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
Top winners of the 17th edition of Algeria’s international Quran competition were awarded in a ceremony on Sunday, February 28th
Zeinab Bin Yousuf won claimed the title of the event. Yahya Bilal Yousuf from Bahrain and Syrian Abd al-Rahman Mohammad Hardan ranked third.
The ceremony was attended by a host of Algerian Quran activists and officials.
Representatives from 48 countries took part in this edition, which was held virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The contestants went to Algeria’s embassies and consulates in their country to take part in the competition via video links.
Members of the panel of judges were from Algeria, Egypt, and Guinea.
According to Algeria’s Awqaf ministry, Wa Rattil al-Quran Tartila (referring to verse 4 of Surah a-Muzmmil that orders reciting the Quran in Tarteel) was the motto of this year’s competition.
Unlike previous editions that were held in the holy month of Ramadan, this edition was organized in the lunar Hijri month of Rajab on the occasion of Lailat-Al-Miraj, the day when Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) ascended to all the seven stages of heaven.
Launched in 2004, Algeria’s international Quran contest is held annually on memorization of the Holy Quran with the participation of young people under the age of 25.
The state-of-the-art wind turbine in Morocco’s Oualidia is expected to generate an annual average of 2.500 MW/h, reducing CO2 emissions by 2.500 tonnes every year.
The 144-meter tall structure, part of the InnoVent’s Oualidia wind farm, provides a milestone thanks to high production capacity and cost-efficiency.
Construction work for the turbine began in 2019 following a deal between Morocco’s government and Spanish renewable energy company Nabrawind Technologies.
The installation is the first “self-erecting turbine” for Nabrawind Technologies.
Aside from breaking the continental height record for turbines, the Nabralift tower is special on grounds of the innovative construction method. The company used an innovative self-erecting system to construct the tower, without the need for conventional large-size cranes.
Built in collaboration with French developer InnoVent, the turbine additionally breaks the record for the tallest turbine constructed with a self-erecting system.
The innovative construction model was also cost-optimal as the tower only needed 80 square-cubic meters of concrete for its foundation, down from 500 square-cubic meters necessary for structures of such height, lowering cost by 60%.
Tunisia bid a final farewell on June 1 to the prominent historian and scholar of Islam – Hichem Djait, whose input was seminal to research on critical periods of Islamic history. From sociological, philosophical and anthropological perspectives, Djait’s publications offer insight into key issues facing the interpretation of Islamic history and the interaction of Islam with modernity.
Born in 1935 in Tunis to an erudite family in Islamic jurisprudence, Djait received a conservative education in his immediate milieu before attending the Sadiki high school in Tunis, which opened the gates for him to French and Western culture in general. He received an advanced degree in history in France in 1962. Afterwards, he obtained a Ph.D. in Islamic history from the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1981.
In a comment on his learning journey from Tunis to Paris, he said: “My discovery of philosophy was decisive. It was a conquest and a spiritual awakening, and I do not mean that only in a metaphysical sense, but also at the level of psychology, ethics and logic. It was then that preconceived certainties began to melt away and I discovered biology and the theory of evolution, and all of this amazed me and astonished me at the same time.” (See a related article, “Do Human Evolution and Islam Conflict in the Classroom?”)
Djait, who died at age 86, spent nearly half a century investigating Islamic history and Arab culture. He was an emeritus professor at the University of Tunis and a visiting professor in several renowned higher education institutions, including McGill University, in Montreal, and the University of California at Berkeley. He was also a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, chairman of the Tunisian Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts, and a member of the International Scientific Committee that produced Unesco’s eight-volume General History of Africa.
His stay in the West inspired him to write Europe and Islam, a book that sheds light on the interplay between Islam and Western civilization. His magnum opus remains The Great Fitna (La Grande Discorde), a groundbreaking work in the study of a major period of Islamic history in line with a rigorous academic approach.
His focus shifted more towards writing the biography of the Prophet Muhammad using scientific lenses in what has been described as a bold approach to Islamic history that breaks away from the sacralization that permeates the work of many Arab scholars on the subject. His goal was to rewrite prophetic tradition in a scientific way that combines comparative history with anthropological insight.
In this respect, he made it clear that a distinction should be made between historical thought, historiography and the philosophy of history. This book was written in three parts and puts the genesis of Islam in its historical context. (See a related article, “A New Perspective on the Last Days of the Prophet.”)
Djait received a constellation of distinctions and prizes, including being named Arab Cultural Personality of the Year by the Arab Institute for Research and Publishing in Beirut in 2016, and being honored in 2018 by a group of Arab researchers who dedicated to him a book that sheds light on his rich academic and intellectual journey.
source/content: www.al-fanarmedia.org (edited for length)
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Hichem Djait died June 2021 at age 86. The Tunisian scholar spent nearly half a century investigating Islam’s place in history and in the modern world (Photo: from Facebook).
After the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a near-two-year closure, the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, has finally reopened its doors to visitors.
