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Ed Webb

The Secret Language of Cairo's Goldsmiths - Atlas Obscura - 0 views

www.atlasobscura.com/...-language-of-cairos-goldsmiths

Egypt language minorities Jews history

shared by Ed Webb on 25 May 20 - Cached
  • the goldsmiths of Cairo, who use trade-specific terminology for their business dealings. Many of the phrases they use, as he soon discovered, are reworked Hebrew terms, remnants of a time—from at least the 16th century through the early 20th century—when Egyptian Jews were central to the jewelry trade. The find was startling not only because of the intrigue of such “secret” trade languages, but because Jews have not worked in the Egyptian goldsmith market since the 1960s. Their language has outlived their community.
  • combine Hebrew roots with Arabic grammar. For example, some merchants would warn one another about a possible thief by using the word “ganneb.” The term comes from the Hebrew verb ganab, to steal, but is in Arabic’s declarative second verb form. As Rosenbaum would write, “Another term for warning against thieves is enaymak, which is a combination of the Hebrew word עינים=/enayim (eyes) and the Arabic suffixed possessive pronoun -ak for the second person.” Translation: Watch out!
  • In the early 1900s, the goldsmith quarter was also home to Cairo’s large Jewish population, which had resided in Egypt for millennia. The departure of the Jewish community in the 1950s and 1960s was swift and sudden, leaving many Jewish goldsmiths to abandon their businesses or hastily gift them to their non-Jewish assistants and colleagues. Few shop owners operating today will openly discuss this period. It’s not known what percentage of shops in the 1950s would have been Jewish-owned.
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  • the pragmatic focus of writing in trade contexts—which was often unconcerned with literary flourishes and instead existed somewhere between written and spoken language—meant traders were often the first to introduce spoken variables of language into the written word. This linguistic trendsetting was particularly true of trades that cultivated a group identity—goldsmiths being a prime example.
  • the Karaite Jews had a unique relationship to Arabic, which some posit might be one reason their trade phrases integrated so widely within the broader, non-Jewish goldsmith population. “There were not many Jews in Egypt who used Arabic exclusively for every aspect of their lives,” explains Katharine Halls, a scholar of Egyptian Jewry and Arabic-to-English translator who has lived on and off in Egypt for several years during her career. “Egyptian Jews often spoke French, like many wealthier Egyptian families, or Alexandria it was Italian for a while, but the Karaites were generally mono-lingual in Arabic, which made them virtually unique among Jews in Egypt.”
  • The Karaite Jewish goldsmiths likely would have freely trained their non-Jewish staff in the use of such terminology.
Ed Webb

Hip Hop Finds Its Groove in North Africa | Newlines Magazine - 0 views

newlinesmag.com/...nds-its-groove-in-north-africa

music hiphop Maghreb MENA Morocco Tunisia Algeria Egypt France Italy Belgium language colonialism identity identities

shared by Ed Webb on 24 May 21 - No Cached
  • Pop music in the region today truly represents the Westernization of classical Arabic music defined by traditional elements of improvisation (where songs often last as long as an hour), instruments native to the region like the oud, and maqam, which is a system of melodies and pitches native to Arabic music. Classical Arabic artists like Oum Kulthum and Asmahan thrived on this style and are considered icons of Arabic music because of their ability to evoke emotion through their artistry.But in conjunction with colonization, Arabic music began to shift from its classical roots with the Cairo Congress of Arab Music in 1932, organized by King Fuad of Egypt. This symposium brought together renowned composers and ethnomusicologists from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe who created a set of proposals for the modernization and standardization of Arabic music, one of which was the incorporation of European instruments into Arabic ensembles because “such instruments possessed tremendously varied, expressive means and depictive powers.”The other notable event that pushed this modernization further was the introduction of the phonograph to the region. Phonographs could only play songs for a limited duration, making the traditional improvisation and hour-long running times of classical Arabic music nearly impossible.The final nail in the coffin was the burgeoning film industry in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in Egypt, the cultural epicenter for creative output in the Middle East and North Africa. Movies were heavily Westernized at the time, forcing directors and producers to modify accompanying music to incorporate Western-style elements in their instruments and duration.
  • a new movement is rising in North Africa.Rappers and emcees from the region are boldly approaching hip-hop and the larger Arab music landscape by exploring taboo themes and proactively deconstructing societal markers of North African identity. They are experimenting with beat production and dialect as they go about creating a space for their music and for these conversations to be held in a public domain. This is not a knock on the Levantine or Khaleeji rap scenes; there are many artists who are doing this currently. But North African emcees are using their lyrical flows and melodic rhythms to grapple with the essential question of identity. The music sounds fresh and breathes new life into the pop-dominant Arabic music scene.
  • A vast majority of North African rappers primarily use their regional Arabic dialects and French in their music. But many artists, specifically North African artists based in Europe, also use Spanish, Dutch, and English on their albums. A few artists will even use all four languages in one song.
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  • French colonial policy in Algeria, she explained, aimed to violently prevent and suppress the teaching of Indigenous languages like Tamazight. France intentionally stoked tensions between Indigenous Imazighen and ethnic Arabs by implementing unjust laws seeking to tear at the societal fabric of the country and destroy Algerian identity.France implemented similar policies in other North African countries as well, actively working to create sectarian tensions that led to ethnic and linguistic divides that, in turn, led to brutal, violent conflicts and suppression of Indigenous culture.
  • Dialect and slang are important in rap, Boubaker stressed, because “it is a question of using a popular spoken language in constant evolution and which incorporates foreign influences.”
  • Many emcees, more so than their Levantine or Khaleeji counterparts, utilize Afropop and Afro-fusion rhythms in their music as a nod to their home continent.
  • Afrobeats is a fusion of hip-hop, dancehall, soca, and other Black genres that can be identified by its use of African drums and a 3/2 time signature — different from a Western 4/4 time signature — that gives the genre its trademark dance tempo
  • For North African artists, use of these rhythms can be traced back to Black North Africans and Indigenous communities who are descendants of the slave trade. Boubaker shared that the different genres, namely gnawa in Morocco, diwan in Algeria, and stambali in Tunisia, are the result of a distinct weaving between the musicalities of North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Black Sufi tradition that can lead to a state of trance.
  • The stambali genre, Boubaker elaborated, is sung in a language derived from a mixture of Tunisian Arabic and the Houassa language spoken by the Hausas, a people of the Sahel, mainly in northern Nigeria and southern Niger who were part of the slave trade to Tunisia.
  • “Moroccan artists, early on, primarily referenced Malcolm X as a way to make the connection between race, Blackness, and Islam in the U.S. and embraced their own African identity through their music,” Almeida said. “The African theme has been going on for a while now.”
  • While Moroccan and Egyptian emcees found early opportunities, Tunisian and in particular Algerian artists did not have that initial access.
  • In Algeria, however, while the rap scene was up and coming, Almeida said the government actively worked to shut it down, which, she said, “really crushed everything.”That now looks different, with Algerian rappers even drawing influences from raï music and sampling prominent Algerian artists in their music.
  • Algerian artists of the 1990s and up to the present day are now primarily recording their music in France, Spain, and other European countries to then broadcast back to Algeria and the rest of North Africa. This is a subtle but noticeable diversion away from seeking opportunities in the traditional Middle East/North Africa hubs of music and culture such as Cairo, Beirut, and Baghdad.
  • “We just have to go back to our history, and we need to start loving ourselves and we need to recognize who we truly are because we’re not Arabs. 100% being Egyptian and being Moroccan is straight up being African and straight up being proud. And this is why I never have any issue representing mahraganat in my music because this is Egyptian music. I’m proud of my double cultures. I’m proud of my continent, and I really want to showcase it everywhere.”
  • North African rappers today are using hip-hop to express what it means to be who they are in the context of their country, their continent, and their lived experiences. And while there is a deep and painful colonial history associated with this music, the artistic yield has been profound not just for the region but the world.
Ed Webb

