EGYPTIAN-BRITISH: Coronation pride for Royal Architect Dr. Khaled Azzam

After years lost in an educational wilderness, the Egyptian-British designer found his niche as a world authority on Islamic art and architecture with noble patrons such as King Charles III.

The Chelsea Flower Show was just some annual event that happened in London as far as Khaled Azzam was concerned, until the day he answered a call from the heir to the throne.

Prince Charles , inspired by two antique Turkish rugs at his residence in Gloucestershire, was on the phone with an unusual brief: “I want you to work with me to design a garden.”

“I thought it was fabulous,” Azzam tells The National. “I’d never designed a garden before in my life so I went to see him at Highgrove House. He’s long been fascinated with Islamic art and architecture, and, because that’s what I practise, we always spoke about such things.

“He said, ‘All these carpets that I live with and love are interpretations of gardens, but I would like to design and build a garden that is an interpretation of carpets. I want to flip it around’.”

So it was that in 2001, among the usual avant-garde displays and emerging trends at the horticultural showcase, the first entry ever submitted by a member of the British royal family instead dug deep into the past.

The classic Islamic charbagh representing the four gardens of Paradise in the Quran was a crowd-drawing triumph yet, when it won a coveted silver-gilt medal, Azzam remembers thinking: “Whoa, that’s crazy.”

In situ ever since at the Highgrove estate, The Carpet Garden is the living incarnation of the two men’s long combined efforts to bring forth new shoots from ancient artistic roots.

Now, more than 20 years on, Azzam presides as director of the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts that is regarded as a centre for excellence in teaching the geometries held to be the common thread between age-old skills all but abandoned in much of the modern world.

The aim is to nurture patterning techniques such as the kind of inlaid stone workmanship used to create the Cosmati Pavement, the 13th-century mosaic floor on which, fittingly, the throne will be placed during the coronation ceremony for King Charles III inside Westminster Abbey on Saturday.

An extensive network of PSTA outreach programmes has spread across the globe from the core educational base in London to regenerate the cultural heritage of different regions and communities, from Jamaica to the UAE to China.

But, from the outset, the school’s ethos often evoked incomprehension, ridicule and, at times, undisguised animosity from some within the art establishment.

“There were moments that I was very, very worried, saying, ‘if this dies, it dies with us’,” Azzam recalls. “What His Majesty was saying that architecture, cities and education should be about, and how we should deal with the environment, was not commonplace. All those things were seen to be interesting and quaint. We never saw ourselves as being alternative. We were part of what we used to call ‘essential thinking’.

“Very early on, we had this strong bond; we understood exactly what we had to do. Then, I had to understand something. He was a prince, now he’s a king. We’ve had visionaries, we’ve had patrons all throughout history, that is the role of a prince. But my role is to make it happen.”

If the mission was to accumulate centuries of precious creative knowledge for alumni to reinvigorate and, in turn, hand to the next generation then there was one significant impediment.

“There weren’t any masters to teach us,” Azzam says.

The disconcerting discovery came when he went to set up a regional centre in his birthplace in 2005 with the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, Art Jameel and local artisans from whom he had hoped to gain a deeper understanding of tradition.

Instead, Azzam had a moment of transformational thinking that “not everything old is beautiful” — the craftsmen and women, in spite of their evident skills, had for generations been learning by rote.

“I really respect them and their role in the community but some of it was quite shoddy workmanship. They would start telling me, ‘Ah, but you don’t know, I am an eighth-generation carpenter and I learnt this from my grandfather’.

“But, because we came from an academic background and could analyse this stuff, I said, ‘your grandfather made a mistake three generations ago and you’re just repeating that mistake’.”

Most saddening for Azzam, however, was that the artists were stuck perpetually reproducing the same designs over and over again. Without much grasp of the underlying mathematical principles, they were incapable of extending the lineage of their traditional arts and crafts by creating anything new.

“It opened my eyes to the limitations of simply teaching young people through copying the forms of the past. We had to go back to the origin, to deconstruct buildings and understand how they were built. We had to look at certain principles to see what they were about. In a way, it was a voyage backwards.

“Then there was a moment where we started turning around, and now we feel that there is enough of a contemporary heritage to call it a living tradition and move into the future.

“If we’ve been successful in one thing, it’s in really delivering the philosophy into practice. It’s not just talk, it’s about making things, creating this process from the origin to the manifestation.”

That their son would end up running any school, let alone a prestigious art institution for the Prince’s Foundation, would once have been inconceivable for Azzam’s parents, Laila and Omar, who long kept quiet their fears over his prospects.

