Author Archives: Arab America

This was aired then immediately banned and removed from the Fox archives right after 9-11, a lot have people still have never seen it and is a must for the first step in the process.

Despite the restrictions under extremist rule and a very uncertain future, locals in Mosul are still getting married. Rumor has it that even the leader of the so-called Islamic State, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, recently opted for matrimonial bliss (again).

It has been ten months since the extremist group widely known as ISIS took control of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the second biggest metropolis in Iraq. And although the group has committed crimes against locals and forced the city’s people to adhere to a strict set of rules, it is also true that many in Mosul believe life must go on.

One of the most obvious signs is that people are still getting married. It may seem strange to contemplate starting a family under the current perilous conditions. But as one local man, whom we’ll call Omar Mohammed, told me over the phone, they have their reasons.

Over the past fortnight Mohammed said he had attended three weddings and he believes that the friends who got married simply got tired of waiting for an end to ISIS rule. They know that it’s going to take a while before their city is freed from extremists and they’re trying to live as normally as possible under very abnormal conditions. Maybe the fact that it’s spring makes a difference as well.

In another phone call, we were able to speak to one of the grooms, who is in his early 20s.

“I actually decided I wanted to get married quite a while ago but I postponed the wedding because of ISIS’s entry into the city,” he explained. “When I realized they were not going to leave very soon I discussed this issue with my parents and we decided we should go ahead.”

Asked whether he was concerned about the city’s uncertain future, the groom replied, “this isn’t an obstacle. There are a million people still living in Mosul and most of them are women and children. Eventually we are all going to have to face the same fate.” Whatever that is, most people believe it is largely out of their control.

ISIS uses marriage as a way to recruit new fighters. It pays between $1,000 and $1,500 to any member who marries, and it may also buy the new couple some furniture.
(And amid all this fatalistic romance, one is reminded of that wise line in the Gabriel García Márquez novel Love in the Time of Cholera: “The heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and … thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”)

Mohammed, for his part, notes that the cost of marriage has gone down. Previously young couples would need to save considerable amounts of money in order to get wed. But since ISIS arrived, wedding ceremonies and celebrations have become a lot more humble. ISIS rules ban celebrations, music, parties and the sexes mixing socially, so even if people had the money to fund lavish ceremonies and dinners, which they do not, there’s less to spend it on.

ISIS has also made rules about how marriages are to be registered: Couples wanting to document their match must do it at the so-called Sharia court that is run by ISIS based on its own interpretation of Islamic law. Those who do not register may be punished.

ISIS has also used marriage as a way to recruit new fighters to its cause. The group pays between $1,000 and $1,500 to any member who marries, and it may also buy the new couple some furniture. This often has tempted young men from low-income families.

Mohammed thinks that boredom might have something to do with it as well. “Families want to keep their teenagers and young people busy—they don’t want them to join ISIS out of boredom, thanks to lack of a job and the fact that schools and universities are all closed,” he explains. “So they encourage them to marry younger instead.”

The people of Mosul are still trying to do normal things like going to coffee shops and watch television news. Many of them were happy to see that pro-Iraqi-government forces were able to liberate the city of Tikrit. But at the same time, they fear for their own futures when the time comes for those forces to move on their city, which may be approaching since Tikrit was the last major town between Baghdad and Mosul.

On April 1 there was another reason for locals to gather together and, well, try to figure out what was going on. ISIS had said that there would be some sort of surprise prepared for the city at the end of March. Days had passed. Nobody could figure out what was happening. Then some ISIS members asked that certain businesses decorate their premises in preparation for the alleged surprise. Rumours spread and there was much speculation. Was ISIS withdrawing? Was it about to grant its many detainees and amnesty? Was it all an April Fools’ Day trick?

Nobody knew for sure then or now what was going on. But the strongest rumor was that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, who claims to lead a new caliphate, had himself gotten married. One Arabic language newspaper even published a story about it, saying that the so-called caliph had wed a German woman who had first joined up with the ISIS group in Syria. He has been married at least once before, and it is unclear how many wives he has at the moment, but if the rumor was true, locals joked, it meant that the caliph was just doing what they did; he, too, had thrown caution to the wind despite a very uncertain future.

Source: www.thedailybeast.com

JOHANNESBURG – Palestinian solidarity organisation Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) on Thursday called on American singer-songwriter Pharrell Williams to cancel his collaboration with high-end retailer Woolworths.

Spokesperson Kwara Kekana said, “We are going to go ahead and write a letter to him and his people, and issue an appeal to him. We are really hoping that once we have issued the call, we are hoping for a positive response, but as to how things will follow beyond that, we can’t say for sure.”

Earlier, the artist announced on Twitter that he would be working with the retailer and asked his South African followers how they felt about the decision.

Source: ewn.co.za

Baddawi (2015) is a coming-of-age graphic novel by Chicago-based artist Leila Abdelrazaq about a boy raised in a refugee camp in northern Lebanon; it’s a poignant tale based on her father’s early life. The eponymous Baddawi is the refugee camp where Ahmad was born after his parents’ expulsion from Palestine in 1948. Just published with a promoted launch next week, it is one of a few graphic novels which attempt to capture the exceptional, uncertain, often surreal, quality of Palestinian lives in chaotic exile as the mundane, everyday tasks demand to be met. 

Going to school, studying, using the library — activities that require a certain measure of certainty and are dependent upon rules, conventions and institutions — are shaken to the core in the story by questions about handling war, weaponry and national identities. While the certainty of childhood expectations contrasts with the uncertain conditions of war and exile, this contrast is not only jarring but poignant when represented through Abdelrazaq’s simplistic style of illustration that emphasises the juvenilia, childhood memory and adolescence associated with the graphic-novel form.

The lineage of graphic novels depicting Palestine can be traced back to arguably the most well-known work, Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1996), based on his two-month visit to the territory in 1991-1992.  Like Abdelrazaq, Sacco’s narrative focuses on the minutiae of the mundane in the occupied territories, revealing everyday tasks transformed into momentous struggles, humiliations and frustrations. Academic Ella Shohat has stated that “maps, borders, checkpoints and the Wall have now become signature icons of the Israeli/Arab conflict.” While these borders appear to be stable, they are overrun by new Jewish settlements within the territories and by the state’s mobile walls, enclosures and “flying checkpoints”. Sacco captures the political strategies of spatial control through illustrating the material realities of the everyday; the home, a bus trip, a walk.

Most of the scenes in his book are conversations between Sacco and Palestinians; his dense, crammed, jumbled panels reveal that the spatial strategies of confinement and contingency are not distant concepts. When Sacco’s avatar is not crossing checkpoints, he is observing events near a wall or fence. Almost every person he meets has been detained by Israeli forces or knows someone who has been in an Israeli jail. The homes that Sacco depicts stretch the definition of “shelter”, as they are subject to attack, demolition and deterioration through the occupation and poverty. He visits his friend Sameh in the Jabalia refugee camp, where the homes, made of corrugated metal and makeshift doors and windows, have the appearance of the temporary, the contingent. At his friend’s house, the roof leaks, and there’s a lamp on the sofa, gaps in the structure of the building and exposed wiring. At the same time, Sacco shows attempts at domesticity, ranging from carpets, plants and paintings, revealing a paradoxical interior aesthetic that struggles between the temporary and permanent.

