November 24: A Reading and Conversation with Amra Sabic-El-Rayess

The Cat I Never Named: A True Story of Love, War, and Survival

Tuesday, November 24, 2020, 11:00-12:15 PM EST

Register for the Zoom webinar here.

Amra Sabic-El-Rayess will read from and discuss her memoir, The Cat I Never Named: A True Story of Love, War, and Survival. Amra grew up in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina and now lives in New York, where she teaches at Teachers College, Columbia University.

The memoir tells the story of a pivotal period of Bosniak history through the life of Amra, a young Muslim teen struggling to survive in the midst of the Bosnian genocide, and the stray cat who protected her family through it all.

The Cat I Never Named is a personal account of a Bosnian genocide survivor, whose family and friends were slaughtered because of their Muslim heritage during the Serbian siege on the city of Bihać. The memoir bravely wrestles with the rawness of human emotion in times of unembellished agony, exposing the ways war tests humanity. It is a witness of how dangerous visceral ethnic, racial, and religious hatred is. The critically acclaimed book explores ideas of populism, Islamophobia, and discrimination, and it covers themes related to narratives of hatred built around Muslim identities.

Presented by Columbia Global Centers - Amman.

Emergency Architecture and Planning: Recovering Beirut Post-Explosion

Thursday, November 12, 2020, 12:00 PM

Free and open to the public. Virtual events hosted on Zoom Webinar do not require an account to attend, advanced registration is encouraged. Register to attend.

Following a series of economic, political and environmental crises that culminated in the Beirut explosion on August 4th 2020, the GSAPP Collective for Beirut, in collaboration with Assistant Professor Hiba Bou Akar invites a group of multidisciplinary professionals to a round table discussion that explores architecture and cities in a time of emergency and political deadlock through ecological, planning, and policy lenses. The discussion will engage questions of the built environment on a variety of social and infrastructural scales.

For more information visit the GSAPP website.

GSAPP Collective for Beirut is an interdisciplinary student and alumni organization dedicated to the promotion, discussion, and reflection of contemporary issues in the middle east, and Lebanon specifically. It was founded organically in 2020, in the aftermath of the Beirut blast by a group of like-minded students and alumni who studied asynchronously at Columbia University. They are currently based both in Beirut and abroad (New York, London, Amsterdam, Toronto). For more information contact the Collective.

November 12: Mawlid 2020

Thursday, November 12, 2020, 6:00 PM

Watch the livestream from St. Paul’s Chapel at http://bit.ly/Mawlid2020

Join us to celebrate Mawlid in the West African Tradition, with poetry and prayer recitations by Alhassan Abubakari. The Mawlid is a commemoration of the birth of the Prophet Mohamed (Peace be upon him). Muslims around the world celebrate their love for him through poetry, prayers, and stories of his life.

Aga Khan Program Lecture: Nasser Rabbat, “History’s Currency: The Afterlife of al-Maqrizi’s Khitat”

Thursday, October 22, 2020, 6:30-8:00 PM

This event is presented by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Registration for this Zoom webinar is required. More details and registration can be found here.

Event Description

This lecture offers a reading of the stages of modernity in Egypt through a medieval lens. It explores how a leading urban history book, al-Maqrizi’s Khitat (written 1415-42), came to absorb and articulate the country’s encounters with colonialism, modernization, Orientalism, historical academicism, nationalism, pan-Arabism, and authoritarian capitalism. Appropriated by the Savants of the French Occupation (1798-1801) in their monumental Description de l’Égypte, the Khitat became the go-to source for anyone studying Cairo. ‘Ali Mubarak, an engineer/minister who Haussmannized Cairo in the 1860s, used it to write his own paean to the remodeled city. K. A. C. Creswell, a British officer turned Orientalist architectural historian, relied on it to anchor his pioneering architectural history of Egypt. Egyptian nationalist historians deployed it as their authenticating native referent. Novelists and poets, like Gamal al-Ghitani and Naguib Surur, assimilated it as a voice of the undying spirit of Egypt and a parable of resistance to corruption and oppression. Eventually, the book acquired a transhistorical sheen that embodied the epistemic and political changes in Egypt from the early 19th century to the present.

Speaker

Nasser Rabbat, RF '12, is the Aga Khan Professor and the Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. His interests include the history and historiography of Islamic architecture, medieval urbanism, modern Arab history, contemporary Arab art, and post-colonial criticism. He has published several books, most recently ‘Imarat al-Mudun al-Mayyita: Nahwa Qira’a Jadida lil-Tarikh al-Suri (The Architecture of the Dead Cities: Toward a New Interpretation of the History of Syria) (2018) and an online book, The Destruction of Cultural Heritage: From Napoléon to ISIS, co-edited with Pamela Karimi (2016). Prof. Rabbat worked as an architect in Los Angeles and Damascus and held academic and research appointments in Cairo, Granada, Rome, Paris, Abu Dhabi, Munich, and Bonn. He regularly contributes to Arabic newspapers, serves on the boards of various organizations and consults with international design firms on projects in the Islamic World. In recent years, he began researching and publishing on immigration, refugees, heritage conservation, and destruction and reconstruction.