Taysir Batniji: Gaza to America – Home Away From Home

When Taysir Batniji left his home in Gaza City in 1993, he was only able to do so thanks to a laissez-passer issued by the Israeli authorities. Valid for one year, the travel document provided the then 25-year-old with the permission he needed to travel to the Italian city of Naples, where Batniji hoped to build on the studies he had already completed in the West Bank and to continue his education and progression as an artist.

The laissez-passer included all the details one might expect from a passport: a photograph and sections relating to the bearer’s name, sex, date and place of birth, the document’s date of issue and the issuing authority.

But when it came to the section entitled nationality, the laissez-passer described Batniji as neither Palestinian nor Israeli but simply as “undefined”.

Batniji eventually realised his dream of becoming an artist not in Naples but in Paris, where he has lived since 1996, the only member of his immediate family to have left the Gaza Strip.

In the intervening years, he has built a reputation as a nuanced chronicler of Gaza, where he returned to regularly and often until 2012, and of states of exile, displacement and what he describes as the cultural and geographical “between-ness” that now increasingly defines the lives of migrants the world over, Palestinian or otherwise.

Even though it is 25 years out-of-date, Batniji still retains his laissez-passer as a reminder of his journey to the West, which is just one of the many things he shares in common with his cousins Kamal, Khadra, Sobhi, Ahmed, Samir, and Akram who are the subjects of his latest exhibition, Gaza to America: Home Away From Home.

Gaza to America was produced in 2017 as part of Immersion, a French-American Photography Commission, a program initiated by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermes together with the New York-based Aperture Foundation.

In it, Batniji retraces the journeys made by his cousins who decided to leave Gaza and who now have extended families of their own in California and Florida.

Their stories are captured in 143 works that include photographs, video portraits and interviews, drawings, old family photographs and objects such as passports that investigate the intimate functioning of this familial diaspora and the practices that define their identities as cousins, Gazans, Palestinians and Arab expats but also, increasingly as Americans.

“I do not pretend to reveal the lives of my American cousins in their entirety, in all their complexities, nor to present an exhaustive statement on the Arab and Palestinian diaspora in the United States,” Batniji writes in his introduction to the book that accompanies Gaza to America: Home Away From Home.

“These works are instead my impressions, born of these encounters, varying in their intensity, according to the context, place, and degree of interaction with these members of my family.”

The title of the work comes from a conversation that Taysir Batniji had with his cousin, Khadra, who in response to the question “Do you feel at home in America?” answered: “My original home is Palestine. But this is a home away from home. Yes, like home.”

What follows is the result of two visits the Palestinian artist made to his cousins in California and Florida, the first of which lasted for three weeks and the second a-month-and-a-half, during which time he had to stay with family members, some of whom he had not seen since he was a child.

“What was strange in this experience was that tradition dictated that I had to stay with the family. There was no question that I would stay in a hotel or rent another house,” Batniji explains, speaking from Paris.

“I knew them, we share family ties, but at the same time, they were strangers to me and there were many things about their family lives that I didn’t know about and had to learn through conversations and interviews.

“It took time for us to become familiar, but through all this time I spent with them, there were always comparisons between me and them, so for me it was a kind of mirror.”

Accompanied by a monographic survey of Batniji’s work which spans the years 1999 to 2012, Gaza to America is one of five exhibitions that form the America Great Again! stand at the 49th edition of the world’s most famous and best-loved photography festival, Les Rencontres d’Arles.

America Great Again! includes some of modern and contemporary photography’s biggest beasts including Robert Frank, Raymond Depardon and Paul Graham, each of whom offer a foreigner’s perspective on modern and contemporary America, and each of whose exhibitions have been allotted serious real estate in the centre of Arles.

In contrast, Batniji’s work is currently being exhibited on two floors of the austere Chapelle Saint-Martin du Mejan, a 17th-century Baroque chapel that sits not far from the banks of the River Rhone.

While Gaza to America occupies the ground floor, the monographic survey of Batniji’s work occupies the first, including series such as the Bernd and Hilla Becher-inspired Watchtowers (2008) and Fathers (2006), which consists of photographs of commemorative portraits that hang in shops and workplaces across Gaza and Gaza Diary #3 (1999-2006).

Initially taken during visits to Gaza as nothing more than a private and personal record, the images that comprise Gaza Diary were first exhibited by the artist in 2008.

“What’s important about Gaza Diary is that I never thought they would be exhibited as an art piece. I was documenting my life in a diary during each period I spent in Gaza, long or short. Until 2008 when the Municipality of Paris commissioned me and another artist, Rula Halawani, to show daily life in Palestine,” he explains.

“At that time, and still unfortunately, it was impossible for me to go to Gaza, but I told them that I had hundreds of photographs that I took, and all of them were about daily life and it was only then that I started to think of these pictures as things that might be shown as artworks.”

As more time has passed, however, Batniji’s Gaza photographs have become like his laissez-passer, objects whose resonance is only increased by absence and loss.

“The more the prospect of a return grows distant, the more the photos are of tremendous importance to me,” he writes. “They are my memory.”

Taysir Batniji, Gaza to America: Home Away From Home runs at Arles 2018 Les Rencontres de la Photographie until September 23, 2018. Visit www.rencontres-arles.com for details

 

Islam: Omar Ghobash’s Letters to a Young Muslim

Omar Ghobash wrote Letters to a Young Muslim while he was serving as the UAE’s ambassador to Russia out of a desire to prevent his son from succumbing to the perils of radicalisation. The book has won critical acclaim for its message of tolerance, writes Nick Leech.

If the level of publicity and media attention associated with the launch of a book is any measure of its success, then the UAE Ambassador’s to Russia, Omar Saif Ghobash, has every reason to be pleased.

