BY LYNN TRIMBLE Phoenix New Times EXPAND Iraqi-born artist Bassim Al-Shaker recently moved into a new studio and gallery space in Roosevelt Row, and will present his first exhibition there on August 5, during Phoenix’s First Friday art walk. He’s calling it Babylon Gallery, which references his Iraqi roots. Until recently, the space located at 918 North … Continued
By Ross
Lichfield LIVE
Palestinian artists have visited the city to help create three new icons for Lichfield Cathedral.
The Bethlehem Icon School students will create the new pieces which will go on display in the Nave.
Ian Knowles, director of the school, has brought the three students to work on the icons – which will include the Archangel Gabriel and Mary – this summer.
Ian Knowles with the students from Palestine in Lichfield
Visitors to the cathedral can see the artists at work, as they write the Icons from 2pm to 4.30pm daily in their studios in the Old Stables in Cathedral Close.
The Very Revd Adrian Dorber, Dean of Lichfield, said: “This is a really exciting and creative project.
“The Bethlehem Icon School is training young Palestinian artists in a form of Christian art that first began in the Holy Land. Recently their training has been accredited by the Prince of Wales’ School of Traditional Arts and Skills.
“Our commission benefits the Bethlehem Centre by providing an important UK venue for its work but it links us in Lichfield with an unbroken form of Christian art that speaks engagingly and beautifully of the Christian Story.
“As a place of pilgrimage and worship, I believe these icons will help all our cathedral visitors to pray and get a glimpse of God’s generous love – his invitation to align our lives with his.
“We also hope that by having the staff and students in Lichfield for the whole summer, local people can get to hear of the struggles people in Bethlehem face but also learn much from the students’ faith and resilience.”
The cathedral will also be hosting talks which will allow visitors to gain a better understanding of iconography, and of Christian culture and identity in the Middle East.
Students from Palestine will return next year to complete a third Icon, encapsulating the Crucifixion and Transfiguration of Christ.
Source: lichfieldlive.co.uk
Synergy, storytelling and selection all have a part to play in creating a collection of character, Mazen and Loulia Soueid tell Ahmad Minkara. Artscoop Mazen Soueid with artworks by Ayman Baalbaki and Marwan Sahmarani Among the many things that brought Mazen Soueid and Loulia Berbir together back in 2007 was a shared passion for art. … Continued
Peter Beaumont
The Guardian
He is regarded as one of Palestinian literature’s most important figures, a poet whose work has been translated and read around the globe, including in Hebrew.
Now the work of Mahmoud Darwish, who died in 2008, has been denounced by Israel’s far-right defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman, as equivalent to Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the latest bitter row over freedom of expression in Israel.
The remarks came as Lieberman waded into the controversy over Israel Army Radio’s inclusion of one of Darwish’s poems, ID Card, in an educational segment, infuriating rightwingers.
Lieberman summoned the station’s head, Yaron Dekel, to reprimand him over last week’s broadcast of the poem on the station’s University on the Air programme.
Darwish is internationally renowned for his poetry, whose themes of identity, exile and belonging are expressed often through an evocation of landscape.
In Israel, Darwish’s most controversial poem has long been Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words, a rejection of occupation written in 1988. It has been cited by former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir as evidence the poet believed Jews should abandon Israel, a claim Darwish denied.
“Maybe it’s not so clear,’’ Darwish said at the time. “In a song it’s hard to say precise things. So I emphasise: only the territories captured during the six-day war, not the state of Israel.’’
ID Card was written in 1964, when Darwish was working as a literary assistant in Haifa on an Israeli communist party publication. Its most famous line – “Write it down! I’m an Arab” – was later borrowed for a documentary of his life. Like many of his poems, it balances complex emotions often within a single stanza: anger, pride in a sense of self, rejection of stereotyping and a warning of the consequences of oppression. It finishes: “Write down on the top of the first page: / I do not hate people / And I do not steal from anyone / But if I starve / I will eat my oppressor’s flesh / Beware, beware of my starving / And my rage.”
Avigdor Lieberman has reprimanded the head of Army Radio for broadcasting ID Card. Photograph: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
According to reports on Israel’s Channel 2, it was this line that provoked Lieberman’s rage, prompting him to say that Darwish, “who called in his poetry for the expulsion of the Jewish people from the state of Israel and who wrote that ‘the flesh of the occupier will be my sustenance’, cannot be part of the Israeli narrative programme that was aired.
