Region

DOHA — In a noisy, chaotic and fast-paced world, the Qatar-based sound artist Guillaume Rousere is on a mission: To get people to slow down and listen again.

Birdsong, insects chirping, the sound of wind brushing through tall grass or over sand dunes — all these form part of what the 44-year-old Frenchman calls his “sound art”.

“Sound art is a discipline where the principal medium is sound and where the aim is to listen,” said Rousere, who lives in the Gulf state that will soon host the World Cup.

For a recent audio project, he set up a microphone at an organic farm in Qatar, where he also recorded man-made sounds such as those of cars, planes and farm machines.

“I walk around the site I want to explore and let my ears guide me if I hear anything that draws me,” he said, adding that often “it’s a matter of luck”.

“I place the microphone and leave,” Rousere told AFP. “I don’t listen to it before I’m back in my studio.”

His sonic artwork is “not to be confused with music” made up of “organised sounds”, stressed Rousere, who explained that his passion started in childhood when he would pop balloons to study the noise it made in different environments.

‘Listen and disconnect’ 

His new, water-themed installation, “The World As We Know It Is Changing”, aims to “take the audience on a journey, to listen and disconnect from the world”, Rousere told AFP.

“It’s become all the more important to me because... we live in fast-paced societies that have stopped listening.”

Visitors sit in a darkened room, surrounded by four loudspeakers, for their experience of “profound listening”, at Mathaf, a modern art museum in Doha’s university district Education City.

They soon find themselves immersed in an ever-shifting soundscape, with flowing river water and the noise of human activity, but also narrated memories connected to water in different languages, as related images are projected on the wall.

A previous installation, “Fragile Resilience”, inspired by the sails of dhows that ply Arabian seas, was shown at the Paris UNESCO headquarters, at an event organised by a Qatari foundation.

Rousere, who in the past managed musicians in Britain and studied sound art in Belgium, has lived in Qatar for nine years and was a resident artist at the contemporary art space Fire Station.

His sculpture “Allow Me” — this one made of stone — is displayed at the Msheireb metro station in downtown Doha.

“Ever since I’ve been here, there has always been support for local and international artists,” he said.

The World Cup, which kicks off on November 20, has given the local art scene an additional boost, he told AFP.

“I think there was already a great dynamic, but everyone realised that there was an international opportunity for visibility.”

DJEBBA, Tunisia — High in the hills of north-western Tunisia, farmers are tending thousands of fig trees with a unique system of terracing they hope will protect them from ever-harsher droughts.

But the “hanging gardens” of Djebba El Olia have been put to the test this year as the North African country sweltered through its hottest July since the 1950s.

That has exacerbated a long drought that has left Tunisia’s reservoirs at just a third of their capacity.

The gardens are supplied with water from two springs high in the mountains.

The water is fed into the orchards by a network of canals that are opened and shut at set times, according to the size of the orchard.

Crucially, a wide variety of crops provides resilience and in-built pest control, unlike the monocultures that dominate modern agriculture and require huge inputs of pesticides to survive.

“We grow figs but also other trees like quinces, olives and pomegranates, and beneath them we plant a wide range of greens and legumes,” said activist Farida Djebbi as insects buzzed between thyme, mint and rosemary flowers.

Djebbi pointed out some of the channels, which irrigate the area’s 300 hectares of steeply sloping orchards.

In 2020, the Food and Agriculture Organisation recognised the system as an example of “innovative and resilient agroforestry”, adding it to an elite list of just 67 “Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems”.

The system “has been able to adapt and take advantage of an inhospitable topography”, the UN agency said.

“Through the use of natural geological formations and the use of stones, local communities have been able to transform the landscape into fertile and productive lands.”

The FAO praised the diversity of local crop varieties grown by the area’s farmers, as well as their use of wild plants to repel potential pests and of livestock to “plough” and fertilise the soil.

Growing up with figs 

While nobody knows exactly how old the system is, human habitation in the area predates the Carthaginian civilisation founded in the ninth century BC.

But while it may have endured for generations, the system is under threat as climate change kicks in.

Activist Tawfiq El Rajehi, 60, says the flow of water from springs irrigating the area has dropped off noticeably, particularly in the past two years.

Unlike in previous years, the surrounding peaks no longer get covered in snow each winter, and the leaves of many of the trees in the lower part of Djebba are yellowing and sick.

Rajehi, a teacher at the local school, said climate change and low rainfall were compounded by another factor: farmers favouring cash crops.

