As the megacity brims with informal settlements, the upper classes are leapfrogging over the urban perimeter for an escapist paradise of luxury desert property. Ursula Lindsey reports.
To drive Cairo’s Ring Road – a 110-kilometre freeway that loops the city – is to sail through an endless sea of red brick. The brilliant green of the Nile Valley appears only in flashes through the expanse of cheap apartment blocks.
The buildings occupy what were once agricultural parcels; like those parcels, they are long and narrow, with only a hair’s breadth of space between them. They crowd right up to the freeway, so close that motorists may glance directly into their bare rooms. From their rooftops sprout unfinished supporting columns – ready for the addition of yet another floor. Their only decoration is bright, mismatched shutters; balconies enlivened by bold geometric patterns – pink and purple lozenges, green and orange stripes; and the bricks that spell, along the upper floors: “Allah.”
These are Cairo’s slums, what experts call its “informal” or “spontaneous” neighbourhoods. Egyptians call them ashwa’iyat – from the Arabic word for “random”, “haphazard”. They are the dense, sprawling answer to Cairo’s population explosion and its lack of affordable housing. Almost six in 10 Cairenes – at least 10 million people – live in informal neighbourhoods, often with limited access to water, electricity, schools, hospitals or refuse collection, and no real roads.
Hoda Hanin, 26, and her daughter Mariam stand in the Bashteel district of Imbaba, where Hoda grew up. "The people here are real," she says, "they're good country people." Dana Smillie for The National
Most capitals are magnets, but the speed with which the Egyptian one has grown in the last century is testament both to a remarkable centripetal power and to a surrounding vacuum of opportunity. Swelled by waves of rural migration, the population of greater Cairo has gone from less than one million at the beginning of the 20th century to about 18 million today – a megacity in the order of Mumbai or São Paulo, with more people than Lebanon, Jordan and Libya combined.
For centuries, Cairo’s expansion has been checked by geography: the city is bounded by a narrow strip of fertile, Nile-irrigated land, with nothing but desert beyond. The migrants who flocked to the city in the last century found there was nowhere to live: they built shacks on rooftops; they made homes out of covered alleys, inner courtyards, and stairwells. Priced out of the soaring formal real estate market, they started building illegally – on the agricultural land that surrounds the city and on the barren plateau that separates it from the desert.
The author Hamdi Abu Golayyel describes the slum in which he lived for six years as "a mongrel of a place, part village and part unplanned city fringe, destination of squatters and incomers". Dana Smillie for The National
Cairo has long been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The city teeters under the weight of its multitudes – its public services worn ragged; its air pollution among the worst in the world; its traffic barely managed by freeway overpasses and tunnels, clumsy last-minute bypass surgeries intended to repair its clogged and failing arteries.
Faced with the city’s barely contained chaos and alarmed by the growing slums, Cairo’s elites have begun to dream of escape. Along the Ring Road, billboards advertise exclusive new private developments, with names like country clubs or bad discos – Utopia, Le Reve, Dreamland, Qattamiya Heights, Palm Hills, Belle Ville – and slogans like ““The Egypt of My Desires.” One advertisement, overlooking dilapidated buildings in the centre of town, simply asks: “Why Are You Here?”
Cairo’s future, it seems, lies outside the city’s boundaries, in the desert – where it can be built from scratch. Today the outer edges of the city are one vast construction site, full of subdivisions where empty million-dollar villas stand among the sand dunes, and giant gated communities that promise a luxurious escape from Cairo’s pollution and friction.
What will be the effect of this flight on the city that’s left behind? If Cairo’s future is uncertain, its present is no easier to comprehend. “Perhaps today’s greatest riddle is not so much ‘Where is Cairo headed?’”, notes the writer Maria Golia, “as ‘Where is Cairo at all?’”
Somewhere between the dirt alleys of the slums and the golf courses of the gated suburbs; between the resourcefulness of millions of poor residents and the real estate speculation that has redefined the city’s edges; between the fears that Cairo is becoming one giant “slum” and the fantasy of starting over – the Egyptian capital is taking shape once again.
Hoda Hanin,a 26-year-old teaching assistant, balances her six-month-old daughter on her hip as she heads down a narrow dirt alley to her parents’ home in the slum of Bashteel. She grew up here, back when it was a village on the western bank of the Nile. “It was all farmland,” she says, “then people started clearing it out, selling the land, building homes for their kids.” Today, Bashteel and numerous other nearby villages have been absorbed into the crowded informal neighbourhood of Imbaba.
The average density in Cairo is 90,000 people per square mile; in Imbaba, it’s over 200,000, three times that of Manhattan. Imbaba’s side-streets are unpaved and no more than two metres wide: narrow, endless crevasses between the red-brick buildings. Three-wheel tuk-tuks, imported from India, are the only vehicles capable of navigating the bumpy, rubbish-strewn paths.
For decades, the Egyptian government willfully ignored the spread of the ashwa’iyat. The low-level officials who were supposed to enforce zoning and building laws took bribes to look the other way; on official maps of Cairo, these areas simply didn’t exist. Under this regime of collusion and neglect, the slums grew and grew, providing the masses much-needed cheap housing and allowing the authorities to forgo providing services.
The Talaat Mustafa Group's latest mega-development, located in the desert east of Cairo. Dana Smillie for The National
By the early 1990s, however, Cairo was forced to face its slums. The earthquake that struck the city in 1992 left thousands in the informal neighbourhoods homeless; since then fires and collapses have regularly put one slum or another on the front pages of local newspapers. At around the same time, the Islamist group Jama’a Islamiya took de facto control of Imbaba – creating what the foreign press quickly dubbed “the Islamic Republic of Imbaba”. The government dispatched more than 12,000 soldiers to carry out a six-week siege, round up the Islamists, and reimpose its authority.
After regaining control of Imbaba, the government announced it would spend hundreds of millions of Egyptian pounds to – as one newspaper put it – “Transform Centers of Terrorism into a Civilised Area”. The government set aside LE600 million (about $200m, or Dh402m) for slum upgrades, demolitions and relocations, and further plans for Imbaba are under way – to create more public housing, relocate thousands of street vendors, demolish some buildings and cut major new thoroughfares through the area.
Hoda thinks new, wider roads would be a great improvement. But like many residents here, her complaints about lack of services are tempered by her pride in how successfully, and civilly, Imbaba manages its own affairs. “The people here are real,” she says, “they’re good, country people.” When on our way home we become stuck in traffic in one of Imbaba’s many impassable intersections, she points to the neighbourhood men who are volunteering as impromptu traffic police: “See how they drop everything to help out.” When I ask Hoda where else she might like to live, her eyes grow wide and she says emphatically: “No, no, no! I never want to live outside Imbaba. I know the people here. We’re used to each other.”
“The people in my street let you take pictures there because they trust that I won’t let anyone give Imbaba a bad name,” Hoda tells me, after my visit. “What will you write about Imbaba? Will you write good things?”