Founded in 2005, AANM bills itself as America’s first and only museum devoted to telling the stories of Arab-American history and culture. Its location is apt; Dearborn is home to the largest Arab community in the US — around 40 percent of the city’s population is of Lebanese, Syrian, Yemeni, Iraqi, or Palestinian origin.
eaturing a courtyard, a fountain, and thematic spaces, the interior of AANM pays homage to Middle Eastern and North African design and architectural aesthetics. Through its galleries, the museum details Arabs’ varied contributions to humanity, and the phases of Arab immigration: the challenges of coming to America, the challenges of establishing a life there, and the impact of Arab-Americans in the public and private spheres.
It tells the stories of peddlers, entrepreneurs, scholars, military men and women, artists, and entertainers. There are some important but relatively unknown names highlighted. Take Ruth Joyce Essad, a fashion designer born in 1908, for example. She became one of Detroit’s first couturiers — dressing socialists and singers, including big-band vocalist Dinah Shore. Another interesting personality is the Syrian business owner Leon B. Holwey, who claimed to have co-invented the ice-cream cone in the early 1900s.
On a national level, the profile of Arab-Americans was raised last year by President Joe Biden, who made history by establishing National Arab American Heritage Month, which will take place in April every year.
source/content: arabnews.com
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The Arab American National Museum is in Dearborn. (Supplied) / arabnews.com
The Fiber Connect Council MENA has announced the appointment of Eng. Ahmed Mekky, Chairman and CEO of Benya Group, as Chairman of the council for a two-year term, succeeding Mr. Juan Colina. His appointment for this esteemed role, marks the first time an Egyptian assumes this position.
Eng. Mekky has been involved with the council in his capacity as a member of the Board of Directors since 2011, and was nominated for his role as Chairman of the council, in light of his endless contributions to the ICT industry on a global level and particularly for his extensive experience in the field of optical fibers.
Benya Cables, a subsidiary of Benya Group, began with ambitious plans to build the region’s largest optical fiber factory, and is now months away from materializing that reality.
Fiber Connect Council MENA has a mandate to exponentially increase the deployment of high-speed fiber networks, to connect consumers, businesses, governments and organizations, with the products and services needed to enhance quality of life, make a sustainable impact on the environment, boost business competition and develop apps to ultimately transform the way people live and businesses operate.
The Council’s Board of Directors is comprised of a notable cohort of member organizations such as Corning, Prysmian MEFC, OFS, Etisalat, and Oman Broadband. The board was formed in 2011 as an initiative launched by the founding members, and since inception, now boasts a member and partner count over 50 prominent industry leaders.
Kholoud Al-Dergham, Director General of Fiber Optic Connect Council MENA, welcomed the appointment of Eng. Ahmed Mekky as the Council’s new Chairman, highlighting “his expert record and experience in this field as invaluable assets to the Council, as well as a unique opportunity to invest that kind of experience, to accomplish the council’s objectives to expand the use of fiber optics”.
Eng. Ahmed Mekky is one of the most influential and prominent leaders in the ICT sector. In 2017, he founded Benya Group, formerly known as “Fiber Misr Systems,” and its affiliates with the goal of accelerating the Middle East and Africa’s digital transformation.
Prior to that, he launched Gulf Bridge International (GBI) in 2008 to build and operate the first underwater cable network, stretching over 40,000 kilometers and connecting 25 nations.
In 2011, he was appointed to the SAMENA Council’s Telecommunications Committee, and was selected on the Board of Governors (PTC).
Eng. Mekky has received various honors in recent years, including the “Telecom Review” award for best CEO in the area of enterprises offering services in telecom infrastructure for three consecutive years (2019, 2020 and 2021)
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).
Researchers from the MAScIR Foundation have developed a 100% Moroccan made molecular test for tuberculosis screening.
The test will provide health professionals with results within 30 minutes.
The test called MAScIR TB SS-LAMP “has the advantage of being precise and fast, delivering results in 30 minutes,” a press release from the foundation said on Friday.
The foundation, which is part of the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, said that the Pasteur Institute of Morocco validated the test. It is also registered with the Directorate of the Medicines and Pharmacy under the Ministry of Health and Social Protection.
The test constitutes a solution that facilitates “diagnosis as close as possible to patients at a controlled cost,” the researchers said.
source/content: moroccoworldnews.com
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MAScIR Develops 100% Moroccan Tuberculosis Diagnostic Test
Monastery has three churches, most important of which is underground Church of St Paul.
The Monastery of St Paul the Anchorite, also known as the Monastery of the Tigers, is a Coptic Orthodox monastery dating back to the 4th Century CE located in Egypt’s Eastern Desert, near the Red Sea Mountains.
Located about 155 km south east of Cairo, the monastery gained the moniker the Monastery of the Tigers due to its isolated location out in the wilderness of Egypt’s desert moonscape. It covers an area of about five acres of land, and is a rectangular shape of 200 metres long by 100 metres wide.
By the 5th Century CE, the monastery was built over the cave where St Paul the Anchorite lived for more than 80 years.
St Paul, also known as St Paul of Thebes, or Anba Bola in Arabic, was a Coptic Orthodox saint born in Alexandria in 228 CE. Following his father’s death, the teenage Paul decided to become a hermit and live a simple life.
