Ahmed Ramzy dies at 82

Beloved Egyptian actor Ahmed Ramzy dies at 82 

Ramzy, who came to prominence in the 1950s, was known for playing womanizers and playboys in his film roles

Ibrahim Saif

Senior Associate

Middle East Center

Ibrahim Saif is a resident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center. An economist specializing in the political economy of the Middle East, his research focuses on economies in transition, international trade with an emphasis on Jordan and the Middle East, institutional governance, and labor-market economics.

In addition to his work at Carnegie, Saif serves as a consultant to numerous international organizations, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Labor Organization. He is also a fellow with the Economic Research Forum and a member of the Global Development Network.

Prior to joining Carnegie, Saif was the director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan and, until recently, served as the secretary general of the Economic and Social Council in Jordan. His recent projects have focused on the political economy of the Euro–Med Association agreement and the oil boom in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. In addition, Saif has taught at both the University of London and Yale University, where he led courses on the economies of the Middle East.

Saif is the editor of the book, Jordanian Economy in a Changing Environment, and co-authored a chapter (with Nesreen Barakat) in the book Market Dynamics and Productivity in Developing Countries: Economic Reforms in the Middle East and North Africa. He has also been published in numerous journals, including Middle East Law and Governance Journal and the Journal of Middle Eastern Geopolitics.

Education

M.Sc. and Ph.D., in economics, University of London

Languages

 Arabic; English

Program in Arabic Language

The Program in Arabic Language (PAL), the Arabic language department within the YCMES, was the first private institution in Yemen dedicated exclusively to teaching Arabic as a foreign language. Our students have the opportunity to learn Arabic in a much more effective, stimulating setting. The PAL has served the needs of international students, researchers, and the resident expatriate community since 1989.

The YCMES’ Arabic Language Learning Program is open to international students of all ability levels, with program lengths from five weeks to a full calendar year. If you are interested in learning more about the Program in Arabic Languages academic schedule or prices; or if you just want an application, please visit the PAL admissions page.

For students who are local to Sana'a (on work visas or residency permits) we have special rates and arrangements, please visit the PAL admissions page or email pal@ymces.org.

http://www.ycmes.org/pal.html

JERUSALEM PEACEMAKERS

http://www.peacengo.org/organization.asp?ID=44

A call for tolerance and understanding

A call for tolerance and understanding

By Sami al-Nwaisir

 Wednesday, 19 September 2012


The recent reaction of Muslim protesters to the Internet film mocking the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is, to many Muslims, as legitimate as American’s reaction to the terrorist acts of Sept.11, 2001.

Many in the West view the protests as a disproportionate response to an unfortunate exercise of free speech, whereas Muslims view it as just another example of daily discrimination and humiliation toward Muslims and Arabs across the world but mainly in the United States.

Although anti-discrimination laws exist to protect persons of different religions and national origins, these laws often conflict with freedom of speech in America. Many times, these laws are not enforced unless the hateful speech constitutes a “clear and present danger” to public security.

One simply can cruise the Internet to see many examples of hateful and disrespectful speech against all ethnic groups. Even for black Americans, Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech calling for tolerance has not been realized in the 50 years since he uttered his famous words on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Seeking to achieve this dream of tolerance and understanding among all peoples remains unfulfilled, but all of us must work toward the goal.

We need more closely to examine this issue of protesters and embassy attacks, as these are symptoms of a clear pattern in the American media to discriminate against Muslims by highlighting radical groups that spew hatred against Islam. Simply reporting the activities of these radical hate groups is not enough; the media must condemn their activities in the strongest terms.

I don’t think this issue will be solved completely, as President Obama wisely is trying to do, by just bringing people to the United States to stand trial for murdering the American ambassador to Libya and three other Americans. We still have no idea what prompted the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, but if it was stimulated by the Internet video against the Prophet (peace be upon him), then the cause must be eradicated, not just the result.

As every reasonable person knows, it is against Islam and the teaching of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) to intimidate or kill anyone. Islam is a peaceful religion, and violent protests are inconsistent with its teachings. Using a video as an excuse to destroy property and harm people is simply wrong. We need to have tolerance, respect for each other, and above all respect for everyone, especially those who are different from us in religion, race, or culture. This foolish and offensive action by the maker of the Internet video and the subsequent reaction by the protesters require us to promote the basic issue of human equality and justice with appropriate action taken against all who have exploited this tragic situation.