“Some farmers have moved to growing more figs instead of less water-intensive crops because figs have become more profitable in recent years,” he said.

“We need to keep a good balance and variety of plants.”

Nevertheless, residents say they are proud of their heritage.

Farmer Lotfi El Zarmani, 52, said there was also growing demand for Djebba figs, which were given a protected designation of origin by the agriculture ministry in 2012 — still the only Tunisian fruit to enjoy the certification.

“They’re getting a reputation, plus exporting them has become easier, plus they bring higher prices,” Zarmani said, adding that most exports go to the Gulf or neighbouring Libya.

Rajehi’s daughter, university student Chaima, put on protective gloves as she set out to harvest the fruit from her family’s small lot.

“Figs are more than a fruit for us. We’re born here among the fig trees and we grow up with them, we learn from a young age how to look after them,” the 20-year-old said.

Djebbi is working to persuade farmers to preserve traditional ways of processing the products harvested in the area.

She is working with 10 other women on a cooperative that distils essence from wildflowers, dries figs, and produces fig and mulberry jam.

“Products we learnt how to make from our mothers and grandmothers are becoming popular because they’re of such high quality,” she said.

QURNA, Egypt — It’s one of the 20th century’s most iconic photos: British archaeologist Howard Carter inspecting the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun in 1922 as an Egyptian member of his team crouches nearby shrouded in shadow.

It is also an apt metaphor for two centuries of Egyptology, flush with tales of brilliant foreign explorers uncovering the secrets of the Pharaohs, with Egyptians relegated to the background.

“Egyptians have been written out of the historical narrative,” leading archaeologist Monica Hanna told AFP.

Now with the 100th anniversary of Carter’s earth-shattering discovery — and the 200th of the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone which unlocked the ancient hieroglyphs — they are demanding that their contributions be recognised.

Egyptians “did all the work” but “were forgotten”, said chief excavator Abdel Hamid Daramalli, who was born “on top” of the tombs at Qurna near Luxor that he is now in charge of digging.

Even Egyptology’s colonial-era birth — set neatly at Frenchman Jean-François Champollion cracking the Rosetta Stone’s code in 1822 — “whitewashes history”, according to specialist researcher Heba Abdel Gawad“, as if there were no attempts to understand Ancient Egypt until the Europeans came”.

The “unnamed Egyptian” in the famous picture of Carter is “perhaps Hussein Abu Awad or Hussein Ahmed Said”, according to art historian Christina Riggs, a Middle East specialist at Britain’s Durham University.

The two men were the pillars, alongside Ahmed Gerigar and Gad Hassan, of Carter’s digging team for nine seasons. But unlike foreign team members, experts cannot put names to the faces in the photos.

‘Unnoticed 

and unnamed’ 

“Egyptians remain unnoticed, unnamed, and virtually unseen in their history,” Riggs insisted, arguing that Egyptology’s “structural inequities” reverberate to this day.

But one Egyptian name did gain fame as the tomb’s supposed accidental discoverer: Hussein Abdel Rasoul.

Despite not appearing in Carter’s diaries and journals, the tale of the water boy is presented as “historical fact”, said Riggs.

On November 4, 1922, a 12-year-old — commonly believed to be Hussein — found the top step down to the tomb, supposedly because he either tripped, his donkey stumbled or because his water jug washed away the sand.

The next day, Carter’s team exposed the whole staircase and on November 26 he peered into a room filled with golden treasures through a small breach in the tomb door.

According to an oft-repeated story, a half century earlier two of Hussein’s ancestors, brothers Ahmed and Mohamed Abdel Rasoul, found the Deir El Bahari cache of more than 50 mummies, including Ramesses the Great, when their goat fell down a crevasse.

But Hussein’s great-nephew Sayed Abdel Rasoul laughed at the idea that a goat or boy with a water jug were behind the breakthroughs.

Riggs echoed his scepticism, arguing that on the rare occasions that Egyptology credits Egyptians with great discoveries they are disproportionately either children, tomb robbers or “quadrupeds”.

The problem is that others “kept a record, we didn’t”, Abdel Rasoul told AFP.

‘They were wronged’ 

Local farmers who knew the contours of the land could “tell from the layers of sediment whether there was something there”, said Egyptologist Abdel Gawad, adding that “archaeology is mostly about geography”.

