DOCSLIB.ORG

Ahmed Abdalla

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Ahmed Abdalla CLOSE UP 61 The Youth Leader In Spring 2003 after the US-led invasion of Ahmed Abdalla: Youth Leader, Iraq, I met Ahmed Abdalla (1950-2006) Intellectual, and Community Worker with friends at a small restaurant near the American University of Beirut. They intro- duced him to me as one of the leaders of the Egyptian student movement in the 1970s. That evening, we engaged in long political conversations on the dark future of the Arab region and listened to Sheikh Imam songs. Sheikh Imam and poet Ahmed Fouad Nigm were major cultural symbols of left-wing politics and popular mobilization in Egypt in the 1970s. Even today, I can recall the imprint of Abdalla’s charming presence, conviviality, wit, and charisma. I met him for few times after that encounter but it was the 2011 Egyptian revolution that reintroduced contentious politics to Egyptian and Arab political life and that led me to rediscover Ahmed Abdalla, not only as the leader of the stu- dent movement in its 1971-1973 moments, but as an intellectual and a community worker who spent his life struggling for Egypt’s national cause, its youth, and underprivileged classes. Abdalla’s rele- vance to Egyptian politics today is observed at two junctures: when the polit- Helena Nassif ical sphere in Egypt opened post-2011 and he became a symbol of continuity with a Keywords: Egypt; legacy of Ahmed problematic past of social mobilization and political Abdalla; political struggle; generational struggle; and as the political sphere is Middle East – Topics & Arguments #09–2017 CLOSE UP 62 closing again, his life as well as his writings of young people to gain a “new courage” total national surrender (Hisham). In the proved to contain valuable insight into to self-organise and engage in politics late 1960s early 1970s, large numbers of understanding the disquiet Egypt is living (“Egyptian Generation” 74). The “most politicised students became attracted to in today. A student political leader, an aca- vocal expression of public unrest follow- Marxist literature and revolutionary theory demic graduate of Cambridge, and an ing the defeat of 1967” was the student as part of a global movement inspired by Old Cairo grassroots development actor, uprising of February 1968, where students the Cuban Revolution, the Vietnam resis- studying the history of Abdalla’s margin- across ideological divides confronted tance against the US, and other self-deter- alisation by the Egyptian regime helps us Nasser’s regime (Abdalla, “Student mination and national independence to understand the relationship between Movement” 149). Abdalla’s role grew from movements. Majority-youth Marxist organ- challenging power at the levels of youth participating in what he described as “a isations of all sizes were established. activism, intellectual pursuit, and grass- reaction to the 1967 defeat” (“Egyptian Abdalla did not belong to any organised roots social work, and the challenges an Generation” 77) to leading a “rebellion” political group, for he was known to prefer intellectual has to endure to remain hon- against the Sadat regime’s control over his intellectual and political independence est to his ideals and to his independent youth and their organisations (“Student but associated himself with the left-wing search for knowledge. Movement” 176). At the age of twenty-two, socialist student movement (Al-Talaba 16). Abdalla was named a leader of the stu- Countering this movement stood students A social liberal and an economic socialist, dent movement, where he played a major with a different ideology, establishing Abdalla belonged to the generation role in the January 1972 student uprising al-Jamāʿat al-Islāmiyyat (the Islamic whose questions, struggles, and motives and the mobilisations of the subsequent Groups), a new political Islamic hybrid linked the personal to the national and the academic year 1972/1973, leading to his trend influenced by the Muslim global. To write about Ahmed Abdalla, detention in December of that year.1 Brotherhood and Salafism, or what they one cannot help but start from the major considered to be an alternative to a “failed formative life-marker on Abdalla and his Abdalla’s 1970s generation challenged Nasserist dream” (Tamam 8). Abdalla iden- generation, the June 1967 Egyptian mili- Nasser’s legacy, even while they contin- tified the “radical left” and the “Islamic fun- tary defeat and subsequent occupation of ued to be inspired by the Third World damentalists” as the major “polar oppo- Sinai by Israel, known as Naksa. Abdalla National Liberation Movements