Young Khaled, despite being widely read and full of curiosity about what was happening in the world, was nonetheless lost within the four walls of a classroom.

“I was always last in the class because I just didn’t understand what was going on at all.

“Although my parents never let on, they admitted it much later, saying, ‘You know, we didn’t think you’d even make it into university’.

“And the fact that I not just got into university but then got a PhD and became involved in education … my brother says it’s a sign of the end of the world,” he says, smiling affectionately at the long-running joke.

It pops up again when we’re discussing Azzam’s receipt of the Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order, a knighthood granted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2009, and his speech before Pope Benedict XVI as representative of Muslims at an interfaith forum the following year.

“I don’t know why until this day that I was chosen,” he says. “It’s another sign of the end of the world, according to my brother.”

Azzam puts being such “a terrible student” down to a childhood disrupted by frequent geographical moves but doesn’t rule out an undiagnosed learning difficulty. “In our day, you were just stupid if you didn’t get it,” he says.

Education eventually took its place as the most important part of his working life once he began to understand that the Latin root, educere, means “to draw out of” not “to put into”.

As a consequence of his own difficulties, he feels an enormous responsibility towards those unable to cope with school systems intent on treating students like empty vessels that need filling with facts and figures.

“I became very, very interested in the journey you take a student through to bring what’s in them out to the surface,” he says.

Though born in Egypt, where his mother “always returned to have her babies”, the family lived abroad because of his father’s job as a senior urban planner for the UN.

After a stint in Saudi Arabia, there was a relatively settled period of 10 years in Lebanon until civil war broke out. They struggled on for almost a year until Omar, working in Paris at the time, suggested that the rest of the family join him temporarily: “Just come over for Christmas,” was the gist, “things will die down.”

“We managed to get on a flight one day very, very quickly — just packed a hand bag each and ran off to the airport. We left everything behind, all our books, our toys, our belongings, our clothes and just never went back because the war never ended. We had to rebuild our life. Then England became my home and I’m very grateful.”

This is not quite how his younger self felt when first pitching up late one Autumn afternoon in what was then the “very, very small town” of Cambridge.

“There was nothing to do. In those days, everything shut at five o’clock. It was foggy, cold and damp, and I’d just spent two years in the South of France. I was trying to figure out what I had done wrong.”

The posse of four siblings received a hospitable welcome from the locals and quickly grew to love their adopted home and the architecture lining the cobbled streets.

There was a particularly memorable encounter, surrounded by fluted limestone columns, medieval stained-glass windows and Tudor symbols in King’s College Chapel that would later inform much of Azzam’s work.

Beneath the celebrated fan-vaulted ceiling of the 500-year-old Gothic landmark built by a succession of English monarchs, the teenager made an unexpected discovery: he found himself.

“Physically, I had nothing to do with that place. Culturally, I was an Egyptian who came to England. I wasn’t even an architect yet. I was doing my O-Levels and A-Levels.

“But there was something in me that completely understood that building; the message, the beauty of it.

“I felt I belonged there, that it was part of me. It was a very profound experience that changed my life somehow.”

Arriving at what he says all the great civilisations of the world had known, however, came only with time and experience.

It has been a constant journey of learning with two particular guiding lights along the way. The first was Abdel Wahed El Wakil, the foremost authority in Islamic architecture with whom Azzam subjected himself completely for eight intense years at a “hothouse” of an office in London.

“We had a difficult relationship because he was very demanding but he was my master who taught me everything I know about architecture,” he says. “I just totally understood that this idea of apprenticeship is to give yourself to somebody, and if you find that person, you’re very, very lucky.”

Through El Wakil, he met Keith Critchlow, the renowned geometer and founder of the Visual and Traditional Arts Department at the Prince’s Institute of Architecture, and developed a deep fascination with the properties underpinning the order of nature.

He talks of the intricate chambers of the nautilus shell and the honeycomb built in hives by bees or the movement of planets over time across the night sky, but perhaps his favourite example is the delicate, six-fold symmetry of a single ice crystal.

“All snowflakes are hexagonal because the molecular structure of water is hexagonal yet — and this blows my mind every time I say it — no two snowflakes that fall on the ground are the same.

“There is a principle of unity manifesting variety. All snowflakes start from the same origin but their final form is the record of their journey down to Earth. In a way, that’s us as human beings as well.

“If you look at a DNA structure, the very basic thing that binds us all together, it’s a beautiful spiral that has a certain proportional system and yet we’re all different.”

