C L O S E R

2007: Year of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

Posted on January 3rd, 2007 by .
Categories: Arts & culture, Internal Debates, Islam in the Netherlands.

Unesco has announced that the 800th anniversary of Mevlana Rumi will be celebrated in the Netherlands in 2007 as the Unesco Year of Mevlana Rumi in the Netherlands.
Mevlana Rumi was born in Balkh (now part of Afghanistan) and died in Konya (now Turkey). Rumi’s significance transcends national, ethnic and religious boundaries. His poems have been widely translated into many of the world’s languages in various formats. After Rumi’s death, his followers founded the Mevlevi Order, better known as the “Whirling Dervishes“, who believe in performing their worship in the form of dance and music ceremony called the sema.

The general theme of his thoughts is essentially about the concept of Tawheed (unity) and union with his beloved (the primal root) and the longing for reunity which could be achieved throught music, poetry and dancing. The sacred dance of the Whirling Dervishes, Sema / turning, symbolizes a mystical journey where the traveller turns towards the truth and love, abandons hostility, hatred, reaches ‘Perfection’ where true peace and harmony exists and returns as a more mature person. Not difficult to understand why Rumi’s message also attracted Jews, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists. For many followers Rumi was a true poet of love:

Love’s nationality is separate from all other religions,
The lover’s religion and nationality is the Beloved (God).

The lover’s cause is separate from all other causes
Love is the astrolabe of God’s mysteries.

From: The Mysteries of the Universe and Rumi’s Discoveries on the Majestic Path of Love

A question I (since I’m not an expert on his work) have: Does Rumi prefer love as the means to submit oneselves to the divine revelation and what does this mean for the place of reason in his work?

1 comment.

Marrakech Inshallah – A film by Steffen Pierce

Posted on December 22nd, 2006 by .
Categories: Arts & culture, Morocco.

Harvard Film Archive’s Steffen Pierce to Debut Feature Film Saturday – HCL News – Harvard College Library
In the 1980s when Steffen Pierce, Assistant Curator of the Harvard Film Archive, spent several years working as a photographer in southern Spain, he fell in love with the country and culture of nearby Morocco, and took advantage of the opportunity to visit close to every other month. Later when a New York producer hired him to return to Morocco and Algiers to write a script on the French historical figure Charles de Foucauld, he took the job—but the film was never made. In frustration, Pierce decided to turn to small-budget films that he could make himself. Two decades later, Pierce, working in collaboration with brother and fellow filmmaker Christian, has channeled his familiarity with Morocco to produce two movies filmed there on location.

This Saturday, December 16, Pierce and his brother will debut their feature film, Marrakech Inshallah, at the HFA in a special screening and meet-the-director event. Pierce, who has been with the HFA for 15 years, was motivated to make the fictional film after his experiences with the brothers’ first movie made on Moroccan soil, the documentary The Bride Market of Imilchil (1988). At the time, the Pierces interviewed two dozen individuals for their film and only later, after they had returned to the United States, learned that everyone they’d spoken to had been arrested and “re-interviewed” by Moroccan authorities.

2 comments.

Neerlands hoop

Posted on November 4th, 2006 by .
Categories: Arts & culture.

Het boek van Laila Lalami, bij bloggers misschien beter bekend als Moorish Girl, is nu ook uit in Nederland. Haar boek Hope and other Dangerous Pursuits is vertaald als Hoop en andere gevaarlijke verlangens. In januari is zij in Nederland bij het Winternachten festival.

0 comments.

C L O S E R – Cruci-Fixion Lane

Posted on September 2nd, 2006 by .
Categories: Arts & culture, Internal Debates, Multiculti Issues.

And in case you find your maker perhaps you’ll plead for us a bit (Procal Harum – Crucifiction Lane)

When I was about thirteen and still lived at my parents farm, we had these people living in our neighbourhood. They also had a farm and their dad was still living there. He was an old nice men, perhaps a little bit forgetting things and telling wonderful stories that were obviously not true such as the one with the giant purple hare with a two by three udder…. He saw this hare in the old farmhouse that was now used as a place for their cows. In this farmhouse above the entrance on the inside their was also a big Crucifix. It was big and old and was hanging there a long time. So long that even the spider webs across the Crucifix were covered not only with dead flies but also with dust. Nevertheless, it was important to him he told me once when I took it off to have a closer look. You never he said what could happen in the future, perhaps he would need Jesus. It was holy for him, it wasn’t a dusty wooden thing covered with fly shit and dead flies, it was a hopefull promis for the afterlife; a life that was real for him since he was 92 at that time.

