Category Archives: Blog

I passed by this graffiti tonight on my way home from tai chi class in Beirut…

Prague Castle, Communist Bunkers & the Rolling Stones
A talk by Prof. arch. Zdeněk Lukeš (NYU Prague)
February 11th, 6:30 PM
NYU Department of Russian and Slavic Studies
19 University Place, 2nd fl., NYC

Professor Zdeněk Lukeš is an architect and renowned architectural historian who participated in the restoration and revitalization of the Prague Castle after the Velvet Revolution. Thus, he had the opportunity to have an intimate look at this vast estate and some of its famous guests…

This afternoon, a Sudanese friend who came to my talk on Malcolm X’s time in Sudan and Lebanon at the American University of Beirut sent me a few photos from Monday’s event. I was very happy that so many Sudanese professors, diplomats, students, and migrant workers attended the talk. It’s been an amazing experience contemplating the meaning of Malcolm X 50 years after his assassination with friends from around the world in Beirut…

Every week, my Iranian friends and I analyze and discuss one of Rumi’s poems in the original Persian. Here are a few of the verses we focused on this week:

A dervish must know pain’s reality
And from the depths of pain must rise, a (hu)man.
In all directions, they build yet again another monastery:
The universe is a monastery; there only needs be a true human…

In my talk last night at the American University of Beirut on Malcolm X’s connections to Sudan, I had the opportunity to speak about the sacred landscapes in Sudan that Malcolm passed by but didn’t visit, such as the popular Sufi shrine of Sheikh Hamad el-Nil in Omdurman–where hundreds of people gather each week to participate in the spirited zikr ceremony and soak in the ecstasy of the whirling dervishes…

I was very grateful to have the opportunity to speak this evening at The American University of Beirut on my latest article on Malcolm X’s time in Africa and the Middle East, which was just published in a Special Issue of the Journal of Africana Religions: “The Meaning of Malcolm X for Africana Religions: Fifty Years On.” A summary of my experience re-tracing Malcolm X’s route in Khartoum and Beirut was also recently published by the Huffington Post: Following in the Footsteps of Malcolm X. It was very inspiring tonight to see so many Lebanese, Sudanese, Indonesian, and American students, professors, and diplomats gather together in Beirut to discuss Malcolm X’s time in Lebanon and his connections to Sudan…

Recently, the Sudanese students in the migrant workers class that I teach in Beirut asked if we could discuss wrestling in our next class. So to prepare for that discussion, I decided to brush up on my knowledge of the history of Nuba wrestling. In the process, I was reminded of Leni Riefenstahl’s documentation of Nuba wrestling in Sudan–where she lived and worked for many years…

Many remember Leni Riefenstahl first and foremost as the director of The Triumph of the Will, the Nazi propaganda documentary that revolutionized filmmaking. Hitler also asked her to film the 1936 Olympics–from which she produced the two-part film Olympia. Unable to continue directing films after the war, Riefenstahl eventually turned her sights on Sudan, and became the first foreign woman with special permission from the Sudanese government to live in the remote valleys of central Sudan. The people with whom she lived in Sudan had no knowledge of her Nazi past in Germany.

Riefenstahl’s celebrated photographs from Sudan were published in 1974 and 1976 as The Last of the Nuba and The People of Kau. Both books became international bestsellers. She also shot 3000 meters of film.

For her work in Sudan, the Art Director’s Club of Germany awarded Leni a gold medal for the best photographic achievement of 1975. This “perfect German woman” (in the words of Hitler) was also granted Sudanese citizenship for her services to the country–becoming the first foreigner to receive a Sudanese passport. In March 2000, while making a film about her life, she was injured in a helicopter crash in Sudan, while traveling under the assumed name of Mrs. Jacob. She died in 2003 at the age of 101 in Germany.

Of her time in Sudan, she said: “The Nuba were strange beings to me. I’d never met native Africans before. They surprised me by their character. They were poor. They only had their land, and a little water–but they were happy. They weren’t suspicious. We soon got to know each other using a few words. They were so warm and cheerful. It made me think: ‘how little one needs to be happy.’ I’ve often been back, and I’ve always felt at ease there.” She also romanticized the Nuba as “very healthy” with “no sickness”–and noted: “many also happen to be beautiful…but I didn’t create them. God did.”