Profound knowledge and skill at excavating had been passed down for generations in Qurna — where the Abdel Rasouls remain — and at Qift, a small town north of Luxor where English archaeologist William Flinders Petrie first trained locals in the 1880s.

Mostafa Abdo Sadek, a chief excavator of the Saqqara tombs near Giza, whose discoveries have been celebrated in the Netflix documentary series “Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb”, is a descendant of those diggers at Qift.

His family moved 600 kilometres north at the turn of the 20th century to excavate the vast necropolis south of the Giza pyramids.

But his grandfathers and great-uncles “were wronged”, he declared, holding up their photos.

Their contributions to a century of discoveries at Saqqara have gone largely undocumented.

‘Children of Tutankhamun’ 

Barred for decades from even studying Egyptology while the French controlled the country’s antiquities service, Egyptians “were always serving foreigners”, archaeologist and former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass told AFP.

Another Egyptologist, Fatma Keshk, said we have to remember “the historical and social context of the time, with Egypt under British occupation”.

The struggle over the country’s cultural heritage became increasingly political in the early 20th century as Egyptians demanded their freedom.

“We are the children of Tutankhamun,” the diva Mounira Al Mahdiyya sang in 1922, the year the boy pharaoh’s intact tomb was found.

The same year Britain was forced to grant Egypt independence, and the hated partage system that gave foreign missions half the finds in exchange for funding excavations was ended.

But just as Egyptians’ “sense of ownership” of their heritage grew, ancient Egypt was appropriated as “world civilisation” with little to do with the modern country, argued Abdel Gawad.

“Unfortunately that world seems to be the West. It’s their civilisation, not ours.”

While the contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb stayed in Cairo, Egypt lost Carter’s archives, which were considered his private property.

The records, key to academic research, were donated by his niece to the Griffith Institute for Egyptology at Britain’s Oxford University.

“They were still colonising us. They left the objects, but they took our ability to produce research,” Hanna added.

This year, the institute and Oxford’s Bodleian Library are staging an exhibition, “Tutankhamun: Excavating the Archive”, which they say sheds light on the “often overlooked Egyptian members of the archaeological team”.

Excavators’ village razed 

In Qurna, 73-year-old Ahmed Abdel Rady still remembers finding a mummy’s head in a cavern of his family’s mud-brick house that was built into a tomb.

His mother stored her onions and garlic in a red granite sarcophagus, but she burst into tears at the sight of the head, berating him that “this was a queen” who deserved respect.

For centuries, the people of Qurna lived among and excavated the ancient necropolis of Thebes, one of the pharaohs’ former capitals that dates back to 3100 BC.

Today, Abdel Rady’s village is no more than rubble between the tombs and temples, the twin Colossi of Memnon — built nearly 3,400 years ago — standing vigil over the living and the dead.

Four Qurnawis were shot dead in 1998 trying to stop the authorities bulldozing their homes in a relocation scheme.

Some 10,000 people were eventually moved when almost an entire hillside of mud-brick homes was demolished despite protests from UNESCO.

In the now deserted moonscape, Ragab Tolba, 55, one of the last remaining residents, told AFP how his relatives and neighbours were moved to “inadequate” homes “in the desert”.

The Qurnawis’ dogged resistance was fired by their deep connection to the place and their ancestors, said the Qurna-born excavator Daramalli.

But the controversial celebrity archaeologist Hawass, then head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said “it had to be done” to preserve the tombs.

Egyptologist Hanna, however, said the authorities were bent on turning Luxor into a sanitised “open-air museum... a Disneyfication of heritage”, and used old tropes about the Qurnawis being tomb raiders against them.

Sayed Abdel Rasoul’s nephew, Ahmed, hit back at what he called a double standard.

“The French and the English were all stealing,” he told AFP.

“Who told the people of Qurna they could make money off of artefacts in the first place?”

‘Spoils of war’ 

Over the centuries, countless antiquities made their way out of Egypt.

Some, like the Luxor Obelisk in Paris and the Temple of Debod in Madrid, were gifts from the Egyptian government.

Others were lost to European museums through the colonial-era partage system.

But hundreds of thousands more were smuggled out of the country into “private collections all over the world”, according to Abdel Gawad.

Former antiquities minister Hawass is now spearheading a crusade to repatriate three of the great “stolen” treasures — the Rosetta Stone, the bust of queen Nefertiti and the Dendera Zodiac.

He told AFP he plans to file a petition in October demanding their return.