The firm belief that we all have the same origin is fundamental not only to his work at the school but also as principal of Khaled Azzam Associates, the “little practice” he started in 1991.

It is hard, he agrees, not to lose count of the many architectural projects he has been involved in over the years: mosques like that commissioned by King Abdallah II to commemorate his father, the late King Hussein, in Amman; royal residences, commercial buildings, offices and schools across the Middle East; and, most recently, the master plan launched by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to sustainably develop the historic Al Ula site in Saudi Arabia where he is headed a few days after our interview.

“I’ve been running two careers, that’s why the number of projects looks bigger than it is,” Azzam, now 62, says modestly.

When it’s pointed out that there doesn’t seem to be much spare time weighing on his hands, Azzam concedes that he wouldn’t know what to do with it if he had any. He works all day, never tiring because, well, he doesn’t see it as work.

“I am blessed in my life because I do things I love. I think very, very early on in my career, I just said: I want work to be part of my identity, part of my character — it all has to be one.

“The school has always been somewhere that I found a great sense of nourishment and fulfilment. And it’s very much part of my life. My wife, Mona, complains that they’re my family more than my family at home.”

Home proper is Clapham in south London, where Mona has laid the unshakeable foundation that has made “all this possible”, Azzam acknowledges. Everything is taken care of so that he never has to worry: the house, the well-being of their children, Issam, 24, and Nadia, 19, and the bills “that she knows I won’t pay”.

A few hours before the rest of the family wakes each day, he is already at his desk with a cup of coffee, drawing while looking out across one of London’s largest parks.

“It’s very quiet,” he says. “There’s nobody there, and then you see one person, then two people, and then you see life coming through, and you start having a funny relationship with it. It’s beautiful.”

From his perch, Azzam envies the super fit elderly man who runs around Clapham Common each day, and often wonders with a glint of amusement what the dogs make of their owners diligently picking up after them.

He watches the latest exercise trends come and go with the seasons — the boxing or tai chi or, as with a few years back, “everybody standing on their heads”.

No surprises, though, that after a lifetime eschewing fleeting fashions, he isn’t inclined to join them.

source/content; thenationalnews.com (headline edited)

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Khaled Azzam concedes that he wouldn’t know what to do with spare time if he had any away from work. ‘I am blessed in my life because I do things I love,’ he says. Photo: Mark Chilvers

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BRITISH / EGYPTIAN

EGYPTIAN-BRITISH Surgeon Sir Dr. Magdi Yacoub flies ‘like a butterfly’ but is still busy as can be

The 87-year-old was recently appointed honorary chancellor of the British University in Egypt and his foundation will soon open heart centres in Cairo and Kigali, Rwanda.

Renowned Egyptian-British heart surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub, 87, made his mark a long time ago.

In 1980, he established what was to become one of the world’s largest and most successful heart transplant units, at Harefield Hospital in west London; in 1983, he performed the UK’s first combined heart and lung transplant; in 1992, he was knighted; and in 2014, he was awarded the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II.

But that is just the shortlist and most recently he became honorary chancellor of the British University in Egypt (BUE).

As a professor of cardiothoracic surgery at Imperial College London for 20 years, Prof Yacoub was also lecturing, researching, publishing and mentoring.

He has founded several charities, starting with Chain of Hope in 1995, which treats children in developing countries who have life-threatening heart conditions. The Magdi Yacoub Heart Foundation’s Aswan centre has earned him an affectionate nickname, Egypt’s King of Hearts.

“Now … I’m like a butterfly, who flies in between all of these things”, Prof Yacoub tells The National.

“I almost work harder, although obviously, my energy is not the same. I used to not sleep for two or three nights and read all the journals and come back in the morning. But I still sleep four hours or so and wake up in the night,” he says.

He says he still wants to address healthcare inequality, chase a cure for heart failure and pass on the baton to the next generation in every way he can.

The BUE is a private institution that was formally inaugurated in 2006 by King Charles, who was Prince of Wales at the time, and Egypt’s former first lady, Suzanne Mubarak.

“I was there at its birth,” says Prof Yacoub, who is also a member of the university’s board of trustees. “I accepted [the role] because I identify with what they’re doing for young people, for the country, for the world … but also university life and its values are very important to me.”

The enthusiasm with which Prof Yacoub mentors young people stems from an appreciation of the influence of his own mentors, starting with his surgeon father, Habib Yacoub.

