Tag: culture

Plug: “With/Without”

Withwithout Cover 2

A little over a month ago, With/Without: Spatial products, Practices and Politics in the Middle East, a collection of essays about contemporary Arab urban issues, was released at the Dubai International Design Forum. Published by Middle Eastern cultural magazine Bidoun and the Forum’s organizer, Moutamarat, it has contributions from writers across the Arab world, including two writers who contribute to Arabist.net: Issandr El Amrani on Cairo’s al-Azhar Park and Ursula Lindsey on The Yacoubian Building.

And tons of other fine people too, such as the great Moroccan photographer Yto Barrada, Director of the Iraqi National Archive Saad Bashir Eskander, renowned Dutch po-mo architect Rem Koolhaas and Lebanese historian Fawwaz Trabulsi to list only a few of the contributors who wrote the 14 essays on themes such as suburbia, shopping malls, public parks, street life, universities, or skycrapers.

I’ve just received my copy (which had been intercepted by the Egyptian Postal Service and inspected at length for subversive material, apparently) and it’s a handsomely designed volume, printed on archival paper with lovely photography.

Where can I acquire this gem of a book, I hear you say? Well, although distribution deals are still underway, you can start by visiting the Bidoun site for ordering info or read the press release after the jump.

Continue reading Plug: “With/Without”

Algeria attacks Mother of the World

How dare they?

Amine Azaoui outrages Egypt
on Monday, June 25 @ 13:40:53 CDT

The head of the National library , M Amine Zaoui sparked a wave of controversy after his statement to one the Egyptian daily newspapers “Al Watani al yaoum” in which he reconsidered the idea of “Egypt, mother of the world” and the wagon of the Arab world.

M Zaoui went on, in his critics by declaring that the Egyptian cultural week in the event “Algiers , capital of Arab cultures” was the worst one so far. He added that “Egypt was no longer the hub of the Arab culture and that the Egyptian men of culture have no cause to defend, besides, the Arab language in Egypt is clumsy”.

These declarations, outraged many Egyptian literary men , among them the poet, Mohamed Ibrahim Aboussena , who replied to Amine Azaoui in these words” Egypt is still the mainstream , and Amine Azaoui has just to look at the reality”.

As to the Egyptian philosopher, Mahmoud Amine Al Alam, this one declared in response to Azaoui’s statement” Egypt is leading the Arab world in terms of plurality, and the fact of belittling this reality is a lie.”

So troublesome, these Algerians… when they’re not complaining about Egypt’s stranglehold over the Arab League (they are the only other country that seems to take the Arab League seriously) they try to belittle it. La h’shouma.

The ferrane

This is a nicely written story about the role of public bakeries in traditional Moroccan life — it made my mouth water at the thought of the tasty bread I grew up with. But it was slightly ruined for me towards the end with the author’s dinner at Mohammed Benaissa, the hapless and reportedly quite corrupt foreign minister (and former ambassador to the US).

Representing the other (and oneself)

The Kevorkian Center at NYU (were I currently study) organized a wonderful literary symposium yesterday. In the morning, Elias Khoury, Yitzhak Laor and Yael Lerer spoke of “Representations of the Other in Literature,” particulary Israeli-Palestinian literature.

I have just recently read Ghassan Kanafani‘s novella “Return to Haifa,” which is generally considered to have the first humanized depiction of an Israeli character in Palestinian literature. Khoury also mentioned the work of the poet Mahmoud Darwish, in particular his poem “The Soldier Dreams of White Lilies.” In an article about Darwish, Adam Shatz writes that:

In “A Soldier Dreaming of White Lilies,” written just after the 1967 war, Mr. Darwish tells of an Israeli friend who decided to leave the country after returning home from the front.

I want a good heart Not the weight of a gun’s magazine.
I refuse to die
Turning my gun my love
On women and children.

The poem elicited ferociously polarized reactions, Mr. Darwish said: “The secretary general of the Israeli Communist Party said: `How come Darwish writes such a poem? Is he asking us to leave the country to become peace lovers?’ And Arabs said, `How dare you humanize the Israeli soldier.’ “

It’s also worth noting the character of Rita, an Israeli lover, who inhabits decades of Darwish’s poetry and was immortalized in the Marcel Khalife song with lyrics by Darwish “Rita and the Rifle.”

The first sympathetic Palestinian character in Israeli fiction on the other hand is widely considered to be the teenage Naim in A. B. Yehoshua‘s “The Lover,” written in 1977, although as panelists pointed out, even when depicterd sympathetically, few Palestinian characters in Israeli fiction are allowed to speak for themselves (in a previous Yehoshua short story, “Facing the Forests,” the Palestinian character is physically silenced: his tongue has been cut out).

Lerer, the head of the publishing house Andalus, spoke of their project to translate literature from Arabic to Hebrew, started in 2000 (she said that the number of works translated from Arabic to Hebrew is disproportionately small, both compared to translations from Western languages and to translations from Hebrew to Arabic). Unfortunately the project is currently stalled, due to generally dismal sales (a novel by the master Tayyib Saleh sold 150 copies).

According to the Israeli panelists, Israeli literature strives for a “high” literary tone and effaces both the inner heterogeneity of the Israeli experience (spoken language, Yiddish, dialects, the voices of Sephardic Jews) and links to Arabic culture and language. Laor spoke of the “fetishization of Western culture” and Lerer said that “the major Israeli policy today is building walls,” including in the field of culture.