Corsican language ban stirs protest on French island | France | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...stirs-protest-on-french-island

France Corsica language identity culture separatism

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • A court in Corsica has prompted outrage by banning the use of the Corsican language in the island’s local parliament.The court in the city of Bastia cited France’s constitution it its ruling on Thursday that French was the only language allowed in the exercise of public office.Corsican, which is close to standard Italian and has about 150,000 native speakers, is considered by the UN’s cultural organisation Unesco to be in danger of becoming extinct.
  • the court said local rules effectively establishing “the existence of a Corsican people” were also a violation of the constitution.
  • Macron said last month that he had “no taboos” about reforming the status of Corsica, which is a sunny Mediterranean island beloved by holidaymakers. But he insisted that Corsica had to remain part of France.
Ed Webb

Invisibility and Negrophobia in Algeria - Arab Reform Initiative - 0 views

www.arab-reform.net/...ity-and-negrophobia-in-algeria

Africa Algeria race racism slavery colonialism history migration migrants

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In post-independence Algeria, autocratic elites have chosen to characterize the Algerian people as a homogenous block with a single culture (Arab-Islamic), religion (Islam), and language (Arabic) because they consider diversity to be a source of division and a threat to the country’s stability and their hold on power. Identity issues, which the regime insists on controlling, are also used to divide and rule. Aware of this, from the beginning, the Hirak downplayed identity and difference within the movement while focusing on getting rid of le pouvoir (Algeria’s military elite and their civilian allies that rule and exploit the country) as a whole, root and branch.
  • placing pressure on existing tensions between Arabs and Amazighs (Berbers) and between Islamists and secularists
  • in Saharan areas, the slave trade continued throughout the period of French settler colonialism (1830-1962)
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  • Anti-Black racism has only increased in Algeria with the arrival of tens of thousands of sub-Saharan Black, largely clandestine, migrants over the last two decades, who enter Algeria for educational or economic opportunities, or more often, to travel through the country en route to Europe.
  • 20-25% of Algerians are native Amazigh speakers (Tamazight), and many more are Arabized Amazighs. The indigenous Amazighs have been struggling for equality since independence against a state determined to impose an Arab Muslim identity on the country’s entire population
  • Amazigh activists have challenged the state’s assertion of Arab-Muslim homogeneity. Amazigh activism, in the form of mass protests and the undertakings of Amazigh-dominated political parties and civil society organizations, has pressured the state to constitutionally accept Amazigh identity as one of the components of Algerian identity, integrate the Amazigh language in secondary education, and recognize the Amazigh language as a national and later an official language of the state, in addition to Arabic
  • Black people, who were present in southern Algeria even before the 13- century-long  trans-Saharan slave trade, can be considered to be as indigenous to Algeria as the Amazigh population.
  • following a regional trend to repress diversity issues, the Algerian government has never taken a census to ascertain the total number of Algerian black citizens in the country, most of whom remain concentrated in the Saharan south. Ninety-one percent of the Algerian population lives along the Mediterranean coast on 12% of the country's total land mass.
  • Because most black Algerians are scattered in the vast southern Sahara, an area of the country about which many Algerians are not familiar, white Algerians may be only dimly aware, if aware at all, that they have black compatriots.25Ouzani, op.cit. Certainly, many black Algerians have reported that they face incredulity when claiming their national identity in northern Algeria at police roadblocks, airports, and even in doing everyday ordinary things like responding to a request for the time, “When I walk in the street and someone wants to ask me the time, he does it in French, convinced that he is dealing with a Nigerien or a Chadian, a way of indicating that an Algerian cannot be black.”
  • When Algerians think of “racial” discrimination, it is likely that they first think of the treatment Algerian Arabs and Amazighs received at the hands of the French during the colonial period (1830-1962), and afterwards in France.27Kamel Daoud, “Black in Algeria? Then You’d Better be Muslim” The New York Times, May 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/opinion/kamel-daoud-black-in-algeria-then-youd-better-be-muslim.html . See also Seloua Luste Boulbina, “Si tu desires te Moquer du Noir: Habille-le en rouge”, Middle East Eye, 24 November 2018. https://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/opinion-fr/si-tu-desires-te-moquer-du-noir-habille-le-en-rouge-0 The debate over Algeria as a post-colonial society has been fully engaged. However, in another sign of the invisibility of Algeria’s black citizens, consideration of Algeria as a post-slave society – and what that means for black Algerians today – has not
  • elites were also leaders of Third Worldism, and officially believed in pan-Africanism. Ahmed Ben Bella, Algeria’s first post-independence president, declared in Accra, Ghana, in 1963: “It was the imperialists who tried to distinguish between the so-called white and black Africans.”
  • Black Algerians find themselves in a perplexing situation during the current slow-moving peaceful Hirak for democracy. Concentrated in the Saharan south of the country, to an extent, Black Algerians are literally not visible to other Algerian citizens – self-identified white Arabs and Amazighs – who are overwhelmingly found on the northern Mediterranean coast. Nevertheless, Black Algerians are indigenous to Algeria’s Sahara,7Marie Claude Chamla, “Les populations anciennes du Sahara et des regions limitrophes,” Laboratoires d’Anthropologie du Musee de l’Homme et de l’Institut de Paleontologie Humaine, Paris 1968, p. 81. and hundreds of thousands of others, across 13 centuries, were enslaved and forced across the desert to Algeria from sub-Saharan Africa. The history of servitude has stigmatized Black Algerians, generated Negrophobia, and fostered a need – so far unrealized – for the mobilization of civil society organizations and the Algerian state to combat anti-Black racism in the country
  • Partly due to pressure on Algeria to control its borders from the European Union, Black sub-Saharan African migrants have been vilified by the Algerian government and some of the press;59https://insidearabia.com/algeria-desert-deportations-eu-migration/ accused – usually falsely – of violence, selling drugs, promiscuity, spreading venereal diseases, perpetuating anarchy, and raping Algerian women.
  • The French accommodated slavery in the Algerian Sahara more than anywhere else. Slave masters and merchants were given permission to trade in slaves and keep those they owned well into the twentieth century.35Ibid. In exchange, slavers and merchants provided intelligence on far-off regions to colonial authorities
  • there is reason to believe that enslaved black people continue to be exploited for agricultural work in the southern oases of Ouargla and Ghardaia provinces to this day (among wealthy families, owners of large palm trees, fields, and farms) and in some instances among semi-nomadic Tuareg
  • The Algerian state has never adopted any policies, including any affirmative action policies, to help their black community emerge from the impact of generations of servitude and brutalization.40Brower, op.cit. Instead, it has sought to legitimize the country’s white Arab-Muslim identity only
  • descendants of freed Black slaves (Haratins) in Saharan regions of Algeria often remain dependent upon former “masters.” Most work as sharecroppers in conditions similar to slavery
  • Black Algerians also face discrimination in urban areas of the country. They encounter the same racist attitudes and racial insults as any other person with dark skin within Algerian borders.
  • Either by their colour, k’hal, which is twisted into kahlouche (blackie), mer ouba (charcoal), guerba kahla (a black gourd to hold water made out of goatskin), nigro batata (big nose that resembles a potato), haba zeitouna (black olive), babay (nigger), akli (Black slave in some Berber areas), rougi  (redhead or Swedish to imply that the black person is culturally and socially white, as everyone must want to be), saligani (from Senegal) 46Khiat, op.cit., Calling black Algerians Saligani (from Senegal) has a different history. It refers back to the early decades of the 20th century when the French utilized black West-African soldiers in their colonial army to do the dirty work of colonialization, including brutalizing members of the population that resisted French rule, taking food from farmers, and rape. or by direct references to past servile status: hartani (dark black slave or ex-slave forced to work outside the master’s house), khadim (servant), ouacif (domestic slave), ‘abd (slave), ‘abd m’cana (stinky black slave).47Ibid. Using these terms against a black Algerian passerby establishes difference, contempt, strangeness, rejection, distance, and exclusion
  • In addition to racial insults, a black Algerian academic has noted, “Our community continues to symbolize bad luck. Worse: in the stories of grandmothers, we play the bad roles, kidnappers of children, looters, or vagrants. [While Arabs and Berbers can both point to a proclaimed noble history in Algeria] there is no place for a black hero in the collective memory of my people.”
  • In addition to rejection of interracial marriages, an Algerian intellectual has reported cases of “white” Algerians refusing to room with Blacks or study with them at university
  • A step forward in reducing Negrophobia, the selection of Khadija Benhamou, a black woman from the Algerian Sahara, as Miss Algeria in 2019 has been marred by the subsequent deluge of posts on social media virulently claiming that she did not represent the beauty of the country, with many direct attacks against the colour of her skin.
  • Arab-Berber whites constructed an economy that relied on black slave labour from their Haratins (enslaved or recently freed Islamicized and Arabized Blacks, who are still susceptible to forced labour practices).31These ambiguously freed black slaves in Saharan areas of Algeria are also called Bella or Ikelan if they were enslaved by Amazighs, including Tuaregs. Today Haratins, mostly sharecroppers, work under harsh labour conditions that some have described as a modern form of slavery, they “dig and tend wells, excavate and maintain the underground channels of foggara, irrigate gardens, tend to flocks, and cultivate dates”.32Benjamine Claude Brower, “Rethinking Abolition in Algeria,” Cahier D’etudes Africaines 49, 2009 Some argue that without the labour of enslaved Black people, the Sahara would never have been habitable at all.33Ibid. The arduous and relentless work to irrigate in a desert includes digging channels tens of feet into the sand with the risk of being drowned under it.
  • Without irony, some graffiti and social media posts called on the migrants to “Go back to Africa.”
  • Three generations after independence, the Algerian state is still resisting the open public debate and civil society engagement needed to reflect the country’s pluralism and to begin to reckon with slave legacies and racial discrimination
Ed Webb

