Category Archives: Blog

Cairo’s Islamic Art Museum, which houses a collection of almost 100,000 objects, suffered damage from one of the car bombs that exploded on Friday morning–killing several people, and injuring many more. Approximately 20 to 30 percent of the objects will now need to be restored. The last time that I was in the museum, I was especially drawn to its Fatimid glass lamps–a number of which, sadly, were completely destroyed by the blast. UNESCO has now offered to assess the damage and help restore the collection.

I got this invitation today from a gamelan friend for a srimpi performance in New York. If you’re interested in seeing srimpi (a classical Javanese court dance) performed in person, make sure to RSVP. As you can hear in the video below, srimpi is performed to the accompaniment of Javanese gamelan, and the singing of Javanese poetry. It’s just one of the many beautiful performing arts traditions that I love from the “most populous Muslim country in the world”…

A few articles this week tried to put the Syrian refugee crisis in perspective by drawing population ratio comparisons with the U.S. Here’s an example from an article about the “virtual” presence of the Syrian conflict at Davos:

More than 130,000 people have died so far. More than a million children are refugees, most of them under the age of 11. Neighboring countries are are trying to absorb enormous numbers of people made homeless by the war. “I am very pessimistic,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres told me. And with reason. If the United States had to absorb as many refugees as Lebanon had, it would have to take in 66 million people.

In another article this week, the Prime Minister of Lebanon wrote that the comparative ratio would be like 100 million Syrian refugees coming to America.

Even though Lebanon is one of the smallest countries in the region, it has absorbed approximately one million refugees–the highest number of any nation. Estimates of how many Syrian children will be enrolled next year in Lebanon hover around 100,000. Syrian refugees now make up almost a quarter of Lebanon’s pre-crisis population.

Because the Syrian crisis has had a direct cost of $7.5 billion to the Lebanese economy, many here are hoping that the softening of sanctions with Iran will have a trickle down effect on the Lebanese economy. But in the face of so much suffering, it’s hard to know what to do…

What you most want,
What you travel around wishing to find?
Lose yourself as lovers lose themselves, and you’ll be that…

— Attar

The lives of the men, women and children who rest in peace here
are part of the history of not only the Hunts Point community, but of New York at large.

— State Senator Jeffrey D. Klein

Students in the South Bronx have discovered a long-forgotten African burial ground. The students, along with official community leaders, are now asking the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation to officially recognize the forgotten cemetery outside the gates of Joseph Rodman Drake Park, and place it on the State Register of Historic Places.

Despite the U.S. warning against visiting “western-style” malls in Lebanon, I ventured today to a mall in Beirut to run a necessary errand. While I was shopping, I was reminded of the mall’s diverse dining options, from sushi to Shake Shack–where my friend and I took a break to enjoy a delicious peanut butter milkshake…

Before there was the movie Gravity, there was Icarus XB-1. Not many people know about the celebrated tradition of science-fiction in Czech literature and film. In fact, while I was studying for a Masters in Czech, I found myself surprised by how much science fiction we were assigned. This week, however, Czech sci-fi hovered out of the shadows, and landed in New York.

A new exhibit, “Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module,” has transformed the Fifth Floor gallery of the New Museum into a simulated interior of a spaceship. This otherworldly exhibit, inspired by the highly original Czech sci-fi film Icarus XB-1, was curated by tranzit, a network of interconnected organizations from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, and Romania. Details about this unusual spaceship concept are below…if you’re in New York, you might czech it out…

The vessel is inspired by the spacecraft in the iconic Czech science-fiction film Ikarie (Icarus) XB-1 (1963), which melded postwar utopianism with Soviet utilitarianism. In its structure and design, it recalls future fantasies from the socialist Eastern European side of the Iron Curtain and explores the ideological role that outer space played during this time. On view in and around the spacecraft will be 117 artworks, including video, sculpture, print, and installation, by artists hailing primarily from cities around Eastern Europe, notably Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, and Bratislava, all of whom tranzit has worked with previously.

“Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module” offers an allegory of “anthropological science fiction,” where the exhibition space becomes an estranged and exciting universe that dramatizes the cross-cultural translation involved in the presentation of art. The unique model evokes the challenges that contemporary artists experience in exhibiting works, or that curators come across in organizing exhibitions that stitch together diverse artworks, selected across generation, cultural context, personal narratives, and time.

Mystics are not themselves. They do not exist
in selves. They move as they are moved,
talk as words come, see with sight
that enters their eyes…

― Farid al-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds

In my ten year journey to visit as many Sufi shrines and sheikhs as possible from Afghanistan to Mali, one text which keeps coming up along the road is the Sufi masterpiece “Conference of the Birds” by Farid ud-Din Attar (فرید الدین), a 12th century Persian poet from Nishapur. This legendary poetic allegory explains Sufi philosophy through a mystic journey made by a group of birds (led by a hoopoe as their guide) to find the mythical phoenix-like Simorgh–the ideal king.

On their spiritual pilgrimage, these birds pass through seven distinct valleys (explained by Imam Jamal Rahman in the video below):

The Valley of Yearning (Talab)
The Valley of Love (Ishq)
The Valley of Knowledge (Marifa)
The Valley of Detachment (Istighna)
The Valley of Unity (Tawhid)
The Valley of Bewilderment (Hayra)
The Valley of Annihilation/Nothinginess (Fana)

This March, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will be offering a ticketed talk on “Conference of the Birds” which will focus on a Persian manuscript from Afghanistan on display at the MET. Details for this talk are below.

“The Canticle of the Birds” of the Poet Attar

The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium

Tuesday, March 4th, 11:00 a.m.

Michael Barry, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University

This talk illuminates some of the prodigiously rich mystical symbolism of the manuscript’s art—the flight and fusion of all the world’s soul-birds into the radiance of the Divine Sun-Bird—in light of some of the most glorious Islamic paintings from the Persian and Indian regions in the Metropolitan’s collection. Tickets to this event include Museum admission.

In the path of nonbeing, we have fallen in love with being.

— Attar

Visit our quarter if you’re infamous and disgraceful.
Beware, for we’re disgraced among the noble and the common.
We’re mystified by Love: we have no heart, no faith, no world;
look into our state if you’re seeking a guide for the road…

— Attar

Today’s “Modern Love” column in the NYTimes starts out with Angelina Jolie’s elbow, but ends with a Czech twist…

On my way home tonight from martial arts practice in Beirut, I passed by this (perfectly named) “cultural bar,” which was bustling with outdoor customers–thanks to today’s warm weather…

In May, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will be offering the follow talk as part of their lectures and panels series. If you’re interested in learning more about Buddhism and Tibet, get your tickets now before spaces run out.

Journeys to Divinity

Tuesday, May 20, 11:00 a.m.
Tickets: $30

Kurt Behrendt, Assistant Curator, Department of Asian Art, MMA

As Tibetan and Indian monks regularly crisscrossed the Himalayas in the twelfth century, a great exchange of ideas, texts, and devotional works of art began to reshape Tibet’s complex religious landscape. In this talk, Met curator Kurt Behrendt explores the art that emerged from the Buddhist communities on the vast flood plains of the Ganges River. He also discusses how contemporary Tibetan artists continue to weave their creative vision into reality. This program is in conjunction with the exhibition Tibet and India: Buddhist Traditions and Transformations, on view from February 8 to June 8, 2014.