Prof Yacoub was born in 1935 in Bilbeis, a town in the Nile Delta about 60km north-east of Cairo, to a Coptic Christian family. He spent his childhood moving around Egypt due to his father’s profession.

Both his father and the death of his aunt from uncorrected mitral stenosis (a narrowing of the heart valve) inspired him to study medicine and cardiology.

After graduating in medicine from Cairo University in 1957, in the early 1960s he moved to the UK for further training.

He worked under the late British chest and heart surgeon Lord Russell Brock, one of the pioneers of modern open-heart surgery.

“I knew of him before I ever came to the UK and I targeted him as a young boy,” Prof Yacoub says. “I learnt so much from him on how to think, how to be a better cardiologist than anybody, how to make decisions for yourself.”

Prof Yacoub’s early work includes repairing heart valves with the late South African-born British cardiothoracic surgeon Donald Ross. He adapted the Ross Procedure, where the diseased aortic valve is replaced with the person’s own pulmonary valve.

A job rejection from the Royal Brompton Hospital prompted him to move to the US in 1968, where he became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago for a year. He was “extremely disappointed and upset” at the time, but “in the long run, it was the best thing that happened to me”, Prof Yacoub says.

“Although I was bent on having the job at the Royal Brompton, which was a huge hospital, it was actually so much better for me to come back to a peripheral hospital because I was allowed to do what I wanted and I was more creative,” he says.

He became a consultant cardiothoracic surgeon at Harefield Hospital in Uxbridge in 1969 and immediately shook up the place.

“When I was appointed as the only heart surgeon there and they were doing one case every week, sometimes one open-heart every two weeks, I said, ‘no, no, we’re going to do nine to 13 every week’,” Prof Yacoub says. “They said, ‘you’re not serious.’ I said ‘I am serious’.”

He went on to become the founder and director at Harefield’s Heart Science Centre, and was also a consultant cardiothoracic surgeon at Royal Brompton from 1986 until his retirement from National Health Services practice in 2001 at the age of 65.

Over the course of his career, Prof Yacoub has performed more than 40,000 open heart surgeries and conducted more than 2,000 heart transplants.

From 1986 to 2006, he held the position of British Heart Foundation professor of cardiothoracic surgery at Imperial College, where he supervised more than 20 higher-degree students.

He credits other mentors along his journey as well, such as the late Sir Peter Medawar, the half-British, half-Lebanese, Brazilian-born immunologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1960.

“He is regarded as the father of transplantation and he has saved so many people around the world,” Prof Yacoub says. “I was very lucky to meet him in Chicago first when I was there and then when he came back to the UK at Oxford.”

The next two centres on the horizon are the Magdi Yacoub Global Heart Centre in Cairo, which is scheduled to be completed in 2024, and the Rwanda Heart Care and Research Foundation in Kigali.

Funded by Dubai-based charity foundation Mohammed bin Rashid Global Initiatives, the 22,000-square-metre, 300-bed Cairo centre will be the largest specialised facility for cardiovascular treatment and research in the Mena region.

Once completed, it will conduct 12,000 heart surgeries a year, of which 60 per cent will target children.

All of Prof Yacoub’s centres focus on three pillars of medical care, research and training: to serve, learn and teach.

“I’m very proud to see that [the new generation is] surging ahead and carrying the message, which I care about most, which is serving humanity, serving science, in the best way and advancing medicine,” he says.

There is one thing, however, that has so far eluded Prof Yacoub: finding a cure for heart failure.

“There are now tools, which are just becoming available to reverse heart failure at the genetic level, biochemical level and metabolic level,” he says. “So we do have tools, but are we going to achieve it within my lifetime? I don’t think so. But we have to keep trying.”

source/content: thenationalnews.com (headline edited)

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LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM – NOVEMBER 24: King Charles III talks with Professor Magdi Yacoub during a luncheon for Members of the Order of Merit at Buckingham Palace on November 24, 2022 in London, England. (Photo by Aaron Chown – WPA Pool / Getty Images)

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BRITISH / EGYPTIAN

IRAQ-BRITISH: If Memory Serves: Lamees Ibrahim’s Quest to Dish up the Iraq of her Past

In our continuing series on inspiring life stories across continents, we learn what made her leave a career in medical science for a ‘cuisine lab called the kitchen’.

When Lamees Ibrahim left Baghdad in the 1970s, certain parts of the city, not least the riverside strip of fish restaurants along Abu Nawas, became a fixed ideal in her memory.

After an interval of three decades, a return to the flat bank of the Tigris in 2004 was an unexpected low point in a thoroughly disturbing homecoming.

