Friday, September 30, 2011

Shajarat al 'Abid

By Lamis Yahya, *A spiritual politics* - Al-Ahram Weekly - Cairo, Egypt; 22 - 28 September 2011, Issue No. 1065

Ammar Ali Hassan, Shajarat al 'Abid (Worshipper's Tree), Cairo: Nefro, 2011

Akif, the hero of this book -- the word means "recluse" -- lives in a Sufi ambience despite the politically, socially, and economically disturbed surroundings.

He is a rebellious student at Al Azhar, torn between changing the world and changing himself.

When he joins a coup attempting to replace the tyrannous sultan, his life changes. It is the danger and complexity of this experience that gives him access to hitherto unknown parts of himself, leading him on a new journey of connection with the divine, which is embodied in his search for the Worshipper's Tree, an inner as well as an outer quest.

Set in medieval Cairo, at its start the text evokes Hadith as Sabah wal Massaa (Morning and Evening Conversation) by Naguib Mahfouz, in which the borders between reality and dreams, human beings and djinn break down. Akif is in love with Namar, a genie very like a human woman, who guides him through a fantasy world similar to our own.

The rich, energetic world of medieval Cairo, of Sufi lodges, Coptic monasteries and bloody court intrigues, is colourfully evoked.

One touching detail in Akif's journey is his connection with Namar and Hafssa, her human counterpart as it were, which sheds light on the role of women in mysticism, evoking the great figure Rab'a al Adawiya.

Other characters too are searching for the tree, but there is no conflict in their interactions. And the verse from Surat an Nur (24, 35 of the Quran) becomes of particular relevance:

Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth;
the example of His light is like a niche in which is a lamp;
the lamp is in a glass;
the glass is as if it were a star shining like a pearl,
kindled by the blessed olive tree,
neither of the east nor of the west --
it is close that the oil itself get ablaze
although the fire does not touch it;
light upon light;
Allah guides towards His light whomever He wills;
and Allah illustrates examples for mankind;
and Allah knows everything.

Dating all the way back to the Kabala, the tree as a symbol is a powerful locus for Akif's journey of self and homeland discovery, and not before the end do we find out if he is destined for life as a religious scholar, a revolutionary or a dervish.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Between Guru and Disciples

By Abrar Haris, *In the heart of Sufism: Wali`s tomb as place of pilgrimage* - The Jakarta Post - Jakarta, Indonesia; Friday, September 23, 2011

Nestled in the heart of Islam, Mecca is the center of a pilgrimage obligatory for devout Muslims who are spiritually and economically ready to perform it. But in the global religious context, Muslim people have developed particular religious pilgrimages of their own that unfortunately are often misunderstood.

Stretching as far as North Africa passing Central Asia and arriving at Southern Asia’s shores, the daily prayer and Koranic recital have been gradually enriched by pilgrimages to sacred tombs and the mausoleums of holy figures.

It is a long and winding journey to sacred places from the grave of Pir Muhammad Barkhudar Gilani Qadri, a Pakistani Sufi figure in Sillanwali, to Ulakan Syeikh Burhanuddin Mosque in Pariaman, West Sumatra, Indonesia. In those burial complexes, ordinary people experience the “conversion” of life.

In the landscape of Islamic faith, the tomb-pilgrimage tradition emerges as a central issue. Islamic authorities denounce this practice as heresy for they fear the pilgrims are seduced by the tomb’s power or karomah to grant their worldly prayers rather than worshiping God.

Crossing the whole bias, tomb pilgrimage actually constitutes the continuation of teachings once so close and intimate between guru and disciples.

India, Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries have thousands of stories of Sufi over more than 1,000 years. In Indonesia, Wali Songo or Nine Holy Preachers accompanied by their faithful disciples walked from coastal villages and stepped into the Javanese court teaching God’s unity. As centuries passed, the land walked over has been consecrated by faith in God and his Prophet.

Some wali even initiated a revolution by founding religious schools. Text books adopting a Western style were printed and the students, fired by the spirit of the dynamic era, began political mapping that would change the socio-cultural landscape of every region they entered.

By doing so, the primeval wali cemented a preliminary sense of nationalism and religious identity which years to come would help indigenous people fight Western colonialism and inspire Asian nations to break free in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In this context, we see that Sufi figures are not stereotypic wandering men in self-ecstasy. Indonesian people can fairly say that men like pedagogic Ki Hadjar Dewantara who founded Taman Siswa College during the Dutch occupation, freedom fighters Tuanku Imam Bonjol, Prince Diponegoro and other Indonesian heroes and heroines and even non-Muslim independence fighters are Sufi.

They did not hide in solitude but led their people to sovereignty. I assume in their ziyarat or long struggle, while waging guerilla war behind mountainous villages, men like Imam Bonjol or Diponegoro used many religious practices to maintain morale among their followers. They would have recited zikir or religious contemplative chants in circle pattern, performed muraqaba or meditation by using their own cultural musical instruments (sama) to achieve self-peace and self-conviction in their fight against the
invaders.

In the end, everybody will admit the employment of ziyarat, zikir, muraqaba or sama constitute Sufistic practices, completing the image of Indonesian national heroes and heroines as gurus and their followers as disciples.

Sunan Kalijaga, a Javanese wali, is admired for his tolerant and artful preaching methods by adopting the existing Hindu and Buddhist cultures. He composed a Javanese suluk titled “Ilir-ilir”; a song in praise of God and Islam. Not to mention approbation of his strong syncretistic master pieces in craft arts, wayang (puppet show) and sekatenan (Prophet Birthday celebration).

His genius reached the architectural world where he adapted the Hindu-style city landscape of palace and alun-alun (open square) guarded by two banyan trees, perfected with the combination of Java-Hindu terraced roofed royal mosques instead of Arabian domes.

In Pariaman, West Sumatra, pilgrims have visited their sheikh-committal complex in Ulakan village since the 17th century, where they spend their nights reading the Koran and contemplating. These Minangkabau pilgrims believe the physical visit and homage to the guru’s tomb is essential.

In this context, the inevitable heretic behavior in burial complexes must be strictly understood as sociologic paradigm rather than allegations of faith perversion.

Anthony Reid, an expert on Southeast Asia, writes in his book Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: “The most early Sufi sects in Southeast Asia world seemingly had no strict structure in comparison with the rest of the Muslim world but they possessed a huge respect for the figures and these burial complexes confirm their role in imposing the enormous change in this region”.

Without the presence of wali, Sufi, nameless heroes and heroines, the Islamic Southeast Asian civilization would never have been shaped as it is now.

The writer is indigenous culture researcher with the Bureau of History and Traditional Values Preservation at the West Sumatra office of the Culture and Tourism Ministry, Padang.

[Picture: Map of Indonesia. Photo: Wiki.]

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

A Spiritual Celebration

By Staff Writer, *Konya welcomes nine groups for music festival* - Today's Zaman - Istanbul, Turkey; Tuesday, September 20, 2011

This week will mark the beginning of the eighth Konya International Mystic Music Festival, a spiritual celebration of music taking place in the serene shadows of the tomb of the great Sufi mystic and poet Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi in the central Anatolian city of Konya.

An eight-day melting pot of mystical music from around the world, this year’s festival will feature nine groups from across the world -- from Tibet, India, the US, Morocco, Guinea, Kyrgyzstan, Iran, Turkey and Tajikistan.

Drawing to a close on the 804th anniversary of the great mystic’s birth on Sept. 30, the festival will present concerts at 9 p.m. every night at the Konya Municipality Mevlana Culture Center’s Sultan Veled Hall and Sema Hall. Admission will be free of charge.

Featured amongst the ensembles this year are West African drumming group Guinee Percussions from Guinea, a 13-member dance and music ensemble that will perform on the opening night on Sept. 22.

Gnawa musician Maâlem Hamid El Kasri from Morocco is set to take to the stage on Friday evening and Saturday will see a performance by Indian bansuri virtuoso Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia. The 73-year-old has composed a number of film scores and collaborated with several Western musicians, including Jan Garbarek and John McLaughlin.

Other acts set to perform include the Afro-American gospel group The Fairfield Four, spiritual Buddhist ensemble Monks of Tashi Lhunpo Monastery from Tibet, the Tengir Too group from Kyrgyzstan, Tajik musician Davlatmand Kholov specializing in rural Falak music and ensemble Parissa from Iran.

The festival will draw to a fitting close on Friday evening with a sema, or whirling dervish ceremony, courtesy of the Konya Turkish Sufi Music Ensemble.

Program at www.mysticmusicfest.com

Picture: Kyrgyz group Tengir Too. Photo: TZ.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Through Junoon’s Platform

By Sher Khan, *Junoon: Celebrating 20 years of Sufi rock* . The Express Tribune - Karachi, Pakistan; Thursday, September 22, 2011

Lahore: With Junoon’s 20th anniversary on its way, several local and young artists have been invited to revamp the band’s songs for an exclusive 20th Anniversary Album. The upcoming album will be an opportunity for rising artists to flaunt their signature styles globally through Junoon’s platform. Salman Ahmad, Junoon’s stalwart guitarist, researched and then contacted bands and artists through email encouraging them to contribute to the album.

Back in the 90s, Junoon was the voice of a generation that brought several musical innovations and provided rock anthems which eventually received international recognition. This inspired the upcoming generation of musicians to follow the pattern of Junoon’s lyrics and style and gain international recognition.

The 20th Anniversary Album initiative will include bands such as Laal, Aag and artists like Bilal Khan, Usman Riaz, Uzair Sultan and many others from the local scene, paying tribute to the band’s songs.

“This literally means everything to me. I spent my childhood trying to emulate Ali Azmat’s vocal range and it was Brian O’ Connell who inspired me to learn bassline, so this is like a dream come true,” says Haroon Sheikh from Aag, who will be covering “Mitti” from the legendary band’s album Parvaz.

Aag is well-known locally, but has not been able to reach mainstream success despite their hit single “Aag” and a popular cover of Imran Khan’s hit single “Bewafa”.

Sheikh explains that being associated with Junoon means being part of an international brand and being connected with the brand’s legacy.

“To let these young artists use the platform is a big deal, because I have seen artists who refuse to share power and try to put a damper on upcoming talent,” states Sheikh, who was told by Ahmad via email that he has heard Aag the band and thinks that they have the passion to represent Junoon.

Twenty-year-old solo artist Usman Riaz [pictured], who is signed by music recording company EMI Pakistan, was also invited to perform after Ahmad came across Riaz’s Facebook page. Riaz who has performed for Uth Records and has a single to his credit, is known for his diverse music style which includes classical piano and guitar beats.

“Here is an established musician who feels I’m good enough. I’m not really concerned about fame or recognition but being allowed to recreate Junoon’s music is what I’m grateful for,” says Riaz, who is covering “Saeein” from the band’s 1997 album Azaadi.

Upcoming singer Bilal Khan of “Bachana” fame has also been requested to contribute his vocals to the anniversary album, which will be a buffet of soulful vocals and music genres. Khan will be singing Junoon’s “Aap Aur Hum” in his signature style while keeping the essence of the band’s music in mind.

Faisal Kapadia, who has lived through the scene in the late 80s and early 90s, says that Junoon contributed majorly in taking pop and rock music to a different level.

He adds that it was a great initiative by Junoon to provide a platform for younger artists. While recalling the Levi’s original music series, which had brought artists such as Bilal Khan and Zoe Viccaji to cover String’s original songs, Kapadia accepts that the project had given a fresh tinge to their older songs.

He further adds that the industry was going through a slump but the recent advent of the digital and internet era has provided more opportunities for artists to be heard. However, currently the depleting economic and security situation is bringing a decline in the music industry again.

“It’s an unfortunate time for people who dream of making music professionally. We have been in the music industry for the last 22 years, so we know that it’s a vicious circle and there is always light at the end of the tunnel,” says Kapadia.

On the brighter side, the musician adds that there are now more opportunities for artists to perform and record internationally.

“When we were making our first album there was no concept of performing in India, but then Junoon changed that in 1998. So now, after every four to five years, a new area or opportunity opens up for Pakistani artists,” states Kapadia.

Picture: Junoon’s Anniversary Album provides a platform for young musicians. Photo: File.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Matrah-ı Şerif

By Anatolia News Agency, *Istanbul’s old Galata Lodge readies for opening after a four-year restoration* Hürriyet Daily News - Istanbul, Turkey; Tuesday, September 20, 2011

One of the cultural landmarks in Istanbul, the Galata Mevlevihane in Beyoğlu has undergone a four-year restoration work and is ready for an official opening

Galata Mevlevihane, the lodge used by Mevlevi dervishes built in 1491 in Istanbul, the Ottoman capital city, has been restored and is anticipating its official opening.

“We are ready to open the museum,” Galata Mevlevihane Museum Director Yavuz Özdemir said, adding that the museum was expected to open this month. “We are waiting for the order from the Culture and Tourism Ministry.”

Located on Galip Dede Street near İstiklal Avenue, Istanbul’s unique original dervish lodge will open to visitors in the coming days with a new facelift after a four-year restoration process.

“The large garden of the dervish lodge has been restored for use as an area where people can escape the crowds of Beyoğlu,” he said. The Galata Mevlevihane was closed to visitors in 2007 and restored with contributions from the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Agency.

Speaking to the Anatolia news agency, Özdemir said the Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi mentioned in his travel books that the dervish lodge had included nearly 100 rooms.

The lodge was damaged in an earthquake in 1509. It has undergone restoration work since the early 17th century and additional structures turned the site into a social complex, according to a document from the museum’s archive, Özdemir said.

Further extensive damage occurred in the Tophane fire in 1765, he said, adding that the lodge was restored and took its current shape from restoration work in 1959-1960. The building served as a school from 1925 to 1957 and reopened as the Divan Literature Museum on Dec. 27, 1975.

Although the lodge had been restored for visitors, cultural events could be organized too, Özdemir said. “The dervish lodges on the lower floor of the semahane (the building where dervishes performed their whirling dance) have been opened to public visitors,” he said.

“Our semahane building is one of the most special buildings that still survive. This is thanks to the protection by the Culture and Tourism Ministry,” he said. The washhouse, Adile Sultan Şadırvan (water-tank with a fountain), is also among the cultural features of the lodge that still survive with the oldest structure being the Hasan Aga Fountain built in 1649, he added. Some unknown hand-carved works on the walls of the lodge had been discovered during restoration work, he said.

The museum

Entry to the Galata Mevlevihane museum is made through a narrow gate, at the end of the large courtyard, there is a three-story semahane building, Özdemir said. “We will organize sema [whirling dervish] performances and Turkish music concerts here,” he said, adding that showcase performances in the surrounding area took place before the restoration occurred. “Objects being displayed here have been removed and visitors will be able to view the original sema area,” he said.

The museum’s main exhibition rooms are the dervish lodges located on the lower floor and visitors will get information about Sufism (the dervish religion) while seeing related artworks, he said. The tools used in the kitchen are on displayed in another room next to Mevlevi dresses, Özdemir said. The most important feature of dervish lodges is their kitchen, called “matrah-ı şerif,” he said.

“Mesnevi,” the Persian religious text written by Rumi, is being exhibited and 18 couplets from the text are displayed in the museum.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Many Positive Points

By Hassan Abou Taleb, *Following the Turkish model or forging our own?* - Al Ahram Online - Cairo, Egypt; Monday, September 19, 2011

As the Turkish experience of democratisation and Islamist party rule becomes more and more influential, what lessons does this model have for post-revolutionary Egypt

The Turkish model of applying democratic government has stirred admiration among many Egyptian and Arab analysts. The source of the sentiment is very simple: Turkey proves that the notion of the Islamists in power is not necessarily antithetical to democracy. They can be pragmatic and realistic, and not the staunch idealists as many have labelled them. Nevertheless, this is how some have continued to describe the Turkish Justice and Development Party, the pioneering experience of an Islamist party in government, on the grounds that it has a religious frame of reference rather than the secularist outlook that a political party should have in a proper democracy.

On the basis of such an overly simplistic perception, some analysts have maintained that post-revolutionary Egypt could clone the Turkish model for political transformation, with some minor adjustments. They maintain that the Muslim Brotherhood, as the largest and best organised political bloc in the country, has the opportunity to win a comfortable majority in the forthcoming parliamentary elections and, therefore, that a Muslim Brotherhood government is a near certainty. With such a government, Egypt would be closer to the Turkish model than anything else, especially in view of the modifications in the Brotherhood’s discourse, which now appears to accept the principles of the civil state, equal citizenship and the civil rights of the Copts.

On the other hand, some political activists outside the Muslim Brotherhood admire the Turkish model for a different reason, namely that the army is the protector of the democratic system. They hold that the new Egyptian constitution should state this explicitly, which would make the Egyptian army play a political role, albeit behind the scenes. I suspect that this body of opinion has failed to appreciate just how much the role of the Turkish army has changed in recent years. But the central question here is to what extent does this common analysis actually reflect realities in both Egypt and Turkey and to what extent could the Muslim Brotherhood reproduce the Turkish model if it did come to power in Egypt?

To begin with, this type of superficial analysis is inherently flawed. Apart from the fact that it is impossible for any country to clone the experience of another, whether in governance, the economy or in value system, the Turkish experience has many characteristics that bear no resemblance whatsoever to the situation in Egypt before or after the 25 January Revolution.

The most crucial factor in the Turkish experience over the past eight years has been that the Justice and Development Party has never cast itself as a religious party that has sought to transform the state into a form of theocracy. It has never opposed secularist values, never had as its principal aim the literal application of Sharia law as understood by Salafis, and never proclaimed that it would declare war in order to liberate Palestine. In addition, the Justice and Development Party came to power in 2003 in the context of a system of government that was already democratic. That system may have had some shortcomings, but it ensured that all had the opportunity to compete via the ballot box and it operated in the context of a general aspiration to obtain European Union membership, a process that requires commitments to a range of political, economic and social reforms.

The Justice and Development Party has acted as a responsible and democratic participant in the polls, and since coming to power it has followed through on and instituted many of the required constitutional and legal reforms. It has restructured the role of the army in Turkey and subordinated it to civilian rule, abolished the death sentence and the criminalisation of adultery, legalised religious conversions, and restricted the power of the judiciary to ban political parties on the grounds that they threaten Kemalist secularism.

The party has also undertaken several initiatives to address injustices against the minority Kurds and Alevis. Although there is still some room for progress on this front, one must acknowledge that the condition of the country's large Kurdish minority is considerably better than it had been before the Justice and Development Party came to power. Kurdish parties now participate in elections and they can now openly demand greater cultural and political rights without risking arrest and imprisonment. Under the Justice and Development Party, the military solution to the Kurdish question has been relegated to the back seat.