We are all guilty if we ignore hate and discrimination, because it will simply get worse and more explosive in the future. Today more than ever, our world urgently needs stability, ethics, tolerance and peace. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) taught the followers to be an example of love, not revenge. (The word revenge is one of Allah’s 99 names so no one should try to have it). The story is told of when the Prophet used to walk daily in a city where a Jewish person repeatedly dumped garbage on him. In spite of this insult, he didn’t do anything to retaliate. One day the Jewish person didn’t do his daily habit of dumping, so the Prophet asked about him and was told that the Jew was sick in bed. Instead of rejoicing for the Jew’s misfortune, the Prophet went and visited him and prayed for his recovery and a healthy life. This is an example of tolerance and forgiveness we all should emulate, and we must stand up to condemn all forms of discrimination against whoever is attacked.

Although it is true that Arabs have been singled out unfairly for scrutiny when traveling abroad, there is no question that Muslims should be treated with the same respect as members of other religious groups, especially when Muslims number more than 1.5 billion in comparison with around 16 million Jews worldwide. Recent events such as the burning of the copies of the Holy Qu’ran in Florida and the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet (PBUH) are more than simply troublesome. They require condemnation, but not by violence against persons and property. This is not a freedom of speech issue at all. When such events occur, they cause dangerous consequences that must be addressed with tolerance and forgiveness.

Current anti-discrimination laws must be better enforced so that those who spread their hateful lies will be brought to justice and held to account for violating basic human rights. Let us hope we can move past these protests in the streets and push for more legal protections for all those who are the victims of these hateful films and media broadcasts.


(The writer is a columnist at the Saudi-based Arab News, where this article was published on Sept. 19, 2012)

*******Lingua árabe e estudos norte africanos******* universidade Al-akhawayn no Marrocos - verão 2012

Arabic language and north african studies -summer 2012

Shlomit Levi, uma linda voz de Israel

http://www.myspace.com/video/vid/101048590#pm_cmp=vid_OEV_P_P

A Story of How Muslims Rescued Jews During the Holocaust 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-pDXW0x4KY

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“Les Hommes Libres” (“Free Men”)

Heroic Tale of Holocaust, With a Twist

Pyramide Productions

 

In “Les Hommes Libres” (“Free Men”), a new wartime French film based on true stories, Tahar Rahim, seated, is a black-market operator and Michael Lonsdale portrays the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris. 

By ELAINE SCIOLINO

 

Published: October 3, 2011 

PARIS — The stories of the Holocaust have been documented, distorted, clarified and filtered through memory. Yet new stories keep coming, occasionally altering the grand, incomplete mosaic of Holocaust history. 

 

 

Martin Bureau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

 

The film's director, Ismaël Ferroukhi. 

One of them, dramatized in a French film released here last week, focuses on an unlikely savior of Jews during the Nazi occupation of France: the rector of a Paris mosque. 

Muslims, it seems, rescued Jews from the Nazis. 

“Les Hommes Libres” (“Free Men”) is a tale of courage not found in French textbooks. According to the story, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the founder and rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, provided refuge and certificates of Muslim identity to a small number of Jews to allow them to evade arrest and deportation. 

It was simpler than it sounds. In the early 1940s France was home to a large population of North Africans, including thousands of Sephardic Jews. The Jews spoke Arabic and shared many of the same traditions and everyday habits as the Arabs. Neither Muslims nor Jews ate pork. Both Muslim and Jewish men were circumcised. Muslim and Jewish names were often similar. 

The mosque, a tiled, walled fortress the size of a city block on the Left Bank, served as a place to pray, certainly, but also as an oasis of calm where visitors were fed and clothed and could bathe, and where they could talk freely and rest in the garden. 

It was possible for a Jew to pass. 

“This film is an event,” said Benjamin Stora, France’s pre-eminent historian on North Africa and a consultant on the film. “Much has been written about Muslim collaboration with the Nazis. But it has not been widely known that Muslims helped Jews. There are still stories to be told, to be written.” 

The film, directed by Ismaël Ferroukhi, is described as fiction inspired by real events and built around the stories of two real-life figures (along with a made-up black marketeer). The veteran French actor Michael Lonsdale plays Benghabrit, an Algerian-born religious leader and a clever political maneuverer who gave tours of the mosque to German officers and their wives even as he apparently used it to help Jews. 

Mahmoud Shalaby, a Palestinian actor living in Israel, plays Salim — originally Simon — Hilali, who was Paris’s most popular Arabic-language singer, a Jew who survived the Holocaust by posing as a Muslim. (To make the assumed identity credible, Benghabrit had the name of Hilali’s grandfather engraved on a tombstone in the Muslim cemetery in the Paris suburb of Bobigny, according to French obituaries about the singer. In one tense scene in the film a German soldier intent on proving that Hilali is a Jew, takes him to the cemetery to identify it.) 

The historical record remains incomplete, because documentation is sketchy. Help was provided to Jews on an ad hoc basis and was not part of any organized movement by the mosque. The number of Jews who benefited is not known. The most graphic account, never corroborated, was given by Albert Assouline, a North African Jew who escaped from a German prison camp. He claimed that more than 1,700 resistance fighters — including Jews but also a lesser number of Muslims and Christians — found refuge in the mosque’s underground caverns, and that the rector provided many Jews with certificates of Muslim identity. 