From sardines to a new language of politics? An interview with Paul Ginsborg | openDemo... - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...litics-interview-paul-ginsborg

Italy politics Bologna protests demonstrations

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Feb 20 - Cached
  • November a new protest movement spread, quite unexpectedly, across Italy. At first glance its participants seemed rather silly. The ‘sardines’, as they called themselves, occupied to overflowing Bologna’s famous Piazza Grande, bearing images and placards of the eponymous fish, a symbol which, according to the organisers was to represent togetherness, non-violence and freedom on a massive scale.
  • 90 piazzas were briefly occupied, the overall numbers involved in spontaneous protest being the greatest since the Second World War
  • Why this movement in particular has been picked up I don’t know. They’ve certainly used social media to the maximum. But if we are uncertain about causes, there can be no doubt about effects. They’ve interrupted the polls. They’ve already made Salvini dip a whole percentage point, which is big. Clearly, they’re serving some purpose.
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  • They respond that they are far from being apolitical but are rather apartitica, that is bitterly against the malpractices of the Italian political parties for many decades…
  • The movement is at its beginning and will evolve rapidly. At its heart is the rejection of violence. There has been a great, unspoken shift from the politics of militant groups like the Red Brigades in the 1970s to the cult of nonviolence and the massive espousal of pacifism. The sardines are completely ‘innocent’ in the narrow political sense, so their critics don’t know what to do. In times like these, pacifism itself is a radical agenda.
  • the organisers have revealed how useful non-violence can be in bypassing the logic of right-wing populism
  • In Italy no one listens to anybody else in political meetings. Instead they gather at the back of the room and conspire
  • All too often meetings end way beyond schedule and with the dominion of male activists late at night. It’s a shocking but perennial way of operating
  • The M5S has failed, or is in the process of failing. This is what gives the sardines space to move. It’s extremely interesting to note how Italy has moved from traditional representative parliamentary government to M5S’s fixation on forms of participatory democracy. But they blew it in a big way. The overall impression they made was not of a genuine participatory model but rather of a false one, seasoned with reverential attitudes towards their leader Beppe Grillo. Then there’s the Rousseau platform, their organising platform, the inner mechanisms of which remain a hierarchal mystery. Here we meet trompe-l'œil democracy. Essentially, around thirty thousand members of the movement - which actually is much larger than that – use polls and questionnaires to decide the line of the party. Meanwhile the political line is clearly dictated by the leadership, which is made up of five or six people
  • This is one of the main concerns today in my opinion: what would a reformism mean that is not just about receiving top down benefits from the welfare state, and ever fewer of these as austerity becomes a permanent feature? Families desperately need these services, but one wonders, is there a possibility of inventing another sort of reformism, more political and participatory in which one reform acts as a sort of snowball for the next one? People of all kinds could perhaps come to understand that the realm of politics is not separate but rather intimately linked to every-day life.
Ed Webb

Arabpop: Metamorphosing Italian anti-Arabism into a creative media marvel - 0 views

english.alaraby.co.uk/...hallenging-italys-anti-arabism

Italy Africa MENA Arabs culture media translation art literature Islam mediterranean

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Arabpop the magazine found a home in the Neapolitan indie publishing house Tamu — the Italian South has always been more ready to embrace its Arab culture, often being mocked by right-wing Italian politicians and their supporters, who openly dream about dividing Italy into North and South and often refer to the South as ‘Africa’, ‘Morocco’ or something along those lines.
  • While the team of editors is fully Italian, some contributing journalists are Italians with an Arab background while most of the writers are Arabs.
  • By curating and translating the work of contemporary Arab poets, writers, visual artists and journalists based around a specific theme, Arabpop aims to fill a gap in accessibility to Arab stories specifically catering to people who are interested in what goes on in the Arab world beyond the daily headlines.
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  • while there is a wealth of academic texts to be found, little is written about Arab culture that is suitable for the general public
  • While it’s merely a coincidence that Arabpop came out almost exactly 20 years after 9/11, Comito does refer to the extreme rise in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment that manifested itself since then, both in politics and society. “I say this at every presentation: a large part of the problem is the media, which in the last 20 years since the attack on the Twin Towers have unleashed a terrifying anti-Islam and anti-Arab country propaganda.”
  • Other highlights include an excerpt from the 2016 book Paolo by celebrated Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha, which is so thoughtfully translated that you wish everyone could read Arabic translated into Italian – the cadence, the poetry of the mundane, the flow of the story shows how perfectly the two languages sway together when approached with a passion for language and culture and attention for detail.
Ed Webb

