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50 countries to take part in Aqsa Week 2022 to promote love of mosque, raise awareness
A UK-based initiative to shed light on the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem has gone global for the second year in a row, with more than 50 countries set to take part, according to organizers.
Aqsa Week 2022, which will run from Feb. 24 to March 2, is being organized by the British-based Friends of Al-Aqsa (FOA) — a NGO concerned with defending the human rights of Palestinians and protecting the Al-Aqsa Sanctuary.
FOA said that during the week, which they anticipate to be the biggest one yet, mosques, universities, local councils and parliaments will hold talks, workshops and other activities and educational events to highlight the mosque’s heritage, and bring global focus to its issues.
Aqsa Week, which was launched by FOA in 2017, aims to inform people of Al-Aqsa and its history and significance, as well as the dangers faced by Al-Aqsa and the Palestinian people.
Al-Aqsa is Islam’s third holiest site and is in close proximity to religions sites significant to Jews and Christians, making the area a flashpoint in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Israeli government has on occasion prevented Muslim worshippers from accessing the mosque.
Several of the FAO events will be streamed live on their social media accounts, as well as TV and radio, and they have chosen #LoveAqsa as this year’s hashtag.
In her latest exhibiton, “My Silk Road,” the Algerian visual artist Salima Ayadi presents a tribute to her cultural heritage with 19 paintings and 30 scarves inspired by — among other things — Islamic architecture, ceramic and faience patterns, and calligraphy.
The exhibition opened at the National Museum of Antiquities and Islamic Art in Algiers on January 22 and runs until February 13.
Ayadi graduated from the School of Fine Arts of Algiers with a degree in visual communication in 1982. For more than 37 years, she has produced silk-painted works — a technique to which she was introduced by an artist friend while on a trip to Switzerland. She has created artworks and scarves for national institutions such as the Senate and the People’s National Assembly, or for large companies including Sonatrach, Sonelgaz, Air Algeria, to name a few.
“For national institutions, I have worked on the cultural and historical heritage of Algeria, which is particularly rich. My works represent landscapes and monuments of all regions of the Casbah of Algiers, the Tassili n’Ajjer in the South-East, or the Berber patterns of Kabylia,” Ayadi tells Arab News. “These creations have been exhibited and some of them have been offered to foreign partners.” Her work has been shown in numerous group and individual exhibitions both at home and in Libya, Morocco and Iran.
Her first solo exhibition, held in 2017 at the Palace of Culture Moufdi Zakaria in Kouba, was a great success. “This exhibition (was very important), because it allowed me interact and mingle with the public,” she says. Each painting is created over a series of stages, each with its own potential pitfalls. Ayadi says that her selection of colors — reds, blues and greens are particular favorites — is based on the idea behind each painting. Once the selection process is complete, she can get to work — an often-painstaking process.
Behind each piece lies her passionate love of her Algerian heritage and her country’s rich and diverse culture. Currently, besides the “My Silk Road” exhibition, she is focused on producing a book of her work, which she hopes to release in the next year or so.
source/content: arabnews.com
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Salima Ayadi is an Algerian visual artist. (Supplied)
Meet the Queen Bikers, Tunisia’s first all-female motorcycle club.
“There are more than 300 women who have a motorcycle driving licence in Tunisia, but do not practise this sport,” Khadija Hsaini, one of the founding members of the group, told Reuters.
She said there are a host of reasons holding women back. “They do not feel safe, or because they can’t find clubs that they can belong to, or because they don’t want to drive with men and want an all-female group.”
Dozens of motorcycle clubs exist around the country, but are almost exclusively composed of men – many of whom think women should only ride motorcycles as passengers.
So Hsaini set about to find other women to ride with. Among them is Wafa Khalifa.
“The idea [for the club] came when we were all separated,” Khalifa told Reuters. “Each woman owned a motorcycle, but was alone.”