he was sites” organising, recruiting, and described the defeat he experienced as a part of. Their rebellion against the regime mobilising students (Abdalla, Al-Talaba seventeen-year-old as a “great psycho- questioned its ways but not its goals. They 413). This polarization within the student logical shock” which shattered the world- requested democracy as a means to hold body was encouraged by Sadat’s govern- view, ideas, and concepts of his genera- accountable those responsible for the mental policies. For while Islamist students tion (Abdalla, “Egyptian Generation” 71). It military defeat, to allow freedom of participated in the student uprising of also destabilised the Nasser regime and thought and political organisation, and to 1968 as part of a general student mobilisa- as a result allowed “a rebellious minority” mobilise against the defeat becoming a tion bringing together different ideolo- Middle East – Topics & Arguments #09–2017 CLOSE UP 63 gies, Islamists in 1972 marched against the Amin). Abdalla hung this article as a wall towards their political mobilisation among student occupation of the University Hall magazine on 28 October 1972 at the students, and its clampdown on the stu- and chanted against communism. What Faculty of Economics and Political Science dent movement and the Marxist organisa- came to be called the 1970s’ student at Cairo University, where he was studying. tions as part of a pro-US Cold War align- movement, which Abdalla led in its 1972 In the article he asserted that ment. It was the liquidation of that moment, is thus a congregation of a gen- generation’s consciousness that was more erally left-leaning block bringing together “the student movement was not a per- difficult. They remained active in resisting the radical left and the Arab nationalists son or another who could be watched the implications of the Camp David who took the name of Nasserists. This or monitored, but the cause of libera- Accords to build relationships between movement excludes the Islamic students ting a country, and as long as liberation Israel and Egypt by initiating anti-normal- who were growing in power and who is postponed, the situation keeps ris- isation campaigns. Abdalla left Egypt for slowly succeeded in exerting their control king to escalate” (Amin 101). the UK following his long 1973 detention; over the Egyptian University, winning the however, he did not give up and sought a seat of president of the Cairo student He added that deeper understanding of the history of union in 1975 (Taman). Abdalla was not in the student movement and its role in Egypt then to witness this shift. In 1974, he “the intellectual differences among stu- Egyptian national politics. His research moved to the United Kingdom, after he dents are all fused in the crucible of nati- culminated in a Ph.D. thesis later pub- had spent nine months in prison onal views”, and that “the central securi- lished in both English (1985) and Arabic (December 1972 – September 1973). He ty might succeed in liquidating protests (2007). was number one on a list of 56 students and sit-ins, but it cannot succeed in li- accused of quidating conscious minds” (Amin 102). The Intellectual Abdalla’s intellectual project was indistin- “publishing false news and rumours”, Consciousness in this context is a shared guishable from his political project of “inciting the students”, and “collabo- generational preoccupation with ques- social liberalism and economic socialism. rating” amongst each other in order tions regarding Egypt’s liberation, free- He started a self-funded Ph.D. at King’s to “disturb the public order, harm the dom, and progress. The slow liquidation College Cambridge during his second public interest, and attack the existing of the movement, however, happened as year in the UK. He worked in different regime” (Amin 624-6). a result of Sadat gaining legitimacy after kinds of occupations, ranging from menial fighting the 1973 war with Israel. The stu- restaurant jobs to research work at the One of the confiscated documents the dent movement lost fighting the war as its Arab Planning Institute in Kuwait. He chose judges used to interrogate Abdalla in 1973 main organising impetus. The Islamic his dissertation topic, “The Student was a handwritten article titled “What is groups grew in power benefiting from the Movement and National Politics in Egypt”, the Student Movement?” (republished in Sadat regime’s laissez-aller attitude based on a clear historic and generational Middle East – Topics & Arguments #09–2017 CLOSE UP 64 positionality, an awareness he said he impacted only those within the scope of power (Abdalla, Al-Jāmiʿ 136). Secondly, shared with the 1970s generation of active Abdalla’s influence in Egypt, an influence intellectual elites failed to prove their students, who in seeking historical knowl- excluded to the margins of the Egyptian respect for democratic processes within edge of Egypt’s student movement since state’s intellectual, media, and political life. their parties and organizations (138). This independence, sought inspiration for their In order to understand the type of intel- can also be extended to the political strug- own political movement (Abdalla, lectual Abdalla constituted, it is necessary gle in general, where they have expressed Al-Talaba 15). Abdalla neither approached to build on his differentiation between two weak commitment to the democratic tra- the generational issue from a perspective trends of intellectuals engaged in social dition, especially with regards to the rep- of bias towards his generation nor eulo- change in Egypt.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • When Art Is the Weapon: Culture and Resistance Confronting Violence in the Post-Uprisings Arab World
    Religions 2015, 6, 1277–1313; doi:10.3390/rel6041277 OPEN ACCESS religions ISSN 2077-1444 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Article When Art Is the Weapon: Culture and Resistance Confronting Violence in the Post-Uprisings Arab World Mark LeVine 1,2 1 Department of History, University of California, Irvine, Krieger Hall 220, Irvine, CA 92697-3275, USA; E-Mail: [email protected] 2 Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University, Finngatan 16, 223 62 Lund, Sweden Academic Editor: John L. Esposito Received: 6 August 2015 / Accepted: 23 September 2015 / Published: 5 November 2015 Abstract: This articles explores the explosion of artistic production in the Arab world during the so-called Arab Spring. Focusing on music, poetry, theatre, and graffiti and related visual arts, I explore how these “do-it-yourself” scenes represent, at least potentially, a “return of the aura” to the production of culture at the edge of social and political transformation. At the same time, the struggle to retain a revolutionary grounding in the wake of successful counter-revolutionary moves highlights the essentially “religious” grounding of “committed” art at the intersection of intense creativity and conflict across the Arab world. Keywords: Arab Spring; revolutionary art; Tahrir Square What to do when military thugs have thrown your mother out of the second story window of your home? If you’re Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuta, Africa’s greatest political artist, you march her coffin to the Presidential compound and write a song, “Coffin for Head of State,” about the murder. Just to make sure everyone gets the point, you use the photo of the crowd at the gates of the Presidential compound with the coffin as the album cover [1].
    [Show full text]
  • Arabic Poetry As a Possible Metalanguage for Intercultural Dialogue Author: Daniel Roters
    Arab-West Report, December 22, 2009 Title: Arabic Poetry as a possible Metalanguage for Intercultural Dialogue Author: Daniel Roters “For me the province of poetry is a private ecstasy made public, and the social role of the poet is to display moments of shared universal epiphanies capable of healing our sense of mortal estrangement—from ourselves, from each other, from our source, from our destiny, from the Divine” (Danial Abdal-Hayy, US-American poet) Introduction The aim of this study is to show how modern Arabic literature and poetry could help in the effort to understand modern Arab society and its problems. At the same time it will be necessary to describe the history of Arabic poetry if we want to understand how important poetry in contemporary Arab society is. This whirlwind tour through the history of Arabic poetry will be restrained to the function of the poet and the role of poetry played in general in Arabic-Islamic history. Indeed the preoccupation with works of modern writers should not only be an issue for organizations working on the improvement of intercultural dialogue. It is also of great importance that the scholarly discourse in Islamic or Middle Eastern Studies recognizes the importance of modern Arabic literature. Arabic literature could be another valuable source of information, in addition to the Qur' ān and Sunnah. If you 1 consider the theory of theologian Hermann Gunkel about the “Sitz im Leben ” (seat in life) and if we question a lyrical or prose text about the formative stage, it is possible to learn much about the society from which an author is addressing his audience.