At the age of 16, he converted to Christianity and escaped Alexandria to avoid Roman persecution. According to one story, God sent Paul an angel who guided him to Egypt’s arid Western Desert, where he could live alone as a hermit.
The same story relates how God sent Paul a crow every day carrying half a loaf of bread to feed him. One day St Anthony joined Paul, and when the crow came, it had a full loaf of bread. St Paul then realised that it was God who had sent St Anthony, after 80 years of his worshipping in solitude.
As legend tells it, when St Paul died St Anthony saw two lions standing by the door of the cave in which the former had made his home. The lions approached the corpse, and used their claws dug in the ground, for St Anthony put St Paul’s body into the hole for burial.
It is for this reason that St Paul’s icon in any Coptic museum in Egypt shows him flanked by two lions with a crown above his head.
The first travel narrative associated with the monastery belongs to an anonymous pilgrim from the Italian city of Piacenza who visited the tomb of St Paul the Anchorite between the years 560 CE and 570 CE. The pilgrim is not to be confused with Antoninus Martyr.
The first monks to occupy the monastery were some of the disciples of Anthony the Great, after they learned the story of St Paul the Anchorite. It may have been occupied by Melkites for a short period, although they were followed by Egyptian and Syrian monks.
The Syrians may have had a sustained existence at the monastery, for it appears that they also occupied the monastery during the first half of the 15th Century, after which their presence disappeared. According to an isolated Ethiopian reference, the 70th Coptic Orthodox Pope, Gabriel II (1131–45 CE), was banished to the monastery of St Paul the Anchorite for three years.
Throughout its history, the monastery has suffered from several Bedouin raids, the worst of which occurred in 1484. This particularly painful attack saw all the monks murdered and the monastery plundered, following which the Bedouins occupied the building for 80 years.
The monastery was rebuilt under the patronage of Pope Gabriel VII of Alexandria (1526-69 CE), then attacked and destroyed again towards the end of the century. The monastery was deserted for 119 years, then extensively reconstructed and repopulated by monks from St Anthony’s Monastery, under the patronage of Pope John XVI of Alexandria (1676-1718 CE).
The monastery has three churches, the most important of which is the underground Church of St Paul that contains the hermit’s cave and burial place. Its walls are painted with well-preserved frescoes, and the ceiling is hung with ostrich eggs, symbols of the resurrection. The larger Church of St Michael has a gilded icon of John the Baptist’s severed head.
There is no public transportation to St Paul’s Monastery and, as the original hermit intended, it is a long journey from civilisation to get there. Visitors can take the bus from Cairo to Hurghada and get off at the turn-off for St Paul’s Monastery, following which there is a 13 km uphill trek to the monastery itself. This may sound daunting at first, but the road is well-paved and has plenty of traffic.
The Monastery of St Paul is an incredibly important site in Egypt’s long and varied history, and is the second ancient Coptic Christian monastery tucked away in the Eastern Desert.
Visitors may also view some of the manuscripts in the monastery’s possession, which includes a Coptic language version of the “Divine Liturgy”. A tour of the site may include a trip up the tower, and a glimpse of the “Pool of Mary” where Mary, the sister of Moses, washed her feet during the Exodus.
Along with the nearby Monastery of St Anthony, the Monastery of St Paul is quite possibly the most impressive structure in the desert. It is for this reason that it is included in several Egyptian desert tours.
Doum was founded by mother-daughter duo Samira Madrane and Yasmine Erguibi in 2017.
Samira and Yasmine Erguibi are the Moroccan mother-daughter duo who have made it their mission to make a positive impact in fashion. The designers are playing an active role in promoting sustainability and ethical practices with their accessories label, Doum.
Each design in their bag line is handmade by underprivileged women. The totes, clutches and pouches support fair trade and sustainable practices to preserve local artisanal traditions and invite local women from rural areas around Marrakech to provide for their families via the production of the bags, according to the label’s manifesto.
The brand takes its name from the Moroccan palm leaf, which is collected, pruned and then woven by the artisans. “It is a nod to our culture, heritage and craftsmanship,” explained Yasmine of the decision to name the label Doum.
Today, Doum operates its own cooperative in Morocco, Doum For Women, which currently employs 235 women artisans.
Doum For Women is the first basketry cooperative in Morocco to have obtained SEDEX certification, meaning that the organization ticks all of the boxes of ethical business practices.
Hannibal Mejbri was elected African revelation of the year by the magazine FootAfrica’s editorial staff
And this following over 469,00 votes.
“A rising star in African football, named after a Carthaginian hero destined for conquest, Hannibal Mejbri has developed several high-profile performances in the last twelve months, most notably reaching the final of the FIFA Arab Cup 2021 in his national jersey (lost 0-2 to Algeria),” the magazine continues.
Voting results:
Hannibal Mejbri (Tunisia / 18 years old): 55.64%
Adem Zorgane (Algeria / 21 years old): 35.88%
Edmond Tapsoba (Burkina Faso / 22 years old): 4.24%
