{"id":4682,"date":"2021-09-15T12:01:16","date_gmt":"2021-09-15T12:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=4682"},"modified":"2021-09-15T12:01:16","modified_gmt":"2021-09-15T12:01:16","slug":"20-years-ago-this-month-9-11-at-souk-ukaz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/20-years-ago-this-month-9-11-at-souk-ukaz\/","title":{"rendered":"20 Years Ago This Month, 9\/11 at Souk Ukaz"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Night concert at Amman’s Citadel (photo Dan Stubbs\/NME).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hadani Ditmars<\/h4>\n

The commemoration of the 20th<\/sup> anniversary of 9\/11 unfolds in televisual real time and yet with a strange sense of suspended animation, as if we\u2019re on a slow motion merry go round that we can\u2019t get off.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just that feeling of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu all over again\u00a0as the TV screen blares scenes from Taliban 2.1 meets Atwood\u2019s Republic of Gilead; nor is it that familiar sense of la naus\u00e9e<\/em> as Bush plays elder statesman rather than architect of the \u201cwar on terror\u201d (or the \u201cwar of terror\u201d as Borat so aptly called it) \u00a0that killed thousands more Iraqis and Afghans than the terrorists who attacked the towers of the World Trade Center. From his televisual pulpit, surrounded by past presidents like Clinton and Obama whose administrations bombed and starved Iraqis, when then weren\u2019t killing Afghans and Yemenis with drones, or funding the occupation of Palestine, Bush decried both homegrown and more exotic strains of extremism as being \u201cchildren of the same foul spirit.\u201d Considering the long standing support of the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies for al-Qaeda and the Taliban<\/a> \u2014 whose jihadist textbooks were paid for by the US and published in the Bible Belt<\/a> \u2014 his unironic truth was possibly an understatement.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s also that sinking feeling that you\u2019ve been telling the same story for 30 years and no one is listening. Over the past three decades of reporting from the region, when questioned about the future of Afghanistan and Iraq, I would always reply, \u201cTo create a stable democracy you need to fund education and healthcare and support women and children. It\u2019s not rocket science.\u201d But actually, with hindsight, perhaps it was.<\/p>\n

Rockets are big business, especially backed by pseudo feminist cheerleaders<\/a> working for the Pentagon. While Afghan and Iraqi and Palestinian civilians were occupied, imprisoned, and killed in the name of Pax Americana<\/a>, arms<\/a> dealers<\/a> raked in billions.<\/p>\n

And now it\u2019s all come full circle in a terrifying way.<\/p>\n

But once there was a time when earnest cultural festivals tried to bring disparate groups together to celebrate life and even dance,\u00a0not to fetishize death and weapons. In retrospect, my attendance at Amman\u2019s Souk Ukaz \u2014 literally a cultural bazaar that coincided with 9\/11 \u2014 may have been akin to Don Quixote tilting at windmills, but in many ways, it was also the best possible place to have witnessed events during that fateful week in early September 2001.<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/soundcloud.com\/levantine-center\/attending-souk-ukaz-during-the-week-of-september-11\n

Instead of an international arms market, imagine if you will, a Middle Eastern cultural marketplace, perhaps hearkening back to the Silk Road, or even the first half of the 20th<\/sup> century; a place where poets and musicians, artists, filmmakers, and dealmakers come together to exchange ideas and sell their wares. Souk Ukaz \u00a0was the brainchild of a Jordanian woman named Iman al-Hindawi, who \u00a0wanted to re-create a market tradition she said stretched back to pre-Islamic times; one that would bring together not only artists from the Middle East and Africa, but also connect them with cultural institutions from the West.\u00a0 About one-third of the participants were Americans, many of them from New York.<\/p>\n

Reality, of course, plagued the festival, which began on September 9.<\/p>\n

The first day \u2014 complete with a dramatic performance by whirling dervishes, an appearance by the ravishing Queen Rania of Jordan, and an intelligent discourse on Islamic art by Princess Wajdan Ali \u2014was marred by bad news from the occupied territories. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was trapped in Ramallah, under Israeli siege. He was scheduled to attend the opening of Algerian artist Rachid Koraichi\u2019s stunning exhibit of calligraphy-inspired sculptures and etchings. The exhibit was described by curator Salah Hassan as speaking \u201cdirectly to issues of memory, diaspora, exile and other aspects of the Arab experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, the next day, September 10, news came that eight people had been killed just south of Baghdad, in an American bombing raid. Still the festival went on, with earnest workshops on cultural funding and collegial discussions about East\/West film co-productions. But beyond official politesse, subtle but powerful lines were being drawn. A British\/Jordanian musical exchange went disastrously wrong, with each group re-enforcing their worst cultural stereotypes. A Lebanese-Christian filmmaker\u2019s views rubbed edgily against those of a Palestinian cultural activist. Meanwhile, it turned out that the main sponsors of the \u201cglobalization and Arabic culture\u201d-themed festival were Texaco and Ford.<\/p>\n