    [Show full text]
  • Incarceration As a Gateway to Wonder in the Poetry of Ahmed Fouad Negm
    Contemporary Literary Review India CLRI Print ISSN 2250-3366 | Online ISSN 2394-6075 Vol. 7, No. 4: CLRI November 2020 | p 1-27 Incarceration as a Gateway to Wonder in the Poetry of Ahmed Fouad Negm Ahsan Ul Haq Ph D Research Scholar, Dept. of English, University of Kashmir, Srinagar, J & K. Abstract Ahmed Fouad Negm (1929-2013), was an Egyptian poet writing poetry in colloquial Arabic. He is one of the most celebrated revolutionary poet of Egypt. Negm was arrests and imprisoned multiple times for his outspoken and dissent voice. It was behind the prison walls that he found his voice. His prison poetry has strong impact on the minds of Egyptian folk, and inspires resistance against the dictatorship and regimes. Negm, remains the most popular and vernacular poet of Egypt. Typifying the artist’s progress, from inside the prison/jail Negm continues to speak for the voiceless Egyptians. This paper is an attempt study his prison poetry, and how jail/prison infused spark in his art. The paper will Contemporary Literary Review India | pISSN 2250-3366 / eISSN 2394-6075 | Vol. 7, No. 4: CLRI November 2020 | Page 1 Incarceration as a Gateway to Wonder in the Poetry of Ahmed Fouad Negm | Ahsan Ul haq examine some of the best prison testimonials translate in English. Keywords: Ahmed Fouad Negm, prison/jail, incarceration/imprisonment, revolution, poetry. Introduction The themes of incarceration and exile are predominant in the poetry of Egyptian Vernacular poet, Ahmed Fouad Negm (1929-2013), who spent eighteen years of his life prisons. Negm was nicknamed as Al-Fagomi (the impulsive).
    [Show full text]
  • My Voice Is My Weapon: Music, Nationalism, and the Poetics Of
    MY VOICE IS MY WEAPON MY VOICE IS MY WEAPON Music, Nationalism, and the Poetics of Palestinian Resistance David A. McDonald Duke University Press ✹ Durham and London ✹ 2013 © 2013 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ♾ Cover by Heather Hensley. Interior by Courtney Leigh Baker Typeset in Minion Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data McDonald, David A., 1976– My voice is my weapon : music, nationalism, and the poetics of Palestinian resistance / David A. McDonald. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-5468-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-5479-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Palestinian Arabs—Music—History and criticism. 2. Music—Political aspects—Israel. 3. Music—Political aspects—Gaza Strip. 4. Music—Political aspects—West Bank. i. Title. ml3754.5.m33 2013 780.89′9274—dc23 2013012813 For Seamus Patrick McDonald Illustrations viii Note on Transliterations xi Note on Accessing Performance Videos xiii Acknowledgments xvii introduction ✹ 1 chapter 1. Nationalism, Belonging, and the Performativity of Resistance ✹ 17 chapter 2. Poets, Singers, and Songs ✹ 34 Voices in the Resistance Movement (1917–1967) chapter 3. Al- Naksa and the Emergence of Political Song (1967–1987) ✹ 78 chapter 4. The First Intifada and the Generation of Stones (1987–2000) ✹ 116 chapter 5. Revivals and New Arrivals ✹ 144 The al- Aqsa Intifada (2000–2010) CONTENTS chapter 6. “My Songs Can Reach the Whole Nation” ✹ 163 Baladna and Protest Song in Jordan chapter 7. Imprisonment and Exile ✹ 199 Negotiating Power and Resistance in Palestinian Protest Song chapter 8.