Even before his Letters to a Young Muslim was published in January, Time magazine billed it as one of this year’s most anticipated books, alongside non-fiction works such as a memoir by transgender media celebrity Caitlyn Jenner and the latest novel by Paula Hawkins, author of the best-selling Girl on a Train.

Written by the 45-year-old diplomat as a series of informal letters to his teenage son, Saif, Letters to a Young Muslim can be seen as part of a literary tradition that extends back to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1929).

It also includes more recent examples, such as Christopher Hitchen’s epistolatory blueprint for debate and dissent, Letter to a Young Contrarian (2001), and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ exploration of what it means to be black and American, Between the World and Me (2015).

“It has been very interesting. I’ve spent a long time thinking about these issues and I’ve been very pleased with the response,” says Mr Ghobash.

“The worst thing would have been if it had fallen flat, but the international response has been great.”

Far from falling flat, the book has been reviewed by the The New York Times and The Times of London and has earned Mr Ghobash an in-depth profile in the London newspaper, The Guardian, and appearances on CNN and National Public Radio, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and the long-running PBS current affairs programme, Charlie Rose.

“People talk about a clash between civilisations but I actually think there is a clash within our own civilisation and within our own Islamic community,” Mr Ghobash told Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham on a recent episode of the show.

“I think that’s particularly worrisome, but also tantalising in a way. There are 1.7 billion Muslims, and the kinds of ways that we discuss ideas hasn’t really progressed in the sense that there is a tremendous amount that is kept under wraps.”

The issue of language is central to Mr Ghobash’s analysis of the issues confronting Islam and the contemporary Arab world and provided him with the immediate inspiration for Letters to a Young Muslim, a project born of his desire to prevent his son from succumbing to the risks associated with radicalisation.

“I was listening to my kids coming back from their Arabic lessons and I thought, ‘This is terrible, nothing has changed in the last 30 years’.”

“Soon, you were coming back from school telling me what I had to do to be a ‘good Muslim’. You became a little aggressive and I began to realise that your mother and I were not the only ones bringing you up,” Mr Ghobash writes in his book.

“I had images of you running away to Syria, where people would exploit your good nature. I imagined you cutting yourself off from us, your family, because we were not strict enough Muslims according to the standards that you had picked up from these so-called teachers of yours.”

When his son brought home a book about Osama bin Laden and started to express respect for the founder of Al Qaeda and to defend some of his actions, he knew as a father that he had to act and his book is part of his response.

Creating a space where Muslims of all ages can discuss faith and issues that are often considered taboo, critically and without fear of condemnation, is one of the central tenets of what Mr Ghobash defines as his call for a “post-modern clarification” of Islam.

“I’m trying to legitimise the normal layperson’s approach to the world and to say that people shouldn’t allow themselves to be shamed or put under a spotlight as being a good Muslim or a bad Muslim by people who are simply shutting their eyes to the modern world,” he says. “It’s about having the right to engage in discussion about these very important issues without feeling as if we are children to be pushed around and shouted at if we ask a difficult question.”

In emphasising the importance of personal responsibility and insisting that there is no contradiction between faith and rational enquiry or modernity and tradition, Mr Ghobash’s approach is one that would appear to put him at odds with existing religious authorities.

But it’s a perspective, he insists, that is born of respect and necessity.

“At the moment, as far as I can tell, there are not really many clerics who are trying to accommodate modernity or really trying to understand how globalisation is affecting people’s lives and psychologies.

“And so I think that to ask them to come to terms with that is going to be difficult.”

Central to the accommodation for which Mr Ghobash is looking is a rejection of the certainties offered by extremism of all forms and a version of the faith that allows young Muslims to stay true to the tenets of Islam while navigating the doubts and uncertainties that beset them in the modern world.

“I’ve heard it from my conversations with young people over the past two years,” he says.

“Uncertainty is right at the heart of everything they do and they are barely holding it together.

“I’ve spent time with ex-members of the Muslim Brotherhood and people with PhDs in the sayings of the Prophet and they’ve all admitted to having to keep things a secret.

“‘I couldn’t tell anybody’, they say, ‘but I can tell you because you seem to be open to these ideas’.”

The failure to address the reality and needs of young people, whose reality has been transformed thanks to the impact of oil and the internet, has resulted, Mr Ghobash argues, in a generational crisis in which parents and children no longer understand one another and in a migration by young people away from the language and traditions of mainstream Islam.

“A remarkable number of Gulf Arab kids from wealthy families don’t speak Arabic any more and the wealthier you become, you migrate out of the region physically, because you spend your time in either America or Europe,” he says.

“You spend your time speaking English and you begin to think in terms that are very different from the structures of the traditional system.

“There is also a growing atheism in the Gulf and in Egypt at the moment but because of the way the Arabic language is so intertwined with religion it’s actually very difficult to pull off speaking Arabic and to be an atheist at the same time.

“So in migrating out of the faith, young people are also migrating out of their language.”

Despite his championing of Arabic and Islamic traditions, Mr Ghobash’s arguments are delivered in a language and a manner that speaks more about his education in England, where he studied at Rugby School, the University of Oxford and the University of London, than of his Emirati and Russian heritage.

But his decision to write his book in English and to pursue opportunities to discuss the issues it raises in the West have been made, Mr Ghobash insists, with a dual purpose.

“My publisher wanted to do an American launch first. From their perspective, that was the most interesting thing, to enter the American debate about Islam,” he says.

“But one of the key things that I really wanted to do was to insert myself, and the Emirates, into the global discussion about these issues,” the ambassador says before his latest local appearances at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature and New York University Abu Dhabi.

“One of the things that I’ve noticed and still see is that most of the time when the region is discussed, it’s discussed by foreign expats from the region, but I wanted to contribute an Emirati voice.

“I also wanted to get the discussion going in the international Muslim community outside the Arab world and to put the issues of the Arab world and the Muslim community on the table from an Arab perspective.”