Her anxiety over how her neighbourhood will be depicted by outsiders isn’t surprising, given the tenor of most discussions of the ashwa’iyat. Hand-wringing over Cairo’s slums has become a favourite habit of Egypt’s policymakers, artists and public intellectuals. The Egyptian and pan-Arab press abounds with horrified descriptions of these supposedly irredeemable hellholes. An article in Dar Al Hayat newspaper offers a description that is typical in its tone of Victorian shock: the ashwai’yat, the author writes, “are neighbourhoods with no laws and no values and no fixed sources of livelihood … They are neighbourhoods with no peace and security, where crime, selling and taking drugs, prostitution, wanton sex from a young age, take place. Relations are stamped with gangsterism, fighting, revenge, and violence. It’s a life without hope, vision, conviction, or the ability to change one’s destiny.”
More sympathetic depictions of the ashwa’iyat are often no less voyeuristic. A blockbuster 2007 film set in the slums, Hena Maysara, tells the melodramatic story of star-crossed lovers named Nahed and Adel; by the end of the film, Adel has become a gangster, Nahed a prostitute; their illegitimate child becomes a homeless teenage grifter. The slum they inhabit, taken over by extremists, is blown to smithereens in a fiery battle with the police.
The director, Khaled Youssef, called the film “a warning cry”, but in scene after titillating scene of sex, violence and drug use, it gives the impression that the ashwai’yat don’t contain a single law-abiding, gainfully employed resident. The Egyptian Ministry of Housing estimates there are 67 informal areas in Cairo. They range from truly dismal slums to lower-class neighbourhoods that are dense and under-serviced, but hardly dens of vice and desperation. Yet even as they use the ashwai’yat to mount a critique of the Mubarak government, many artists and intellectuals end up stigmatising these areas as dark, dangerous, and radically different places, which threaten the city’s supposed order and culture.
“It’s impossible to distinguish between what’s ashwa’i and what’s not, in Cairo,” says Hamdi Abu Golayyel. Abu Golayyel lived in the slum of Manshiyat Nasr for six years, and described it as “a mongrel place, part village and part unplanned city fringe, destination of squatters and incomers” in his 2006 novel Thieves in Retirement.
Abu Golayyel and I head there one night, in a taxi that speeds, for almost an hour and half, south along the Nile. Manshiyat Nasr (“Nasser’s New Town”) is in the industrial suburb of Helwan. It started as public housing for the workers in the nearby state-owned cement factories; but it soon overflowed into the surrounding countryside. A patch of palm trees, stranded between apartment buildings, conjures the fields that stood here just a few decades ago.
Abu Golayyel paid LE 100 a month (about $30, or Dh67 at the time) during his stay there, from 1995 to 2001. He waves towards the stocky little buildings, the small doors and cramped stairwells – these are “living spaces in the most basic sense,” he says. “Spaces to eat and sleep.”
Manshiyat Nasr is a new slum, and it lacks Imbaba’s self-confidence and cohesiveness. Abu Golayyel’s sly, satirical novel depicts a world in which every basis for community is frayed and unstable. But in his novel the slum isn’t the anti-city – it’s the essence of the city.
“I don’t understand what critics mean by the word ‘marginalised,’” says Abu Golayyel, as we leave Manshiyat Nasr. He gestures around him: “This neighbourhood isn’t any more marginalised than the rest of the city. People in Midan Tahrir,” he says, mentioning Cairo’s central square, “have no more power to make political decisions than people here. Mubarak is the core, and the rest of us are all marginalised.”
“It’s the future,” the salesman beside me says matter-of-factly, as we drive across a grey and empty desert plateau, 40km outside Cairo. We’ve finally reached the outer edge of the seemingly endless belt of construction that surrounds the city. Here lies Madinaty (“My city”), an enormous planned gated community, the brainchild of the disgraced tycoon Talaat Mustafa – once close to the Mubarak family, now appealing a death sentence for the hit he ordered on his Lebanese pop singer girlfriend. Madinaty is designed to house 500,000 people, as well as hospitals, universities, malls and a water park. The developer’s website calls it “the biggest all-inclusive enclosed city in the Middle East.” Renditions of the city feature palm-dotted lawns, man-made lagoons, glistening office towers, spotless shopping arcades.
The Egyptian government has long been convinced – since the early 1960s – that the solution to Cairo’s ills lie in expansion beyond its borders. Back then, however, it was the government that did the developing, erecting a series of self-sufficient blue-collar desert cities that drew disproportionate subsidies but attracted few residents. In line with Egypt’s latter-day rapprochement with capitalism, the Mubarak government has taken a drastically different approach, turning over the colonisation of the desert to the forces of private enterprise, selling off vast swaths of state land to developers.
Frenzied real-estate speculation has continued to drive development on Cairo’s outskirts: houses and apartments in the new cities are sold and resold many times over before they’re even built. My salesman, it turns out, lives in another new development called Dreamland, but he also bought an apartment in Madinaty “as an investment”; in the few years since his purchase, it has already doubled in value. So many people have purchased “investment” properties that, in a city with a severe housing shortage, an estimated million apartments sit empty.
We pass the security checkpoint and enter Madinaty’s endless, sweeping driveway. Its main gate is the size of the Arc de Triomphe. The architecture of the duplexes, town houses and apartment buildings inside is internationally bland and rigidly repetitive: red-tiled gables, sun patios, sliding glass doors. The two-bedroom apartments here will set you back Dh370,000; the grand and bland villas cost close to a Dh3.7m.
But what’s here so far is nothing compared to what is coming. I look out towards the horizon at a construction site the size of, well, a small city – row upon row of buildings, rising from the sand like a pastel mirage.
The salesman notes the clean, bracing breeze. Madinaty is on a desert plateau, almost 300 metres above Cairo. Water from the Nile will have to be pumped all the way up and out here – as to all the new cities – by state-built infrastructure. Electricity and roads – a second ring road is now being planned – will also be provided by the New Urban Communities Administration, which has just issued an LE 10bn (Dh6.7bn) bond to fund its efforts.
Relocating Cairo’s wealthier residents will not alleviate the crowding and poverty they leave behind. Though Imbaba has now been “pacified”, across enormous tranches of the city the state is still regarded as an unwelcome interloper, and anger is never far from the surface. When a cliff collapsed in the dismal slum of Duwaiqa, in 2008, killing 60 people and destroying 35 houses, emergency vehicles took hours to arrive. The authorities seemed more concerned with sealing off the area to journalists and aid workers than helping distraught residents who had been digging for their relatives with their bare hands. Then bulldozers arrived to demolish 1,000 homes at risk of collapse. Furious residents threw volleys of stones at the bulldozers and the governor’s convoy. They compared themselves to Palestinians under Israeli occupation. One columnist in an opposition newspaper wrote of “The Intifada of the ashwa’iyat”.
The new enclaves in the desert promise protection from such tensions. A friend knows a lady who bought a home in one of the new private developments. Her house was in the outer row, not far from a nearby public housing project. She decided to switch to a house nearer the centre – because, she said, “when those people rise up,” she didn’t want to be in the front line.