While Palestine is a sequenced description of events during the Second Intifada, representing a typical graphic-novel linearity, Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (2009) challenges this aspect of the genre through a mix of panels that alternate between the past and present, as Sacco’s avatar attempts an excavation of events buried in the Palestinian past. The novel focuses on two days in Gaza in 1956 when Palestinians said that hundreds of civilians were killed by Israeli forces. Sacco found almost nothing written in English about these killings, despite UN estimates of nearly 400 deaths in both Rafah and Khan Younis. A broad selection of testimonies are combined with speeches and official documents, but most of the 400 pages are made up of memories of executions, hiding and the aftermath of burials, rendered through Sacco’s emblematically cinematic repertoire of viewpoints within a single page: zooming in for a close-up of a survivor of the massacre as she remembers and vacillates between the past and present; or pulling away from a scene of a mass execution to give perspective on its scale. While testimony of the past prevails in the novel, its resonance in the present compels Sacco to write, “While we feverishly dig away at 1956, daily events are obscuring our finds, making it that much harder for our subjects to focus on the stratum in question.” This text block is set alongside a panel in which an elderly woman lies in a hospital bed, her leg in a cast as a result of injuries wrought by the demolition of her home by Israeli bulldozers.

Like Footnotes in Gaza, Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman (2009), an Israeli filmmaker and former soldier, attempts to reconstruct from shrouded memory traumatic episodes, specifically fighting the 1982 Israeli-Lebanese war in Beirut and an elusive vision of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. It is told from the perspective of an Israeli soldier. Originally an animated film, it was adapted later into a graphic novel.  While both novels cross space and time fluidly — between memory and the present, dream and lived, waking experience — and provide a street view of events on the ground, Waltz with Bashir has been criticised for rendering Palestinians indistinct and anonymous, lacking individuality and a voice; beyond the collective wails of the victims in the camp, they are excluded from the narrative process.  This is in contrast to Sacco whose panels are essentially composed of individual testimonies, with the faces of Palestinians each drawn uniquely, and his own face appearing simply illustrated.

Guy de Lisle’s Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (2012) is a travelogue in graphic-novel form that provides a pavement view of an expat living temporarily in occupied East Jerusalem.  The outsider perspective illuminates the inequalities between Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, with their cratered roads, piles of rubbish and lack of a pavement, and the modern and developed streets in Israeli areas.

The Novel of Nonel and Vovel (2009) by Larissa Sansour and Oreet Ashey is an experimental graphic novel that features the creators’ alter egos.  The novel takes the issues of narration and composition, with which Sacco also grapples, to an explicitly self-reflexive level when, in a few panels on a single page, the super-hero duo pull back from the action in which they are engaged to question their own narration.

Another film adapted into a graphic novel is Irene Nasser’s Budrus (2013), based on the documentary directed by Julia Bacha. It follows the unarmed protest movement in a village through the eyes of 15-year-old Iltezam Morrar, but so far it only exists in Arabic.  France has also produced a variety of (untranslated) graphic novels, such as Gaza, un pavé dans la mer (2009), Les chemins de traverse (2010), , Faire le Mur (2010), and Palestine, dans quel État? (2013)  by Maximilien Le Roy, Torture Blanche by Philippe Squarzoni (2004),  and Les Amandes Vertes (2011) by Delphine and Anaële Hermans.

Recently, graphic novels have taken more of a hold in Palestine; its first comic-book festival was held last year. The collection West Bank Stories: The Graphic Novel (2010), edited by Rebecca Cox and launched by NGO Project Hope, was composed entirely by Palestinian youth; hopefully, it’s a sign of what’s to come, with more work emerging from Palestine itself. (http://projecthope.ps/organizational-news/west-bank-graphic-novels/)

Before all of this, though, there was Naji Al-Ali, one of the Arab world’s most prominent cartoonists and satirists, displaced several times over, detained, censored, expelled and finally assassinated in 1987. His work is most represented by his iconic Handala, the rumpled, dishevelled, barefoot refugee child of the camps, who stands with arm clasped behind his back and back turned to the reader until he can return to Palestine. This iconic image not only resonates in the character of Ahmed, the child of the refugee camp in Baddawi, but also on the cover where, surrounded by patterns of Palestinian embroidery, we can see his back turned and hands clasped behind his back in a Handala stance refusing to go any way but home.

Source: www.middleeastmonitor.com

Tolerance. Unconditional love. Understanding. Peace. Those are words that seem on a trajectory to certain extinction soon. War, hatred and destruction are all around us, whether we’re in the midst of it or sitting at home watching the news. Yet somehow, for a resolute optimist like me, there are signs of hope.

One of the brightest, loudest, flashing neon-style sign that humanity can indeed get along is the upcoming Middle East Now festival in Florence, Italy. Yes, Florence, where that original coming out of the Middle Ages happened hundreds of years ago, is the city I believe could also be at the epicenter of a new cross-cultural Renaissance, one that sees every country in the Middle East be a part of the discussion, and so eventually, a solution.

After attending last year’s edition of Middle East Now, or MENOW for short, I realized just how special this festival is. The creation and love-child of two multi-talented persons, Roberto Ruta and Lisa Chiari, to call MENOW just a film festival would be a gross understatement. This is a meeting of minds, a salute to all the great arts and culture that the Region has to offer, complete with delicious food tastings, exclusive concerts and yes, of course, stunning new films.

It also includes that most groundbreaking of ideas, that the Middle East should indeed include Israel, and a Palestinian short can be the introductory film for an Israeli feature, or vice versa. I have yet to witness this kind of intentionally pioneering programming anywhere else in the world.

Inspired by the words of writer, playwright and activist Manuela Dviri, who was born in Italy but since 1968 lives in Israel and battles for across-the-board human rights there after losing a son to the conflict, Middle East Now is a festival possessing the courage to experiment with “the risks of peace.”

Just to make a few examples of the festival’s extraordinary vision, this year The Narcicyst (AKA Yassin Alsalman), an Iraqi-Canadian wondrous hip hop star, will perform, both on opening night and at a special concert on April 10th at FLOG, while legendary Iranian actress Fatemeh “Simin” Motamed-Arya is the festival’s Guest of Honor; Tarzan and Arab, by Paul Fischer — a stunning documentary about the Gaza-born Nasser brothers, two filmmakers who currently could be both stateless and celebrated in Cannes — is featured along with Mor Loushy’s Censored Voices, centered around the never-before heard confessions of Israeli soldiers upon their return from the 1967 “Six Day War”; Turkish nights will be followed by Emirati days, Florentine landmarks from the height of the Renaissance will be seen through Arab eyes in the drawings of Nasser Al Zayani, a young Bahraini artist; Mizrahi culture will be showcased, Palestinian food classes will be packed with those wanting to learn how to make the best falafel, and so on and so on.