The Rosetta Stone has been housed in the British Museum since 1802, “handed over to the British as a diplomatic gift”, the museum told AFP.

But for Abdel Gawad, “it’s a spoil of war”.

Nefertiti’s 3,340-year-old bust went to Berlin’s Neues Museum a century later through the partage system, but Hawass insisted it “was illegally taken, as I have proved time and again”.

The Frenchman Sebastien Louis Saulnier meanwhile had the Dendera Zodiac blasted out of the Hathor Temple in Qena in 1820.

The celestial map has hung from a ceiling in the Louvre in Paris since 1922, with a plaster cast left in its place in the southern Egyptian temple.

“That’s a crime the French committed in Egypt,” Hanna said, behaviour no longer “compatible with 21st century ethics”.

KARBALA,  Iraq — Dressed in black, 21 million pilgrims from around the world massed in the Iraqi city of Karbala on Saturday for the Arbaeen commemoration, against the backdrop of a political crisis.

Arbaeen marks the end of the 40-day mourning period for the 7th-century killing of Imam Hussein by the forces of the Caliph Yazid — a formative event in Shiite Islam.

The annual festival sees men and women from across Iraq and beyond travel to Karbala, where Imam Hussein and his brother Abbas are buried, for one of the world’s largest religious gatherings.

After two years marked by the COVID pandemic and border restrictions, 21.2 million pilgrims have flocked to the city in central Iraq this week, said the organisation that manages Abbas’ mausoleum.

Among them are 5 million foreigners, including a record of more than 3 million from neighbouring Iran, according to authorities in the two countries.

On the esplanade linking the mausoleums of Hussein and Abbas, worshippers recited prayers on Saturday.

Groups of men beat their chests to the rhythm of religious chants and the din of loudspeakers, some of them slowly making their way around the two mausoleums.

The pilgrims waved black flags and banners bearing the image of Imam Hussein.

Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein during the US-led invasion in 2003, participation in Arbaeen has been steadily increasing.

“Arbaeen means different things to different people,” said Alex Shams, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago who specialises in Shiite politics.

“For Iraqi Shiites it’s very much an expression of their freedom after years of dictatorship and also pride in their Shiite identity,” he told AFP.

This year the commemorations are being held against the backdrop of a political crisis in Iraq.

Squabbling between the two main Shiite factions — the pro-Iran Coordination Framework and a bloc loyal to mercurial cleric Moqtada Sadr — has prevented the establishment of a coalition government.

The crisis escalated into violence in late August, when Sadr supporters clashed with the army and forces from the Hashed Al Shaabi, former paramilitaries integrated into the regular military.

More than 30 Sadr followers were killed.

WASHINGTON — The US State Department on Wednesday announced it was sending $756 million in new humanitarian aid to Syria, where need remains "dire" after more than a decade of war.

The funds, which are in addition to a tranche of $808 million announced earlier this year, will go to "continue our unwavering support for the Syrian people", Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.

He added that the US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, had made the announcement earlier in the day at a UN Security Council meeting on Syria.

Blinken stressed the importance of an international agreement allowing the delivery of humanitarian aid across the border, calling it a "lifeline" for millions of Syrians.

“Cross-border deliveries ensure that life-saving aid including food, medicine, and other relief supplies reach people throughout northwest Syria, who rely on this aid to survive,” Blinken said in the statement.

In July, the Council adopted a resolution extending a system for cross-border aid to Syria by six months, the duration demanded by Russia. Other members had sought a full year.

The aid delivery system across Turkey’s border into rebel-held Syria, in place since 2014, is the only way UN assistance can reach civilians without navigating areas controlled by Syrian government forces.

In total, Washington says it has supplied about $15.7 billion in humanitarian aid for Syria since the war began 11 years ago.

QURNA, Egypt — For decades, Egyptians have dreamed of bringing back some of the glories of their ancient civilisation scattered across museums and private collections across the world.

Now as Cairo gears up to open “the largest archaeological museum in the world” at the foot of the pyramids of Giza in November, Egypt’s former antiquities minister ZahiHawass told AFP that he will soon demand the return of three of its greatest lost treasures:

Rosetta Stone 

The basalt slab dating from 196 BC was the key that helped French linguist Jean-Francois Champollion crack the code of Egypt’s ancient hieroglyphs.

The stone was discovered by Napoleon Bonaparte’s invading French army in 1799 while troops were repairing a fort near the Nile Delta port of Rashid (or Rosetta), close to the Mediterranean.