    [Show full text]
  • The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest : the Arab Spring and Beyond, P
    eCommons@AKU Individual Volumes ISMC Series 2014 The olitP ical Aesthetics of Global Protest : the Arab Spring and Beyond Pnina Werbner Editor Martin Webb Editor Kathryn Spellman-Poots Editor Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.aku.edu/uk_ismc_series_volumes Part of the African History Commons, Asian History Commons, Islamic World and Near East History Commons, and the Political History Commons Recommended Citation Werbner, P. , Webb, M. , Spellman-Poots, K. (Eds.). (2014). The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest : the Arab Spring and Beyond, p. 448. Available at: https://ecommons.aku.edu/uk_ismc_series_volumes/3 The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest The Arab Spring and Beyond Edited by Pnina Werbner, Martin Webb and Kathryn Spellman-Poots in association with THE AGA KHAN UNIVERSITY (International) in the United Kingdom Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations The opinions expressed in this volume are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations. © editorial matter and organisation Pnina Werbner, Martin Webb and Kathryn Spellman-Poots, 2014 © the chapters, their several authors, 2014 First published in hardback in 2014 by Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh eh8 8pj www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Goudy Oldstyle by Koinonia, Manchester and printed and bound in Spain by Novoprint A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9334 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9335 1 (paperback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9350 4 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 9351 1 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No.
    [Show full text]
  • SPEED SISTERS Directed by Amber Fares Produced by Amber Fares, Avi Goldstein and Jessica Devaney
    A SOCDOC STUDIOS PRODUCTION SPEED SISTERS Directed by Amber Fares Produced by Amber Fares, Avi Goldstein and Jessica Devaney U.S. SALES INTERNATIONAL SALES First Run Features Dogwoof Paul Marchant Vesna Cudic [email protected] [email protected] +1 212 243 0600 +44 20 7253 6244 Run Time: 80 mins USA, Palestine, UK, Denmark, Qatar, Canada Languages: Arabic and English, with English Subtitles [email protected] WWW.SPEEDSISTERS.TV Twitter: @SpeedSisterFilm Facebook: http://facebook.com/speedsistersthefilm Trailer: https://vimeo.com/125648413 STORY LOGLINE The Speed Sisters are the first all-women race car driving team in the Middle East. They’re bold. They’re fearless. And they’re tearing up tracks all over Palestine. SHORT SYNOPSIS The Speed Sisters are the first all-woman race car driving team in the Middle East. Grabbing headlines and turning heads at improvised tracks across the West Bank, these five women have sped their way into the heart of the gritty, male-dominated Palestinian street car-racing scene. Weaving together their lives on and off the track, SPEED SISTERS takes you on a surprising journey into the drive to go further and faster than anyone thought you could. LONG SYNOPSIS Despite a tangle of roadblocks and checkpoints, a thriving street car racing scene has emerged in the West Bank. Held at improvised tracks – a vegetable market, an old helicopter pad, a security academy – the races offer a release from the pressures and uncertainties of life under military occupation. The fanfare and rivalry between cities brings spectators out in droves, lining rooftops and leaning over barricades to snap photos of their favorite drivers and to catch final times on the scoreboard.
    [Show full text]
  • 5 Communism, Dream Deferred
    PROPERTY OF THE MIT PRESS FOR PROOFREADING, INDEXING, AND PROMOTIONAL PURPOSES ONLY 5 Communism, Dream Deferred A Lebanese man working at a company in Dubai has produced a spectacular advertise- ment for a French automobile. It required an airborne shot of an airplane in flight releasing a minivan full of parachutists. The bulbous vehicle sails out of the plane’s open cargo door, and the parachutists rise and flutter around it. Accompanying this impressive achievement of international cooperation, booming male voices sing a rousing anthem of Fatah, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement. This jam- ming of revolutionary fervor and virtuosic merchandising, in Mohamed Soueid’s My Heart Beats Only for Her (2008), creates an uncanny feeling, as though something you repressed has returned to stir the hairs on the back your neck. The surrealist André Breton wrote that he was only sensitive to “those works of art that … straight off arouse a physical sensation in me, like the feeling of a feathery wind brushing across my temples to produce a real shiver.”1 Breton relates this sensation to erotic pleasure, though the images need not be sexual, suggesting that eroticism is the attraction not of the known but of the unknown. A surrealism of our time unfolds something so unspeakable that it has become unimaginable, something truly uncanny—not sex, not even death: Communism. The word itself might produce in you an ecstatic tremor similar to what Breton described. Communism is the deeply repressed contents of our time. It seems radically out of fashion, beyond thought, beyond caring. To bring those stories into a present that is mostly indifferent to them requires dili- gent research and creative imagination.