If you think the power of one can’t change the world, you haven’t been to Middle East Now.

My recommendations can only go as far as what I’ve already watched before. Among my personal favorites, featured in this year’s festival line-up, are the following:

The opening night film, and absolute winner for me last year in both Venice and Abu Dhabi, Tales by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad. I am looking forward to the Iranian filmmaker’s previous The Blue Veiled, which apparently has a thread running through to her latest oeuvre, and features a stunning performance by Motamed-Arya.

The Valley by Lebanese filmmaker Ghassan Salhab, a story that intrigued me from the first shot — of a man walking away almost unharmed from a fiery crash in the Beqa Valley — to the last. Starring the haunting Carlos Chahine as the Stranger who seems to come from a different world altogether.

The Wanted 18 by Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan, an animated recounting of the First Intifada through the eyes of eighteen Palestinian cows (yes, you read that right, “moo,” cows) from the Palestinian village of Beit Sahour. It won Best Documentary at this year’s Abu Dhabi Film Festival.

The Kurdish masterpiece Memories on Stone by Shawkat Amin Korki, which I can only describe, without getting too inventive, as a kind of Cinema Paradiso set in post-Saddam Iraq.

Hailing from the UAE, one of the featured countries at this year’s MENOW, is Nayla Al Khaja’s short The Neighbour which was spellbinding to watch last year at the Dubai International Film Festival and I can’t wait to watch again.

Also from the UAE, a never before seen (in Italy) look at the acclaimed animated TV series Freej, created by Mohammed Saeed Harib, which shows the daily interactions of four spirited grandmothers in Dubai.

Finally, Rise, a short directed by Ali F. Mostafa, which was written and features The Narcicyst, along with his one-of-a-kind sound. And of course, everything else to do with this talented, cool, rocking musical artist whose 2009 single Hamdulillah, featuring the rapper Shadia Mansour, is featured on the current Furious 7 soundtrack.

With many more favorites guaranteed once I get to watch them in Florence, from the 8th of April through the 13th. Check out the full program here. And the interactive film guide here.

Finally, the theme for this year’s edition of Middle East Now is “Traveling in the Middle East”. A message of cultural exchange, highlighting the need to “get to know each other” at this time, a crucial time. Because while most countries in the Region have been placed by the US on a travel warning list, it is exactly now when the influence of art, that magical power achieved simply by reaching across political borders with an open mind and a free heart, is most needed.

So if you wish to let your imagination run away from you to a land where right and wrong do not matter, only what is entertainingly human does, discover in Florence a new Middle East. A Middle East Now, this weekend.

Portrait of Fatemeh Motamed-Arya by M.R. Ghavampoor, all images courtesy of Middle East Now, used with permission.

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Palestinian campaigners have chalked up an important win as the French municipal services conglomerate Veolia has sold off most of its businesses linked to the Israeli occupation in the West Bank.

The company reported that it sold its “water, waste and energy activities in Israel” to Los Angeles-based private equity firm Oaktree Capital Management.

But Veolia remains involved in one major colonization project: the Jerusalem Light Rail.

Under boycott pressure

The company has been a principal target of the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement for several years.

“Grassroots BDS activism across the world made it very difficult for Veolia to win public contracts in some parts of Europe, the US and the Middle East, leaving the company no choice but to significantly scale back its involvement in illegal Israeli projects,” Mahmoud Nawajaa, the general coordinator of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), said in a statement.

“Around 10 authorities in Ireland and the UK introduced official policy barring Veolia from public contracts,” the BNC statement notes. “Councils in at least 25 cities including London, Stockholm and Boston opted not to award or renew contracts with Veolia following public campaigns that were backed by local community leaders, churches, trade unions and mainstream political parties.”

Various pension and investment funds have also divested from Veolia over its role in Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

A Veolia official has admitted that the global campaign has “lost us important contracts.”

The boycott Veolia campaign was launched in Bilbao, the Basque Country, in November 2008, to pressure the company to end its involvement in illegal Israeli projects that serve settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, the BNC notes.

Veolia, which profits from the privatization of public services, has also been the target of actions over its labor and environmental practices.

Reparations

But, says the BNC, “Veolia continues to remain involved in the illegal Jerusalem Light Rail that links Israeli colonies to west Jerusalem through its holdings in Veolia Transdev.”

The company has however announced its intention to sell its holding in the railway. Nonetheless, the BNC’s Nawajaa said that the campaign against Veolia would continue.

“The sole purpose of the Jerusalem Light Rail is to increase the appeal and facilitate the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements through the theft of Palestinian land,” Najawaa said. “We will continue to boycott Veolia until it ends its participation in the Light Rail project and pays reparations to those Palestinian communities impacted by its support for Israel’s colonization of Palestinian land.”

“International corporations cannot simply profit from Israel’s war crimes and then leave when the going gets tough, without being held accountable,” Nawajaa added.

As The Electronic Intifada has reported, the Jerusalem Light Rail has colluded directly with Israeli occupation forces in the detention of Palestinian children.

Still, Veolia’s retreat from Israel and its colonies is powerful evidence that even the most well-financed and well-connected international corporations cannot remain immune to sustained grassroots pressure.

Source: electronicintifada.net

Film Clinic, the Cairo-based production company behind some of the freshest, boundary-pushing, Arab movies made recently, has hired Paris-based producer and film industry expert Daniel Ziskind as its European representative.

Ziskind joins the expanding shingle headed by Mohamed Hefzy in an effort to step up its European co-production and international sales side.

Ziskind, who will also continue to represent multihyphenate Amr Waked, Egypt’s biggest international star, and also a producer (“Winter of Discontent”), has more than three decades of experience in the French biz, where he started out as an a.d. for venerable auteurs including Claude Lelouch and Alain Resnais. More recently Ziskind worked for five years with Egypt’s Good News Group, producer of Marwan Hamed’s groundbreaking epic “The Yacoubian Building,” which he sold to Jean Labadie’s Bac Films in 2006.

Ziskind’s first project with Film Clinic is timely Islamic fundamentalism-themed thriller “Clash,” which he brought to French sales company Pyramide International. They took world sales on the pic by Egyptian auteur Mohamed Diab, who is known internationally for bold sex harassment pic “Cairo 678.” “Clash” is now set to start shooting in Cairo in April with Franco-German network Arte also on board.

More announcements on Film Clinic’s slate and its growing European partnerships are expected during the upcoming Cannes fest.

Film Clinic is known, among other titles, for Ahmad Abdalla’s 2010 “Microphone,” about the hip-hop scene in Egypt’s Alexandria; this radical movie was considered a harbinger of the Arab Spring. Hefzy more recently produced Amr Salama’s “Excuse My French,” about a Christian kid enrolled in an Islamic public school who finds himself forced to conceal his religious identity, and also Emirati filmmaker Ali Mostafa’s pan-Arab road movie “From A to B.”