It bore extracts of a decree written in Ancient Greek, an ancient Egyptian vernacular script called Demotic and hieroglyphics.

Comparing the three scripts finally helped resolve a mystery which had bedevilled historians for centuries.

Champollion announced his discovery on September 27, 1822.

The stele has been housed in the British Museum since 1802, inscribed with the legend “Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801” on one side and “presented by King George III” to the museum on the other.

Egypt has been demanding its return for decades, with Egyptologist Heba Abdel Gawad saying the inscriptions alone were “an act of violence that no one talks about, and which the British Museum denies is destruction of an artefact”.

The museum told AFP that the stone was “handed over to the British as a diplomatic gift.”

Nefertiti bust 

The bust of the wife of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, whose name meant “the beautiful one has come”, was sculpted around 1,340 BC but was carted off to Germany in controversial circumstances by a Prussian archaeologist after it was found at Amarna in 1912.

The depiction of one of the most famous women of the ancient world was later given to the Neues Museum in Berlin.

Cairo demanded its restitution as early as the 1930s, but Germany has long held that it was handed over in a colonial-era partage agreement, under which countries that funded archaeological digs could keep half of the finds.

But for Hawass it “was illegally taken”.

Egyptologist Monica Hanna told AFP that Germany once agreed to give the bust back only for Adolf Hitler to block it after the Nazi leader fell under its spell.

No official requests for the treasures’ return have been received “from the Egyptian government”, according to the three European museums.

Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities did not respond to AFP’s request for comment.

Dendera Zodiac 

The celestial map was blasted out of the Hathor Temple in Qena in southern Egypt on the orders of French official Sebastien Louis Saulnier in 1820.

It has been suspended on a ceiling in the Louvre museum in Paris since 1922, while a plaster cast stands in its place in the temple.

The chart, regarded as “the only complete map that we have of an ancient sky”, is thought to date from around 50 BC.

BEIRUT — A Lebanese woman held up a Beirut bank on Wednesday and reportedly walked out with thousands of dollars to fund what she said was hospital treatment for her ill sister.

The move and another heist on Wednesday come as Lebanese depositors — whose savings have been devalued and trapped in banks for almost three years amid an economic collapse — take matters into their own hands.

Sali Hafiz streamed a live video of her raid on a Beirut branch of Blom Bank, in which she could be heard yelling at employees to release a sum of money while entrances to the bank were sealed.

“I am Sali Hafiz, I came today... to take the deposits of my sister who is dying in the hospital,” she said in the video.

“I did not come to kill anyone or to start a fire... I came to claim my rights.”

In an interview with a local broadcaster after the heist, Hafiz said she managed to free around $13,000 from the $20,000 she said her family had deposited.

Cancer treatment for her sister costs $50,000, she said.

An AFP correspondent at the scene said gasoline had been poured inside the bank during the heist, which lasted under an hour.

Hafiz told local media she had used her nephew’s toy pistol for the hold-up.

Hafiz and suspected accomplices managed to escape through a smashed window out the back of the bank before security forces arrived, the AFP correspondent said.

Also on Wednesday, a man held up a bank in the city of Aley northeast of Beirut, the official National News Agency (NNA) reported.

He was arrested, the NNA said, without specifying if he managed to take any money.

‘Thank you’ 

Hafiz is a 28-year-old activist and interior designer, her sister Zeina told AFP.

She said the family had not been in touch with Hafiz since the heist and was not involved in its planning.

Hafiz instantly turned into a folk hero on social media in Lebanon, where many are desperate to access their savings and furious at a banking sector perceived as a corrupt cartel.

Pictures and footage of her standing on a desk inside the bank carrying a gun went viral on social media.

“Thank you,” one Twitter user wrote. “Two weeks ago I cried at Blom Bank. I needed the money for a surgery. I am too weak to hold a gun and take what is mine.”

Last month, a man received widespread sympathy after he stormed a Beirut bank with a rifle and held employees and customers hostage for hours to demand some of his $200,000 in frozen savings to pay hospital bills for his sick father.

He was detained but swiftly released.

In January, a bank customer held dozens of people hostage in eastern Lebanon after he was told he could not withdraw his foreign currency savings, a source at the lender said.

Local media reported that the customer was eventually given some of his savings and surrendered to security forces.

Lebanon has been battered by its worst-ever economic crisis since 2019. The local currency has lost more than 90 per cent of its value on the black market, while poverty and unemployment have soared.