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Ed Webb

Death metal rockers raise eyebrows in sedate Bahrain - CNN.com - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...bahrain.metal.music

death metal Bahrain middleeast music censorship socialnetworking

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Mar 10 - Cached
  • "People don't accept the fact of metal being music and having fun. It's always in conflict with religion,"
  • In Bahrain, metal bands and their followers are often branded as Satan worshippers. Gigs are regularly shut down, and the movement largely stays underground to avoid public attention. Many groups rely on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook to stay connected.
  • the rock and metal movement, which is mostly an expression of freedom
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  • A melting pot of different cultures, Bahrain boasts a diverse cultural scene. But partly because of small size of the country, it is often overlooked, said Al Shafei. "Noone looks at Bahrain as a place where talented musicians are emerging," she said. In fact, overall there's been little attention placed on the underground musical scene in the Middle East, which is one of the reasons why she's launching Web site Mideast Tunes.
Ed Webb

Tunisia's Dying Jazz | Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...ng-jazz-stambeli-chedli-bidali

Tunisia politics transition religion music art censorship Salafism

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Sep 17 - Cached
  • Bidali is one of the last living practitioners of stambeli, a uniquely Tunisian hybrid of musical genre, healing practice, and religious ceremony. It’s deeply rooted in the history of a specific community: the descendants of slaves brought to the region from sub-Saharan Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also has close links to Sufism, an ancient form of Islamic mysticism that uses music, dance, and rhythm to induce trance-like states that are supposed to bring listeners closer to the essence of the divine
  • President Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s first postcolonial leader, gave state support to many forms of art, but stambeli wasn’t among them; it didn’t fit the modern image of the country he was trying to shape
  • while subsequent police crackdowns have landed Salafists of all stripes in jail, some of the trends they promoted, such as moral self-policing and austere interpretations of Islamic cultural heritage, have taken root in society. With its unorthodox religious associations, stambeli has found itself in the firing line
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  • because of the rising influence of orthodox interpretations of the faith, stambeli artists are careful to stress the monotheistic, Islamic essence of their practice
  • The origins of stambeli music resemble those of American jazz (even though the two genres don’t sound alike). In both cases, the musical traditions of former slaves combined with the diverse cultural influences of their new environments to create something radically new. Whereas slaves arriving in Louisiana mixed their music and practices with European, Caribbean, and American ingredients, slaves arriving in Tunis during the same period fused their animist practices with North African versions of mystical Sufism and orthodox Islam. Mounir Argui, a theater director and music producer who works with Bidali, says that the metal castanets that play such a prominent role in stambeli performances evoke “the sounds of chains and shackles” that the slaves once wore, while the chanting recalls the “moaning.”
  • the Tunisian state never prioritized the preservation of stambeli, focusing instead on the art and culture it considered highbrow
  • Many Tunisians see stambeli as an alien phenomenon associated with blacks, who are already widely viewed as not quite Tunisian. In post-revolutionary Tunisia, where asserting the Islamic character of the country has become an important political symbol for some, the pagan origins of stambeli also cause suspicion
  • As long as some Tunisians continue to see freedom of religion and freedom of art as mutually exclusive, the rare traditions like stambeli that manage to straddle both will find little space
Ed Webb