The slums are most often referred to as a “cancer” – and by that analogy, Cairo is already a terminal case. And the better off residents of this supposedly dying city have embraced the new developments as a sort of miracle cure.
I catch a glimpse of their enthusiasm at a five-star hotel overlooking the Nile, where a fashionable crowd – the men in suits, the women in slinky black dresses, not a headscarf in sight – nibbles on canapés while a jazz band plays in the background. I’m attending a reception organised by the real-estate developers SODIC and SOLIDERE to promote their new development, WestTown, located in the desert on the opposite side of Cairo from Madinaty.
I ask a salesman if business has slowed due to the global recession. He assures me that almost all the 175 units on sale – high-end apartments with whirlpools and teak floors, which can be customised in one of three styles: “Urban Chic,” “Natural Zen” and “Modern Islamic” – have been snapped up.
Guests take turns huddling around a maquette of the development. A projector has been mounted on the ceiling above, to create little virtual future residents, driving their cars down traffic-free, palm-lined streets, eating lunch in the cafes of the (closed-circuit-TV-monitored) plaza and diving into the rooftop pools. It is a projection of a perfect life, and it could be taking place anywhere.
Such pristine, self-sufficient communities are in fact a global phenomenon. But in a city where until recently everyone has been forced to endure close quarters, it is a new development. If, in the next few decades, the enclaves in the desert are populated by Cairo’s upper classes, this will represent what one expert on the Egyptian capital calls “a radical reformulation of Cairo’s urban landscape.”
Modern Cairo came into being, 150 years ago, with another “reformulation”, one that bears some striking resemblances to what’s going on today. In the 1860s, Egypt’s ruler, Khedive Ismail, grafted a European façade onto his capital, hoping to impress the foreign dignitaries invited to the opening ceremonies of the Suez Canal. A western downtown, complete with an opera house, public gardens, and wide Parisian-style avenues, was erected in the span of a few frantic years.
Ironically, the cost of these public works contributed to Egypt’s bankruptcy and led to the 70-year-long British occupation that would follow. Ismail showed off, then lost the country; but the district he established flourished, attracting the upper classes and the first modern government services. The nearby medieval core of the city, meanwhile, was increasingly seen as a dirty, disorderly relic of the past.
For most of the 20th century, the fault line between these two worlds – foreign and local, modern and “backward”, rich and poor – dominated the real and imaginative landscape of the city. What the anthropologist Janet Abu Lughod has called the “rent in the social fabric” of Cairo featured prominently in work of great Egyptian writers such as Naguib Mahfouz and Youssef Idris.
But in 20th-century Cairo, the new and the old city were contiguous, and crossing from one to the other was a fraught but relatively common journey. Today, as spatial segregation and social inequality increase, a much greater chasm seems to be opening.
Or perhaps it would be better described as a vacuum, for Cairo risks becoming a city where no one belongs – a place where the lower classes are blamed for their own disenfranchisement, and from which the upper classes are eager to secede. The preoccupation with the slums shows the malaise most Cairenes feel over the way their city has drifted, seemingly rudderless, over the last half-century.
To stigmatise the ashwai’yat for their poverty and their supposed chaos is politically convenient, but to bemoan them as the apocalyptic end of Egypt’s urban civilisation is far-fetched. The slums of Cairo are the visible symptoms of the shortage and misdirection of Egypt’s resources, of the limits of public oversight, interest and authority. They’re the best that most of Cairo’s residents – left largely to their own devices – have been able to come up with.
The fantasy that leads into the desert and the hysteria over the slums are two sides of the same coin, each one the sign of a deep unease over Cairo’s future and a desire to avoid confronting its present. In the escapism of the gated cities and the horror over the ragged lower-class neighborhoods, after all, there is the same whiff of denial – of a city eager, at least for the time being, to stick its head in the sand.
Ursula Lindsey is a freelance journalist based in Cairo, and writes the culture blog The Arabist Review.
Source: The National: And then Cairo turned itself inside out
Saturday, 6 March 2010
Saturday, 27 February 2010
A brief history (or lack thereof) of Atatürk in the movies
With Zülfü Livaneli's Atatürk biopic 'Veda' (Farewell), along with another offering on the same subject, due out in the next few months, we look back at the history of Atatürk biopics in Turkish cinema - or, more accurately, at the lack of them
A scene from 'Veda' by Zülfü Livaneli.
A scene from 'Veda' by Zülfü Livaneli.
Despite the passing of nearly a century since one of the first films detailing Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s role in the War of Independence, we have yet to see a truly impressive, groundbreaking feature film on Atatürk.
This week, “Veda” (Farewell), an Atatürk biopic by revered writer, composer, singer and filmmaker Zülfü Livaneli is being released. And in March, we will get to see another biopic, “Dersimiz Atatürk” (Today’s Lesson, Atatürk), written by Turgut Özakman, who penned the biggest-selling novel/biopic on Atatürk, “Şu Çılgın Türkler” (These Crazy Turks).
Both films promise to be essentially chronological tales of Atatürk’s life from childhood to death, a story memorized by heart by everyone born in Turkey. “Veda” is narrated by Atatürk’s childhood friend Salih Bozok, a devoted follower to his vision. The second film is told by an old storyteller to children – meaning we will get to watch another film about the founder of the Turkish Republic in narration, much like Can Dündar’s controversial 2008 documentary, “Mustafa.”
From Olivier to DeMille
As long as there has been cinema in Turkey, there have been rumors about Atatürk films, with a definitive feature biopic perpetually in the works since the 1950s. The reasons why these films were never made boil down to three basic facts: Atatürk’s image as a deity in the collective conscience of the Turkish people; apprehension about deviating from the state accounts of Atatürk’s biography; and the significance of such a film for the current political agenda.
According to Metin Erksan, one of Turkish cinema’s greatest filmmakers, Hollywood’s interest in an Atatürk biopic goes back to the late 1940s. American actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was cast to play Atatürk after World War II; when he visited Turkey in 1951, he was welcomed as a national hero, but the film project never came to fruition.
Later, Sir Laurence Olivier showed interest in the same script. But his interest also wore off as no government, civil or private institution from Turkey chose to cooperate in the project. Soon, another big name, the legendary American director and producer Cecil B. DeMille, showed interest in adapting Atatürk’s life, the Independence War and the Kemalist revolutions to the silver screen.
DeMille, who was known for his penchant for extravaganza with big epic dramas such as “The Ten Commandments” and “Cleopatra,” approached state representatives from both Turkey and the United Kingdom. Though U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave a green light to the project, Turkey once more remained silent.
After DeMille died, his production partner, Adil Özkaptan, talked with Turkish President Cemal Gürsel. Both Özkaptan and Yul Brynner, the latest actor cast as a potential Atatürk, also met with Gürsel, but were once again unable to produce an Atatürk biopic.
License to film Atatürk
Tarquin Olivier, the son of the British cinema giant, tried for more than a decade to bring Atatürk to the screen – even linking Antonio Banderas to the role at one point. The plan was shelved, however, and Banderas had to content himself with playing Ché in “Evita” and Zorro in “The Mask of Zorro” and its sequel.
