By LEYAL KHALIFE StepFeed We’re all pretty familiar with what happens when visiting an Arab person’s house. It all starts with the deyafe including a wide array of nuts, homemade sweets and juices. As hospitable as we are, Arabs sometimes take food to a whole new level – especially when the person asking you if you … Continued
By AMY NILE LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL As the leader of the Arab Music Ensemble, Dr. Bishr Hijazi hopes to reverse misconceptions about Middle Eastern culture and connect people across the world through the group’s alluring, curious and gentle sounds. Hijazi is a prominent Las Vegas hand surgeon, but when he trades his scalpel for a … Continued
ALTM ALTM editor Zehra Rizavi meets up with Luby Ismail to discuss Connecting Cultures in an insightful interview into her life, ideas and experiences. 1) Growing up as a Muslim American of Egyptian descent, what was your experience of living between different faiths and cultures? Any memories/moments that stand out? I grew up in a small … Continued
by Anh Nguyen
Temple-News
Al-Bustan and Prometheus reinterpret the famous piece “Spain” by jazz artist Chick Corea. | COURTESY CHIP COLSON
Inside the Church of the Advocate’s sanctuary, Hanna Khoury stood quietly as the musicians rehearsed their pieces one last time. He shook his head gently, his left foot tapping to the rhythm of the drums. On stage, the musicians followed the melody and not in anyone’s direction. When they wanted to stop, they looked at each other and mildly nodded.
“The sound of the music is wonderful,” said Diana Danot, who came from Ocean City, N.J. to attend the event. “I haven’t heard anything like it before.”
“Musical Encounters,” a three-concert event, brought together Al-Bustan Takht, an ensemble made up of world-renowned musicians in classical Arab music and Prometheus Chamber Orchestra, Philadelphia’s self-managed, self-conducted string ensemble. The final concert was held in the Church of the Advocate at 18th and Diamond streets.
“The purpose of the program is presenting one concert in three different neighborhoods and reaching out to the community,” said Hazami Sayed, executive director in the opening remarks. “[It’s] to showcase the combination of Western classical music and music from the East.”
The previous concerts were held at the Unitarian Society of Germantown and Oxford Mills, which is located in Olde Kensington.
The Takht ensemble is a branch of Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, a non-profit organization based in Philadelphia that seeks to promote conversation and understanding of Arab culture. Al-Bustan has an educational approach with K-12 summer camps and after-school programs to “expose and educate youth and adults of Arab and non-Arab heritage,” according to its website.
“Sayed wanted to find a forum to connect with the Arab culture but not religion based, so she sought out different art forms because they exclude any political or religious affiliation,” said Hanna Khoury, The Takht Ensemble’s music director since 2009.
Al-Bustan emphasizes the education of Arab language, history and culture through choir, dance and percussion, Khoury said.
Founded in 2013, Prometheus, which consists of mostly Temple alumni, took residency at the Church of the Advocate because of its proximity to the university. With frequent shows running and a new season about to unveil, Prometheus offers “high quality entertainment” for the underserved community free of charge, Johnson said.
For the last concert to return to Prometheus’s home, the members of the ensemble wanted the music to foster the neighborhood and the people of North Philadelphia who have been supporting and nurturing its existence.
“Prometheus was born out of the crossroads,” said Johnson, who is the co-founder of the self-managed ensemble. “[It is] where we try to change the way we experience music for both the audience and the performers.”
The mix-and-match production from Prometheus and Al-Bustan Takht traces back to Temple’s Boyer School of Music in 2009. Vena Johnson, who graduated in 2010, was a Violin Performance and Music Education major when she first met Hanna Khoury, who was pursuing a Master of Music Performance at the school.
After their path diverted, Khoury became the Music Director for Al-Bustan Music and led Al-Bustan Takht Ensemble to tour and record with prominent orchestras as well as collaborating with musicians like Lebanese singer Fairouz, Sting and Shakira.
When they met again in 2014, Prometheus collaborated with Al-Bustan to present Marcel Khalife, a well-known Lebanese composer, at Haverford College. After the premiere’s success, the idea of an Arab-Western classical concert consummated into Musical Encounters. Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture was then able to secure funding from PNC Arts Alive, a large initiative designed to support the visual and performing arts in the Greater Philadelphia region, Hazami Sayed said.
