The New Arab Meets: Ballet dancer and choreographer, Ahmad Joudeh. Born stateless, Ahmad has had to reckon with divorce, death threats and ISIS. Now based in the Netherlands, Ahmad's success is an inspiration for refugees and creative minds alike.
Judith Wright is celebrated as a quintessentially Australian literary figure. Her poetry engages with the land, with her ‘white settler’ farming family and its problematic historical relationship to Indigenous people, and with environmental issues. Despite living almost exclusively within one nation space, Wright’s mental spaces included transnational exchanges. This chapter tracks one line of cultural influence involving an Australian religious movement with links to India, translations of Hafiz in England and the adaptation of a Persian poetic form, the ghazal, in Wright’s later work.
With a voice that transcends worlds and soulful techniques that touch the heart, Sheikh Sayed Al-Naqshabandi’s Sufi prayers and chants where beauty laces each word are a pillar in Egyptian spirituality. Born in 1920 in the village of Demira, in the Dakahlia governorate, Al-Naqshabandi started learning the art of inshad dini (Islamic hymns) Sufi poems recited
Sufism as a moral and spiritual way of life with its universal appeal of love and humanism found an exceptionally congenial ground for its growth and spread in India from the earliest phases of its history