The street once the “pomegranate of Baghdad” was no longer filled with diners being entertained by poets and musicians, engulfed in the aroma of arguably Iraq’s national dish, masgouf.

Instead, Dr Ibrahim stood shaken as she took in a rubble-strewn wasteland populated by a handful of struggling fish sellers.

Yet one sense was still powerfully triggered by the fresh carp grilling over the charred wood.

“It was not in very good shape,” she tells The National. “There were only bits of its old self left, but the smell was still amazing. There are certain scents that you smell and you think, ‘Wow, this is Baghdad.’ It is very, very specific. If you enjoy samak masgouf once, you will never forget it.”

Dr Ibrahim had made a long, hazardous journey from her home in London, where she moved decades earlier: marrying, earning a PhD in Pathology, raising four children.

Her husband was with her as she set out from Jordan in a car just after Fajr prayers that day, to “feel” her land, see her extended family, and show her eldest child, Maysa, her ancestral roots.

But the Baghdad conjured up by the smell of the barbecued fish was gone; the deserted, bombed-out streets were not at all familiar to her. They did, however, bring back one particularly strong recollection from childhood.

Sometimes in the summer months, the young Lamees would gather with her three siblings around their father to be regaled by stories about Iraq.

“I remember one day when he said: ‘Look, we built this country, the Iraqis, and we have to keep doing that. If every one of us contributed their own brick then the wall would go up and up, and we should keep on building.’ I never forgot that,” Dr Ibrahim said, “and I felt that we had to add our little brick to the wall. We had to make Iraq keep going.”

She returned to London on a mission to help rebuild Iraq in some way for the younger generations that would never have a chance to experience what it had been in the golden years.

The need to describe the country’s rich history and accomplishments was urgent, but whatever she put down on paper seemed inextricably tied to cooking. So it was that she came to realise it would be through food that she could preserve connections to things past.

“I wanted to write something, I needed to write, I had to write,” she says. “So I started. Eventually, it became a cookbook with a bit of history and anecdotes about culture, about civilisation.

“My background has nothing to do with cooking. It’s not cuisines of any kind, but I have a passion for Iraq. It’s my motherland, my country.”

When the 21-year-old Lamees had come to London in the early 1970s, it was to pursue a postgraduate medical degree at King’s College and then head back to her beloved Baghdad. Soon after arriving, she married and her life, she says, became busy but limited as she immersed herself in studying and research projects.

“You go to college, you study, you attend lectures, you come home, you open the books, read, read, read, have some dinner, and go back to college,” she says.

“I didn’t know that I was homesick until one day during Ramadan I saw an elderly woman going into King’s College Hospital with her black abaya and veil. I said to her ‘marhaba hajji’ and she was shocked. She hugged me, and I went home, crying all the way.

“I cried because I had a goal. I wanted to get a degree, and the sooner I got it, the sooner I could go back home. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.”

She was haunted by her homeland, by such memories as the heady perfume of jasmine and the days in her youth when the children would pick the flowers and turn them into long necklaces.

But the months turned into years, and years into decades. At first, returning to Baghdad was difficult as the academic successes mounted and her family grew. It became impossible when Saddam Hussein came to power, with Dr Ibrahim fearing that she would be detained were she to attempt a visit, and never see her three daughters and son again.

Her father died and then, on news of the death of her mother, Dr Ibrahim made the fateful trip when she found a country that was “not what I was expecting, of course. It was demolished, devastated.”

The resulting homage, The Iraqi Cookbook, was published in 2009, a labour of love with the name of each dish painstakingly recorded in Arabic. Samak masgouf, of course, features, and Dr Ibrahim advises in the foreword that all visitors to Iraq should try it in one of the cafes and restaurants on the bank of the Tigris.

“I came back to London with one idea in mind, which is something that as a girl I grew up to learn,” she says. “I must do something for my country. I need to tell my children what my country is like, our history, our culture, our ability to do what we did in the old days.”

She is speaking by Zoom from her home in Richmond-Upon-Thames, her voice at times faltering and cracking with emotion as she talks about dedicating herself to bringing Iraq to the diaspora.

“Iraq to me is very important, very important,” Dr Ibrahim says. “It is in my blood. It’s in my genes. It’s my history.”

The book sold out in the UK and the US, and was reprinted by popular demand. Bit by bit, the time-consuming process of writing and re-writing, working with publishers and photographers, the press interviews had taken Dr Ibrahim away from her career in pathology.