Hsaini reached out to her and others. “She looked for us on social media and found every person in the area. Then she sent messages asking why we were so far from each other.”
Now the women gather regularly to ride their motorcycles along Tunisia’s scenic coastal roads, past Roman ruins and through endless stretches of olive groves. They pause along the way to take selfies with their bikes, and with one another.
source/content: thenationalnews.com
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Chaima Ben Ammou, member of a women’s-only motorcycle club, cleans her bike at her shop in Nabeul, Tunisia. Reuters
Saudi Arabia has declared Feb. 10 as “Arabian Leopard Day” in a bid to raise awareness of the endangered big cat.
The move, which was announced by the Council of Ministers last month, is part of the Kingdom’s efforts to protect the species, which is now classed as critically endangered, from extinction.
The Arabian leopard is the chief predator in Saudi Arabia and plays a major role in the Kingdom’s culture. But overhunting and a lack of natural prey means there are now fewer than 200 left in the wild.
In December 2020, Prince Badr Bin Farhan, the minister of culture and governor of the Royal Commission for AlUla, established the Global Fund to Protect the Arabian Leopard from Extinction in the Sharaan Nature Reserve. Its aim is to sustain the leopard population and its prey, and protect its natural habitat.
Images of the Arabian Leopard were projected onto buildings and monuments across Saudi Arabia and the UAE on Feb.10.
In recent years, the commission and the National Center for Wildlife have been working on a number of initiatives to protect the big cat. Among these is expanding a breeding program within the Sharaan reserve.
Also, last year, Princess Reema bint Bandar Al-Saud, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the US, launched the nonprofit foundation Catmosphere to raise awareness of the many endangered cat species around the world, including the Arabian leopard.
The Kingdom also works closely with Panthera, which is devoted to the conservation of the world’s wild cat species.
The Arabian leopard lives in high mountains and is native to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman and the UAE. Anyone found hunting the animal in the Kingdom faces a fine of SAR400,000 ($106,000) — rising to SAR30 million for repeat offenders — and up to 10 years in prison.
source/content: arabnews.com
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The Arabian leopard is the chief predator in Saudi Arabia and plays a major role in the Kingdom’s culture. (SPA)
In summer 2020, Arab News reported that the National Library of Israel, founded in Jerusalem in 1892, was planning to digitize its large collection of rare Islamic books and manuscripts, as part of a cross-cultural drive to open its digital doors to Arabic speakers in Israel and across the region.
Back in August 2020, Dr. Raquel Ukeles, then curator of the Islam and Middle East Collection at the NLI, said that the library was determined to play a part in eradicating what she saw as the “tremendous amount of ignorance about Islam, about Palestinian culture and Arab culture generally that has real repercussions on the political level.”
It was, she said, “very natural for us to be focusing on and investing in this material, to create space for Muslim culture in Israel and in the broader intellectual life, whether it’s in the Middle East or in the world, to enable greater understanding.”
The response has been truly impressive.
“The truth is that I’m thrilled to see the massive increase in the use of our Arabic digital resources,” Dr. Ukeles, who is now head of collections at the library, told Arab News a year and a half later.
“It’s so heartening to see that people are willing to cross boundaries in order to gain knowledge.”
In 2021, more than 650,000 visitors from across the Arab world found their way to the NLI’s Arabic-language website — an increase of 40 percent compared with 2020. There has been a dramatic increase in interest from Saudi Arabia in particular.
Most of the visitors, seeking out not only rare Islamic documents but also other archival treasures including a large collection of historic Arabic-language newspapers, came chiefly from the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Algeria.
Worldwide, there was a 125 percent increase to 1.5 million visitors to the Arabic site. Within Israel itself, the number of visitors to the site jumped by 250 percent to a total of 620,000 users, while the library’s trilingual Hebrew-Arabic-English site as a whole registered 10 million visits in 2021.