Mr Ghobash’s mother was Russian and his father, Saif Ghobash, the UAE’s first Foreign Minister, was killed at Abu Dhabi international airport in 1977 by a terrorist whose target was the Syrian minister with whom his father was travelling.

As well as establishing the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arab Literary translation in his father’s memory, Mr Ghobash is a sponsor of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction – an award described as the Arab Booker Prize – and serves on the advisory body of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College London.

“I’m trying to give expression to an approach to the world that I’ve seen in the Emirates,” Mr Ghobash says.

“Obviously, there are elements that come from my personal life and the fact that I’m half Russian and an outsider, in a sense, but otherwise, what I’m talking about is pretty much what I have absorbed from many people here,” he says.

Mr Ghobash is encouraged by the responses the book has provoked among its target audience, Muslim youth.

“One of the things that is really interesting for me is to see the response of young Arabs in particular who are getting in touch with me and saying ‘Thank you for having voiced these issues, thank you for putting the words on my feelings and for giving me something to hold on to’,” Mr Ghobash says.

“I actually think that most people in this age have an awareness of the internal contradictions in the things they are being told and I don’t think that’s a big deal.

“I think that we all have the brain power and the cultural resources to find interesting answers to these questions.”

This article originally appeared in The National in 2017

 

Urbanism: how do you (re)build a Palestinian state?

Decades of sporadic violence in Gaza have inevitably left their mark on the urban landscape. Today, entire neighbourhoods stand in ruins, with some 18,000 homes destroyed or severely damaged and 100,000 Gazans left homeless.

“In the last decade, Gaza witnessed repeated catastrophes,” the Palestinian architect Elias Anastas explains. “The disasters are as random and as violent and as badly predicted as natural disasters, except that they have been much more frequent.

“In Gaza [however], the annihilation has become so frequent that the building, rebuilding and destroying are happening at the same time.”

For Muna Budeiri, the head of the housing and camp improvement unit at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the current need for swift action has to be tempered with careful consideration.

“Planning is usually a long and tedious process, but emergencies and conflicts require very quick solutions because people are homeless,” the Amman-based architect explains. “There is always a period where you need to create transitional housing for refugees before planning can begin, but even then it is very important for planners to be involved from the start.”

Budeiri’s understanding of the pressures and the pitfalls associated with the earliest phases of reconstruction is born of 20 years’ experience of working as an architect and a planner in the region’s refugee camps such as Jenin in the West Bank and Nahr Al Bared in northern Lebanon.

“In the early stages of the reconstruction of Jenin and even in the early stages of the reconstruction of Nahr Al Bared, there were suggestions that we use prototype buildings, with designs that were very easy and that we build them in a standard grid with roads and walkways, like a city from the 1950s.”

For Budeiri however, the inherent dangers in such an approach stem from the fact that it fails to take the culture, living habits and family bonds of the displaced persons into account. “Most of the Palestinian refugee camps are based on extended family housing and each plot has a house that has been vertically and horizontally extended to house the family itself.

“So, decisions made at early stages that come up with multi-storey or high-rise buildings to create higher densities and to make prototypes that make [reconstruction] quicker, all of these will affect the social fabric later on. These are issues that planners can provide solutions to at a very early stage.”

Last Sunday, the streets of Gaza filled with more than 430,000 children finally making their way back to school.

They are the lucky ones. According to the latest report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 501 children were killed in the recent conflict and estimates by the Palestinian Authority (PA) suggest that about half a million children no longer have a school to go to, either because of damage and destruction to their school buildings or because their schools are now being used to house displaced persons or refugees. Due to the severity of the situation, the start of the new school term had been delayed by two weeks.

However, for the pupils of Children’s Land, a kindergarten in the Bedouin village of Umm Al Nasser, there was no possibility of return.

The school, located just 600 metres from the security barrier that defines Gaza’s border with Israel, was one of 26 in Gaza that had been destroyed completely, razed to the ground by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during a devastating attack that also depopulated the village.

The school’s designers Mario Cucinella of Mario Cucinella Architects (MCA) and Alberto Alcalde of Architettura & Cooperazione (ARCo), only learnt of the kindergarten’s fate a month after the attack. “The Israelis came from the north to Erez and demolished everything,” Cucinella explains. “They came with bulldozers and they just took everything down.”

Cucinella admits that he was shocked by the news “but when we saw the pictures we were most sad for the community. These people were living at the very edge of society, a very small community of Bedouin, really living with nothing.”

Built using corrugated sheeting and timber and with walls made from sandbags filled with earth, the 120-pupil school and community centre had included six classrooms, a family counselling space, an infirmary and a community kitchen.

“When we opened the school it was a moment of joy for the community because they had the feeling, for the first time, that somebody was taking care of them,” the Italian architect explains.

“The problem was that there were no services for families with children aged between zero and five so the kindergarten was built to care for children who would have to play out in an environment that is very dangerous. This was the first time the kids had been able go to school and play in safety.”

Thanks to the simplicity of the centre’s design, the kindergarten took only a few weeks to build using unskilled labour from the local community and cost only Dh856,000 (€180,000) when it was completed in 2011.

Funded by the Italian ministry of foreign affairs and international cooperation, the project was coordinated by Vento di Terra, an Italian NGO. According to Cucinella, both the NGO and the ministry are already making assessments for the Umm Al Nasser kindergarten’s reconstruction.

“There was no reason to demolish [the school] but there are very good reasons to rebuild [it] and I think that the Cooperazione Italiana want to show that they are stronger than any war. We have to do this.”

A decade ago, in the unlikely setting of Santa Monica, California, Doug Suisman was surprised to find his attention turning to the seemingly intractable urban problems of one of the most troubled regions in the Middle East.

An experienced architect and urban planner, Suisman had been approached by the RAND Corporation, a US-based, not-for-profit think tank, and was given the task of developing a concept plan for a sustainable Palestinian urban future predicated on the existence of peace in the region and a viable Palestinian state.

