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Paying tribute to Her Highness the Honourable Lady Assayida Ahd Abdullah Hamed Al Busaidi, Spouse of the Sultan of Oman, the Infrastructure, Technology, Industrial and Consumer Solutions cluster of Mohsin Haider Darwish LLC (MHD-ITICS), sponsored an event to set a new Guinness World Record for ‘A Word Written with the Largest Number of Flowers’.
The event was hosted by Lujaina Mohsin Darwish, Chairperson, MHD-ITICS. The mammoth task of assembling 12,000 roses, which spelt out the First Lady’s name, ‘Ahad’, began with fabrication work on 25 October and was successfully completed on 26 October.
It was then displayed at a grand event organised near the Snow Zone area, located on level two of the Mall of Oman. Official adjudicators from Guinness World Records were present to supervise, analyse and follow every step of the process. Adhering to all the stringent criteria, the masterpiece, once finished, stood 8.2 metres wide and 3 metres tall and proved to be a true work of art.
Ideated and conceptualised by Ms Naseem Abdullah Al Fadhli, MD, Integrated Benefits Projects and supported by Ms Haifa Balfaqih, Investment Programme Director – Nazdaher and GM, Strategic Planning and Technology, be’ah, the historic event witnessed the presence of some of the highly-esteemed guests including her excellencies, leading businesswomen and attendees from all over the country.
Receiving an overwhelming response from the audience, the new Guinness World Record further cements Oman’s position on the map as a country filled with unique initiatives and also as a nation raising an empowered generation of women.
Lujaina Mohsin Darwish said, “With the key message behind this initiative being especially close to our hearts, we are indeed delighted to set this new world record. It not only celebrates Omani women but is a tribute to Her Highness the Honourable Lady Assayida Ahad Abdullah Hamed Al Busaidi.
Her unwavering faith in the capabilities of the Omani women of today and continuous appreciation of their achievements have served as a constant motivation for all. It has ignited a zeal in every woman to break the glass ceiling and push the frontiers of women leadership.”
“Drawing inspiration from our leaders, MHD-ITICS will continue to act as a catalyst of change, encouraging women’s contribution to the Omani economy as well as participating and leading in their respective areas of influence and expertise. The strong Omani women have displayed courage, creativity, vision and accomplishment and will continue to play an instrumental role in driving transformation,” she added.
A keynote speech was delivered by Lujaina Mohsin Darwish, which was then followed by the much-awaited showcasing of the largest flower word. Another key highlight of the event was the large LED display wall with snippets and pictures of the First Lady of Oman. All attendees were gifted a branded scarf and were entertained with live music, a food and beverage counter and photo opportunities.
MHD-ITICS, under the guidance of Honourable Lujaina Mohsin Darwish, has achieved commendable growth in recent years. Moreover, the Company has been at the forefront of setting new benchmarks in the industry and supporting its women employees to assume various critical roles in the organisation.
In our continuing series of inspiring life stories from across continents, we hear why the Palestinian filmmaker redirected his creative efforts.
The first time that Omar Al Qattan filmed in the Palestinian territories, he was a 22-year-old on set with his mentor, the director Michel Khleifi.
Happy weeks were spent scouting locations in the West Bank region in search of the perfect settings for the scenes depicted in the script in only his second visit to the birthplace of his parents. He soaked up the breathtaking scenery and filmed in a restored Ottoman fortress village surrounded by olive groves.
The result was 1987’s Wedding in Galilee, the first studio feature film shot in Palestine, depicting life under curfew following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It would go on to win a clutch of awards, including the prestigious International Critics Prize at Cannes, and propel Khleifi on the path to directorial eminence.
“It was wonderful,” Al Qattan recalls. “When you work in film you get to do a lot of scouting so you really know a place, especially a small place like Palestine.”
In the years since, Al Qattan has worked in and for Palestine many times, but he stresses that this has never been simply because of his own heritage. “It is a matter of a right to be able to identify with whatever you like,” he tells The National. “But the issues for me are political. I think really you need to transcend these affiliations, these loyalties.
“I’m not really sure that cultural identity is actually that powerful a bond, or as powerful a bond as the sense of injustice that inhabits us to be the sons or grandsons of refugees, regardless of how successful or comfortable they turned out to be in life.