There has been a dramatic increase in interest from Saudi Arabia in particular. In 2021, there was a 30 percent growth in traffic from the Kingdom to the NLI site, with more than 121,000 sessions by nearly 94,000 individual users. About a third of the visitors were women, and 60 percent of the total were aged between 25 and 44.
“When we launched our first digital archive of early Arabic newspapers from Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine in September 2016, we had an annual rate of about 5,000 users for the first few years,” Dr. Ukeles said.
“That number has now increased by about tenfold and, thanks to our talented Arabic digital team, this past year we had 1.5 million total users of our Arabic websites.”
It was, she said, the aim of the National Library of Israel “to allow people to gain access to their own culture and history,” but also “to stimulate curiosity and engender respect about other cultures.”
This seems to be working.
“Users from the Arab world are searching our collections of Arabic newspapers and Islamic manuscripts, but they are also interested in our historical maps and digitized materials about Jewish history and Israel.”
Thanks to technology, the priceless documents at the library are even more accessible online, where they can be seen in exquisite, close-up detail — far better than they would be if viewed in person behind the glass of a display case.
“Technology allows culture and the written word to cross boundaries and reach new places previously inaccessible,” said Yaron Deutscher, head of digital at NLI.
“The fact that so many people from across the Arab world are expressing such a high level of interest in the cultural treasures freely available via the website shows just how relevant these things are, even for the younger generation living in our region.”
Those treasures include some extraordinary documents, including an exquisite copy of Muhammad Al-Busayri’s famous 13th-century poem “Qasidat Al-Burda,” or Ode of the Mantle, written in praise of the Prophet.
Also online are maps, illustrations and photographs, and hundreds of thousands of pages of historic Arabic newspapers from Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine — invaluable “rough first drafts of history” published between 1908 and 1948.
Newspapers and journals from the past “constitute one of the more clear-sighted vantage points for acquainting ourselves with bygone eras,” said a spokesperson for the library.
“Periodicals are an important resource for scholars as well as a portal for anyone wishing to access history through the words of contemporaries.”
Among the most regularly viewed items are 73 issues of the weekly newspaper Al-Arab, published in Mandatory Palestine between August 1932 and April 1934. Its writers included prominent authors and intellectuals of the day, such as Muhammad ‘Izzat Darwaza, the Palestinian politician and historian whose contributions included the important article, “The Modern Awakening of Arab Nationalism,” and who was interned by the British in 1936.
The 167 issues of the bi-weekly newspaper Al-Jazira, published in Palestine between 1925 and 1927, is another invaluable insight into the politics of the day, while a fascinating snapshot of contemporary art and culture can be found in the rare three issues of the magazine Al-Fajr. Its purpose, as declared in its first edition, published on June 21, 1935, was “to represent all intellectual currents in literature, society, art, and science.”
It was, says the NLI, “a veritable storehouse of knowledge and included diverse writings (and) represented an important stage in the development of Palestinian culture.”
Al-Fajr lasted only two years. Along with many newspapers and magazines, it ceased publishing during the Arab revolt in Palestine between 1936 and 1939, and never returned to print.
One of the oldest periodicals in the digital collection is the daily newspaper Al-Quds. First published in Jerusalem in 1908, the 107 issues in the collection cover the period from then until the end of 1913, offering fascinating insights into the prevailing social and political concerns on the eve of the First World War and the final death throes of the Ottoman Empire.
Social history aside, the most visually breathtaking treasures belong to the more distant past. Many of the documents and books contain unrivaled examples of Arabic and Persian calligraphy and illustrations.
The library attributes the rise in interest in its collections in part to the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreement signed between Bahrain, Israel and the UAE on Sept. 15, 2020, which saw the first Israeli embassy open in Abu Dhabi, and the first embassy of the UAE in Tel Aviv.
In May last year, the NLI signed a historic memorandum of understanding with the National Archives of the UAE in Abu Dhabi, committing the two organizations “to work together in support of mutual and separate goals and for the benefit of the international cultural and documentary heritage sector.”
