The Puzzle of Left-Handedness Read Online Free PDF Page A

disaster. Geographer Carsten Niebuhr was the only member of the group to make it back alive, after endless wanderings, and he told the whole story in Description of Arabia , published in 1776. In his book he was fairly positive about the Arabs. Anyone who showed proper respect for them could generally depend on being treated decently in return, he wrote. So later expeditions were considerably surprised by the dour, unsympathetic treatment they rece ived. The cause turned out to lie in the maps Niebuhr had made. As was usual in Europe, they were orientated towards the north, so Yemen was on the left side of Arabia. The Yemenis, it transpired, regarded this as an insult. Any right-minded Arab takes his bearings from the east, which puts Yemen, at the south-westerly tip of the pen -insula, on the auspicious, right side of the map. This was precisely the reason why in the Latin world the country was called Arabia Felix. On Niebuhr’s maps, used by later travellers, it instead lay on the accursed left side.

    A map of the Arabian peninsula made in about 1800, on which everything currently called Saudi Arabia, plus Oman and the United Arab Emirates on the south-eastern side, is labelled ‘Ayaman’ or ‘Arabia Felix’. That name should really be applied only to the bottom left corner of the peninsula, present-day Yemen.
    There’s a direct counterpart to the name Yemen, incidentally. The Arab word for Syria is Sam, a word related to simâl , which means ‘north’ and ‘left’. Sam is also connected to the verb sa’ama , which originally meant both ‘to bring bad luck’ and ‘to turn left’ but over time acquired a third meaning: to go to Syria. The connection with bad luck is reflected in many sayings and expressions about the unpleasant effects of the desert winds from the north.
    Arab culture is certainly not alone in having a strict taboo against the left side and left-handedness. Japan, hardly a paragon of social flexibility and tolerance, is perhaps the worst case of all. left-handedness used to be completely unacceptable there and in many ways it still is. In earlier times, left-handed women are said to have concealed their ‘abnormality’ from their husbands, because left-handedness could be grounds for rejection. Fairly recent research on Japanese schoolchildren suggests that a mere 2 per cent write with their left hands, even though almost everywhere else in the world the number of left-handers is roughly 10 per cent. Japanese researchers have claimed that the low figures are a result of the special qualities of the characters used in the written language, insisting it can be produced only with the right hand. In reality writing Japanese with the left hand isn’t particularly difficult. The cause is more likely to lie in the repressive Japanese school system, which simply refuses to tolerate left-handedness. This conjecture is bolstered by the fact that in Europe and the United States far fewer children wrote with their left hands in the past than now, sometimes as few as 2 per cent, as in Japan. When teachers gradually ceased objecting to left-handedness in the classroom, the percentage steadily rose, eventually reaching that magical figure of around 10 per cent.
    A similar hostility to the left side and the left hand can be found in many parts of Africa. Often this has to do with the influence of Islam, but not always. Tribes of the lower Niger have a rule that a woman must use her right hand rather than her left when cooking, unless she needs to use both. The Ovambo in Namibia will never pass you anything with their left hands and a left-handed greeting is a downright insult. The Wachagga tribe apparently goes so far as to exclude left-handed men from hunting and warfare, since they are believed to bring bad luck. No one knows the origin of the most terrible story of all, which began to circulate in the early twentieth century. There were said to be tribes in Africa that cured a child of left-handedness