Once the symbol of modern Turkey, the Ataturk Cultural Center has been abandoned for a decade since closing in 2008. Amid furious debate about its future, many are unhappy with the current grand plans for the site.
Syrians are clearly shouting, “We exist.” They seek to leave traces of their existence wherever they go. They long to express the things they have gone through, for fear of these events being consigned to oblivion.
The New Arab and others.
So wrote Ibn al-Wardi in the 14th century, before dying of the plague himself. Al-Wardi, a historian from what is now northern Syria, was alive at a dreadfully unfortunate time, the Black Death thrashing through the world like a monsoon.
Unlike in Europe, there is a lack of data on how many people in the Middle East died from the pandemic. Historians such as Michael Dols have suggested that the death toll in cities such as Cairo, Damascus and Aleppo was disastrous.
“Oh God,” continued al-Wardi in his 1348
Report on the Pestilence, “it is acting by Your command. Lift this from us. It happens where You wish; keep the plague from us.” Al-Wardi wrote his final words in Aleppo, not too far from his hometown of Maaret al-Numan.
New York Times-bestselling novel,
Love, Hate and Other Filters (Soho Teen, 2019). The book explores the life of an Indian-American Muslim as she battles Islamophobia and cultural divides. Her other works include
Internment (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2019) and
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know (Soho Teen, 2020).
Internment revolves around the life of a Muslim teen who is forced into an internment camp for Muslim Americans and decides to rebel. Narrated in dual timelines,
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know traces the lives of two women striving to chase their passion while escaping family burdens.
Canadian author Uzma Jalaluddin s debut novel,
Ayesha At Last (Berkley Books, 2019), is loosely based on the plot of Jane Austen s
Out on the Street (2015) he uses performance, in his found footage films
Mapping Lessons (2020) and
The Ghost of Tutankhamun (work in progress) he experiments with the technique of montage. Rizk is a member of the Mosireen video collective behind the archive 858.ma. He has a forthcoming book co-authored with Jasmina Metwaly titled
On Trials: A Manual on the Theatre of Law (Archive Books, 2021).
Mapping Lessons (2020) is the most recent film by Philip Rizk, a filmmaker from Cairo. The film is Rizk’s attempt to put different images and political struggles into conversation with each other: from anti-colonialism to the Syrian revolution, from the Paris Commune to the Soviets.