    [Show full text]
  • CONGRESS Middle East and Muslim Worlds © Lassaâd Meteoui Studies 28 June- 2 July 2021
    4e CONGRESS Middle East and Muslim Worlds © Lassaâd Meteoui Studies 28 june- 2 july 2021 Panel 16 Ideology, aesthetics and the (re)significations of the «popular» in the music and poetry practices of the Middle East and North Africa In the MENA region as elsewhere, popular music and poetry have historically been instruments for the popular masses to criticize and contest authority, to provide a counternarrative to official historiography, to serve as archives of the subalterns’ history and depositories of collective memory. At the same time, the popular arts have also been tools of consensus: manipulated by a state authority or the cultural industry, they can support the dominant discourse and serve conservative purposes. By acknowledging the fluidity and ambiguities of the «popular culture» category, this panel aims at investigating the processes of transformation, re-signification, and re-appropriation of popular music and poetry in the Middle East and North Africa throughout history and through the lenses of changing power discourses. All the empirical contributions of this panel are the result of the participants’ long-lasting fieldwork in their country of expertise, although their theoretical and methodological approaches vary, ranging from anthropology and ethnomusicology, to cultural and literary studies and cultural history. The entanglement between popular culture and issues of power and resistance, between national heritage and identity politics, will be thus discussed and dissected from a multidisciplinary perspective. This panel thus wishes to contribute to the current thriving debate on popular culture in the MENA, which has by now proved extremely fruitful for broadening and giving new perspectives to the understanding of the region’s political and social history.
    [Show full text]
  • Download Book
    CONTENTS PREFACE ................................................................................................... 4 INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ............................... 5 POEMS FOR LITTLE CHILDREN ........................................................ 7 O BELOVED OF ALLAH .............................................................................. 7 THE SAHABAH LOVED RASULULLAH ........................................................ 8 LOVE RASULULLAH .................................................................................. 9 HAMD, NAAT AND SALAAM .............................................................. 10 DUROOD SHAREEF .................................................................................. 10 HAMD (YA ALLAHU) .............................................................................. 11 HAMD (LA I LA HA ILLAL LAH) .............................................................. 12 URDU NAATH .......................................................................................... 14 SALAAM (YA NABI) ................................................................................ 16 SALAAM (MUSTAFA JAANE REHMAT) ..................................................... 17 STORIES ................................................................................................... 18 SHEIKH ABD AL-QADIR JILANI (RAHMATULLAH-ALAI) AND THE ROBBERS ................................................................................................................ 18 KHWAJA MUIN UD-DIN CHISTI (RAHMATULLAH-ALAI)
    [Show full text]
  • Harbmichel Georgetown 0076M
    “IRHAL!”: THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE IN THE ARAB SPRING A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Arab Studies By Nazir Nader Harb Michel, M.P.A. Washington, DC April 18, 2013 Copyright 2013 by Nazir Nader Harb Michel All Rights Reserved ii “IRHAL!”: THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE IN THE ARAB SPRING Nazir N. Harb Michel, M.P.A. Thesis Advisor: Fida Adley, Ph.D. ABSTRACT This research investigates the explanatory power of Arabic dialects in describing why the ‘Arab Spring’ is a transnational regional phenomenon rather than an isolated local event specific to Tunisia or Egypt? Is the Arabic language (standard), or its colloquial variants (dialects), part of the explanation, and to what extent? In a December 31, 2011 YouTube posting, Al-Arabiya spotlights language as a critical component of the Arab Spring uprisings. In countries where certain kinds of speech and particularly anti-regime expression are monitored, regulated, and punishable by both legal and extra-legal means, an imperative like /irHal/ (MSA: ‘depart’) is interpreted by regime security apparatuses as action. Elliot Colla explains that the “slogans the protestors are chanting are couplets—and they are as loud as they are sharp.” This poetry is “not an ornament to the uprising,” but rather it is a veritable “soundtrack and also composes a significant part of the action itself.” In the Arab Spring uprisings, then, poets are warriors. Code choices about Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Colloquial Arabic (CA) in the context of the Arab Spring reflect Reem Bassiouney’s concept of “involvement,” a psycho-social objective related to the speaker’s intended level of audience engagement.