“Through this sense of outrage, anyone can identify with you, anyone can support you on that basis, whereas if you come from a sort of clannish or sectarian perspective then it becomes like a sort of closed canal.”
Al Qattan’s reference to a comfortable life is an important one. His father Abdel Mohsin went on to become a successful businessman and his son is now chairman of the foundation set up in his name.
He is not one to be pigeonholed but, when asked, provides a label with a hint of embarrassment: “I guess ‘diaspora philanthropist’ is about right.”
The answer is rooted in the journey of his parents as refugees from Palestine – his father after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and his mother, Leila, after her family was exiled during the British Mandate over her father’s refusal to salute the Union flag. They met and married in their country of refuge, Kuwait, while working as teachers. There, they had three children before moving to Lebanon for their education where their fourth child, Omar, was born.
Al Qattan points out that, in fact, he belongs to many diasporas – those of Palestine, Kuwait and Lebanon. “It might seem confusing to some that I have these multiple identities but it’s not an invention of mine; it’s the reality of my life,” he says. “I find that it’s incredibly enriching. I don’t think it’s an issue.
“It was a problem when I was younger, for sure. When I became an adolescent, it did seem sometimes like it would be so nice just to be an English boy without these complications. But now I think how impoverishing that would have been if I had sort of ignored the rest and how isolating as well.”
When the young Omar was sent to board at Millfield Preparatory School in Somerset at the outbreak of the civil war in Lebanon in 1975, he arrived in what felt like an alien culture. Unable to speak English, he ate “terrible food” and was awash with homesickness.
“I think it hardened me in a way,” Al Qattan, now 56, says over Zoom. “It made me maybe try to resist any temptations for sentimentality or nostalgia, especially after a couple of years when it was really clear that there was no going back.”
Then, though, he pined for the childhood he had left behind by the warm Mediterranean Sea and the school that more or less nestled inside a forest. It was a idyllic – until it wasn’t.
“It sort of started to dawn on me as an 11-year-old that this is not an adventure; it was very serious.”
The trauma of the rupture and the loneliness was compounded by the racism he encountered at school. Lacking the means to answer back with language, Al Qattan admits that he sometimes resorted to his fists until he developed some defence mechanisms.
He credits an “eccentric, extraordinary, generous kind of spirit” exhibited by teaching staff for helping him find his feet.
Despite failing all his secondary entrance exams except French, the teenage Omar went on to study at Westminster School, one of the country’s most prestigious. “When I asked my eventual housemaster why they’d taken me, he said: ‘Well, we’ve never had an Arab boy before, and we thought it would be interesting.’ Which wasn’t technically true – there had been a couple of others.
“So I was in that atmosphere of, on the one hand, a lot of stereotyping and unpleasant, racist comments and, on the other hand, we were still in an era in certain sectors of British society where there was this international outlook and curiosity.”
Al Qattan found solace in books. Reading, he says, was the only way he could catch up on English. When he discovered how much he loved books, he went on to read English literature at Oxford University.
Having dabbled in theatre at school and university, Al Qattan then decided to pursue his interest across the Channel, studying film and directing at the Institut national superieur des arts du spectacle in Brussels, where he created short documentaries and dramas under the tutelage of Khleifi.
After Wedding in Galilee, Al Qattan quickly flourished in his own right. His first film, Dreams & Silence, an early exploration of political Islam, won the 1991 Joris Ivens Award and was broadcast in Europe and Australia. In 1994, under the Sindibad Films production company he co-founded, he produced Khleifi’s Tale of the Three Jewels, the first feature film shot entirely in the occupied Gaza Strip. It premiered at Cannes and picked up a host of international awards.
Despite his illustrious film career, Al Qattan found himself slowly being drawn into the philanthropic arm of the “family business”. His father had made his fortune through a contracting business in Kuwait and wanted to channel his riches towards educational outreach programmes focused on the arts in Palestine.
Yasser Arafat once told Abdel Mohsin that he wished him to become the Palestinian Rothschild. “For that to happen, we need a Palestinian Ben-Gurion,” the retort came.
The famous quip by Al Qattan’s father was often repeated in public, much to the irritation of the now-late leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and symbolises the family’s at times delicate footing within the political arena.