Initially, the challenge seemed overwhelming, not least because RAND had given Suisman a deadline of six weeks. As Suisman remembers, the whole project seemed a rather unlikely prospect at the time.

“I said: ‘You must be kidding’ … You’re saying to me, take the world’s most intractable political conflict in a region that I don’t know, am not expert in and travelled to once 30 years ago and in six weeks you’d like me to come up with some kind of concept for housing and urban development. [RAND] said: ‘Yes, that’s about the long and short of it.’”

As early as 2002, RAND had assembled a multidisciplinary team of experts to work with Palestinians, Israelis and the international community to develop an in-depth and comprehensive nation-­building plan to address the issues that might affect the peace associated with a successful two-state solution.

It was during this period that the need for a framework that addressed Palestine’s urban future became paramount in order to facilitate the state’s success.

“What would it need to be successful, that was really the question,” Suisman remembers. “Because the creation of a state was one thing, but no one wanted to create what would become a failed state.”

Unexpectedly, Suisman’s status as an outsider became his most useful aid; it allowed him and his team to consider the everyday – the topography of the land and the density of existing settlements – even as the raging Second Intifada made travel to the region impossible.

“We almost made the point of making it like any other urban design challenge. It made it easier but it also matched the problem, which was ‘let’s just assume that the political conflict had ended’.

“We were looking at ordinary things, like how people would buy their groceries in the morning; would they walk or would they get into a car; how would they get to school or a doctor or to a university.”

Having worked on numerous downtown city planning projects as well as a mass transportation system for Los Angeles, Suisman found that, at a certain level, planning for Palestine’s future away from the region and as a desktop exercise actually worked.

As part of an earlier study, RAND had identified the need for infrastructure to connect the cities of the West Bank to Gaza, an idea which led Suisman’s team towards a simple and striking concept for meeting the challenges of Palestine’s rapid urban growth – The Arc.

The benefits of the early introduction of efficient, fully integrated public transport and urban infrastructure was a lesson that Suisman had learnt from his experience in LA. One aim was an urban future free from the problems associated with a predicted influx of cars.

“In a sense, Palestine would leapfrog over the urban sprawl phase. They would jump past that, which would be a blessing, like missing an unpleasant adolescent phase of urban growth and just be grown up.”

For Suisman, the key to The Arc’s success lay in engaging with its intended audience, something that could only be achieved by developing the concept to a stage where it was sufficiently detailed to make sense to them – the politicians, planners and residents of Palestine.

To achieve this, Suisman made what was potentially a politically charged decision, to render his plans with the kind of detail that a wider public could get excited about. “We developed different schemes where people could potentially project themselves into these places and say: ‘Oh, that is what it would look and feel like in a prospective Palestinian state,’” he says.

“And, I think that was powerful in that the notion of a Palestinian state had remained such a political abstraction. So many Palestinians told us – and others involved – that for the first time they could see and envision what such a state would look like and feel like …”

Following the earliest phase of The Arc’s development, Suisman visited the Palestinian Territories some 13 times but he first crossed an Israeli checkpoint to present his plans to president Mahmoud Abbas in June 2005. The reception was positive, Suisman says, so much so that he continued to work with planners from the Palestinian Authority on The Arc’s development until 2011.

According to Suisman, the period was one of relative optimism. “It seemed plausible that the plan might help in some small way, just as a concept or as a guiding star.”

Although the Arab Spring brought work on the scheme to a standstill, Suisman is not entirely pessimistic: “At this moment, I am not optimistic that in the immediate future there is any prospect of bringing it back on the table, but I have been surprised before,” he says. “On at least five occasions, I thought it was dead and over, and someone came back to it, so it seems to have staying power.

“We certainly designed it that way … We felt that if the concept is clear and strong and bright enough, it can survive upheaval and changes of personnel and administration, in the way that any long-term urban plan must because otherwise, every plan gets thrown out by the next round of folks.”

Within the Palestinian Territories, Suisman believes that the plan has been used as a starting point for discussions on development that had not previously existed because of a fear that anything concrete might derail or curtail the outcome of negotiations. In one sense, however, Suisman’s Arc achieved a modicum of success, despite the fact that not a single spade of earth has been turned nor a foundation stone laid.

“As we talked to people, the one phrase that we heard again and again to our surprise – it was not any­thing we intended – was: ‘This gives me hope.’ We heard this from very senior Palestinian officials, from certain Israelis, from others in the region: ‘This gives me hope.’

“So, there was a kind of power in the idea, fleshed out, that seemed to inspire people. And that kept it going. People began to say to us, this is not just about the day after peace, getting these images out could actually help get to peace because it gives people an idea of what it might be like. It makes it plausible.”

Despite the recent agreement between the UN, the Palestinian Authority and Israel for the rebuilding of Gaza, there remains a lack of large-scale, long-term thinking about the future of the Territories, but for Suisman his experience with The Arc and in Palestine has made one thing certain. “When people dream of peace, they are dreaming really of very ordinary things and peace means being able to do very mundane things without fear.

“Most people aspire to just live a decent life for themselves and their families. And that’s how we developed it. Every day we got up and thought: ‘OK, how could life be made better on a daily basis in a prospective Palestinian state,’ and that’s what people responded to.”

Two Palestinian brothers, Elias and Yousef Anastas, form the core of AAU Anastas, a small architectural practice with offices in Paris and Bethlehem. The brothers are currently designing a new paediatric hospital in Bethlehem and new courthouses for the West Bank communities of Hebron and Tulkarem, but it is the links their works draw between architecture conducted at a small scale and the larger urban issues faced by the Palestinian Territories that have brought most attention to their work.

Given the situation in the Territories today, Elias Anastas agrees with the basic proposal that lies at the heart of the RAND Arc – that reconstruction needs to focus on major infrastructural renewal – but that is where their similarities end.