Projects on Film Clinic’s slate include Abdalla’s next feature, Beirut-set “Black Tea,” an adaptation of Lebanese writer Rabee Jaber’s 1995 novel, and Sherif El Bendary’s “Ali, the Goat and Ibrahim,” about a man who loses his girlfriend in the 2011 uprising and believes that her soul has been reincarnated in a goat.

Source: variety.com

As Catholics and most of the western world celebrate Easter today, we asked a Greek-Orthodox priest to explain why the Orthodox Church doesn’t celebrate Pascha (Easter) on the same day the Catholic church does! Here’s his well documented explanation. By Fr. Jon Magoulias* – As -Orthodox Christians prepare to celebrate Easter on Sunday,April 12th, we … Continued

The University of Michigan has decided to proceed with a screening of the film “American Sniper” despite objections from some students.

More than 200 students signed a petition asking the school not to show the movie as part of UMix, a series of social events the university stages for students.

Bradley Cooper was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL and the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history. Kyle was fatally shot at a Texas shooting range in 2013.

Some students believed the movie’s depiction of the Iraq War reflected negatively on the Middle East and people from that region.

Michigan’s Detroit metropolitan area is home to the nation’s largest Arab-American population.

But there was a backlash to the decision to yank the movie, and a counter-petition asked school officials to reconsider.

On Wednesday, E. Royster Harper, University of Michigan’s vice president for student life, said in a statement that “It was a mistake to cancel the showing of the movie ‘American Sniper’ on campus as part of a social event for students” and that the show will go on.

“The initial decision to cancel the movie was not consistent with the high value the University of Michigan places on freedom of expression and our respect for the right of students to make their own choices in such matters,” the statement said.

Source: www.cnn.com

I am Bulgarian. I live in Paris. My third home is in Cairo. Egyptian taxi drivers flirt with me, attracted by my milk-white skin. Their Bulgarian counterparts try to guess which western country I may live in as bizarrely I put on the seat belt when in the car. And, well, Parisian taxi drivers are too expensive for me to afford.

My heart beats the same way when student protests erupt in my very first alma mater, Sofia University, and when people march with flowers on the streets of Cairo in remembrance of the January 25 Revolution. And it beat similarly when I marched in Paris against social reforms, which would transform us, highly educated youth, into precarious workers.

Every time I land in Cairo, there is a friend to welcome me at the airport. There is another friend to offer hospitality. And there is yet another dear friend to hug me saying, “welcome home”. The same happens in Bulgaria and Paris, every time I come back from yet another journey.

I don’t fit exactly anywhere but I wander the streets in any of my three home countries like a fish in water. 

Around a hundred years ago, the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans were part of the same empire – the Ottoman Empire. A notebook is “tefter” in Bulgarian and “daftar” in Egyptian Arabic. My beloved granny used to wish me “happy bath” when I was a kid… just as a former Egyptian boyfriend of mine jokingly congratulated me with the Arabic equivalent“na3eeman” twenty years later. Our regions’ histories have followed their own dynamics, but we have remained strangely similar in the quest to redefine our own selves.

I am far from vocal about my identity. I do not mean nationality, rather the way I see myself – precisely not of a given nationality. I am what people in both the Balkans and the Middle East hate the most: a hybrid identity.

It is difficult to frame intuitions and personal observations into a rational argument. My point is not about religion, but about memory and ideology, about the otherness we represent and the way it has been addressed by the west and our own political elites. I am not aiming to pay lip service to this or that school of thought. Nor am I eager to be the n-th pedantic writer spitting on the nasty westerners and their neo-colonial desiderata. The ambition here lies in explaining how orientalism and balkanism are the same side of one coin. I am no humanities scholar; so forgive me for not conforming to the comme il faut manner.

Let’s be eloquent about the burden of conforming to our own identities, and the ways culture and architecture shape political ideology in both the Balkans and the Middle East. This happens quite seamlessly through shaping the collective memory and mastering doublespeak. Amend language, semantics and public discourse, destroy buildings and monuments to substitute them with new ones to a current strongman’s glory. This rings a bell on both sides of the Mediterranean, right? 

He who controls the past
The original quote is “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past”, by Orwell. In just two sentences, he has embraced our fate.

There is not one “good” way of remembering. We know that our memories are temporary and of an uncertain future. Using them to root back justice and engage in a reconciliation process supposes the exact opposite: it supposes that it is possible to transform them into rigid facts laying the groundwork for a reconstruction of the future.

Yet, this is what happens. Playing around with collective memory is a favourite spare time activity in both the Balkans and the Middle East. Employing strong words (e.g., “genocide”, “victims of communism” for Nazi collaborators, etc.) assigns events beyond intelligible boundaries – to the kingdom of emotions. Language and semantics thus become a powerful modulator of political will and ideology.

In both the Balkans and the Middle East, to remember means to recall, to reshape, to rebuild, to hammer certain events thus transforming them into an essential bit of the construction of a society.  The concept of collective memory embraces socially shared representations of the past; these then nurture current identities. Thus, collective memory is far from being the mere sum of individual memories. Instead, it is both a cognitive and a communicative process: it is the act of remembering together.

This is how the individuals involved in this activity co-construct their memories and can oppose versions of the past presented by others. Verbalised memories reflect therefore not individual “true memories” but constitute ‘actes de langage’. These, according to outstanding linguist Emile Benvéniste, are a substitute for experience, able to live limitlessly in time and space. The existence, for example, of the Kosovo Memory Book as well as a wide range of artistic graffiti in Egypt reveal the importance of naming: “Let People Remember People”, the leitmotiv of the Kosovo Memory Book, crystallises the practice of using language as a tool to build collective memory.

Remembering together and sharing the same memories is a pre-requisite to belonging to society. Thus, inscribing precise memories in the collective memory is a political act. Such a choice, through words and monuments, translates which precise bit from the past will be used to build the future.

The nation’s collective memory builders in both the Balkans and the Middle East have been spectacularly gifted in crafting “them” and “us”, the eternal revenge against the “other”, our opposite. Such a duty to remember is therefore an identity amplification.

Constructing collective memory follows a simple three-step process: pick the facts from the past, inject them into national memory and then, document them for posterity. The ad nauseam reminder of certain past heroes and saviours, of certain past victories and glory are thus incorporated in the modern national project. These ‘foundational myths’ are then structured into memory items (monuments, faces on banknotes, etc.). The story, which these bits tell, is one of grand destiny and deeds. It is therefore difficult, if not impossible, to incorporate the violence committed by such a highly valued society into this memory scheme.