The concert started with Prometheus playing a piece by Baroque composer, Antonio Vivaldi. The tacit arrangement was communicated through eye contact and nods, without a conductor.
The distinctive sound of “qanun”, a large string instrument popular in the Middle East, along with the playful, lively and fast-paced sound of percussion added an Arab fusion to popular pieces and genres like Spain by Chick Corea and El Cumbanchero by Rafael Hernandez, a famous Puerto Rican composer.
“It was phenomenal,” said Serge El Helou, the composer of “Lebanese Rhapsody” after his piece was played by Prometheus and Al-Bustan Takht. “My music was made alive.”
Source: temple-news.com
By SAM SACKS
Wall Street Journal
Early in Saleem Haddad’s “Guapa” (Other Press, 358 pages, $16.95), the novel’s narrator, Rasa, accompanies an American journalist to an interview with an opposition leader, acting as her interpreter. The setting is an unnamed Middle Eastern nation that could stand in for any of the countries convulsed during the Arab Spring. Rasa has taken part in the protests, but when he meets the opposition leader, a religious populist who wants to usher in a strict Islamic state, he’s flooded with doubts. For as well as being American-educated and reform-minded, Rasa is gay. “I joined the protests so that I would no longer have to wear a mask. What’s the point of risking your life to remove a mask only to have to wear a different one?”
“Guapa”—the title refers to a clandestine gay bar Rasa frequents—is about the furtive, outcast status of gay men in the Arab world. Mr. Haddad, who was born in Kuwait and lives in London, threads the book’s conflicts through both political and personal spheres. Just as Rasa is squeezed between Islamism and authoritarianism, his place in the household is thrown into doubt when his grandmother catches him sharing a bed with his lover. His fear of government reprisal is matched by his ingrained horror of violating the codes of eib, a word that loosely translates to “shame” and refers to Arabic societies’ strict rules of social conduct that deem homosexuality a perversion.
The spreading feeling that he has nowhere to turn for sanctuary outside the walls of Guapa lends a taut, controlled sense of panic to Rasa’s plight. Alas, this promising debut novelist doesn’t sustain it. A lengthy flashback to Rasa’s American education is hijacked by some postcolonial-studies boilerplate about otherness and agency. The book never recovers from the interruption, and its dramatic tension dissolves into a vapor of self-affirmation: “I’m done with your rules about what is eib and what isn’t. I have my own rules now.” What will happen to Rasa now that his mask has come off? We can only guess.
One answer is suggested by the life of Abdellah Taïa, a Moroccan writer who since 1998 has lived in Paris. In 2006, Mr. Taïa came out of the closet in a widely read newspaper interview. He was denounced by Moroccan officials, received death threats from angry readers and became further estranged from the family he had left when he emigrated. He is today an informal spokesperson for gay Arabs, and this reputation obscures the eerie originality of his stories.
“Infidels” (Seven Stories, 143 pages, $23.95), the third of his books to be translated into English, centers on Jallal, the teenaged son of a Moroccan prostitute whose own sexual initiation comes at the hands of men in bathhouses. This world is described in a succession of raw, polemical monologues spoken by Jallal and his relatives (all in a rough-and-ready translation from French by Alison Strayer). Jallal’s grandmother, who initiated the family trade, rages at the hypocrisy of being “damned, and so very much in demand.” The angriest voice is the boy’s: “For the tens of thousands of people around us, we deserve our pariah status, our grim fate, because we do nothing to change it, break out of it. Maman, one day you’ll be stoned to death by the very same people who creep to the house each night to ask for your forgiveness and a bit of pleasure.”
An outsider’s fury fuels Jallal’s coming of age, which takes him in exile to Egypt and then Belgium. There he meets and falls for Mahmoud, another disenchanted expat who introduces him to a mystical form of Islam based on ecstatic love and liberation. The planned endpoint of their febrile religious conversion? A suicide bombing in Casablanca.
Mr. Taïa unblinkingly recounts this folie à deux as it moves toward a “sublime explosion” designed “to make people see love. Through death. Through an extreme act.” Jallal’s testimony boils with resentment, self-loathing, vindictiveness and a flailing desire for personal salvation. “I understood that a huge sacrifice had to be made in order for the world to change,” he says, “for my heart to open and let in the light.” In view of the deadly attack in Orlando, Mr. Taïa’s unnerving portrait of self-radicalization feels all the more relevant.