“And I never went back,” she says. “I’m still very interested. I read a lot about Covid. I follow the research, but I’m not going back to that lab. I have a cuisine lab called the kitchen.”

With the emergence of the pandemic, Dr Ibrahim revisited experiments that she had begun as a teenager when she would try to make her mother’s recipes without meat. Sometimes it was successful, she acknowledges, sometimes not.

As a child, though, she had never been as fond of lamb as her siblings were. The family cat adored her, loitering under the table at lunchtimes for the morsels of the daily stew that Lamees would sneak down to her.

During lockdown, her own children became “guinea pigs” for her avant-garde creations as Dr Ibrahim collected together an array of vegan offerings that would appeal to a young audience interested in preserving the planet.

“Dishes don’t need to have meat to have the taste and flavour, for it to smell like an Iraqi dish,” she says. “Iraqi cooking can be vegan, as well as meat and fish-centric.

“If you can preserve the taste of the flavour of the dish, go for it. Many Iraqi dishes are, in fact, vegan but we ate them before ever knowing the word ‘vegan’.”

When one of Dr Ibrahim’s friends called to see how she was faring with the tight coronavirus restrictions in the capital, she told him she had been busily cooking all the recipes to be photographed for The Iraqi Vegan Cookbook. Curious, he wanted to know whether she was including any kubba, knowing that Dr Ibrahim had devoted an entire chapter to its many meaty variants in her first book.

On learning that the new book would contain Kubbet Jeriesh, Kubbet Halab and another recipe that Dr Ibrahim made from lentils, he answered: “Only three?”

His grandmother, he said, had never enjoyed meat in her kubba so the family reinvented the dish to suit her preferences, stuffing the shells with pine nuts, onion, spices and parsley.

“If all these years ago we had vegan Iraqis, we have plenty today,” Dr Ibrahim says, smiling.

The Iraqi Vegan Cookbook had been due out on December 31, but the release has been delayed not least because of the queues of hauliers that built up in Calais and Dover as a result of Brexit and the French shutdown of the border when the new strain of the coronavirus emerged in the UK.

Rescheduled for release at the end of January, Dr Ibrahim hopes that sharing more of the oldest cuisine in the world will counter some of the negative perceptions that persist about Iraq today.

“Iraq is positive,” she says. “Iraq is full of history, full of culture. This is the cradle of civilisation. I don’t like to talk about what’s going on now. I would like to talk about the positivity of all of our achievements.

“I feel nowadays, if I add that little brick, then I have added something which I would be proud of as an Iraqi living in the West. Living in Iraq, we can build from within. We are living in the West – all my children are also living in the West, but we add our bricks from our side, from outside the country.”

Dr Ibrahim is modest about her contribution to the wall that her father told her about all those years ago, hesitating to use the word achievement. If her writing can be described as such, she says, she wants to make clear that it was never about her. It was always for Iraq.

source/content: thenationalnews.com (headline edited)

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Dr Lamees Ibrahim has dedicated herself to bringing the country of her birth to the diaspora: ‘Iraq is very important to me. It is in my blood. It is in my genes. It is my history,’ she says. Courtesy of The Mosaic Rooms
The homage to Dr Ibrahim’s homeland, ‘The Iraqi Cookbook’, was published in 2009, a labour of love with the name of each dish painstakingly recorded in Arabic. Courtesy Lamees Ibrahim 

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BRITISH / IRAQI

Moroccan-Spanish Mohamed Katir Wins Silver Medal at ‘European Championships 2022’, Munich,Germany

Moroccan-Spanish athlete Mohamed Katir won on Tuesday a silver medal after finishing second in the 5,000 meters final at the European Championships. The tournament is taking place between August 11 and 21 in Munich, Germany.

Katir finished the race in 13 minutes, 22 seconds, and 98 milliseconds, behind the gold medalist Norway’s Jacob Ingebrigsten, who recorded a time of 13 minutes, 21 seconds, and 13 milliseconds. Italy’s Yemanebrhan Crippa finished third with a time of 13 minutes, 24 seconds, and 83 milliseconds.

Nine minutes and 30 seconds into the race, French runner Hugo Hay, who was positioned between fourth and fifth place,  fell to the ground and was unable to recover, finishing 19th in the race.

The Moroccan-born holds impressive records in medium and long-distance running competitions. Katir is the 27th all-time fastest runner to ever compete at Golden Gala, an annual track and field event.

The runner won the record after completing 5,000 meters in a personal best time of 12 minutes, 50 seconds, and 79 milliseconds in June 2021.