If The Arc can be characterised as a rare and well-intentioned attempt to propose a large-scale, long-term solution to Palestine’s urban problems, it does so, necessarily, from the outside.

Despite Suisman’s long experience as an urban designer and many visits to the region, The Arc also has no option but to be an exercise in strategic urban planning conducted from the top-down.

As Palestinians in the West Bank, however, the Anastas brothers command an insider’s knowledge of their own heritage and culture and begin at the opposite end of the planning spectrum, from the bottom up, with the individuals and the buildings that form the DNA of successful neighbourhoods.

When it comes to talking about Gaza, however, Elias Anastas insists that he is also an outsider. “It’s quite complicated for us as Palestinians living in the West Bank to have a correct assessment about the priorities for Gaza. We are physically completely separated from Gaza – I have never been there – and a majority of my generation living in the West Bank are not allowed to go there.”

What divides Elias Anastas’s approach from Suisman’s most profoundly, however, is a fundamental question of scale. For him, it is the inability to conceive of an appropriate sense of scale, or agreed borders, that has prevented local architects and planners from taking a longer-term perspective when thinking about Palestine’s urban future.

“Usually, the planning of cities is connected directly to a territory and a limit, whereas in Palestine, the recognised 1967 borders are infringed by the path of the segregation wall,” he explains.

“This means we cannot count on them as a base on which to plan. How can we plan for these disconnected cities without knowing or having a territorial limit? It makes any planning on the Palestinian side impossible.”

This adherence to a smaller scale can be understood most clearly in the AAU design for the Bethlehem branch of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music. In 2007, AAU won a competition to design the new community centre and in 2012 the conservatory was built on land donated by the municipality of Beit Sahour, east of Jerusalem.

Both the conservatory and its adjacent neighbourhood, a form of outdoor souq, can be understood as a contemporary reinterpretation of traditional Palestinian architectural features and urban forms and as an attempt to envision a new, nuanced, form of Palestinian future.

Clad in traditional Sour Ma’in stone from a nearby quarry, the conservatory also features external louvres over its windows that reference traditional mashrabiya, and a central plaza, or hosh, inspired by the communal, semi-private courtyards that were once an important feature of rural Palestinian homes.

Not only does this contemporary hosh act as a new semi-public open space for both the students at the conservatory and the residents of Beit Sahour, but it also helps as a cooling mechanism for the central plaza, reducing ambient temperatures by one or two degrees.

“The project started at the scale of the music conservatory but gradually it grew into an urban form that enabled us to understand and question the process of city construction at the local scale,” he explains.

The parcel of land adjacent to the conservatory was originally intended to be a public open space, but as construction began the local municipality changed its mind and wanted to create a mall or a commercial centre immediately in front of the new conservatory’s hosh.

In response, AAU made a counterproposal which aimed to balance the outward-looking character of the conservatory’s central plaza with the municipality’s desire for an adjacent commercial scheme. AAU achieved this with a plan that aligned the pedestrian street of the new outdoor souq with the central hosh of the new conservatory, reinforcing and expanding the neighbourhood’s public realm while visually connecting the conservatory with the city in the process.

The result was an expanded design not just for a building but for a neighbourhood, something Elias Anastas refers to as an “urban fragment”, that not only reflected the culture and heritage of the traditional Palestinian city, but which also responded to contemporary urban issues and demands.

“We wanted to think about the future of the city in an inclusive manner, so we involved the citizens, the municipality, bricklayers and the engineers in a conversation and a process that made our design feasible,” the architect explains.

This strategy of inclusion not only allowed the brothers to gain acceptance for their design and make it workable, it also helped them to persuade the local municipality to maintain many of the areas around the conservatory as public open spaces.

Elias Anastas admits this is no easy task in the occupied territories. “People have a lack of trust in public spaces and so, even at the municipal level, it’s not easy to try to persuade them to keep a space open for the public in the evening. Public space became associated with expressions of power so today, public spaces are not perceived as places where you can have confidence.”

If AAU’s conservatory attempts to reconstruct an idea of contemporary public space in Palestine, so too does another AAU project, Stonesourcing Space, an experimental stone pavilion created by Yousef Anastas. A contemporary reinterpretation of the mounteer, a type of refuge or shelter traditionally found throughout the Palestinian countryside, Stonesourcing Space was first constructed in Bethlehem’s Nativity Square in September 2013.

Like the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, the Anastas brothers see their pavilion as an “architecture of resistance”. The aim of this temporary structure is to encourage Palestinians to reclaim, occupy and redefine public space in ways that move beyond the terms of surveillance, control, security and protest.

The pavilion’s resistance stems from its ability to introduce the notion of exhibition, discussion, inquiry and play in Palestinian public space by virtue of its location and existence.

For the Anastas brothers, however, there is an extra dimension to Stonesourcing Space’s resistance. Each time a pavilion is erected, it becomes a symbolic marker, like some contemporary cairn or a 3-D version of a graffiti artist’s tag, that acts as a mark and a reminder of property ownership and a symbolic act of resistance to the path and the existence of the Israeli West Bank Barrier.

“As Palestinian architects,” Elias Anastas explains, “our challenge is to develop urban forms and construction techniques that can evolve and develop into the urban fabric of the future Palestinian city.

“As time passes, we are more and more persuaded that an architecture of resistance has a real place in solving the complex territorial reality in Palestine [but] I think in order to achieve peace, an architecture of resistance should contribute to the emancipation of the Palestinian population.

“To achieve peace, the Palestinian population must be emancipated.”

This article was originally published in The National in 2014

Driving: I’m a 45-year-old man who takes the bus. So what?

Outing yourself as a 45-year-old non-driver in Abu Dhabi attracts the same mixture of disbelief, suspicion and pity that’s usually reserved for British teetotalers and vegetarians in France

In 1986, the year her government privatised and deregulated Britain’s bus networks, Margaret Thatcher is reputed to have said that: “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure.”