On the whole, the Justice and Development Party offers a model of secularism reconciled with religion. From this perspective, secularism is a system that guarantees every citizen the right to practise his religion freely without fear of punishment or exclusion from public life and that protects the freedoms of all, inclusive of the freedom to be devoutly religious.

In spite of Turkey’s official secularism, the Justice and Development Party certainly did not evolve in a religious vacuum. As rigid as Kemalist ideology may have been, it could not begin to curb the widespread Sufi movement that is deeply ingrained in Turkish society and cultural heritage. The Sufi movement and, specifically, the Fethullah Gülen movement, has been highly instrumental in safeguarding Islamic piety in Turkish society, but with an emphasis on tolerance for others of different creeds and beliefs. In addition, the evolution of Sufism in Turkey from a purely spiritual movement to a social movement that provides various public services, such as education, healthcare, and commercial and economic facilities to its members and others has contributed to creating an extensive social force with bases in the countryside and urban centres and one that is committed to supporting the Justice and Development Party, many of whose leading members, among them Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gül, were affiliated with the Fethullah Gülen movement.

Anyone who has followed Turkish political developments over recent years will be familiar with the term “deep state”. The term refers to the socio-political establishment dedicated to the protection of the exclusionist-type secular system established by Kemal Ataturk, the chief cornerstones of which are the army, the judiciary and the educational system. This “deep state” has remained clearly unchanged in the Justice and Development Party era. There are forces that do not appear visibly enough on the surface to identify them clearly; however, they also support the government of this party and fight its opponents using methods familiar from previous decades.

These methods sometimes step over the threshold of legality, using slander, arbitrary fines and other media and economic screws in order to harass and put pressure on opponents among politicians and the press. There is, indeed, a “deep state” in Turkey with roots deep in the Sufi movement that offers indirect backing to the Justice and Development Party, however vehemently it denies this.

Perhaps the most salient success of the Justice and Development Party government in Turkey has been the economic boom that has catapulted the country’s economy to the 14th strongest in the world. In the space of eight years, per capita GDP climbed from $2,800 to $12,300, the value of the Turkish lira strengthened, gross national product soared to over $370 billion, and the volume of foreign trade topped $200 billion in 2009.

Now to the question as to whether post-25 January Egypt can reproduce the Turkish experience. Any answer to this needs to take into account certain observations. First, Egypt is currently passing through a difficult transition period. As much talk as there has been about the general desire for a civil state, in the sense of a state characterised by the rule of law, democracy and respect for human rights and civic freedoms, our society has yet to reach a consensus over these concepts, let alone over how to bring them into effect. Secondly, the Muslim Brotherhood is not the only movement espousing an Islamist outlook and discourse. It has rivals, some of which have emerged from the Brotherhood fold, and others of which are staunchly Salafist and have no qualms about speaking openly about the need to establish a theocracy that would apply Sharia law in accordance with certain juridical interpretations that many Islamic jurists would disagree with, that are inimical to certain freedoms and human rights, and that condemn all those who appeal for a modern civil state as heretics.

Thirdly, the modernist forces that act as the self-appointed protectors of the revolution are themselves divided and do not appear to represent any single concrete trend or social force in the Egyptian political arena. Fourthly, the vast majority of the Egyptian people, Muslims and Christians alike, are very religious, but they oppose the notion of a government ruling in the name of religion. Fifthly, the Egyptian army is a professional institution that adheres to its constitutionally stipulated role as the protector of legitimacy, without meddling in politics or acting as the guardian of the regime.

True, the army’s situation has changed somewhat since the revolution, now that it is charged with managing the affairs of the country and setting it on the road to a civil democratic government. However, once that mission has been accomplished, it will return to the barracks and the exercise of its natural function as the defender of the nation. In short, any comparison between the role of the Egyptian army and that of the Turkish army, whether before or after the arrival of the Justice and Development Party in power, does not hold water.

These five observations alone are sufficient to tell us that the course of the Egyptian political transformation will differ significantly from the Turkish experience. Even supposing that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party can form a coalition government following the parliamentary elections, it is unlikely that it will win a large enough majority to free the hands of the Brotherhood to establish a government with a “religious frame of reference”, as some Brotherhood leaders predict. As organisationally weak as the Egyptian liberals and left are, the vast majority of the Egyptian people are imbued with the spirit of the civil state, which would hamper any attempts to drag Egypt toward a theocracy.

In the final analysis, the Turkish experience of political transformation and economic development has many positive points that we can learn from and take as inspiration without trying to imitate the details. Perhaps the grand strategies adopted by the Justice and Development Party to stimulate the Turkish economy offer a useful guide. Consider, in particular, the measures it has taken to uproot corruption in national and local government, to clarify the laws pertaining to economic activity and to expedite the settlement of commercial disputes, to attract foreign investment, and to compel local manufacturers to comply with quality standards and consumer rights. Of course, such measures are not a purely Turkish phenomenon: they are now very much a part of a global trend.

Ultimately, however, Egypt has its own long heritage of a liberal secularism that is at peace with religion. This legacy should enable Egypt to develop a unique, homegrown model for the application of democracy and the rule of law, even if the Muslim Brotherhood comes to share in power via the ballot box.

The writer is a senior advisor in AlAhram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies and an expert in Turkey

Saturday, September 24, 2011

‘Sufi Aman Mela’

By Staff reporter, *PNCA brings Sufi’s message of tolerance, brotherhood* - Daily Times - Lahore, Pakistan; Sunday, September 18, 2011

Islamabad: Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA) organized one-day ‘Sufi Aman Mela’ (Sufi Peace Festival) with the aim to promote tolerance, brotherhood and interfaith harmony in the country, in which the performers -including Meena Gul, Sonia Azeem, Saien Mushtaq, Saira Tahir, Shaukat Manzoor, and Shabnam Majeed- put up brilliant show rendering Sufi poetry of various Sufi Saints in diverse languages.

The National Performing Arts Group (NPAG) students also with the scintillating performance of ‘Sufi Dance’ in various costumes with the background music spellbound the audience.

They performed on ‘Cheti Bori Wi Tabeeba’, ‘Aaj Rang Hai’, ‘Gharoli’, ‘Tery Rang Rang’, and ‘Dhamal’.

The first to appear on stage was Meena Gul, a renowned artist from KPK who sang ‘Maien Ni Mein Kinnu Aakhan, Dard Wichoray Da Haal Ni’, with her perfect Punjabi accent. The spectators seen whispering commenting though Gul is from KPK but her Punjabi accent is quite brilliant.

The other artists including Saira Tahir who has acquired her master degree in Music from Punjab University, as well as Sonia Azeem, Shaukat Manzoor, Saien Mushtaq, also song harmoniously the poetry of Sufis from Subcontinent to spread peace, love and tolerance.

In between, Saien Mushtaq, who has roamed across the world and his booming enchantment of ‘King Wajda, Tara Wajda’ and delight of Shaukat Manzur, a local artist from Potohar region. The audience had a chance to listen and appreciate a wide range of music artists from this region.

The spectators however, got annoyed that there was no Qawwali music in the Sufi night. They also were surprised over the selection of Sufi songs.

“We turned up here to listen our favourite kalam from Iqbal ‘La Phir Ik Baar Wohi Bada-o-Jaam ay Saqi, Haath A jay Mujhay tera Makam Ay Saqi’, sung by Shabnam Majeed but she also couldn’t please us,” said Oheed Ahmed a young Sufi poetry/ music lover.

The performers of NPAG also provided the mood for the ‘Punjabi Dhamal’ dance, which insists the spectators gone whirling similarly seen to the Sufis shrines with offering beating their own drums.

Shabnam Majeed from Lahore concluded the night with ‘Dama Dam Mastt Qalandar’.

The Sufi Night was an extension of Sufi music project, which PNCA started from Multan in 2010, taking it forward to Hyderabad, Karachi, and then returning to federal capital.

This year’s presentation was the continuation of the same project with the core theme on seeking harmony within the land, which we find disturbed in the horrendous calamity of natural disaster in Sindh and killings of innocent people in Dir, Amber Shah, an official of PNCA said.

Friday, September 23, 2011

On the Right Track

By Ali Huseyin Bakir, *The Current Polarization in Egypt* - The Journal of Turkish Weekly - Ankara, Turkey; Friday, September 16, 2011

Egypt is witnessing an internal disturbance within the background of attempting to find the best road through which to build a democratic regime and develop a constitution for the country. The conflicting views and perspectives lead the various components of the Egyptian revolution to divide deeply, and we started to see skirmishes and polarization between them.

Although the revolutionary forces belong to different trends, they showed a high degree of cohesion and tended to work together at first as they had one common goal—toppling the regime. After managing to achieve that goal, the growing differences between them are snowballing into an avalanche that might push Egypt into a cycle of instability, and thus toward an uncertain future.

It is understandable that such temporary chaos comes after 40 years of suppression and dictatorships, but this situation shouldn't dominate the current and future scene.

Unfortunately, the gap between Islamists and secularists is becoming wider and deeper. The polarization is no longer secret to any one, and the relation between them changed from cooperation to struggle. The competition for the parliamentary elections and the relatively short time available to prepare for these elections may be another factor fueling the struggle between these forces.

Moreover, some of the foreign powers are trying to take advantage of this polarization and play on it. Some U.S. think tanks for instance called openly for the support of secular groups against Islamists in Egypt.

Both Islamists and secularists bear responsibility for what is happening right now. Secular groups refuse to allow any other group to impose its ideas on them, but at the same time, they want to impose what they believe in on the majority. They are provoking the Islamists, discriminating against them, attacking them intentionally, and portraying them as a big unified monster in order to use the "fear" of them as a tool to rally all other groups to their side, knowing that this is very dangerous road to take.

Moreover, secularists are feeding the misconception that "Egypt is on the brink of theocracy," knowing that even the biggest and most effective Islamic groups in Egypt don't want such thing. The Iranian model inspires no one and has no popularity in the Arab world at all; the main discussions right now are about the civil state with Islamic, Arab, and Egyptian characteristics.

Islamists in Egypt are not one block, they are diverse, different, and mainly divided into three big groups (Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi, Sufi), and inside each of these groups are differences regarding many issues including the political process, religious ideas, and the general perspective toward Egypt.
There are good signs in that some groups showed responsibility and changed the tune and content of their speeches and became more moderate. Unfortunately, they are still heavily dependent on slogans rather than work, and they can be easily provoked by secularists which drive them to be more aggressive.

Islamists should act wisely, they should not show off their strength, and they must understand the critical situation and what it takes and needs to help the country recover and stand on its feet again. They should understand the fears of minorities, protect their rights, and try to make concessions, otherwise, Egypt will witness no stability and things will be out of control.

All players on the political stage in the country should be more responsible about the current situation, work slowly but steadily to reach goals, and keep in mind that it is a long journey. If they think that they can achieve their ultimate goals within a short time, they will achieve nothing and they will fail. They should seek common ground and let the democratic process take its place smoothly, of course after putting it on the right track.

[Picture: Egypt, Orthographic Projection. Photo: Wiki.]

Thursday, September 22, 2011

'Naqshbandi Greenacre Engagement'

VIDEO installation examining Islamic faith and prayer has won this year's Blake Prize for religious art.

By AAP, *Islamic faith video wins 60th Blake Prize* - news.com.au - Australia; Thursday, September 15, 2011

A Video installation examining Islamic faith and prayer has won this year's Blake Prize for religious art.

Western Sydney artist Khaled Sabsabi won with a three-channel installation titled Naqshbandi Greenacre Engagement, which engages the viewer in an Islamic Sufi ritual.

"The audience is almost invited to be, if not part of it, then in the space of it," judge and executive director of the Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Dr Blair French said.

Mr Sabsabi was not present at the announcement as he is in Beirut as part of the 2010 Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship.

The event was first founded in 1951 to revitalise religious art in Christian churches.

[Picture: Installation view of Khaled Sabsabi. Photo: Artspace Visual Arts Centre.]

Closer to God

By Steve Meacham, *Artful ordinariness proves a winner* - The Sydney Morning Herald - Sydney, Australia; Friday, September 16, 2011

LITTLE could appear more exotic or unusual to most contemporary Australians than a group of Eastern mystics - who rarely allow outsiders into their inner circle - going through the centuries-old ritual chanting they believe will eventually bring them closer to God.

Except these Naqshbandi Sufi Muslims - subject of Khaled Sabsabi's winning multimedia entry in this year's $20,000 Blake Prize - couldn't appear more, well, ordinary.

The men and women are wearing everyday clothes. Their children run around in the background, oblivious to the spiritual ceremony, anxious to get on with their Saturday. And the prayer room itself is just a western Sydney scout hut.

Yet it was the very mundanity of Sabsabi's video, Naqshbandi Greenacre Engagement (2010), which made it the unanimous choice of the three judges in the 60th anniversary year of a prize originally set up to improve the standard of religious art in Christian churches.

''There's no paraphernalia, no religious robes, nothing to create a barrier between observer and the participants,'' said one of the judges, Dr Julian Droogan, a lecturer in religious history at Macquarie University. ''Nothing to give the religion any exoticism or mystique. It is an inviting piece of work that talks to the viewer of religion as normal daily practice, as social community, as being held together by family and kin.''

Sabsabi, 46, is in Istanbul, taking a break from creating new works in Lebanon as part of the Helen Lempriere travelling art scholarship he won last year.

''I haven't even thought about what I'll do with the Blake Prize money,'' Sabsabi said. The part-time artist, who works for Liverpool City Council as a community and cultural engagement officer, said he knew little about Sufism before undertaking his winning work.

He was commissioned originally by Lisa Havilah, then director of Campbelltown Arts Centre, for the Edge of Elsewhere project which formed part of the 2011 Sydney Festival.

Ms Havilah, now director of CarriageWorks, said: ''Khaled worked with the Sufi community for over 12 months, spending a lot of weekends with them to develop trust before he started filming.''

The multicultural, multi-faith nature of modern Australia was also apparent in the other winners announced yesterday. Carla Hananiah won the John Coburn emerging artist award for her painting Refuge while Abdul Abdullah received the MUA Human Justice Award for his digital self-portrait Them and Us.

''The Blake Prize is beginning to reflect that Sydney is right up there with London and New York as one of the most religiously diverse cities,'' Dr Droogan said. ''By far the greatest number of entries this year refer to personal spirituality than they do to any of the established world religions.''

The 60th Blake Prize Exhibition is at the National Art School Gallery, Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, until October 15.

Picture: Inviting piece … Khaled Sabsabi's award-winning video. Photo: Edwina Pickles.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Love Opens the Gate

By Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah, *Crescendo: A review of English translations* - The Kashmir Dispatch - Srinagar, J&K, India; Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Ours is largely a trash age and literature and especially poetry has been so massively trivialized that most of the poets today have become disgraceful wah wah party whom few read and still fewer appreciate.

However some poets declare their genius nonetheless and it is pleasure to read them.

Crescendo is a translation by Abid Ahmad, of the select poems of Sheikh Khalid Karrar, a promising Urdu poet from Jammu and it is good fortune of a poet if he gets an able translator.

I was moved by the translation that flows effortlessly and reads refreshingly original. A great transcreation of poems representing diverse themes with a good introduction by the translator make the book as much a creation of translator as the poet. Very few poets of Urdu find able translators or readers in English.

Crescendo is a mirror of our age with its doubts, anxieties, aspirations, disillusionments, and frustrations, passions and dreams.

It’s profound, subtle and intoxicating at occasions and never superficially thoughtful or emotional. It leaves you guessing at deeper and deeper interpretations.

Beautifully and often wittily well-crafted words and images weave a magic that transports one to a different world for a time being. The poet has something to say and the translator has amply gifted imagination to help him say it with both force and poetic beauty.

The poet remains himself, densely allusive and elusive. At times he appears mystical but agnosticism keeps him haunting. He finds no answers to life’s innocent questions.

One recalls that beautiful verse ”Zindagi tere masum sawalun se pareshan hu mein.” And one may remark, has anyone found these answers?

My reading of scriptures, mystics and the most brilliant minds of history who are universally respected as philosophers has convinced me that great religions, philosophies and poetry and mysticism have not answered the troubling questions regarding fate, suffering, mystery, glory, quest for transcendence and meaning and madness of dreams we weave and passions that move us, the passions of life.

They have, however, dissolved these questions, and asked for a new orientation to life, a transformation of our attitude to it.

Nirvana is samsara when looked from the eyes of a child – trusting, grateful, playful, artistic and non-egoistically. Umer Khayam has expressed the position of mysticism and great poetry or tragic art in his Rubaiyyat. So has Hafiz when he says ‘Who has solved the riddle of life?’ At a purely rational plane, life offers us wide balls that you can’t maneuver.

Yes, love opens the gate but then you are no longer the old self – doubting, questioning, anxiously seeking answers.

Unconditional love, soul ravishing vision of beauty, consent to be nothing in the experience of fana dissolve that old self-centric rationality-bound creature. The poets appears to be close to achieving this breakthrough but it seems they are yet to travel some more distance and complete the rendezvous with Purgatory.

Much of Crescendo seems to be a voice managing to fight the dark night of the soul with faith that is often too deep for exotericism to grasp and dignity that is denied to even great humanists. One wonders how much the poet has assimilated of life’s woe and sorrow but still managed to be a Man – defiant, undaunting.

Perhaps the translator has found echo of his own complex inner journey through the Purgatory of despair that modern education brings to religiously sensitive heart and mind and this heroic resolve in the poet to fight with existential questions has made him to undertake this translation.

Crescendo is about life with its variegated hues.

Life is not subject to a consistent coherent interpretation. Great poetry embraces life’s transcendence of dogmatic positions that rationalists and fundamentalists impose on it.

Crescendo is existentialist in its approach – it seeks to come to terms with the void – captured brilliantly in the poem “Void” – that seems to walk with us everywhere. “Plaintalk” is a plain talk on man’s inability to find God’s phone number to clarify the mess that life often seems to be in.

It expresses absurdity of alienated labour to which man is subject in an apparently alien world.

“I struggle hard in day
to make my ends meet
once I return exhausted
I collect each drop of the patches of light
in the dark light

I see dreams
that hold no meaning
in life
I spurn my being
with cigarette sore and ill-logic.”


It asks God to call from his own side when he chooses to come to earth implying that He is absent from the scene now. This echoes “absent God thesis” favoured by many existentialist writers and mystics like Simone Weil and philosophers like Wittgenstein.

Many modern theologians and Sufis have maintained that God is “an unattainable quest” as Whitehead put it. Muslim theology denies possibility of vision of God in all its nakedness and glory in this world.

All these points imply that man is condemned to deny himself and his dreams in the face of “deaf” universe. However this doesn’t mean God is not but God is not in the world.

The best prayer and the only one that we really need, from a mystical viewpoint, is to say ‘Thank you God.’ Prayer is not petition.

