BY: Nisreen Eadeh/Staff Writer National Arab American Heritage Month is coming to an end, but there’s no shortage of ways to continue celebrating our amazing culture and community beyond April. One of the easiest ways to honor heritage month is simply by spending time with family. And as every Arab American knows all too well, … Continued
BY: Patrick Nahhas/Contributing Writer The moment a beat of an Arabic instrument is played through a speaker, it is immediately recognizable by most Arab Americans. Classical and pop music from the Arab World is influencing American music and creating hits. However, many Arab Americans strive to preserve the classical music of their ancestors back in … Continued
BY: Patrick Nahhas/Contributing Writer and Nisreen Eadeh/Staff Writer Across the country there are numerous Arab American organizations that contribute to local and national communities of all religions, nationalities, professions, and interests. Here are some of the organizations working to build stronger communities everywhere: One of the most recognizable Arab American organizations is ACCESS, the Arab … Continued
BY: Patrick Nahhas/Contributing Writer The Arabic language is one of the oldest, most expressive, and well-preserved languages in world. The language comes from only two historical sources: the Quran and pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. Present day Arabs try as much as possible to keep the language sacred, which is part of the reason why words like … Continued
Ibn Hazm statue in Cordoba, Spain. BY: Habeeb Salloum/Contributing Writer Described by historians as one of the most distinguished and literary personalities in Arab Spain, Ibn Hazm, whose name is sometimes found in its Europeanized form, Abenhazam, was a creative scholar who is as much alive today as when he walked the streets of … Continued
BY: Nisreen Eadeh/Staff Writer The visual arts are a hub for Arab Americans who express themselves through paintings, drawings, sculptures, and more. Art does not play the same role in society as it did just 50 years ago, but its importance remains as strong as ever. Unknown to many, Arab Americans have become recognized in … Continued
BY: Nisreen Eadeh/Staff Writer We are thirteen days into National Arab American Heritage Month and it’s time to celebrate! Try any of these 13 fun activities with fellow Arab Americans and non-Arabs so you can remember just how fascinating Arab heritage is. 1. Ask your teacher or professor to feature Arab American contributions to American society … Continued
By Shir Haberman
Fosters.com
Robert Azzi is a photojournalist, a columnist and an educator. He is also a Muslim.
It was in all of those capacities that Azzi appeared at the Water Street Bookstore on Sunday, where he gave a talk titled “The Other: To Be or Not To Bbe.” The talk was subtitled “A talk about identity and Islam; Being American-Arab-Muslim in America.”
Azzi said the talk was part of his “Ask a Muslim Anything” program that is seeking to dispel American preconceptions about Islam and its followers. Many of those preconceptions, at least here on the Seacoast, stemmed from the inclusion of a DVD of the film “Obsession” in a 2008 edition of this newspaper, he said.
According to the film’s web site, the film “explores growing Islamist ideology among Muslims in the West, the rejection of notions of tolerance and inclusion, and the role of Jihad (the religious duty of Muslims to engage in a Holy War against infidels).”
Calling the distribution of this film an attempt to “vilify” the then-Democratic nominee for president, Barack Obama, in a war on Muslims for profit and power, Azzi said that, as a result of the film’s release, “Muslim became a code word for ‘other.’”
“For many Muslims it was like waking up and seeing a cross burning on their lawns,” Azzi said. “Today that cross is still burning.”
Azzi contended that rather than being “others,” Muslims “are irrevocably woven into the fabric of America.”
As proof, he pointed to information that the first African-American slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619, a year before the Mayflower made landfill at Plymouth, and that between 20 percent and 25 percent of the slaves in America were Muslim. He also said Thomas Jefferson had a Koran while he was a student at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and that the owners of the largest mill in Biddeford, Maine, had built a mosque inside the mill for the many Albanian Muslim workers employed there. There is even a section in the cemetery in that local town in which the headstones are situated to face Mecca, Azzi said.
Aside from learning about Muslims in this country and correcting some of the attitudes that have led to questionable U.S. governmental actions in Iraq, Iran and concerning the Palestinian issues in Israel, Azzi said he sees education as an invaluable tool for bringing people together.
“I think we need a core curriculum in this country,” he said. “We need to know what other people think and give our children knowledge of the ‘other.’”
Azzi was asked his opinion on this year’s presidential candidates, specifically, about their abilities to handle the issues he was discussing.