If that’s the case, then the vast majority of men in Abu Dhabi are certain winners in the great commute of life, whereas my failure is absolute: not only do I not drive, but I cannot.

In 2009, fewer than 1 per cent of men in the emirate used buses as their primary form of transport; a whopping 49 per cent used private cars, 8 per cent used private taxis and 22 per cent walked.

Only 0.3 per cent travelled by bicycle and 0.1 per cent used a motorbike, which is understandable given the suitability and safety of the UAE’s highways where, according to estimates, 5.9 road traffic fatalities were recorded per 100,000 people last year, with the number of fatalities surging by 7.4 per cent.

Outing yourself as a 45-year-old non-driver in Abu Dhabi attracts the same mixture of disbelief, suspicion and pity that’s usually reserved for British teetotalers and vegetarians in France.

“You mean you don’t drive?” people say when I confess, seemingly happier for a journalist to have a criminal record or a problem putting words in a coherent order, than an inability to steer a potentially lethal piece of machinery that travels at high speeds.

At home in the United Kingdom, where 80 per cent of the men eligible for a driving licence have one, I was happy with my minority status, but now that I live in the UAE, a place where the distances between work, home and my children’s school are vast and the love of driving runs deep, I’ve decided it’s finally time I learned to drive.

As I make my way to the Emirates Driving Company (EDC) in Mussaffah, the idea feels both liberating and rash.

It’s only 2pm in the afternoon, but homebound traffic is already hurtling thick and fast as it jockeys for position along Al Khaleej Al Arabi Street.

Four-wheel drives bank across the highway like jets in an aerobatic display, and my taxi driver, who clearly thinks that a stopping distance of three metres is more than generous, cruises behind a white Lexus at 120 kilometres per hour, sending my stress levels sky high.

After nine years in Abu Dhabi, I’m normally inured to such behaviour, but I’m now focused on the road around me as never before and I’m finding the experience alarming in the extreme.

Sending non-drivers to Mussaffah feels like a punishment that is particularly cruel. If areas such as Yas, Al Maryah and Saadiyat Islands represent Abu Dhabi’s polished super-ego, Musaffah is more like the city’s unburnished id, a bewildering labyrinth of workshops, foundries, factories and camps that become increasingly industrial and more confusing the further you venture in.

As the prize-winning author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Suketu Mehta, confessed to me recently after he had to abandon a walking tour of the district, Mussaffah may be the place to discover Abu Dhabi’s unvarnished underbelly, but it’s no place for pedestrians.

Arriving at the vast driving-school campus, I join a knot of salwar kameez-­clad fellow hopefuls who are just as eager to escape the 46°C heat, and through the heat haze before us we spy our immediate goal: the EDC test area packed with learners. A rink of infrastructure – bridges, flyovers, underpasses and car parks – designed specifically for driving instruction, it represents a condensed and uncanny simulacrum of Abu Dhabi’s urban landscape.

Before we can join in, however, we’re required to open a file, have our eyes tested, submit our documents and pay our fee, a process that takes place in a sparkling building on the far side of the campus, an anvil of melting asphalt that feels soft and sticky underfoot.

Arriving at speed, we push at doors with scalding, stainless steel handles, only to be repelled. They are locked, so we work our way around the building, desperately looking for an opening.

It’s only once we complete a circuit that we notice the sign bearing the news we had all feared: at 2.30pm, the EDC may be open for learners, but for non-drivers, registration is already closed.

Before even reaching the rink, I’ve failed my very first driving test so I leave the EDC’s car park in search of a taxi, knowing I will have to make the 60-kilometre round trip to Mussaffah all over again.

My feelings of exasperation are intense, but as a 45-year-old pedestrian in Abu Dhabi, what more did I expect?

This article was originally published in The National

 

Linguistic twist: is Arabic in crisis?

Throughout the Arab world, young people are rejecting classical Arabic in favour of a mish-mash of English and their own local dialects – ‘Arabish’ – a popular chat language that mixes the two, writes Nick Leech.

When Jihad El Eit opened the first branch of his fast food business in Dubai, he relied on little more than gut instinct when it came to choosing a name. At the time, ‘Man2ooshe & Co’ seemed like an inspired choice. Not only did it fit with the company’s contemporary take on traditional Arabic street food but it also used the Arabic chat alphabet in its name, a phonetic mish-mash of Arabic sounds and Roman characters that has become one of the most common and convenient modes of written communication for Arabic-speaking youth.

In the phonetic Arabic chat alphabet, ‘Man2ooshe’ becomes ‘Man’oushey’ because the ‘2’ is used to represent a pause between syllables in Arabic. The name spoke directly to the young, hip, Arabic but English-speaking market Jihad El Eit was aiming for.

Unfortunately, ‘Man2ooshe & Co’ soon became the victim of its own success, as non-Arabic speakers, unfamiliar with the phonetic transliteration that defines the Arabic chat alphabet, also started to demand the firm’s home-made take on traditional Middle Eastern snacks such as manakeesh, burek, and minikeesh.

“We never expected a non-Arabic audience to be interested in our food,” explains El Eit. “As more Western and Asian customers started coming to our stores, they didn’t understand what the ‘two’ meant. Some people started calling us ‘mantooshey’. Some people thought we were called ‘man-two-ooshey’. The name started to distract from the essence of the brand.”

Three years and five Man2ooshe stores later, El Eit wanted to expand his business further, but felt he had no choice but to employ the services of a consultancy to remedy the issue surrounding the brand’s name. The result was what the chief executive now describes as a “costly facelift”. ‘Man2ooshe & Co’ became ‘Man’oushe Street’ and no longer employs the Arabic chat alphabet in its branding, menus or signage.

