Figure 1: Still from “At those terrifying frontiers,” with Palestinian hills in the background (Photo credit: N.A. Mansour)
Maybe I just have to resign myself to the fact that some Palestinian art is not made for me, a Palestinian.
When Palestinian culture is given some representation at major institutions and major publications, my instinct is to support it, even though I know diversity, equity and inclusion policies are instrumentalized as corporate tools. I try to be optimistic.
I tried to be optimistic when I heard that the Art Institute of Chicago was running Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s exhibition If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust, from July 31, 2021 until January 3, 2022. It’s one of the very few shows the Art Institute of Chicago has organized featuring contemporary artists from the Arabic-speaking world; it might even be the first, certainly the only in the last decade. The Art Institute’s permanent collection has a poor record when it comes to modern Arab artists, with only a handful representing the region, including Ghada Amer, Lalla Assia Essaydi, and Jacob El Hanani. Compare that to the dozens of Warhols perpetually on display.
In light of recent events in Lebanon, we want to encourage you to donate to support domestic workersvia Egna Legna, an Ethiopian domestic worker-run organization based in Beirut Lebanon, which has over the past three years assisted domestic workers including victims of horrible abuses to the best of its ability.We also recommend donating to Beit el Baraka.Use this tool to find more places that need donations.
If you’re an Arabist, think about the digital library or archive catalogues you use and then try to count the number that have interfaces and data available in Arabic. There are few in Arabic, although there are more catalogues and tools that are in Turkish. In addition, the design of these resources often is adapted without much alteration from tools produced for European-language materials for European-language audiences. It dismisses even the possibility that other intellectual histories rooted in different contexts function differently and require different things from their organizational standards; it also dismisses the notion that technologies are neutral and that they are inclusive.
A doorway in the IDEO featuring mashrabiyya (Photo Credit: N.A. Mansour)
The Arabic intellectual tradition is built around commentaries all expressing different and often diverging opinions, although they are often tied to the same text. So in order to study, for example كتاب سيبويه Kitāb Sībawayh, you need to be familiar with existing critical editions of the text. You might also want the commentaries written on it. You also naturally want the secondary sources on it as well: Arabic journal articles and monographs, as well as those written in other languages. Your institution’s standard catalogue might not be as much help here. You need a catalogue built to these bibliographic purposes. The AlKindi catalogue, developed by the Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies (IDEO) is the best solution to this problem of needing research tools in Arabic, built for Arabophone audiences with the Arabic intellectual tradition in mind. It’s also the solution to our bibliographical problems, essentially letting you browse online more effectively. It’s not perfect yet, namely in that it does not include every Arabic book ever written but each day, the catalogue becomes a stronger engine, as more data is added to it and as more people use it; it is often the first result you find when using a standard internet search engine to look for a text, like, say كتاب سيبويه, Kitāb Sībawayh. The cataloguing team has needed to expand multiple times to accommodate the work-load and under the direction of Mohamad Malchouch, it is full-steam ahead for the project. Here, we’ll be giving you an introduction to using the system, as well as a crash-course in cataloguing standards.
Ever since podcasting hit the scene in the early 2000s, there has been no shortage of content on the Middle East, North Africa, the Islamicate world, and on Muslims. We’ve assembled a list here –subject to eventual updates and suggestions– of podcasts on history, current events, and culture from the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans and the Islamic(ate) world more generally. We have also included a few other podcasts on Muslim cultural and intellectual matters. This list is by no means exhaustive and we look forward to developing it more: you can DM us suggestions on Twitter or Facebook and you can email us or comment below.
For those of you who are uninitiated in the ways of podcasts, a basic guide: you can either listen to them streamed from their sites on your computer or tablet or you can download a podcast catcher app (iPhones come preloaded with the Podcast app). Many are uploaded to Soundcloud (which is both a website and an app). Other podcast apps include Overcast, Stitcher, Anchor, Breaker, PodTail, Google Podcasts and Spotify. Once you’ve installed the apps, search by podcast title (or episode title) to find what you’re looking for. You can choose to subscribe or just listen to individual episodes (either via downloads or streaming) If you are having problems finding the podcasts on your podcast catcher of choice, please visit the podcast’s homepage to see if it is only available on certain platforms.