The NLI said that the collaboration came “amid increased interest in regional collaboration in the wake of the Abraham Accords” and, in a joint communique, the new partners hailed the agreement as “a significant step forward.”
Both organizations, said the NLI, “serve as the central institutions of national memory for their respective countries and broader publics, and in recent years both have launched expansive and diverse efforts to serve scholars and wider audiences domestically and internationally.”
For Dr. Ukeles, the collaboration advanced “our shared goals of preserving and opening access to cultural heritage for the benefit of users of all ages and backgrounds in Israel, the UAE and across the region and the world.”
Dr. Abdulla M. Alraisi, director-general of the UAE’s national archives, said that the collaboration reflects its determination to “spread its wings around the world to reach the most advanced global archives and libraries, to obtain the documents that come at the heart of its interest as it documents the memory of the homeland for generations.”
source/content: arabnews.com
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Ottoman Hajj manual. (Supplied/ National Library of Israel)
The video chain features 265 people of different nationalities speaking various languages while passing the “Expo 2020 Dubai” pin in the Al Forsan Park at Expo 2020 Dubai.
The Dubai Police General Command and Expo 2020 Dubai received an official Guinness certificate in the presence of Reem bint Ibrahim Al Hashemy, Minister of State for International Cooperation and Director-General of the Expo 2020 Dubai Office; Major General Ahmed Mohammed Rafea, Assistant Commander-in-Chief of Dubai Police for Administrative Affairs; Brigadier Saleh Murad, Director of the General Department of Human Resources; and many officers and officials representing the various pavilions at the global event.
The event witnessed the participation of 265 people, 146 females and 119 males, from 193 nationalities of participating pavilions at Expo 2020 Dubai.
Jonathan Broxton, a veteran music critic with Movie Music UK, has included the Pharaoh’s Golden Parade music by Hisham Nazih in his choices for best works of 2021.
Broxton is a Los Angeles-based British film music reviewer who for over the past two decades has written reviews published on Movie Music UK, an internationally renowned online platform dedicated to monitoring and writing about new developments in film music.
Each year, Broxton, who is also a member of the International Film Music Critics Association, sums up the year and picks his favourite works from the film industry from all around the globe.
In his latest entry titled Movie Music UK Awards 2021, Broxton highlighted the Pharaoh’s Golden Parade with music by Egyptian composer Hesham Nazih.
In April 2021, 22 royal mummies of ancient Egyptian kings and queens were transferred from the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir to their final destination at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation in Fustat, in a large ceremony that was broadcast live internationally.
As Broxton explains in his review, “the whole thing was a grand, spectacular celebration of Egyptian culture, featuring light and laser displays, and parades of men and women in traditional dress accompanying these ancient rulers to their new resting places.”
Speaking about the United Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Egyptian conductor Nader Abbasi, Broxton calls Nazih’s music a “spectacular orchestral and choral glory, bold, dramatic, intense, thematically rich, and mesmerizing when combined with the visuals of these long-dead kings and queens making their journey through contemporary Cairo. There are layered vocals with men and women intoning in superb call-and-response fashion, vivid cello ostinato, swirling string figures, bold explosions of brass.
Born in 1972, Nazih is an Egyptian film and television series score composer. His career has involved composing music for a number of successful films, including Hysteria, Sleepless Nights (2003), Tito (2004), Ibrahim Labyad (2009), Elfeel El-Azraq (The Blue Elephant, 2014), The Treasure (2017), The Treasure 2 (2019), Sons of Rizk (2019), among others.
Nazih also wrote the music for Born a King, a 2019 historical coming-of-age drama film directed by Agustí Villaronga. The film was a coproduction between the UK and five Arab countries.
His scores for the television series include Sharbat Louz (Almond Nectar, 2012), Niran Sadiqa (Friendly Fire, 2013), and Al-Aahd (The Covenant, 2015).
