Freshly baked doctors at Lund University

Frau Doktor Elmgren
Originally uploaded by Turukhtan

Ainur has now been promoted to Ph.D. in History. So we can expect much more serious posts from her in the future. ;o)

Ainur, who at 30 was one of the youngest among the 233 new doctors, was actually not the youngest. Ather Gattami, Ph.D. at 28, is a maths genius who at the age of 22 was the fastest and youngest examined Engineering student ever in Sweden.

Ather and his family moved to Sweden from Iraq when he was 12, after his father had received a serious threat from the secret service. Soon, his talent for maths was noticed, and in high school he was already taking classes in Mathematics and Physics at university level.
Ather is now a Ph.D. in Engineering at the Department of Automatic Control at Lund University. His research has focused on Optimal Decision Theory, including static and dynamic cooperative and non-cooperative games. The title of his thesis is Optimal Decisions with Limited Information - click here to read it!

As Ather explains in this interview for Sydsvenskan, Automatic Control sounds very technical but is actually a quite interdisciplinary subject, which has a lot to do with economics: "You can say that it's about games between different teams, where one team, for example, is trying to minimize costs and the other one is trying to maximize costs. It can also be about logistics and information flow."


View large size.

Ather's family are secular Mandaeians (a monotheistic religion with a strongly dualistic worldview, about 100,000 followers, mostly in Iraq and Iran - Sweden has the third largest Mandaeian community in the world).
Their family trade is goldsmith, and in his high school years Ather actually worked as a salesman at a couple of gold stores in the summers. Besides having learned the trade of a goldsmith, Ather's father had also studied to be an engineer, and back in Baghdad he was one of Iraq's highest factory directors at a military-industrial company. Today he is a senior high school teacher.

According to the Sydsvenskan interview, Ather seems to be pretty relaxed about people who are impressed with his career. And he also knows that without it, the same people might very well think completely differently about him. "It's no secret that my origin is somewhere else, I don't look Swedish. Sometimes I get the feeling that people's attitudes towards me change by 180 degrees when they hear what I do. That they might have had a whole other kind of attitude otherwise."

Further reading: Ather Gattami's page at Lund Institute of Technology.

(Both photos by Tinet.)

Baghdad Calling

Baghdad Calling is a book by photojournalist Geert van Kesteren. In interviews and photos - both his own and those collected from Iraqi amateur photographers - it shows the everyday life of Iraqi refugees, most of whom have escaped from the centres of conflict to calmer parts of Iraq or neighbouring countries like Jordan, Turkey and Syria. There is hardly any relief in any form for these refugees, "with all the attendant consequences: children do not go to school and people are denied any medical care", as Jan Gruiters writes in the introduction.

People cope as they can - in the photo below, for example, two boys entertain their family by putting on a muscle show ...



Photo by Geert van Kesteren, Syria 2007.

Find out more about the book and see more photos: www.baghdadcalling.com

Naseer Shamma

Naseer Shamma is an Iraqi musician who has specialized in playing the 'oud, a traditional Middle Eastern stringed instrument.

Shamma's interest in the oud awoke already at 11 years of age, when he was a young boy in the city Kut on the Tigris river. Since then he has become a world-renowned master of the instrument.

The classical 'oud has six strings, but Shamma has constructed an 8-string 'oud following a manuscript of the 9th century music theorist Al-Farabi, expanding the musical range. (Read more about it and see Farabi's manuscript at Shamma's official website.)

He has also developed a new method of playing the 'oud with only one hand (something that was originally invented by the Iraqi 'oud master Salim Abdulkarim), so that children and soldiers who have lost one arm in war could play the 'oud.



Here, Naseer Shamma is performing "رقصة الفرس" ("When the mare is dancing"):

And here, he demonstrates his one-handed 'oud technique (clip originally from Mike's ouds):

Shamma has lived in exile in Cairo since 1993, but remains conscious of the plight of his fellow countrymen, 4.2 million of whom are refugees, both within Iraq and in neighbouring countries, mainly Syria and Jordan. In December he helped launch a 90-day fundraising campaign to aid Iraqi refugees, in cooperation with the League of Arab States and UNHCR. Back in October, Shamma had approached the League of Arab States offering to help after watching a documentary on Iraqi refugees in neighbouring countries:

"I have not been able to sleep more than four or five hours a day since that documentary," he said, sitting at his office in a 14th-century house in Cairo's Islamic quarter, where he founded a school to teach youngsters how to play the oud, the Arab cousin of the European lute.
"Winter is approaching. I cannot imagine myself sleeping on a comfortable bed while others are cold, cannot afford medicine or dinner," he said in an interview on Monday. (Reuters)

Read more about the campaign.

Massoud Barzani

A slight detour to the southwestern edges of Central Asia - this is Massoud Barzani, who was born in the shortlived Kurdish Republic of Mahabad in Iran. His father Mustafa was an important figure in the Kurdish national movement.

After Mahabad fell, the family fled to the Soviet Union, and Massoud later went to Iraq to live with his grandfather and go to school. At the age of 16, he quit school and joined his father's armed rebellion against the Iraqi government, after promises to grant national rights to Kurds were not fulfilled. (BBC)



Here, Massoud is at the tender age of 17.

After more mutton and baklava, and less physical exercise than the life of a guerilla fighter would provide, as well as a couple of massive foreign interventions in Iraq (1991 and 2003-present), Massoud, as the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, went on to become a suit-clad politician and president of Iraqi Kurdistan.