Transforming Post-Revolution Cairo | Newlines Magazine - 0 views

newlinesmag.com/...sforming-post-revolution-cairo

Egypt politics economy Cairo cities urbanspace urban Sisi Mubarak history debt authoritarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 31 May 21 - Cached
  • The occupation of Tahrir Square, which continued from that night until Egypt’s long-ruling president, Hosni Mubarak, stepped down on February. 11, 2011, was an exercise, too, in overcoming decades of public policy and urban planning that had sought to render urban open spaces inaccessible or even dangerous to would-be protestors.
  • A decade after the 2011 revolution, Egypt’s sprawling capital city looks a lot different. Tahrir Square has been adorned with Pharaonic monuments and staffed with police. Domineering concrete barriers and towering metal gates topped with spikes and painted in national colors now line the surrounding streets. Rabaa Al Adawiya Square, where hundreds of protesters were killed in August 2013, has been made inaccessible. A large monument meant to express “the unity of the army, the police, and the people,” according to Brig. Tarek Mohamed Sayed, was erected in the square in September 2013, and an overpass — one of the dozens built in the city in recent years — now crosses over it. Under Al Sisi, the Egyptian government has been transferring the nation’s capital out of Cairo altogether, building lavish palaces and administrative compounds in a far-off, sparsely populated New Administrative Capital in the desert.
  • Construction projects have also resulted in the destruction of hundreds of thousands of square meters of green space — 390,000 square meters (429,000 square yards) alone, in the affluent neighborhood of Heliopolis in eastern Cairo, according to the Heliopolis Heritage Initiative, where hundreds of century-old trees have been uprooted to widen arterial avenues like Abou Bakr Al Seddik and Al Nozha, which cut through the heart of the neighborhood. There is no place in today’s Egypt for broad-leaved trees that hinder surveillance nor shaded spaces that foster assembly.
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  • In neighborhoods like this one, with winding roads and haphazard rows of buildings, the elevated highway provides a watchtower for the state.
  • Rather than connecting informal districts to utilities and providing funds to upgrade housing, the government prefers to relocate residents to satellite cities on the outskirts. As residents of these areas grow poorer and more desperate under crushing austerity measures, the government would rather see them housed in isolated contingents in the desert, thus eliminating the prospect that they could participate in a mass mobilization, as happened a decade ago.
  • Building or repairing roads offers a relatively quick and easy way for a government to demonstrate progress, something the young regime would have been eager to do to establish some semblance of legitimacy.
  • the megaprojects. Work began on a $4.2 billion expansion of the Suez Canal in August 2014. The crews responsible for the canal expansion had not yet set down their shovels when construction began on the world’s widest cable-stayed bridge, which now stretches across the Nile in central Cairo. Its six lanes in each direction are inaccessible to most commuters who cannot afford to pay the 20 Egyptian pound ($1.27) toll. But those who tuned in to public television on New Year’s Eve were treated to a spectacle of fireworks choreographed to nationalist music above its towering pylons and a floating portrait of the president.
  • Located some 45 kilometers (28 miles) east of Cairo, the New Administrative Capital is Al Sisi’s crown jewel. Contractors began work on the project in 2015. When finished, the luxe megacity will be almost as large as Singapore and boast a series of artificial lakes, an amusement park four times the size of Disneyland, and the tallest skyscraper on the continent. But the first phase alone, slated for completion in 2022 (although engineers working on the project say that construction is far behind schedule), will cost $45 billion — an unfathomable sum to anyone, perhaps, but more dissonant still for the more than 60 million Egyptians who depend on shrinking subsidies for their daily bread.
  • Television commercials starring Egyptian celebrities and billboards stationed along every road in the nation depict imagined lives in lush, gated communities backdropped by gleaming glass towers and bluer skies than dust-choked Cairo has ever seen. They are part of what architect Adham Selim describes as a practice of “ruling through drawing,” in which the government produces images of the future as a means of exerting greater control over the present and the past. “The continuous act of drawing the world-to-be is the way in which authority sustains a stable worldview, in which it places itself as an external to the world it intends to change, and rule,”
  • Al Sisi longs to be remembered as the ruler who snatched Egypt from the mouth of the Muslim Brotherhood and built a new Cairo in its wake. To this end, he is curating an archive that will be taught in the future.
  • Ismail borrowed so excessively from foreign lenders to realize his vision that when a collapse in the price of cotton left Egypt unable to repay its debts, European powers had him deposed. Then Britain invaded Egypt to protect its interests, starting a decadeslong occupation.
  • Successive Egyptian administrations have tried to decentralize Cairo, building generation after generation of satellite cities meant to entice upper- and middle-class Cairenes out of the urban core. The cities 10th of Ramadan and 6th of October, located east and west of Cairo, respectively, built under Sadat, and Madinaty and New Cairo (not to be confused with the New Administrative Capital), scattered to the east and started under Mubarak, sit half-empty, having never reached their target populations — or anything close.
  • Yahia Shawkat, author of “Egypt’s Housing Crisis: The Shaping of Urban Space,” estimates that 33,000 families were victims of forced eviction under Mubarak between 1997 and 2012. Under Al Sisi, the Ministry of Housing now boasts that it has relocated 60,000 families between 2018 and 2020 alone
  • When the government wanted to demolish informal housing on Warraq Island, located in the center of the Nile river in Cairo and home to 90,000 people, it sent security forces with bulldozers in the predawn hours of July 16, 2017, while most residents were still asleep. Heba Nagaa Otmorsi, a resident of the island, told The Guardian that her house had been demolished while she was at work. “It was our neighbors who rescued the children,” she said. Clashes on the island left one resident dead and dozens injured.
  • “People living in these semi-autonomous neighborhoods are always blamed for some sort of social urban ill,”
  • In January 2021, several high-level government officials laid the cornerstone of the Cairo Eye in Zamalek, one of Cairo’s wealthiest neighborhoods. One-third of Al Masallah Garden, a 15,000-square-meter (16,500-square-yard) historic park, will be destroyed to make way for the 120-meter-tall (132-yards) observation wheel, surrounded by shops, entertainment, restaurants, and a two-story parking garage.
  • Recent projects have disrupted Khedival Cairo and Mamluk-era tombs in the City of the Dead. A recent announcement that graves around Imam Al Shafi’i Mosque will be moved to make way for a bridge project has left Hussein Omar heartbroken at the prospect of losing his family mausoleum, where generations have been laid to rest since his great-great-grandfather bought the plot in 1924. It feels like a “concerted assault on the fundamental relationship that Egyptians have with their past,” he says. A plot that has belonged to his maternal grandmother’s family since the 19th century is even nearer to the site of the scheduled bridge project. There is no way of knowing if either plot will survive the new construction.
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