Traveling at about 60 m.p.h., the dust storm moved into downtown Chicago…Thomas Gill, a professor of environmental science and engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso, said it was appropriate to call Friday’s storm a haboob.
-New York Times, May 18
A haboob in Chicago is maybe an act of God, no less than the election of a Chicago pope, or the destruction of Khartoum’s National Palace and Omdurman’s Khalifa House, one the redoubt of colonialism, the other the symbol of its resistance. And N.B. to beginning students of Arabic…the words Habūb and Habīb generate from different triliteral roots, the former’s first radical with an unemphatic H, the latter’s H very much so, as also in, Harāmī, Thief, of Camels, aka Billa Ali al-Qrayn, as KhairAllah might aspirate his name.