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
Mark Stryker,
Detroit Free Press
We don’t just talk about diversity in Detroit. We live it.
The 24th annual Concert of Colors, which unfolds Thursday through Sunday at five venues, nearly all clustered in Midtown, is one of the best pieces of evidence. Sponsored by the Arab American National Museum, the free festival features about 35 events that span a dizzying array of cultural traditions. Among them: Eddie Palmieri’s Latin jazz, King Sunny Ade’s Nigerian JuJu, Brown Rice Family’s eclectic roots melange, Mama Sol’s hip-hop, Fred Penner’s folk music for children, Astrid Hadad’s Mexican cabaret music and Yuna’s Malaysian pop.
And the beat goes on. Reggae, calypso, blues, rock, jazz, salsa, indie pop dance, spoken world, film, food, children’s activities and carnival games are all on the docket. Top Detroit musicians share the bill with the international headliners.
The festival opens with a forum on community, culture and race at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the Arab American American National in Dearborn. Journalist Martina Guzmán will moderate, and the panelists of artists and activists include, among others, Sacramento Knoxx, Naim Edwards and Nada Odeh. The major music performance venues in Midtown are the Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Music Center (multiple stages, indoors and outdoors), the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Scarab Club.
Spoken Word with Joel Fluent Greene, Ajanae Dawkins, Caesar Torreano & Phoenix Eagle: Detroit poet Joel Fluent Greene has organized a reading featuring three charismatic poets who suggest the vitality of the city’s spoken-word scene: 8 p.m. Friday, Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.
Planet D Nonet: One of Detroit’s stalwart jazz ensembles and a dynamic party band, the Planet D Nonet offers an “African Township” program including music of great South African musicians, among them Abdullah Ibrahim, Hugh Masekela and others. 9:30 p.m. Friday, Scarab Club.
King Sunny Adé: The ebullient and influential Juju music of guitarist-singer King Sunny Adé, an Afropop pioneer, marries traditional Nigerian rhythms and African melodic material with Western instruments and styles, among them synthesizers and pedal steel guitar. With a 17-member ensemble of musicians and dancers. 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Orchestra Hall, Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Music Center.
Britney Stoney: A compelling singer, songwriter and guitarist and 2014 Kresge Artist Fellow, Britney Stoney brings soul-inspired vocals to original material whose sense of themes and poetry have a storytelling quality associated with folk singers. 6 p.m.Saturday, outdoor stage at Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Music Center.
Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra: One of the true innovators in salsa and Latin jazz, pianist and composer Eddie Palmieri, 79, created his own fiery take on the Afro-Caribbean and Puerto Rican dance music tradition and then increasingly pursued sophisticated jazz-influenced hybrids under the sway of such heroes as pianist McCoy Tyner. 8 p.m. Sunday, Orchestra Hall, Max M. and Marjorie S. Music Center.
Concert of Colors
Thu.-Sun.
6:30-8:30 p.m. Thu., Forum on Community, Culture & Race. “Artists Speak: Water is Life,” Arab American National Museum, 13624 Michigan Ave., Dearborn. Reservations here.
6-11:30 p.m. Fri. Midtown venues
1-11 p.m. Sat.-Sun. Midtown venues
Midtown venues:
Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Music Center, 3711 Woodward, Detroit
Detroit Institute of Arts, 5200 Woodward, Detroit
Scarab Club, 217 Farnsworth, Detroit
Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, 315 E. Warren, Detroit
Complete schedule and other details: www.concertofcolors.com
Free admission
Source: www.freep.com
Arab Americans are facing one of the toughest decisions this election cycle. With both presumptive party nominees attacking the interests of Arab Americans through proposed legislation (banning Arab refugees, banning Muslims, passing anti-BDS legislation, increasing financial support to Israel, etc.), the decision is that much more difficult to make. While many Arab Americans are considering … Continued
By Amy Zayed BBC When their home country was torn apart by war, the members of the Orchestra of Syrian Musicians were dispersed around the world. Last month, they were brought together again for brief tour, aided by Damon Albarn. The BBC World Service went behind the scenes of the rehearsals. The Q Factory, a … Continued
Jess Gormley and Tom Silverstone The Guardian Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has promised to build a wall on the border of the US and Mexico. Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar is one of the Cultrunners, a group of 10 Middle Eastern artists exploring the ideological boundaries between the US and the Middle East.
by LIANA SATENSTEIN
VOGUE
Bakchic’s Instagram is basically an ongoing advertisement for all of what Morocco has to offer. It’s a rich feed, full of shots that include plump fresh figs and sequined babouches, Zellige enameled tiles, or a shot of designer Sofia El Arabi posing in front of a whitewashed wall in a bright red fez hat and an armful of silver Berber cuffs. El Arabi embraces all things Morocco, as does her label which includes everything from riffs on traditional caftans to more contemporary pieces like simple tees.
From the looks of El Arabi’s output, both physical and on social media, it would seem that the designer has spent her life dedicated to Moroccan culture, but the idea to create Bakchic stemmed instead from a lack of exposure to her surroundings. El Arabi grew up in a family that she considers “Western oriented,” and spoke French and English while living in Morocco, as well as attending a French-speaking high school. It was only when she returned to Morocco after studying in France that she discovered what her country had to offer. “This period of my life was really about trying to discover Morocco,” she says. “My own identity has been divided between something Eastern and Western so I tried to find a way between these two worlds.” That way came from clothing, and El Arabi soon began making custom caftans for her family. Soon after, El Arabi quit her job at a French television station and launched Bakchic in 2012.
Though El Arabi has amassed more than 35,000 followers on her Instagram, fans of her brand tend to be abroad, rather than in the cosmopolitan areas of Morocco, where general style tends toward a more Western aesthetic. She has found it difficult to tap into the local market. “The problem in Morocco, is that people are not totally proud of this cultural wealth that we have, because no one before really took it seriously,” says El Arabi, “This is a challenge of making Arab style cool again. People are more attracted to the universal culture, which is Western. Universal culture is easier to access. It’s a style that people understand so you don’t really take a risk wearing different clothes.” Of course, there are also the political connotations. “I really wanted to show the world that being Arab doesn’t mean being violent, or all of these cliches that you can watch on TV,” says El Arabi. “Even if you may think that clothing is not as serious, or [cannot] solve the political problems that the world is going through, I think it is cool to communicate a certain identity and vision of the Arabs.” And to that end, El Arabi wears her caftans with Adidas track pants, or blue jeans. “The most important thing to remember is to stay simple because these pieces are full of embroideries,” says El Arabi. “The thing is to wear a pair of jeans for example, or a simple T-shirt, and then to add something Moroccan with embroideries. It’s staying simple on the Western side of your outfit.” The other part? Wearing your culture proudly on your sleeve.
Source: www.vogue.com
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