East. Misguided at best, malicious at worst when it comes to the Middle East.

The US is the biggest producer now ahead of Russia and Saudi Arabia, Venezuela is at 21st. This post is about future production expansion.