In 1975, Susan Sontag penned an infamous take down of the “fascist aesthetics” of Riefenstahl’s photographs from Sudan in a piece for the New York Review of Books entitled Fascinating Fascism. Despite Sontag’s searing criticism of Riefenstahl’s aesthetics, Sontag deemed The Land of the Nubia “the most ravishing book of photographs published anywhere in recent years.”

When asked about Sontag’s scathing critique, Riefenstahl replied: “You mean Susan Sontag? It’s a mystery to me…how such an intelligent woman can talk such rubbish…I took these pictures of the Nuba, just as they live, unobserved, without posing. What can be fascist about that? I don’t understand.”

When asked how one might define a fascist aesthetic, Riefenstahl responded: “I’ve no concept of fascism…unless it be the Hitler salute…or the fascist salute with the raised right hand. I can’t imagine anything.”

Though Steven Soderberg abandoned his Leni Riefenstahl biopic project last year (and the long-awaited Jodie Foster project has failed to materialize), Riefenstahl will soon appear on movie screens as a character in Race, the Jesse Owens biopic. Her character will be played by Carice van Houten, who plays priestess Melisandre on HBO’s Game of Thrones.

A bus bombing in Damascus today killed at least 6 Lebanese pilgrims and wounded 22 others who were visiting Shia shrines in Syria. The al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front claimed responsibility for the attack. In a statement, Hezbollah said: “Hezbollah condemns the terrorist blast that was executed by Takfiri criminals in the Syrian capital Damascus and that targeted the visitors of Sayyida Roqaya and led to the killing and wounding of several pilgrims.” When I was in Damascus visiting Sufi and Shia shrines two months before the Syrian war began, I had the opportunity to visit the same shrines that the pilgrims who were attacked today were scheduled to visit. I was very sad this afternoon to hear about the violence they suffered on the way. According to several reports, the bus was on its way to the shrine of Sayyida Zeinab–which has seen its own share of conflict in the ongoing Syrian war…

When I was studying for my Masters in Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian Studies at Columbia University, I was fortunate to have professors who introduced me to the notion, meaning, and constructions of “race” in the Soviet Union. In February, Columbia and New York University will be hosting a two-day workshop on race in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union.

Russia’s Races: Meanings and Practices of Race in Imperial Russia & the Soviet Union
Thursday, February 26 to Friday, February 27, 2015
10:00 am – 6:00 pm
NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia
(19 University Place, 2nd Floor)

Please join the Harriman Institute, the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York Univeristy (NYU), the NYU Provost, NYU History Department, and the Humanities Initiative at NYU for a two-day workship on race in Russia and the Soviet Union. This two-day workshop aims to make a serious intervention in a key category of global analysis. It brings together historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists from Europe and the U.S., and combines Russian specialists with discussants from other fields (Latin America, U.S., Western Europe, the Caribbean). The central question will be not whether, but how race has worked in Russia over the past two centuries.

Yesterday, when I was making a powerpoint using slides from my summer research in Indonesia, I came across photos of my pencak silat class in Indonesia. Pencak silat is a Javanese martial art composed of movements derived from Javanese dance and philosophical principles infused with Javanese spirituality. It was also used by Indonesians against the Dutch in the colonial period. Remembering how much fun I had studying pencak silat this summer on a Fulbright in Java, I reached out to the Indonesian Embassy in Beirut to ask if pencak silat counts as one of the many arts that graduating seniors from the American University of Beirut can study while on scholarship in Indonesia–and they said yes. Training in this beautiful martial art in paradise for a year after graduation sounds like an amazing way to make the transition from university life to the “real world.”

For the past month, I’ve been in touch with the Indonesian Embassy in Lebanon about the possibility of offering scholarships to students from the American University of Beirut to study in Indonesia. Today, I received confirmation that graduating students from AUB may now apply for a scholarship funded by the Indonesian government to spend a year in Indonesia studying language, Islamic studies, gamelan music, masked performance, shadow puppetry, art, cuisine, or tourism. When I was a student, I studied the meditative music of Java, and I’ve been performing Indonesian music in concert ever since–from Lincoln Center to Java. Being immersed in the performing arts of Indonesia has changed my life on many levels, and this past summer I had the opportunity to live in Indonesia as a Fulbright-Hays Scholar. I’m so happy that students from Lebanon will now have a similar opportunity to learn about Indonesian culture, while living in Java or Bali…