The Post-WWI Migrations That Built Yugoslavia and Turkey Have Left a Painful Legacy - N... - 0 views

newlinesmag.com/...key-have-left-a-painful-legacy

Turkey Balkans Greece Yugoslavia Bulgaria Albania history migration nationalism Kosovo Serbia Romania minorities

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • the religious, ethnic and linguistic diversity that characterized their territories in the Middle East and Eastern Europe no longer chimed with the new world order being organized around nation-states
  • Designing measures such as the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923, the League of Nations legitimized demographic engineering policies and made migration an intrinsic part of nation-building. With international encouragement, the states with Muslim minorities in the Balkans devised multipronged policies to push out the citizens they saw as undesirable. Turkey became the only destination for Balkan Muslims, even when they were not Turkish.
  • in 1938 Belgrade and Ankara concluded a little-known agreement to transfer 200,000 Yugoslav citizens to Turkey. The transfer did not materialize because of the start of World War II, but the migrations did eventually take place and continued into the 1950s. For both Yugoslavia and Turkey, new states created in the aftermath of World War I, migration was an important part of nation-building.
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  • took as its model another such deal between Turkey and Romania in 1936 as well as the better-known Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923
  • During the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria invaded the remaining Ottoman territories in Europe. Within several months, an estimated 1 million Muslims vanished, murdered and expelled from the regions taken over by these states. The shocking magnitude of the violence, which continued into World War I, made many Muslims wary of their future in the new nation-states and incited migration to the Ottoman Empire, itself in the midst of conflict.
  • Focus on religious identity allowed for a formal incorporation of these rather diverse populations into the Turkish national body. The asylum policy and the settlement laws defined migrants as Turks and those “affiliated with Turkish culture” to encompass all the Slav, Albanian and Greek Muslims, making Turkey­­ a safe haven for Muslim minorities fleeing oppressive regimes.
  • Dispossession, expulsions and massacres of diverse Muslim populations were already a grim reality of nation-building in southeastern Europe in the 19th century, when Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria were carved out of Ottoman provinces. In fact, the conquests of Ottoman Europe after 1699 normalized expulsion and compulsory conversion of local Muslims in the lost territories
  • Forced processes of homogenization are still part of the repertoire of nation-state building, and continue to shape our understanding of world order. Muslim presence in the southeastern periphery of Europe likewise continues to be viewed as problematic and even dangerous: As Piro Rexhepi observed in the book “White Enclosures,” their integration continues to be desirable for security but impossible racially.
  • In the 1920s, Catholic missionaries working in neighboring Kosovo, a former Ottoman province inhabited by Albanian Muslim and Christian populations and similarly incorporated into Southern Serbia, sent reports of massacres, assassinations, imprisonment and forced labor in a memorandum to the League of Nations, receiving no response.
  • 19th-century definitions of South Slavic brotherhood envisioned Slav Muslims as potentially assimilable, distinguishing between “the Turks” as the non-Slavic Ottomans and “our Turks,” that is, Slav Muslims
  • so-called reform also included the vast properties of the Islamic pious endowments. Schools, mosques and Sufi lodges lost the land and incomes that were used to operate educational, religious and community services. Some land appropriations were symbolic: The 15th-century Burmali Mosque that visually defined Skopje’s main thoroughfare was simply torn down
  • Ivo Andric, an admired novelist and Yugoslav Nobel laureate, was also one of the highest-ranking Yugoslav diplomats in the interwar period. Eager to finalize the population transfer agreement with Turkey, he advised the government in Belgrade that Turkey was not only interested in the small group of ethnic Turks in Yugoslavia but also populations akin to Turks in their “mentality.” Repeating a constant theme in almost all of Andric’s novels, Muslims were described in his diplomatic correspondence as alien to the Balkans. For Andric, they were “Turks leftover in the territories of our Kingdom.”
  • over 2,000 Bosnians were settled along with Greek Muslims in the town of Izmir.
  • Turkish officials, faced with the constant influx of migrants, pursued agreements with the Balkan states that would offset the costs of migrant settlement. The 1934 Balkan Pact included minority clauses that allowed Turkish citizens to sell their properties in their former homelands. Turkish administrators also considered requesting an estimated payment from the Balkan nation-states to match the value of the properties that Balkan Muslims were forced to leave behind.
  • The Turkish Republic saw population growth as beneficial for economic development and national defense in the long term, as it worked to populate its eastern and western borderlands. Moreover, many of Turkey’s early administrators, as migrants and children of migrants themselves, understood these new waves of migration from a personal perspective.
  • Laws barred those speaking languages other than Turkish from settling in groups and limited the “foreign” presence to no more than 10% of a municipality, though the realities of the period frequently made these laws impossible to execute. The locals took on much of the burden of helping newcomers, begrudgingly sharing public resources. At the same time, the immigrants provided necessary manpower and introduced new methods in agriculture and certain industries. While Balkan languages largely disappeared with the following generation, enduring legacies, such as Balkan cuisine and music evoking the most personal memories of exile, acquired a place in the Turkish national heritage.
  • Today, no official recognition of the violent policies of “unmixing” exists, and barely anyone has heard of Yugoslavia’s attempted population transfer of 1939.
  • the international community’s preferred solutions to “ethnic conflicts” in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo remain equally tied to principles of nationalist homogenization and demarcation. A century after the foundation of modern Turkey and the first Yugoslavia, the legacies of that era’s mass migration and state violence persist.
Ed Webb

Appease and enable: The West's disastrous Russia and Turkey policies - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.eu/...sastrous-russi-turkey-policies

opinion diplomacy military politics authoritarianism Erdogan Putin Turkey Russia NATO EU

shared by Ed Webb on 24 May 22 - No Cached
  • Western powers once again make excuses for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, understanding Turkey’s mysterious “legitimate security concerns,” which often equates to a license to kill. But by appeasing him for the sake of “keeping” the country within NATO, they miss the point that the Turkish leader is not so different from Russian President Vladimir Putin — and that once again, a policy of appeasement simply won’t work. 
  • Turkey has been allowed to indulge in its long-running double game, continuing to play Russia and the West against each other, delivering pre-ordered drones to Kyiv on the one hand, while ignoring sanctions against Moscow and opposing Finland and Sweden’s applications to join NATO on the other. 
  • the systems Erdoğan and Putin have crafted disregard the rule of law and supersede it with one-man rule, as they both have surrounded themselves by oligarchs and yes-men. Both countries are undemocratic, their elections neither free nor fair,  their regimes pushing narratives and pursuing actions that are irredentist, revisionist and bellicose
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  • This cynical agenda is driven by the fear of losing “NATO partner Turkey” to Russia. In addition, Europeans have been avoiding jeopardizing their economic interests in Turkey and are fearful of placing their refugee deal with Ankara at risk.
  • There are strong similarities between Russian arrogance toward Ukrainians and Turkish high-handedness toward the Kurds.Ankara targets anything that sounds or looks Kurdish — inside or outside the country. And both Erdoğan and Putin see it as their historic missions to “civilize” these “substandard” and finally “non-existing” nations, to invoke their right to self-defense and preventive strikes against Nazis and terrorists respectively, who they say threaten to attack “peace-loving” Russia or Turkey.
  • In Turkish-occupied northern Syria, the Kurdish language is banned in official institutions and schools and replaced by Turkish, much like in occupied Ukrainian land, where Russian has ousted the Ukrainian and Turkish Tatar languages.
  • Appeasers fail to understand that Western standards, values and principles are obstacles to the functioning of these regimes
  • they cannot be engaged through values and rules-based approaches but need to be treated as what they are — security threats.
Ed Webb

