Aux Résistances - Noun Ya

Aux Résistances est un album magnifique. Les talents de Yann Pittard et Naissam Jalal se mèlent pour créer Noun Ya, aboutissant à une création minimale et merveilleuse au même temps. Il est domage qu'il n'y aie plus de matériel sure le site Myspace du duet et qu'on ne trouve l'album que chez des marchands japonais.

Heureusement, on a youtube:

Les croisades sous le regard de l'Orient - Ensemble al-Kindi & Omar Sarmini

Great album and an even better booklet. I consider this a tribute to the Krak des Chevaliers, partially destroyed in the ongoing Syrian Civil War -the fact that WMD's have been partially removed doesn't mean it's still not over.

Liturgies coptes - Ensemble David

Les observateurs occasionnels du Moyen Orient peuvent être excuses de croire que les coptes étaient une minorité respectée jusqu’à la chute de Hosni Mubarak. En réalité, les coptes sont opprimés depuis l’implantation de l’Islam en Egypte et au Soudan. Le pape Chenouda III, chef de l’Église copte a été mis en résidence surveillée entre 1981 et 1985. Plus récemment, le soi-disant « printemps arabe » a résulté dans une série d’attaques contre des églises et personnalités coptes. Un jour, le Monde comprendra que la démocratie et les droits de l’homme, ainsi comme toute autre idée de modernité, ne sont pas compatibles avec le voile Islamique…

Dans ce contexte, l’album Liturgies coptes de l’Ensemble David, production de l’Institut du MondeArabe, est un rappel du danger subi par les communautés coptes au Moyen Orient. 

Flamenco Arabe 2 - Hossam Ramzy & José Luis Montón

Flamenco Arabe 2 pretends to fusion José Luis Montón's flamenco guitar with the talent of Hossam Ramzy playing Arabic traditional instruments. Both Montón and Ramzy are extremely talented musicians. For what it's worth, Ramzy played with Peter Gabriel prior to the recording of Flamenco Arabe 2.

For some reason, I found this album tremendously disappointing. There are three possible non-excluding reasons for that: the first reason is that, after the work of Michel Camilo and Tomatito, my standards for flamenco-fussion are very high. The second reason is that I'm probably too tired of listening Mediterranean music. I'm going to give it a break, go back to King Crimson for a couple of weeks, and then come back. The third reason is that Flamenco Arabe 2 sounds like any modern Arabic music album. We all know that Arabic countries have had tremendous problems dealing with modernity in all aspects, and music is not the exceptions. For most Arabic musicians, modernity means using the same instruments that have been played in the region for the last 500 years, only faster and with some Western arrangements. And that's the problem with this album: it's too Arabic, up to the point where the influence of flamenco is lost. Nightclubs in Marrakech, Tunis, or El Cairo can play this or any other album in the top-100; listeners will not notice the difference. This blog makes a similar statement about this album, though using a more subtle style. 

The best song of the album is probably "Arena", written by José Luis Montón, who says the following about it:

"With this Cadiz rhythm full of warmth, I try to twin two towns and two sands: sea and desert." 

Imagined Communities - Benedict Anderson

Imagined Communities was first published in 1983. At the time, when fights over "Marxism" and "Capitalism" were still relevant and every concept was seen through the prism of these two ideologies, the book was considered as a History book. In 1991, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the book was seen as a prophecy, similar to what happened to Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations after 9/11. Today, Imagined Communities is a text book for students of nationalism and culture.

At the core of Anderson's argument is the idea that books printed in vernacular language and novels allowed members of the national bourgeoisies to communicate with each other, which allowed them to create, little by little, a common discourse that eventually ended up in the struggle to create Nation-States. If one assumes that Internet and cell phones changed the way people communicate with each other qualitatively with respect to books, it is easy to stretch the argument and buy the idea that Twitter, blogs, and cell phones will create new and different discourses that might change Nation-States. There is already  some academic evidence on how Internet has already changed the way in which we read and write.

The technological support determines what is written and who does it:

The first known texts are written in hard surfaces such as stone, an expensive and labor intensive activity that could be paid for only by large organizations such as empires. That's why the first written records are laws, such as the Code of Hammurabi.

Paper, clay, and papyrus lowered the costs of writing, which became an affordable activity that allowed the transmission of non-essential ideas such as religion more easily.

The printing press lowered even more the costs of passing ideas: novels, poems, and all kind of texts could be produced massively at a very low cost. Bourgeois could read, but also write very easily.

Twitter and the Internet represent the ultimate democratization of writing: anyone with a computer can create a blog or open a Twitter account and say whatever (s)he wants, with an added value: previous means of communication had some gatekeepers that guaranteed, up to an extent, the quality of whatever was published. Printing a book might have been cheap for some sectors of society, but a would-be writer still needed to convince the printer that his work was worth it. 

Gatekeepers have totally disappeared in the Internet age, resulting in a lot of noise and polarizing voices, but also in a richer debate in some cases -the blogosphere changed the terms and nature of the debate on Economics, to mention just one field. 

Internet is putting us in a more democratic and unregulated World. The left likes the "democratic" part, and the right likes the "unregulated" part. The result, like in most undemocratic and unregulated environments, is lack of depth. The clearest example is the United States, whose Founding Fathers found inspiration in the books by Locke and Montesquieu; the Tea Party, in Sarah Palin's tweets...

Internet and cell phones are changing the political debate, and they will eventually change Nation-States, just like books turned empires into Nation-States. It is obviously too early to say whether the final result will be  a more unified humankind or a multiplicity of isolated communities. Whatever we think the final result will be is pure speculation and a result of our preconceptions about human nature.

From Babel to Dragomans - Bernard Lewis

Bernard Lewis is the author one must read to start having a broad idea of the Middle East. For one thing, he was the creator of the expression "clash of civilizations", later popularized by Samuel Huntington, and taken as a guidance for policy by some neo-conservative ideologues in the aftermath of 9/11.

From Babel to Dragomans collects 51 essays written by Bernard Lewis on the Middle East. The topics covered range from gastronomy to U.S. foreign policy, passing through Turkish historiography and several comparative analysis of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The book is divided in three sections: part 1 deals with   "past history"; part 2, with "current history", and part 3 collects essays on historiography and Orientalism. By construction, books that collect essays tend to be repetitive and From Babel to Dragomans is not an exception. From that perspective, part 1 is probably the best part of the book by providing a quick introduction to Middle East from a scholar perspective -part 2 is too ideologized, and part 3 is too academic.

There are a lot of remarkable quotes in this book, though there is probably one that comes out for its prescience regarding the current events in the Middle East: 

"Where the so-called fundamentalist Muslims and democrats are both in opposition, the former have an immense advantage. In the mosques and preachers, they dispose of a network for meeting and communication that no government, however tyrannical, can entirely control and no other group can rival."

This quotation comes handy now that the popular revolts in Egypt and Tunisia are getting stopped by the military or kidnapped by the Salafists. 

People were too optimistic about the prospects of these two countries to implant functioning democratic regimes. Obviously, the images of young people going out to the streets and risk their lives is shocking and moving at the same time, but any cold and fact-based analysis could see from the beginning that both the military and the Salafists had something that the protesters have lacked since they took the streets: organization and command chains. A political movement cannot be run like an assembly if it really wants to survive.