In his 2006 book, “Among the Righteous,” Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, uncovered stories of Arabs who saved Jews during the Holocaust, and included a chapter on the Grand Mosque. Dalil Boubakeur, the current rector, confirmed to him that some Jews — up to 100 perhaps — were given Muslim identity papers by the mosque, without specifying a number. Mr. Boubakeur said individual Muslims brought Jews they knew to the mosque for help, and the chief imam, not Benghabrit, was the man responsible. 

Mr. Boubakeur showed Mr. Satloff a copy of a typewritten 1940 Foreign Ministry document from the French Archives. It stated that the occupation authorities suspected mosque personnel of delivering false Muslim identity papers to Jews. “The imam was summoned, in a threatening manner, to put an end to all such practices,” the document said. 

Mr. Satloff said in a telephone interview: “One has to separate the myth from the fact. The number of Jews protected by the mosque was probably in the dozens, not the hundreds. But it is a story that carries a powerful political message and deserves to be told.” 

A 1991 television documentary “Une Résistance Oubliée: La Mosquée de Paris” (“A Forgotten Resistance: The Mosque of Paris”) by Derri Berkani , and a children’s book “The Grand Mosque of Paris: A Story of How Muslims Saved Jews During the Holocaust,” published in 2007, also explore the events. 

The latest film was made in an empty palace in Morocco, with the support of the Moroccan government. The Paris mosque refused to grant permission for any filming. “We’re a place of worship,” Mr. Boubakeur said in an interview. “There are prayers five times a day. Shooting a film would have been disruptive.” 

Benghabrit fell out of favor with fellow Muslims because he opposed Algerian independence and stayed loyal to France’s occupation of his native country. He died in 1954. 

In doing research for the film, Mr. Ferroukhi and even Mr. Stora learned new stories. At one screening a woman asked him why the film did not mention the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern European origin who had been saved by the mosque. Mr. Stora said he explained that the mosque didn’t intervene on behalf of Ashkenazi Jews, who did not speak Arabic or know Arab culture. 

“She told me: ‘That’s not true. My mother was protected and saved by a certificate from the mosque,’ ” Mr. Stora said. 

On Wednesday, the day of the film’s release here, hundreds of students from three racially and ethnically mixed Paris-area high schools were invited to a special screening and question-and-answer session with Mr. Ferroukhi and some of his actors. 

Some asked banal questions. Where did you find the old cars? (From an antique car rental agency.) Others reacted with curiosity and disbelief, wanting to know how much of the film was based on fact, and how it could have been possible that Jews mingled easily with Muslims. Some were stunned to hear that the Nazis persecuted only the Jews, and left the Muslims alone. 

Reviews here were mixed on the film, which is to be released in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Belgium. (American rights have been sold as well.) The daily Le Figaro said it “reconstitutes an atmosphere and a period marvelously.” The weekly L’Express called it “ideal for a school outing, less for an evening at the movies.” 

Mr. Ferroukhi does not care. He said he was lobbying the Culture and Education Ministries to get the film shown in schools. “It pays homage to the people of our history who have been invisible,” he said. “It shows another reality, that Muslims and Jews existed in peace. We have to remember that — with pride.” 

Talking Arabic, feeling Turkish

Talking Arabic, feeling Turkish

A recent visit to Turkey took Reda Hilal, Al-Ahram's senior political correspondent, first to the disputed Iskenderun or Hatay region claimed by both Turkey and Syria. He reports here on how he found that most residents of Iskenderun identify themselves as Arabs, yet their loyalty is to Ankara. Subsequently, he travelled to Turkish Kurdistan, where he witnessed the deteriorating living conditions of millions of Kurds and visited the remains of several villages burned and forcibly evacuated by the heavy-handed Turkish army

A Turkish crowd lifting a huge portrait of modern Turkey's founder, Kamal Ataturk, during a recent rally in Ankara (photo AFP)

Al-Ahram correspondent Reda Hilal during his visit to the disputed Iskenderun region
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When I arrived in the city of Iskenderun, coming from Adana, the Syrian Arab characteristics of the region were immediately apparent. Iskenderun is the second city of the disputed region known as Iskenderun to the Syrians and Hatay to the Turks, after the capital Antakya. The region as a whole, in heritage, culture, and language, remains more Arab in nature than Turkish. In the streets and markets, Arabic is the primary spoken language.

The Arab character of the region dates back to the 7th century AD when the Arabs occupied it for the first time following the time of the fall of the Byzantine Empire. However, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, in 1921 France, with the approval of the League of Nations, was given a mandate over all of Syria. Turkey agreed to allow France to control the Iskenderun region, as being part of Syria.