In 1993, the A.M. Qattan Foundation was born and the youngest of the Al Qattan siblings redirected his creative efforts towards empowering others. Almost three decades on, the foundation employs more than 100 people across the West Bank and Gaza.
A $24 million dark grey cube on a hillside in Ramallah was the patriarch’s dying wish. Opening a year after his death in 2017, the cultural beacon that is the A.M. Qattan Foundation Cultural Centre is the first of its kind in the Occupied Territories, housing a gallery, library, theatre, artists’ residencies and public plaza.
Al Qattan also opened The Mosaic Rooms as a cultural space in 2008 in London, not far from where he now lives.
He has intermittently chaired the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit since 2012 and the Shubbak Festival of Contemporary Arab Culture in 2013 and 2015. He produced Khleifi’s last film Zindeeq, which received the 2009 Muhr Award for Best Arab Feature at the Dubai Film Festival.
As well as following in his father’s footsteps in philanthropy, he also rejuvenated the waning Al-Hani Construction and Trading Company in Kuwait as a means of financing the A.M. Qattan Foundation. There, he has undertaken large-scale public projects such as the Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Cultural Centre and Kuwait National Library.
Prior to the pandemic, Al Qattan returned to Palestine often, saddened by the dramatic decline he has witnessed over the decades. “The landscape has been completely brutalised,” he laments. “It’s not just the apartheid rule but the awful settlement building, which is going on everywhere.”
But the disenchantment and cynicism among the population was the most painful to observe. “It’s based on a sort of hopelessness and very dark outlook,” he says. “I find that harder to accept even than the chaos of the uprising.”
He hopes that the AM Qattan Foundation’s work can help remedy this, particularly by encouraging the involvement of youth.
Al Qattan has been actively steering the Foundation in a different direction to make it less of a family enterprise and more of an independent, public institution. But the input of the younger generation, whether his own offspring or those of others, is crucial to these plans. He says that it is far easier to shape the future with the young, who are still open to new ideas, than it is with older generations.
“If we want to build something for the long term, we have to focus on young people, especially children,” Al Qattan says.
Even at arm’s length, the guiding hand of the prodigious creator is making a difference.
Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula left many influences, later taken to the continent by colonists
Some researchers believe 700-1,000 Portuguese words and about 4,000 in Spanish come from Arabic
In recent years, a new generation of researchers has been examining the ancient Islamic roots of Latin American societies.
In the age of social media, such content is being disseminated among larger audiences, and many people in Latin America seem to be avidly interested.
“I began to read about the Moors when I was studying Arabic in Egypt,” said Mansour Peixoto, a Muslim convert from the Brazilian city of Recife who in 2014 founded the website Historia Islamica (Islamic History).
“I’d already learnt at that time about the Islamic influence on Portugal, but then I became interested in its direct and indirect impacts on Brazilian culture,” he told Arab News.
Between 711 and 1492, Arab-Berber rulers dominated parts of present-day Portugal, Spain and France, naming the region Al-Andalus.
An almost-800-year presence in the Iberian Peninsula left many influences that were brought to colonial Latin America.
After the Christian re-conquest, Islam was forbidden in Spain and Portugal. From then on, especially at the beginning of the 17th century, many Muslims — including people of European ancestry — were forced to move to North Africa, but many accepted to convert to Catholicism, some of whom remained secretly Muslim.
“Those people, especially the poor, were numerous among the Portuguese who came to colonize Brazil since the 16th century,” said Peixoto.
FAST FACTS
Between 711-1492, Arab-Berber rulers dominated parts of Portugal, Spain and France, naming the region Al-Andalus.
After the Christian re-conquest of Al-Andalus, Islam was forbidden in Spain and Portugal.
Some researchers believe that 700-1,000 Portuguese words come from Arabic.
Although his website deals with several Islamic themes, the history of Muslim Portuguese settlers — known as Mouriscos, or Moors — and their influence on Brazil is a frequent topic. “Many people don’t realize that we have customs in Brazil that come from the Islamic world,” said Peixoto.
Historia Islamica’s publications about the influence of Arabic on the Portuguese language are among the most shared by the website’s followers.
Some researchers believe that 700-1,000 Portuguese words come from Arabic, but recent studies suggest that the number of Arabisms could be much higher.