The culture of memory
Tribalism, ethnicity and ideology maintain a tenuous relationship in both the Balkans and the Middle East. In our countries, we nurture archetypes of the hero and his enemy. The hero’s sacrosanct image is a core principle of identity definition. The ‘villains’ in popular representations are ‘impure’, hybrid personalities as they have a foot in different worlds. Attempting to tell in non-imaginary terms the “sites, symbols and narrations of wars in the Balkans” means challenging the official memory and thus, identity; by doing so, you are necessarily a spy. The paranoia and rejection can grow ridiculous, for example, when Egyptian-Britons get arrested in Cairo metro for discussing January 25, 2014 in English. Such non-Manichean personalities are thus proscribed as they threaten the national identity.

It is also necessary to be able to “read” a monument – and the lack thereof. It is a textbook case of demagogy to “forget” to represent given events or to shift the representation provided by a given memorial entity. In Serbia, for instance, no monument has been built in homage of the victims of the Yugoslav wars. According to Milošević, Serbia was not at war; there was thus no victim or winner to honour.

A pre-existing monument – or even a whole city – can also be used to tell a different narrative. In a short film entitled The Third River (1952), the state-owned Iraqi Petroleum Company aimed to convey a complex yet clearly narrated nationalism. The film combines depictions of ruins and monuments, and incorporates Babylon, Assyria and the Abbasids in its history of Iraq. These have all been integral parts of the discourse and imagery of Iraqi nationalism after the coup, and more particularly under Saddam Hussein’s reign. This film also features the traditional ‘old vs. new’ semantics; the narrator tells that, “the oldest techniques are practised side-by-side with the new” while we watch images of industrial architecture and farmers labouring their land with donkey-pulled ploughs. As the film is narrated in English, one may guess that it was intended for a western (actually, British) audience. It is most probably why the film also highlights Roman and Byzantine history to support the western claim to Mesopotamia.

Egypt has not been better at commemorating the hundreds who died during the 18 days of the Revolution. In November 2013, the then-interim government unveiled a circular monument at Tahrir Square, “to the glory of the martyrs”, as a police general ensured in a communiqué. The Tahrir monument came after another memorial, honouring police and soldiers, was erected on the site of a square near the Rabaa al-Adawiya Square in eastern Cairo where Muslim Brotherhood supporters and members were brutally killed in the bloody dispersal of the sit-ins in August 2013. 

Similar whitewashing of reality is also common in the Balkans. The monument in Budrovci (Croatia) originally dedicated to the liberators of World War II today honours those who fought in the civil war in the 1990s. Worse, the past 15 years have seen the destruction of nearly all 3,000 monuments erected across Croatia in homage to World War II; the museums have been closed one after the other as well. In addition to this dreadful obliteration, a recent book narrates the purge of more than 2.8 million books (an estimated 13% of Croatia’s bibliographic fund), destroyed because written in Cyrillic, by Serbian authors, by leftist intellectuals, etc. 

We are all neighbours
We burnt and forgot monuments. But neither peoples from the Balkans nor those from the Middle East managed to uproot the human vestiges, the felool, the remnants of old regimes. We cannot however rely on outside ‘benevolent wills’ to help us throughout our transition.

Against the backdrop of the only organised activity in the Balkans and the Middle East – corruption – transitions and transformations happen. And they affect all our identities. The Berlin Wall fell and oligarchy spread all over the Balkans. Bulgaria, my beautiful country of birth, suffers from chronic oligarchy today. It is no new illness: Aristotle defined plutocracy centuries ago, and oligarchy is just one of its flavours along with military junta. In 1999, the European Union (EU) daringly announced that the transition to democracy in Bulgaria was achieved. Our oligarchs did everything to outlaw freedom of speech, and threats and various ‘accidents’ continue in neighbouring countries aimed at stifling dissent. And then, there is that thing that people call the ‘Arab Spring’. It continues to “reverberate across MENA countries in complex ways defying easy assessment and unequivocal judgements”. 

What is interesting in all these cases is that, except for Palestine and Kosovo, we hardly speak of state-building. Instead, the dynamics we observe are the ones of democracy-building. The ineptness of the Westphalian model of statehood applied to the Balkans and the Middle East is not a new fad.

I will spare us the headache of recalling in detail the number of scholars having dedicated years of brain juice to prove the Balkan and the Arab worlds’ ‘exceptional’ nature. Whoever the expert talking on this was, the rhetoric barely changed: authoritarianism blossomed because of our societies constructing intrinsic barriers to democracy. That is, both the Balkans and the Arab world are built on an array of social, cultural and economic practices that clash with democratic values. Add to this the lack of institutional frameworks able to support a sustainable transition toward democracy as well as the staggering absence of “good governance”, and here we are with God-forsaken places inhabited by barbarians who may or may not have heard about fridges.

The collective memory I elaborate on above naturally varies from person to person. Although they are greatly intertwined, Balkan and Mid-Eastern peoples’ histories are far from homogeneous. Yet, when speaking of the Balkans or of the Middle East, western discourse often essentialises these peoples. Edward Said has coined ‘orientalism’ – and Maria Todorova has come up with ‘balkanism’. I will not attempt to summarise the immensely popular work of Said, rather elaborate on Todorova’s concept since it is less well known. Balkanism is a reflection of the quest to critically examine how the geographically and historically defined Balkans have become a synonym of derogatory meaning. As she writes in The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention, balkanisation today signifies more generally the disintegration of viable nation-states and the reversion to “the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian”.

Similarly to Said who explored how western (European) culture has succeeded in producing an ‘Other’, i.e. the “politically, sociologically, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively” East, Todorova builds upon the essentialised “Other” from the Balkans. In a similar way, the western essentialist representation framework achieves a dichotomy where the west keeps its own self-image as the superior civilisation compared to the Balkans. Todorova writes, “[g]eographically inextricable from Europe, yet culturally constructed as ‘the other,’ the Balkans became, in time, the object of a number of externalized political, ideological and cultural frustrations that have served as a repository of negative characteristics against which a positive and self-congratulatory image of the ‘European’ and ‘the West’ has been constructed”.

Today, aside from the generalised fear of losing our identities, the only common aspiration of the Balkan peoples is to join the EU as an attempt to achieve a better life. Nationalisms and strong patriotisms arise – and are growing stronger as we speak – in Eastern Europe and in the Middle East, in part due to a carefully built collective memory and partly as a response to the strong ‘westernisation’ we are subjected to. The latter is a complex matter to debate as it generally includes pointing fingers, borderline comments and swiftly attained Godwin points. Yet, the challenges we face today, in each of these countries, can only be solved internally and after we have embraced our real neighbours.

And for us, the hybrid identities of ‘the fifth column’, challengers of the official collective memory, the national duty to remember becomes thus the foe to knock out yesterday, today and tomorrow as the past sucks the lifeblood out of both the present and the future.

Source: www.opendemocracy.net

Around 120 professors at New York University have joined the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in calling for the institution to divest from companies linked to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Al-Risalah newspaper has reported. The BDS movement has had some success in other parts of the US, notably in California.

According to Al-Risalah, the academics criticised the NYU policy of not disclosing the identity of the companies it is dealing with. This, they say, makes it harder to know whether they deal with the Israeli occupation or not. Students at NYU are pushing their professors to call for transparency in the university’s investments, and for divestment if and when links to the occupation are discovered.