“We didn’t do our homework properly when we started in terms of acceptance of the brand,” El Eit explains. “If we had used a generic texting message that was understood by all audiences, I don’t think we would have changed our name, but we used an Arabic word with a twist of English and that created confusion. I regret it now because I paid much more for the rebrand than I did when we started.”

While El Eit’s experience may provide a salutary business lesson for companies targeting non-Arabic speakers, the exponential growth of the Arabic chat alphabet since the 1990s has led to a sea change in the way the language is written by young people across the Arabic-speaking world. Arabish or Arabizi (a contraction of Arabic and Inglizi) even appears in advertising and on TV, especially on youth-oriented shows and channels such as Na3na3 on MTV Middle East. Throughout the Arabic speaking world, Arabish has become a default for written communication among the young in text messages, in email and online.

The preponderance of Arabish in the digital realm should come as no surprise. The language was born online during the 1990s, when operating systems, web browsers, personal computers, keyboards and keypads were unable to support Arabic.

The only readily available option at the time was to use the Roman fonts and characters defined by the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), a character-encoding scheme based on the English language that defined the 128 characters – including the numerals 0-9 and the letters A-Z – that appear on printers, keyboards, computers and communication equipment. Originally developed for telegraphic communication, ASCII soon became the effective lingua franca of the internet, a huge benefit to languages written in Roman script, but a massive problem for the users of different alphabets.

Arabic speakers responded to the absence of Arabic script in two ways: some used English, but many more began to use Roman characters to recreate the appearance and the sounds of Arabic words. Arabic was effectively ASCII-ised so that it could be written on a standard keyboard, and numerals were enlisted to represent specific Arabic sounds that do not occur in English. The number 5 became kha; 6 became taa; 8 qa and so on. It was from this ingenuity and the desire to communicate that Arabish was born.

David Palfreyman, a linguist based at Zayed University in Dubai, was the co-author of a 2003 research paper, A Funky Language for Teenzz to Use: Representing Gulf Arabic in Instant Messaging, one of the first academic studies of ASCII-ised Arabic. Palfreyman had arrived in the UAE in 1999 and soon became interested in the way the university’s female students were making use of technology and social media to express themselves.

“I’m interested in the creative aspect of ASCII Arabic and how the issue is playing out in a society that is changing,” Palfreyman explains. When the linguist conducted his research back in 2003, he had no way of knowing just how successful and pervasive ASCII-ised Arabic would become. Not only has it survived the introduction of technologies that now support the Arabic language, but it has thrived.

“Students could write in Arabic now, but I still find lots who continue to type in Roman script. In theory, the technical reasons for using ASCII-ised Arabic have disappeared, but the fact that it has survived shows there must be other reasons for its use.”

Palfreyman believes that ASCII-ised Arabic is not only an important expression of youth culture but that its use of Arabic, English and Roman characters also allows it to act as an identity marker that simultaneously references global, non-Arabic norms. It also gives a voice to the very local Emirati dialect.

“In Emirati Arabic there is a ‘ch’ sound in words like ‘kitabitch’. It’s the feminine form of ‘your book’,” the linguist explains. “In standard Arabic, the same word would be ‘kitabuk’. There’s no normative way in the Arabic script … to write ‘ch’, whereas English has an accepted way of writing that sound. The use of the English ‘ch’ allowed the student in my study to write in the way that she spoke.”

Palfreyman also believes ASCII-ised Arabic contributes to literacy by encouraging reading and writing, but admits he takes an optimistic view of an issue that has become something of a moral panic throughout the Middle East. Instead, there is a widespread and growing perception that classical and modern standard Arabic – the official language of government, news and the Quran – are in a state of crisis.

An increasing number of column inches have been dedicated to the apparent rejection of standard Arabic by the younger generation, while concerned parents have added fuel to the debate by voicing their concerns about the standard of Arabic teaching and the seeming inability of their children to master even basic Arabic skills. Their fears appeared to be confirmed by the findings of a recent report, issued by Dubai’s Knowledge and Human Development Authority, which showed that over the last five years, students in the emirate’s private schools had shown little or no improvement in the language.

Educational experts may identify outdated teaching methods and a reliance on rote learning as reasons for the current malaise, but there is also a widespread perception that the increasing use of English in schools and the popularity of Arabish are also to blame.

“Arabish started with our generation, but it has passed on to the next and now it is even worse,” bemoans Jaber Mohammad, a 35-year-old businessman from Dubai. “We did our 12 years of schooling with normal Arabic and never used Arabish until we were in college, but now the younger generation start using it when they are in school,” he explains. “I see it with my cousins and my nephews – they all use Arabish – I doubt they even have Arabic installed on their mobile phones.”

Mohammad has a long history of promoting the use of the Arabic language and Arabic content online. In 1997, he helped to develop an early Arabic chat room that provided users with an on-screen Arabic keyboard that allowed them to type with their mouse. Since then, he has helped to develop Arabic literacy, football and medical websites and his latest project is tajseed.net, a not-for-profit initiative that seeks to promote the development of Arabic infographics. He is alarmed and mystified by the enduring popularity of Arabish, but is clear about the scale and the nature of its threat.

“Lots of companies in Dubai and Abu Dhabi might not care if you can’t speak proper Arabic, but you might not get the job if you can’t speak proper English. We’ll end up with a generation who aren’t even linked to their own language and Arabish isn’t helping. It used to make sense back at the time, but not any more.”

Omar Al Hameli is one Emirati who is determined not to lose his relationship with the language he describes as his mother tongue. The 25-year-old insists on using Arabic in all forms of written communication and thinks that it is “ridiculous to talk with other Arabic guys in English.” He readily admits however, that this marks him out as unusual among his family, colleagues and friends.

“I am the only one of my friends who is like this. Some use the mixed language, but some use only English and when they try to type in Arabic I always find lots of mistakes. Sometimes I poke fun at them and tell them that they should use their own language.”

For Al Hameli, an environmental science student at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, the correct use of Arabic is central to his sense of self.

