Arabs & Arabian Records Aggregator. Chronicler. Milestones of the 25 Countries of the Arabic Speaking World (official / co-official). AGCC. MENA. Global. Ist's to Top 10's. Records. Read & Enjoy./ www.arabianrecords.org
Category: Non-Resident / PAO (Persons of Arab Origin / Descent)
With France’s 2022 presidential elections around the corner, Anasse Kazib , a French-Moroccan railroad worker, labor rights activist, and Marxist, has entered the race for the Elysee Palace.
Anasse Kazib was born in 1987 in Sarcelle, the northern suburbs of Paris, to a Moroccan family that emigrated to France in the 1970s to meet the country’s demand for cheap labor.
In July, Kazib, who is an employee of France’s state-owned railroad company (SNCF), announced his “pre-candidacy” for the 2022 presidential elections by launching a “digital campaign” to mobilize support and collect valuable signatures from the electorate.
Dana Ballout, the Lebanese-American Emmy-nominated producer of “Trafficked with Mariana Zeller,” knows the exact moment she started paying attention to what was going on in the world. It was February 14, 2005.
Ballout was a senior in high school in Beirut, and as she sat in class that Valentine’s Day morning, a bomb went off just down the block, sending the building’s shatter-proof windows into convulsions. Lebanon’s recently-resigned prime minster, Rafic Hariri, had been assassinated.
She spent years covering the war in Syria as a reporter for outlets including The Wall Street Journal, but it was in podcasts and documentaries that she fully found her voice, allowing her to journey in depth into people’s lives in a way she never could before.
Ballout is a storyteller, but the stories she chooses to tell are ones that few are brave enough to tell. Often they can be harrowing, including the latest documentary she co-produced, “Groomed,” which follows a woman returning to her hometown in search of answers about the man who abused her as a child.
In “Trafficked,” recently renewed for a third season at National Geographic, Ballout and company travel across the world to profile the global underworld, sitting down with the titans of illegal industries such as scamming, steroids, counterfeiting and poaching.
source/content : arabnews.com
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Ballout had grown up in a household with a newspaper on the table every morning. (Supplied) / arabnews.com
Rawdah Mohamed. Somali Origin – Norwegian. Social media influencer, model, blogger, activist, healthcare professional.
Mohamed landed the role as Vogue Scandinavia’s Norway fashion editor earlier this year.
The magazine launched last week with Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg on the front cover.
At the beginning of her modeling career, Mohamed juggled the job with working with autistic people and people with different mental disabilities.
She continues to volunteer in mental health care to this day and has been working with patients at overstretched hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic.
source/content: arabnews.com
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Rawdah Mohamed is the first hijab-wearing editor of color at a western fashion magazine. (Ole Martin Halvorsen) / arabnews.com
I Was a French Muslim: Memories of an Algerian Freedom Fighter.
pproachable writing and a refreshing perspective bring his story to life in “I Was a French Muslim,” released in September by Other Press.
Mokhtefi’s memoir was translated and prepared for publication posthumously by his widow, an American painter and author. After independence, the couple lived in Algeria, where they liaised with the Black Panthers and leading Algerian figures such as former presidents Houari Boumediene, and Ahmed Ben Bella.
His story begins with his formative years as a child in a small town in Algeria. He slowly moves toward becoming a revolutionary within the National Liberation Front (FLN), and he goes out of his way to note the French colonial figures who played a role in his formative years and in supporting his education. Some were French priests, members of the worker-priest movement who supported the Algerian cause.
Mokhtefi was a pious Muslim, but it is clear from his text that he was also enamored with French culture and ideals. Yet as a child growing up in French Algeria, it was painfully clear to him that French colonialists were hypocritical in their application of the ideals of their society. It is this duality that is expressed in the title.
Given recent events, this book offers both important context and a unique narrative on perhaps the most important event in the Francophone Arab world in the 20th century.
Dr. Abdulrazk Gurnah. Writer. Born in Zanzibar (Tanzania) based in England.
No black African writer has won the prize since Wole Soyinka in 1986. Gurnah is the first black writer to win since Toni Morrison in 1993.
Gurnah is a Professor at the University of Kent.
His novel “Paradise” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994.
The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.
Gurnah grew up on one of the islands of Zanzibar before fleeing persecution and arriving in England as a student in the 1960s.
Gurnah was born in 1948, growing up in Zanzibar. When Zanzibar went through a revolution in 1964, citizens of Arab origin were persecuted, and Gurnah was forced to flee the country when he was 18. He began to write as a 21-year-old refugee in England, choosing to write in English, although Swahili is his first language. His first novel, Memory of Departure, was published in 1987. He has until recently been professor of English and postcolonial literatures at the University of Kent, until his retirement.