The book is about Kashmir as well or one could interpret it like that.

“Life lying in an isolation ward” speaks of day to day experiences for many victims of current trouble. In a brilliant stroke of wit the poet says that our bodies are used as laboratories. Isolation ward could mean prison to which those are taken who need special treatment.

To quote the poet

“He injected poison in my veins
tore my fibres
fragmented my body into pieces
let loose predators on me

each day a fresh torture
he trampled my living body
dragged it on roads
now he has thrown me in isolation ward.”


“Curfew, I and he” expresses a novel thought about now a familiar experience. The poem is a powerful satire on current phase of Kashmir history.

“My wailing Wall” is a statement of desecrating war that respects no holy days and is imposed on us. ”Noah’s Ark” is a critique of messianic thinking that has been the bane of Muslims. On the ravages of time is a brilliant short poem “Time” echoing the theme of the Quranic chapter titled “Wal Asr” though the poet has not made any exception of the chosen ones who are not blinded by the raging torment of desire.

The poet however keeps his faith in life’s forward movement by employing the symbol of water in the poem “Water”. The poet is a master of monologue and brilliantly weaves the tapestry of images on such otherwise hazy subjects as meaning in “Meaning.”

The book is an impressive use of various linguistic devices and does achieve the major aim of defamiliarization partly by deft use of images.

Mysticism echoes in many poems. “Itinerary” reminds us of traditional Sufi poets in theme and dares to state its conclusion much more boldly than we usually find in Sufis.

“I have become a god
unto myself.”


However he is still in search of the elusive self that gives us intimations of solid grounding in the eternal rock of joy and light.

He is yet to arrive, if we use mystical terms. He finds no anchor, no balm anywhere and betrays his mystical intuitions that redeem him at other moments.

Although aware of the difference between loneliness and being authentically alone like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Mansur he is not on the other side of the shore. Vacillating faith and agonizing doubt is evident in many poems including the one titled “Where am I.”

The poet appears to be neither traditional nor modern but hovering in a half way house of hazy belief and suspected doubt.

“Winter” is one of the most beautiful poems celebrating ordinary happenings, not unlike Zen mystics, whose only prayer ritual consists of drinking qehwa in silence.

The poet in “December” ingeniously compares life’s unfulfilled dreams and ambitions to

“thousands of shoulders, graceless
dead bodies”

on which he sees himself sitting.

As the translator of poems has observed: “The poet doesn’t accept dictation from the universe”. Like Ghalib he is not going to accept the terms that the world of space and time impose on us. He is not a slave of any gazelle eyed beauty.

“Heart is restless
if not you, some other wish would be there
Not that you are the source of my life
yes, if not you, there would be some other support.”


The poet is quite modern in his sensibility and beliefs but what prevents him from being a dry as dust secular modernist (a lost, self doubting, pessimistic mass of protoplasm) is his mystical faith in himself and loftiness of his station.

Although quite conscious that ours is an age of demythologization when medieval enchanted landscape of fairies and supernatural tales is gone forever, as in the poem “Jinnie” he knows how to enjoy newer consolations, how to see the sacred undercover of secular or material miracles like computers.

One is reminded of Camus of The Myth of Sisyphus in such poems as “Wilderness,” “Growth” and “Void”.

He finds wilderness and void

“under the façade of splendorous dresses
dancing under beautiful fabrics
in long queues
crowded streets of city

work places
highways
paths and restaurants
rallies and processions
houses of representation”


As in the last line he appears to be a postmodernist. In fact he is a postmodernist, existentialist, mystic all rolled into one. In “Computer and I” he looks at the problem of time (as memory) and on the old question of to be or not to be.

The poet explores the possibility of formatting himself – what an image to use! – but concludes that it is not possible as

“He has kept the password of the set up with himself”.

The poem “No one is here” is a serious musing on the drama of being and nothingness and has Beckettian overtones. The poet travels, like Ghalib, with many idealogues for some time but keeps his distance and has not found a master. He reserves commitment to any totalizing narrative or ideology.

The supreme beauty of the book is in its language. And for this the translator must be congratulated. Language is such that you don’t suspect you are reading a translation. Profound thoughts require deep meditation on the part of the translator and he is equal to the task.

We may get the idea of use of language appropriate to the ideas and emotions expressed by looking at such extracts as

”Everything is same
frozen
useless
pensive
unbridled
lost”


“In this torment of seasons
all eyes
dry
parched
coverless
leafless”


“Nowhere without
Nothing nowhere
Nowhere is out there”


“I am sitting on
thousands of shroudless, graceless
dead bodies”


The texts’freeflow, again a difficult job the translaltor has so well executed could be found by considering any poem. To illustrate I quote only two excerpts:

“Anyone coming there?
No one is there
Is anyone alive?
in walls of fractured moments
No one is there…
A strange drama of being and nothingness”


“With destination nowhere in sight
ruins were calling us
from all sides
with their abandoned selves”


And lastly to quote an entire poem

“Nowhere is my balm.
Awestruck am I
All shades vision has absorbed
while the rest have faded off
dark is still there
red is alive
dark is the night
red is the blood
nowhere is my balm
baffled am I.”


I conclude with a note of gratitude to the poet as well as to the translator for discovering the poet, making an exquisite selection of poems to be translated and equally exquisite and brilliant translation.

[Picture from Sheikh Khalid Karrar's Blog.]

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

The Time Has Come

By Dr. Akmal Hussain, *Norms, values and democracy* - The Express tribune - Pakistan; Monday, Septembe 12 2011

Essential to the institutional structure of democracy is democratic consciousness.

In the process of consolidating democracy in Pakistan, the nurturing of this consciousness and the norms and values signified by it are vital to the functioning of the formal rules of the constitution.

Let us briefly examine the challenge of rediscovering from the shared tradition of the diverse cultures of Pakistan, the consciousness that can sustain our journey of democracy.

Douglass C North, the Nobel Prize winner, who pioneered the New Institutional Economics, defines an institution as a set of formal rules and informal norms, which together with their enforcement mechanisms structure human interaction. Research on the subject over the last two decades, shows that the formal rules of a democratic institutional structure can be actualised in practice only when they are underpinned by norms and values conducive to its functioning.

Historically, until 2007, successive military regimes in Pakistan were able to blatantly violate the constitution because the underlying democratic norms had not sufficiently permeated popular consciousness to constitute a credible threat to military dictatorship. In this sense, the citizens’ movement led by the lawyers in 2007, aimed at restoring the judiciary and constitutional rule, was a watershed moment in Pakistan’s history.

Subsequently Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Sahiba, sacrificed her life to express the will of the people for democracy. Thus, a democratic consciousness was manifested to give meaning and strength to the formal rules of the constitution.

The urge for an equitable and representative polity goes back to ancient times, in the area which today constitutes Pakistan.

According to the Indian historian Romila Thapar, the earliest republics were formed around 600 BC in northern Punjab and foothills of the Himalayas, possibly by independent minded elements of society who rebelled against the hierarchic orthodoxy of the monarchies, which had been established in the plains.

Much later, the widespread peasant revolt in Punjab in the 18th century, against the authoritarianism of Mughal rule, and celebrated in folk poetry by Sufi poets such as Najam Hussain Syed, further irrigated the perennial aspiration of equity and freedom in popular consciousness.

The Sufi tradition, which represents the unity amidst the diverse folk cultures of each of the four provinces of Pakistan, propounds freedom and the essential equality of all human beings in so far, as each has a bond with God.

This bond is made palpable in a state of adoration of God and thereby makes possible for humans to tread the path of righteousness: the path of love, compassion and justice towards others. This wisdom finds resonance in the songs, dances and value system of our folk cultures whose images, in turn, are taken up and given spiritual depth in the Sufi poetry of this region.

Bulleh Shah suggests that the journey to God is through love: “Demolish the temple, demolish the mosque, demolish all that can be demolished, but do not injure the human heart, for that is the abode of God.”

Counterposed to the love and compassion of the Sufi tradition is the egotism and greed that underlies the current violence by armed groups allegedly sponsored by various elements in the political sphere and within the state apparatus.

Individuals shorn of their humanity and divorced from the traditional value system have descended to demonic depths. When the violence in Karachi was vividly described in a presentation to the federal cabinet on September 8, the sheer horror of it, reportedly, stunned the ministers. The Supreme Court too has called upon the government to quell this violence to establish the rule of law and save democracy.

Clearly the time has come to exercise state power without fear or favour to re-establish order.

Equally important in the years ahead is to rediscover the traditional norms and values that must now underpin Pakistan’s quest for democracy and a humane society.

The writer is distinguished professor of economics at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan

Monday, September 19, 2011

Les Maîtres Invisibles

By Staff Writer, *Banners win Jameel prize at V&A* - BBC News - London, UK; Monday, September 12, 2011

Algerian-born Rachid Koraichi has won the prestigious Jameel Prize, the V&A museum in London has announced.

Established in 2009, the £25,000 prize honours international art and design inspired by Islamic tradition.

Ten artists and designers were shortlisted for the award, which is presented every two years, from almost 200 nominations from across the globe.

Koraichi's winning work consisted of embroidered banners inscribed with Arabic symbols and ciphers.

Entitled Les Maîtres Invisibles (The Invisible Masters), the series is a tribute to 14 mystic personalities from the Islamic world.

The artist, who now lives in Tunisia and France, was born into a Sufi family - Sufism being a mystical aspect of Islam.

His work often explores Africa's complex contribution to Islamic culture and philosophy.

'Hold their own'

"Rachid's work stood out because his banners have a universal appeal," said Martin Roth, chairman of the judging panel, and director of the V&A.

"They work in the white space of a contemporary art gallery, but they also hold their own in historical settings - from Parisian palaces to simple Sufi shrines."

Nominated works for the Jameel Prize ranged from traditional Iranian felt garments, to complex architectural models, placed upon densely-patterned Persian rugs.

All of the pieces incorporated an element of traditional Islamic craft and design.

An exhibition has been running at the V&A since 21 July and will tour Europe and the US later in the year.

Afruz Amighi, who won the inaugural Jameel prize in 2009, was among the judges this year.

Picture: The series consists of six cloth banners embroidered with symbols and text. Photo: BBC / Victoria & Albert Museum.

Real Connections

By Christopher Lord, *Rachid Koraichi: a mystical winner of the Jameel Prize* - The National - Abu Dhabi, UAE; Wednesday, September 14, 2011

As only the second recipient of the biennial Jameel Prize at London's Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), the Algerian artist Rachid Koraichi took away an award of £25,000 (Dh146,000) and acknowledgement of his Islamic craft from one of the world's leading cultural institutions on Monday evening.

The winning work is a collection of six tall banners that incorporate mystic symbols and plaits of calligraphy from Koraichi's hand. Each is dedicated to a Sufi master, the poet Rumi, for instance, or the 13th-century philosopher Ibn Arabi, and feature stick-figure whirling dervishes and imagery drawn from a well of esoteric sources.

Koraichi, who is in his 60s was selected from a shortlist of 10 artists that spans several generations. He was up against the likes of Monir Farmanfarmaian, a leading figure in Iranian modernism who has created beguiling mirror mosaics for the past 50 years. There was also much younger talent - Noor Ali Chagani, for instance, a trained Pakistani miniature painter who has applied his style to sculpting with tiny terracotta bricks.

But Koraichi's work fits perfectly into the Jameel Prize remit. His pieces draw on handmade traditions in the Islamic world. Speaking to The National just after receiving his award, Koraichi reflected on this inspiration, and found common ground with the other artists on the shortlist.

"The level of quality is stunning and I'm amazed to be with this group of people. Many of them merited this prize," he said. "I think that there are real connections going on between the minds of the artists here. Everyone is thinking about how we can join our present with our traditions."

Koraichi pointed to the shortlisted work of Bita Ghezelayagh, a series of felt shepherd's robes ornamented with iconography from the 1979 revolution in Iran. "I've had similar ideas myself, because I've wanted to talk about the importance of robes and costume in a living culture. I think that the big question shared by both the Islamic world and the West is of how you join modernity with your past."

What Koraichi tries to achieve in his work could be described as "living culture". There's almost a cumulative sense about these banners - the artist's extensive research into symbols, ritual and song become shards of inspiration that cling, magnet-like, to the visual composition.

There's an ordering, but also some sense of free-association: the meaning of these nuanced symbols is never explained directly, yet they have some unnameable power that speaks to our intuition.

Our understanding of them comes in glimpses.

As a cave painting might communicate something in its most stripped-down form, so do these works tap into a shared symbolic understanding that is universal.

In that way, this works like reading the Sufi saints that Koraichi venerates. "We can talk about Ibn Arabi and Rumi, but I look at recent poets like Mahmoud Darwish and the work of John Berger. These are contemporary versions of the same overall intensity."

Though we think we have modernised, nothing has really changed, Koraichi continued. "We breathe the same air, we look for the same fruitful relationships with people. These old poets speak to us today in exactly the same way as they did."

But a "living culture", Koraichi suggested, is best expressed with the hands. The imagery and composition on these six huge banners is so tight, yet the presence of the artist's hand gives them warmth.

"When we talk about an Islamic craft tradition, we're not talking about the art of the 19th century that took place in an artist's studio and on canvas. Here we're talking about things that come out of everyday life," Koraichi said.

"It's not a world in which the artist lives apart."

The culture of the artisan - still present, but steadily disappearing in the streets of Koraichi's native Algeria and surrounding Maghreb countries - offers an insight into how art can be drawn directly from a day-to-day world, yet heightened by the dedication of craft.

"If you look at the foundations of western art," Koraichi continued, "it was based on a whole tradition of craft that went into churches; the goblets made by metalworkers and the marbling. It's exactly the same with mosques, in that they were built by those who could work with stone and weaving. These are sources that we can clearly see but the question we have is how to take those disappearing traditions and make them present again in the living moment."

Koraichi's works are offerings, first and foremost. To the Sufi saints they venerate, they offer the hand of an artist who has lived a life reading and reflecting on their lives. To the craftsmen that he adores - the streetside painters, metalworkers and, indeed, banner-makers of the past - he has carved out an oeuvre of offerings so that they not be forgotten.

As Koraichi headed off to celebrate, he uttered a simple, telling koan: "All that is not offered, is lost."

Sunday, September 18, 2011

The Constructed Dichotomy

By Isabelle Werenfels, *Promoting The “Good Islam”: The Regime And Sufi-Brotherhoods In Algeria – Analysis* - Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Berlin, Germany / IPRIS Portuguese Institute of International Relations and Security / Eurasia Review; Europe; Mon. September 12, 2011

In the run up to the presidential elections in 2004 and 2009, Algerian newspapers repeatedly ran headlines such as “the President courts the Sufi-brotherhoods”.

A few decades ago, this would have been inconceivable. Up to the late 1980s, the post-colonial elites sought to economically marginalize, politically repress and socially stigmatize the brotherhoods.

In stark contrast, regime elites from 1990 onwards engaged in their top-down promotion. both approaches, repression and revival of the brotherhoods, have been a function of power-ensuring strategies of the authoritarian regime.

The reasons for marginalization of the brotherhoods up to the late 1980s and early 1990s were manifold. They were seen as a threat to the state’s claim to speak for Islam, and as a potentially strong organizing social force outside the framework of the parti unique and its satellites.

Indeed, in colonial and pre-colonial times the brotherhoods had not only been spiritual and cultural movements, but political, social, economic and, at times, military key players on the local and regional levels.

The modernizers within the post-colonial elite viewed the brotherhoods as backward and out-dated, while the conservative elite and the scholars of the ‘ulama‘ considered them as “charlatans” and “heretics”.

The fact that a number of sheikhs of zaouias (religious lodges, some of which belonged to large transnational brotherhoods while some others worshipped “independent” local saints) had collaborated with the French colonial power served to discredit the brotherhoods in toto and to justify the state’s repressive policies toward them.

These policies ranged from nationalization of territories, the closing of religious and worldly schools run by the zaouias, prevention of pilgrimages to intimidation of members and the imprisonment of sheikhs.

From repression to instrumentalization

The turnaround in regime policies toward the brotherhoods has been gradual, but radical. It began with a certain easing of pressure in the 1980s under President Chadli Bendjedid, whose wife belonged to a zaouia.

The brotherhoods’ full rehabilitation began a decade later when the government in 1991 organized a national seminar on the zaouias (used as a synonym for brotherhoods in colloquial Algerian) which was attended by several hundred sheikhs. This seminar took place against the backdrop of the FIS’ (Front Islamique du Salut) growing popularity and reach for power.

It aimed at rehabilitating and promoting the brotherhoods with the goal of creating a social and spiritual counter-force to the “imported” political Islam of the FIS.

Now the brotherhoods were no longer portrayed as backward, but framed as the embodiment of the “tolerant, peaceful, apolitical, traditional real Algerian Islam”. However, the real boost for the brotherhoods came with the arrival to the presidency in 1999 of Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who is said to have a personal affinity with them.

Ever since, the state has accelerated renovation and restitution of their properties, and granted several zaouias licenses for the (re-)opening of educational institutions.

Figures providing an overview of direct state subsidies are difficult to obtain – sheikhs of large zaouias do claim however that these are minimal. But the state has been sponsoring numerous conferences and events involving Sufi brotherhoods (among them a huge international gathering of the Tidjaniya in 2007 as well as numerous scholarly colloquies on the brotherhoods).

Also, state television, radio and the print media, both private and governmental, have increasingly featured zaouias.

The official portrayal is remarkably simplistic and essentialist: the zaouias are portrayed as “sanctuaries of peace”, allegedly “unchanged for centuries”, “remote from worldly affairs” and “profoundly apolitical”. however, both the state’s instrumentalization of the zaouias as well as the zaouias’ proper interests and activities stand in stark contrast to such ascriptions.

Simplistic framing, complex realities

In the era of Bouteflika, zaouïas have not only been objects of political maneuvering and targets for co-optation, but have actively engaged in the do-ut-des rituals of election campaigns.

With the overall number of their adherents estimated to be roughly at 1.5 million, they constitute an important pool for voter mobilization. In 2004 and 2009 most presidential candidates, including Islamists, visited important zaouias and courted their sheikhs.

These in turn – and in contradiction to claims of their being apolitical – endorsed the president or (in rare cases) voiced opposition to him. In some cases, public endorsements appeared to be directly linked to material benefits, again testifying to the zaouias’ pursuit of “worldly” (economic) interests.

The existence of two competing umbrella organizations of zaouias may be a result of both the uneven distribution of funds to some but not all zaouias and the power struggles within Algeria’s ruling elite.

The extent to which the brotherhoods are actually fulfilling regime expectations and becoming a spiritual and social alternative to political Islam is difficult to assess in the absence of broad sociological data on their followers.

