New Muslim Cool

The youth of Lucknow came together for an exclusive sneak preview screening of the American documentary-film New Muslim Cool at the University Grants Commission Academic Staf College, University of Lucknow, on Monday, 22nd June, 2009, a day before its world premiere on the American channel PBS, thanks to Open Space - Lucknow, which won the exclusive right to screen the film in Lucknow even before it got released in the US., through a competition held by the makers of the film, non-profit media strategy company Active Voice and POV, as part of their worldwide community engagement campaign aimed at promoting dialogue and discussion among diverse groups the world over. The film was screened by Open Space in collaboration with the Lucknow chapter of the student organisation AIESEC, which is active in 107 countries.

A new documentary by Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, New Muslim Cool tells the true life story of Hamza Perez, a Puerto Rican American hip hop artist who converted to Islam at age 21, pulling himself off the streets to become a community activist and rising star. Forging unlikely friendships with a Jewish poet, a prison chaplain, and many others along his surprising spiritual journey, Hamza faces challenges with a message of hope, finding his balance in a world that never stops changing.

The broadcast premiere of New Muslim Cool took place on 23rd June , 2009, on the American channel PBS, a day after its preview screening in Lucknow, India.

The film was presented in partnership with Active Voice and Specific Pictures
For more information about the New Muslim Cool community engagement campaign, visit www.activevoice.net

EARLY PRAISE FOR NEW MUSLIM COOL

Jonathan Curiel, San Francisco Chronicle reporter and author, Al' America
New Muslim Cool is a spellbinding documentary - a film that gives us the full dimension of a Muslim American man who's a rapper, educator, father, husband, and reformed idealist. His gang days behind him, Hamza Perez now tries to steer people away from that life. Perez's own life - hectic, challenging, full of love of his faith and his growing family - takes him on a circutous path that Jennifer Taylor captures with a sensitive and unblinking eye.

Salman Ahmad, UN Goodwill Ambassador and acclaimed rock musician with Junoon
New Muslim Cool moved me deeply both on a visceral and spiritual level. Like me, Hamza's Muslim-American identity envelopes religious, racial, cultural, and nationalistic frontiers. It weaves the complex threads of his American story in a beautiful and sensitive way.

Ambassador Akbar Ahmad, Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, American University
Almost single-handedly, New Muslim Cool challenges the distortions, stereotypes, and misunderstandings around Islam. See it for pleasure and a new outlook on Islam in America.

Dr. Ben Chavis, CEO and Co-Chairman of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network
The temperature and resounding impact of New Muslim Cool is both hot and cool. While the film transcends race, ethnicity, class and religion, the settings, scenes and scope all reaffirm the universality of one humanity. New Muslim Cool, like hip hop culture, is all about irrepressible social transformation and empowerment.

Sylivia Chan-Malik, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkley
As a scholar, I am so excited to see a film about Islam in the US that demonstrates all the complexity and nuances of the Muslim American experience. I look forward to showing the film in my classroom in years to come and can hardly wait to hear what students might say about the intersections of race, gender, and religion that are highlighted in every frame of the piece.

Larry Kirkman, Dean, School of Communication, American University
What a show! Authentic, intimate, a true POV experience, a window on a culture that most viewers cannot imagine, and a powerful trigger for discussion and reflection by young people - asking what is family, religion, art, service, jobs, politics, freedom, interfaith.

The Rural-Urban Divide in India

Untitled

I drew a plan of the city -
tall housing
quarters,
narrow offices,
roads for two-wheelers, four-wheelers,
footpaths,
space allocated for trees to stand,
gardens,
statues.

I marked them all in the city,
not knowing how
to make space for me.

Carefully I created the city,
leaving myself out.

(Poem by A. Vennila, Translated by C. S. Lakshmi and Arundhati Subramaniam, Taken from the Open Space pamphlet titled, Coming to the City)

A Picture of an Indian Metropolitan

A Picture of an Indian Village

Indian Urban Women

Indian Rural Women

Indian Urban Women

Indian Rural Women

Padmashri Prof. Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004)

Urban

The hills are always far away.
He knows the broken roads, and moves
In circles tracked within his head.
Before he wakes and has his say,
The river which he claims he loves
Is dry, and all the winds lie dead.

At dawn he never sees the skies
Which, silently, are born again.
Nor feels the shadows of the night
Recline their fingers on his eyes.
He welcomes neither sun nor rain.
His landscape has no depth or height.

The city like a passion burns.
He dreams of morning walks, alone,
And floating on a wave of sand.
But still his mind its traffic turns
Away from beach and tree and stone
To kindred clamour close at hand.

- Nissim Ezekiel

• Inequalities in income, lack of employment opportunities, lack of infrastructure and civic amenities, inadequate access to education, healthcare and other basic services are some of the major areas where rural areas lag behind.
• Over 70% of the population resides in rural areas, and agriculture which is its main occupation now, accounts for only a quarter of the country's GDP.
• Rural India encompasses a little less than three-fourths of the country's poulation and is characterised by low income levels, poor quality of life and a weak base of human development.
• The agriculture sector has been growing at less than half the pace of the other sectors. During the Seventh Plan, agriculture and allied sectors grew at a rate of 3.4 per cent, while the national economy grew at 6 per cent. In 1997-98, there was negative growth of 2 per cent in the agricultural sector, although the national economy grew by 5 per cent.
• Agricultural investments account for 10 per cent of the total investments in the country.
• According to one estimate, the average income of an urban dweller is four times higher than that of a rural dweller. Rural deprivation becomes crystal clear if we look at the data on rural India's contribution to the GDP and what the rural areas get back. Rural contribution is 27% but the return is 5%.
• The gap between the average for urban and rural areas widened by over 8% between 1987-88 and 2000-01.
• In 2001, the urban literacy rate was 80.6% but the rural literacy rate was 59.21%.
• Of the illiterate people who are 15 years and above but not beyond 60 years, rural areas have 55.8% and the urban areas 25.1%.
• Of the school-going children in the age group of 5-14 years, 82.4 per cent live in urban areas.
• Data collected from the sample registration show that life expectancy at birth in rural areas is 58 years, in the case of urban India it is 64.9 years.
• 84.4% of rural households are devoid of toilet facilities, in the case of urban areas it is 23%.
• The all-India average monthly per capita consumer expenditure (MPCE) was Rs. 495 in rural areas and Rs. 914 in the urban ones.

Sources:

• S. Rajagopalan, "The Rural-Urban Divide in India", ICFAI Journal of Urban Policy, Vol. 2, No. 1, April 2007
• Prabhat Datta, "The Great Indian Divide", Frontline, Vol. 21, Issue 14, July 3 -16, 2004
• Dileep Rangachari, "The Wide Rural-Urban Divide", The Times of India, March 24, 2003

Open Space organised a discussion on the Rural-Urban Divide in India on Sunday, 14th June, 2009, at its premises in Lucknow. On the occasion a few of Nissim Ezekiel's poems were also recited. The great Indian Jewish poet Prof. Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004), who was decorated with India's fourth highest civilian honour, the Padmashri, is widely known as an Urban Poet.

Lecture on the Right to Information

Dr. Govind Pandey, Reader, Dept. of Mass Communication & Journalism. Ambedkar Univ., introducing the speaker, Mr. Izhar Ahmad, Secretary, Action Group for the Right to Information

Mr. Izhar Ahmad, Secretary, Action Group for the Right to Information, delivering his lecture

Dr. Govind Pandey, Reader (left) and Dr. Gopal Singh, Head, Dept. of Mass Communication & Journalism, Ambedkar University

Advocate Rawal explaining the nuances of the Act "Right to Information"

Open Space
in collaboration with
the Department of Mass Communication & Journalism,
School of Information Science & Technology,
Babasahab Bhimrao Ambedkar University (A Central University)
organised a lecture on the
Right to Information
by
Izhar Ahmad
Secretary, Action Group for the Right to Information
on
Wednesday, 29th April, 2009
at
Babasahab Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow

In Dark Times

The Holocaust

Babri Mosque Demolition, 1992

Gujarat, 2002

Kandhmal, 2008

Bertolt Brecht

Gauhar Raza

Open Space
screened Gauhar Raza directed documentary-film
ज़ुल्मतों के दौर में (In Dark Times)
on Sunday, 19th April, 2009 at its premises in Lucknow.

Using Bertolt Brecht's poetry and footage from Nazi Germany and contemporary India the film puts together a persuasive argument about the ways in which Fascism grows and takes over society. It shows Hitler's rise to power through electoral process as an example, and subtly draws parallels between the conditions in Germany then and in India currently.

The screening was preceded and followed by discussions.

A Message of Communal Harmony and a Muslim's Search for his Jewish Mother

Soz Malihabadi, a devout Muslim, with his Jewish aunts, Katty alias Khatoon (left) and Ghazala (right) in 1995

From the left in the front row: Maqbool Ahmad Khan, Mahfooz Ahmad Khan 'Soz Malihabadi', Rehana (nee Rahama), Manzoor Ahmad Khan (Soz's elder brother), Katty alias Khatoon and Ghazala

On Friday, 17th April, 2009, Open Space organised a poetry session dedicated to communal harmony, particulary peace between Jews and Muslims, with the Urdu poet Soz Malihabadi , who has been in search of his Jewish mother for fifteen years, at the Academy of Mass Communication, Lucknow. At the session Soz Malihabadi recited his poems and narrated the story of his unceasing search for his Jewish mother, a story that connects three continents (Asia, Europe and North America), five countries (India, Israel, Canada, the United Kingdom and Pakistan) and the two communities that are sadly seen as natural adversaries today, viz., Jews and Muslims.

Urdu poet and Hafiz-e-Qur'an (one who has memorised the entire Qur'an), Mahfooz Ahmad Khan 'Soz Malihabadi' was absolutely ignorant of his Jewish maternal side until he received a letter from his London-based Jewish aunt one day at his modest dwelling in Kakori in Lucknow district. Soz had grown up hearing that his mother passed away when he was very small. The next letter from his aunt proved to be the catalyst that set him on the the search for his mother, Rehana (nee Rahmah), about whom he discovered from the letter that she was still alive and lived in the neighbouring country Pakistan.

Born in a Baghdadi Jewish family resident in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Rehana (nee Rahmah) married a young handsome Pathan, Maqbool Ahmad Khan, in 1947. In 1950, their second child, Mahfooz Ahmad Khan, who later came to be known as Soz Malihabadi, was born to the couple. Soon Maqbool's thriving business failed, reducing him to penny pinching and souring his relations with his wife, who aspired to be a film actor. In 1955 they got divorced and Rehana married a Pakistani Airforce officer and moved to Pakistan, leaving behind her two little sons and two orphan young sisters in her former husband Maqbool's custody. In 1956 Soz Malihabadi's young orphan aunts, Khatoon and Ghazala reached Israel under the Zionist programme of Youth Aliyah (emigration to Israel aimed at the ingathering of Jewish exiles from around the world), while Soz with his father moved to his ancestral village, midway betwen Malihabad and Kakori in Lucknow district.

When Soz met his aunts in Mumbai after an epoch of forty years, he enquired about his mother's whereabouts, but strangely enough they refused to divulge it to him. Not losing hope, Soz made a trip to Karachi, Pakistan, in search of his mother, but to no avail. The posture taken by his aunts absolutely disillusioned him, and he severed all ties with them. The Muslim son is still in search of his Jewish mother.