    [Show full text]
  • The Wisdom of Stubbornness
    Contexto Internacional vol. 38(3) Sep/Dec 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0102-8529.2016380300005 The Wisdom of Stubbornness Khadija El Alaoui Khadija El Alaoui* Abstract: How does it feel when one’s wound is an exhibit for an academic who investigates what is scripted as defeated life practices? How does it feel to deal with texts announcing victorious life practices such as human rights and progress while life is being threatened by the modern tech- nologies of violence? How is it possible to read the texts in any hermeneutic fashion while so many familiar ‘coloured’ bodies are being targeted and slaughtered? These are the questions that haunt me in my academic journey. I will attempt to answer them by exploring how the project of Westernised education (developmental time) is entangled with a deeper understanding of the political that poet Murid al-Barghouti captures in his reflection: ‘[politics] is your memories that you fear to gaze at but you gaze at it despite it all.’ I wonder how much the festering wounds and the prominence of the familiar invoke a different temporality that can be but too aware of the crimes committed against humanity in the name of progress and development. I wonder how that political act of the unwilling gaze at one’s wounds and one’s memory reaffirms a notion of time thought to be over, but is not. Keywords: Time; Colonialism; Development; Memory; Resistance; Stubbornness. We have never really seen the war go away (John Trudell 2005). In France I have often heard people I respect, but do not approve of, deplore [the army] burning harvests, emptying granaries and seiz- ing unarmed men, women and children.
    [Show full text]
  • Egyptian Band Expresses Hope for Better Tomorrow
    March 19, 2017 23 Culture Egyptian band expresses hope for better tomorrow Marwa al-A’sar ple who attended [because] they heard that we would play for those renowned artists,” Shahin said. Cairo Eskenderella eventually be- gan performing its own songs. It f you happen to visit Egypt, gradually included more singers, you will probably hear about bass guitar, oriental and Western Eskenderella, a band whose percussion, piano or keyboard and concerts are always fully several oud players. booked. The 10-member band now sings IEskenderella is one of the best- lyrics written by late legendary known independent bands in poet Fouad Haddad, contempo- Egypt that has succeeded in con- rary ones written by his son Amin necting music with politics in a Haddad and his grandson Ahmed simple way that reflects the pains Haddad. and hopes of the country’s citi- “We are a group of friends who zens. The band became a symbol love their culture and homeland. of resistance through art. We gathered to create art that re- Last December, the band mem- flects truth,” said band member bers celebrated their 11th anniver- and singer Salma Haddad, a grand- sary with hundreds of their fans. daughter of Fouad Haddad. “We started as a group of musi- The band proved there is no con- cians playing and singing at our tradiction between originality and houses and people came over to modernity. Interestingly enough, listen to us, bringing their friends,” the old songs of Darwish and band founder, lead oud player and Sheikh Imam that Eskenderella at- Eskenderella oud players perform at a concert in El-Sawy Cultural centre.
    [Show full text]