Author Archives: Arab America

Islamism and feminism are diametrically opposed worldviews. Arguably, Islamism is accused of sabotaging women’s emancipation, while feminism strives to liberate women from the constraints of patriarchy. Although both have gender at the heart of their activism and projects, being an Islamist and being a feminist are different matters. Many believe a combination of the two is implausible, but it is, however, possible if one is prepared to accept that there are multiple feminisms and Islamisms in the world today.

Feminism, a movement with its origins in the struggle of women in the West for political, economic and social equality, has today fractured into multiple camps. There are, for example, the older feminists with roots in radical feminism who wanted to free women not only from entrenched religious, legal and political constraints, but also from the newer exploitation associated with capitalism, hyper-neoliberalism and the consumer femininity of cosmetic surgery and shopping. This position is now giving way to a kind of liberal feminism in which women are drawn into liberal economic precincts as a show of fulfilling themselves.

Source: www.usnews.com

Mahmoud Darwish was born in the Galilean village of al-Birwa of March 13th 1941. Forced from his home village in 1948, along with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Darwish spent much of life in exile but Palestine never left him. This Palestinian experience of displacement and exile, and a profound love for his homeland, was the focus of much of his literary work which saw him go on to become the national Palestinian poet and the leader of the resistance poetry movement. Yet throughout his life, his literary work and his political activism became deeply intertwined.

Read the MEMO Profile on Mahmoud Darwish.

In 1970, Darwish first joined the PLO and was later elected to its executive committee in 1987. The following year it was Darwish who wrote the text for the ‘Palestinian Declaration of Independence’ that Yasser Arafat proclaimed in November of that year. Yet only 6 years later, Darwish penned his resignation following the signing of the Oslo Accords.

Darwish died in Houston, America, in 2008 and his body was returned to Palestine where he was finally laid to rest alongside the Ramallah Cultural Palace. His death was felt deeply by across Palestine and by Palestinians the world over and his State Funeral was followed by 3 days of national mourning.

On the fourth anniversary of Darwish’s death, the Mahmoud Darwish Musem was opened alongside his tomb in Ramallah. At the opening ceremony, then Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayad stated that the museum, “was made to befit this poet’s enormous imprint on the Palestinian people”.

Source: www.middleeastmonitor.com

A vote on divestment taking place today at Montreal’s McGill University has attracted national attention in Canada after Liberal Party leader and would-be prime minister Justin Trudeau attacked student organizers and questioned their right to free speech.

“The BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] movement, like Israeli Apartheid Week, has no place on Canadian campuses,” Trudeau tweeted. “As a @McGillU alum, I’m disappointed.”

on Twitter

Source: electronicintifada.net

n Muslim regions, gardens are seen as places of peace, an escape from the noise outside, and perhaps the best place on earth to feel close to God. Indeed, the Qur’an offers several references to the idea of jannat al-firdaus or gardens of paradise, ranging from blissful retreat to secure refuge. These images have fed centuries of Muslim art, narrative, and design. Along with being an integral feature of Islamic architectural design, particularly for palaces, gardens have also served as final resting places for the dead. 

“Ever since the earliest palace gardens were wrought from the arid conditions of the deserts of the Middle East in the seventh century, the Islamic garden was a place of lush vegetation, repose, and leisure, as well as an expression in intimate detail of all the processes by which humankind makes the earth hospitable and productive. As gardens evolved, their shade was equated with the promise of paradise, a place of rest and pleasure. The fruit-bearing trees and plants likewise were understood to provide a foretaste of the heaven to come.”* Gardens are also rich with esoteric symbolism not only because of the Qur’anic references, but also because of the way a garden organizes space to appeal to both the outer and inner dimensions of a person.

Source: ismailimail.wordpress.com

“My answer to racism.” This is not a typical campaign slogan for a national political party, but the Arab Joint List party (“Joint List”) in Israel is not a typical political party. And the upcoming Israeli election next Tuesday is far from a typical election, considering that this Arab-led party may very well decide who will be the next prime minister of the Jewish state.

Lost in the spectacle of Benjamin Netanyahu using our Congress as a prop for his reelection campaign is the fact that the most Israeli polls have his Likud party trailing the more liberal Zionist Union party headed by Isaac Herzog. It appears that Netanyahu is far more popular among American Republicans than his own people.

Source: www.thedailybeast.com

The pleas are getting louder and more desperate from Middle Eastern Christians whose ancient homelands stand in the path of the rampaging Islamic caliphate ISIS.

The latest sign of desperation came in the voice of the Syrian archbishop, cracking with emotion and dismay as he described the plight of more than 200 Assyrian Christians kidnapped from their homes by ISIS in northeast Syria in late February near the Turkish border.

“Many were plucked from their beds at dawn,” CBS News reported. “A man who refused to leave his home was set on fire along with his house.”

ISIS is still holding as many as 220 of the Assyrians Christians, an indigenous people who trace their roots back to ancient Mesopotamia, where the Apostle Thomas brought the gospel in the first century. It was in Antioch, Syria, where followers of Jesus first called themselves “Christians.”

The archbishop of Aleppo, Jean-Clement Jeanbart, issued an urgent appeal through ABC News on March 8, begging the West to intervene and stop the slaughter of more Christians in his country.

ISIS has torched their churches, some dating back 1,800 years, and destroyed their ancient Bibles and relics.

Their language, Aramaic, is the same language spoken by Jesus. If their communities are destroyed, the language will eventually also disappear from the face of the earth.

