So why am I telling you all this? As I write it is another bright and crisp October day and we have recently memorialised the tenth anniversary of 9/11. It seemed that for weeks wherever I turned on television, radio, the papers, magazines, the internet, everything – space itself – was devoted to every aspect and nuance of the trauma of that day.
2.3 | The Idea of Islam
Years after his death in the autumn of 2003, Edward Said, who had attained the rank of ‘University Professor’ at Columbia University, continues to elicit an equal measure of adulation and vitriolic criticism.
Desert, white sand rippling, reddish sky. A figure, on a white horse, head wrapped in a scarf and covered in a hat, wearing an assortment of Western clothes: boots, jodhpurs, a short jacket.
In Far Pavilion, Adrus plays with memory, history and location using photographs, video installation and abstract watercolours. It focuses on the emergence of mosques in Britain, and the lingering memory of Indian soldiers in Britain, who fought in World War I, and ended up convalescing in the Royal Pavilion, Brighton.
The West is so ignorant of the vast musical landscape of the Muslim world that even traditional styles seeming old-school in Istanbul could strike wild applause in Köln and Chicago. But there is more to jazz than New York and New Orleans.
Profitocracy does not have to be our political destiny, but it may well be if we do not start fiercely challenging the system of ideas on which it is based.
Judaism and Islam are in many ways the closest of cousins. Sharing a rigorously monotheistic faith as articulated by a shared canon of prophets in related Semitic tongues, tracing their common origins to the patriarch Abraham, their destinies have been inextricably intertwined.