Last month, Katir claimed a bronze medal in the 1,500 meters race at the World Athletics Championships held in Oregon, the United States.

Katir was born in 1998 in the Moroccan city of Ksar El Kebir but immigrated to Spain with his family when he was a young child. He received Spanish nationality in 2019, allowing him to compete under the Spanish flag since January 1, 2020.

source/contents: moroccoworldnews.com (edited)

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Moroccan-Spanish Mohamed Katir Wins Silver Medal at European Championships

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SPAIN / MOROCCO

Hanan Issa the Welsh-Iraqi Artist Becomes both – the First Muslim and the First Welsh of Arab Origin Named as National Poet of Wales

The Welsh-Iraqi artist will represent the country’s diverse cultures and languages.

Wales has named Hanan Issa as its fifth national poet, making her the first Muslim to hold the title.

The Welsh-Iraqi poet, filmmaker and artist will serve a three-year term, representing the country’s diverse cultures and languages and acting as an ambassador for the people of Wales.

Her recent works include her poetry collection My Body Can House Two Hearts, published in 2019, and her contributions to Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales and The Mab.

Issa grew up in Cardiff surrounded by different languages, including Arabic, which was spoken by her Iraqi parents. She described the role as an “incredibly positive step” and said it was “exciting to think that Wales is taking the lead on this aspect of representation”.

“Poetry exists in the bones of this country. I want people to recognise Wales as a country bursting with creativity; a land of poets and singers with so much to offer the arts,” she said.

“I’d like to continue the great work of my predecessors in promoting Wales, Welshness, and the Welsh language outside of its borders.

“More than anything, I want to capture the interest and inspiration of the public to see themselves in Welsh poetry and encourage a much more open sense of what Welshness is.”

Ashok Ahir, who led the selection panel for the National Poet of Wales, said: “This is a hugely exciting appointment. Hanan’s is a cross-community voice that speaks to every part of the country. She will be a great ambassador for a culturally diverse and outward-looking nation.”

Issa said she hopes that her appointment will allow women from all walks of life, but especially Muslim women, to see her success and think “that’s a thing that’s achievable for me”.

source/content: thenationalnews.com (headline edited)

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Hanan Issa will act as an ambassador for the people of Wales as part of her new role. Photo: Camera Sioned / Literature Wales

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UNITED KINGDOM / WALES / IRAQ

Ghalia Benali: Tunisian Singer, Writer, Graphic Designer & Actress

An electrifying voice.

Ghalia Benali is a Tunisian poet, writer, and songwriter best known for dabbling in multiple music genres, multiculturalism, and defining contemporary Arabic music. She is also an actress and a graphic designer, a talent that goes hand-in-hand with her literature works such as “Romeo and Leila.”

Although born in Brussels in 1968, Benali was raised in Zarzis, in southeastern Tunisia, where she got her early exposure to songs and dances, with her mother being her personal music teacher. Growing up, she was exposed to the world of Egyptian and Indian films, as well as the voices of Arab singers such as Adib AlDayikh, Oum Kalthoum, and Sabah Fakhri, all of which influenced her multicultural style of singing growing up.

By the age of 19, Benali returned to Belgium to study graphic design at the Institut Saint-Luc of Graphic Arts where she would begin to sing and perform professionally. Her early performances would include collaborations with live bands and fellow musicians in 1993, a tour in Portugal in 1994, and a live performance with the band “Timna,” in Brussels, in 1999.

From 2001, she released a number of loved albums such as “Wild Harissa,” “Nada,” and “Romeo and Leila.” However, the very album that put her on the map was “Ghalia Benali Sings Umm Kulthum.” In fact, it was a smashing hit, earning her the title Ambassador of Arab Culture in Europe in 2009. By the following year, Benali would be featured on television across several Arab countries.

Benali is also renowned for her poetry, some of which centered around works by famous poets, Sufism, and Persian mystics. She is also known for her acting, winning an award from Women for Africa Foundation for her role in “As I Open My Eyes” in 2016, and nominated by Les Magrittes du Cinema for “Best Hope Actress” in 2017. She had played recent roles in the films “Fatwa,” and “A Tale of Love and Desire.”

Finally, Benali is credited for launching the Brussels-based MWSOUL Art Foundation. Having had to deal with unorganized management, she took it upon herself to launch her very own platform, a non-profit organization that brings awareness through art. You can follow them on Instagram for featured artworks and photography.

source/content: abouther.com

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BELGIAN / TUNISIAN

Tunisian-French Film Producer Tarak Ben Ammar buys Studios De Paris from EuropaCorp

Tunisian-French film producer Tarak Ben Ammar has finalized a $37 million deal to purchase Studios de Paris, the production facility outside the French capital.