Rare articles – academic and journalistic – on the social embeddedness of zaouias in the 2000s indicate that they are not just receiving support from above but also experiencing a revival from below. Yet, the causal link between the two is by no means evident: The growing social demand for “traditional” spirituality may just as well be a reaction to the violence and insecurity of the 1990s.

However, there is evidence that the constructed dichotomy between mystical spiritual movements on the one hand and political Islam on the other hand is not mirrored on the ground. For instance, the Alawiya Brotherhood prides itself of having followers belonging to Islamist parties, and some members of Islamist parties are known to have close ties to a zaouia.

Whether the brotherhoods are actually appealing to those in danger of being radicalized and attracted to jihadi milieus, namely young men with a lack of perspectives, remains an open question – there are indications that the zaouias, at least in urban contexts, are particularly attractive to middle class females.

Yet, even if the zaouias are not fulfilling (all) the functions ascribed to them top-down they serve the regime.

Being a polymorphous and internally fragmented phenomenon that is partly co-opted and featuring a broad spectrum of agendas, the zaouias present a fertile ground for the social and political fragmentation strategies that have contributed to the long-lividness of Algeria’s liberalized autocracy.

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Our People

By Kathy Lally, *Dagestan: another powder keg in Caucasus* - The Seattle Times /The Washington Post - USA - Saturday, September 10, 2011

Until recently, it was the insurgency in neighboring Chechnya that had posed the biggest challenge to Russian leaders. But now, it is the traditionally independent and Muslim Dagestanis whose resentments are turning violent.

Makhachkala: The latest episode in Moscow's struggle with rebellious Muslims is unfolding here in Dagestan, a forbidding North Caucasian realm where peaks as high as 13,000 feet descend sharply to running rivers.

Suicide bombers have emerged. Each week, an average of three policemen are killed and numerous civilians become casualties. Tanks and helicopters, weapons blazing, pursue guerrillas in the woods.

Until recently, it was the insurgency in neighboring Chechnya that had posed the biggest challenge to Russian leaders. But now, it is the traditionally independent and Muslim Dagestanis whose resentments are turning violent, finding expression in a conservative form of Islam taking root in the beautiful severity of the mountain landscape.

Authorities blame Muslim extremists for the unrest. Conservative Muslims blame government repression. The fighting sometimes appears dangerously close to civil war, with imams attacked and killed, liquor stores blown up, and angry young men taking up arms and going into hiding — which in the North Caucasus is called going to the forest.

"They terrorized the people," a 30-year-old religious leader known as Abu Umar said of regional authorities. "And now, the people terrorize them."

When the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of 1991, Russia emerged independent and its new president, Boris Yeltsin, promised democracy and prosperity in a multiethnic nation. Twenty years into statehood, a minority has accumulated great wealth while the average citizen has been disappointed by lack of opportunity and an increasingly authoritarian government run on corruption and disregard for law. Ethnic tension has grown.

Few protest. Chechnya has been subdued. But Dagestan roils with religious disputes and anger at Moscow, mixed almost indistinguishably with vicious commercial and political struggles.

"Russia will never make Dagestan prosperous," Abu Umar said. "We are a third-class people for them. They want us humiliated, and we feel it."

On a late-summer afternoon, only the mosquitoes look bloodthirsty in a muddy field where Abu Umar politely offers insect repellant and a tour of a self-sufficient Islamic community about 70 miles northwest of Makhachkala, the Dagestani capital. He is a Salafi, what Russians call a Wahhabi and consider synonymous with extremism.

The walls are already up on the three-story madrassa, or religious school, where Salafis say they intend to provide social services, sports, education and opportunities untainted by corruption. As a bulldozer rumbled, Abu Umar pointed out the spot reserved for an orphanage to care for children he says the government neglects.

He imagines citizens obeying the law of Allah, making police and other accoutrements of the state unneeded, allowing Muslims to live in peace and prosperity. The government considers such talk a dangerous cover for subversion and terrorism. Abu Umar says the authorities have lost their moral bearings and are wrong about the Salafis.

"We are building," he said, "not destroying."

Soviet repression

Islam arrived here in the late Middle Ages, becoming a moderate Sufism infused with local customs. But religion was mostly forced underground during the officially atheistic years of the Soviet Union. In Dagestan, believers buried their Korans in the forest and suffered silently as their mosques were destroyed.

When religion began to reemerge in Russia as the Soviet Union crumbled in the late 1980s, Salafism — a puritanical form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia — began to drift here through Afghanistan. The disillusionment and chaos of the 1990s, as Russia struggled to replace communism with democracy, provided fertile ground for it to take hold.

Salafis believe a Muslim has a direct relationship with God and should study the words of the prophet Mohammed. Sufis in Dagestan follow the instruction of their sheiks, who stand between them and God and have anywhere from 500 to 20,000 deeply loyal followers.

Salafis dislike the Sufi alliance with the government. Sufis run the government-sanctioned Spiritual Board of Muslims, to which the official clergy belong. They also support a secular state. Salafis do not.

"Whether he's Sufi or Salafi," Abu Umar said, "if a man is not dreaming about sharia, he's not a Muslim."

Assaults on rise

Violent and unsolved deaths have become a routine part of life here. At a Makhachkala sports center, a tiny grandmother named Nisakhan Magomedova who presides over the front desk takes a rat-a-tat-tat pose as she describes how the director of the judo program was gunned down recently, just after getting a bigger job at another club, targeted perhaps by a professional rival.

Residents can point out the spot at the beach where a bomb went off last year, a protest against women in bathing suits that cost one woman her leg.

Police have killed 100 people they identified as rebels since the beginning of the year, Interior Ministry officials said in June, and human-rights activists accuse police of killing first and then finding a crime to assign to the body.

Local journalists estimate that 1,000 to 1,500 armed men are in the forest at any one time, with perhaps 5,000 others prepared to join them. The forest shelters organized terrorism as well — the U.S. government has offered a $5 million reward for information leading to Doku Umarov, a Chechen terrorist with al-Qaeda connections suspected of hiding in Dagestan who has been accused of terrorist attacks on Moscow.

Police targeted

In Dagestan, all policemen are targets, because they represent government authority and because they are accused of treating the population brutally.

"Property is being divided" as it was in the U.S. era of the robber baron, said Abrek Aliev, the head of protocol for the city of Makhachkala.

Greeting visitors with sweet fresh apricots, dark red cherries and juicy local strawberries, he opens a bottle of cognac in a City Hall anteroom and offers a toast to the mayor's health.

Said Amirov, mayor of Makhachkala since 1998, has survived 15 assassination attempts, one of which severed his spine and left him unable to walk.

"There are people who try to live outside the law," the mayor said, "and I don't let them do what they want."

Amirov heads Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia party in Makhachkala. He said he is busy building the housing and infrastructure required for a city of 710,000 whose population is expected to grow to a million.

The birthrate in Dagestan is much higher than in the rest of Russia, and people are moving to the city looking for work.

"We want a secular state here, as part of the Russian Federation," he said. "If those in the forest stop fighting and drop their guns, they can rejoin the peaceful population. They are our people, too."

Friday, September 16, 2011

Sufi-style Spirituality

By Lamine Chikhi, *INTERVIEW - Algerian wants reformist Sufi role in Arab Spring* Reuters Africa - Algiers, Algeria; Friday, September 9, 2011

* Algerian Sufi master urges Sufis to speak up for freedom

* Arab governments risk being swept away if they ignore youth

* Official Islam in North Africa has failed, Bentounes says


Mostaganem: Sufi Muslims across North Africa must stand up for dignity and freedom so their mystical form of Islam can be heard in the lively debates over democracy in the Arab world, a leading Algerian Sufi master says.

The official Islam promoted by dictators who were swept away by Arab Spring revolts has failed and Muslims now need Sufi-style spirituality to promote brotherhood and unity, said Sheikh Khaled Bentounes, head of the Al' Alawiya Sufi order.

Arab leaders who do not guarantee universal values such as dignity and freedom risked being swept from office by a "tsunami" of youth protests, he told Reuters at his order's lodge in this coastal city 300 km (187 miles) west of Algiers.

"We need to open the doors of debate in our countries," said Bentounes, 62, whose order claims tens of thousands of followers in North Africa and Europe. "Let the Salafi, the Muslim Brother, the secularist, the agnostic and the Sufi speak freely and suggest solutions."

"Spirituality commits us to take the path of the good, of unity and brotherhood," he added.

SUFI-SALAFI TENSION

Although well-represented in the traditional Islam of North Africa, Sufis -- whose teaching stresses mysticism and love of God -- have been less visible in the Arab Spring uprisings than the conservative Muslim Brothers or the strict orthodox Salafis.

Sufis in Egypt have occasionally come under attack by Salafis, who consider them heretics for venerating saints and sometimes damage the shrines they maintain in their honour. Bentounes said Sufis should stand up to counter extremism.

"There are 13 million Sufis in Egypt and it's time for them to show what they can do to help implement democracy," he said.

Dressed in a traditional white gandoura robe, the sheikh said the young people driving the Arab Spring protests "can no longer live in a dictatorship."

"The rulers in the Arab world have no choice now but to guarantee dignity and freedom for young people," he said. "If they don't, they will be swept away by a tsunami (of protest)."

Bentounes, who has written several books on Sufism, criticised the official Islam long promoted in North Africa.

"Like everything else, Islam has become a consumer item. The Friday sermons of the imams are consumer items. They've failed," he said. "Conservative Sufism has also failed.

"What we need now is a Sufism in phase with universal values such as dignity and freedom for all," he said.


INVEST IN YOUTH

Bentounes has angered Algerian Salafis with his latest book "Sufism, A Common Inheritance" because its cover has a picture of the Prophet Mohammad. But the book is still on sale here.

The sheikh said Algeria, which has not been hit by the Arab Spring protests rocking neighbouring countries but did see unrest early this year over pay and working conditions, should invest all its money on its youth.

"What is the most important resource in a country, its oil, its gas, its army -- or its youth?" he asked.

Responding to the unrest, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, 74, has increased wages and offered free loans to millions of people in a strategy that is so far successful.

"The youth wants more space and hope. It is the duty of the government to meet these demands," Bentounes said. "Algeria cannot solve its problems on its own. It must accept the idea to create a bigger space to include all countries of the region."

Editing by Tom Heneghan

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Sermons, Seminars and Qawalis

By Staff Reporter, *Visitors complain about poor security* - The Express Tribune - Pakistan; Friday, September 9, 2011

Kasur: Devotees have complained about poor security arrangements on the first day of 254th annual urs celebrations of Sufi poet Baba Bulleh Shah.

They said though police officials were present at the shrine but no walk through gates or metal detectors had been installed to prevent possible terrorism attacks.

A large number of people thronged the shrine’s complex on the first day of the urs. Talking to The Express Tribune they complained that none of the entrances to the shrine had a walk through gate.

Police deployed at the shrine said metal detectors were found to be faulty. They, however, said they were keeping an eye on the surroundings and would take immediate action if any suspicious person or activity were observed.

Besides police, officials of Health and Civil Defence departments were also present at the shrine to deal with emergencies.

Earlier, the three-day ceremony was formally inaugurated by provincial minister for Auqaf and Religious Affairs, Haji Ehsanuddin Qureshi. He laid a ceremonial cloak over the poet’s grave.

Auqaf Department has allocated Rs265,000 for the urs. Free food (lunger) will be served to visitors to the shrine.

Sermons by scholars from different schools of thought, seminars and qawalis would be the main attractions of the urs ceremony.

Kasur district administration has announced a public holiday today (Thursday) so that people may attend the urs.

Provincial Minister for Auqaf andReligious Affairs Haji Ehsanuddin Qureshi Thursday inauguratedthe 254th annual Urs celebrations of Baba Bulleh Shahby lying traditional ‘chadar’ on his shrine in Kasur.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Not in that Direction

By Patrick Wall, *From fear of Islam to outreach: how 9/11 prompted interfaith efforts* - The Christian Science Monitor - Boston, MA, USA; Thursday, September 8, 2011

In the decade since 9/11, the percentage of US congregations that participate in interfaith worship has doubled, a study says, and more mosques are engaging in outreach and dialogue.

After the deadly attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the first person Rabbi Ted Falcon called was his friend, Jamal Rahman, a Sufi imam. On the following Sabbath, the rabbi invited the imam to his Seattle synagogue to speak to the congregation.

Soon after, the two spiritual leaders, along with Pastor Don Mackenzie, commenced a series of frank conversations about their beliefs, both shared and exclusive. The talks eventually inspired a radio show, a pair of books, and worldwide speaking tours.

The men’s willingness to ask and answer tough questions about faith in the wake of 9/11 had clearly struck a nerve with many Americans. In particular, many people wanted to talk about a religion they had barely considered before the attacks, but which now consumed their thoughts: Islam.

“One of the things that 9/11 showed was that, generally speaking, Americans had an abysmal ignorance of Islam,” says Rabbi Falcon, who founded his Bet Alef Meditative Synagogue in the 1990s.

In the decade since 9/11, despite some Americans’ fears of and hostility toward Islam, many individuals and institutions have followed the path of the rabbi, the pastor, and the imam: They’ve reached out across faiths to increase their understanding and to address common concerns.

Over the past 10 years, the percentage of US congregations involved in interfaith worship has doubled – from 7 to 14 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of congregations performing interfaith community service nearly tripled – from 8 to almost 21 percent – according to a new survey by Hartford Seminary’s Institute for Religion Research in Connecticut. In doing so, these congregations have joined the colorful, decades-old American interfaith movement. Since 9/11, the movement has gained new momentum and, more than ever before, has drawn Muslims into its ranks.

As America marks the 10th anniversary of 9/11, several interfaith events are planned around the country, including, prominently, the 9/11 Unity Walk in Washington, D.C.

“To think about 9/11 without thinking about the interfaith movement would almost be a travesty,” says Maureen Fiedler, host of “Interfaith Voices,” a nationally syndicated radio program that was created in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Islam was so misunderstood and so vilified by those events,” says Ms. Fiedler, “that a real interfaith understanding has to be brought to bear on the issue.”

In the days and weeks after 9/11, when Muslim extremists killed nearly 3,000 civilians, some Americans came to view Islam itself as the enemy. Around the country, mosques were vandalized, people who appeared Muslim or Middle Eastern were harassed and, in Arizona, a Sikh man who was wearing a turban was mistaken for a Muslim and shot and killed.

In recent years, anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States has diminished, but not disappeared. A proposal to build a Muslim community center near the World Trade Center site provoked heated protests last year. This year, Congress held controversial hearings on Muslim radicalization within the US.

Curiosity about Islam

While America’s post-9/11 Islam fixation filled some people with dread, others were filled with curiosity.

“Many people realized, maybe for the first time, that, ‘Hey, there are mosques in our town,’ ” says Diana Eck, a comparative religion professor at Harvard University and director of the Pluralism Project, which documents America’s religious landscape.

As interest in American Muslims surged, many Muslim leaders went to great lengths to explain Islam to outsiders and to develop partnerships beyond the Muslim community – often, for the first time.

“Before 9/11, most mosques were fairly insular. Today, most mosques, if not all, have intensive programs of reaching out and having dialogues,” says Imam Rahman, who helped found the Interfaith Community Church in Seattle.

In the weeks immediately after Sept. 11, mosques and Islamic community centers around the country held open houses. Then, in 2008, a multinational group of 138 Muslim scholars, called Common Word, invited senior Christian leaders to Yale University to discuss commonalities among their faiths.

Real-world collaboration

Interfaith interaction can sometimes amount to little more than religious show-and-tell: you show me your strange rituals, and I’ll show you mine. But often, the theological icebreaking leads to real-world collaboration.

In Seattle, Falcon, Rahman and Pastor Mackenzie, who lecture and publish as the Interfaith Amigos, decided to turn their talk into action. They joined various interfaith service projects – including one where the men worked with the congregants of an evangelical megachurch to build a Habitat for Humanity home for a Muslim family.

In an area of Brooklyn, New York known as “Little Pakistan,” a local entrepreneur founded a nonprofit agency in early 2002 to serve low-income South Asians and Muslims, including many who were detained after 9/11.

Since then, the group has expanded its mission to serve non-Muslims and has worked with Jewish and Christian leaders on several initiatives, including a public health campaign, hate crime prevention, and youth leadership training. In August, the group honored rabbis and pastors at a series of public iftar dinners during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

Successful interfaith coalitions must focus on shared concerns, rather than theological differences, says Mohammad Razvi, founder of the Brooklyn nonprofit, known as the Council of Peoples Organization.

“It’s not a Kumbaya dialogue,” says Mr. Razvi. “We’re working on serious issues, concrete issues, [so] that we can actually have accomplishments.”

Mobilizing youth

In 2002, Eboo Patel, a Muslim then in his mid-20s, founded the Interfaith Youth Core with a Jewish friend. They hired one full-time staff member: an evangelical Christian. Today, the nonprofit employs 31 staffers and operates on a $4 million annual budget.

The group trains college-aged leaders – “interfaith fellows” – who then return to their campuses to organize interfaith events and community service projects. This year, the organization trained leaders on 97 campuses who enlisted around 10,000 participants of various faiths to tackle issues such as homelessness, hunger, and sustainable living.

“We’ve seen an outpouring of interest in our programs,” says Mr. Patel. “There’s a lot of people watching blatant bigotry and saying, ‘We cannot let our country go in that direction.’ ”

Patel and his staff helped the White House develop an initiative that it launched this year, called the “Interfaith and Community Service Challenge.” So far 278 colleges have promised to sponsor interfaith programming and community service projects next year.

9/11’s interfaith casualty list

People often treat interfaith as a tool – religious coalitions that are built to achieve some shared goal, such as education or social justice. But sometimes, interfaith can be an end in itself.

In New York City, the One Spirit Interfaith Seminary offers a two-year interfaith ordination program.

Among One Spirit’s graduates is Reverend Lisa Bellan-Boyer, an interfaith minister who lives in New Jersey and teaches college courses on religions of the East and West.

On the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, Ms. Bellan-Boyer stood near the Jersey City harbor and scanned the Manhattan skyline for the Twin Towers, only to find rising curls of coal-black smoke. When she turned and saw a young Muslim woman, her head fully covered, Bellan-Boyer had the sudden urge to scream at her.

Instead, she headed to the city, where she volunteered to serve as a Red Cross chaplain. As it turned out, the first person she counseled was a Muslim woman, whose daughter died in the World Trade Center.

“So I learned my lesson right then and there how much of a world disaster and how interfaith the casualty list really was,” she says.

Picture: A man walks past a memorial pool at ground zero in New York, Wednesday, Sept. 7. Photo: Seth Wenig/AP.