Source: www.wsj.com
By Basman Derawi We Are Not Numbers Painting by Malak Mattar Do you love Gaza? Or do you hate Gaza? When I applied for my job as a physiotherapist, one of my interviewers asked me to “talk about Gaza in English.” I replied, “Give me a few seconds to think.” He nodded. I closed my … Continued
She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World BY: Clara Ana Ruplinger/Contributing Writer This summer, Washington’s National Museum of women in the arts is displaying She Who Tells a Story, or in Arabic, Rawiya (راوية), which brings together art from 12 women photographers from Iran and the Arab world. The series is as … Continued
Hue Wire
Michel Ayoub’s holy racket begins each day at 2:00 am, when he steps into the cobbled streets of Acre’s old city with tambourine in hand, awakening Muslims for Ramadan.
His role as the city’s “mesaharati” is a traditional one during the sacred fasting month, but Ayoub is by no means a traditional holder of the position: He is Christian.
The 39-year-old Arab Israeli sees no contradiction in that, and neither do the Muslim residents of this ancient city in northwestern Israel, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.
“We are the same family,” says Ayoub, who wears traditional Levantine dress as he meanders the alleyways, a keffiyeh draped over his shoulders, baggy sirwal pants held around his waist with an embroidered belt, a black-and-white turban tied around his head.
“There is only one God and there is no difference between Christians and Muslims.”
His voice rings out as he chants, piercing the silence of the empty streets decorated with traditional colourful lamps for Ramadan.
“You, sleeping ones, there is one eternal God,” he chants.
Houses begin to light up one by one. Some stick their heads out of their windows to greet him and tell him they have heard the call, awakening them for the “suhur,” the traditional Ramadan pre-dawn meal.
During the holy month, which began on June 5, Muslims abstain from food and drink from sunrise to sundown, making the suhur an important meal before the long day ahead.
– ‘We Would Be Lost’ –
Acre’s population of more than 50,000 includes Jews, Muslims, Christians and Baha’is.
It has been continuously inhabited since the Phoenician period, which began around 1500 BC.
It was the main port of the medieval Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and a major Ottoman walled city.
Napoleon tried to conquer the heavily fortified town in 1799 but was repelled by the Ottomans and a small British Royal Navy force.
The walled old city, complete with a well-preserved citadel, mosques and baths, is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site.
Today it is part of Israel, which captured it in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war surrounding the state’s creation.
About 28 percent of its population are Arab Israelis, who are Palestinians and their descendants who remained after the 1948 creation of Israel.
Most of the city’s Arabs are Muslims, but a minority, like Ayoub, are Christians.
The mesaharati tradition had disappeared from Acre until Ayoub, who usually works in construction, revived it 13 years ago. He says it was his way to preserve his grandfather’s heritage.
He says his grandfather, a fervent Catholic, listened to readings of the Quran every Friday during the main weekly Muslim prayers.
Partly for that reason, Ayoub says he grew up with the idea of coexistence, respect and knowledge of other religions.
By carrying on the mesaharati tradition, he says he was “only doing my duty by helping our Muslim brothers who endure hunger and thirst” during the fasting month.
Sabra Aker, 19, says she “grew up with Michel Ayoub’s wake-up calls during Ramadan.”
“If he didn’t come one day, we would be lost,” she says through the window of her home.
Safia Sawaid, 36, exits her home to ask if she can take a photo with Ayoub and her children.
“It’s great to see someone so attached to our culture and our traditions,” she says. “I hope that he will continue every year.”
Ayoub may even be grooming a successor to ensure the tradition does not end with him.
Ahmed al-Rihawi, 12, accompanies him on his nighttime mission, wearing sirwal pants, a black vest and a turban.
“He is a promising mesaharati,” Ayoub says. “He is very talented.”
Source: www.huewire.com
BY: Habeeb Salloum/Contributing writer “The Damascene swords are not made any more. We have long lost the secret of how they were produced. There are only a few left, mostly in museums and rare antique shops. But look! I have one here! If you can afford it, its only $10,000.” The Damascene merchant was dramatic … Continued
By Pamela Falk
Observer.com
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power. (Photo: Luiz Rampelotto/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Visitors from around the world flock to the Met to view art history’s great masterpieces and attend fashionable galas, but to negotiate international relations is surely a first. New York’s premier museum recently became the unlikely venue for a high-security, invite-only meeting organized by Samantha Power, President Barack Obama’s envoy to the United Nations. Mixing business with pleasure, the U.S. ambassador invited key international diplomats to tour the museum’s newest exhibition of Islamic art.