In an afternoon panel (Sami Chetrit, Ella Shohat, Sinan Antoon and Ammiel Alcalay) this point came up again, with participants noting the difficulty of getting works by Arab Jews translated and published, because these works are not easily categorizable and challenge prevailing dichotomies.

In this panel, about “The writer as public intellectual,” the participants discussed not only the challenge for Middle Eastern writers and intellectuals of interjecting some nuance into thoroughly polarized debates, but also the growing ethnification of literature and academia, with ethnic/sectarian/racial categories expected to correspond to political positions or ideologies. Thus Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi Christian who left Iraq in 1991, has been approached and asked to write about “Iraqi Christian literature” (a category he is doubtful exists). When Ammiel Alcalay was trying to get a book about a Jewish convert to Islam in Iraq of the 1930s (by Shimon Ballas, an Iraqi Jew who emigrated to Israel in 1951) published, an editor told him: “This is an amazing book. But what does it have to do with Israel?”

I think the desire to fit Arab and Muslim and Jewish literature into identifiable categories goes beyond the “market niche” mentality of publishing and speaks to a view of the Middle East as one in which everyone can be categorized by religion/ethnicity/tribe and in which writers are often expected to inform us in some (often politically) useful way about their particular community. What I’ve often thought of as “the instrumental value” approach to, and what Antoon labelled the “forensic interest” in, Arab/Muslim literature drives me absolutely nuts and deserves a whole separate post.

In the meantime, for work that challenges such views, you may be interested in the recently published “Outcast” by Shimon Ballas, “I’jaam, an iraqi rhapsody” by Antoon, and “Scrapmetal” by Ammiel Alcalay. I picked up all three and can’t wait to read them. I would also keep my eyes out for the forthcoming English translation of Yitzhak Laor’s work. He read an excerpt and it was dark and hilarious.

Liberation through shopping

Ever since I read this New York Times article a few days back about the identitarian fashion issues of Muslim American women I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what bothers me about it. It’s not just the article’s utter naiveté (the New York Times discovers that Muslim women–even veiled ones–care about fashion!) or the trite dichotomies it sets up. Here’s the lead, for example:

For Aysha Hussain, getting dressed each day is a fraught negotiation. Ms. Hussain, a 24-year-old magazine writer in New York, is devoted to her pipe-stem Levi’s and determined to incorporate their brash modernity into her wardrobe while adhering to the tenets of her Muslim faith.

(Wow, get it? Pipe-stem Levi’s = “brash modernity.” Muslim faith = the opposite.)

And it’s not just that it seems to be trying to turn a pretty mundane observation (what a Muslim woman chooses to wear “is a critical part of her identity,” says one interviewee) into a sociological phenomenon that is unique to Muslim women.

It’s mostly the way the article seems to subscribe to a “liberation through shopping” theory. The title is “We, Myself and I.” Presumably, in the outfits of the Muslim women interviewed, the “we” is exemplified by the veil and the modest long sleeves, and the “myself” by the brash, modern touches of Western coutoure. Theres’ no questioning of the assumption that fashion and consumerism do anything but allow the individual woman to express herself.

Venice and the Middle East

Yesterday I went to the Met to see this exhibit on “Venice and the Islamic World.” While not perfect, the show was facinating. Did you know the first Koran was printed in Venice in 1537? Or that Venetians learned the art of glass-blowing from the Arab world, Syria in particular?

There are many examples throughout the exhibition of the ways in which craftsmen in Venice and Muslim countries imitated each other’s work, competed, and at times produced strikingly similar objects. There are also examples of the kinds of luxury items (and I mean LUXURY: we’re talking robes embroidered with gold, linen boxes made of crystal) that Venetians traders brought to and from the Middle East.

It was impossible not to think of these by-gone trade routes as terribly romantic and surprisingly cosmopolitan–the show reminded me of Amitav Gosh’s “In An Antique Land,” a wonderful book that partly traces Gosh’s research into the Indian Ocean trade and into a family of Arab Jewish merchants who lived between Tunisia, Egypt and India (it also gives a wonderful portrait of Gosh’s life in a small Egyptian village).

And although there wasn’t nearly enough Venetian painting in the show, the canvases, illuminated manuscripts and portraits (many Sultans commissioned Venetian painters to portray them), also reminded me of Orhan Pamuk’s “My Name is Red,” a great novel that deals with the crisis in the world of Ottoman miniaturists provoked by the encounter with Renaissance painting.

Pyramids built from inside out?

A new theory on how the Pyramids were built:

A French architect says he has cracked a 4,500-year-old mystery surrounding Egypt’s Great Pyramid, saying it was built from the inside out.

Previous theories have suggested the tomb of Pharaoh Khufu was built using either a vast frontal ramp or a ramp in a corkscrew shape around the exterior to haul up the stonework.

But flouting previous wisdom, Jean-Pierre Houdin said advanced 3D technology had shown the main ramp which was used to haul the massive stones to the apex was contained 10-15 metres beneath the outer skin, tracing a pyramid within a pyramid.

I still think it was aliens. But look at how they want to prove the theory:

Now, an international team is being assembled to probe the pyramid using radars and heat detecting cameras supplied by a French defence firm, as long as Egyptian authorities agree.

What, using high-tech defense equipment on the national treasures? I suspect Zahi would say no unless he gets to do the Discovery Channel special about it, and Hosni will say no unless he gets to keep the high-tech gadgets.