Friday, September 30, 2011

Shajarat al 'Abid
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By Lamis Yahya, *A spiritual politics* - Al-Ahram Weekly - Cairo, Egypt; 22 - 28 September 2011, Issue No. 1065

Ammar Ali Hassan, Shajarat al 'Abid (Worshipper's Tree), Cairo: Nefro, 2011

Akif, the hero of this book -- the word means "recluse" -- lives in a Sufi ambience despite the politically, socially, and economically disturbed surroundings.

He is a rebellious student at Al Azhar, torn between changing the world and changing himself.

When he joins a coup attempting to replace the tyrannous sultan, his life changes. It is the danger and complexity of this experience that gives him access to hitherto unknown parts of himself, leading him on a new journey of connection with the divine, which is embodied in his search for the Worshipper's Tree, an inner as well as an outer quest.

Set in medieval Cairo, at its start the text evokes Hadith as Sabah wal Massaa (Morning and Evening Conversation) by Naguib Mahfouz, in which the borders between reality and dreams, human beings and djinn break down. Akif is in love with Namar, a genie very like a human woman, who guides him through a fantasy world similar to our own.

The rich, energetic world of medieval Cairo, of Sufi lodges, Coptic monasteries and bloody court intrigues, is colourfully evoked.

One touching detail in Akif's journey is his connection with Namar and Hafssa, her human counterpart as it were, which sheds light on the role of women in mysticism, evoking the great figure Rab'a al Adawiya.

Other characters too are searching for the tree, but there is no conflict in their interactions. And the verse from Surat an Nur (24, 35 of the Quran) becomes of particular relevance:

Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth;
the example of His light is like a niche in which is a lamp;
the lamp is in a glass;
the glass is as if it were a star shining like a pearl,
kindled by the blessed olive tree,
neither of the east nor of the west --
it is close that the oil itself get ablaze
although the fire does not touch it;
light upon light;
Allah guides towards His light whomever He wills;
and Allah illustrates examples for mankind;
and Allah knows everything.

Dating all the way back to the Kabala, the tree as a symbol is a powerful locus for Akif's journey of self and homeland discovery, and not before the end do we find out if he is destined for life as a religious scholar, a revolutionary or a dervish.
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Thursday, September 29, 2011

Between Guru and Disciples
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By Abrar Haris, *In the heart of Sufism: Wali`s tomb as place of pilgrimage* - The Jakarta Post - Jakarta, Indonesia; Friday, September 23, 2011

Nestled in the heart of Islam, Mecca is the center of a pilgrimage obligatory for devout Muslims who are spiritually and economically ready to perform it. But in the global religious context, Muslim people have developed particular religious pilgrimages of their own that unfortunately are often misunderstood.

Stretching as far as North Africa passing Central Asia and arriving at Southern Asia’s shores, the daily prayer and Koranic recital have been gradually enriched by pilgrimages to sacred tombs and the mausoleums of holy figures.

It is a long and winding journey to sacred places from the grave of Pir Muhammad Barkhudar Gilani Qadri, a Pakistani Sufi figure in Sillanwali, to Ulakan Syeikh Burhanuddin Mosque in Pariaman, West Sumatra, Indonesia. In those burial complexes, ordinary people experience the “conversion” of life.

In the landscape of Islamic faith, the tomb-pilgrimage tradition emerges as a central issue. Islamic authorities denounce this practice as heresy for they fear the pilgrims are seduced by the tomb’s power or karomah to grant their worldly prayers rather than worshiping God.

Crossing the whole bias, tomb pilgrimage actually constitutes the continuation of teachings once so close and intimate between guru and disciples.

India, Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries have thousands of stories of Sufi over more than 1,000 years. In Indonesia, Wali Songo or Nine Holy Preachers accompanied by their faithful disciples walked from coastal villages and stepped into the Javanese court teaching God’s unity. As centuries passed, the land walked over has been consecrated by faith in God and his Prophet.

Some wali even initiated a revolution by founding religious schools. Text books adopting a Western style were printed and the students, fired by the spirit of the dynamic era, began political mapping that would change the socio-cultural landscape of every region they entered.

By doing so, the primeval wali cemented a preliminary sense of nationalism and religious identity which years to come would help indigenous people fight Western colonialism and inspire Asian nations to break free in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In this context, we see that Sufi figures are not stereotypic wandering men in self-ecstasy. Indonesian people can fairly say that men like pedagogic Ki Hadjar Dewantara who founded Taman Siswa College during the Dutch occupation, freedom fighters Tuanku Imam Bonjol, Prince Diponegoro and other Indonesian heroes and heroines and even non-Muslim independence fighters are Sufi.

They did not hide in solitude but led their people to sovereignty. I assume in their ziyarat or long struggle, while waging guerilla war behind mountainous villages, men like Imam Bonjol or Diponegoro used many religious practices to maintain morale among their followers. They would have recited zikir or religious contemplative chants in circle pattern, performed muraqaba or meditation by using their own cultural musical instruments (sama) to achieve self-peace and self-conviction in their fight against the
invaders.

In the end, everybody will admit the employment of ziyarat, zikir, muraqaba or sama constitute Sufistic practices, completing the image of Indonesian national heroes and heroines as gurus and their followers as disciples.

Sunan Kalijaga, a Javanese wali, is admired for his tolerant and artful preaching methods by adopting the existing Hindu and Buddhist cultures. He composed a Javanese suluk titled “Ilir-ilir”; a song in praise of God and Islam. Not to mention approbation of his strong syncretistic master pieces in craft arts, wayang (puppet show) and sekatenan (Prophet Birthday celebration).

His genius reached the architectural world where he adapted the Hindu-style city landscape of palace and alun-alun (open square) guarded by two banyan trees, perfected with the combination of Java-Hindu terraced roofed royal mosques instead of Arabian domes.

In Pariaman, West Sumatra, pilgrims have visited their sheikh-committal complex in Ulakan village since the 17th century, where they spend their nights reading the Koran and contemplating. These Minangkabau pilgrims believe the physical visit and homage to the guru’s tomb is essential.

In this context, the inevitable heretic behavior in burial complexes must be strictly understood as sociologic paradigm rather than allegations of faith perversion.

Anthony Reid, an expert on Southeast Asia, writes in his book Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: “The most early Sufi sects in Southeast Asia world seemingly had no strict structure in comparison with the rest of the Muslim world but they possessed a huge respect for the figures and these burial complexes confirm their role in imposing the enormous change in this region”.

Without the presence of wali, Sufi, nameless heroes and heroines, the Islamic Southeast Asian civilization would never have been shaped as it is now.

The writer is indigenous culture researcher with the Bureau of History and Traditional Values Preservation at the West Sumatra office of the Culture and Tourism Ministry, Padang.

[Picture: Map of Indonesia. Photo: Wiki.]
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Wednesday, September 28, 2011

A Spiritual Celebration
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By Staff Writer, *Konya welcomes nine groups for music festival* - Today's Zaman - Istanbul, Turkey; Tuesday, September 20, 2011

This week will mark the beginning of the eighth Konya International Mystic Music Festival, a spiritual celebration of music taking place in the serene shadows of the tomb of the great Sufi mystic and poet Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi in the central Anatolian city of Konya.

An eight-day melting pot of mystical music from around the world, this year’s festival will feature nine groups from across the world -- from Tibet, India, the US, Morocco, Guinea, Kyrgyzstan, Iran, Turkey and Tajikistan.

Drawing to a close on the 804th anniversary of the great mystic’s birth on Sept. 30, the festival will present concerts at 9 p.m. every night at the Konya Municipality Mevlana Culture Center’s Sultan Veled Hall and Sema Hall. Admission will be free of charge.

Featured amongst the ensembles this year are West African drumming group Guinee Percussions from Guinea, a 13-member dance and music ensemble that will perform on the opening night on Sept. 22.

Gnawa musician Maâlem Hamid El Kasri from Morocco is set to take to the stage on Friday evening and Saturday will see a performance by Indian bansuri virtuoso Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia. The 73-year-old has composed a number of film scores and collaborated with several Western musicians, including Jan Garbarek and John McLaughlin.

Other acts set to perform include the Afro-American gospel group The Fairfield Four, spiritual Buddhist ensemble Monks of Tashi Lhunpo Monastery from Tibet, the Tengir Too group from Kyrgyzstan, Tajik musician Davlatmand Kholov specializing in rural Falak music and ensemble Parissa from Iran.

The festival will draw to a fitting close on Friday evening with a sema, or whirling dervish ceremony, courtesy of the Konya Turkish Sufi Music Ensemble.

Program at www.mysticmusicfest.com

Picture: Kyrgyz group Tengir Too. Photo: TZ.
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Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Through Junoon’s Platform
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By Sher Khan, *Junoon: Celebrating 20 years of Sufi rock* . The Express Tribune - Karachi, Pakistan; Thursday, September 22, 2011

Lahore: With Junoon’s 20th anniversary on its way, several local and young artists have been invited to revamp the band’s songs for an exclusive 20th Anniversary Album. The upcoming album will be an opportunity for rising artists to flaunt their signature styles globally through Junoon’s platform. Salman Ahmad, Junoon’s stalwart guitarist, researched and then contacted bands and artists through email encouraging them to contribute to the album.

Back in the 90s, Junoon was the voice of a generation that brought several musical innovations and provided rock anthems which eventually received international recognition. This inspired the upcoming generation of musicians to follow the pattern of Junoon’s lyrics and style and gain international recognition.

The 20th Anniversary Album initiative will include bands such as Laal, Aag and artists like Bilal Khan, Usman Riaz, Uzair Sultan and many others from the local scene, paying tribute to the band’s songs.

“This literally means everything to me. I spent my childhood trying to emulate Ali Azmat’s vocal range and it was Brian O’ Connell who inspired me to learn bassline, so this is like a dream come true,” says Haroon Sheikh from Aag, who will be covering “Mitti” from the legendary band’s album Parvaz.

Aag is well-known locally, but has not been able to reach mainstream success despite their hit single “Aag” and a popular cover of Imran Khan’s hit single “Bewafa”.

Sheikh explains that being associated with Junoon means being part of an international brand and being connected with the brand’s legacy.

“To let these young artists use the platform is a big deal, because I have seen artists who refuse to share power and try to put a damper on upcoming talent,” states Sheikh, who was told by Ahmad via email that he has heard Aag the band and thinks that they have the passion to represent Junoon.

Twenty-year-old solo artist Usman Riaz [pictured], who is signed by music recording company EMI Pakistan, was also invited to perform after Ahmad came across Riaz’s Facebook page. Riaz who has performed for Uth Records and has a single to his credit, is known for his diverse music style which includes classical piano and guitar beats.

“Here is an established musician who feels I’m good enough. I’m not really concerned about fame or recognition but being allowed to recreate Junoon’s music is what I’m grateful for,” says Riaz, who is covering “Saeein” from the band’s 1997 album Azaadi.

Upcoming singer Bilal Khan of “Bachana” fame has also been requested to contribute his vocals to the anniversary album, which will be a buffet of soulful vocals and music genres. Khan will be singing Junoon’s “Aap Aur Hum” in his signature style while keeping the essence of the band’s music in mind.

Faisal Kapadia, who has lived through the scene in the late 80s and early 90s, says that Junoon contributed majorly in taking pop and rock music to a different level.

He adds that it was a great initiative by Junoon to provide a platform for younger artists. While recalling the Levi’s original music series, which had brought artists such as Bilal Khan and Zoe Viccaji to cover String’s original songs, Kapadia accepts that the project had given a fresh tinge to their older songs.

He further adds that the industry was going through a slump but the recent advent of the digital and internet era has provided more opportunities for artists to be heard. However, currently the depleting economic and security situation is bringing a decline in the music industry again.

“It’s an unfortunate time for people who dream of making music professionally. We have been in the music industry for the last 22 years, so we know that it’s a vicious circle and there is always light at the end of the tunnel,” says Kapadia.

On the brighter side, the musician adds that there are now more opportunities for artists to perform and record internationally.

“When we were making our first album there was no concept of performing in India, but then Junoon changed that in 1998. So now, after every four to five years, a new area or opportunity opens up for Pakistani artists,” states Kapadia.

Picture: Junoon’s Anniversary Album provides a platform for young musicians. Photo: File.
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Monday, September 26, 2011

Matrah-ı Şerif
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By Anatolia News Agency, *Istanbul’s old Galata Lodge readies for opening after a four-year restoration* Hürriyet Daily News - Istanbul, Turkey; Tuesday, September 20, 2011

One of the cultural landmarks in Istanbul, the Galata Mevlevihane in Beyoğlu has undergone a four-year restoration work and is ready for an official opening

Galata Mevlevihane, the lodge used by Mevlevi dervishes built in 1491 in Istanbul, the Ottoman capital city, has been restored and is anticipating its official opening.

“We are ready to open the museum,” Galata Mevlevihane Museum Director Yavuz Özdemir said, adding that the museum was expected to open this month. “We are waiting for the order from the Culture and Tourism Ministry.”

Located on Galip Dede Street near İstiklal Avenue, Istanbul’s unique original dervish lodge will open to visitors in the coming days with a new facelift after a four-year restoration process.

“The large garden of the dervish lodge has been restored for use as an area where people can escape the crowds of Beyoğlu,” he said. The Galata Mevlevihane was closed to visitors in 2007 and restored with contributions from the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Agency.

Speaking to the Anatolia news agency, Özdemir said the Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi mentioned in his travel books that the dervish lodge had included nearly 100 rooms.

The lodge was damaged in an earthquake in 1509. It has undergone restoration work since the early 17th century and additional structures turned the site into a social complex, according to a document from the museum’s archive, Özdemir said.

Further extensive damage occurred in the Tophane fire in 1765, he said, adding that the lodge was restored and took its current shape from restoration work in 1959-1960. The building served as a school from 1925 to 1957 and reopened as the Divan Literature Museum on Dec. 27, 1975.

Although the lodge had been restored for visitors, cultural events could be organized too, Özdemir said. “The dervish lodges on the lower floor of the semahane (the building where dervishes performed their whirling dance) have been opened to public visitors,” he said.

“Our semahane building is one of the most special buildings that still survive. This is thanks to the protection by the Culture and Tourism Ministry,” he said. The washhouse, Adile Sultan Şadırvan (water-tank with a fountain), is also among the cultural features of the lodge that still survive with the oldest structure being the Hasan Aga Fountain built in 1649, he added. Some unknown hand-carved works on the walls of the lodge had been discovered during restoration work, he said.

The museum

Entry to the Galata Mevlevihane museum is made through a narrow gate, at the end of the large courtyard, there is a three-story semahane building, Özdemir said. “We will organize sema [whirling dervish] performances and Turkish music concerts here,” he said, adding that showcase performances in the surrounding area took place before the restoration occurred. “Objects being displayed here have been removed and visitors will be able to view the original sema area,” he said.

The museum’s main exhibition rooms are the dervish lodges located on the lower floor and visitors will get information about Sufism (the dervish religion) while seeing related artworks, he said. The tools used in the kitchen are on displayed in another room next to Mevlevi dresses, Özdemir said. The most important feature of dervish lodges is their kitchen, called “matrah-ı şerif,” he said.

“Mesnevi,” the Persian religious text written by Rumi, is being exhibited and 18 couplets from the text are displayed in the museum.
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Sunday, September 25, 2011

Many Positive Points
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By Hassan Abou Taleb, *Following the Turkish model or forging our own?* - Al Ahram Online - Cairo, Egypt; Monday, September 19, 2011

As the Turkish experience of democratisation and Islamist party rule becomes more and more influential, what lessons does this model have for post-revolutionary Egypt

The Turkish model of applying democratic government has stirred admiration among many Egyptian and Arab analysts. The source of the sentiment is very simple: Turkey proves that the notion of the Islamists in power is not necessarily antithetical to democracy. They can be pragmatic and realistic, and not the staunch idealists as many have labelled them. Nevertheless, this is how some have continued to describe the Turkish Justice and Development Party, the pioneering experience of an Islamist party in government, on the grounds that it has a religious frame of reference rather than the secularist outlook that a political party should have in a proper democracy.

On the basis of such an overly simplistic perception, some analysts have maintained that post-revolutionary Egypt could clone the Turkish model for political transformation, with some minor adjustments. They maintain that the Muslim Brotherhood, as the largest and best organised political bloc in the country, has the opportunity to win a comfortable majority in the forthcoming parliamentary elections and, therefore, that a Muslim Brotherhood government is a near certainty. With such a government, Egypt would be closer to the Turkish model than anything else, especially in view of the modifications in the Brotherhood’s discourse, which now appears to accept the principles of the civil state, equal citizenship and the civil rights of the Copts.

On the other hand, some political activists outside the Muslim Brotherhood admire the Turkish model for a different reason, namely that the army is the protector of the democratic system. They hold that the new Egyptian constitution should state this explicitly, which would make the Egyptian army play a political role, albeit behind the scenes. I suspect that this body of opinion has failed to appreciate just how much the role of the Turkish army has changed in recent years. But the central question here is to what extent does this common analysis actually reflect realities in both Egypt and Turkey and to what extent could the Muslim Brotherhood reproduce the Turkish model if it did come to power in Egypt?

To begin with, this type of superficial analysis is inherently flawed. Apart from the fact that it is impossible for any country to clone the experience of another, whether in governance, the economy or in value system, the Turkish experience has many characteristics that bear no resemblance whatsoever to the situation in Egypt before or after the 25 January Revolution.

The most crucial factor in the Turkish experience over the past eight years has been that the Justice and Development Party has never cast itself as a religious party that has sought to transform the state into a form of theocracy. It has never opposed secularist values, never had as its principal aim the literal application of Sharia law as understood by Salafis, and never proclaimed that it would declare war in order to liberate Palestine. In addition, the Justice and Development Party came to power in 2003 in the context of a system of government that was already democratic. That system may have had some shortcomings, but it ensured that all had the opportunity to compete via the ballot box and it operated in the context of a general aspiration to obtain European Union membership, a process that requires commitments to a range of political, economic and social reforms.

The Justice and Development Party has acted as a responsible and democratic participant in the polls, and since coming to power it has followed through on and instituted many of the required constitutional and legal reforms. It has restructured the role of the army in Turkey and subordinated it to civilian rule, abolished the death sentence and the criminalisation of adultery, legalised religious conversions, and restricted the power of the judiciary to ban political parties on the grounds that they threaten Kemalist secularism.

The party has also undertaken several initiatives to address injustices against the minority Kurds and Alevis. Although there is still some room for progress on this front, one must acknowledge that the condition of the country's large Kurdish minority is considerably better than it had been before the Justice and Development Party came to power. Kurdish parties now participate in elections and they can now openly demand greater cultural and political rights without risking arrest and imprisonment. Under the Justice and Development Party, the military solution to the Kurdish question has been relegated to the back seat.