The latest in a line of international Atatürk projects was initiated not long ago by Fuad Kavur, a British citizen who is also the cousin of the late Turkish director Ömer Kavur. The script is apparently ready and there are rumors that Kavur has been approaching producers with the idea of casting Daniel “James Bond” Craig in the lead role.
Despite the abortive foreign attempts, there are a few examples of Atatürk biopics in the history of Turkish cinema – some of them merely adaptations of school books, others expensive productions that are little more than glorified adaptations of the same school books.
The most noted of these offerings are director Feyzi Tuna’s “Metamorfoz” (Metamorphosis), commissioned by President Kenan Evren following the 1980 coup; the early 1990s television series “Kurtuluş” (Independence), directed by Ziya Öztan and written by Özakman; and “Cumhuriyet” (The Republic) by the same duo in the late 1990s.
Semih Tezcan began attempting an Atatürk biopic in 1980s; his three-decade-long quest to make the movie, however, resulted instead in the book, “Atatürk Filmi Projesi Nasıl Baltalandı?” (How Did the Atatürk Biopic Project Get Axed?).
Was ‘Mustafa’ a cautionary tale?
The most recent example of an Atatürk movie was a documentary film that proved more controversial than it deserved to be. Dündar’s “Mustafa” shed a whole new light on Turkey’s greatest hero, depicting the deified leader as a human being for perhaps the first time.
As implied by the first-name title, “Mustafa” was a very intimate recounting of Atatürk’s life in a never-before-seen light. Following painstaking research in the public archives from Atatürk’s personal journals, Dündar brought a whole new dimension to an exalted leader who finally came down from his pedestal.
Here was a man who flirted, missed his mother, had his heart broken, clashed with his friends, made mistakes, danced, drank and eventually led a lonely life in the face of a new century he could understand perfectly well but had no one with whom to share it.
From the first day of its release, “Mustafa” became the top subject of newspaper stories and TV programs. Did Atatürk talk about an autonomous land for the Kurds? Could he be called a dictator? What were the motives behind showing him smoking? And, oddly enough, how could he be lonely with a whole nation in awe of him?
Two years after “Mustafa” and the endless debates around it, two new feature films on Atatürk are ready to hit the screens.
The debates surrounding Dündar’s efforts seem to have sounded a cautionary note because, from the looks of the trailers, both films promise to be history lessons rather than character dramas. Here’s hoping the trailers are misleading.
Source: Hurriyet: A brief history (or lack thereof) of Atatürk in the movies
A scene from 'Veda' by Zülfü Livaneli.
A scene from 'Veda' by Zülfü Livaneli.
Despite the passing of nearly a century since one of the first films detailing Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s role in the War of Independence, we have yet to see a truly impressive, groundbreaking feature film on Atatürk.
This week, “Veda” (Farewell), an Atatürk biopic by revered writer, composer, singer and filmmaker Zülfü Livaneli is being released. And in March, we will get to see another biopic, “Dersimiz Atatürk” (Today’s Lesson, Atatürk), written by Turgut Özakman, who penned the biggest-selling novel/biopic on Atatürk, “Şu Çılgın Türkler” (These Crazy Turks).
Both films promise to be essentially chronological tales of Atatürk’s life from childhood to death, a story memorized by heart by everyone born in Turkey. “Veda” is narrated by Atatürk’s childhood friend Salih Bozok, a devoted follower to his vision. The second film is told by an old storyteller to children – meaning we will get to watch another film about the founder of the Turkish Republic in narration, much like Can Dündar’s controversial 2008 documentary, “Mustafa.”
From Olivier to DeMille
As long as there has been cinema in Turkey, there have been rumors about Atatürk films, with a definitive feature biopic perpetually in the works since the 1950s. The reasons why these films were never made boil down to three basic facts: Atatürk’s image as a deity in the collective conscience of the Turkish people; apprehension about deviating from the state accounts of Atatürk’s biography; and the significance of such a film for the current political agenda.
According to Metin Erksan, one of Turkish cinema’s greatest filmmakers, Hollywood’s interest in an Atatürk biopic goes back to the late 1940s. American actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was cast to play Atatürk after World War II; when he visited Turkey in 1951, he was welcomed as a national hero, but the film project never came to fruition.
Later, Sir Laurence Olivier showed interest in the same script. But his interest also wore off as no government, civil or private institution from Turkey chose to cooperate in the project. Soon, another big name, the legendary American director and producer Cecil B. DeMille, showed interest in adapting Atatürk’s life, the Independence War and the Kemalist revolutions to the silver screen.
DeMille, who was known for his penchant for extravaganza with big epic dramas such as “The Ten Commandments” and “Cleopatra,” approached state representatives from both Turkey and the United Kingdom. Though U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave a green light to the project, Turkey once more remained silent.
After DeMille died, his production partner, Adil Özkaptan, talked with Turkish President Cemal Gürsel. Both Özkaptan and Yul Brynner, the latest actor cast as a potential Atatürk, also met with Gürsel, but were once again unable to produce an Atatürk biopic.
License to film Atatürk
Tarquin Olivier, the son of the British cinema giant, tried for more than a decade to bring Atatürk to the screen – even linking Antonio Banderas to the role at one point. The plan was shelved, however, and Banderas had to content himself with playing Ché in “Evita” and Zorro in “The Mask of Zorro” and its sequel.
The latest in a line of international Atatürk projects was initiated not long ago by Fuad Kavur, a British citizen who is also the cousin of the late Turkish director Ömer Kavur. The script is apparently ready and there are rumors that Kavur has been approaching producers with the idea of casting Daniel “James Bond” Craig in the lead role.
Despite the abortive foreign attempts, there are a few examples of Atatürk biopics in the history of Turkish cinema – some of them merely adaptations of school books, others expensive productions that are little more than glorified adaptations of the same school books.
The most noted of these offerings are director Feyzi Tuna’s “Metamorfoz” (Metamorphosis), commissioned by President Kenan Evren following the 1980 coup; the early 1990s television series “Kurtuluş” (Independence), directed by Ziya Öztan and written by Özakman; and “Cumhuriyet” (The Republic) by the same duo in the late 1990s.
Semih Tezcan began attempting an Atatürk biopic in 1980s; his three-decade-long quest to make the movie, however, resulted instead in the book, “Atatürk Filmi Projesi Nasıl Baltalandı?” (How Did the Atatürk Biopic Project Get Axed?).
Was ‘Mustafa’ a cautionary tale?
The most recent example of an Atatürk movie was a documentary film that proved more controversial than it deserved to be. Dündar’s “Mustafa” shed a whole new light on Turkey’s greatest hero, depicting the deified leader as a human being for perhaps the first time.
As implied by the first-name title, “Mustafa” was a very intimate recounting of Atatürk’s life in a never-before-seen light. Following painstaking research in the public archives from Atatürk’s personal journals, Dündar brought a whole new dimension to an exalted leader who finally came down from his pedestal.