'Qualification Passport' Enables Refugees to Study, Work in Countries of Exile | Voice ... - 0 views

www.voanews.com/...ees-study-work-countries-exile

refugees UN UNESCO qualifications

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • More often than not, refugees and migrants who have had a secondary or tertiary education at home have difficulty applying for higher education or finding work commensurate with their skills in their new countries.  They often lack the certificates proving they have completed their studies. The UNESCO Qualification Passport is a standardized document, which contains information about the person’s qualifications, job experience and language proficiency.   
  • this is for helping refugees.  Then there is the other side of the coin, which is to give hosting countries the opportunity to valorize human capital they have
Ed Webb

Can Culture Make You an Italian Citizen? - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...ship-culture-blood-immigration

Italy race migration immigration citizenship law reforme advocacy

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Jan 20 - Cached
  • This past October, the Italian Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee brought back to the table the discussion about a reform of the citizenship law currently in force, which dates back to 1992 and mainly awards Italian citizenship through blood ties. The so-called jus culturae (Latin for “cultural right”) would offer a third alternative to the more common jus soli and jus sanguinis, which recognize birthright citizenship and citizenship by bloodlines, respectively. The reform instead proposes citizenship by cultural assimilation, mainly through the Italian education system, and aims to support demographic growth in a country with low birth rates.
  • during the 2017-2018 academic year, 842,000 “foreign” students enrolled at Italian public schools didn’t have Italian citizenship. (The report labels as foreign those students who hold residence permits but not Italian nationality.) If approved, the law will deliver automatic citizenship to all those children who were born in or entered Italy before turning 12 and finished at least five years of Italian schooling.
  • Next Generation Italy, a grassroots group of first- and second-generation Italians. Their work aims to give a voice to young Italians with immigrant backgrounds who do not feel sufficiently represented in Italian politics and are now asserting the importance of their citizenship rights and demanding fair representation in politics. It’s a rare opportunity for Italians to hear and learn directly from those affected by Italy’s immigration policies—rather than from politicians with no skin in the game.
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  • As many migrants lost their jobs or could only find illegal job options during the economic crisis, they often have trouble providing evidence of continuous legal residence in the country for 10 years. Because of the high costs of the application process—250 euros ($275) just to submit the application form, plus other bureaucratic expenses—entire families simply give up.
  • the main challenge is the inability of politicians to make a clear distinction between migrants temporarily landing in Italy as a result of the refugee crisis and generations of immigrants who have been living in the country for decades, since the end of World War II.
  • The 2018 populist coalition, consisting of the Five Star Movement and Matteo Salvini’s far-right League party, built its entire campaign, both for national and EU elections, around the issue of migration
  • populist parties continue to advocate ethnic nationalism and are now avoiding the citizenship question, in accordance with their promises made to voters. On the other hand, Italy’s Democratic Party had tried to promote immigrants’ rights in order to attract the pro-migrant side of the population, but they have done so without concrete results. Second-generation Italians remain the main losers on this political battlefield.
  • Saidi said he’s always found it odd that the current law recognizes citizenship rights for descendants of the Italian diaspora worldwide who no longer speak the language or never visited the country, but not to youngsters who, like him, have grown up in Italy, attended Italian schools, and fully embraced Italian culture and lifestyle
  • Recently, a group of graduates from the University of Bologna launched the Boundless Identities Project, which aims to send DNA tests to Italian politicians in 2020 and challenge them to unravel their not-so-Italian origins.
  • young people with immigrant backgrounds are everywhere in Italy, except in crucial sectors of Italian society such as media and politics.
  • In May, Antonella Bundu, a candidate for mayor in Florence, attracted attention for her darker skin and curly hair rather than for her work. Media coverage about her focused more on clickbait headlines about her mixed-race background (her father comes from Sierra Leone) and less on her policy proposals. Although Bundu is Italian, she has been labeled a foreigner due to her looks, and she lost the election to the incumbent mayor
  • “Older generations don’t fully grasp the idea of modern identity. For them, Italians cannot yet be associated with darker skin, a hijab, or oriental features. But millennials seem more open-minded on this matter,”
  • Kaabour said the first time he truly felt Italian was in 2004, during a university exchange in France through the Erasmus program. There, he realized that the French seemed to accept his dual identity as both Arab and Italian far more than anyone at home—a damning indictment of Italian society, given France’s long-standing history of racism toward people of North African descent.
  • Although recent statistics show that seven out of 10 Italians are in favor of the reform, Gulia believes more years of education aimed at normalizing a multicultural Italy are needed before an actual change will come. Starting in elementary schools, he said, is the way forward because “the difference at the moment is only perceived by adults,” as older generations were raised on myths and stereotypes about immigrants, compared to today’s youth
  • In the past five years, more millennials are trying to prove their capacity to influence political sentiments through panels and meetings, rather than continuing to live as ghosts in the place they consider their home country.
  • “Our tests are just a means to awaken Italians on the unsustainable idea that being Italian is something exclusively connected to blood.”
Ed Webb

Muslim Sicily and the First Reconquista - Byzantine Emporia - 0 views

byzantinemporia.com/uslim-sicily-first-reconquista

Sicily history Italy mediterranean Islam Christianity minorities cuture syncretism tolerance Byzantium Arabs Normans