“By that logic, the complete legacy of the Mufti al-Husseini or the literary merits of Mein Kampf could also have been included.”
Other reports quoted Lieberman as complaining that “someone who writes texts against Zionism, which are used to this very day as fuel for terror attacks against Israel, gets the honour of his creations being included by the station as part of texts that made it into Israel’s canon, alongside Jerusalem of Gold and The Silver Platter”.
“It is obvious that this represents a failure and cannot go unchallenged,” said Lieberman’s spokesperson.
The row was initially ignited by the culture minister, Miri Regev – who has sought to deny government funding to arts groups that refuse to perform in the occupied territories – in a Facebook post.
Calling on Lieberman to stop funding the station, Regev claimed it was “providing a platform to the Palestinian narrative that opposes the existence of Israel as a Jewish democratic state”.
While nominally in charge of Army Radio, Lieberman has no power to intervene in its output. For its part, the station defended the broadcast, saying: “On this platform we’ve hosted programmes on various topics, including the literary works of Rabbi Kook, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Theodor Herzl and Naomi Shemer, as well as the text of the declaration of independence. We believe that academic freedom obligates us to offer our listeners a wealth of ideas.”
Darwish has been widely translated into Hebrew and some poems were considered for inclusion in the Israeli school curriculum in 2000, before the idea was dropped after criticism by rightwingers.
The poet is in many respects a metaphor for the Palestinian exile experience. Born in al-Birwa, in what was then British Mandate Palestine, his family fled after the Israeli state was created in 1948, first to Lebanon, before returning to Acre. After studying in Moscow, he joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the early 1970s, living in exile in the Middle East before being allowed to settle in Ramallah in 1995.
Among those who were unsurprised by Lieberman’s comments was Ghassan Khatib, a professor at Bir Zeit University – a Palestinian university, he said, which teaches texts by key Zionist thinkers including Herzl and Jabotinsky.
“It is a demonstration that he is not serious about positive relations between the two sides,” he said. “In conflict there are two sides, each with its own narrative. When media outlets in Israel allow Israelis to look at the other side’s narrative, it should be respected.
“Mahmoud Darwish in particular is extremely sophisticated and humanitarian. I went back to revise his poems. I find it very difficult to find anything to justify Lieberman’s remarks.”
Khatib insists that Darwish’s poem needs to be read in the historical and political context in which it was written.
“It was written when the land of Palestinians was being taken every day. How can we forget that the land called Israel was the property of family and relatives that was taken in an illegal way?”
Source: www.theguardian.com
REUTERS
Among enthusiasts of handmade art, Hamid Abdulrazzaq Rwaiyd is a well-known name in Iraq.
The work of the Iraqi sculptor and engraver requires precision and time so it is unsurprising that his pieces are highly sought after by royal families from the Gulf and beyond.
His trademark is engraving rifles, pistols, and other such weaponry.
“I combined between engraving and sculpture, some pieces reached a point where the engraver -by himself- can’t master it because it needs sculpting, and the sculptor can’t master it because it need engraving, so I made a very beautiful pieces especially with Mesopotamian symbols, they demand a precise work where I can show my skill,” said Rwaiyd.
“I received 15 rifles of sheikh Zaiyd sons. I cherish these pieces because I excelled with them. I showed my skills in engraving, sculpting, and design. I used different patterns and designs. The rifle is divided into 3 parts: iron, wood and box, each one of these parts is an art piece in its own. These were very unique pieces,” he adds.
Some items can take days to complete, others months or even years.
One of his masterpieces is a revolver pistol that took him 6 years to finish – engraved both inside and out. Such intricacy has set a high bar for other engravers.
The engraver believes it is his duty to use his gifted talent to promote Iraq engraving tradition – running in his family for several generations.
“I’m interested in Iraq’s civilization and I feel that it’s my message to share and make people know about Iraq’s great civilization. I feel like I have a message to promote Iraq’s civilization not only in Iraq but also abroad when many of my art pieces travel abroad. I’m really proud of it,” he added.
Rwaiyd is an enthusiast of the Mesopotamian civilization, which is reflected in all of his art work, utilizing many Assyrian and Babylonian symbols as well as Islamic symbols and ancient Arabian poetry.
He hopes that by showing the younger generations what can be achieved with a little creativity, precision and concentration, the art of engraving will live on.