Here was a man who flirted, missed his mother, had his heart broken, clashed with his friends, made mistakes, danced, drank and eventually led a lonely life in the face of a new century he could understand perfectly well but had no one with whom to share it.
From the first day of its release, “Mustafa” became the top subject of newspaper stories and TV programs. Did Atatürk talk about an autonomous land for the Kurds? Could he be called a dictator? What were the motives behind showing him smoking? And, oddly enough, how could he be lonely with a whole nation in awe of him?
Two years after “Mustafa” and the endless debates around it, two new feature films on Atatürk are ready to hit the screens.
The debates surrounding Dündar’s efforts seem to have sounded a cautionary note because, from the looks of the trailers, both films promise to be history lessons rather than character dramas. Here’s hoping the trailers are misleading.
Source: Hurriyet: A brief history (or lack thereof) of Atatürk in the movies
Liberation and artistry have transformed the Arab novel
There is little doubt that the Arab novel has been on the rise in recent years. The volume of published works, the expansive themes and forms, the breaking of taboos, the new emerging prizes and the active translations into other languages all point to such a rise. Size of readership is also widening, though not at the same pace as other promising developments. In certain ways, part of the impetus of this rise could be accredited to the late Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz winning the Nobel Prize in 1988. Since then Arab novel writing and publishing have witnessed a remarkable leap.
This new contemporary wave of Arab novel has indeed moved the art of fiction writing in the Arab world into new territories: breaking more taboos and developing new aesthetics.
Socially and culturally, the Arab novel has come to the forefront, exposing and questioning many previously unquestionable traditional forms of sociality.
Aesthetically, creative forms and experimental structures and prose have also flourished, challenging classical traditions and reflecting more self-confidence and adventurous attitudes.
Key to understanding the rise and success of the recent surge of the Arab novel, which deserves to be underlined, is its relation to the suppressive socio-cultural and political conditions in the Arab world. The flourishing of Arab fiction is in fact linked and provoked by the continuation of these conditions, and is a sharp response against its coercions and an uncompromising denunciation of it.
This key linkage between the success of the Arab novel and the suppressive environment from which it is emerging merits further elaboration in more than one aspect.
In the first place, the sheer contradictions and interwoven sets of political, social and religious patriarchies of the Arab reality at home and/or abroad keep creating manifestations of suffering, longing and revolt at individual and group levels.
All this produces ripe themes waiting to be captured aesthetically and creatively, not only in novel writing but also in other forms of art. The Arab reality over the past two decades, in the 1990s and 2000s, has perhaps witnessed a trajectory of the sharpest changes: global wars fought on Arab land, deep rifts among and within many individual countries, a mushrooming of sectarianism, increases in religiosity and conservatism.
The recent Arab reality has also experienced both a continuing lack of justice and the heavy presence of authoritarianism, compounded with confusion over modernity and westernisation led by the globalisation of communication, satellite broadcasting and internet penetration.
Added to this has been the collapse of pan-Arab ideologies which has brought with it lack of meaning and purpose, and also the alienation of younger generations and general challenges to identity and belonging. For many Arabs, aspects and consequences of this vastly compounded surreal reality seem in fact unbelievably more fictitious than fiction.
Thus successful creative representations of these aspects and consequences, when cleverly formulated, have yielded astounding works, as has indeed been the case over the past two decades in the field of novel writing.
A second aspect worth noticing is the fact that the Arab novel has become one of the freest intellectual and yet public platforms of expression in the Arab sphere.
Apart from the internet and blogging, no other intellectual platform could accommodate the sensitivity, daring and provocation that the new Arab novel is addressing. While some relatively free media outlets that challenge the boundaries of political free expression shy away from touching traditional social taboos, representations in Arab fiction challenge exactly these religious, social and cultural boundaries.
Fanaticism in general and even religion itself is criticised, existential questions are posed, social norms and traditions are deconstructed, self-expression and longing for emancipation takes voice limitlessly, and so on and so forth.
But on top of all this and related to it is the incidence of both female writings and writers. A generation of female novelists, from the Maghreb countries to the Gulf countries, has strongly and confidently burst on to the literary scene. All prize short-lists have had on them successful female writers. It could be said that nowhere else in Arab writing or social platforms are women’s issues, including suppression, desire for rebellion against traditional constructs and emancipation, expressed and presented as they are in the Arab novel.
Intimately related to the above is a third aspect that is worth mentioning and that is the diverse background of the Arab novelists in general.
Because of the harsh Arab reality and the limited venues of free expression, we have witnessed ex-politicians, journalists, academics and activists, males and females, migrating to the field of fiction writing. Most of them have done so seeking a freer sphere for self-expression. Some of their production suffers, expectedly, from directness and emphasis on message-delivering at the expense of aesthetics. But a considerable part of the writing by these groups has nonetheless succeeded in impressing.
Many of these newcomers have discovered in fiction writing a new terrain. It is here and not in academic or serious journalistic writing where almost everything is allowed: subjectivity and self-expression, freedom from political correctness, wild articulation, naming things even with prejudice, nurturing metaphors that are decoded by all, and so on.
Notwithstanding all of the cultural considerations mentioned above, it must be said that it is not just cultural criticism that matters in fiction and creative writing. Literary forms, artistic presentations and imaginative approaches remain first and foremost. No compromise on the aesthetics of literary works should ever be accepted. And the guarding of the aesthetics of the new wave of Arab novel has evolved into the a motivating cause for a number of fiction prizes in the Arab world, chief among them the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, launched in 2007/2008.
In taking a quick or even a deeper look at the titles that have made it on to the long and short lists in the past three years, one could safely conclude that a combination of fine artistic writing and social and political taboo-breaking themes has lain at the heart of this plethora of Arab fiction writing. Taboo-breaking works are common in all cultures; most of them substitute lack of aesthetics with sensationalism. This type of work has little artistic value, if any. The same applies to Arab fiction writing. There have been many “works of fiction” that were produced exploiting a challenge to the three traditional taboos: politics, sex and religion. Hastiness and opportunism are clear in many cases where authors seek fame and publicity, claiming heroism because of the sensitive subjects they embark on, sometimes with risks. One could compile a long list of Arabic works over the past few years that belong to this taxonomy.
However, the carte blanche that used to be given to these works only on the basis of taboo-breaking has been revoked. The true contribution of the fiction and literary prizes comes exactly at this juncture – that is to shepherd all experimentation, cultural challenges and theme exploration within the boundaries of literary criticism as the main criteria for judging creative writing.
Dr Khaled Hroub is the Director of Cambridge Arab Media Project at the University of Cambridge. The International Prize for Arabic Fiction is funded by the Emirates Foundation and is independently managed by its own board of trustees
Source: The National: Liberation and artistry have transformed the Arab novel
This new contemporary wave of Arab novel has indeed moved the art of fiction writing in the Arab world into new territories: breaking more taboos and developing new aesthetics.
Socially and culturally, the Arab novel has come to the forefront, exposing and questioning many previously unquestionable traditional forms of sociality.
Aesthetically, creative forms and experimental structures and prose have also flourished, challenging classical traditions and reflecting more self-confidence and adventurous attitudes.