On the whole, the Justice and Development Party offers a model of secularism reconciled with religion. From this perspective, secularism is a system that guarantees every citizen the right to practise his religion freely without fear of punishment or exclusion from public life and that protects the freedoms of all, inclusive of the freedom to be devoutly religious.

In spite of Turkey’s official secularism, the Justice and Development Party certainly did not evolve in a religious vacuum. As rigid as Kemalist ideology may have been, it could not begin to curb the widespread Sufi movement that is deeply ingrained in Turkish society and cultural heritage. The Sufi movement and, specifically, the Fethullah Gülen movement, has been highly instrumental in safeguarding Islamic piety in Turkish society, but with an emphasis on tolerance for others of different creeds and beliefs. In addition, the evolution of Sufism in Turkey from a purely spiritual movement to a social movement that provides various public services, such as education, healthcare, and commercial and economic facilities to its members and others has contributed to creating an extensive social force with bases in the countryside and urban centres and one that is committed to supporting the Justice and Development Party, many of whose leading members, among them Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gül, were affiliated with the Fethullah Gülen movement.

Anyone who has followed Turkish political developments over recent years will be familiar with the term “deep state”. The term refers to the socio-political establishment dedicated to the protection of the exclusionist-type secular system established by Kemal Ataturk, the chief cornerstones of which are the army, the judiciary and the educational system. This “deep state” has remained clearly unchanged in the Justice and Development Party era. There are forces that do not appear visibly enough on the surface to identify them clearly; however, they also support the government of this party and fight its opponents using methods familiar from previous decades.

These methods sometimes step over the threshold of legality, using slander, arbitrary fines and other media and economic screws in order to harass and put pressure on opponents among politicians and the press. There is, indeed, a “deep state” in Turkey with roots deep in the Sufi movement that offers indirect backing to the Justice and Development Party, however vehemently it denies this.

Perhaps the most salient success of the Justice and Development Party government in Turkey has been the economic boom that has catapulted the country’s economy to the 14th strongest in the world. In the space of eight years, per capita GDP climbed from $2,800 to $12,300, the value of the Turkish lira strengthened, gross national product soared to over $370 billion, and the volume of foreign trade topped $200 billion in 2009.

Now to the question as to whether post-25 January Egypt can reproduce the Turkish experience. Any answer to this needs to take into account certain observations. First, Egypt is currently passing through a difficult transition period. As much talk as there has been about the general desire for a civil state, in the sense of a state characterised by the rule of law, democracy and respect for human rights and civic freedoms, our society has yet to reach a consensus over these concepts, let alone over how to bring them into effect. Secondly, the Muslim Brotherhood is not the only movement espousing an Islamist outlook and discourse. It has rivals, some of which have emerged from the Brotherhood fold, and others of which are staunchly Salafist and have no qualms about speaking openly about the need to establish a theocracy that would apply Sharia law in accordance with certain juridical interpretations that many Islamic jurists would disagree with, that are inimical to certain freedoms and human rights, and that condemn all those who appeal for a modern civil state as heretics.

Thirdly, the modernist forces that act as the self-appointed protectors of the revolution are themselves divided and do not appear to represent any single concrete trend or social force in the Egyptian political arena. Fourthly, the vast majority of the Egyptian people, Muslims and Christians alike, are very religious, but they oppose the notion of a government ruling in the name of religion. Fifthly, the Egyptian army is a professional institution that adheres to its constitutionally stipulated role as the protector of legitimacy, without meddling in politics or acting as the guardian of the regime.

True, the army’s situation has changed somewhat since the revolution, now that it is charged with managing the affairs of the country and setting it on the road to a civil democratic government. However, once that mission has been accomplished, it will return to the barracks and the exercise of its natural function as the defender of the nation. In short, any comparison between the role of the Egyptian army and that of the Turkish army, whether before or after the arrival of the Justice and Development Party in power, does not hold water.

These five observations alone are sufficient to tell us that the course of the Egyptian political transformation will differ significantly from the Turkish experience. Even supposing that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party can form a coalition government following the parliamentary elections, it is unlikely that it will win a large enough majority to free the hands of the Brotherhood to establish a government with a “religious frame of reference”, as some Brotherhood leaders predict. As organisationally weak as the Egyptian liberals and left are, the vast majority of the Egyptian people are imbued with the spirit of the civil state, which would hamper any attempts to drag Egypt toward a theocracy.

In the final analysis, the Turkish experience of political transformation and economic development has many positive points that we can learn from and take as inspiration without trying to imitate the details. Perhaps the grand strategies adopted by the Justice and Development Party to stimulate the Turkish economy offer a useful guide. Consider, in particular, the measures it has taken to uproot corruption in national and local government, to clarify the laws pertaining to economic activity and to expedite the settlement of commercial disputes, to attract foreign investment, and to compel local manufacturers to comply with quality standards and consumer rights. Of course, such measures are not a purely Turkish phenomenon: they are now very much a part of a global trend.

Ultimately, however, Egypt has its own long heritage of a liberal secularism that is at peace with religion. This legacy should enable Egypt to develop a unique, homegrown model for the application of democracy and the rule of law, even if the Muslim Brotherhood comes to share in power via the ballot box.

The writer is a senior advisor in AlAhram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies and an expert in Turkey
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Saturday, September 24, 2011

‘Sufi Aman Mela’
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By Staff reporter, *PNCA brings Sufi’s message of tolerance, brotherhood* - Daily Times - Lahore, Pakistan; Sunday, September 18, 2011

Islamabad: Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA) organized one-day ‘Sufi Aman Mela’ (Sufi Peace Festival) with the aim to promote tolerance, brotherhood and interfaith harmony in the country, in which the performers -including Meena Gul, Sonia Azeem, Saien Mushtaq, Saira Tahir, Shaukat Manzoor, and Shabnam Majeed- put up brilliant show rendering Sufi poetry of various Sufi Saints in diverse languages.

The National Performing Arts Group (NPAG) students also with the scintillating performance of ‘Sufi Dance’ in various costumes with the background music spellbound the audience.

They performed on ‘Cheti Bori Wi Tabeeba’, ‘Aaj Rang Hai’, ‘Gharoli’, ‘Tery Rang Rang’, and ‘Dhamal’.

The first to appear on stage was Meena Gul, a renowned artist from KPK who sang ‘Maien Ni Mein Kinnu Aakhan, Dard Wichoray Da Haal Ni’, with her perfect Punjabi accent. The spectators seen whispering commenting though Gul is from KPK but her Punjabi accent is quite brilliant.

The other artists including Saira Tahir who has acquired her master degree in Music from Punjab University, as well as Sonia Azeem, Shaukat Manzoor, Saien Mushtaq, also song harmoniously the poetry of Sufis from Subcontinent to spread peace, love and tolerance.

In between, Saien Mushtaq, who has roamed across the world and his booming enchantment of ‘King Wajda, Tara Wajda’ and delight of Shaukat Manzur, a local artist from Potohar region. The audience had a chance to listen and appreciate a wide range of music artists from this region.

The spectators however, got annoyed that there was no Qawwali music in the Sufi night. They also were surprised over the selection of Sufi songs.

“We turned up here to listen our favourite kalam from Iqbal ‘La Phir Ik Baar Wohi Bada-o-Jaam ay Saqi, Haath A jay Mujhay tera Makam Ay Saqi’, sung by Shabnam Majeed but she also couldn’t please us,” said Oheed Ahmed a young Sufi poetry/ music lover.

The performers of NPAG also provided the mood for the ‘Punjabi Dhamal’ dance, which insists the spectators gone whirling similarly seen to the Sufis shrines with offering beating their own drums.

Shabnam Majeed from Lahore concluded the night with ‘Dama Dam Mastt Qalandar’.

The Sufi Night was an extension of Sufi music project, which PNCA started from Multan in 2010, taking it forward to Hyderabad, Karachi, and then returning to federal capital.

This year’s presentation was the continuation of the same project with the core theme on seeking harmony within the land, which we find disturbed in the horrendous calamity of natural disaster in Sindh and killings of innocent people in Dir, Amber Shah, an official of PNCA said.
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Friday, September 23, 2011

On the Right Track
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By Ali Huseyin Bakir, *The Current Polarization in Egypt* - The Journal of Turkish Weekly - Ankara, Turkey; Friday, September 16, 2011

Egypt is witnessing an internal disturbance within the background of attempting to find the best road through which to build a democratic regime and develop a constitution for the country. The conflicting views and perspectives lead the various components of the Egyptian revolution to divide deeply, and we started to see skirmishes and polarization between them.

Although the revolutionary forces belong to different trends, they showed a high degree of cohesion and tended to work together at first as they had one common goal—toppling the regime. After managing to achieve that goal, the growing differences between them are snowballing into an avalanche that might push Egypt into a cycle of instability, and thus toward an uncertain future.

It is understandable that such temporary chaos comes after 40 years of suppression and dictatorships, but this situation shouldn't dominate the current and future scene.

Unfortunately, the gap between Islamists and secularists is becoming wider and deeper. The polarization is no longer secret to any one, and the relation between them changed from cooperation to struggle. The competition for the parliamentary elections and the relatively short time available to prepare for these elections may be another factor fueling the struggle between these forces.

Moreover, some of the foreign powers are trying to take advantage of this polarization and play on it. Some U.S. think tanks for instance called openly for the support of secular groups against Islamists in Egypt.

Both Islamists and secularists bear responsibility for what is happening right now. Secular groups refuse to allow any other group to impose its ideas on them, but at the same time, they want to impose what they believe in on the majority. They are provoking the Islamists, discriminating against them, attacking them intentionally, and portraying them as a big unified monster in order to use the "fear" of them as a tool to rally all other groups to their side, knowing that this is very dangerous road to take.

Moreover, secularists are feeding the misconception that "Egypt is on the brink of theocracy," knowing that even the biggest and most effective Islamic groups in Egypt don't want such thing. The Iranian model inspires no one and has no popularity in the Arab world at all; the main discussions right now are about the civil state with Islamic, Arab, and Egyptian characteristics.

Islamists in Egypt are not one block, they are diverse, different, and mainly divided into three big groups (Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi, Sufi), and inside each of these groups are differences regarding many issues including the political process, religious ideas, and the general perspective toward Egypt.
There are good signs in that some groups showed responsibility and changed the tune and content of their speeches and became more moderate. Unfortunately, they are still heavily dependent on slogans rather than work, and they can be easily provoked by secularists which drive them to be more aggressive.

Islamists should act wisely, they should not show off their strength, and they must understand the critical situation and what it takes and needs to help the country recover and stand on its feet again. They should understand the fears of minorities, protect their rights, and try to make concessions, otherwise, Egypt will witness no stability and things will be out of control.

All players on the political stage in the country should be more responsible about the current situation, work slowly but steadily to reach goals, and keep in mind that it is a long journey. If they think that they can achieve their ultimate goals within a short time, they will achieve nothing and they will fail. They should seek common ground and let the democratic process take its place smoothly, of course after putting it on the right track.

[Picture: Egypt, Orthographic Projection. Photo: Wiki.]
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Thursday, September 22, 2011

'Naqshbandi Greenacre Engagement'
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VIDEO installation examining Islamic faith and prayer has won this year's Blake Prize for religious art.

By AAP, *Islamic faith video wins 60th Blake Prize* - news.com.au - Australia; Thursday, September 15, 2011

A Video installation examining Islamic faith and prayer has won this year's Blake Prize for religious art.

Western Sydney artist Khaled Sabsabi won with a three-channel installation titled Naqshbandi Greenacre Engagement, which engages the viewer in an Islamic Sufi ritual.

"The audience is almost invited to be, if not part of it, then in the space of it," judge and executive director of the Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Dr Blair French said.

Mr Sabsabi was not present at the announcement as he is in Beirut as part of the 2010 Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship.

The event was first founded in 1951 to revitalise religious art in Christian churches.

[Picture: Installation view of Khaled Sabsabi. Photo: Artspace Visual Arts Centre.]
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Closer to God
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By Steve Meacham, *Artful ordinariness proves a winner* - The Sydney Morning Herald - Sydney, Australia; Friday, September 16, 2011

LITTLE could appear more exotic or unusual to most contemporary Australians than a group of Eastern mystics - who rarely allow outsiders into their inner circle - going through the centuries-old ritual chanting they believe will eventually bring them closer to God.

Except these Naqshbandi Sufi Muslims - subject of Khaled Sabsabi's winning multimedia entry in this year's $20,000 Blake Prize - couldn't appear more, well, ordinary.

The men and women are wearing everyday clothes. Their children run around in the background, oblivious to the spiritual ceremony, anxious to get on with their Saturday. And the prayer room itself is just a western Sydney scout hut.

Yet it was the very mundanity of Sabsabi's video, Naqshbandi Greenacre Engagement (2010), which made it the unanimous choice of the three judges in the 60th anniversary year of a prize originally set up to improve the standard of religious art in Christian churches.

''There's no paraphernalia, no religious robes, nothing to create a barrier between observer and the participants,'' said one of the judges, Dr Julian Droogan, a lecturer in religious history at Macquarie University. ''Nothing to give the religion any exoticism or mystique. It is an inviting piece of work that talks to the viewer of religion as normal daily practice, as social community, as being held together by family and kin.''

Sabsabi, 46, is in Istanbul, taking a break from creating new works in Lebanon as part of the Helen Lempriere travelling art scholarship he won last year.

''I haven't even thought about what I'll do with the Blake Prize money,'' Sabsabi said. The part-time artist, who works for Liverpool City Council as a community and cultural engagement officer, said he knew little about Sufism before undertaking his winning work.

He was commissioned originally by Lisa Havilah, then director of Campbelltown Arts Centre, for the Edge of Elsewhere project which formed part of the 2011 Sydney Festival.

Ms Havilah, now director of CarriageWorks, said: ''Khaled worked with the Sufi community for over 12 months, spending a lot of weekends with them to develop trust before he started filming.''

The multicultural, multi-faith nature of modern Australia was also apparent in the other winners announced yesterday. Carla Hananiah won the John Coburn emerging artist award for her painting Refuge while Abdul Abdullah received the MUA Human Justice Award for his digital self-portrait Them and Us.

''The Blake Prize is beginning to reflect that Sydney is right up there with London and New York as one of the most religiously diverse cities,'' Dr Droogan said. ''By far the greatest number of entries this year refer to personal spirituality than they do to any of the established world religions.''

The 60th Blake Prize Exhibition is at the National Art School Gallery, Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, until October 15.

Picture: Inviting piece … Khaled Sabsabi's award-winning video. Photo: Edwina Pickles.
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Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Love Opens the Gate
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By Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah, *Crescendo: A review of English translations* - The Kashmir Dispatch - Srinagar, J&K, India; Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Ours is largely a trash age and literature and especially poetry has been so massively trivialized that most of the poets today have become disgraceful wah wah party whom few read and still fewer appreciate.

However some poets declare their genius nonetheless and it is pleasure to read them.

Crescendo is a translation by Abid Ahmad, of the select poems of Sheikh Khalid Karrar, a promising Urdu poet from Jammu and it is good fortune of a poet if he gets an able translator.

I was moved by the translation that flows effortlessly and reads refreshingly original. A great transcreation of poems representing diverse themes with a good introduction by the translator make the book as much a creation of translator as the poet. Very few poets of Urdu find able translators or readers in English.

Crescendo is a mirror of our age with its doubts, anxieties, aspirations, disillusionments, and frustrations, passions and dreams.

It’s profound, subtle and intoxicating at occasions and never superficially thoughtful or emotional. It leaves you guessing at deeper and deeper interpretations.

Beautifully and often wittily well-crafted words and images weave a magic that transports one to a different world for a time being. The poet has something to say and the translator has amply gifted imagination to help him say it with both force and poetic beauty.

The poet remains himself, densely allusive and elusive. At times he appears mystical but agnosticism keeps him haunting. He finds no answers to life’s innocent questions.

One recalls that beautiful verse ”Zindagi tere masum sawalun se pareshan hu mein.” And one may remark, has anyone found these answers?

My reading of scriptures, mystics and the most brilliant minds of history who are universally respected as philosophers has convinced me that great religions, philosophies and poetry and mysticism have not answered the troubling questions regarding fate, suffering, mystery, glory, quest for transcendence and meaning and madness of dreams we weave and passions that move us, the passions of life.

They have, however, dissolved these questions, and asked for a new orientation to life, a transformation of our attitude to it.

Nirvana is samsara when looked from the eyes of a child – trusting, grateful, playful, artistic and non-egoistically. Umer Khayam has expressed the position of mysticism and great poetry or tragic art in his Rubaiyyat. So has Hafiz when he says ‘Who has solved the riddle of life?’ At a purely rational plane, life offers us wide balls that you can’t maneuver.

Yes, love opens the gate but then you are no longer the old self – doubting, questioning, anxiously seeking answers.

Unconditional love, soul ravishing vision of beauty, consent to be nothing in the experience of fana dissolve that old self-centric rationality-bound creature. The poets appears to be close to achieving this breakthrough but it seems they are yet to travel some more distance and complete the rendezvous with Purgatory.

Much of Crescendo seems to be a voice managing to fight the dark night of the soul with faith that is often too deep for exotericism to grasp and dignity that is denied to even great humanists. One wonders how much the poet has assimilated of life’s woe and sorrow but still managed to be a Man – defiant, undaunting.

Perhaps the translator has found echo of his own complex inner journey through the Purgatory of despair that modern education brings to religiously sensitive heart and mind and this heroic resolve in the poet to fight with existential questions has made him to undertake this translation.

Crescendo is about life with its variegated hues.

Life is not subject to a consistent coherent interpretation. Great poetry embraces life’s transcendence of dogmatic positions that rationalists and fundamentalists impose on it.

Crescendo is existentialist in its approach – it seeks to come to terms with the void – captured brilliantly in the poem “Void” – that seems to walk with us everywhere. “Plaintalk” is a plain talk on man’s inability to find God’s phone number to clarify the mess that life often seems to be in.

It expresses absurdity of alienated labour to which man is subject in an apparently alien world.

“I struggle hard in day
to make my ends meet
once I return exhausted
I collect each drop of the patches of light
in the dark light

I see dreams
that hold no meaning
in life
I spurn my being
with cigarette sore and ill-logic.”


It asks God to call from his own side when he chooses to come to earth implying that He is absent from the scene now. This echoes “absent God thesis” favoured by many existentialist writers and mystics like Simone Weil and philosophers like Wittgenstein.

Many modern theologians and Sufis have maintained that God is “an unattainable quest” as Whitehead put it. Muslim theology denies possibility of vision of God in all its nakedness and glory in this world.

All these points imply that man is condemned to deny himself and his dreams in the face of “deaf” universe. However this doesn’t mean God is not but God is not in the world.

The best prayer and the only one that we really need, from a mystical viewpoint, is to say ‘Thank you God.’ Prayer is not petition.