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • the island grew in some ways more cosmopolitan. Sicily had been something of a backwater under Byzantium, lying at the furthest reaches of the empire. Muslim Sicily was much more central to the Islamic world: it enjoyed easy communication with the friendly ports of Syria, Egypt, Spain, and North Africa.
  • The island’s governor transferred the capital to Palermo and undertook a major building program there. Palaces, mosques, baths, and public buildings were erected to make the city worthy of a great kingdom. The population swelled as Palermo drew people from all over, soon making it one of the largest cities in the Mediterranean.
  • Palermo soon began to rival Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and Cordoba.
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  • The Arabs introduced new crops and irrigation techniques, turning the island into a major producer of pistachios, citrus, sugarcane, and cotton. These cash crops were exported to all the major ports of the Mediterranean.
  • Pirates were expelled from their nest in southern France. Genoa, recovering from complete destruction by Arab pirates in 934, and Pisa, which also suffered devastating raids, began undertaking retaliatory expeditions. They started by clearing out bases on Corsica and Sardinia, and eventually went on to raid Ifriqiya itself.
  • as with the Spanish Reconquista and the Crusades, the reconquest of Sicily was spearheaded by warriors from northern Europe
  • The year was 1038, and the Byzantine Empire was at its height. Over the past century it had systematically broken the strength of several powerful enemies, and expanded their borders by hundreds of miles to recover lost territory. The treasury was full, the frontiers were secure, and the army was strong.
  • A large army was sent from the empire’s eastern provinces to Italy, where the commanders set about raising auxiliaries. The Normans were always eager for battle and loot, and so a corps of several hundred knights joined the army. Among its leaders was one William de Hauteville, accompanied by two of his younger brothers. The force crossed the Straits of Messina, and met with initial success. But after two years, the expedition fell apart from factional squabbles. First, the Normans abandoned the enterprise. They punched far above their weight and were crucial to several victories, but felt they received an inferior share of the spoils. Then a conflict between the Byzantine general and admiral caused the former to be recalled to Constantinople, dooming any chance of victory.
  • From the papacy’s perspective, the conquest of Muslim Sicily would serve several purposes. First and foremost, it would eliminate a dangerous enemy of Rome. Sicily was the nearest base for the Muslim sea-raiders that had long plagued Christian lands in the western Mediterranean. Arab corsairs had sacked St. Peter’s in 846, and even occupied part of Apulia for several decades. Second, it expanded the influence of Rome within Christendom itself. A long-brewing conflict between eastern and western divisions of the Church was reaching a head around this time. The Greek Patriarch in Constantinople resented papal claims to primacy over all Christendom, and had theological quibbles of his own with the Latin rite. By investing Robert Guiscard as duke of Sicily, the pope was asserting his power in what had long been Constaninople’s purview.
  • Up until the Norman conquest, the Byzantines had been de facto protectors of all Christians in Sicily. They were the last Christian power to rule the island, and had maintained close contacts with the its Christian population throughout the Muslim occupation, launching several expeditions to liberate their coreligionists. The success of the Normans put an end to this, and allowed the Church of Rome to assume authority over Greek Christians in southern Italy. With Latin Christendom directly abutting Muslim Sicily, the papacy took a new concern for Christians living under Islamic rule. The new holy struggle envisaged not just taking back land from Muslims, but winning over the faithful from the Byzantine rite. This dynamic would play out during the Crusades, as western Europeans conquered once-Byzantine lands from the Muslims.
  • The new kingdom was the richest and most advanced state of western Europe. In part, this was because it took full advantage of the talents of its Muslim population, which skilled tradesmen, merchants, and scholars. Whatever the pope’s religious motives behind granting the Normans the right to conquer Muslim Sicily, they cared most of all about power. As such, they happily patronized Arabs, Greeks, and Jews alike.
  • Muslims, Jews, and Byzantine Christians were all allowed a dignity and freedom of worship unheard of elsewhere in either Christian or Islamic lands. Indeed, they were treated with more than just haughty indifference; men of merit were held in high esteem, whatever their religion. Talented Greeks and Arabs were given high positions as administrators, and craftsmen of all faiths were employed by the court.
  • Norman governance concerned itself with taxation, military affairs, and justice, but various peoples were free to maintain separate customs and govern themselves at the communal level.
  • an astonishing amalgamation of wildly different styles: architects ornamented northern Gothic buildings with Arab designs, while Greek artists decorated the interiors with Byzantine mosaics. Nor was this fusion a strictly monumental phenomenon: the Tabula Rogeriana, a world atlas composed by an Arab geographer for Roger II, was produced as a bilingual Arabic-Latin text. The Sicilian court attracted scholars from as far afield as England and Baghdad, who then brought bits of its unique culture back to their homelands. This cultural exchange was much more than an accident of circumstance—the Norman kings took an active interest in the culture of the island, and several learned Arabic, Greek, and Sicilian. As late as 1250, the king of Sicily was fluent in all three languages.
  • One side-effect of the Norman reconquista was the gradual disappearance of Greek culture on the island. Southern Italy and Sicily had long maintained a Greek character, as far back as the first Euboean colonies of the 8th century BC. This had persisted under Roman rule, and was revitalized by later Byzantine reconquests.
  • the Normans expelled the last Byzantine garrison from Apulia in 1071, the same year as the siege of Palermo, and never again would a Greek power rule any part of Italy.
  • Over time, the Roman Church replaced Greek clergymen with Latins, and the Sicilian-speaking majority asserted its cultural power.
  • When the First Crusade was preached in 1095, the duke of Normandy and many other nobles took the cross, inspired by their cousins’ example. Within forty years of the Normans gaining a toehold in Muslim Sicily, Toledo and Jerusalem were back in Christian hands. Christian princes on both sides of the Mediterranean were aggressively expanding their domains, and everywhere Islam was in retreat. The Sicilian Reconquista was a precursor to these titanic clashes—itself not a holy war, but the opening act to the great crusading era.
  • Ed Webb on 12 Sep 21
     
    Despite its pro-Byzantine biases, even this account has to concede the reality of cultural synthesis and mutual toleration in Muslim and Norman Sicily
Ed Webb

Crusaders No More: What Arab Christians and Muslims Think ...... | News & Reporting | C... - 0 views

www.christianitytoday.com/...o-arab-christians-muslims.html

religion politics US USA opinion Muslims Christians education crusades

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • One month before Evangel, Valparaiso University, a Lutheran institution in Indiana, announced in February it was dropping its own Crusaders nickname. Last month, the school rechristened its sports teams the Beacons.
  • “As a Muslim, I was embarrassed to come to Valpo because the school’s mascot was a Crusader, even though my mom and older siblings went here before me,”
  • It is somewhat of a trend among Christian institutions, however. Wheaton College dropped its Crusaders nickname in 2000, followed by the University of the Incarnate Word in 2004, Northwest Christian (now Bushnell) University in 2008, Eastern Nazarene College in 2009, and Alvernia University and Northwest Nazarene University in 2017.
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  • about a dozen colleges still use it, including the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts
  • contemporaneous Muslims, Christians, and Jews all referred to the Middle Ages conflict as “the Wars of the Franks.” It was not until about the 18th century, Mikhail said, that Muslim polemicists began translating the conflict as “the Wars of the Cross-bearers.” But today, this is the term that has universal usage in Arabic.
  • most Middle Eastern Christians stood with the Muslims against the Crusaders.
  • “Christians and Muslims both have a lot of work to do in terms of revising elements of their religious language that poison everyday relations,” Accad said. “We have to create new symbols.”
  • I would never call myself a Crusader
Ed Webb

