I saw the first production of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, albeit an excerpt of Gogo and Didi talking, in the UAE, put on by the new director of the theater department of UAE University, Jim Mirrione. It took place on the Women's Campus in the brand new theater. The two actresses that played Vladimir and Estragon respectively were Baina Matuenoua and Nina Grishkeeua, the only two Russian students in the whole of the female student body.

The excerpt, according to Jim was seven minutes long during which Gogo and Didi exchange a hat back and forth while trying it on. The two Russians had never acted before and they were young and enthusiastic. They articulated the lines very well, were well rehearsed and had obviously been well coached.

Jim would ultimately like to do both an Arabic and an English production but an all female cast would be problematical for the estate, according to Jim, as an all female production in Croatia with Lynne and Vanessa Redgrave had been behind closed doors.

Mr Faizee's letter gets a response about his use of the word 'revert'.

Submission
Mr Faizee's letter ("Revert, not convert", Gulf News, Online, October 28) needs clarification. In the Quran, specific references to someone being a Muslim in earliest times is of Ebrahim, and prophets after him. Sura 39:11 commands Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) to say, "And I am commanded to be the first of those who bow to Allah in Islam."
Other references to the acceptance of Islam by the Prophet are in Sura 6:14, 6:161. The word "revert" is nowhere mentioned in the Quran to denote acceptance of Islam.
Even for the Prophet, it is "bow in submission to the will of Allah" is used indicating acceptance. So it is neither convert nor revert, but submission.
From Mr I. Mohammad
Kochi, Kerala, India

So, Abraham was a Muslim, and therefore, all of us, including Christians, are Muslims. There is no conversion or metanoia as the ancient Greeks called it, apparently. But how does one accept? I went through the prayers as a young lad on a kind of a lark. I wonder if that is acceptable, or is it merely acceptance eo ipso? I was in West Africa and I met a Senegalese hotel clerk who guided me through the prayers and taught me the greeting of his Islamic sect, the Moueeds, "Serigne Touba ben rekla."

I cannot sleep, it was Eid today, the fast has been broken and one can emerge from the cafeteria at the university without first chewing all the food in one's mouth. Eid is the first day after the last day of the month of Ramadan, 'ram-it-in' the gay Americans and Britts in Saudi used to say. The first sound in 'eid' is one of those sounds unpronouncable without much practice, and never an attained perfection by those whose tongues and throats are less versed in mimicry. It is that harsh sound from the throat that the Emiratees like to particularly pronounce. It is a sound that has not even a phoneme in English, hence one of those sounds not furnished by the haberdashery of English, one of those Lowghosts Spicer would call it in the room in the mind that has all the potential furniture of language that poetry had to negotiate itself through and around in Spicer's mind during the transmissions he received at night. I had been pronouncing my student Asma's name the correct way with that proverbial glottal stop Arabic words have a tendency to begin with when I realized that it is the same word in English that is so badly spelled for Arab students who would have no idea how it is pronounced unless a native speaker would. At Carrefour's G.'s son A. was having a little cough that my daughter was mimicking when G. said that A. had asthma. I've been blind to similarities at the phonetic level between Arabic and English that I didn't see this, because I am assiduously applying myself to learning Arabic. I remember a teacher from Wisconsin who thought one of his students' name was very funny since the overweight student embodied her name, Fatma. It had never occurred to me, but now I find it rather amusing not so much because of the ridicule implied but by the ignorance of the teacher from Wisconsin.