“Looking at their resumes, I’ll just say that the person walking into the Oval Office on day one most ready to deal with those issues is Hillary Clinton,” he said. “I’m not a great fan of Hillary Clinton, but she’s wicked smart and knows a lot of these world leaders.”
As for the Republicans, while Azzi initially urged those present not to vote for either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, he noted that there could be a positive side to making either the GOP nominee.
“There is a part of me that says ‘I hope Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee” because it forces America to make a choice between the dark side we’ve always had and some path forward,” he said.
Source: www.fosters.com
BY: Husayn Hosoda/Contributing Writer Like many professional fields, Arab Americans have participated and excelled in the engineering field. Arab Americans in engineering play a particularly important role in keeping society safe, improving the standard of living, and serving the public interest. Engineers are highly regarded for their ethics standards and honesty, making them valuable … Continued
Associated Press
The kitchen hums with activity. Rachana Rimal is at one table, making momos, the traditional dumplings from her native Nepal. Next to her, Iraqi immigrant Dhuha Jasif mixes some pureed eggplant for baba ghanouj. Containers of adas, a lentil stew from the East African nation of Eritrea, sit on a counter.
The unusual mix of cuisines is how it works at Eat Offbeat, a Queens-based food delivery service. All seven employees are refugees or asylum seekers who fled their home countries.
None had any professional cooking experience before coming to work for the startup, which launched in November.
The company has committed to hiring refugees and teaching them culinary skills, partly for altruistic reasons and partly as a business strategy. In a city filled with good ethnic food, it is a way for the cuisine to stand out.
“We are really focusing on these new and off-the-beaten-path cuisines,” said Manal Kahi, who founded the company with her brother, Wissam Kahi. “Refugees are coming from countries that have cuisines we don’t really know. … It’s not cuisines that you find at every corner.”
A Lebanese immigrant who came to New York for graduate school, Manal Kahi started thinking about a food business in 2014 after getting rave reviews from friends for the hummus she made from her grandmother’s recipe.
At the time refugees were also on her mind, since many Syrians had started fleeing their war-torn home for next-door Lebanon.
“I was feeling very hopeless about it,” Kahi said. “When I got this idea of making hummus, I thought maybe Syrian refugees could be making” it.
As the idea for the scope of the company grew, the thought of employing refugees stuck.
“We thought they were more in need than any other immigrants,” she said.
She and her brother partnered with Juan Suarez de Lezo, a chef who has worked in high-profile restaurants around the world, and contacted the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organization that helps resettle refugees and asylum seekers.
Rimal was one of their first hires. The 52-year-old was granted asylum after coming to the U.S. in 2006, at the time leaving behind her husband and two of her three children. She was reunited with most of her family in recent years, but her son is still in Nepal, making her reluctant to talk about what drove her to seek asylum. When she left, an armed conflict between the Nepal government and the Communist Party of Nepal had been going on for 10 years, leaving at least 13,000 dead.
She’s been a cooking aficionado her entire life, having learned from her mother and grandmother. When the opportunity came from Eat Offbeat, she jumped at it. Since then, momos have become a standard offering on the company’s menu, and she’s taught the other women how to make them. Another favorite is her cauliflower Manchurian, which comes in a spicy sauce.
Rimal has had to change her recipes somewhat to accommodate an American palate, and she’s often tired from the work, but “I’m so happy to be here,” she said.
Kahi said the company is making close to 200 meals per week now out of the professional kitchen they rent in Queens.
They offer food delivery to groups of at least five people, with hopes of growing to the point where individual meal delivery becomes economically feasible.
If someone leaves, as the Eritrean refugee who brought the recipe for adas to the company did, Eat Offbeat is likely to take that person’s dish out of circulation even though the other employees would have learned how to make it, Kahi said.
That’s because it’s not just about the food, but also the people making it, she said. “We want to keep it tied to them.”
Source: www.watertowndailytimes.com
By Tammy La Gorce
The New York Times
Those who visit “Wondrous Worlds: Art and Islam Through Time and Place” at the Newark Museum may also be interested in a screening of “A Thousand and One Journeys: The Arab Americans,” an award-winning documentary currently on the festival and screenings circuit.
Then again, they may not be.
Grouping together Islam and the Arab-American experience is precisely what the curators of the exhibition and the executive producer of “A Thousand and One Journeys” hope people will not do.
Myth-busting is a goal of both undertakings, whose paths converge only in that they hope to engage New Jersey audiences.