Joining Power to see “Court & Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs,” an exhibition of artifacts from a short-lived Turkic dynasty, were diplomats from 15 countries, including Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Qatar, Senegal and Palestine. Power’s hope: the historic artworks would provide the edification needed to soften the tone of regional discord. Just a day before the museum tour, Syria’s besieged city of Aleppo was plunged into chaos.
Ambassador Power was once a trusted campaign policy advisor to President Obama, and served as a member of the National Security Council before heading to the U.N. in 2013. With only six months left on at her current post, the ambassador is looking to create legacy results.
“She does a lot of events outside of Turtle Bay,” said Rae Lynn Wargo, an aide to Power.
The ambassador has found taking discussions away from the occasionally numbing rhetoric of the U.N. has proved effective for diplomacy. In the past, Power has sparred on Twitter with outspoken Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin regarding her meeting with the punk band Pussy Riot, played basketball with Arab and Israeli youth, and sung karaoke at the South Korean ambassador’s residence. She frequently brings her work home with her to the Waldorf Tower penthouse she shares with her Harvard professor husband Cass Sunstein.
As it turns out, Power’s tour is not the first time the museum has hosted VIP politicians. When the U.N. General Assembly is on, small groups of government representatives have been known to swing through. Notable visitors included Secretary of State John Kerry and Crown Prince Naruhito of Japan, according to the museum’s vice president of communications Elyse Topalian.
The exhibition at the Met includes exquisite relics from an ancient culture that once occupied the now war-torn region spanning Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria from the 11th through 13th centuries. In the show’s catalogue and in an earlier book, historian A.C.S. Peacock wrote that the Sunni nomadic group, who briefly captured Mosul, Iraq, suffered from divisions during its short dynasty, which is best known for its literacy, innovation and religious tolerance.
“In the Middle Ages, many Muslim societies placed great emphasis on learning and had large libraries and great respect for our shared history,” Met Museum president Daniel Weiss said.
Diplomats spent two hours in the galleries, sharing perspectives on the Seljuqs and, it seemed to this reporter (the only member of the media invited), they managed to find some common ground.
Sheila Canby, curator of Islamic art, directed the visiting diplomats to view a 13th century basin from Jazira. “The relationship,” she said of the ancient Muslims and crusaders, “was complicated,” with some conquest and some cooperation.
“It is important to show that Islamic history is not about fanatics waving flags,” said Weiss. “Most people get it that Muslim world history and culture is not about ISIS.”
Amr Al-Azm, an anthropology professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio who specializes in the region, joined the tour. “I am like a kid in a candy shop, these are treasures of Islam,” said Al-Azm, an anthropology professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio. “A people without their history are lost.”
Al-Azm told the group that Aleppo’s ISIS brigades, such as the Zangids, take their names from ancient civilizations.
“Those who choose those brigade names, are they on the extremist side? On the al-Nusra side or ISIL?” Power asked, intrigued.
“More on the al-Nusra side,” Al-Azm answered.
“This is not the Security Council,” Jordan’s ambassador Dina Kawar chimed in, eliciting laughter. Evoking candor was the point of Power’s tour.
“The exposition shows a period of our history where cultural influences were able to produce the epitome of beautiful artistic pieces,” said Kawar. “When you see the exposition and you watch D’aesh [ISIS] destroying our cultural heritage, claiming it as unreligious, you realize the urgent need to unite against such a dark force…Cultural diplomacy is certainly the most effective and the most necessary at this stage”
Power pushes hard but artfully, and she may be on the right track. Some of the biggest breakthroughs in diplomatic relations since World War II have occurred outside the hallowed halls of government: in the bucolic estate of Bretton Woods, Camp David, the Wye Plantation, and Potsdam. There has been Henry Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy” and Richard Nixon’s “ping-pong” diplomacy. Whether Power’s “museum diplomacy” will help mend Middle East fences is hard to predict, but she succeeded at focusing diplomats on history and art. Not a bad place to get the conversation started before she exits the corridors of the U.N.