Over the years, he collaborated with a number of well-known directors including Sherif Arafa and Marwan Hamed, with whom he worked on several occasions.
Nazih’s work for El-Asliyyin (2017) brought him the Best Music award at the Cairo National Festival for Egyptian Cinema (2018). For his contribution to the film music scene, he was also awarded the Faten Hamama Excellence Award at the 40th Cairo International Film Festival (2018).
The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque’s main prayer hall housed the world’s largest carpet, a unique masterpiece with dazzling beauty and design. The carpet was hand-knotted by a group of the world’s most skilled artists and weavers.
The wool and cotton carpet was hand-crafted by around 1,200 artisans. It is 5,400 square metres, with 40 knots per 6.5 centimetres and 2.5 billion knots for the entire carpet, weighing 35 tons after completion.
Despite its enormous size, the carpet was designed as a single piece, which qualified it for the Guinness Book of Records in 2017 as the largest carpet in the world. Its knotting took approximately 12 months.
With unique harmony and integration of aesthetic elements, the carpet covers the floor of the main prayer hall and magnifies its splendour. The hand-woven carpet has an astonishing design, looking like a reflection of the above chandelier. Its background features a variety of 25 natural colours from traditional herbs, including local madar roots, pomegranate peels, leaf veins, and others.
The carpet is predominately green, bringing a sense of calm and comfort to the place. To maintain the beauty of the design, a shaving technique was used to define the rows of worshipers on the carpet.
The carpet weaving took place in three large workshops on a built-up area of 5,000 square metres. The carpet’s high-quality materials, colours, and creative design make it one of Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque’s finest elements. It is carefully supervised by Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque Centre, with its maintenance work taking more than 12 days according to thoughtful plans by specialized teams.
During the Arab occupation of Iberian Peninsula their language spread throughout the area and entered Latin.
A large number of words from donor languages have been absorbed in English, mostly from Latin, French, Greek and the Germanic languages. But many more entered the lexicon during centuries of the British Empire that at one time spanned all continents. Familiar English words often have foreign origins, with research discovering more links beyond the British Isles.
Unknown to many, English speakers all speak a little bit of Arabic, thanks to history. In the early eighth century, Arab fighters invaded and took control of the Iberian Peninsula, modern-day Spain and Portugal. During the occupation, their language spread throughout the area, and entered Latin, the language spoken by the locals, and over the next several centuries, Christian-led forces took control of the peninsula. But by this time the language spoken there had been forever influenced by the Arabic language. As Latin began to influence English, some of the Arabic words were passed on.
John Simpson, editor of the third edition of Oxford English Dictionary (OED), offers the example of ‘magazine’, which is of Arabic origin. The word’s history was not mentioned in earlier editions, but the word ultimately derives from makhazin, the Arabic term meaning ‘a storehouse’, which appears in a Latin form magazinus in an Italian document of 1214. He writes: “The Italian form magazzino (recorded from 1348) is the source of Middle French magasin (recorded from 1409, and from 1389 in the form maguesin).
The English word derives from the French, and is first recorded in 1583, in the sense ‘a place where goods are kept in store’. Many of the later English senses parallel earlier meanings in other European languages, but it is of some interest that the meaning ‘periodical publication’ is an English innovation, not recorded in its French form until later. Needless to say, one of the essential components of a viable etymology for a loanword such as ‘magazine’ is an established record of cultural contact between speakers of the languages involved, as is here the case with Arabic, Italian, and French. Not surprisingly, the Arabic word also appears in various forms in early Spanish.”
Other Arabic-origin words in English include: camphor, carat, caravan, cotton, elixir, kohl, monsoon, nadir, safari, serendipity, sofa, sugar, syrup, henna, jar, tariff, zenith, admiral, arsenal, alchemy, assassin, azimuth, algebra, coffee, lemon.