The studios are known for being home to Netflix shows such as “Emily in Paris” and “Murder Mystery 2” and blockbusters such as “Jackie,” “Lucy” and “Taken 2”.

The facility, which has nine sound stages, was placed under court protection a year ago for its debt which are being paid by the acquisition, reported Variety

The studios were co-founded by Ben Ammar, who co-owned them through his company Bleufontaine along with EuropaCorp, a French film and TV production and distribution company created by Luc Besson in 1999, Front Line, Europacorp’s holding company, and Euromedia, a live transmissions company.

Now, Ben Ammar has acquired the shares owned by all three other partners in a deal completed via Eagle Pictures France, a subsidiary of the producer’s Italy operation.

The studios will continue to “represent a center of excellence for the French film industry and be an attractive factor for the entire sector,” according to a statement released by EuropaCorp to investors.

source/content: arabnews.com

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The studios are known for being home to Netflix shows such as “Emily in Paris” and “Murder Mystery 2.” (Studio de Paris)

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FRANCE / TUNISIA

 Latifa Ibn Ziaten, Awarded ‘Zayed Award for Human Fraternity 2022’ : March 01st, 2022

Latifa Ibn Ziaten . French-Moroccan Activist. President, Association for Youth and Peace (IMAD).

Zayed Award for Human Fraternity has empowered me to continue fighting: Latifa Ibn Ziaten.

Anti-extremist French-Moroccan activist Latifa Ibn Ziaten, President of the Association for Youth and Peace (IMAD), called on countries participating in Expo 2020 Dubai to support the efforts aimed at supporting peaceful coexistence and combatting extremism.

She also lauded the UAE’s efforts to encourage social peace and promote the principles of tolerance and human fraternity.

In an exclusive interview with the Emirates News Agency (WAM), Latifa Ibn Ziaten, winner of the award in 2021, expressed her appreciation for the award.

“I am proud to be here in the UAE, the country that gave me the opportunity to win the Zayed Award for Human Fraternity, which empowered and motivated me to continue my journey and fight to help marginalised youths,” she said.

“We need to help each other, most notably the youth who engage in terrorism. I will explore the reasons that led them to choose extremism, as people are not born terrorists, but factors, such as misery, ignorance, desperation and specific lifestyles, have led them to become prey for terrorism,” she added.

Ibn Ziaten said that she delivered several lectures in Abu Dhabi on terrorism and participated in seminars on how to save the youth from terrorism, in addition to delivering lectures in Morocco, the US, India and Mali. In France, she has worked with the Ministry of Education and conducts weekly lectures to raise the awareness of the youth.

After her son was killed in a terrorist attack in 2021, Latifa Ibn Ziaten has dedicated herself to promoting tolerance and countering terrorism.

source/content: wam.ae

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FRANCE / MOROCCO

Moroccan-Spanish Sarah Loinaz Crowned Miss Universe Spain 2021 : October 16th, 2021

Sarah Loinaz. Model. Beauty Queen.

Moroccan-Spanish model Sarah Loinaz was crowned Miss Universe Spain 2021 at the Los Olivos Beach Resort in Costa Adeje, Tenerife, Canary Islands, on October 16.

The gala was hosted by Sofia del Prado, the former crowned Miss Universe Spain in 2017, and finalist of Miss Universe 2017.

Sarah Loinaz will compete at the Miss Universe 2021 pageant, which will be held in Israel, in December 2021.

The Moroccan-Spanish model made her runway debut for a fashion show for VIDDA in April 2019 in Las Palmas, Spain.

In 2017, she represented Spain at the Miss Universe Spain 2017 competition where she placed second behind model Sofia del Prado.

source/content: moroccoworldnews.com

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pix: elespanol.com / El Espanol

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SPAIN / MOROCCO

Lina Ghotmeh – Awarded the ‘Tamayouz’ Prize, for ‘Excellence of Women Architects in the Middle East and North Africa’ : January 2021

Lina Ghotmeh. Humanist Architect . Founder of Lina Ghotmeh – Architecture, France

French-Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh recently received the “Tamayouz” prize, which rewards the excellence of women architects in the Middle East and North Africa.

An additional recognition for this architect, who has won several other international awards.

www.linaghotmeh.com

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© Hannah-Assouline-ok./ pix: linaghotmeh.com

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FRENCH / LEBANESE