Word: arabian
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...time rolling his eyes slightly. He tried distracting me, asking me if I wanted to visit the Ali bin Abi Taleb mosque or ogle the colossal white yachts lining the waterfront like beached Moby Dicks. I pointed out our route - down the creek to the harbor and into the Arabian Sea. There, three miles offshore, was a cluster of 300 man-made islands shaped like a map of the globe. Each was named after a country or a city. The massive archipelago stretched across six miles and supposedly had been constructed with more than 5,000 tons of coral, making...
...belly shirt, goes under on such songs as “Why Wait.” It opens excitingly enough, with five counts of electronic pulsing reminiscent of the beginning to Kelis’s “Milkshake,” but quickly grows tiresome. The faux-Arabian exotica to which the singer is so devoted as a reminder of her Lebanese heritage explains its expected appearance here, but adds little. Neither is the voice as convincing on this track as in her past music, meandering listlessly, as bare of feeling as the droning machine drumbeat supporting...
Stretched around the Southern heel of the Arabian Peninsula and home to 23.8 million people - compared with 28.7 million in Saudi Arabia - Yemen, which came into being when North and South Yemen merged in 1990, is one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. Long a source of jihadis, the region sent hundreds of fighters to the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and, to judge by the number of captured, killed or identified insurgents in Iraq, continues to be one of the biggest suppliers of fighters to regional conflicts. It's common knowledge in the tearooms of Sana...
...foreign interests in Yemen, most notably through a foiled attempt to storm the U.S. embassy in September 2008. Early this year, the head of al-Qaeda in Yemen, Naser al-Wahishi, announced the merger between his organization and al-Qaeda's Saudi branch to form al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a move that caused the U.S. director of national intelligence to note that Yemen was "re-emerging as a jihadist battleground and potential regional base of operations for al-Qaeda." With a base in Yemen, al-Qaeda could launch attacks on the Red Sea gateway to the Suez Canal...
...afternoon, most men walking the streets of Sana'a are high, or about to get high - not on any sort of manufactured narcotics, but on khat, a shrub whose young leaves contain a compound with effects similar to those of amphetamines. Khat is popular in many countries of the Arabian peninsula and the Horn of Africa, but in Yemen it's a full-blown national addiction. As much as 90% of men and 1 in 4 women in Yemen are estimated to chew the leaves, storing a wad in one cheek as the khat slowly breaks down into the saliva...