Several everyday words in Brazil have Arabic origins, such as alface (lettuce), almofada (cushion), acougue (butcher shop) and garrafa (bottle).
“Not to mention architectural terms that we still use today, like alicerce (foundation) and andaime (scaffolding),” said Peixoto.
“Iberian building methods were mostly Arab in the 16th century, and they were brought to the Americas.”
Islamic architectural influence in Latin America is one of the most noticeable cultural traits of Al-Andalus in the region, according to Hernan Taboada, an expert on the subject and a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
“That can be seen in the architectural style in New Spain, the viceroyalty that extended from the south of the present-day US to Central America,” he told Arab News.
Along with the Viceroyalty of Peru, in South America, that region probably concentrated most of the Moorish settlers in colonial Latin America, Taboada said.
Colonial-era churches in Mexico, from Veracruz on the Atlantic coast to Oaxaca in the south, exhibit evident Moorish artistic traits.
“They’re especially visible in the elements of decoration in those churches,” Taboada said. “Many temples in Mexico undoubtedly have Moorish style, which doesn’t mean they were necessarily built by Moors. In general, such elements were assimilated in Spain and transposed to Latin America.”
The presence of Muslims in New Spain and elsewhere in the region is not easy to verify, given that it was a clandestine presence.
This may be why the subject was ignored in academia for so long, although classical works of Latin American history mentioned it in the 19th and 20th centuries.
“The study of the Moorish presence was mostly resumed by Muslims and people of Arab origin. Those works showed that they weren’t as few in Latin America as was once supposed,” Taboada said.
Although Islam was forbidden, the Moors — like the Jews — largely enjoyed tolerance in the New World, though the Inquisition did act against them at times, he added.
Historian Ricardo Elia, cultural director of the Islamic Center of the Republic of Argentina, has since the 1980s been one of the pioneers in the study of the Moorish presence in the region of La Plata River.
“I discovered that the gauchos (the term used in Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil for legendary horsemen) are nothing less than Moors,” he told Arab News.
There is an ancient controversy regarding the etymological origin of that term in Argentina. Some scholars say it comes from a Quechuan word, but Elia and other researchers say it comes from chauch, a term with Arabic origins that means something like indomitable.
“In Valencia, Spain, the word chaucho was used to designate horsemen and pastors,” Elia said, adding that most of the crews of the Spanish ships that explored the Americas since the 15th century were composed of Moors, and that the first person to catch sight of the Americas was Rodrigo de Triana, a Moor.
“They needed to leave Spain so they came to the Americas. And they were good sailors.”
Over the centuries, Moors intermarried with other ethnic groups such as the Guarani indigenous people, but their cultural impact in the region is felt to this day.
Elia said empanadas, Argentina’s most typical pastry, have Andalusian origins, as does dulce de leche (caramelized milk).
The linguistic influence on the Spanish language is unquestionable. Elia estimates that there are about 4,000 Arabisms, most of them adopted in Spain.
“But in Argentina and Uruguay, the Moors also impacted our way of pronouncing the words,” he said.
Over the years, Elia has taught classes in universities in Argentina and Chile about the Moorish presence in South America.
“Unfortunately, the community of Lebanese and Syrian descent in Argentina has never shown much interest in such themes. Non-Arab Argentinians have always been the most curious about that,” said Elia, who comes from a Lebanese family.
He added that more and more people now want to learn about the first Muslim settlers in Latin America.
“In Morocco, an academic conference dealing especially with that topic was organized in 2021,” he said.
Peixoto said many people are “willing to discover more about their ancestry and the many questions not answered about it,” which is why a new generation of scholars has been researching the Moors of Latin America.
He plans to conduct an academic study about the Moors in Brazil, publish books on that topic and offer online classes.
“Our elite (in Brazil) likes to see itself as European, but we’re a combination of indigenous peoples, Africans, Europeans, and also Moors,” he said.
Peixoto thinks Muslims and Arabs made a decisive contribution to the formation of the Brazilian people, not only with the settlers from Al-Andalus, but also with the Africans brought as slaves, and the huge wave of Syrian and Lebanese immigrants who came to Brazil since the end of the 19th century.
“They transformed our way of being on many levels,” he said.
Taboada agreed, saying: “Eurocentric views are dominant among the Latin American elite. We have to emphasize that we have a multicultural origin.”
