From Ms C. Said

I always find Daphne Caruana Galizia’s Opinion page a good read largely for its brassy attitude. If she’s periodically tarred and feathered by reader’s pens for being insufferably arrogant and obnoxious, well, all I can say is she’s only guilty of exercising two well-honed attributes of the less attractive side of the Maltese persona.

Being stridently opinionated and going for the political jugular earns my grudging respect regardless of how irritated the writer makes me feel, but being daft and misinformed doesn’t. In her last lambasting article, she spoilt what could have been a very humorous satirical stab at the inexcusable ignorance of the international press with regard to certain Islamic customs by matter-of-factly making a totally off-the-wall observation. The Butcher of Baghdad, she states, is not actually Mr Saddam Hussein but rather Mr Hussein Saddam! This is because, she claims, in Islamic culture like in Far Eastern cultures, the family name precedes the given name. Upon reading this I immediately broke out into a cold sweat. As opposed to a hot sweat which currently is standard practice for me. Good grief. So that means in all my two decades of living in the Middle East, I was continually making huge faux pas by calling formal acquaintances by their personal name when I thought it was their surname? Or calling all my close Gulf Arab friends formally by their family name that I thought was their given name? They must have all been cruelly laughing behind my back because never in my 25 years of living among them did they ever correct me. Heartless haters of Capitalist Imperialist Caucasians!

Fact of the matter is, the joke wasn’t on me (in this instance) – rather, its on Daphne for her huge journalistic booboo. Whichever Web sites she accesses for her info about Islamic culture must be the same ones Dubya Bush’s foreign policy advisers use – those that can read, that is. Let’s set the facts straight. In some Muslim countries such as Morocco, people do have their names in the sequence of tribal family name followed by a given name. But certainly not in Iraq, or Saddam’s case. If it were so, he’d be referred to as al-Tikriti Saddam, al-Tikriti being the tribal region where he was born. Generally, Islamic custom calls for each person to have three names: the given name followed by the father’s name (patronymic) and the grandfather’s name and finally the tribal or regional name, in that order. A bit of a mouthful so for brevity Arabs generally stick to only two – their given name and their patronymic name. Lets take an example. Fatma Ibrahim Ahmed al-Qudsi is to all intents and purposes Fatma bint (daughter of) Ibrahim bin (son of) Ahmed from the tribe or region of al-Quds. But she'd commonly be called Fatma Ibrahim. It would be a hoot if Daphne applied her learned familiarity with Islamic custom and started amicably calling the woman Ibrahim!

I recommend that Daphne revise her sources on Middle East customs before her next visit to that area; a quick pit stop at Wikipedia would suffice. She won’t win too many Brownie points if she unwittingly uses a first name basis when addressing all those Arabic dignitaries and diplomats whom she’s most likely to meet in her capacity as a leading light of Malta’s visiting journalism team. It probably won’t merit a mention in a local writer’s gossip column (Western booboos about local culture are old news), but in coffee shops there might be some chuckling over it. “And you thought the cherry on the cake was that British TV news reporter speaking to Om Ibrahim and calling her ‘Om’ – the woman probably thought he was practising Buddhist meditative techniques! Now listen to this one!.. ”

Caroline Said

ATTARD