Baghdad through Latif al-Ani's lens
Rasheed Street (شارع الرشيد) is the invisible link that ties together several of this selection of Latif al-Ani’s photographs of Baghdad. This was the first “straight” street in the medieval city, part of a campaign to modernize Baghdad during the reign of Madhat Pasha. In the decades that followed, the street was widened, its façade colonnaded with shops on the ground floor and offices and hotels occupying the upper two. Rasheed Street became the commercial, business and financial hub of Baghdad throughout the first half of the twentieth century. What remained of the medieval city, narrow alleyways, courtyard houses, schools and bathhouses lay hidden behind the fashionable street façade, a historic fabric that was allowed to decay because it was deemed “unmodern.”
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Hye times
Lara Sarkissian is a lucky girl – and she knows it. A filmmaker, creative producer, curator, and DJ of Iranian-Armenian descent born and bred in San Francisco, Sarkissian is the proud owner of boxfuls of vintage Persian and Armenian records, all thanks to the efforts of her mother and uncle, who packed them in their suitcases when they left Iran and Armenia for the States. Known to her fans as ‘Foozool’ – Persian for ‘nosy’ – Sarkissian has been making a noise in the West Coast with her experimental mixes often combining electronic sounds with traditional ones from Armenia, Iran, and the greater Middle East. For REORIENT, Ms. Foozool has put together a smashing selection of retro Persian and Armenian tracks, which more than compensates for the envy she’s inspired in me.
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Israeli tourist map of Jerusalem rewrites history
The Israeli Ministry of Tourism is removing Palestinian culture from the map, in the most literal sense.
Last month, a new English-language guide to Jerusalem’s Old City was published, featuring fifty-seven tourist sites. Among them, only one was Muslim, five were Christian, while a whopping fifty-one were Jewish. Distributed for free at tourist offices, the map undermines Palestinian political claims to Jerusalem through a deliberate cultural whitewash that re-imagines the historically multi-ethnic and multi-religious city as exclusively Jewish.
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