Key to understanding the rise and success of the recent surge of the Arab novel, which deserves to be underlined, is its relation to the suppressive socio-cultural and political conditions in the Arab world. The flourishing of Arab fiction is in fact linked and provoked by the continuation of these conditions, and is a sharp response against its coercions and an uncompromising denunciation of it.
This key linkage between the success of the Arab novel and the suppressive environment from which it is emerging merits further elaboration in more than one aspect.
In the first place, the sheer contradictions and interwoven sets of political, social and religious patriarchies of the Arab reality at home and/or abroad keep creating manifestations of suffering, longing and revolt at individual and group levels.
All this produces ripe themes waiting to be captured aesthetically and creatively, not only in novel writing but also in other forms of art. The Arab reality over the past two decades, in the 1990s and 2000s, has perhaps witnessed a trajectory of the sharpest changes: global wars fought on Arab land, deep rifts among and within many individual countries, a mushrooming of sectarianism, increases in religiosity and conservatism.
The recent Arab reality has also experienced both a continuing lack of justice and the heavy presence of authoritarianism, compounded with confusion over modernity and westernisation led by the globalisation of communication, satellite broadcasting and internet penetration.
Added to this has been the collapse of pan-Arab ideologies which has brought with it lack of meaning and purpose, and also the alienation of younger generations and general challenges to identity and belonging. For many Arabs, aspects and consequences of this vastly compounded surreal reality seem in fact unbelievably more fictitious than fiction.
Thus successful creative representations of these aspects and consequences, when cleverly formulated, have yielded astounding works, as has indeed been the case over the past two decades in the field of novel writing.
A second aspect worth noticing is the fact that the Arab novel has become one of the freest intellectual and yet public platforms of expression in the Arab sphere.
Apart from the internet and blogging, no other intellectual platform could accommodate the sensitivity, daring and provocation that the new Arab novel is addressing. While some relatively free media outlets that challenge the boundaries of political free expression shy away from touching traditional social taboos, representations in Arab fiction challenge exactly these religious, social and cultural boundaries.
Fanaticism in general and even religion itself is criticised, existential questions are posed, social norms and traditions are deconstructed, self-expression and longing for emancipation takes voice limitlessly, and so on and so forth.
But on top of all this and related to it is the incidence of both female writings and writers. A generation of female novelists, from the Maghreb countries to the Gulf countries, has strongly and confidently burst on to the literary scene. All prize short-lists have had on them successful female writers. It could be said that nowhere else in Arab writing or social platforms are women’s issues, including suppression, desire for rebellion against traditional constructs and emancipation, expressed and presented as they are in the Arab novel.
Intimately related to the above is a third aspect that is worth mentioning and that is the diverse background of the Arab novelists in general.
Because of the harsh Arab reality and the limited venues of free expression, we have witnessed ex-politicians, journalists, academics and activists, males and females, migrating to the field of fiction writing. Most of them have done so seeking a freer sphere for self-expression. Some of their production suffers, expectedly, from directness and emphasis on message-delivering at the expense of aesthetics. But a considerable part of the writing by these groups has nonetheless succeeded in impressing.
Many of these newcomers have discovered in fiction writing a new terrain. It is here and not in academic or serious journalistic writing where almost everything is allowed: subjectivity and self-expression, freedom from political correctness, wild articulation, naming things even with prejudice, nurturing metaphors that are decoded by all, and so on.
Notwithstanding all of the cultural considerations mentioned above, it must be said that it is not just cultural criticism that matters in fiction and creative writing. Literary forms, artistic presentations and imaginative approaches remain first and foremost. No compromise on the aesthetics of literary works should ever be accepted. And the guarding of the aesthetics of the new wave of Arab novel has evolved into the a motivating cause for a number of fiction prizes in the Arab world, chief among them the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, launched in 2007/2008.
In taking a quick or even a deeper look at the titles that have made it on to the long and short lists in the past three years, one could safely conclude that a combination of fine artistic writing and social and political taboo-breaking themes has lain at the heart of this plethora of Arab fiction writing. Taboo-breaking works are common in all cultures; most of them substitute lack of aesthetics with sensationalism. This type of work has little artistic value, if any. The same applies to Arab fiction writing. There have been many “works of fiction” that were produced exploiting a challenge to the three traditional taboos: politics, sex and religion. Hastiness and opportunism are clear in many cases where authors seek fame and publicity, claiming heroism because of the sensitive subjects they embark on, sometimes with risks. One could compile a long list of Arabic works over the past few years that belong to this taxonomy.
However, the carte blanche that used to be given to these works only on the basis of taboo-breaking has been revoked. The true contribution of the fiction and literary prizes comes exactly at this juncture – that is to shepherd all experimentation, cultural challenges and theme exploration within the boundaries of literary criticism as the main criteria for judging creative writing.
Dr Khaled Hroub is the Director of Cambridge Arab Media Project at the University of Cambridge. The International Prize for Arabic Fiction is funded by the Emirates Foundation and is independently managed by its own board of trustees
Source: The National: Liberation and artistry have transformed the Arab novel
Sunday, 14 February 2010
The Ottoman architect who linked East and West
The extent to which the great Ottoman Empire influenced the rest of Europe can still be seen from the buildings it has left behind, explains architecture and design expert Jonathan Glancey.
Driving west from Istanbul, it looks as if the city will never end.
Out through the commanding Roman walls of the town - bulldozed in parts to let six-lane carriageways of traffic race through - the skyline turns into a seamless blur of fourth-rate quick-build apartment blocks.
Cheap hotels bristle with dripping air-conditioning units, anonymous business headquarters are set behind jammed car parks, carpet warehouses proffer colourful displays behind enormous plate glass windows.
And the giant cranes - I couldn't begin to count them all - raise reinforced concrete skeletons of ever more apartment blocks on floodplains and hillsides, on what were once fields and forests, as far as the eye can possibly see.
Istanbul is one of the world's fastest growing cities, expanding north, south, east and west
Will the built-up area ever stop? Will it go all the way to the Balkans, Greece and Italy?
Perhaps it will, especially if Turkey becomes a member of the European Union, and also because Istanbul, with a population of who knows exactly how many millions of people, is one of the world's fastest growing cities, expanding north, south, east and west.
But what I could not help thinking, as I made my way to Lake Buyukcekmece on the far side of the city's Ataturk Airport, is that the Ottoman Empire that drove Istanbul for the best part of half a millennium, once headed this way too.
Reconnecting Istanbul
If Suleiman the Magnificent, the 16th Century Ottoman emperor, had had his way, the road west would have led directly to Rome - the city that had been the hub of the empire that had created Istanbul, or Constantinople, in the first place.
Inside the Rustem Pasha Mosque (completed by Sinan in 1563)
How far did Ottoman style influence Europe's great architects?
Calling himself "Caesar of all the lands of Rome", Suleiman dreamed of reconnecting Istanbul with Rome.
He would do it by conquest, travelling on the road that passes over Lake Buyukcekmece on a bridge designed and built by his architect, Sinan.