The book is about Kashmir as well or one could interpret it like that.

“Life lying in an isolation ward” speaks of day to day experiences for many victims of current trouble. In a brilliant stroke of wit the poet says that our bodies are used as laboratories. Isolation ward could mean prison to which those are taken who need special treatment.

To quote the poet

“He injected poison in my veins
tore my fibres
fragmented my body into pieces
let loose predators on me

each day a fresh torture
he trampled my living body
dragged it on roads
now he has thrown me in isolation ward.”


“Curfew, I and he” expresses a novel thought about now a familiar experience. The poem is a powerful satire on current phase of Kashmir history.

“My wailing Wall” is a statement of desecrating war that respects no holy days and is imposed on us. ”Noah’s Ark” is a critique of messianic thinking that has been the bane of Muslims. On the ravages of time is a brilliant short poem “Time” echoing the theme of the Quranic chapter titled “Wal Asr” though the poet has not made any exception of the chosen ones who are not blinded by the raging torment of desire.

The poet however keeps his faith in life’s forward movement by employing the symbol of water in the poem “Water”. The poet is a master of monologue and brilliantly weaves the tapestry of images on such otherwise hazy subjects as meaning in “Meaning.”

The book is an impressive use of various linguistic devices and does achieve the major aim of defamiliarization partly by deft use of images.

Mysticism echoes in many poems. “Itinerary” reminds us of traditional Sufi poets in theme and dares to state its conclusion much more boldly than we usually find in Sufis.

“I have become a god
unto myself.”


However he is still in search of the elusive self that gives us intimations of solid grounding in the eternal rock of joy and light.

He is yet to arrive, if we use mystical terms. He finds no anchor, no balm anywhere and betrays his mystical intuitions that redeem him at other moments.

Although aware of the difference between loneliness and being authentically alone like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Mansur he is not on the other side of the shore. Vacillating faith and agonizing doubt is evident in many poems including the one titled “Where am I.”

The poet appears to be neither traditional nor modern but hovering in a half way house of hazy belief and suspected doubt.

“Winter” is one of the most beautiful poems celebrating ordinary happenings, not unlike Zen mystics, whose only prayer ritual consists of drinking qehwa in silence.

The poet in “December” ingeniously compares life’s unfulfilled dreams and ambitions to

“thousands of shoulders, graceless
dead bodies”

on which he sees himself sitting.

As the translator of poems has observed: “The poet doesn’t accept dictation from the universe”. Like Ghalib he is not going to accept the terms that the world of space and time impose on us. He is not a slave of any gazelle eyed beauty.

“Heart is restless
if not you, some other wish would be there
Not that you are the source of my life
yes, if not you, there would be some other support.”


The poet is quite modern in his sensibility and beliefs but what prevents him from being a dry as dust secular modernist (a lost, self doubting, pessimistic mass of protoplasm) is his mystical faith in himself and loftiness of his station.

Although quite conscious that ours is an age of demythologization when medieval enchanted landscape of fairies and supernatural tales is gone forever, as in the poem “Jinnie” he knows how to enjoy newer consolations, how to see the sacred undercover of secular or material miracles like computers.

One is reminded of Camus of The Myth of Sisyphus in such poems as “Wilderness,” “Growth” and “Void”.

He finds wilderness and void

“under the façade of splendorous dresses
dancing under beautiful fabrics
in long queues
crowded streets of city

work places
highways
paths and restaurants
rallies and processions
houses of representation”


As in the last line he appears to be a postmodernist. In fact he is a postmodernist, existentialist, mystic all rolled into one. In “Computer and I” he looks at the problem of time (as memory) and on the old question of to be or not to be.

The poet explores the possibility of formatting himself – what an image to use! – but concludes that it is not possible as

“He has kept the password of the set up with himself”.

The poem “No one is here” is a serious musing on the drama of being and nothingness and has Beckettian overtones. The poet travels, like Ghalib, with many idealogues for some time but keeps his distance and has not found a master. He reserves commitment to any totalizing narrative or ideology.

The supreme beauty of the book is in its language. And for this the translator must be congratulated. Language is such that you don’t suspect you are reading a translation. Profound thoughts require deep meditation on the part of the translator and he is equal to the task.

We may get the idea of use of language appropriate to the ideas and emotions expressed by looking at such extracts as

”Everything is same
frozen
useless
pensive
unbridled
lost”


“In this torment of seasons
all eyes
dry
parched
coverless
leafless”


“Nowhere without
Nothing nowhere
Nowhere is out there”


“I am sitting on
thousands of shroudless, graceless
dead bodies”


The texts’freeflow, again a difficult job the translaltor has so well executed could be found by considering any poem. To illustrate I quote only two excerpts:

“Anyone coming there?
No one is there
Is anyone alive?
in walls of fractured moments
No one is there…
A strange drama of being and nothingness”


“With destination nowhere in sight
ruins were calling us
from all sides
with their abandoned selves”


And lastly to quote an entire poem

“Nowhere is my balm.
Awestruck am I
All shades vision has absorbed
while the rest have faded off
dark is still there
red is alive
dark is the night
red is the blood
nowhere is my balm
baffled am I.”


I conclude with a note of gratitude to the poet as well as to the translator for discovering the poet, making an exquisite selection of poems to be translated and equally exquisite and brilliant translation.

[Picture from Sheikh Khalid Karrar's Blog.]
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Tuesday, September 20, 2011

The Time Has Come
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By Dr. Akmal Hussain, *Norms, values and democracy* - The Express tribune - Pakistan; Monday, Septembe 12 2011

Essential to the institutional structure of democracy is democratic consciousness.

In the process of consolidating democracy in Pakistan, the nurturing of this consciousness and the norms and values signified by it are vital to the functioning of the formal rules of the constitution.

Let us briefly examine the challenge of rediscovering from the shared tradition of the diverse cultures of Pakistan, the consciousness that can sustain our journey of democracy.

Douglass C North, the Nobel Prize winner, who pioneered the New Institutional Economics, defines an institution as a set of formal rules and informal norms, which together with their enforcement mechanisms structure human interaction. Research on the subject over the last two decades, shows that the formal rules of a democratic institutional structure can be actualised in practice only when they are underpinned by norms and values conducive to its functioning.

Historically, until 2007, successive military regimes in Pakistan were able to blatantly violate the constitution because the underlying democratic norms had not sufficiently permeated popular consciousness to constitute a credible threat to military dictatorship. In this sense, the citizens’ movement led by the lawyers in 2007, aimed at restoring the judiciary and constitutional rule, was a watershed moment in Pakistan’s history.

Subsequently Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Sahiba, sacrificed her life to express the will of the people for democracy. Thus, a democratic consciousness was manifested to give meaning and strength to the formal rules of the constitution.

The urge for an equitable and representative polity goes back to ancient times, in the area which today constitutes Pakistan.

According to the Indian historian Romila Thapar, the earliest republics were formed around 600 BC in northern Punjab and foothills of the Himalayas, possibly by independent minded elements of society who rebelled against the hierarchic orthodoxy of the monarchies, which had been established in the plains.

Much later, the widespread peasant revolt in Punjab in the 18th century, against the authoritarianism of Mughal rule, and celebrated in folk poetry by Sufi poets such as Najam Hussain Syed, further irrigated the perennial aspiration of equity and freedom in popular consciousness.

The Sufi tradition, which represents the unity amidst the diverse folk cultures of each of the four provinces of Pakistan, propounds freedom and the essential equality of all human beings in so far, as each has a bond with God.

This bond is made palpable in a state of adoration of God and thereby makes possible for humans to tread the path of righteousness: the path of love, compassion and justice towards others. This wisdom finds resonance in the songs, dances and value system of our folk cultures whose images, in turn, are taken up and given spiritual depth in the Sufi poetry of this region.

Bulleh Shah suggests that the journey to God is through love: “Demolish the temple, demolish the mosque, demolish all that can be demolished, but do not injure the human heart, for that is the abode of God.”

Counterposed to the love and compassion of the Sufi tradition is the egotism and greed that underlies the current violence by armed groups allegedly sponsored by various elements in the political sphere and within the state apparatus.

Individuals shorn of their humanity and divorced from the traditional value system have descended to demonic depths. When the violence in Karachi was vividly described in a presentation to the federal cabinet on September 8, the sheer horror of it, reportedly, stunned the ministers. The Supreme Court too has called upon the government to quell this violence to establish the rule of law and save democracy.

Clearly the time has come to exercise state power without fear or favour to re-establish order.

Equally important in the years ahead is to rediscover the traditional norms and values that must now underpin Pakistan’s quest for democracy and a humane society.

The writer is distinguished professor of economics at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan
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Monday, September 19, 2011

Les Maîtres Invisibles
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By Staff Writer, *Banners win Jameel prize at V&A* - BBC News - London, UK; Monday, September 12, 2011

Algerian-born Rachid Koraichi has won the prestigious Jameel Prize, the V&A museum in London has announced.

Established in 2009, the £25,000 prize honours international art and design inspired by Islamic tradition.

Ten artists and designers were shortlisted for the award, which is presented every two years, from almost 200 nominations from across the globe.

Koraichi's winning work consisted of embroidered banners inscribed with Arabic symbols and ciphers.

Entitled Les Maîtres Invisibles (The Invisible Masters), the series is a tribute to 14 mystic personalities from the Islamic world.

The artist, who now lives in Tunisia and France, was born into a Sufi family - Sufism being a mystical aspect of Islam.

His work often explores Africa's complex contribution to Islamic culture and philosophy.

'Hold their own'

"Rachid's work stood out because his banners have a universal appeal," said Martin Roth, chairman of the judging panel, and director of the V&A.

"They work in the white space of a contemporary art gallery, but they also hold their own in historical settings - from Parisian palaces to simple Sufi shrines."

Nominated works for the Jameel Prize ranged from traditional Iranian felt garments, to complex architectural models, placed upon densely-patterned Persian rugs.

All of the pieces incorporated an element of traditional Islamic craft and design.

An exhibition has been running at the V&A since 21 July and will tour Europe and the US later in the year.

Afruz Amighi, who won the inaugural Jameel prize in 2009, was among the judges this year.

Picture: The series consists of six cloth banners embroidered with symbols and text. Photo: BBC / Victoria & Albert Museum.
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Real Connections
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By Christopher Lord, *Rachid Koraichi: a mystical winner of the Jameel Prize* - The National - Abu Dhabi, UAE; Wednesday, September 14, 2011

As only the second recipient of the biennial Jameel Prize at London's Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), the Algerian artist Rachid Koraichi took away an award of £25,000 (Dh146,000) and acknowledgement of his Islamic craft from one of the world's leading cultural institutions on Monday evening.

The winning work is a collection of six tall banners that incorporate mystic symbols and plaits of calligraphy from Koraichi's hand. Each is dedicated to a Sufi master, the poet Rumi, for instance, or the 13th-century philosopher Ibn Arabi, and feature stick-figure whirling dervishes and imagery drawn from a well of esoteric sources.

Koraichi, who is in his 60s was selected from a shortlist of 10 artists that spans several generations. He was up against the likes of Monir Farmanfarmaian, a leading figure in Iranian modernism who has created beguiling mirror mosaics for the past 50 years. There was also much younger talent - Noor Ali Chagani, for instance, a trained Pakistani miniature painter who has applied his style to sculpting with tiny terracotta bricks.

But Koraichi's work fits perfectly into the Jameel Prize remit. His pieces draw on handmade traditions in the Islamic world. Speaking to The National just after receiving his award, Koraichi reflected on this inspiration, and found common ground with the other artists on the shortlist.

"The level of quality is stunning and I'm amazed to be with this group of people. Many of them merited this prize," he said. "I think that there are real connections going on between the minds of the artists here. Everyone is thinking about how we can join our present with our traditions."

Koraichi pointed to the shortlisted work of Bita Ghezelayagh, a series of felt shepherd's robes ornamented with iconography from the 1979 revolution in Iran. "I've had similar ideas myself, because I've wanted to talk about the importance of robes and costume in a living culture. I think that the big question shared by both the Islamic world and the West is of how you join modernity with your past."

What Koraichi tries to achieve in his work could be described as "living culture". There's almost a cumulative sense about these banners - the artist's extensive research into symbols, ritual and song become shards of inspiration that cling, magnet-like, to the visual composition.

There's an ordering, but also some sense of free-association: the meaning of these nuanced symbols is never explained directly, yet they have some unnameable power that speaks to our intuition.

Our understanding of them comes in glimpses.

As a cave painting might communicate something in its most stripped-down form, so do these works tap into a shared symbolic understanding that is universal.

In that way, this works like reading the Sufi saints that Koraichi venerates. "We can talk about Ibn Arabi and Rumi, but I look at recent poets like Mahmoud Darwish and the work of John Berger. These are contemporary versions of the same overall intensity."

Though we think we have modernised, nothing has really changed, Koraichi continued. "We breathe the same air, we look for the same fruitful relationships with people. These old poets speak to us today in exactly the same way as they did."

But a "living culture", Koraichi suggested, is best expressed with the hands. The imagery and composition on these six huge banners is so tight, yet the presence of the artist's hand gives them warmth.

"When we talk about an Islamic craft tradition, we're not talking about the art of the 19th century that took place in an artist's studio and on canvas. Here we're talking about things that come out of everyday life," Koraichi said.

"It's not a world in which the artist lives apart."

The culture of the artisan - still present, but steadily disappearing in the streets of Koraichi's native Algeria and surrounding Maghreb countries - offers an insight into how art can be drawn directly from a day-to-day world, yet heightened by the dedication of craft.

"If you look at the foundations of western art," Koraichi continued, "it was based on a whole tradition of craft that went into churches; the goblets made by metalworkers and the marbling. It's exactly the same with mosques, in that they were built by those who could work with stone and weaving. These are sources that we can clearly see but the question we have is how to take those disappearing traditions and make them present again in the living moment."

Koraichi's works are offerings, first and foremost. To the Sufi saints they venerate, they offer the hand of an artist who has lived a life reading and reflecting on their lives. To the craftsmen that he adores - the streetside painters, metalworkers and, indeed, banner-makers of the past - he has carved out an oeuvre of offerings so that they not be forgotten.

As Koraichi headed off to celebrate, he uttered a simple, telling koan: "All that is not offered, is lost."
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Sunday, September 18, 2011

The Constructed Dichotomy
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By Isabelle Werenfels, *Promoting The “Good Islam”: The Regime And Sufi-Brotherhoods In Algeria – Analysis* - Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Berlin, Germany / IPRIS Portuguese Institute of International Relations and Security / Eurasia Review; Europe; Mon. September 12, 2011

In the run up to the presidential elections in 2004 and 2009, Algerian newspapers repeatedly ran headlines such as “the President courts the Sufi-brotherhoods”.

A few decades ago, this would have been inconceivable. Up to the late 1980s, the post-colonial elites sought to economically marginalize, politically repress and socially stigmatize the brotherhoods.

In stark contrast, regime elites from 1990 onwards engaged in their top-down promotion. both approaches, repression and revival of the brotherhoods, have been a function of power-ensuring strategies of the authoritarian regime.

The reasons for marginalization of the brotherhoods up to the late 1980s and early 1990s were manifold. They were seen as a threat to the state’s claim to speak for Islam, and as a potentially strong organizing social force outside the framework of the parti unique and its satellites.

Indeed, in colonial and pre-colonial times the brotherhoods had not only been spiritual and cultural movements, but political, social, economic and, at times, military key players on the local and regional levels.

The modernizers within the post-colonial elite viewed the brotherhoods as backward and out-dated, while the conservative elite and the scholars of the ‘ulama‘ considered them as “charlatans” and “heretics”.

The fact that a number of sheikhs of zaouias (religious lodges, some of which belonged to large transnational brotherhoods while some others worshipped “independent” local saints) had collaborated with the French colonial power served to discredit the brotherhoods in toto and to justify the state’s repressive policies toward them.

These policies ranged from nationalization of territories, the closing of religious and worldly schools run by the zaouias, prevention of pilgrimages to intimidation of members and the imprisonment of sheikhs.

From repression to instrumentalization

The turnaround in regime policies toward the brotherhoods has been gradual, but radical. It began with a certain easing of pressure in the 1980s under President Chadli Bendjedid, whose wife belonged to a zaouia.

The brotherhoods’ full rehabilitation began a decade later when the government in 1991 organized a national seminar on the zaouias (used as a synonym for brotherhoods in colloquial Algerian) which was attended by several hundred sheikhs. This seminar took place against the backdrop of the FIS’ (Front Islamique du Salut) growing popularity and reach for power.

It aimed at rehabilitating and promoting the brotherhoods with the goal of creating a social and spiritual counter-force to the “imported” political Islam of the FIS.

Now the brotherhoods were no longer portrayed as backward, but framed as the embodiment of the “tolerant, peaceful, apolitical, traditional real Algerian Islam”. However, the real boost for the brotherhoods came with the arrival to the presidency in 1999 of Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who is said to have a personal affinity with them.

Ever since, the state has accelerated renovation and restitution of their properties, and granted several zaouias licenses for the (re-)opening of educational institutions.

Figures providing an overview of direct state subsidies are difficult to obtain – sheikhs of large zaouias do claim however that these are minimal. But the state has been sponsoring numerous conferences and events involving Sufi brotherhoods (among them a huge international gathering of the Tidjaniya in 2007 as well as numerous scholarly colloquies on the brotherhoods).

Also, state television, radio and the print media, both private and governmental, have increasingly featured zaouias.

The official portrayal is remarkably simplistic and essentialist: the zaouias are portrayed as “sanctuaries of peace”, allegedly “unchanged for centuries”, “remote from worldly affairs” and “profoundly apolitical”. however, both the state’s instrumentalization of the zaouias as well as the zaouias’ proper interests and activities stand in stark contrast to such ascriptions.

Simplistic framing, complex realities

In the era of Bouteflika, zaouïas have not only been objects of political maneuvering and targets for co-optation, but have actively engaged in the do-ut-des rituals of election campaigns.

With the overall number of their adherents estimated to be roughly at 1.5 million, they constitute an important pool for voter mobilization. In 2004 and 2009 most presidential candidates, including Islamists, visited important zaouias and courted their sheikhs.

These in turn – and in contradiction to claims of their being apolitical – endorsed the president or (in rare cases) voiced opposition to him. In some cases, public endorsements appeared to be directly linked to material benefits, again testifying to the zaouias’ pursuit of “worldly” (economic) interests.

The existence of two competing umbrella organizations of zaouias may be a result of both the uneven distribution of funds to some but not all zaouias and the power struggles within Algeria’s ruling elite.

The extent to which the brotherhoods are actually fulfilling regime expectations and becoming a spiritual and social alternative to political Islam is difficult to assess in the absence of broad sociological data on their followers.