Source: www.nrttv.com
The Arabic Music Retreat BY: Sami Asmar/Contributing Writer It is rare when an experimental event turns into a national and international institution of historical significance. This is what happened when twenty years ago, a handful of musicians decided to hold a training camp on a college campus, empty for the summer, to allow interested participants … Continued
BY:Eugene Smith/Contributing Writer Psychedelic Funk Music of Lebanon in the 60’s and 70’s: Cultural Conversation through Sound Once a tourism advertisement for westerners, this footage offers a grainy window into the joie de vivre of pre-civil war Lebanon. Scantily clad women frequent snow-white beaches and azure Mediterranean waters. Alcohol flows as if pouring from a … Continued
By BEN RAWLENCE
New York Times
THE WAY TO THE SPRING
Life and Death in Palestine
By Ben Ehrenreich
Illustrated. 428 pp. Penguin Press. $28.
“It is perhaps unavoidable and surely unfortunate that any book about the region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea requires introduction, and some small degree of defensiveness on the part of the author.” So writes Ben Ehrenreich, a journalist and novelist, in the (avoidable) introduction to his love letter to Palestine, “The Way to the Spring.”
I say avoidable because, as Ehrenreich acknowledges on the same page, the current debate about Israel-Palestine is virulently partisan. His exposition of the politics of storytelling (“choosing certain stories and not others means taking a side”) and the task of the writer (“to battle untruth”) is eloquent, though I fear more likely to deter than move those who have already made up their minds on the issue. His cause would be better served by letting his stories do the talking, for they are both heartbreaking and eye-opening.
The book begins with Bassem Tamimi, whom Ehrenreich met in 2011. Bassem is a resident of the village of Nabi Saleh in the West Bank, which had been holding weekly demonstrations against the Israeli occupation — protesting the grabbing of the village spring (its water supply) and the arrest and detention of villagers, as well as the death of one of them, a 13-year-old boy. The intimacy of Ehrenreich’s reporting domesticates the violence and injustice, thus rendering it more shocking: A fragment of a tear gas grenade and broken lawn furniture mingle beneath a fruiting mulberry tree in the garden. Children proudly show where an Israeli bullet scarred one of the rooms. Bassem’s wife, Nariman, reads Dan Brown in Arabic translation outside, at night, watching the brake lights of cars at the checkpoint down the hill.
The people of Nabi Saleh are among the few who still regularly protest and resist the occupation, and Ehrenreich accompanies them on marches, getting tear-gassed more times than I can count. But this is not the story he has come for, not the only one he is interested in. He spends enough time among the family of Bassem and others to realize that “the people of Nabi Saleh were crafting a narrative of their own struggle.” They needed “to see themselves a certain way.” And this is the heart of the book: the stories people tell themselves to survive.
Next we meet Hani Amer, whose farm lay on the route of the infamous wall. After a long struggle, Amer won the right to have his house and some of his land preserved but enclosed like a bubble with the wall divided into two loops. The Israeli Army built a gate that they opened for 15 minutes every 24 hours. Nonetheless, within the space, he has planted olive, fig, apple, peach and plum trees, vegetables of all kinds. “Instead of seeing the wall,” he says, “I try to see the garden.”
The narrative doesn’t linger for long with any one character. Like an overeager tour guide, Ehrenreich has too much to show us and too much to say. He pulls us back to Ramallah to see the incremental theft that is the process of a new settlement going up. Then to the refurbished muqata’a, the official residence of the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, to illustrate how the building works as a “palimpsest of 80 years of colonial and now neocolonial rule,” designed to create the impression of a state without the substance. Most disturbing is “planet Hebron,” where the list of abuses considered normal includes soldiers firing tear gas at schoolchildren to mark the beginning and end of each day of school.
We meet a new cast of characters in Hebron, and another in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Kheir, including the unforgettable vegetarian pastoralist Eid Suleiman al-Hathalin, who makes model bulldozers out of scrap and whose ambition is to have one of them exhibited at the Caterpillar company’s museum in Peoria, Ill. In between are set-piece “interludes” examining the mechanics of the occupation — the “humiliation machine” of the checkpoint at Qalandia, the apartment blocks of Rawabi, near Ramallah, not, as the promotional materials and newspaper reports would have you believe, a “city of hope,” but in fact a tangle of financial interests tying Palestinian elites to Israeli developers and Qatari financiers.