Another major non-European donor to the language is the Indian subcontinent. The link between India and Britain began in 1600, when the East India Company was formed. Over the centuries a large number of Indian words entered the English language, the most prominent collection being Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, by Henry Yule and AC Burnell, published in 1886. It had over 2,000 entries, but independent India has continued to lend more words to the language.
Indian words recently recorded in OED include ambari, Angrezi, chuddies, kirana, satta, shishya, udyog and updation.
According to Pingali Sailaja of the University of Hyderabad, there are five major types of words in Indian English that are distinct from words seen across other varieties of English: borrowings from Indian languages; novel constructions through processes of affixation and compounding; hybrid constructions which bring together English and Indian languages; loan translations or calques; and, words that are used with different meanings from those one finds in other varieties.
The British Council collated 10 ‘surprising’ expressions of Indian English: ‘I am doing my graduation in London’, ‘I passed out of college’, ‘My neighbour is foreign-returned’, ‘My daughter is convent-educated’, ‘I belong to Delhi’, ‘Where’s the nearest departmental store?’, ‘My teacher is sitting on my head’, ‘My friend is eating my brain’, ‘Monkey cap’, ‘Why This Kolaveri Di?’
The history of the blessed Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the journey of its establishment was full of ambition. All the Kingdom’s founding leaders had great visions of a united state full of peace and stability.
This dream kept expanding bigger and bigger throughout their years to cover the whole of Arabian Peninsula and finally was achieved after centuries of fragmentation, dissension and instability.
On Thursday, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman issued a Royal Order to commemorate February 22 every year as Saudi Arabia’s Founding Day.
Here are 8 facts you need to know about the Founding Day:
1. Not the same as the Saudi National Day
The official National Day is still on September 23, and it signifies the unification day of all Saudi Arabia’s regions under King Abdulaziz.
While the nation’s Founding Day is a new event to commemorate the deep historical roots of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. September 23 is commemorated as the unification day of the third Saudi state.
2. A new political date for Saudi Arabia to celebrate
The objective of the announcement of the Founding Day is to put a precise political date to the founding of the state, namely the first Saudi State by Imam Muhammad bin Saud.
3. The second official Saudi holiday
The Founding Day, February 22, was decreed to be an official national holiday every year according to the Royal Order issued by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman.
4. The First Saudi State: 1157-1233H (1744-1818)
In 1139H (1727), Imam Muhammad bin Saud Al-Muqrin (Ibn Saud) founded the first Saudi state in Diriyah as its capital and made it the most stable regions after years of hard work.
5. Diriyah was divided before Ibn Saud united it
Diriyah was unsettled at the time due to many conflicts between neighboring tribes of Najd. After being assigned to govern Diriyah, Ibn Saud succeeded in bringing peace and safety, and in maintaining protection on the routes of trade and Hajj.
6. The Second Saudi State, known as the “Emirate of Najd”: 1240-1309H (1824-1891)
It was founded by Imam Turki bin Abdullah bin Muhammad bin Saud and located in Najd, the regions of Riyadh and Ha’il. His rule began when he liberated the entirety of Najd from the armies of Mohammad Ali Pasha.
7. Riyadh was not always the capital city
The township of Diriyah was the capital for the first Saudi state under Ibn Saud. However, the title of the Capital was transferred to Riyadh by Imam Turki when he established the second Saudi state.
8. The Third Saudi State, known as the “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”: 1319H (1902)
In 1891, Muhammad Al Rashid took Riyadh which was governed at the time by King Abdulaziz’s father, Emir Abdulrahman bin Faisal Al Saud. Both former Emir and his 10-year-old son moved to Bahrain.
In 1902, Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman Al Saud, only 21 years old at the time, journeyed back to his ancestral home and succeeded in recapturing control of Riyadh against all odds.
During the following years, young King Abdulaziz set out to unite the rest of the surrounding regions into one state through a series of conquests. The year 1351H (1932) signifies the unification of all these regions under the Third Saudi State named the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