Source: observer.com
BY: Habeeb Salloum/Contributing writer To fully realize the extensive influence of Arabic on the Spanish language and culture let us relate an imaginary journey made to Andalusia, the name itself a pure symbol of this impact. The Arabic name for this part of the Iberian Peninsula is al-Andalus – a corruption of ‘the Vandals’, a … Continued
By Amanullah De Sondy
The Washington Post
In reaction to the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, people hug outside the Stonewall Inn near a vigil for the victims in New York on Sunday. (Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images)
Muslim Americans. LGBT Americans. One would imagine that the marginalized would unite.
From the straight Muslim man who is profiled at the airport for his bushy, long beard to the transgender Muslim who fears being shunned from the mosque held so dear to heart and faith — is there so much distance?
Yet those who are marginalized are not immune to their own prejudices and phobias. Omar Mateen, who killed at least 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando on Sunday morning, offers a chilling example.
I’ve spent more than a decade researching Islamic masculinities, including five years living and teaching in Florida before I moved last year. I have heard some Western Muslim leaders step haltingly toward acceptance. But most of what I have heard, when Muslim leaders speak to the LGBT believers in their midst, is callous disregard or deafening silence.
We can no longer go on without accepting every Muslim of every sexuality. Sunday’s violence in Orlando proves that all too painfully.
As I have monitored the evolving statements of Western Muslim leaders — most of whom are straight — over the years, here’s what I have heard: a slight movement with regard to LGBT issues by some. Many are silent, but some have realized that the issue must now be publicly addressed, especially with the rise of countries adopting same-sex-marriage bills.
There are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Muslims who stand proud in their understanding that they have a God-given right to claim their gender and sexuality. But the religious leaders who speak out at all on LGBT issues say only this — reluctant and guarded — “Hate the sin and not the sinner.” From the discussions I have had informally with these leaders, this is as far as they think they can go without losing their own followers.
This sort of cautious stance echoes repeatedly. Muslim writer Mehdi Hasan headlined his 2013 essay on the subject, “As a Muslim, I struggle with the idea of homosexuality — but I oppose homophobia.” University of Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan wrote before that, “Homosexuality is forbidden in Islam,” but “we must avoid condemning or rejecting individuals.” There are dozens more statements like these only a YouTube search away.
In the anxious day since the shooting in Orlando, this horrific event seems to be making Muslim communities at last stand up and make bolder statements about the LGBT community. But not all offer support. There are those on social media — Muslim and Christian, in the Middle East and the United States — who basically applaud the disgusting actions of Mateen. And surely it is easier to focus on “the other” than to admit that there is a true overlap between the Muslim community and the LGBT community, and between Islamophobia and homophobia.
But today, Muslim communities are saying it: LGBT Muslims do exist. They face both Islamophobia and homophobia every day. And they are grieving.
This is a thorny issue within Muslim communities, who find it difficult to find the rainbow within historical, rigid understandings of the tradition. But it is possible to find different colors of a tradition, text or law if we begin by associating that text with the lives of those who uphold it.
Of course, it is also easy to find the dark, gloom or heterocentric within the Muslim tradition. We must remember that much of this “tradition” was written by heterosexual Muslim men who may have been pressured to uphold particular forms of gender and sexual custom in print.
The challenge for Muslim communities around the globe today is to find and appreciate differences and pluralism and to support the lives of believers who do not fit societal norms. It is imperative if we want to support those on the margins who are hurt and damaged.
We need to think carefully about what goes through the mind of that closeted Muslim man listening to the statements today, who may well end up married to someone of the opposite sex because he fears losing his position in his Muslim community. We need to think carefully about what these statements do to empower heterosexual Muslim individuals, who then stand to represent not just Islam but the “ideal” gender and sexuality.
Are the small steps by Muslim leaders enough? Is this slight movement enough to prevent hatred and killing? There is no quick fix to this tension. But just as heterosexual Muslims combat Islamophobia through their loud voices, they must also now listen and accept the voices of LGBT Muslims as equals within the fold of Islam.
Much of our effort in the West to combat extremist ideology relies on building bridges between people, and many Muslim leaders are the first to take to the podium in interfaith dialogue. In light of the Orlando shooting, it is now untenable to have this dialogue of action without including and accepting every face of marginalization within faith communities — especially the LGBT people who are essential partners in our desire for a bright and colorful world.
Source: www.washingtonpost.com
1,627 Results (Page 108 of 136)
Notifications
Loading ...