“I support ‘NYU Out of Occupied Palestine’ because I am opposed to apartheid,” said Professor of English Elaine Freedgood in a press statement. “The international boycott of apartheid in South Africa was a significant factor in its demise.”

Other professors who signed the petition include Iraqi novelist Sinan Antoon, historians Greg Grandin and Zachary Lockman, and Ella Shohat, a well-known cultural studies scholar.

Source: www.middleeastmonitor.com

RDOBA, Spain — For a few weeks last fall, the Mosque of Córdoba, Europe’s most important Islamic heritage site, disappeared from the map.

Or, at least, from Google Maps. If a tourist had Googled directions to the mosque in mid-November, he or she would have only found a reference to the Cathedral of Córdoba — the Catholic house of worship that lies within the mosque’s ancient walls.

The disappearance of Spain’s most famous mosque (and also one of its main tourist attractions) spawned a public outcry. Spaniards flooded Google Maps’ editor with indignant emails, and a group of citizen activists in Córdoba launched an online petition demanding that Google Maps restore the word “mosque” to the monument’s name. The petition accused the bishop of Córdoba of a “symbolic appropriation” of the monument, and it warned that the change to the monument’s name “erases, in the stroke of a pen, a fundamental part of its history.” The petition received over 55,000 signatures in less than three days. On Nov. 25, Google reinstated the mosque, under the official name that has been in use since the early 1980s: the “Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba.”

Just what prompted the incident, however, remains shrouded in mystery: The Catholic Church has denied any involvement; Google, in a statement to Spain’s leading newspaper, El País, merely said that its map information “comes from very diverse sources.” But in the mosque’s brief, unexplained disappearance, many Spaniards saw a hint of something more sinister: an ongoing effort to erase any traces of Islamic heritage from a building that was once the intellectual and spiritual heart of Muslim Iberia.

In the 10th century, Córdoba was the most spectacular city in Europe and perhaps in the entire world. The city boasted paved and well-lit streets, running water, thousands of shops, and a wealth of booksellers and libraries, including the caliph’s library, which held some 400,000 books. Córdoba’s crown jewel was the colossal mosque commissioned by ʿAbd al-Rahman I in A.D. 785 and expanded by his successors in the Umayyad dynasty that ruled Córdoba. By 929, the Umayyads had claimed for themselves the mantle of the caliphate, in a bid to cast their capital, Córdoba, as the center of the entire Muslim world.

The Mosque of Córdoba was the symbol of Umayyad power and also the center of the city’s intellectual life. Large enough to hold 40,000 people, the mosque served as both the city’s main prayer space and also the university, where the intellectual elite of the western Islamic world went to study. The building commanded such respect that when Córdoba succumbed to the forces of Ferdinand III in 1236, its new Christian rulers transformed the mosque into a cathedral, while preserving its prayer niche (facing toward Mecca) and its celebrated red-and-white horseshoe arches.

In its heyday, the Mosque of Córdoba was the embodiment of the cultural achievements of al-Andalus, the Arabic name for medieval Muslim Iberia. Today, the hybrid structure — a cathedral within a mosque — has come to encapsulate a different ideal: The building evokes a supposedly harmonious past, when Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together in peace, an idea that the Spanish refer to as convivencia, or “coexistence.”

But convivencia is looking increasingly shaky in modern-day Spain. Despite its Muslim past, the country is currently home to some of the highest levels of anti-Islam sentiment in the West: In 2013, 65 percent of Spaniards surveyed by the Bertelsmann Foundation agreed with the statement that “Islam is not compatible with the Western world,” as compared to 55 percent in France and 45 percent in Britain.

At the same time, Spain is looking to cast itself as a leader in the ongoing conversation about Europe’s increasingly troubled relationship with Islam — based in part on Córdoba and Andalusia’s historical reputation for religious tolerance. The country is trying to position itself as both an international symbol of interfaith harmony and a major destination for Muslim tourism and business.

At the center of these forces stands the Mosque of Córdoba, which has become a focal point in the increasingly fierce debates over how Spain’s Islamic past should inform its present and its future.

* * *
The mosque’s brief disappearance from Google Maps in November is just one chapter in an evolving dispute about the monument’s name and meaning. Since 2006, the Cathedral Chapter of Córdoba, the branch of the Catholic Church that administers the site, has slowly wiped away the word “mosque” from the monument’s title and from the print and online publications about the site, where it is now officially called the “Cathedral of Córdoba.”

The church has also revised the tourist literature for the site in order to emphasize its Christian identity. The official tourist brochure from 1981 extolled the structure as “the foremost monument of the Islamic West” and called it the epitome of “the Hispano-Muslim style at its greatest splendor.” In the mid-2000s, however, the church debuted a new brochure whose introduction does not mention the monument’s Islamic past and, instead, states that the building “was consecrated as the mother Church of the Diocese in the year 1236.” The brochure continues, “Since then and without missing a single day in this beautiful and grandiose temple, the Cathedral Chapter has celebrated solemn worship, and the Christian community comes together to listen to the Word of God and to participate in the Sacraments.” The introduction concludes by asking the visitor to the Cathedral “to be respectful with the identity of this Christian temple.” The period of Muslim rule is relegated to a sidebar, titled “The Muslim Intervention.”

In fact, the new brochure aims to convince the visitor that the building was Christian before it was Muslim, and that the five centuries of Muslim rule were just a parenthesis in Córdoba’s long-standing history as a Christian city. Archaeology plays an important role in this narrative. The church has funded excavations in an attempt to document the existence of a Visigothic church, the Basilica of Saint Vincent, underneath the oldest part of the mosque. “It is a historical fact,” the brochure declares, “that the Basilica of Saint Vincent was expropriated and destroyed in order to build on top of it the subsequent Mosque in the Islamic period.”

Today, when you visit the monument, the first thing you encounter is a glass-covered hole in the floor, through which you can observe excavated mosaics, which a nearby plaque attributes to the Basilica of Saint Vincent. Nevertheless, the church’s archaeological reconstruction is, at best, speculative. Art historian Susana Calvo Capilla, a leading specialist in the history of the building, argued in a public lecture in Córdoba in October that the archaeological findings do not give any clear evidence of a church existing on the site where the mosque was built in the eighth century.

The church’s assault on the monument’s name and Muslim heritage spawned a local outcry in Córdoba, but it did not become a national and international cause célèbre until the past year. The renewed attention was in large part due to the intervention of a group of citizen activists who call themselves the “Platform for the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba.” The group launched an online petition in early 2014, demanding that the word “mosque” be restored to the monument’s official name and calling for the building to be administered by a public authority, rather than by the Catholic Church. The petition now has almost 400,000 signees, including such cultural luminaries as the British architect Norman Foster and the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo. In addition, the platform’s activities have attracted the attention of many international media outlets, including the BBC and Al Jazeera. In December 2014, the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISESCO), which represents 52 member states, released a statement condemning the name change, calling it “an attempt to obliterate the landmarks of Islamic history in Andalusia, and a provocation for Muslims around the world, especially Muslims of Spain.”