It is not surprising then that the program “God doesn’t exist” (God bestaat niet) was considered a blasphemy for example because of the following picture:
(Yes that is a naked black woman being crucified). This blew over and now we have in the Netherlands a row over the upcoming concert of Madonna, also about a crucifixion scene:

Watch the video with Madonna’s Live to Tell crucifixion scene:

According to Madonna this is a means to appeal to the audience to donate AIDS charities. Nothing wrong with that cause of course. Madonna probably feels the same and said “I don’t think Jesus would be mad at me and the message I’m trying to send,” in New York Daily News. Not everyone is inclined to believe this, such Thomistic:

Let’s face facts: Madonna has built her career mixing pop songs with visual imagery which has promoted sexuality at odds with Chrsitian values. She has posed naked for photographs throughout her career, and many of these pictures have glorified deviant sexual acts. She has a large homosexual following and, although she is not homosexual, she has frequently identified herself with homosexuals and homosexuality. She has, form the beginning of her career, mixed religious imagery with blasphemy [her Like A Prayer video, her movie Truth or Dare (which depicted her Blonde Ambition Tour) and even her recent album “American Life” where she has sung “there is no resurrection”]. Madonna is an apostate Catholic who has serious issues with the Catholic Church and Christianity in general. She has been quoted as saying the following:

“Crucifixes are sexy because there is a naked man on them.”

“Nuns are sexy.”

She has also suggested that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were sexually intimate (and this was in the early 1990’s, long before “The Da Vinci Code”).

Madonna has attempted to portray herself as having become softer and more spiritual, and I have heard many Catholics talk about this with hope that she is experiencing a conversion.

Hopefully, Madonna will come back home to the Faith she has abandoned and openly mocked. However, she will need to publicly retract much of her career and admit that her actions were blasphemous and that many of her works (like her “Sex” book, which she reportedly quietly regrets) which led countless souls into sin and darkness.

Once she has done such things, and renounced her denial of the Divinity of Christ and His Resurrection, I will be more inclined to listen to her speculations about what Jesus would think of her behavior.

This case brings not only to attention the way religion is portrayed in modern culture and mass media, but of course also how it is done and by whom and how people react to that. (more…)

3 comments.

C L O S E R – MaRock!

Posted on May 27th, 2006 by .
Categories: Arts & culture, Morocco.

Voor de oplettende Closer-lezer, niks nieuws, maar het schijnt dat MaRock in Marokko vooral nogal wat ophef heeft gezorgd en dat deze commotie nu ook in Nederland is doorgedrongen.

Voor meer recente info zie ook ook de bijbehorende weblog (in het Frans).

0 comments.

Protected: Trouw, deVerdieping| dossiers – Naema Tahir

Posted on May 6th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Arts & culture.

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Protected: Trouw, deVerdieping| dossiers – Naema Tahir

Posted on May 6th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Arts & culture.

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The Daily Star – Arts & Culture – ‘Paradise Now,’ what’s next?

Posted on May 4th, 2006 by .
Categories: Arts & culture.

The Daily Star – Arts & Culture – ‘Paradise Now,’ what’s next?
‘Paradise Now,’ what’s next?
Hany Abu-Assad discusses making art that is full of politics but free of rage

By Jim Quilty
Daily Star staff
Thursday, May 04, 2006

‘Paradise Now,’ what’s next?

Interview

BEIRUT: “My aim is to make art that lasts, not a piece of analysis. There are political scientists to do that.”Hany Abu-Assad is talking about his next project. This is an exotic turn for the Netherlands-based Palestinian filmmaker who has been doing variations of the same interview for the last year and a half – all in support of his last project, “Paradise Now.”

That film won a plethora of awards, including the Blue Angel for Best European Film at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival, the Amnesty International Award and the Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Film. It was Palestine’s official entry for best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.

Awards and critical praise were balanced by controversy.

“Paradise Now” tells the story of Khaled (Ali Suliman) and Said (Kais Nashef), childhood friends from the West Bank town of Nablus who’ve been selected to carry out a suicide operation in Tel Aviv.

Both men, and their dead-end working class existence, could be transplanted anywhere in the world – were it not for the Israeli occupation and the ambient humiliation it causes.

Khaled is so lumbered with inchoate rage that he can’t hold down a job. Said’s father was executed as a collaborator, leaving him weighed down by an ambivalent mix of shame and hatred for the occupation that made his father a traitor.