Rare articles – academic and journalistic – on the social embeddedness of zaouias in the 2000s indicate that they are not just receiving support from above but also experiencing a revival from below. Yet, the causal link between the two is by no means evident: The growing social demand for “traditional” spirituality may just as well be a reaction to the violence and insecurity of the 1990s.

However, there is evidence that the constructed dichotomy between mystical spiritual movements on the one hand and political Islam on the other hand is not mirrored on the ground. For instance, the Alawiya Brotherhood prides itself of having followers belonging to Islamist parties, and some members of Islamist parties are known to have close ties to a zaouia.

Whether the brotherhoods are actually appealing to those in danger of being radicalized and attracted to jihadi milieus, namely young men with a lack of perspectives, remains an open question – there are indications that the zaouias, at least in urban contexts, are particularly attractive to middle class females.

Yet, even if the zaouias are not fulfilling (all) the functions ascribed to them top-down they serve the regime.

Being a polymorphous and internally fragmented phenomenon that is partly co-opted and featuring a broad spectrum of agendas, the zaouias present a fertile ground for the social and political fragmentation strategies that have contributed to the long-lividness of Algeria’s liberalized autocracy.
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Saturday, September 17, 2011

Our People
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By Kathy Lally, *Dagestan: another powder keg in Caucasus* - The Seattle Times /The Washington Post - USA - Saturday, September 10, 2011

Until recently, it was the insurgency in neighboring Chechnya that had posed the biggest challenge to Russian leaders. But now, it is the traditionally independent and Muslim Dagestanis whose resentments are turning violent.

Makhachkala: The latest episode in Moscow's struggle with rebellious Muslims is unfolding here in Dagestan, a forbidding North Caucasian realm where peaks as high as 13,000 feet descend sharply to running rivers.

Suicide bombers have emerged. Each week, an average of three policemen are killed and numerous civilians become casualties. Tanks and helicopters, weapons blazing, pursue guerrillas in the woods.

Until recently, it was the insurgency in neighboring Chechnya that had posed the biggest challenge to Russian leaders. But now, it is the traditionally independent and Muslim Dagestanis whose resentments are turning violent, finding expression in a conservative form of Islam taking root in the beautiful severity of the mountain landscape.

Authorities blame Muslim extremists for the unrest. Conservative Muslims blame government repression. The fighting sometimes appears dangerously close to civil war, with imams attacked and killed, liquor stores blown up, and angry young men taking up arms and going into hiding — which in the North Caucasus is called going to the forest.

"They terrorized the people," a 30-year-old religious leader known as Abu Umar said of regional authorities. "And now, the people terrorize them."

When the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of 1991, Russia emerged independent and its new president, Boris Yeltsin, promised democracy and prosperity in a multiethnic nation. Twenty years into statehood, a minority has accumulated great wealth while the average citizen has been disappointed by lack of opportunity and an increasingly authoritarian government run on corruption and disregard for law. Ethnic tension has grown.

Few protest. Chechnya has been subdued. But Dagestan roils with religious disputes and anger at Moscow, mixed almost indistinguishably with vicious commercial and political struggles.

"Russia will never make Dagestan prosperous," Abu Umar said. "We are a third-class people for them. They want us humiliated, and we feel it."

On a late-summer afternoon, only the mosquitoes look bloodthirsty in a muddy field where Abu Umar politely offers insect repellant and a tour of a self-sufficient Islamic community about 70 miles northwest of Makhachkala, the Dagestani capital. He is a Salafi, what Russians call a Wahhabi and consider synonymous with extremism.

The walls are already up on the three-story madrassa, or religious school, where Salafis say they intend to provide social services, sports, education and opportunities untainted by corruption. As a bulldozer rumbled, Abu Umar pointed out the spot reserved for an orphanage to care for children he says the government neglects.

He imagines citizens obeying the law of Allah, making police and other accoutrements of the state unneeded, allowing Muslims to live in peace and prosperity. The government considers such talk a dangerous cover for subversion and terrorism. Abu Umar says the authorities have lost their moral bearings and are wrong about the Salafis.

"We are building," he said, "not destroying."

Soviet repression

Islam arrived here in the late Middle Ages, becoming a moderate Sufism infused with local customs. But religion was mostly forced underground during the officially atheistic years of the Soviet Union. In Dagestan, believers buried their Korans in the forest and suffered silently as their mosques were destroyed.

When religion began to reemerge in Russia as the Soviet Union crumbled in the late 1980s, Salafism — a puritanical form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia — began to drift here through Afghanistan. The disillusionment and chaos of the 1990s, as Russia struggled to replace communism with democracy, provided fertile ground for it to take hold.

Salafis believe a Muslim has a direct relationship with God and should study the words of the prophet Mohammed. Sufis in Dagestan follow the instruction of their sheiks, who stand between them and God and have anywhere from 500 to 20,000 deeply loyal followers.

Salafis dislike the Sufi alliance with the government. Sufis run the government-sanctioned Spiritual Board of Muslims, to which the official clergy belong. They also support a secular state. Salafis do not.

"Whether he's Sufi or Salafi," Abu Umar said, "if a man is not dreaming about sharia, he's not a Muslim."

Assaults on rise

Violent and unsolved deaths have become a routine part of life here. At a Makhachkala sports center, a tiny grandmother named Nisakhan Magomedova who presides over the front desk takes a rat-a-tat-tat pose as she describes how the director of the judo program was gunned down recently, just after getting a bigger job at another club, targeted perhaps by a professional rival.

Residents can point out the spot at the beach where a bomb went off last year, a protest against women in bathing suits that cost one woman her leg.

Police have killed 100 people they identified as rebels since the beginning of the year, Interior Ministry officials said in June, and human-rights activists accuse police of killing first and then finding a crime to assign to the body.

Local journalists estimate that 1,000 to 1,500 armed men are in the forest at any one time, with perhaps 5,000 others prepared to join them. The forest shelters organized terrorism as well — the U.S. government has offered a $5 million reward for information leading to Doku Umarov, a Chechen terrorist with al-Qaeda connections suspected of hiding in Dagestan who has been accused of terrorist attacks on Moscow.

Police targeted

In Dagestan, all policemen are targets, because they represent government authority and because they are accused of treating the population brutally.

"Property is being divided" as it was in the U.S. era of the robber baron, said Abrek Aliev, the head of protocol for the city of Makhachkala.

Greeting visitors with sweet fresh apricots, dark red cherries and juicy local strawberries, he opens a bottle of cognac in a City Hall anteroom and offers a toast to the mayor's health.

Said Amirov, mayor of Makhachkala since 1998, has survived 15 assassination attempts, one of which severed his spine and left him unable to walk.

"There are people who try to live outside the law," the mayor said, "and I don't let them do what they want."

Amirov heads Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia party in Makhachkala. He said he is busy building the housing and infrastructure required for a city of 710,000 whose population is expected to grow to a million.

The birthrate in Dagestan is much higher than in the rest of Russia, and people are moving to the city looking for work.

"We want a secular state here, as part of the Russian Federation," he said. "If those in the forest stop fighting and drop their guns, they can rejoin the peaceful population. They are our people, too."
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Friday, September 16, 2011

Sufi-style Spirituality
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By Lamine Chikhi, *INTERVIEW - Algerian wants reformist Sufi role in Arab Spring* Reuters Africa - Algiers, Algeria; Friday, September 9, 2011

* Algerian Sufi master urges Sufis to speak up for freedom

* Arab governments risk being swept away if they ignore youth

* Official Islam in North Africa has failed, Bentounes says


Mostaganem: Sufi Muslims across North Africa must stand up for dignity and freedom so their mystical form of Islam can be heard in the lively debates over democracy in the Arab world, a leading Algerian Sufi master says.

The official Islam promoted by dictators who were swept away by Arab Spring revolts has failed and Muslims now need Sufi-style spirituality to promote brotherhood and unity, said Sheikh Khaled Bentounes, head of the Al' Alawiya Sufi order.

Arab leaders who do not guarantee universal values such as dignity and freedom risked being swept from office by a "tsunami" of youth protests, he told Reuters at his order's lodge in this coastal city 300 km (187 miles) west of Algiers.

"We need to open the doors of debate in our countries," said Bentounes, 62, whose order claims tens of thousands of followers in North Africa and Europe. "Let the Salafi, the Muslim Brother, the secularist, the agnostic and the Sufi speak freely and suggest solutions."

"Spirituality commits us to take the path of the good, of unity and brotherhood," he added.

SUFI-SALAFI TENSION

Although well-represented in the traditional Islam of North Africa, Sufis -- whose teaching stresses mysticism and love of God -- have been less visible in the Arab Spring uprisings than the conservative Muslim Brothers or the strict orthodox Salafis.

Sufis in Egypt have occasionally come under attack by Salafis, who consider them heretics for venerating saints and sometimes damage the shrines they maintain in their honour. Bentounes said Sufis should stand up to counter extremism.

"There are 13 million Sufis in Egypt and it's time for them to show what they can do to help implement democracy," he said.

Dressed in a traditional white gandoura robe, the sheikh said the young people driving the Arab Spring protests "can no longer live in a dictatorship."

"The rulers in the Arab world have no choice now but to guarantee dignity and freedom for young people," he said. "If they don't, they will be swept away by a tsunami (of protest)."

Bentounes, who has written several books on Sufism, criticised the official Islam long promoted in North Africa.

"Like everything else, Islam has become a consumer item. The Friday sermons of the imams are consumer items. They've failed," he said. "Conservative Sufism has also failed.

"What we need now is a Sufism in phase with universal values such as dignity and freedom for all," he said.


INVEST IN YOUTH

Bentounes has angered Algerian Salafis with his latest book "Sufism, A Common Inheritance" because its cover has a picture of the Prophet Mohammad. But the book is still on sale here.

The sheikh said Algeria, which has not been hit by the Arab Spring protests rocking neighbouring countries but did see unrest early this year over pay and working conditions, should invest all its money on its youth.

"What is the most important resource in a country, its oil, its gas, its army -- or its youth?" he asked.

Responding to the unrest, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, 74, has increased wages and offered free loans to millions of people in a strategy that is so far successful.

"The youth wants more space and hope. It is the duty of the government to meet these demands," Bentounes said. "Algeria cannot solve its problems on its own. It must accept the idea to create a bigger space to include all countries of the region."

Editing by Tom Heneghan
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Thursday, September 15, 2011

Sermons, Seminars and Qawalis
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By Staff Reporter, *Visitors complain about poor security* - The Express Tribune - Pakistan; Friday, September 9, 2011

Kasur: Devotees have complained about poor security arrangements on the first day of 254th annual urs celebrations of Sufi poet Baba Bulleh Shah.

They said though police officials were present at the shrine but no walk through gates or metal detectors had been installed to prevent possible terrorism attacks.

A large number of people thronged the shrine’s complex on the first day of the urs. Talking to The Express Tribune they complained that none of the entrances to the shrine had a walk through gate.

Police deployed at the shrine said metal detectors were found to be faulty. They, however, said they were keeping an eye on the surroundings and would take immediate action if any suspicious person or activity were observed.

Besides police, officials of Health and Civil Defence departments were also present at the shrine to deal with emergencies.

Earlier, the three-day ceremony was formally inaugurated by provincial minister for Auqaf and Religious Affairs, Haji Ehsanuddin Qureshi. He laid a ceremonial cloak over the poet’s grave.

Auqaf Department has allocated Rs265,000 for the urs. Free food (lunger) will be served to visitors to the shrine.

Sermons by scholars from different schools of thought, seminars and qawalis would be the main attractions of the urs ceremony.

Kasur district administration has announced a public holiday today (Thursday) so that people may attend the urs.

Provincial Minister for Auqaf andReligious Affairs Haji Ehsanuddin Qureshi Thursday inauguratedthe 254th annual Urs celebrations of Baba Bulleh Shahby lying traditional ‘chadar’ on his shrine in Kasur.
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Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Not in that Direction
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By Patrick Wall, *From fear of Islam to outreach: how 9/11 prompted interfaith efforts* - The Christian Science Monitor - Boston, MA, USA; Thursday, September 8, 2011

In the decade since 9/11, the percentage of US congregations that participate in interfaith worship has doubled, a study says, and more mosques are engaging in outreach and dialogue.

After the deadly attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the first person Rabbi Ted Falcon called was his friend, Jamal Rahman, a Sufi imam. On the following Sabbath, the rabbi invited the imam to his Seattle synagogue to speak to the congregation.

Soon after, the two spiritual leaders, along with Pastor Don Mackenzie, commenced a series of frank conversations about their beliefs, both shared and exclusive. The talks eventually inspired a radio show, a pair of books, and worldwide speaking tours.

The men’s willingness to ask and answer tough questions about faith in the wake of 9/11 had clearly struck a nerve with many Americans. In particular, many people wanted to talk about a religion they had barely considered before the attacks, but which now consumed their thoughts: Islam.

“One of the things that 9/11 showed was that, generally speaking, Americans had an abysmal ignorance of Islam,” says Rabbi Falcon, who founded his Bet Alef Meditative Synagogue in the 1990s.

In the decade since 9/11, despite some Americans’ fears of and hostility toward Islam, many individuals and institutions have followed the path of the rabbi, the pastor, and the imam: They’ve reached out across faiths to increase their understanding and to address common concerns.

Over the past 10 years, the percentage of US congregations involved in interfaith worship has doubled – from 7 to 14 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of congregations performing interfaith community service nearly tripled – from 8 to almost 21 percent – according to a new survey by Hartford Seminary’s Institute for Religion Research in Connecticut. In doing so, these congregations have joined the colorful, decades-old American interfaith movement. Since 9/11, the movement has gained new momentum and, more than ever before, has drawn Muslims into its ranks.

As America marks the 10th anniversary of 9/11, several interfaith events are planned around the country, including, prominently, the 9/11 Unity Walk in Washington, D.C.

“To think about 9/11 without thinking about the interfaith movement would almost be a travesty,” says Maureen Fiedler, host of “Interfaith Voices,” a nationally syndicated radio program that was created in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Islam was so misunderstood and so vilified by those events,” says Ms. Fiedler, “that a real interfaith understanding has to be brought to bear on the issue.”

In the days and weeks after 9/11, when Muslim extremists killed nearly 3,000 civilians, some Americans came to view Islam itself as the enemy. Around the country, mosques were vandalized, people who appeared Muslim or Middle Eastern were harassed and, in Arizona, a Sikh man who was wearing a turban was mistaken for a Muslim and shot and killed.

In recent years, anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States has diminished, but not disappeared. A proposal to build a Muslim community center near the World Trade Center site provoked heated protests last year. This year, Congress held controversial hearings on Muslim radicalization within the US.

Curiosity about Islam

While America’s post-9/11 Islam fixation filled some people with dread, others were filled with curiosity.

“Many people realized, maybe for the first time, that, ‘Hey, there are mosques in our town,’ ” says Diana Eck, a comparative religion professor at Harvard University and director of the Pluralism Project, which documents America’s religious landscape.

As interest in American Muslims surged, many Muslim leaders went to great lengths to explain Islam to outsiders and to develop partnerships beyond the Muslim community – often, for the first time.

“Before 9/11, most mosques were fairly insular. Today, most mosques, if not all, have intensive programs of reaching out and having dialogues,” says Imam Rahman, who helped found the Interfaith Community Church in Seattle.

In the weeks immediately after Sept. 11, mosques and Islamic community centers around the country held open houses. Then, in 2008, a multinational group of 138 Muslim scholars, called Common Word, invited senior Christian leaders to Yale University to discuss commonalities among their faiths.

Real-world collaboration

Interfaith interaction can sometimes amount to little more than religious show-and-tell: you show me your strange rituals, and I’ll show you mine. But often, the theological icebreaking leads to real-world collaboration.

In Seattle, Falcon, Rahman and Pastor Mackenzie, who lecture and publish as the Interfaith Amigos, decided to turn their talk into action. They joined various interfaith service projects – including one where the men worked with the congregants of an evangelical megachurch to build a Habitat for Humanity home for a Muslim family.

In an area of Brooklyn, New York known as “Little Pakistan,” a local entrepreneur founded a nonprofit agency in early 2002 to serve low-income South Asians and Muslims, including many who were detained after 9/11.

Since then, the group has expanded its mission to serve non-Muslims and has worked with Jewish and Christian leaders on several initiatives, including a public health campaign, hate crime prevention, and youth leadership training. In August, the group honored rabbis and pastors at a series of public iftar dinners during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

Successful interfaith coalitions must focus on shared concerns, rather than theological differences, says Mohammad Razvi, founder of the Brooklyn nonprofit, known as the Council of Peoples Organization.

“It’s not a Kumbaya dialogue,” says Mr. Razvi. “We’re working on serious issues, concrete issues, [so] that we can actually have accomplishments.”

Mobilizing youth

In 2002, Eboo Patel, a Muslim then in his mid-20s, founded the Interfaith Youth Core with a Jewish friend. They hired one full-time staff member: an evangelical Christian. Today, the nonprofit employs 31 staffers and operates on a $4 million annual budget.

The group trains college-aged leaders – “interfaith fellows” – who then return to their campuses to organize interfaith events and community service projects. This year, the organization trained leaders on 97 campuses who enlisted around 10,000 participants of various faiths to tackle issues such as homelessness, hunger, and sustainable living.

“We’ve seen an outpouring of interest in our programs,” says Mr. Patel. “There’s a lot of people watching blatant bigotry and saying, ‘We cannot let our country go in that direction.’ ”

Patel and his staff helped the White House develop an initiative that it launched this year, called the “Interfaith and Community Service Challenge.” So far 278 colleges have promised to sponsor interfaith programming and community service projects next year.

9/11’s interfaith casualty list

People often treat interfaith as a tool – religious coalitions that are built to achieve some shared goal, such as education or social justice. But sometimes, interfaith can be an end in itself.

In New York City, the One Spirit Interfaith Seminary offers a two-year interfaith ordination program.

Among One Spirit’s graduates is Reverend Lisa Bellan-Boyer, an interfaith minister who lives in New Jersey and teaches college courses on religions of the East and West.

On the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, Ms. Bellan-Boyer stood near the Jersey City harbor and scanned the Manhattan skyline for the Twin Towers, only to find rising curls of coal-black smoke. When she turned and saw a young Muslim woman, her head fully covered, Bellan-Boyer had the sudden urge to scream at her.

Instead, she headed to the city, where she volunteered to serve as a Red Cross chaplain. As it turned out, the first person she counseled was a Muslim woman, whose daughter died in the World Trade Center.

“So I learned my lesson right then and there how much of a world disaster and how interfaith the casualty list really was,” she says.

Picture: A man walks past a memorial pool at ground zero in New York, Wednesday, Sept. 7. Photo: Seth Wenig/AP.
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