For platform members, the mosque-cathedral is more than just a place. It is “a universal paradigm of concord between cultures,” in the words of their petition. “The fundamental idea of the Córdoba paradigm is to recuperate the historical glory of what Córdoba represented in the ninth and 10th centuries,” said spokesman Miguel Santiago — to preserve it as an “interreligious beacon” for Muslims, Catholics, Jews, and all religions alike.

* * *
Historians today are divided on whether or not Umayyad Córdoba was actually a place of exceptional tolerance. Scholars hoping to deflate its reputation as a model of interfaith harmony point to such cases as the “martyrs of Córdoba” — Christians who were executed in the city in the ninth century for publicly insulting Islam. Many historians would also point out that it is anachronistic to use the modern concept of “tolerance” to describe social relations in the medieval past.

Yet there are certainly compelling cases of interfaith life from Spain’s Muslim period. Those who want to celebrate al-Andalus as a multicultural paradise exalt figures like Hasdai Iibn Shaprut, a 10th-century Córdoban Jew who served as the personal advisor, physician, and diplomat for the caliph ʿAbd al-Rahman III (who ruled from 912 to 961). Hasdai was also the patron to the Jewish writer Dunash ben Labrat, whose adaptation of Arabic poetry’s meter and themes into Hebrew led to a golden age in Hebrew poetry. Dunash exhorted his fellow Andalusian Jews to “let Scripture be your Eden and the Arabs’ books your paradise grove.”

The truth, though, is that we base our claims about interreligious relations in Islamic Córdoba on a fragmented archive that gives us only fleeting glimpses of what day-to-day life in the city really looked like. How we weave together those fragments into coherent stories about the past depends as much on the historical archive as it does on the hopes, desires, and ideals that we project onto the past. Whether or not Hasdai and Dunash are illustrative cases of medieval Córdoban culture or outliers, their lives continue to speak to us precisely because they provide a counterweight to our world, with its myriad conflicts between Muslims, Jews, and Christians. In the end, assertions about the tolerance of Islamic Córdoba tell us more about our current moment than they do about the medieval past.

The idea of a once-multicultural and tolerant Córdoba has become even more powerful in the post-9/11 era, when it has often served as a corrective for the “clash of civilizations” mentality that underwrote the Bush-era “war on terror.” U.S. President Barack Obama evoked Córdoba’s “proud tradition of tolerance” in his famous 2009 speech in Cairo. Playing on this same theme of tolerance, the Muslim leader behind the controversial “Ground Zero mosque” in New York, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, called the proposed Islamic cultural center “Córdoba House.” The name, he wrote in his book Moving the Mountain, was meant to recall a place and time in which “Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived in what was then the most enlightened, pluralistic, and tolerant society on earth.”

The idea of Córdoba’s tolerance has become the bedrock for a potent marketing strategy for the former capital of the caliphate. At the same time that the mosque-cathedral’s Islamic identity is under threat, business and cultural leaders in Córdoba are working to position the city as a major destination for Muslim tourism and as the leading European producer of halal food and services. According to a report published by Thomson Reuters and the consulting firm DinarStandard in December, the global Muslim market spent $140 billion on travel in 2013, accounting for 11.5 percent of global travel expenditures, and $1.3 trillion on food, or 17.7 percent of global expenditures. With growing international competition for a share of what the report dubs “the global Muslim lifestyle market,” Córdoba and Granada, two of the most emblematic cities of al-Andalus, are positioning themselves to lead the Spanish charge in this new market. Córdoba’s city government has partnered with several Spanish Muslim organizations to propose the creation of a halal “cluster” in Córdoba, which, they say, will host as many as 1,300 businesses devoted to halal food and service in a region where the unemployment rate hovers at around 34 percent.

When the Halal Institute, which certifies halal food and products in Spain, announced the “Córdoba Halal” project on its website in late 2014, it suggested that Córdoba’s multicultural past made the city a logical home for the initiative: “In the collective imaginary of Muslims, Córdoba is a historical point of reference of Islamic civilization in the West, and, therefore, what we seek when we visit this city is to find a place that carries values such as concord, mutual respect, religious freedom, diversity.”

The Córdoba brand has also created a space for Spanish travel agencies that focus exclusively on Muslim tourism to Spain. Most clients of the Madrid-based agency Nur and Duha come from Southeast Asia or the Gulf countries, said Flora Sáez, the agency’s director and a Spanish-born convert to Islam. For her clients, Sáez said, Córdoba is “a myth,” which symbolizes “the past, the lost splendor.” She said, “We’ve seen more than a few of our clients cry from the emotion of visiting the Mosque of Córdoba.”

Andalucian Routes, another tourist agency, works mostly with Muslim youth groups from Western countries. The agency’s director, Tariq Mahmood, was born in Pakistan and grew up in Birmingham, England. He first traveled to Spain as a teenager on a road trip with friends. At the time, he says, he was experiencing an “identity crisis” because he did not feel accepted in British society. Visiting Spain’s Islamic heritage sites gave him “the missing link for my Asian-Muslim-Islamic identity and my Western identity.” He believes that travel in Spain can help young European Muslims see that “there’s no contradiction” between being Muslim and being European.

* * *
Scholars and journalists alike have tended to see the presence of Muslims in Europe as a postwar phenomenon, related to the migration of former colonial subjects to such metropoles as Paris and London. Spain, too, has seen these demographic shifts: According to the most recent census of Spain’s Muslim population, there are currently 1,858,409 Muslims living in Spain, and of them, almost 800,000 are Moroccan citizens. Most of the Moroccans in Spain hail from the northern regions of Morocco, which were part of the Spanish protectorate in Morocco from 1912 to 1956.

What distinguishes Spanish Muslims is not demographics but discourse. French Muslims are often cast as a new challenge to old republican values — and, in particular, to the idea of laïcité (secularism). Spanish Muslims, in contrast, can draw upon the country’s Muslim past in order to envision themselves as essential parts of Spanish identity, rather than as awkward additions to it.

A recent spike in Spanish Islamophobia, however, has challenged Spanish Muslims’ efforts to see themselves as part of their country’s social fabric. Politicians on the Spanish right have taken to scaremongering about an imminent Muslim “reconquest” of Spain: In a press conference held in Córdoba in November, Santiago Abascal, the fiery leader of a populist far-right Spanish political party named Vox, accused the platform — the group petitioning to restore “mosque” to the mosque-cathedral’s name — of throwing “a lifeline to jihadism.” He also warned that “Córdoba, Granada, and al-Andalus … are in the sights and the ideology of the most radical Islam.”