Following the Lausanne Agreement of 1936, in which the borders of modern Turkey were defined, Turkey agreed to give up all claim to the areas south of its borders, among them the Iskenderun region. However, the French soon suggested granting Syria total independence, and when the country was divided into nine governorates later the same year, the Iskenderun region became one of them. This led Ankara to protest and declare that the region fell under its sovereignty. The dispute was taken to the League of Nations in 1937, which ruled that the region's special status should be lifted and that henceforward its internal affairs should be under Syrian jurisdiction. Both Turkey and France appeared to agree to this outcome.

France, however, then went on to help set the scene for Turkey's army to invade and occupy the region on 5 and 6 July 1938. In light of this development, France and Turkey signed an agreement on 27 July 1939, granting the people of the region the right to Turkish nationality. In this way, Turkey managed to secure the region as part of its territory. The reason this surprising move was to be found in Europe: on the eve of World War II, France wished to make allies against Germany. This move also accorded with France's historical interests in the region, as became even more apparent in the late '30s. France was well aware of Turkey's importance as an ally, given its geographical location and its control over several strategic sea straits.

The city of Iskenderun was established by Iskender the Great after he defeated the Persian King Darius at the battle of Asseus in 333BC, with the aim of creating a trading zone. Under Arab rule, it was transformed into a port, and under the Ottomans sat astride a major trading route leading to Aleppo, the Arabian Peninsula and Persia. It is still today a functioning commercial port and a major point of contact between Turkish and Arab merchants, as well as an important industrial city and military base.

At Inono Square, site of the city's main bus station, I asked whether any Arabic newspapers are published in the region of Iskenderun. The answer was no. I also asked how it came to be that the primary language in the region was Arabic, when the schools taught only in Turkish? The answer was that the Arabs speak Arabic at home, and not Turkish. They also speak Arabic when dealing with people in the markets and on the streets -- unless they are talking to Turks.

On the road leading south-east of the city through the mountains, I stopped at the town of Belin, which has been known since Roman times as "the Gateway of Syria". From there I travelled on another 25 kilometres until I reached Antakya, the capital of the Iskenderun or Hatay region. In spite of its name, which comes from the Latin "Antioch", Antakya is distinctively Arab in appearance, as if totally removed from its Turkish surroundings.

As soon as you alight at the bus station in Antakya, you can clearly see the Al-A'si River which flows down from Syria and cuts right through the city. A few steps away lies the Rana Kubru, a bridge over the Al-A'si River which can be dated back to the 3rd century AD.

Across the river, on the opposite bank, lies Antakya's town hall. If you turn left into Ataturk Street, also known as Al-Saray Street, you immediately notice its resemblance to the more modern shopping streets of Ankara or Istanbul. If you turn right, however, you soon come across shops selling Syrian shawarma which have all kept their Arabic names.

If you continue on in this direction, you find yourself in Kubru Basha market. There you might be in a market in Baghdad, Damascus or Cairo: the streets are crowded with people, horse-driven carts and pick-up trucks. In the midst of this vast market, I sat in the Urta coffee shop. The room was crowded with people drinking tea and boiled lemonade and playing cards by the hour. The people of Antakya are traders by nature, but the rate of unemployment is high and few people have much formal schooling.

I asked my companions about Turkey's recent threats to wage war against Syria. They said that their sons are drafted into the Turkish army, while their relatives live in Syria. That is why they hope there will never be war between the two countries.

I then asked them whether they considered themselves to be Turkish or Syrian. Their immediate reply was that they considered themselves to be Arabs, but that they are Turkish citizens. One man, named Mahmoud, said: "The Iskenderun region has witnessed separatist rebellions from time to time, and Syria brought down a Turkish monitoring plane in 1989. But in general the situation is calm." Mahmoud went on, "The Arabs of Antakya, in spite of their Arabic lifestyle, are fortunate to live in a country like Turkey, where there is a general freedom of religion and life-style, in comparison to their relatives across the border."

When I asked, the residents of the region also seemed to share a single attitude towards two prominent figures: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and the Kurdish leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

Mahmoud explained, "The Arabs of Antakya agree on the need to honour Ataturk. Most of them are from the Alawite Shi'ite minority and Ataturk granted them equality with the majority Sunnis in Turkey. They also consider that Ataturk created a modern country, by comparison with other neighbouring Arab states."

As for Ocalan, Mahmoud added, "The Arabs of Antakya agree with other Turks: they consider him their enemy. For Ocalan, they say, kills their children in the army and police. In their view, a Muslim should not kill another Muslim."

Leaving behind me the coffee shops, I ended up once again in Ataturk Street, just in time to witness a procession of armoured cars pulling canons behind them on their way to the Syrian border.