When the resistance calls on them to sacrifice themselves, they accept.

Said’s foil, in more ways than one, is Suha (Lubna Azabal), the daughter of a slain resistance leader returned from overseas. She works with a human rights NGO and opposes any militancy that gives Israeli soldiers an excuse to kill more Palestinians.

The film begins shortly before Khaled and Said are given their mission and follows them as they prepare but then find it impossible to carry out the operation as planned. This gives both men an opportunity to re-evaluate.

As Abu-Assad has pointed out in previous interviews, “Paradise Now” is a thriller – a genre to which contemporary Palestine is particularly well suited. It’s an unusually well-devised thriller, leading the audience through an uncharacteristically human depiction of what can be wrought from humiliation and rage.

It does so without being unremittingly bleak. There are several moments of dark humor here.

“Life is neither exclusively comic nor tragic,” the writer-director says. “And when you move from comedy to tragedy … it’s the shift in direction that makes you feel.” (more…)

0 comments.

The Daily Star – Arts & Culture – 'Paradise Now,' what's next?

Posted on May 4th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Arts & culture.

The Daily Star – Arts & Culture – ‘Paradise Now,’ what’s next?
‘Paradise Now,’ what’s next?
Hany Abu-Assad discusses making art that is full of politics but free of rage

By Jim Quilty
Daily Star staff
Thursday, May 04, 2006

‘Paradise Now,’ what’s next?

Interview

BEIRUT: “My aim is to make art that lasts, not a piece of analysis. There are political scientists to do that.”Hany Abu-Assad is talking about his next project. This is an exotic turn for the Netherlands-based Palestinian filmmaker who has been doing variations of the same interview for the last year and a half – all in support of his last project, “Paradise Now.”

That film won a plethora of awards, including the Blue Angel for Best European Film at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival, the Amnesty International Award and the Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Film. It was Palestine’s official entry for best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.

Awards and critical praise were balanced by controversy.

“Paradise Now” tells the story of Khaled (Ali Suliman) and Said (Kais Nashef), childhood friends from the West Bank town of Nablus who’ve been selected to carry out a suicide operation in Tel Aviv.

Both men, and their dead-end working class existence, could be transplanted anywhere in the world – were it not for the Israeli occupation and the ambient humiliation it causes.

Khaled is so lumbered with inchoate rage that he can’t hold down a job. Said’s father was executed as a collaborator, leaving him weighed down by an ambivalent mix of shame and hatred for the occupation that made his father a traitor.

When the resistance calls on them to sacrifice themselves, they accept.

Said’s foil, in more ways than one, is Suha (Lubna Azabal), the daughter of a slain resistance leader returned from overseas. She works with a human rights NGO and opposes any militancy that gives Israeli soldiers an excuse to kill more Palestinians.

The film begins shortly before Khaled and Said are given their mission and follows them as they prepare but then find it impossible to carry out the operation as planned. This gives both men an opportunity to re-evaluate.

As Abu-Assad has pointed out in previous interviews, “Paradise Now” is a thriller – a genre to which contemporary Palestine is particularly well suited. It’s an unusually well-devised thriller, leading the audience through an uncharacteristically human depiction of what can be wrought from humiliation and rage.

It does so without being unremittingly bleak. There are several moments of dark humor here.

“Life is neither exclusively comic nor tragic,” the writer-director says. “And when you move from comedy to tragedy … it’s the shift in direction that makes you feel.” (more…)

0 comments.

Protected: Trouw, De 10 Geboden – Theo Maassen

Posted on April 23rd, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Arts & culture, Islam in the Netherlands.

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ArteEast-Virtual Gallery: Ali Kaaf

Posted on April 20th, 2006 by .
Categories: Arts & culture.

ArteEast-Virtual Gallery
FEATURED ARTIST: Ali Kaaf
February 1, 2006

ArteEast introduces the drawings and photography of Ali Kaaf, which are explorations of black itself — as a color, a material and formal presence, and a set of possibilities and foreclosures. More broadly, Kaaf’s works are visual discussions of the contrasts of light and form and their material possibilities. These discussions draw on, but are not limited to, different international histories of modernism. Critics have also highlighted a Sufi element to his work. And they have welcomed its concern with artistic questions unrelated to the political, in contrast to much of the art from the Middle East featured in Western arts institutions. Indeed, Kaaf’s work reflects an intense interest with materiality among many artists working in the Middle East, but so rarely acknowledged elsewhere. It reminds us of the necessary freedom of all artists to engage formal and material questions, and the truly international history of that process. Born in Algeria of Syrian descent, Kaaf graduated from the Lebanese University and later trained at the Universitat der Kunste in Berlin. His bright future was recently recognized when he was awarded Germany’s prestigious Daad Prize. Since 1999, he has exhibited in Amman, Beirut, and Berlin. He is currently an artist in residence with Solidere’s Beirut reconstruction program, and this exhibition features new work that is simultaneously showing at an exhibition at Beirut Central in Lebanon.