Ehrenreich’s vivid, lyrical, sometimes snarling prose overwhelms the attempt at formal structure, however. The reportage motors forward, propelled by Ehrenreich’s wonder at the outrageous curiosities of the occupation. In Umm al-Kheir the Israeli Army dispatches a platoon to confiscate a portable toilet and demolish a bread oven. In Hebron, a settler scales a wall and snares himself in barbed wire to request that his Palestinian neighbor remove a Palestinian flag. “The citizens of each city are trained from infancy to unsee the other city and its residents,” Ehrenreich writes, citing a work of science fiction.
The book is not a polemic, Ehrenreich says in the introduction. This is argument by way of anecdote. The French writer Jean Genet also wrote a passionate homage to Palestine (“Prisoner of Love”) and also pondered the question of how the battle for truth is waged: “It’s not enough just to write a few anecdotes,” he warned. “What one has to do is create and develop an image or a profusion of images.” In those terms, Ehrenreich’s haunting, poignant and memorable stories add up to a weighty contribution to the Palestinian side of the scales of history.
Source: www.nytimes.com
Dennis Lynch
Brooklyn Daily
It’s a modest success.
A Bay Ridge woman has turned frustration into inspiration, starting a body-covering clothing line for Muslim women after struggling to find fashionable threads that still leave a little to the imagination. The Egyptian-born, Bensonhurst-raised founder of Urban Modesty said she got the idea because her only other options were donning stuffy traditional garb or cobbling together a hodgepodge of Western clothes.“Finding an outfit for any occasion is always a nightmare — my peers, friends, young women, older women, they all had the same problem,” said Sherihan Moustafa. “You either dress very traditionally, or you try to put something together by layering clothes from five different stores.”
Moustafa, a 29-year-old City College economics grad and self-described fashionista, stitched together Urban Modesty in 2013 after she took an entrepreneurial business class. She has no formal fashion training, but designs the pieces herself before sending patterns to China for production, she said. Moustafa hit the market with eight designs, but now offers more than 70 tops, bottoms, dresses, gowns, and cover-ups — in addition to kids’ digs and jewelry. Most pieces sell for $25–$70, but formal gowns can go for up to $230.
The store is a godsend, according to one shopper who picked up some threads at the Arab American Bazaar in Bay Ridge last weekend.
“I saw those long dresses that I do not see in stores, I always felt I should have a piece like that in my closet, but I did not know how to get it,” said Bay Ridgite Abeer Assad.Moustafa relied on word-of-mouth among friends and family in Bay Ridge to spread her brand early on. New Yorkers are still the biggest buyers, but frequent trips to Islamic conventions outside the city have helped spread the word nationally.
She recently made progress in the Great White North during a showcase in Toronto, she said.
“We walked in with six laundry bags full of clothes and walked out with one half-full,” she said.
Moustafa has carved out a niche in a growing industry — Muslims spent roughly $230 billion on clothing worldwide in 2014, and that figure could grow to $327 billion by the end of the decade, according to Dinar Standard’s Global Islamic Economy Report. Not all of that is on modest fashion, but the top brands Dinar Standard highlights in the report make demure duds.
Next, she’s taking on the major retailers, and hoping to expand her reach outside of the Muslim community, she said.
“We have cover-ups that you can throw over jeans or whatever you want, so [non-Muslims] have bought those too,” she said. “It’s cute and trendy and now if you look, Forever 21 sells a maxi dress cover-up as well, that’s who we are competing with.”
Source: www.brooklyndaily.com
BY: Habeeb Salloum/Contributing Writer It was the sixth time I had travelled to Córdoba, the fabled city of Moorish Spain, yet it was as if I had entered it the first time. My heart throbbed as I walked its streets on my way to La Mezquita – six acres of architectural magic that was once … Continued
Conductor Daniel Barenboim has been bringing musicians from Israel and Arab countries together for many years already. His new academy in Berlin will allow them to develop musical skills – and new ideas for peace, too. Deutsche Welle (DW) The Barenboim-Said Academy is a new type of music academy to open in Berlin. It is … Continued
“Toilette,” 2008. All images courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery Olivia Parkes Broadly.com Iraqi artist Hayv Kahraman was ten years old when her family fled Baghdad for Sweden during the Gulf War, eventually settling in Arizona in 2006, when the US and Iraq were at war. Memories from her home country—and the artist’s … Continued
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