Abe Kasbo, who grew up in Paterson and is the executive producer of “A Thousand and One Journeys,” said that when he tells people that he’s from Syria and a Christian, they are often stumped. “They just assume I’m Muslim,” he said. “There are so many misconceptions out there about what it means to be Arab-American.”
Mr. Kasbo started pooling funds to make his first documentary in 2007 after what is now known in his family as “hummusgate.”
“My son was at day care; he was 3 or 4 and somebody made a face and said something to him about his hummus sandwich,” Mr. Kasbo said. “It brought me back to when I first came here from Aleppo as a 10-year-old, and the same sort of stuff happened to me. Now it’s 36 years later, and nothing has changed. Now we have Trump talking about Muslims and Arabs.”
Part of the appeal of the 90-minute film is the help Mr. Kasbo recruited in telling it: Former Senator George J. Mitchell, the actor Jamie Farr, the political activist Ralph Nader and the journalist Helen Thomas, who died in 2013, all of Lebanese descent, make appearances.
Bowl, Iran, ninth or 10th century. Credit via Newark Museum
Of particular interest to New Jersey audiences may be the movie’s discussion of the Paterson silk mills, and the Arabs who settled in the area to work in them in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “They were textile workers back in Syria and Lebanon and Palestine. They helped build those industries,” Mr. Kasbo said.
In addition to the misguided notion that all Arabs are Muslim, Mr. Kasbo addresses other pet-peeve fallacies in the film, including the idea that Arab-Americans come from unsophisticated cities.
“Aleppo is as cosmopolitan as New York, but people think it’s backwoods. It’s ridiculous,” he said of Syria’s largest — and currently war-torn — city.
Both cosmopolitan cities and rural edges of the earth, from Africa to Australia, are represented in the “Wondrous Worlds” exhibition; the only continent without a presence here is Antarctica.
“One of the very unusual things about this exhibition is that we’re featuring works from all over the world, not just the Middle East,” said Katherine Anne Paul, lead curator of the exhibition and the curator of Arts of Asia at the museum. “I think there’s a lack of awareness of how expansive and far-reaching the world of Islamic art is.”
The 120 pieces on display date from the ninth century and are drawn from the museum’s vast collection of 275,000 objects, including carpets, costumes, jewelry, ceramics, prints, paintings and photographs.
Nations heavily represented include Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, Iran and India. But France, China, the United States, Indonesia, Malaysia and many other countries make appearances, too — some more lavishly than others. For example, from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan is an embroidered, sequined horse cape dating to the late 19th or early 20th century.
“This was how you pimped your ride back then,” said Dr. Paul, whose co-curator for the show is Kimberli Gant, the museum’s Mellon Curatorial Fellow of Arts of Global Africa.
Ties to Islam are not always obvious in “Wondrous Worlds.” Prestige garments like the horse cape, for example, might seem opposed to the modesty of dress Islam encourages, such as the simple 19th-century Sudanese tunic that is on view beside it. But in the secular Islamic world, such items marked social rank in public life.
Wall text throughout the sprawling show helps connect the dots. So does the show’s division into sections. In addition to “Modest Beauty: Dress, Fashions and Faith,” the section with the tunic and horse cape, “Wondrous Worlds” explores the Quran and calligraphy and book arts; hospitality and the domestic arts through objects like ceramics and musical instruments; architecture and its offspring, such as tiles; and the intercontinental trade nurtured by the hajj pilgrimage.
The rarest item displayed is a knotted Egyptian prayer rug from the early 17th century. “There are only five known similar examples,” Dr. Paul said. “What distinguishes it is the quality of the materials — fine silk, wool and cotton — coupled with the specific format that was most likely drawn in the Ottoman court,” she said. A section of the rug is worn, she added, probably from daily prayers.
When the show opened in February, Dr. Paul expected controversy, but she hasn’t encountered any, perhaps because of her guiding principle.
“My primary goal in presenting anything is, ‘Look, we’re all people, and this person thought about creating this thing this way because they live in this place in this time and have these resources,’” she said. “One of the great things about art is it can speak to the basics of humanity. That’s what I hope we did here.”
Source: www.nytimes.com
There is a song by the legendary singer, Wadih El Safi, whose title literally translates into, “Lebanon, oh piece of heaven.” To the millions of Lebanese-Americans, even those who haven’t stepped a foot on the country’s versatile terrain, Lebanon is just that. As the image of this tiny, 10, 452 km squared piece of paradise … Continued
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