0 comments.

Middle East Online – ‘Marock’ causes shock and awe in Morocco

Posted on January 14th, 2006 by .
Categories: Arts & culture, Misc. News.

Middle East Online
‘Marock’ causes shock and awe in Morocco

Filmmakers lash out at Leila Marrakchi’s controversial film about Muslim-Jew love story in Tangiers film festival.

By Saad Guerraoui – LONDON

Leila Marrakchi’s “Marock” is a movie not like any other movie Moroccans have seen or heard. The Moroccan film has caused uproar among the audience and critics in the eight Moroccan film festival held in Tangiers.

Many elites of Moroccan cinema were appalled by the story which touches Islamic values and questioned the filmmaker’s nationality.

Mohamed Asli, a film director, explained how Marrakchi had been blindly manipulated by the “Zionist ideology.”

“Neither the young lady (director) nor her film is Moroccan… and they have no place in national festival,” he lamented. “The government becomes accomplice of Imperialism and Zionism by allowing its screening.”

The film tells the story of a rich 17-year old Moroccan girl from a liberal Muslim family who falls in love with a handsome Jew from a rich family just before she graduated from high school.

Marrakchi said the title “illustrates a spoiled, wild and schizophrenic youth which adheres to western lifestyle but still attached to its traditions.”

The filmmaker unveiled a taboo in the Moroccan society. Her film simply reflects the real truth but which many would not dare talking about. Marock was filmed in Casablanca where you can come across a sexy girl dressed in a mini-skirt and another veiled from head to toe, and where you find the country’s trendiest night clubs and Islamic fundamentalism.

However, there was another cultural factor which angered the audience. The only conversations heard in Arabic were those of domestics, chauffeurs, and parking attendants. The filmmaker forgot the illiteracy level in Morocco where only a tiny minority is able to speak and understand French fluently.

Marock certainly caused a trauma in the festival, but raised many question marks that were forgotten in the Moroccan society where the wealthy teens are more and more rebellious against the country’s Islamic and cultural values.

1 comment.

Middle East Online – 'Marock' causes shock and awe in Morocco

Posted on January 14th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Arts & culture, Misc. News.

Middle East Online
‘Marock’ causes shock and awe in Morocco

Filmmakers lash out at Leila Marrakchi’s controversial film about Muslim-Jew love story in Tangiers film festival.

By Saad Guerraoui – LONDON

Leila Marrakchi’s “Marock” is a movie not like any other movie Moroccans have seen or heard. The Moroccan film has caused uproar among the audience and critics in the eight Moroccan film festival held in Tangiers.

Many elites of Moroccan cinema were appalled by the story which touches Islamic values and questioned the filmmaker’s nationality.

Mohamed Asli, a film director, explained how Marrakchi had been blindly manipulated by the “Zionist ideology.”

“Neither the young lady (director) nor her film is Moroccan… and they have no place in national festival,” he lamented. “The government becomes accomplice of Imperialism and Zionism by allowing its screening.”

The film tells the story of a rich 17-year old Moroccan girl from a liberal Muslim family who falls in love with a handsome Jew from a rich family just before she graduated from high school.

Marrakchi said the title “illustrates a spoiled, wild and schizophrenic youth which adheres to western lifestyle but still attached to its traditions.”

The filmmaker unveiled a taboo in the Moroccan society. Her film simply reflects the real truth but which many would not dare talking about. Marock was filmed in Casablanca where you can come across a sexy girl dressed in a mini-skirt and another veiled from head to toe, and where you find the country’s trendiest night clubs and Islamic fundamentalism.

However, there was another cultural factor which angered the audience. The only conversations heard in Arabic were those of domestics, chauffeurs, and parking attendants. The filmmaker forgot the illiteracy level in Morocco where only a tiny minority is able to speak and understand French fluently.

Marock certainly caused a trauma in the festival, but raised many question marks that were forgotten in the Moroccan society where the wealthy teens are more and more rebellious against the country’s Islamic and cultural values.

1 comment.

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