Erdogan, Sultan of Jerusalem? - 1 views

www.al-monitor.com/...st-jerusalem-erdogan-katz.html

Jerusalem Jordan Israel Palestine Turkey Erdogan Ottomans neo-ottomanism opinion analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • No one who has visited Jerusalem over the past few years will be surprised by the preponderance of red Turkish flags with their crescent and star, fluttering over the city’s eastern Palestinian neighborhoods. These flags are just one visible manifestation of a major effort by the Turkish government to establish a presence in the Israeli capital. Investigative reports in the press, conducted over the last few years, have revealed the scope of Turkish activity in Jerusalem, which includes the renovation of homes, restoration of mosques and efforts to expose the residents of East Jerusalem to Turkish culture, including cooking workshops and Turkish-language classes. These efforts also include increasing involvement in the affairs of Al-Aqsa Mosque, as described by Ben Caspit in July 2018.
  • Israel has decided to put an end to this Turkish involvement in Jerusalem affairs
  • Israel intends to revoke the head of TIKA’s diplomatic status in Jerusalem, effectively making his presence in Israel illegal. “The era of the Ottoman Empire is over. Turkey has no reason to be in Jerusalem,” said the Foreign Ministry in an especially bellicose statement. “[Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan’s declarations that Jerusalem belongs to all Muslims are absolutely baseless and ridiculous. Israel maintains sovereignty in Jerusalem, while ensuring freedom of worship for all religions. We will not allow anyone to interrupt this sovereignty.”
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  • Turks have renovated Mamluk buildings, which they then pass off as Ottoman. “Apart from the city walls, built by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, there aren’t many Ottoman sites in Jerusalem. In contrast, the Mamluks invested quite a bit on construction in Jerusalem, and that’s good enough for Erdogan,” he told Al-Monitor. “It demonstrates his desire to flood Jerusalem with ties to the Ottoman Empire.”
  • a neo-Ottoman policy that Erdogan has been promoting over the past few years. Its goal is to bolster Turkish control in Jerusalem
  • “As far as he is concerned, the fact that the Ottomans once ruled here means that he is no stranger to Jerusalem. He is also challenging Israeli sovereignty in the city. Turkish activity in Jerusalem is his way of engaging in the soft conquest of al-Quds [Jerusalem].”
  • “People wandering around East Jerusalem might think that they are visiting a Turkish city. There are voluminous amounts of flags, stickers and signage, and the Turkish presence is very obvious. This includes charitable activity. In winter, they distribute heaters, warm clothing and food stamps. Last Ramadan, they handed out $100 to all businesses in the Old City. They are involved in the educational system, they renovate buildings and they organize heavily subsidized and even free trips [from Turkey to Al-Aqsa Mosque]. As someone on the ground here, I am constantly surprised by the scope of this activity."
  • Israeli experts estimate that another person particularly concerned about the situation is King Abdullah of Jordan, who has a special status in Jerusalem as “Protector of the Holy Sites.” The Foreign Ministry’s statement refers to these Jordanian concerns. “In accordance with the peace treaty with Jordan, the Jordanians have a special status at the Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem. As such, we will not allow Erdogan to interfere with this special status, as they are doing now,” reads the statement.
  • the growing presence of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs in the Temple Mount compound. They come with lots of money, and their efforts are already bearing fruit. Erdogan’s popularity among the Palestinians is skyrocketing, and the main person to suffer for that is Jordan’s King Abdullah. He cannot compete with the funds that the Turks are pouring in, while his rhetoric on behalf of the Palestinians pales in comparison to Erdogan’s stinging attacks.”
  • “Erdogan’s ultimate goal is Erdogan himself. He wants to become 'Sultan of all Muslims.' Unlike Iran, for example, which has no access to Jerusalem, Turkey does have access to the city. Israel allows him to operate on the ground and emblazon Jerusalem prominently on his personal banner. This positions him as the greatest Muslim leader in the world.”
  • “He wants to return to rule over all those lands that were once controlled by the Ottoman Empire. We are witnessing Turkish activity of this kind not only in the Middle East but in the Balkans and Caucasus too
  • Mordechai Goldman has served for the past few years as the diplomatic and military analyst of the ultra-Orthodox daily Hamevaser. He attended ultra-Orthodox rabbinical colleges and studied psychology at the Israeli Open University. He also participated in the national civil service program. Goldman lectures to ultra-Orthodox audiences on the diplomatic process and on the Israel Defense Forces and consults with companies in regard to the ultra-Orthodox sector.
Ed Webb

Portugal's Sardine Capitalism Is a Post-Pandemic Economic Model - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...alism-is-a-model-for-the-world

EU Italy Portugal Spain Greece Ireland Eire economy migration Euro

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Oct 21 - Cached
  • Portugal’s colonies are long gone, but the country’s penchant for charting its own course lives on in its uncanny ability to maintain what is arguably the European Union’s most successful mixed economy. Despite the global financial crisis a decade ago and the more recent economic downturn driven by the pandemic, Portugal has emerged as a growth model for Europe’s smaller economies, which have struggled to balance cultural traditions and political values against the demands of much larger economies—such as Germany, France, and Italy—with which they share the euro.
  • Portugal has found a formula for maintaining Western Europe’s most reasonable cost of living, relatively low unemployment, steady economic growth, and general public contentment in an age of polarization
  • The 2008-2009 financial crisis exposed the weaknesses and contradictions of the eurozone project. Lumping economies like France and Germany into a single currency with the likes of Latvia, Cyprus, and Greece led to trouble. Unable to devalue a national currency—the classic economic answer to a sovereign debt crisis—weaker eurozone economies nearly lost access to international markets. The solution imposed by the continent’s apex economies, led by the Germans, was an austerity so deep it crippled smaller economies for more than a decade.
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  • a country of 10 million citizens whose primary influence on global affairs these days is the fact that its language is still spoken by about 240 million people in the far-flung lands it once ruled, including Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, and East Timor. With the world’s 34th largest economy—known mostly for sardines, soccer, and Port wine until recently—Portugal has managed to defy stereotypes about southern European nations (supposedly lazy and imprudent) and countries run by socialists (inefficient and uncompetitive) to combine growth, social cohesion, and quality of life
  • Spurred in part by unusually generous tax and immigration policies aimed at luring wealthy northern Europeans and North Americans to resettle, the country’s expat population has exploded from about 100,000 people at the turn of the century to nearly a half million people in 2020, when the rate of increase slowed for the first time since the financial crisis due to COVID-19, according to a report by Portugal’s Foreigners and Border Service. Even so, the overall number grew by 12.2 percent in 2020, and that has increased as restrictions were loosened this year.
  • Italy, with the highest debt-to-GDP rate among the world’s large economies (158 percent), has never recovered from the disastrous collapse it suffered after 2008. That year, Italy was a $2.39 trillion economy. At the end of 2020, it was a $1.9 trillion economy, a loss of 20 percent of its economic heft, since 2010. Spain, though not as indebted, has an unemployment rate in the high teens since the crisis began and remains at 15.3 percent today.
  • Socialist governments gave way to social democrats in 2015, then back to socialists in 2021. Along the way, Portugal resisted troika pressure to accept a second tranche of bailout funds and shook free from foreign-imposed austerity
  • One reason beyond beautiful beaches, low prices, and great seafood for this influx is the “Golden Visa” rule whereby Portugal allowed foreigners who purchase sufficiently expensive real estate to obtain a residency visa for renewable for five years, at which point they can begin the process of obtaining citizenship. Already a popular retirement destination for the British, Germans, and other EU sun-seekers, a new wave of Chinese, Russian, Arab, and North American money began to flow when the rule was enacted in 2012. Not surprisingly, Portugal, in the words of global law firm DLA Piper, “is currently considered by many to be the most attractive country in Europe for foreign investment.”
  • what we do well is hospitality, and natural beauty, and sardines
  • The price of real estate, especially in popular tourist destinations like Lisbon, Porto, and the sandy shores of the Algarve, has skyrocketed. This trend is not consistent with a country that prides itself on holding down the cost of living. Angry at seeing the prospect of homeownership—or even a reasonable tenancy—pushed over the horizon, groups like Stop Despejos (“Stop Evictions”) and Morar em Lisboa (“Live in Lisbon”) have held protests and disrupted new developments.
  • The idea that Portugal, besides being an attractive place to retire to, is also emerging as a model for smaller European countries has stoked national pride
  • Portugal remains burdened with a lot of government debt: about 155 percent of GDP at the end of 2020, according to the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s a lot of debt, but it follows an economic crisis that demanded spending. And again, it’s not the 236 percent of GDP that burdens Greece or even the 160 percent of GDP hovering over the United States.
Ed Webb