In fact, his armies did set foot and hoof in Italy - but they never made it as far as Rome.
In recent years the superb bridge, too narrow for modern traffic has been bypassed.
A lonely tourist attraction, it takes off from a sorry-looking public park, complete with a cartoon-style statue of Sinan sporting an ambitious turban, and lands at the foot of another concrete panorama, blocking the view west.
This was the bridge Suleiman saw rising as he set off on his last military adventure, to conquer Hungary. He was killed in the campaign so never saw it completed.
Nor had he managed to forge a direct link between what had been the ancient Roman Empire and his New Rome, Ottoman Istanbul.
From his death in 1566, the empire sank into a long, if exquisite, decline.
Yet one legacy Suleiman left is that of his architect, Sinan.
Influential art
Sinan lived to be 100, realising hundreds of designs for mosques and madrassas, bridges and aqueducts.
One of Palladio's churches: St Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
Does Palladio's St Giorgio Maggiore borrow from the works of Sinan?
This contemporary of Michelangelo and Andrea Palladio, two of the most influential Italian architects, is little known in the West, yet not only did Sinan shape some of the world's finest buildings - who could argue with the choice of his Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul or Selimiye Mosque in Edirne? - but his work was also to influence that of the most ambitious architects of the Italian Renaissance, as theirs was to affect his.
What I came to understand on my latest trip to Istanbul - with the penny, or Turkish Lira, dropping as I walked across Sinan's Buyukcekmece bridge - is just how real this connection was.
Istanbul was joined to the West culturally if not politically or in terms of religious belief, and if not by political treatises, then by architecture.
Michelangelo's dome, soaring above the roof of St Peter's, Rome, was surely influenced by those of Sinan's daring mosques in Istanbul.
Scholars might yet stumble on correspondence between the greatest architects of Italy and Istanbul
Equally, it seems possible that Sinan would have seen drawings by the Italians.
Palladio's champion and patron, Marcantonio Barbaro, was for six years the Venetian ambassador to Istanbul.
Surely he made some sort of connection between Sinan and Palladio?
Whenever I go to Venice and look afresh at Palladio's sublime churches of St Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore - the Redeemer - I am sure I am seeing or scenting something in their design from east of the Mediterranean - from Istanbul?
Somewhere in undocumented Ottoman archives, scholars might yet stumble on correspondence between the greatest architects of Italy and Istanbul, confirming a connection between the Italian and Suleiman's Renaissance, between the old and new Romes.
FIND OUT MORE
Radio 3 Sunday Feature: Sinan the Magnificent
Presented by Jonathan Glancey, Architecture Correspondent for the Guardian
2000GMT, 14 February
Available for 7 days on the iplayer
The desperate sprawl of modern Istanbul makes today's city somehow further from Rome, the West or the European Union, than Sinan and Suleiman's city was 500 years ago.
As I stood on the haunting bridge across Lake Buyukcekmece it seemed somehow sad that the road across it leads not to some new glory or to a shaking of modern Turkish hands in western Europe, but to the blank-faced and all too solid walls of yet another, architecture-free concrete housing estate.
Source: BBC News: The Ottoman architect who linked East and West
Driving west from Istanbul, it looks as if the city will never end.
Out through the commanding Roman walls of the town - bulldozed in parts to let six-lane carriageways of traffic race through - the skyline turns into a seamless blur of fourth-rate quick-build apartment blocks.
Cheap hotels bristle with dripping air-conditioning units, anonymous business headquarters are set behind jammed car parks, carpet warehouses proffer colourful displays behind enormous plate glass windows.
And the giant cranes - I couldn't begin to count them all - raise reinforced concrete skeletons of ever more apartment blocks on floodplains and hillsides, on what were once fields and forests, as far as the eye can possibly see.
Istanbul is one of the world's fastest growing cities, expanding north, south, east and west
Will the built-up area ever stop? Will it go all the way to the Balkans, Greece and Italy?
Perhaps it will, especially if Turkey becomes a member of the European Union, and also because Istanbul, with a population of who knows exactly how many millions of people, is one of the world's fastest growing cities, expanding north, south, east and west.
But what I could not help thinking, as I made my way to Lake Buyukcekmece on the far side of the city's Ataturk Airport, is that the Ottoman Empire that drove Istanbul for the best part of half a millennium, once headed this way too.
Reconnecting Istanbul
If Suleiman the Magnificent, the 16th Century Ottoman emperor, had had his way, the road west would have led directly to Rome - the city that had been the hub of the empire that had created Istanbul, or Constantinople, in the first place.
Inside the Rustem Pasha Mosque (completed by Sinan in 1563)
How far did Ottoman style influence Europe's great architects?
Calling himself "Caesar of all the lands of Rome", Suleiman dreamed of reconnecting Istanbul with Rome.
He would do it by conquest, travelling on the road that passes over Lake Buyukcekmece on a bridge designed and built by his architect, Sinan.
In fact, his armies did set foot and hoof in Italy - but they never made it as far as Rome.
In recent years the superb bridge, too narrow for modern traffic has been bypassed.
A lonely tourist attraction, it takes off from a sorry-looking public park, complete with a cartoon-style statue of Sinan sporting an ambitious turban, and lands at the foot of another concrete panorama, blocking the view west.
This was the bridge Suleiman saw rising as he set off on his last military adventure, to conquer Hungary. He was killed in the campaign so never saw it completed.
Nor had he managed to forge a direct link between what had been the ancient Roman Empire and his New Rome, Ottoman Istanbul.
From his death in 1566, the empire sank into a long, if exquisite, decline.
Yet one legacy Suleiman left is that of his architect, Sinan.
Influential art
Sinan lived to be 100, realising hundreds of designs for mosques and madrassas, bridges and aqueducts.
One of Palladio's churches: St Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
Does Palladio's St Giorgio Maggiore borrow from the works of Sinan?
This contemporary of Michelangelo and Andrea Palladio, two of the most influential Italian architects, is little known in the West, yet not only did Sinan shape some of the world's finest buildings - who could argue with the choice of his Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul or Selimiye Mosque in Edirne? - but his work was also to influence that of the most ambitious architects of the Italian Renaissance, as theirs was to affect his.
What I came to understand on my latest trip to Istanbul - with the penny, or Turkish Lira, dropping as I walked across Sinan's Buyukcekmece bridge - is just how real this connection was.
Istanbul was joined to the West culturally if not politically or in terms of religious belief, and if not by political treatises, then by architecture.
Michelangelo's dome, soaring above the roof of St Peter's, Rome, was surely influenced by those of Sinan's daring mosques in Istanbul.
Scholars might yet stumble on correspondence between the greatest architects of Italy and Istanbul
Equally, it seems possible that Sinan would have seen drawings by the Italians.
Palladio's champion and patron, Marcantonio Barbaro, was for six years the Venetian ambassador to Istanbul.
Surely he made some sort of connection between Sinan and Palladio?
Whenever I go to Venice and look afresh at Palladio's sublime churches of St Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore - the Redeemer - I am sure I am seeing or scenting something in their design from east of the Mediterranean - from Istanbul?