Source: www.wnd.com

Alya Marquardt is a classically trained singer and composer who is passionate about Iraqi folk music.
Her arrangements of popular Iraqi songs are heavily influenced by jazz, and in her performance for Middle East Beats she is accompanied by piano, cello and oud.
Alya Marquardt grew up in London. Her parents left Iraq in the 1980s to pursue their studies, and stayed in the UK when war broke out in their homeland.
“I think the diaspora who live outside Iraq tend to be more nostalgic about this music”, says Marquardt.
Her debut album, Chai party, was released in February 2015.

Source: www.bbc.com

When a Lebanese television host, Rima Karaki, abruptly ended a live interview with an old friend of Al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zahwahri, two weeks ago — cutting off his microphone when he told her to “be silent” and let him continue — her station, Al Jadeed, was so pleased with her performance that it proudly posted the clip on YouTube, where it earned praise from dozens of her fans.

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Ms. Karaki’s no-nonsense style — she scolded the guest, the Egyptian sheikh Hani al-Sibai, for disrespecting her after pulling the plug — was already familiar to regular viewers. In an interview with the Lebanese magazine Fit’n Style a week earlier, she had acknowledged that some critics of her style “accuse me of being ‘disrespectful,’ ” for addressing her guests by their first names and for frankly sharing her opinions during interviews. To those critics, she had an answer that would not sound out of place from an American cable news host: “Some say that I am not objective; I call it honesty.”

Source: www.nytimes.com

A Gaza novelist who was shortlisted for a prestigious Arabic literature prize but couldn’t attend the announcement ceremony because of alleged ­Hamas harassment, says he learnt ­storytelling from his refugee grandmother, who recounted happier times.

As a boy, Atef Abu Saif began writing down his grandmother Aisheh’s stories about life as the wife of an orange merchant in the Mediterranean city of Jaffa – before her family fled during the war over Israel’s creation in 1948. She ended up in the Gaza Strip’s Jebaliya refugee camp, 70 kilometres to the south.

Abu Saif, 41, has continued writing since then, through two Palestinian uprisings, clashes between rival political factions and three full-fledged wars pitting the territory’s militant Hamas rulers against Israel. His most recent novel, A Suspended Life, tells the stories of several Jebaliya residents and their struggle to carve out normal lives amid the recurring ­mayhem.

“The main message is that life in Gaza is a break between wars,” Abu Saif said in a recent interview in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “This break ­deserves to be lived.”

The novel is one of six shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction for 2015, an award for contemporary ­fiction run with the support of the Booker Prize Foundation in ­Britain and funded by the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority. It is widely known as the “Arabic Booker”, and this year’s US$50,000 (Dh183,647) prize will be awarded in May at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair.

Source: www.thenational.ae

There were two who died. Yes, two,” Kamel Daoud writes in his meditative first novel, “Meursault, Counter Investigation.” “The first knew how to tell a story, to the point where everyone forgot about his crime, whereas the second was a poor illiterate whom God created only, it seems, to receive a bullet and return to dust, an unknown without the time even for a name.” Daoud has said that his novel is an homage to Albert Camus’s “The Stranger,” but it reads more like a rebuke. Camus’s French-Algerian hero, sentenced to execution for the murder of an Arab, descends into a bloodless interrogation of life in the face of death. In “Meursault,” Daoud imagines a brother, Haroun, for Camus’s nameless Arab, who recounts the grief that he and his mother suffered after the murder, as the world was entranced by the intellectual calisthenics of the criminal. Haroun’s quest for justice over the next twenty years is really a tale of the Algerian struggle for independence. When at last he takes his vengeance, it is July 1962, the eve of liberation. But independence, and the exchange of power that comes with it, hardly settles everything; the violence of colonialism, followed by the vacuum of withdrawal, pushed the young nation into years of civil war. “It was your hero who killed,” Haroun says to a French companion, “but it is I who am condemned to wander.”

Source: www.newyorker.com

Once a thriving marketplace, Hebron’s Shuhada street has been closed to Palestinians for the past twenty-one years.

Israel used the 1994 massacre at the nearby Ibrahimi Mosque — during which the extremist American settler Baruch Goldstein killed 29 worshippers — as a pretext to tighten its control over the occupied West Bank city.

Today, Jewish-only settlements have surrounded Hebron and taken over parts of the city. These settlements are illegal under international law.

The closure of Shuhada Street is vigorously opposed by Palestinians. The organization Youth Against Settlements (YAS) both documents human rights abuses carried out by the Israeli military and takes direct action against Hebron’s suffocation.

In a symbolically important move, the group has succeeded in setting up a kindergarten on Shuhada Street.

Doing such work is highly risky. Youth Against Settlements has repeatedly found itself attacked by Israeli settlers and the military. Last month, for example, some of its activists were fired upon by residents of the Jewish-only settlement Karmei Tzur.

Issa Amro is a founder of Youth Against Settlements. He spoke to Narjas Zatat.

Source: electronicintifada.net

Hamas on Saturday released a series of videos which it says contain confessions by agents working for the Palestinian Authority who passed information to Israel that was used to attack the Gaza Strip.

In at least one case, Hamas says that information a collaborator passed to his PA handler was used by Israel to target and kill one of its members.

One of the videos contains what Hamas says are confessions from PA officers that they were behind a recent series of car burnings that were intended to sow chaos and instability in Gaza.

The Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has dismissed the Hamas claims.

Source: electronicintifada.net