Un-Mooring Race in Sicilian Folklore: The Tradition of "Testa di Moro" | by ACMRS Arizo... - 0 views

medium.com/...-of-testa-di-moro-878a9e8cbe20

Sicily history culture race identities art analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • Sicily has a centuries-long history of complex negotiations with its African heritage (it was ruled, among others, by the Phoenicians, Aghlabids, and Fatimids), and it continuously reexamines its role as a locus of cross-cultural encounters and imperialistic fantasies. Moreover, the island is now at the center of anti-immigration rhetorics, with episodes of xenophobia and racism directed against migrants from Africa and the eastern Mediterranean
  • there is a direct line of continuity between teste di moro and the head-shaped vases produced in ancient Greece and Italy, which often depicted Black African youths. In the late Middle Ages, large and elaborate flower vases in polychrome majolica (called albahaquero from the Spanish word for “basil,” albahaca) became very popular in Spain and Morocco. Further into the early modern period, Europeans’ interest in the Ottoman Empire generated a robust demand for commodities that would allow for the consumption of a culture that inspired fear and fascination. Portraits of Ottoman men and women (whether authentic or based on European subjects dressed in Ottoman garb) were sought after in Venice, Florence, and elsewhere in Italy, including Sicily: majolica vases such as this one from early modern Palermo are a close antecedent to teste di moro.
  • the early modern popularity of the testa di moro capitalized on the European fascination with the male Black body as a symbol of dominance over the Mediterranean
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  • The tale of Lisabetta da Messina inaugurated the motif of the dismembered head placed into a vase and enjoyed several adaptations across regions and languages, such as the early modern murder ballad “The Bramble Briar,” which transferred the story to a village in Somerset. The folktale of teste di moro falls into this reception history, as attested by a more simple variant, in which the two lovers are decapitated as punishment for initiating an impossible interracial romance.
  • By appropriating Boccaccio’s exploration of Sicily as a locus of the macabre and projecting it onto the island’s premodern past under Muslim rule, the iconography and lore surrounding teste di moro inscribe fantasies of Mediterranean exchange within a commodified body that can be admired and reproduced for everyone to possess. Much like the port of Messina in Boccaccio’s tale (and others in the Decameron) or the resort in The White Lotus, the medieval Palermo of this folktale is a node within a broader maritime network. All three are places where peoples meet to trade in cultures, sex, and desire; if the exchange is unsatisfactory for one of the involved parties, they are also places in which one can also meet a violent end.
  • the displaced Muslim body becomes desirable only as a disembodied and sublimated commodity, to be pleasurably displayed in one’s garden or salotto — a stark contrast to the lived experience of other displaced non-European bodies living or passing through contemporary Sicily
Ed Webb

Lebanon, Israel reach 'historic agreement' on maritime borders | News | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...draft-deal-on-maritime-borders

Israel diplomacy Lebanon USA US energy gas maritime border borders mediterranean

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Lebanon and Israel have reached a “historic” deal to end a long-running maritime border dispute in the gas-rich Mediterranean Sea, according to negotiators from the two countries.
  • Lebanon’s presidency voiced hope that “the agreement on the demarcation will be announced as soon as possible”. Aoun had previously said that a deal would not signify a “partnership” with Israel. The two countries are technically at war.
  • The deal would resolve a territorial dispute in the eastern tip of the Mediterranean Sea in an area where Lebanon aims to explore for natural gas, and near waters where Israel has already found commercially viable quantities of hydrocarbons.
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  • Lebanon had previously had a number of concerns about the border. The first related to a borderline marked by buoys that was created by Israel as its forces withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. Beirut asked for language in the draft to be changed to avoid this becoming an international maritime border.
  • intermittent negotiations between the two sides have been taking place for more than a decade. “But now Lebanon is in crisis and if it is able to start exploring and drilling [for gas reserves], it could have revenues from gas production to help it with its financial meltdown,”
  • Officials from both countries were in close contact via US mediator Amos Hochstein over the past few days to resolve outstanding differences. US President Joe Biden hailed the deal on Tuesday as a “historic breakthrough” in the Middle East.
  • The US text has not been made public but under terms leaked to the press all of the Karish field would fall under Israeli control, while Qana would be divided but its exploitation would be under Lebanon’s control. Total would be licensed to search for gas in the Qana field, and Israel would receive a share of future revenues. Bou Saab said Lebanon will “get its full rights from the Qana field”, and Israel might receive compensation through Total. There will be no direct partnership in gas exploration or exploitation between the two enemy states, he said.
Ed Webb

The Many Myths of the Term 'Crusader' | History | Smithsonian Magazine - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...of-the-term-crusader-180979107

mediterranean history ideology propaganda Israel Palestine crusades

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Dec 21 - Cached
  • the international news cycle whirred to life, attaching a charged adjective—Crusader—to a potentially unrelated object. In doing so, media coverage revealed the pervasive reach of this (surprisingly) anachronistic term, which gained traction in recent centuries as a way for historians and polemicists to lump disparate medieval conflicts into an overarching battle between good and evil, Christianity and Islam, civilization and barbarism.
  • the term should never stand alone as an explanation in and of itself. Crusades were waged by Christians against Muslims, Jews and fellow Christians. They were launched in the Middle East, in the Baltic, in Italy, in France and beyond
  • The Crusades weren’t the only events happening during these two centuries in either the Middle East or Europe. Relatively few people were, in fact, Crusaders, and not everything that fell into the eastern Mediterranean Sea during this period was a Crusader artifact. The habit of referring to the “era of the Crusades,” or calling the petty kingdoms that formed, squabbled and fell in these years the “Crusader states,” as if they had some kind of unified identity, is questionable at best. Inhabitants of this part of the Middle East and North Africa were incredibly diverse, with not only Christians, Muslims and Jews but also multiple forms of each religion represented. People spoke a range of languages and claimed wildly diverse ethnic or extended family identities. These groups were not simply enclaves of fanatically religious warriors, but rather part of a long, ever-changing story of horrific violence, cultural connection and hybridity.
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  • “In calling this period ‘Crusader,’ Israeli archaeology had, in some ways, aligned itself with a European colonial narrative about the Middle East” that privileged the experience of Europeans over those of locals.
  • The term “Crusade” has always been an anachronism—a way of looking back at complex, often disconnected movements with a wide array of motivations, membership, tactics and results and organizing them into a single coherent theology or identity. As Benjamin Weber of Stockholm University explains, the phrase “opened the way to complete assimilation of wars fought against different enemies, in varied places and often for similar reasons. ... [It] took on a legitimizing function. Any contested action could be justified by dubbing it a ‘crusade.’ It, therefore, became a word used to wield power and silence denouncers.”
  • The word “Crusade” came into use late, long after medieval Christian holy wars began. The Latin word crucesignatus, or “one marked by the cross,” first appeared in the early 1200s, more than a century after Urban II’s call to action in 1095. In English, “Crusade” and “Crusader” don’t appear until around 1700; by the 1800s, the term—defined broadly as a military campaign in defense of one’s faith—had become a convenient way for Victorian historians to mark the past as a battle between what they saw as good and evil, represented respectively by Christianity and Islam
  • claims worked especially well as supposed historical justification for contemporary European colonialism, which used rhetoric like “The White Man’s Burden” to paint land grabs as civilizing crusades against “uncivilized” non-Westerners.
  • Today, the terms “Crusader” and “Crusade” latch onto a nostalgic vision of the past, one that suggests there was a millennia-long clash of civilizations between Islam and Christianity (or “the West”)
  • historians must develop terminology that accurately reflects the people who inhabited the Middle East around the 12th century. A potential alternative is “Frankish,” which appears routinely in medieval Arabic sources and can be a useful “generalized term for [medieval] Europeans,” according to Mulder. It initially had pejorative connotations, being “kind of synonymous with a bunch of unwashed barbarians,” she says. “But as there come to be these more sophisticated relationships, it just becomes a term to refer to Europeans.”
  • Between the 11th and 13th centuries, “hybridity [in the region] is the norm. The fact that another kind of group [establishes itself in the same area] is just part of the story of everything. It's always someone. ... If it's not the Seljuks, it’s the Mongols, it’s the Mamluks. It’s you name it.” Mulder isn’t denying that medieval kingdoms were different, but she argues first and foremost that difference was the norm.
  • In the Middle Ages as a whole, but perhaps especially in this corner of the Mediterranean, objects, people and ideas moved across borders all the time
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