Somewhere in undocumented Ottoman archives, scholars might yet stumble on correspondence between the greatest architects of Italy and Istanbul, confirming a connection between the Italian and Suleiman's Renaissance, between the old and new Romes.
FIND OUT MORE
Radio 3 Sunday Feature: Sinan the Magnificent
Presented by Jonathan Glancey, Architecture Correspondent for the Guardian
2000GMT, 14 February
Available for 7 days on the iplayer
The desperate sprawl of modern Istanbul makes today's city somehow further from Rome, the West or the European Union, than Sinan and Suleiman's city was 500 years ago.
As I stood on the haunting bridge across Lake Buyukcekmece it seemed somehow sad that the road across it leads not to some new glory or to a shaking of modern Turkish hands in western Europe, but to the blank-faced and all too solid walls of yet another, architecture-free concrete housing estate.
Source: BBC News: The Ottoman architect who linked East and West
Prism Magazine
A new magazine was launched recently by wrongly accussed and subsequently tortured Mahed Arar. The focus of the magazine is national security, obviously with an emphasis on Canada.
Prism Magazine
Prism Magazine
Where religion and civil society meet
The US-Islamic World Forum – held this weekend in Qatar – will once again explore the nature and possibilities of the power dynamics between these two entities, one a nation state, the other, ostensibly a religion.
However “Islamic”, or its place holder, “Muslim”, has come to mean more of a region than anything more meaningful.
As a region, “Islamic” would embrace the Christian, the atheist, the Jewish, the Marxist and the non-committed. Adding to the stickiness of the proposition is the prevalence of Islam in regions not designated “Islamic”. Albania and Bosnia are soundly European. Spain was a Muslim country for 700 years. And yes, the US itself has been witnessing its second wave of indigenisation since the turn of the 20th century; the US ambassador to the Philippines converted in 1888 and continued to advocate the Muslim faith among New York’s elite society until his death in 1916. Muslim “buffalo soldiers” fought with the Union army during the 1861-1865 American Civil War.
This weekend’s conference will explore among other things, possibilities for strengthening civil society and non-governmental efforts to fill the “human development” gaps left by beleaguered or otherwise distracted governments.
But what, if anything, has religion to do with this? Quality of life services are socially inclusive and universally perfected by international NGOs that transcend, in their technique, any religious affiliation. It is a shared knowledge, a common effort, and an inclusive pursuit.
So has the utility of religion in the equation been reduced to no more than one among several policy facilitators? Has religion been reduced to an opiate for steering masses with this particular fix?
Here is a case for an expanded consideration that may not have been lost on all the organisers. Barbiturates and intoxicants are forbidden in Islam because of their propensity to cloud the mind, whereas Islam unflinchingly calls for the enhancement and sharpening of the rational faculty.
The contribution that theological reasoning makes to civil society and human development initiatives is unique in its three dimensional approach.
Man is a whole as body, mind, and soul; not body alone. Being is material, spiritual and divine; not material alone.
The effective value-add of theological reasoning to human development initiatives turns upon five themes: First, it brings sense to the confusion stemming from the displacement of the human condition in an alienating modernity.
Second, it assesses the ordering of material and circumstantial priorities in light of an authentic Islamic worldview.
Third, it provides doctrinal grounding for fundamental human development objectives.
Fourth, it can facilitate, advocate and encourage helpful and constructive behaviours for good global citizenship and environmental consciousness.
Fifth, it can potentially contribute to the development of an integrated, engaged and participatory Muslim identity for the 21st century.
Returning to the motif of the opiate. The Muslim poet said: “Our wine is the wine of meaning; it is permissible and not unlawful.” The difference between the wine of the world is that it dulls the senses and shackles you to the ground. But the wine of paradise sharpens the mind and lifts you out of the petty, the mundane, and the unidimensional. It gives life to the life of the mind, to the life of the spirit, and not merely to the life of body alone. It is 360 degrees, in three dimensions, it is whole, and it is vibrant.
Jihad Hashim Brown is director of research at the Tabah Foundation. He delivers the Friday sermon at the Maryam bint Sultan Mosque in Abu Dhabi/
Source: The National: Where religion and civil society meet
Tabah Foundation
However “Islamic”, or its place holder, “Muslim”, has come to mean more of a region than anything more meaningful.
As a region, “Islamic” would embrace the Christian, the atheist, the Jewish, the Marxist and the non-committed. Adding to the stickiness of the proposition is the prevalence of Islam in regions not designated “Islamic”. Albania and Bosnia are soundly European. Spain was a Muslim country for 700 years. And yes, the US itself has been witnessing its second wave of indigenisation since the turn of the 20th century; the US ambassador to the Philippines converted in 1888 and continued to advocate the Muslim faith among New York’s elite society until his death in 1916. Muslim “buffalo soldiers” fought with the Union army during the 1861-1865 American Civil War.
This weekend’s conference will explore among other things, possibilities for strengthening civil society and non-governmental efforts to fill the “human development” gaps left by beleaguered or otherwise distracted governments.
But what, if anything, has religion to do with this? Quality of life services are socially inclusive and universally perfected by international NGOs that transcend, in their technique, any religious affiliation. It is a shared knowledge, a common effort, and an inclusive pursuit.
So has the utility of religion in the equation been reduced to no more than one among several policy facilitators? Has religion been reduced to an opiate for steering masses with this particular fix?
Here is a case for an expanded consideration that may not have been lost on all the organisers. Barbiturates and intoxicants are forbidden in Islam because of their propensity to cloud the mind, whereas Islam unflinchingly calls for the enhancement and sharpening of the rational faculty.
The contribution that theological reasoning makes to civil society and human development initiatives is unique in its three dimensional approach.
Man is a whole as body, mind, and soul; not body alone. Being is material, spiritual and divine; not material alone.
The effective value-add of theological reasoning to human development initiatives turns upon five themes: First, it brings sense to the confusion stemming from the displacement of the human condition in an alienating modernity.
Second, it assesses the ordering of material and circumstantial priorities in light of an authentic Islamic worldview.
Third, it provides doctrinal grounding for fundamental human development objectives.
Fourth, it can facilitate, advocate and encourage helpful and constructive behaviours for good global citizenship and environmental consciousness.
Fifth, it can potentially contribute to the development of an integrated, engaged and participatory Muslim identity for the 21st century.
Returning to the motif of the opiate. The Muslim poet said: “Our wine is the wine of meaning; it is permissible and not unlawful.” The difference between the wine of the world is that it dulls the senses and shackles you to the ground. But the wine of paradise sharpens the mind and lifts you out of the petty, the mundane, and the unidimensional. It gives life to the life of the mind, to the life of the spirit, and not merely to the life of body alone. It is 360 degrees, in three dimensions, it is whole, and it is vibrant.
Jihad Hashim Brown is director of research at the Tabah Foundation. He delivers the Friday sermon at the Maryam bint Sultan Mosque in Abu Dhabi/
Source: The National: Where religion and civil society meet
Tabah Foundation
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