Applying to annual meetings is a minefield. Which ones to go to? What are the organizations looking for? How do you assemble a panel? What are the strategies to employ when putting together multiple entries? Hazine has got you covered: we crowdsourced advice on social media from annual meeting veterans over the last few weeks then put it up here to immortalize their comments.
As usual with Hazine content, we rely on YOU for submissions, so tweet us or email us with advice for applying to an annual conference and we’ll get this information up ASAP. We also realize we have included information on a limited number of annual meetings: please send us tips and tricks by emailing us (hazineblog@gmail.com) or starting your own thread on social media (tag us please!). Then we can include AAA, MELA, MELCOM, BRISMES, BRAIS, ASOR and whatever other acronyms floating out there. We will also try to update with tips for what to do when actually going to the meeting.
Big thank yous to everyone who contributed: Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst, Kecia Ali, James Ryan, Candace Mixon, Kristian Petersen, Joshua Donovan, William Carruthers, Evan Berry, and Matthew B. Lynch.
Maktabat al-Azhar (al-Azhar Library) in Cairo is reportedly about to move to a new location not far from the original location on Salah Salem Street, around the corner from al-Azhar mosque and al-Azhar Garden. Thus, it does not merit a full archive review. HOWEVER, one of our editors, N.A. Mansour, has been using it and she put together a Twitter thread with all the relevant information. Click through to read the thread in its entirety (you DO NOT need a Twitter account to read it) and we look forward to featuring an entire archive review when the library moves.
We at Hazine love our lists. So hot off the heels of our visual resource guide and our regularly updated blog-list, we have a list of online resources to share with you all: this is where you can find primary sources online or resources to help you get at primary sources. An earlier incarnation of this list is here, written by Zachary Foster. We’re including links to digitized Islamic manuscripts, digitized periodicals, digitized books, oral history repositories, online syllabi and material history archives, all relevant to Middle East, North African, Islamicate world, and Islamic studies. Note while many of these are open access, some are not. Standard rules apply: this is not a comprehensive list so tweet at us or email us and we’ll add things to our semi-annual updates to this list.
We recently tweeted out some of our favorite blogs to follow: we threw out a couple of names you probably know and some you might not have had the chance to follow. Then our followers (and some of the people we tagged) tweeted back at us some of their favorites (particular shout-outs to Rich Heffron, Hind Makki and M Lynx Qualey). Here it is, in list form, if you don’t follow us on Twitter. Please either comment bellow on your favorites, tweet at us, or email us at hazineblog@gmail.com and we’ll update the list as we go along!
When historians refer to ‘training,’ we often refer to being able to read an archive and understand how the source itself fits into the grander scheme of the archive. But part of the problem, at least in Middle East and North African studies, is having archives to read into at all. The last two decades have witnessed multiple archive crises in the region. Archives have been rendered inaccessible, often by conflict, in the case of Syria and Iraq, or sources have been deliberately removed from archives by security states, such as the Israeli State Archives; Lebanon’s national archives, meanwhile, are under ‘renovations’ and there’s little word on when they might be accessible to the general public. But perhaps the problem is that we’re not thinking archive-first: we dive into topics without thinking of the availability of sources. Another layer of training we might receive is to construct projects while thinking source-first and readily reading available sources against the grain.
Jafet Library at the American University of Beirut (AUB) is one such repository of primary sources that might inspire researchers to think critically when building their own collections of sources. The Library has an impressive microfilm collection of Arabic-language periodicals. Furthermore, its Archive and Special Collections have accumulated some noteworthy unique documents, including private papers of the region’s elites.
