The Arab Sickle. A quasi-interview with Muhammad Al-Maghut. "I don't have the ability to smoke a pipe and listen to classical music in an ordered room and an elegant office, as Adonis does when he writes. All what I wrote was in the popular Abu Shafiq cafe, amid the noise and people....Naguib Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Price because he recognized Israel; I refuse it." And I said earlier that I felt quite disgusted when the US Department of State, most probably at the behest of the pro-Bush Arab journalists in Washington, DC, issued a note of condolence over the passing of Maghut. So I would like the US Department of State to note those words of Maghut: "I will not recognize Israel even if I saw the children of stone signing their signature of recognition of it...Palestine is not Yasir `Arafat or microphone. It is present in our cells...Palestine will liberate us; it is not us who will liberate it....They have oil? Our tears are our oil....The New World Order will not confiscate even my shoe....I have become part of Damascus--tell that to Jumanah Haddad of An-Nahar (the right-wing, sectarian Christian newspaper with more than a tinge of anti-Palestinian, anti-Syrian racism)--and Damascus has become part of me. It is the the story of the first love, and the first voice...The world was a hammer and sickle. The Soviet sickle went away, and the American hammer remained. States avoid this hammer. I don't fear it. I am the Arab sickle."