By Sarah Burke

Sadder Than Water: poems by Samih al-QasimMaps

Several years ago I traveled in Tunisia with a friend. We felt pretty cool: we avoided the resorts, took local transport, ate local food, practiced our languages. One day we rolled into a town by the edge of the Sahara that is the starting point of many coordinated journeys into the desert—camels, sunset over the dunes, dinner cooked on a fire, etc. We had compared the reviews of several tour agencies in Lonely Planet and Rough Guide, volumes stored like talismans in our respective backpacks. As we emerged from the shared van into this new town, a man approached us and began talking about the agency he represented. It was the best, he said, the number one agency for trips into the desert.

I have been known to collect postcards of a particular variety. The typical postcard in my collection is made of paper, measures five and a half inches long by three and a half inches wide, and dates around the first few decades of the twentieth century. All of my postcards depict women of colonial North Africa and the Middle East.

Amazigh Film FestivalThe second annual Amazigh Film Festival, under the stewardship of director Helene Hagan, will present art, music and films of the Amazigh or Berber cultures of North Africa. Last year's event was highly successful and the second edition promises to be even more intriguing. Here's the schedule:

4:00-4:30 pm: Slideshow presentation, "Kabylia, the land, the people, the Arts" (10 min) - Welcome Address by Helene Hagan and presentation by Rachid Bouksim, Director of the Issni N'Ourgh Film Festival of Agadir, Morocco, on the recent development of the Amazigh Cinematography in Morocco.

4:30-6:30 pm: Documentaries "Pottery from the Rif" (27 min, 2003, Morocco, Dounia Productions, Ltd.) and "On Native Lands" (86 min, Canada/Morocco, 2007, Orbi xii).

6:30-7:30 pm: Art Exhibit and Reception with art by Moroccan artists Hassan Moumene (Atlas) and Abdallah Aourik (Souss). Traditional mint tea and tidbits catered by CHAMEAU, Inc. of Beverly Hills.

By Yasmine El-Rashidi

Cairo’s streets have always been sad. I have spent years traversing them, getting lost and familiar with alleyways littered with paper, saturated with smells and colors and a conflict of noise. Mothers and daughters call down to the greengrocers to fill their dangling baskets with goods. Young boys shout randomly into the hollow of the maze of buildings. Conversations take place across alleys, from balconies, from windows. Recipes are exchanged, news is shared, the call to prayer resonates. Sellers of all sorts call out the isms of slogans and sounds that make Cairo’s streets familiar to those who live them. Television filters out from every floor and the voracity of traffic chimes in with consistency. It is a commotion of life that I have perhaps only experienced to such intensity in India, where the air is inflated with ebullience and vivid colors appear to stream from the city’s pores of windows and doorways. In India there is exuberance. In Cairo, however, it feels quite different.

Fez: Queen of Cities

An evening of live music and dance at UCLA's Royce Hall

Christopher Caldwell on "What is the West's Problem with Islam?"

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West: your purchase benefits LCC programming Europe has received a wave of immigration from the global south in recent decades, similar in scope to the US-but very different in its results. Many immigrant and second-generation communities have astronomical unemployment rates and a thin connection to European identity. Some have produced terrorists. The problems are particularly severe among newcomers from the Muslim world.

If Europe has an Islam problem, whose fault is it? Is Islamic belief and culture incompatible with Western institutions? Or is there such a thing as "Islamophobia," poisoning immigrants' efforts to integrate on European terms?

Christopher Caldwell, who writes for the Financial Times, The New York Times Magazine and The Weekly Standard, visits Zócalo to talk about themes from his upcoming book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.

The 4th Annual God Loves Beauty Festival, Nov. 12-20, 2008

The eclectic Al-Fareed aka Alfred Madain is a deejay, musician and ethnomusicologist in Los Angeles. A walking encyclopedia of traditional, folkloric and contemporary music of the Arab/Islamic world and Africa, he intimately “gets” and analyzes music ranging from ancient traditions to modern world techno, hip hop, western new wave, heavy metal and punk. Al-Fareed’s attuned feel for rock gives him the ability to reflect on the west from an eastern perspective and on the east from a western perspective. As a music historian he can explain the history and influence of ziryab (a musician of the Baghdadi and Andalusian courts) as well as the history and influence of Woody Guthrie, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Black Flag, Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Velvet Underground and more.

Artist Mounir FatmiA multimedia artist born in Tangier, Morocco who divides his time between Paris and Tangier, Mounir Fatmi constructs visual spaces and linguistic games that aim to free the viewer from his/her preconceptions of politics and religion, and allow them to contemplate these and other subjects in new ways. His videos, installations, drawings, paintings and sculptures bring to light our doubts, fears and desires, directly addressing the current events of our world. Sometimes his work serves to both explicate the origins and symptoms of global issues as well as speak to those whose lives are affected by specific events.
An evocative work critical of corporal punishment

From October 24-26 in Hollywood, Arpa International Film Festival will screen 50 films from 21 nations, including Armenia, Australia, Canada, China, Congo, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Romania, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Tobago, Trinidad, Turkey, UK, and Venezuela.

Arpa International Film Festival, which goes green in 2008, is produced by Arpa Foundation for Film, Music, and Art (AFFMA), a non-profit organization dedicated to artists exploring identity, multi-culturalism, war, exile, genocide and global empathy.