He has published 10 novels as well as a number of short stories. Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee, said that the Gurnah’s novels – from his debut Memory of Departure, about a failed uprising, to his most recent, Afterlives – “recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world”
source/content : theguardian.com
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By PalFest – originally posted to Flickr as Abulrazak Gurnah on Hebron Panel, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/
Lebanese-Armenian scientist Ardem Patapoutian is one of the two winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of receptors for touch, heat and bodily movement
Two scientists who made landmark discoveries about human senses, have won the Nobel Prize for Medicine, beating vaccine pioneers to the prestigious award.
Announcing the winners after balloting behind closed doors on Monday, the Nobel jury said the US duo had broken open a “fundamental unsolved question” about human biology.
Dr Patapoutian, who was born in Lebanon in 1967 and moved to the US as a young man, works at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. He identified genes that control sensitivity to touch.
The proteins he discovered also play a role in how people sense motion and how the body deals with blood pressure, respiration and bladder control.
He said his research had shone light on fundamental human behaviour which many people rarely question. “In science, many times, it’s the things that we take for granted that are of high interest,” he said
Nobel prize winner Ardem Patapoutian was also awarded Lebanese Order of Merit.
Dr. Patapoutian, who was born to an Armenian family in Beirut, Lebanon in 1967, came to the United States in 1986. “I fell in love with doing basic research. That changed the trajectory of my career,” he said in an interview with the New York Times. “In Lebanon, I didn’t even know about scientists as a career.”
The Muslim Coordination Council is a conglomeration of Germany’s largest Islamic advocacy groups.
Germany’s largest Islamic advocacy platform has announced that Moroccan-German national Abdassamad El Yazidi is now the group’s official spokesman.
Starting Friday, October 1, El Yazidi will publicly represent the Muslim Coordination Council, according to German news source Deutschlandfunk. El Yazidi announced that his plans as the group’s new spokesperson is to “make a contribution to critical and constructive talks and reduce prejudice and resentment against Muslims and their organizations.”
Prior to his current role, El Yazidi led the Central Council of Muslims in Germany as its Secretary-General. The Central Council of Muslims is one of the organizations that cooperated under the Muslim Coordination Council to further the interests of Muslims in Germany.
source/content: moroccoworldnews.com
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Prior to his current role, El Yazidi led the Central Council of Muslims in Germany as its Secretary-General. Photo Credit: Frankfurter Allgemeine / moroccoworldnews.com
Mitt Queen Ann Najjar, the boxing coach athletes and celebrities want to work with. Najjar trains boxers, mixed martial arts fighters, professionals, amateurs, and any athlete that does mitt work.
The first generation American of Iraqi parents shot to worldwide fame thanks to viral Instagram videos during the pandemic. Born and raised in San Diego to parents from Baghdad. Her Instagram account proudly bears the Iraqi flag.
Ann Najjar has fast hands. So fast she can keep up with boxers twice her size. Boxers who, over the last few years, have lined up to work with her.
Najjar is the Mitt Queen, a coach at Bomber Squad Boxing Academy in her native San Diego. Thanks to an Instagram account (@mittqueen) that has almost 610,000 followers, she has become an online sensation.
source/content: arabnews.com
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Najjar, aka the Mitt Queen, has become a boxing coach for athletes and celebrities in her native San Diego. (RBO) / pix: arabnews.com
Razan Al-Sous and her husband Raghid Sandouk fled Syria to start a new life in Yorkshire, leaving behind their dream of setting up their own pharmaceutical company but opening up a new entrepreneurial life in the city of Huddersfield.
With the simple idea of making halloumi-style cheese from cows’ milk and launching a best-selling range of Arabian flavoured cheeses, the innovative pair have won more than 30 awards for their product and gained royal approval from Princess Anne.
When they arrived in Yorkshire, Mr Sandouk’s brother let them run his chicken food outlet and it was there the first Yorkshire Dama Squeaky Cheese was created.
Now they have nine flavours in their range, from plain and chilli to black onion seed, rosemary and mint.
The couple recently won their latest award, for their black pepper squeaky cheese.
n 2017 the couple expanded to new premises and were given a royal seal of approval when Princess Anne officially opened their factory in Sowerby Bridge.
Now the couple have been invited to Buckingham Palace.
This month they won yet another award for their Middle Eastern style cheese, Nabulsi, which contains black onion seeds and has now become a bestseller in the UK.
www.yorkshiredamacheese.co.uk
source/content: thenationalnews.com
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Syrian cheese maker Razan Al-Sous. / pix: Ashraf Helmi / The National
British rower and gold medalist Mohamed Sbihi will on Friday make history when he becomes the first Muslim to carry the British flag at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, a role he will share with another gold medalist, sailor Hannah Mills.
Sbihi, 33, won a gold medal in the coxless four at the 2016 Rio Olympics, and claimed a bronze as part of the British crew in the men’s eight at London 2012.
Sbihi, who received an MBE in the British Queen’s 2017 New Year’s Honors list, and Mills, a campaigner for clean oceans.
Sbihi, who was born in Kingston upon Thames to a Moroccan father and British mother, gave notice of his talent as a rower at the age of 15 when he finished first in the junior men J15 category at the 2003 Great Britain Indoor Rowing Championships.
