ARTS & CULTURE STORIES
Featured
By Lauren Abunassar
“Talking about art and creativity is not secondary or tertiary to Islam. It’s primary to Islam. There is a place in Islam for levity. There is a place for celebrating beauty.”
By Joseph Fahim
The cornerstone of works by diaspora filmmakers is identity and alienation, and intricate community dynamics in relation to diverse American environments. In the scant body of work by Arab Americans, these issues have never surpassed an elementary examination.
By Gawhara Abou-eid
All evening, the sold-out venue felt like a citywide inside joke finally getting told out loud.
By Gawhara Abou-eid
“When performed with authenticity, raqs sharqi becomes a form of empowerment, an act of reclaiming the beauty and strength of the feminine and honoring the deep humanity that this dance expresses.”
By Lauren Abunassar
“I think something that draws me to glass so much is that it is a very experience-based medium where the process itself is so captivating and exhilarating and fun, but also difficult. When you make the work, you're aware that there is a very large chance you're not going to get anything from it. Something may break, something may not exist at the end.”
By Elissa Odeh
At his show, Al-Rayess joked about one of the biggest cultural pressures in Arab culture — getting married. “I’m almost 30, so the questions never stop. Back home I would’ve been married to my cousin by now.”
By Joseph Fahim
“One Battle After Another” is not just about the U.S. — it’s a fable about the failure of the left worldwide. And for the Arab viewer, it’s impossible to watch the film without drawing comparisons to our own failures in the Arab Spring.
By Lauren Abunassar
“I cannot genuinely say I believe that my writing and publishing a book with a small press based in the U.S. is an act of resistance. For me, it tends to get into these questions about rhetoric, or about public opinion, or about changing people's minds or hearts through our writing. But I don't know that I would call that resistance.”
By Joseph Fahim
The success of “With Hasan in Gaza” in Locarno, where it was seen by thousands of people, has proven that there is a sizeable audience for films like Aljafari’s: an artistically and intellectually uncompromised cinema that rejects a digestible, ready-made message.
Gauri Mangala
The festival panel noticed a shift in this year’s collection of applications. While overall application numbers have dwindled, a larger proportion featured strong political themes and messages.
By Joseph Fahim
Criticism is imperative not only for understanding Arab culture, but for confronting the mediocrity that can arise from silencing critical perspectives.
By Elissa Odeh
Wahab still remembers his first stand-up show in Ferndale, Michigan: “They gave me five minutes, so I wrote three minutes of jokes and figured the other two would be filled with laughter,” he said. “Let’s just say it didn’t quite work out that way.”
By Ragad Ahmad
For nearly five decades, El Funoun has understood that keeping Palestinian tradition alive and building upon it constitutes a political act in a context where Palestinians’ very existence remains contested.
By Ben Bennett
Informed by her architectural training and her Sudanese heritage, Elnayal’s art envisions a different, personal kind of futurism in Sudan. And at Studio Black, she doesn’t just imagine what a better future for designers might be, she creates it.
By Elissa Odeh
What began as background music for diners soon evolved into Barakka, a multicultural band that fuses Turkish folk, Anatolian rock, Middle Eastern classics and Western instrumentation.
By Lauren Abunassar
The insistence on storytelling as testimony of survival, and of survival as a defiant act, is a vibrant throughline in much of Chahwan’s work.
By Elissa Odeh
Ballan believes that Palestinians need to be able to express a larger narrative about who they are—one that reflects their presence not only in politics, but in art, music, filmmaking, academia and more.
By Ragad Ahmad
After years of American individualism, where success is measured by self-sufficiency and connections often feel transactional, the interdependence I found in Palestine felt like rediscovering a language I had forgotten I knew.
By Ragad Ahmad
For many Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) women across Philadelphia, cultural garments serve not merely as clothing, but as living threads connecting them to their ancestral heritage.
By Ragad Ahmad
For some MENA students, studying abroad offers experiences that are not available to them in the U.S.—along with some unexpected rewards.
By Elissa Odeh
Holy Week activities at Arab American churches throughout the Philadelphia area provided opportunities for congregants to continue centuries-old traditions while observing the holiest days in their faith.
By Elissa Odeh
With spring’s arrival last Friday, 400 people came out to celebrate Nowruz, the Persian New Year, during a colorful night filled with Iranian music, food, and dance at Ruba Club in Northern Liberties. Iranian Philadelphians Neema Kashi, 32, of South Philadelphia, and Amanda Etemad, 27, of Washington Square West, hosted the Nowruz party, hoping to grow Philadelphia’s Iranian community and introduce the city’s non-Iranians to their traditions and culture.
When Medford, New Jersey-based documentary filmmaker Zainab Sultan was considering what new film projects to pursue, Delaware State Representative Madinah Wilson-Anton emerged as an immediate source of fascination. The first female Muslim legislator in Delaware, Wilson-Anton is young, candid, a steadfast community advocate, and a stand-up comedian.
Mohammed Aqlan is a big dreamer. The Yemeni-born owner of Malooga, a Yemeni restaurant in Philadelphia’s Old City, is quick to admit this if you ask him about the genesis of Malooga.
Al-Bustan News reports on Philadelphia’s La Farrah Boutique, a dress shop in Philadelphia's Winchester Park neighborhood, which sells traditional Palestinian dresses decorated with embroidery, or tatreez....
In many ways, electronic music producer and self-described “Arab bass dropper” Samer Saim Eldahr, who goes by the stage name Hello Psychaleppo, has a typical Syrian story. More than a decade ago, after the start of the war in Syria, he left his hometown of Aleppo for Beirut, and has relocated numerous times since. But that might be the only typical thing about Eldahr, 35. Today, the musician draws large, international crowds has booked shows in Paris, Berlin, Beirut, and Osnabrück, Germany. And he is slated to share a West Philadelphia stage on Saturday, August 10 with renowned Sudanese band Alsarah & The Nubatones.
Philadelphia’s BlackStar Film Festival is set to kick off on August 1st. Opening day programming features films that hail from Brazil, Manila, the American Midwest, Pakistan, and more. And though this year’s offerings are as emblematically diverse and probing as ever, if you ask festival director Nehad Khader what makes the right kind of BlackStar film, her answer is an evocative commentary on both film and artmaking in a time of sociopolitical upheaval: “We like to look for films that break something,” Khader told Al-Bustan. “Maybe they’re breaking form or breaking genre. Or doing something really unexpected… But think of those films that make you ask questions. That challenge you to think outside of what you already believe.”
For Trenton-based artist Alia Bensliman, putting women at the center of her work is a responsibility she inherited from her late grandmother, the prominent Tunisian feminist Asma Belkhodja. Belkhodja served as the first Secretary General of the Union of Tunisian Women when the nation gained independence from France in 1956, and she was a singular and formative influence on her young granddaughter. “Because of my family,” Bensliman told Al-Bustan in an interview, “I grew up with the vocabulary of women’s rights.”