Taxi's and Christmas Trees

Maysaloon introduces readers to a writer called Ibn Tufayl, a prominent philosopher, astronomer and thinker who grew up in Granada, Spain, during the middle ages. Of his works, the only one which survives is called “Hayy Ibn Yaqzan,” or “The Living Son of Awake.”

The work charts the grown of Hayy – an ‘Adam’ like being – as he observes the reality around him, and starts noticing a world behind sensual things… beyond the things you can see, touch and smell. Eventually, he reaches the conclusion that there is a creator of the universe.

The blog goes onto consider the thinker and his work in greater depth… for anyone interested in Islamic or Neo-Platonic philosophy this post is a must.

Kuwait once had a vibrant home-grown theater scene, which increasingly looks threatened. Twofortyeight highlights a BBC video looking into the subject, and points to the golden days of plays like “Bye Bye London”… asking why shouldn’t Kuwait be known for its theater?

It had to be done – A Dubai based production house turns the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, into the world’s tallest Christmas tree. Video embedded to left.

+961 reports on an article in Byblos Bank issue 193 of “Lebanon this Week” - apparently there are now 968,780 facebook users in Lebanon as of the end of November 2010.

This means that 1 in 4 Lebanese have internet, despite in the words of +961 “having the 5th slowest internet speed in the whole universe.”

"This is Beirut" talks about the drama of taking a taxi in Beirut… and never quite knowing what to expect.

Describing the sense of spirituality as “palpable”, Black Iris features a picture of a girl praying at the Chaldean Catholic church in Amman.