In the run-up to the March 22 Andalusian elections, Vox produced an incendiary YouTube video about the mosque-cathedral. In a fake newscast dated March 2018, the newscaster announces that the government of Andalusia has “expropriated” the monument from the Church, and that “the Mosque of Córdoba will be reserved, from now on, for Muslim prayer.” The newscaster then goes to a fake reporter in Córdoba, a woman dressed in a headscarf, who reports that over 20 Muslim countries have sent delegations to congratulate the Andalusian government on its decision, with the biggest delegation coming from Iran. She concludes by estimating that more than 2 million Muslims are planning to move to Córdoba in order to “reconnect with their past and their culture.” The video cuts to black, and then the following text appears: “Do you want a future like that? We can still change it. Vox.”

The video drew more than 300,000 views in less than a week, and it was the talk of the town in Córdoba. The massive response to Vox’s video did not translate into votes; in the March elections, Vox only received 0.33 percent of the city’s vote. But the provocative video is, nonetheless, a stark reminder of the Islamophobic backdrop against which the mosque-cathedral debate is unfolding.

I first spoke with Santiago, the spokesman for the “Platform for the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba” on Jan. 8, the day after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. The events in Paris cast a long shadow over our conversation. Santiago presented the mosque-cathedral, with its hybrid architecture and origins, as an antidote to the extremist ideology behind the attacks that ravaged Paris. The edifice, he said, is “a universal mirror to tell the world that intercultural life is possible, that interreligious life is possible because humans are mixed.” Antonio Manuel Rodríguez, another prominent voice in the platform, called Córdoba’s tradition of tolerance “an extraordinarily useful social tool” in the face of Europe’s increasingly fraught relationship with Islam.

The members of the platform are not alone in seeing the debate over the mosque-cathedral as an important flashpoint in the broader debate about intercultural life in contemporary Europe. When El País organized an homage for the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the paper’s president, Juan Luis Cebrián, gave a speech in which he criticized the bishop of Córdoba for removing the word “mosque” from the name of the mosque-cathedral. In the same speech, Cebrián accused the bishop of “assaulting” Spanish Muslims and of provoking “attitudes of hate and fundamentalism.” Guillermo Altares, a staff writer for El País, wrote a few weeks later that Córdoba “is missing an opportunity to become a pole of dialogue between religions at a moment when that is more necessary than ever.”

Whatever the international repercussions of the controversy might be, Muslims in Spain are already feelings its effects. All of the Muslims I interviewed for this article shared recent stories about times when they or their friends had been harassed when visiting the mosque-cathedral. When I asked Kamel Mekhelef, the president of the Association of Muslims in Córdoba, about these anecdotes, he replied: “Those aren’t anecdotes; they’re realities…. Just 10 days ago, a couple from Arabia came to visit, a man and his wife. I took them to visit the mosque. Even though the guards there know me, the second we entered, they started talking with each other on their walkie-talkies and following us. Because they have that paranoia that every Muslim who enters there is going to try to pray.”

The former president of the Córdoba-based Islamic Council, Mansur Escudero, made an international splash when he petitioned Pope Benedict, in 2006, to turn the Cathedral of Córdoba into an ecumenical space, open for both Muslim and Christian prayer. When the petition was rejected, Escudero began performing his Friday prayers outside the mosque-cathedral as a protest against the Church’s decision. Escudero died in 2010, and the Islamic Council has since retracted its call for universal use of the monument.

For Mekhelef, the issue is not whether Muslims are allowed to pray in the mosque-cathedral. What bothers him more is that some non-Muslim Spaniards do not want to see the history of Islamic Córdoba as part of their own history. “There is an attempt to falsify history,” he said, and to make Spaniards believe that the medieval Islamic civilization built there “is something alien to them. And that’s not how it is, because it’s something that came from here. It is Córdoban.” The famous philosophers and physicians of the period “weren’t from Arabia or from Algeria or Morocco. They were Córdobans.”

* * *
In June of 1766, the Moroccan ambassador to Spain, Ahmad bin al-Mahdi al-Ghazzal, passed through Córdoba on his way to Madrid to negotiate a peace treaty between Spain and Morocco. The trip was a homecoming of sorts. In 1492, Ghazzal’s ancestors had been driven off the Iberian Peninsula. By crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, Ghazzal was also crossing the threshold between present and past in order to reconnect with one of the greatest periods of cultural splendor in Islamic history.

Córdoba and its famous mosque were the centerpiece of Ghazzal’s nostalgic tour. Ghazzal visited Córdoba over 500 years after its Christian conquest, but when he entered the city’s most renowned monument, he did not see a cathedral. Rather, he saw a time when Córdoba was the home of 70 libraries and some of the leading philosophers, doctors, and poets of the world.

“We remembered what had happened there during the time of Islam,” Ghazzal writes. “All of the sciences that were studied there, and all of the Qurʾanic verses that were recited there, and all of the prayers that were performed there, and how many times God (let him be exalted!) was revered there. And we began to imagine that the mosque’s walls and its columns were greeting us and consoling us from the great sorrow we felt, until we began to address the inanimate objects and to embrace the columns, one by one, and to kiss the walls and the surfaces of the mosque.”

Today, 1.5 million visitors a year follow Ghazzal’s footsteps to the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, hoping to catch a glimpse of a time when the most culturally advanced part of Europe was Muslim. Saad Bourkadi, a Moroccan engineer from Rabat, is one of them. Bourkadi has visited Córdoba every year for the past three years as a member of a Moroccan cultural association that organizes an annual trip to Spain’s Islamic heritage sites in Córdoba, Seville, Granada, and Toledo.

In February, Bourkadi told me that his group doesn’t plan to visit Córdoba this year because they are afraid of visiting the mosque. There has been a “radical change in the treatment of Muslims,” he said. “When you enter the mosque, and the guards see that you are Muslim,” he told me, “they tell you that prayer is forbidden.” When Bourkadi and his group visited the site in the summer of 2014, they expected to be warned not to pray. What they didn’t expect was that the guards would trail them closely from section to section, making sure that that they didn’t even try. Bourkadi says that the guards’ harassment of Muslim visitors is so severe that he thinks “they want to make sure that you know that you are being harassed.” He observed that his group was visiting the monument alongside a group of Japanese tourists, who were able to walk around and take pictures without any monitoring from the guards. (A spokesman for the Cathedral Chapter denied that his organization gives any special instructions to the security guards about how to treat Muslim visitors.)

And yet Córdoba and its mosque remain an important symbol for Bourkadi and his fellow Moroccans, millions of whom claim descent from al-Andalus. In fact, the 2011 Moroccan constitution enshrines al-Andalus as a major component of Moroccan “national identity,” which the constitution describes as “the Moroccan people’s attachment to the values of openness, moderation, tolerance, and dialogue” — in short, convivencia. It is this spirit of intercultural dialogue that attracted Bourkadi, an engineer, to become an amateur historian and enthusiast of Spain’s Islamic past. “I believe that the study of al-Andalus is a way of creating common ground with Spain,” Bourkadi told me. “It is a means of drawing Spain and Morocco closer together.”

But Bourkadi no longer feels welcome here. And for now, he has no plans to come back.

Source: foreignpolicy.com