Islam, Arabs and the Hijra

By Robert M. Kerr

The traditional account of Muhammad’s life tells us that in June of 622, upon getting wind of an assassination plot against him at Mecca, he escaped with some of his loyal followers and eventually made his way to Yathrib/Medina. The traditionally accepted reference for this event is in Surah 9: 100, which in the translation of Pickthall reads:

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The Language of the Koran

By Robert M. Kerr

When we look at Late Antique Syro-Palestine and Arabia in the early seventh century, the time when Islam is said to have become a religion, an interesting yet complex mosaic of cultures and languages can be observed. Linguistically, various languages were spoken and written. Here we confront a common long-persisting misconception, namely that the Arabs were largely illiterate before Islam. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Roughly speaking, Arabia in Antiquity was divided into three geographical regions: Arabia Felix, Deserta and Petraea.

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Colonial Tangier: From a Hybrid Space to a Hybrid Literature

By Anouar El Younssi

From 1923 to 1956, the city of Tangier was legally designated as an International Zone ruled by eight Western countries. Tangier was under the control of foreign consuls, and was considered by “most pious Moroccans as a place apart, a plague zone infested and infected by infidels.” The city’s international status made it possible for people of different ethnicities and nationalities to take it as a place of residence. Tangier thus housed diverse inhabitants; in addition to its native Arabs, Berbers, and Jews, there were Spaniards, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Americans, Greeks, and others. Geographically, the city was divided into quarters housing myriad nationalities, speaking different languages.

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Yto Barrada in Chicago

By David Álvarez

No other Moroccan photographer working today has achieved the sort of international prominence that Yto Barrada now enjoys. Born in Paris to émigré Moroccan parents, raised in France and Morocco, educated in those two countries and in the United States, Barrada is a consummately global artist whose work has been exhibited in places as far-flung from each other as Birmingham and Beirut, Dubai and Chicago. No matter where her work is exhibited, however, whether in the Middle East, in England’s Midlands or in America’s Midwest, Barrada’s subject matter has been and remains resolutely local: her work dwells principally on Tangiers and its environs, although the latter can at times be read as metonym for the country as a whole. Along with the Rif mountain chain that lies behind it and the bodies of water that it overlooks, “the quaint provincial town” that Barrada calls home bulks large in all of her work not just as photographer, film-maker, and installation artist, but also as the co-founder and director of the Cinémathèque de Tanger, a multi-purpose cultural center that houses among other projects the Cinéma Rif, one of the first movie theaters in the country.

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