And then came September 11th, exactly the half-way point of this cultural marketplace.<\/p>\n

\n

News of events in America reached us as we were emerging from a workshop on \u201cArab images in Western media.\u201d Mere minutes later, inflammatory images of ululating Palestinian women in East Jerusalem celebrating the attack were being broadcast around the world on CNN.<\/p>\n

American participants left abruptly en masse and spent the next four days trapped in airports. The rest of us \u2014 including a Palestinian folk-dancing troupe from Ramallah which could not get back home because of the Israeli siege \u2014carried on in a rather stunned state.<\/p>\n

The evening of September 11th, we dutifully took a bus to Amman\u2019s Citadel, the Roman ruins where King David dispatched Bathsheba\u2019s husband to certain death in battle, itself one of the highest points in the city. Underneath a starlit sky, we listened to soothing Sufi music from Syria. Later, a group from Egypt called \u201cLes Tambours de Nubie\u201d played music that combined traditional Nubian melodies and African rhythms, with classical cello. Their closing number was a unique version of Beethoven’s \u201cSong of Joy.\u201d East and West had never seemed so close yet so far.<\/p>\n

The mood on the Jordanian street was increasingly grim. Everyone was worried about the death of tourism, the only real industry in a country that had not been blessed with oil when the French and British were carving up the Middle East. A taxi driver, thinking I was American, offered his sincere condolences. When I told him I was Canadian, he inquired discreetly about visas and unemployment rates.<\/p>\n

Thursday night, as the enormity of what had happened and the increasing certainty of war began to sink in, we were all bussed out to a beautiful spot in the country, where a Lebanese jazz band and a Nigerian group entertained us. As the Nigerian band sang a song that began \u201cWe are all brothers and sisters\u2026\u201d a bunch of us rather bewildered attendees \u2014including Senegalese, British, Palestinian and one lone American (the only one who had stayed out of solidarity, a sweet natured teacher from Kansas) \u2014 slowly began to dance. As we moved and swayed together, any political or national \u201cline-drawing” that had begun, melted into a sense of unity.<\/p>\n

The next day, September 14, the festival continued with a rather Fellini-esque fashion show at the Dead Sea Moevnpick resort. Half a dozen designers from around the Arab world \u2014 Jordanian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Moroccan, Palestinian \u2014 showcased their work that mixed traditional artisanal designs with Western style couture. The evening was a fantasia of design possibilities that seemed to speak to the aesthetic dividends of peaceful co-existence.<\/p>\n

The festival closed with a performance by Vienna-based Palestinian singer\/songwriter Marwan Abado, minus his Austrian band members, who had been spooked by the thought of travel to the Middle East and cancelled at the last minute. Like an Arabic Leonard Cohen, Abado sang songs that transcended the political with their humor and humanity. In \u201cPoem to the Moon” he sang of being freed from a \u201cprison\u201d that could be real or psychological.<\/p>\n

I asked him afterwards about his feelings as an artist caught between East and West vis \u00e0 vis the current \u201csituation.\u201d Abado responded that the most \u201csurreal\u201d experience of his performing life was representing Austria at a musical festival in Morocco. \u201cWhen people ask me where I\u2019m from,\u201d he continued, \u201cI say, \u2018from Ottakring\u2019 (a neighborhood in Vienna). Then I say I am Palestinian. Then a musician. But in the end, I can only say, \u2018I am a human being.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

The war on terror spawned by that fateful week would kill thousands of innocents in Afghanistan and Iraq, increase racial profiling and \u201cextraordinary rendition\u201d of Canadian citizens like Maher Arar, who was infamously deported to a Syrian prison by American authorities.<\/p>\n

But for that one extraordinary week in September 2001, I was sheltered in a tiny oasis of peace, where culture trumped terror, and artists dreamed of happier futures. This is what I choose to remember today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hadani Ditmars The commemoration of the 20th anniversary of 9\/11 unfolds in televisual real time and yet with a strange sense of suspended animation, as if we\u2019re on a slow 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