“I hate it when somebody messes with Arabic because I love this language. It is part of my identity. The Quran is in Arabic and I am an Arab and a Muslim. I would love to do my Master’s in Arabic because I want to learn more about the language and I want to understand the holy book.”

Salem Al Qassimi has rather a different perspective on Arabish, and is used to having to defend his views. “People have criticised me for advocating this way of writing, but I have never said that Arabish is good or bad.”

The 30-year-old designer and founder of the Fikra Design Studio in Sharjah started researching the cultural significance of Arabish and its impact on Emirati identity while studying as a postgraduate at the Rhode Island School of Design. Language is also central to his sense of identity, but bilingualism was something with which Al Qassimi has grown up.

“I went to an American school, an American university, and I was trained as a designer in English. There are certain design terms that are difficult to translate into Arabic, so I use English when I talk about design. At home with my family and friends however, I use Arabic, and if I am speaking about religion, there is no way I can translate that into English because Arabic is the language of Islam.”

For Al Qassimi, Arabish is something more than a matter of emails and text messages, it is a concept that has become central to his design practice and his whole way of life. Right or wrong, Arabish is a cultural reality that cannot and should not be ignored.

“Right now, I feel that we live in a hybrid culture and Arabish is a philosophy about the merging of cultures. The way we dress, the cars we drive, the lifestyle we carry, all of those confirm Arabish as a fact.”

The cultural and linguistic hybridity of Arabish is something that Al Qassimi investigates through graphic design, typography and film, media that come together in projects such as Typographic Hybrids in the City, an animation that sees Arabic letters and their Roman replacements fly across the cityscape of Dubai, set to a soundtrack that mixes classical Arabic oud music with modern electronica. In Hybrid Dress, Al Qassimi created a series of posters that overlaid a kandura, the traditional clothing of Emirati men, with Western shirts and jeans and the words “Arab” in Arabic, and “Western” in English.

Rather than trying to resist the kind of cultural change that Arabish represents, Al Qassimi believes that it should be embraced, not only because it is inevitable, but because it also denotes an openness and a vitality in contemporary Emirati culture that he believes are necessary and that should be encouraged.

“To identify Emirati culture today as something that it was 50 years ago is incorrect. We are creating our own culture and a new identity right now by taking the identity we had previously and building on it, but if we restrict ourselves by not absorbing or taking things from other cultures, then our culture will become stagnant.”

“Will English affect our local, colloquial Emirati Arabic? For sure. Is it going to affect formal, classical Arabic? Not so much, because that is the Arabic of the Quran and we will always go back to that. It is the biggest protector of Arabic that we have.”

If the use of hybrid text and language has assumed the status of a moral panic in discussions about the fate of the Arabic language – a term used by sociologists to describe phenomena that are perceived as threats to cultural values and social order – there are Arabs who are campaigning for a brighter future for written and printed Arabic.

The Lebanese designer, academic, and writer Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFares is one of these. As the founding creative director of the Khatt Foundation, a largely virtual cultural organisation and network of experts, designers, and researchers, Smitshuijzen AbiFares has been responsible for organising a series conferences, exhibitions, books and workshops dedicated to improving the quality of contemporary Arabic typographic design.

Her vision is nothing less than the regeneration and the renewal of Arabic visual culture – something that she currently defines as “poor” – and her aim is to achieve this using the medium of Arabic type. “Our main goal is to talk about a constant rejuvenation of the culture through typography” she explains.

“It’s important that we look at our script. In Arab culture, two of the highest forms of art we have are calligraphy and poetry, but we no longer see these in our public spaces and our cities. That is a loss.”

Smitshuijzen AbiFares has been in Dubai for the last nine days, coordinating a series of daily, nine-hour-long practical workshops in Arabic calligraphy and font design. Despite its gruelling workload, the course, the third of its kind to be held at the Tashkeel studios in Nad Al Sheba, has succeeded in attracting a dedicated band of delegates from across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Europe and the United States.

The quality of tutors, internationally recognised luminaries such as the Syrian calligrapher Mounir Al-Shaarani and the specialist Arabic type designer Lara Assouad Khoury attract some. Others are drawn by the prospect of producing their own unique digital font, no small matter in a world where the number of Roman fonts outnumber their Arabic counterparts by more than 100 to one. The course’s biggest pull however, is its rarity, as Smitshuijze AbiFares explains.

“Arabic type design has not been properly covered in design education, especially in the UAE. There are graphic design courses, there are typography courses, but Arabic specific courses are lacking. Even elsewhere in the world, these kind of courses are not widely spread.”

“We need these courses in the Middle East because we do not have enough well-crafted, good quality Arabic typefaces. I have a class full of Arabs, but every one of them speaks a different Arabic. That should also be seen in the way they design.”

For Smitshuijzen AbiFares however, the main obstacles to the cultural rejuvenation she seeks are not only a lack of knowledge and expertise but something more profound, an over-protectiveness of Arabic that stems from a lack of self-confidence among Arabs.

“There’s a sense that we do not know how to define ourselves because everybody tears you in different directions. If you try to do something new, everybody automatically labels it as Western, but if you do something traditional, it doesn’t quite relate because you’re dealing with something that comes from a thousand years away.”

For Smitshuijzen AbiFares, the success of the Khatt Foundation’s project relies on the development of tools that will enable designers working in Arabic to develop a contemporary and authentic voice of their own, independent of Western firms, commercial concerns, and unfettered by what she sees as a widespread tendency to constantly revisit and refine things from the past.

“There’s a misunderstanding that being contemporary is not being Arab,” she explains. “I don’t believe we should shut other cultures out, not at all, but instead of just absorbing everything that comes from abroad, just because it comes from Europe, [that] is a bit strange … Our culture is not dead and I don’t believe we need to preserve it, but to evolve it and to nurture innovation. That is the best way to ensure our culture goes on.”

This article originally appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi