The online collection, which now includes more than 300 pictures, is set to grow. The goal is to piece together as many family albums from the region as possible in order to create an organic, growing database of our personal histories.

The more submissions and stories that are collected, the more impact the project can have in shaping perceptions about the region. Everyone is free to dust off the old family album and submit their own memories here.

Istanbul, Turkey, 1973

The father of Dilara Aliye Sofie with his friends from university. He studied chemistry but it was always his dream to be a musician. He still plays music today.

Iran, mid-1960s

Nehjad, the grandfather of Parcia, is the man with the big hat. The teenager behind him is a family friend, Cyrus. The young kid facing the camera is Percia’s mother, Jinous. The third daughter in the family, she wears a boyish look because Nehjad really wanted a boy. The little boy behind her is her cousin Farzeen.

Lebanon, 1972

This photo was taken at the wedding of Jihad‘s parents in October 1972 as they were leaving for their honeymoon, right after their cocktail reception at Hotel Le Vendôme in Beirut (next to present-day Hotel Saint Georges, where the bomb that killed former Prime Minister Rafiq Al-Hariri exploded.

Baghdad, Iraq, 1970s

Friends of Ishtar’s father lounging near the banks of the Tigris River at Baghdad University. This is at the Academy of Fine Arts, which taught film studies and fine art during the 1970s.

Abu Dhabi, UAE, 1982

The father of Hicham Rahma‘s back in the 1980s when he worked for the beloved children’s magazine Majid.

The 7th edition of the Dubai Art Fair boasted over 500 artists and 75 museum groups. Over half of the artists exhibiting in the fair were from the Middle East and South Asia. Running and open to the general public between March 20 and 23, the fair along with parallel events in the city brought an influx of visitors who came to admire and inspect Dubai’s cultural scene – said to be one of the most vibrant of its kind in the Middle East.

The dedicated gallery spaces, spread over two large wings and outdoors spaces, resembled a city plan somehow – a patchwork of elements and districts that generate a slow feeling of attachment as you stroll through, all united under one roof. Just like every district in the city is a proud entity that showcases a very multi-faceted Dubai, the galleries exhibiting artists’ works join together to create a diverse mix of contemporary art from the region and beyond. But what the fair does in parallel is provide a hub for Dubaïote hospitality and exhibit a city that is eager for attention as it rebuilds its image.

“A Very Short History of Tall Men.” Vartan Avakian, 2013. Abraaj Group Art Price.

Art Dubai, 2013.

The photographs which inspired this book visualize the homes of a group of residents in Kuştepe, an area in Istanbul. These Istanbulites are people whose homes rarely get photographed because they are not in the interest of home decor magazines. When photographing them, Engin Gerçek makes visible a group of urban dwellers whose lives are less-known and rarely seen, and portrays neighborhoods that are under the threat of transformation and gentrification.

In his text, Uğur Tanyeli touches upon the history of private housing in Istanbul. Stretching from the 15th century to the present, this is the history of how and for which reasons urban dwellers define their private living spaces. It illustrates the extensive changes that private housing has undergone during the last 500 years. It is possible to sketch out an architectural-social adventure starting with the single-room houses in the 15th and 16th centuries to contemporary Istanbul’s gated communities. This is the story of the city’s urban dwellers, not of courtiers. It is the daily adventure of the man on the street.

Translated from Turkish by Cihan Tekay.

Texts edited by Nalan Erbil.

Growing up in post-war Lebanon, I often heard about a city that once existed long before I was born, known as Beirut. As a child, I was lucky enough to see what was left of it. A dusty landscape littered with the artefacts of a thriving society. A town where clubs and bars ruled the night, markets buzzed during the day, and everyone and everything was coated in a golden glow.

Yes, it was a place where everything seemed perfect, but no one could ignore the ominous stirring underneath its paved streets, a black ooze that would intoxicate its citizens and engulf the city in a darkness from which it could never recover.

This imagined city remained with me until I grew up and with my project, the Atlas Hotel, I am slowly recreating this world but with my own characters, rules and settings. Inspired by the hotel resorts of the Middle East and North Africa in the 1950s and 60s, and the film industry in the region during that period, below are some of the images that prompted me to begin on this project.

The project has developed into a narrative, a story with two main characters: Nasser al-Safi, a washed-up actor, and his precocious daughter Aziza. Their lives are changing quickly and being infiltrated by new influences. For Aziza, its her comic books and Francoise Hardy records which seduce her with promises of independence, and for Nasser its the Hollywood studio that threatens to take over his comfortable position of dominance in the film industry. Its at the Atlas Hotel in Wazazat where they are forced to confront these changes and eventually, each other.

Pure nostalgia (from Assaleh ERA)

Pure nostalgia (from Assaleh ERA)

Pure nostalgia (from Assaleh ERA)

Pure nostalgia (from Assaleh ERA)

Pure nostalgia (from Assaleh ERA)

Resting on the commercial passage between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, the cities of Hejaz were once characterised by the cosmopolitan traditions of traders and visiting pilgrims. The architecture of the Hejaz was known for its tall colourful stone and clay buildings that lined narrow alleys, designed to direct sea winds into the coastal cities. Hejazi architecture was influenced by a variety of regional styles and disciplines, from Malayan craftsmanship to the decorative details characteristic of Ottoman tradition. Most notable were the intricate wooden balconies (rawasheen), which helped circulate the breeze through buildings and to give women privacy from outsiders, while at the same time diffusing the glaring sunlight through the shade they provided. Hejazi architecture had character, functionality and a sense of time and place. I could hardly celebrate the preservation of anything visually reminiscent of a historical period, which albeit not long ago is virtually lost.

One of the two holiest cities in Islam, Al-Medina Al-Munawwarah (The Enlightened City), was the city to which the Prophet Muhammad and his original followers migrated from Mecca, marking the Hijra (“The Migration” and the start of the Islamic calendar). Al-Masjid Al-Nabawi (The Prophet’s Mosque) served as Islam’s power base during its first century, and Medina became known as “The City of the Prophet”. The spatial character of the city began to change in the 1950s, with the renovation of The Prophet’s Mosque and the initiation of modernisation campaigns. Many of the city’s residents were forced out by the rising cost of land.

In Medina today I was expecting to see steel, cement and cranes as the city’s expansionist projects continue. But I was hoping not to witness an imposing skyline like the one that surprised me a few years ago, during my inaugural visit to Mecca. Being aware of the Wahhabi destruction  of early Islamic heritage sites, such as the mausoleums in Al-Baqi’, most of my anticipation of exploring Medina was to catch what is still standing today. The mausoleums in Jannat Al-Baqi, the cemetery where the Prophet’s companions and relatives were buried, were demolished in 1925. Marked by the foundation of the Saudi kingdom, the destruction of the historical sites was vindicated by the Wahhabi interpretation that reverence paid by visitors to such sites may potentially give rise to idolatry (shirk), contesting the very virtue of monotheism (tawheed). And so, the cleansing of sites linked to the founding figures of early Islam continued, while expansion projects were carried out in order to accommodate the increasing number of pilgrims in the city.

At the Uhud graveyard, people gather in front of the fence surrounding the graves of the Prophet’s uncle Hamza bin Abdul Mutalib and other martyrs, who died during the historic battle of Uhud. These tombs have been destroyed. On the fence, there are billboards with instructions by the Committee to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice. A few men walked back and forth patrolling the fence, one of them told me to fix my hijab. There were countless vendors around, a construction site, and this fence. The Uhud graveyard, along with other historical sites, looked and felt hollow and spiritless.

Over the last 10 years, the gap between Tarlabaşı and the center of Beyoğlu has increased, as Istiklal and the surrounding streets underwent steady gentrification. Most of the people who head to Istiklal for shopping, eating, drinking and clubbing would never cross the line and enter Tarlabaşı, which has come to be associated with prostitution, illegal immigrants, crime and drugs.

As a photographer, I was interested in portraying Tarlabaşı and its inhabitants. All my previous projects have dealt with the lives of people at the bottom of the social ladder. I try to shed light on the lives these people lead as society in general seems reluctant to even admit that they exist, let alone that they need help. With this project, I attempted to photograph the simple, day-to-day routines of those who live there.

Tarlabaşı has come to be commonly associated with petty crime, prostitution and drug dealing. But, despite its bad reputation, the area is occupied mainly by working class people.

Life in this street seems to go on as usual. However, in accordance with the plans of the Tarlabaşı Renewal Project, these buildings will soon be demolished and the inhabitants will have to leave their homes.

Once, as I was walking in Tarlabaşı, I heard these young Kurdish musicians singing the well-known Kurdish song “Hey Dilbere”. The lyrics go like this: “It turned winter in my garden / Hey Dilbere / In this time there should be flowers instead / All my flowers and the garden vanished / My home is ruined”. In today’s Tarlabaşı, these words take on a very specific meaning.

The basic income for many residents in Tarlabaşı is collecting and sorting rubbish for further recycling. From this they earn small amounts of money, enough only for their basic needs and to sustain their families. They look for anything: paper and packaging thrown away by shop keepers, metal cans or plastic from bins and containers.

According to the government, Tarlabaşı’s reconstruction is to happen gradually, street by street. By now, those residents whose streets have already started being “renewed” have been evicted, while others remain, still living in their ruined houses and apartments. This is a woman baking bread for her family using traditional methods.

Only about one hundred metres from Tarlabaşı is Istanbul’s famous Istiklal Avenue with its expensive shops and restaurants. Tarlabaşı’s residents often cross the virtual border between the two worlds. Many of them will never tell you that they live in Tarlabaşı, because they are ashamed of their social status. That is why the young man in the picture covers the lens with his hand.

Up to 278 buildings will be demolished to make way for a high-end construction project which will include residential houses, offices, hotels and a shopping mall. Property owners are enforced to sell their apartments for very little and move to distant suburbs. Some tenants are trying to stay on until the very end, regardless of the fact that the properties have already been sold to private interests. Many of them cannot afford to rent places in other areas, and some are concerned about losing their jobs near Tarlabaşı. A young woman who preferred to stay anonymous said: “I have been living in this house for almost 20 years. When the reconstruction project begins, I will have to move somewhere else. Why? Why do I have to leave my home?”

Tarlabaşı is one of few places in Istanbul where transsexuals have found a safe haven. Turkish society is in many ways socially conservative, and transsexuals are met with discrimination, mockery and attacks. But in Tarlabaşı – often the only place in the city where they can find apartments to rent – the community feels relatively safe.

Chaila (Çağla), a transsexual, has lived in Tarlabaşı for many years. Until 2012, she was working in a venue called “Mini bar”, standing everyday at the entrance attracting passersby to come inside and have a drink. Sometimes she entertained the audience by singing songs. The money she earned covered her rent in an apartment she was sharing with a friend, also transsexual. But, soon after the reconstruction began, the bar was closed and then demolished, and Chaila was forced to work on the street. “What can I do? I don’t have a choice,” she says.

Many men in Tarlabaşı find it difficult, even impossible, to have a family because the money they earn is not enough to provide for a household. There are also those who have wives and children back in their villages, whom they can only afford to visit a few times every year. This man lives on his own in a small room decorated with Hollywood movie posters and a portrait of Che Guevara.

After the reconstruction started, crime in Tarlabasi increased. Street lighting was reduced, and many people who still live in the area say that this caused the crime rate to rise.

The fate of Angela, the Russian woman in this photo, is tragic. She arrived in Istanbul a few years ago to try and make a living in the city. At first she worked in a night club, but after sustaining a serious trauma and health problems, she had to quit that job. After that she worked in a cafe, washing the dishes, but now she earns her living by collecting rubbish in the streets. Her boyfriend, also an immigrant, used to be her sole support. Sadly, he died as a result of an accident in prison after being arrested. Angela now lives on her own, in a small, dirty room. To pay for it, her friends help her out. She dreams of returning to Russia, but she does not have enough money for the ticket.

In 2014, when the reconstruction is scheduled to be finished, Tarlabaşı will be “The Champs Elysée of Istanbul”, an expression often used by Beyoğlu mayor Ahmet Misbah Demircan.

I met a woman from Azerbaijan called Aigul. She came to Istanbul a few years ago to work, washing dishes in a cafe. She got married to a Turk and gave birth to two children. Because of the low rent, the family took a room in Tarlabaşı. In 2011, Aigul’s husband lost his job. The family did not have money to pay the rent, so they had to move to a room on the first floor of the a house that was not fit for living in. The family does not pay for the room, but it has neither light nor water. The compulsory eviction regulation is mostly affecting needy people with very low incomes; those who need social protection the most.

By Jamal Al Afghani (Palestinian) – 1980
Publisher: The PLO department of information and graphics

Arabic translation: 30 March 1979 (Land Day) / The day of the Arabization of the land / The day of the liberation of Palestine – 1979
Publisher: FATAH

By: Emad Abdel Wahhab (Palestinian) – 1992
Publisher: Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)

By Zuhdi al Aduwi (Palestinian) – 1988
Publisher: Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)

By Mona Saudi (Palestinian) – 1977
Publisher: Great Union of Palestinian Women

By Abed Abed El Hameed (Palestinian) – 1985
Publisher: PLO Unified Information

This is one of a series of posters designed by the artist Ismail Shammout incorporating the drawings of the nineteenth century Scottish artist David Roberts. By David Roberts (Scottish), Ismail Shammout (Palestinian) – 1983
Publisher: FATAH

Arabic translation: March 30 / Palestine / Land day (repeated 12 times) – By Muwaffaq Mattar (Palestinian) – 1984 Publisher: PLO Unified Information

I am part of that flow myself. Sometimes, I start walking against the stream in an attempt to capture that fugitive moment when I get close enough to another person’s bubble to discern his or her intimate thoughts and feelings.

When people walk in their bubble, there is something in their face. A kind of truth. We are true to ourselves only when we are not consciously posing for an external eye. Istiklal Avenue is one such place, not quite unlike William Burroughs’s Interzone, where identities coexist incommunicado and where people just walk past each other, oblivious of onlookers. I am an onlooker. But I am also one of them.

There is a level of unconsciousness in the faces and people I choose to photograph and, in a sense, this series is also a self-portrait. It could be that, with each year, I have come to be drawn towards faces which capture the spirit of Istanbul’s streets, which has seeped into me.

In Alberto Manguel’s review of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, he suggests that each melancholic city has its own melancholy. “The saudade of Lisbon, the tristeza of Burgos, the mufa of Buenos Aires, the mestizia of Turin, the Traurigkeit of Vienna, the ennui of Alexandria, the ghostliness of Prague, the glumness of Glasgow, the dispiritedness of Boston share only on the surface a common sense of melancholy.” Manguel says that, according to Pamuk, Istanbul’s melancholy can be understood through the Turkish word hüzün, the Arabic root of which “denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life, a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.”

This project is a burgeoning one, still going in multiple directions. At the moment it is like a mashup; a source of inspiration for eventually finding my own way through the maze of the megapolis.

For more pictures.

Hira Nabi spoke with Yaminay Nasir Chaudhri from Tentative Collective (known as Aarzi Group in Urdu) who runs the Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema project. They talked abou challenges involved in the project, social practice in the field of art and possibilities in Karachi.

HN: What is Tentative Collective?

YNC: We are a nomadic collective of people who share resources to create art in the public spaces of cities where we live. We want to cultivate new spaces for social engagement through creating surreal and transformative situations within the everyday. Our projects are collaborative, site specific and involve different levels of society.

At the moment, we are responding to the observation that public space is shrinking, and we try to insert ourselves into the city every time an opportunity presents itself. The name “Tentative” is appropriate for us because of the unstable political context within which we operate. We try to use the uncertainty to our advantage and adopt a sort of creative “Let’s do it!” methodology. Different people generously donate their time and resources to different projects depending on their interests.

Our latest project, Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema, was a response to the walls that are rising all around Karachi. Our parks are walled, and the beach now has an entry fee. Homes in both elite and marginalised areas have enhanced their boundaries using hedges, grilles, concrete and barbed wire — barriers to mark our visual landscape. For us, projecting moving images on these walls is a way of dematerialising them. Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema also aims to create a sense of community ownership of public spaces in various neighborhoods by hosting screening parties featuring videos filmed on cell phones and gathered from those locations.

HN: How does the project grow? How do you involve more people?

YNC: Each project has its own team of participants, so it really depends. I don’t think we are aiming to continuously growing. Personally, I think too much growth can have dangerous side effects. But we do want to become a sort of institution that is present for many years and available to anyone who wants to take advantage of our resources.

We are always open to new people and new projects. Since we are so young, I am currently handling a lot of the organising and structural setup. It would be great to get a good core group in place or a whole slew of people who want to take our themes and use them to organise new projects all over the city. Our current way of reaching out is through word of mouth, social media and a network of people we meet, work with, employ and  accidentally encounter!

With Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema we started small, with a lady living in Ibrahim Haidery. She was introduced to us by an urban scholar, Dr. Nausheen Anwar, who is a friend and an adviser to our team. This contact became a member of the collective and pulled in her entire neighborhood. It was all very organic.

HN: How participatory is the work that you do? What kind of access to technology do collaborators have to create and share work?

YNC: I am trying to establish a horizontal approach to creating work. That is, I want people who participate to share and produce ideas equally and to learn from each other instead of having a top-down approach. This is very hard. It’s particularly hard to navigate class and educational barriers as some members’ privileges can outweigh the ideas of others. But we are aware of this and deal with it by exposing our own irregularities and subjectivities. Technology is shared as much as possible and we seek mediums that are easily accessible and common, such as cell phone cameras instead of expensive DSLRs in Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema.

This offers the possibility of replication or reuse after we are gone. Therefore, in many ways it is the idea that has preference rather than the technology. And sometimes we dream of upping the ante and doing things like teaching our resident contact in Ibrahim Haidery how to edit and how to become a teacher for other kids in the neighborhood, so that after we leave the area that teacher can continue organising new things and develop our idea in myriad ways.

HN: What kind of history does artistic social practice have in Pakistan?

YNC: To be quite honest, I don’t know enough about the origins of artistic social practice in Pakistan but at the risk of sounding presumptuous I have observed that there isn’t a large group of artists working in this realm. This might be because of a lack of institutional support and an art scene that is largely dominated by gallery practice. In other words, it is harder to sell social practice performances with intangible outcomes than it is to sell paintings and sculpture.

Until quite recently, two and three dimensional works were at the forefront of what was identifiable as visual art in Pakistan. Contradicting myself now, I have to say that, having visited art colleges in Pakistan in the last five years, things do appear different. There is a vibrant experimentation that students are pursuing via video and performance in the public space, and it is exciting to see a language of conceptually driven projects emerge in Pakistan.

In the 1990s, ‘Karachi pop’ artists including Durriya Kazi, David Aylesworth, and Elizabeth and Iftikhar Dadi provided a jumping-off point for collaborative social practice projects. Arze-e-Mauood (picture below) is an excellent example of a project constructed in the 1990s by Kazi and Aylesworth that set the tone for social practice in Pakistan. In this project, a shamiyanah (tent) erected outside the gardens of Frere Hall transformed the anonymous public space into a convivial zone for desire-centric photo opportunities and message-board exchanges between unlikely strangers. Visitors observed a kind of “brotherhood spirit” inside that space.

The situation in Pakistan is really different today with international opportunities, education, biennials, residencies and grants opening up to artists here. There is a growing appetite for social practice and intangible conceptual work in an increasingly diverse art market. Groups like Mauj Media Collective work in Pakistan but show their work internationally. Individual artists with studio practices are also doing interesting work. Bani Abidi’s Shan Pipe Band Learns the Star Spangled Banner, an awesome video, captures the layers of political complexity when a Pakistani musical ensemble is asked to rote learn and reproduce the American anthem. There are several more artists whose individual works I can mention in this category, but I can’t say there are many whose entire body of work is based on social practice.

No more than an ink stain on the map, the zone sits isolated between small Israeli colonies which houses line up in neat rows. It is not uncommon to come across settlers on the roads right before entering this area. They look as if coming from a different world, though theirs is only moments away. Here, there are no clashes. The villagers consider themselves pacifists, but they have not abandoned their passion for life, nor their feeling of belonging to this land.

Qarawa Bani Zaid is typical of the West Bank’s Palestinian villages: with 3,000 inhabitants, it is made up of modest houses built on a hillside. From the top of the hill, you can see the Mediterranean and Tel Aviv. Despite being a mere 35 km from there as the crow flies, the Israeli city is totally inaccessible.

We were welcomed like family, stuffed full of delectable dishes so numerous that they threatened to slide off the sides of the table. The wife of our host had been cooking all afternoon. The doors of Qarawa’s houses remained open late into the evening as neighbours, aunts, uncles, and cousins paraded into the courtyard to greet family, nibble on fruit and pastries, and chat over coffee. They also came to meet the “guests from France.”

The morning of our second day in Qarawa, we were asked if we had heard Israeli tanks during the night. They had made a noisy tour of the village. Under to the Oslo Accords, Israel is committed not to set foot in Zone A, which comprises only 16% of the Occupied Territories. It is a commitment that has never been honoured.

Conversation, especially with men, quickly turns political: we are told of the realities of occupation, relations with other Palestinians, or with the Palestinian Authority, headed by Mahmoud Abbas. We soon discover that most of the village men have at a point been imprisoned by Israel, for periods ranging between ten days and one year. Most were teenagers at the time, who had taken part in the first Intifada. They were arrested for throwing stones, or misidentified by the Israeli army. Those men spoke of the experience of internment with detachment, without hatred or remorse, and sometimes with sarcasm, often expressing serene resignation. Regrettably, internment comprises an integral part, for them, of being Palestinian.

Many of these men have learned Hebrew in prison, which has since been of benefit to them. For Palestinian workers, knowing Hebrew enables them to find a job more easily in Israel, where wages, though lower for Palestinians than for the Israeli workforce, remain higher than in the Occupied Territories.

In the nineties, many of these men were employed for the construction of colonies: electrical work, carpentry, masonry. Sadly, they participated in the nibbling away of their land by Israel. But here again, a combination of resignation and pragmatism wins out over bitterness: “One has to work to feed his family.”

There, we are informed bluntly of the local political color: it is historically communist, and proudly so. The PPP (People’s Palestinian Party) has always held the majority in the village. For the inhabitants of Qarawa, conflict is seen through the prism of class struggle as well as national struggle, making their dialectic relatively unique within the Palestinian political landscape. During our stay, political activists and leaders of village associations lose no occasion to point out the Qarawa’s most beautiful houses. With three floors built of Jerusalem stone, they have balconies and decorative columns. They belong, we are told, to officials of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

The PA has been a great source of disappointment. Its bitter theatre of divisions and power struggles between political factions has deeply alienated the Palestinian population from its executives, based in Ramallah. Thus, Palestinian civil society has relied exclusively on itself and its own ingenuity to create mechanisms of solidarity, develop institutions and source funding. Apparently, without personal connections or affiliations to the ruling party, “you get nothing.” According to the villagers, that’s how a system built on wasta — personal contacts to powerful people — works.

The village has taken things in hand to organize community life. Qarawa Bani Zaid has eleven associations, including five for women and six Islamic ones. There is as well a farmers’ cooperative for the production of olive oil, which locals call “the best in Palestine.” Walking through their beautiful olive groves, we are told that the French Development Agency has funded an updating of the cadastre, streamlining the division of land and olive trees, and thus helping to settle neighbourhood disputes. Moreover, everything produced or grown in the village — from chickens to onions — is “organic,” a concept that people here have long applied, though only recently discovering its potential marketing value.

The major problem for residents of Qarawa is the lack of water, and the restrictions on it imposed by colonisation. Colonies easily visible on the adjacent hill have running water. The average rate of consumption in Israeli settlements is 242 liters per capita, compared to 45 liters in Palestinian villages. Here, people provision themselves through the swift replenishing of rooftop cisterns, sold by private dealers at twice the cost per cubic meter — about 5 euros — than the price sold to Israelis. Village solidarity thus plays an important role; the head of a better-off family tells us that he purchases enough water to meet the needs of his own household and those of his cousins, who live in the same neighbourhood, when they do not have the means.

What truly sets Qarawa apart is the Al Diwan Centre for Culture and Heritage, created by Abu Derar, the intellectual father of the village. He is a history professor at Al Quds University, and holds of a doctorate from the Sorbonne. Abu Derar has always been very attached to his village, where he lives modestly with his wife and children. In the nineties, he decided to obtain a ruined house that had belonged to a village notable. He succeeded in renovating it, and this magnificent building now impresses its visitors with polished stone and hardwood beams. Guests are welcomed into a large room with high ceilings, a large television, and books of all types, primarily in French and Arabic. The library has been enriched over the years by generous donations. The centre’s director, who recently wrote his Master’s thesis on Mahmoud Darwish, named that room after the great Palestinian poet. The centre has quickly become the heart of community life for children and adolescents in Qarawa. It offers them academic support, sports, games, film screenings, poetry classes, and calligraphy lessons.

Abu Derar reminds us that he has also organised political debates and invited well-known political and cultural figures to speak at the centre. For him, it is a duty to provide and nourish culture, which is an essential aspect of a people’s identity. He also adds, in the gravest of tones, that he refuses to suffer superficial gossip under his roof — even from guests — concerning neighbours, family, or the lives of so-and-so. Instead, he always seeks to steer the conversation towards culture, politics, and society.