A link across borders
THE NATIONAL (10/1/2020) The dusty chairs at the Amman train station are empty. There are no departures today. Vintage carriages line up on the tracks waiting for passengers, but the last train to Syria departed a decade ago. “When I travelled to Syria by train, I was just a child – I was this tall,” […]
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Reviving the Hejaz railway with a park
AL-MONITOR (4/12/2019) The century-old Hijaz Railway crosses Amman from north to south. Children play close by, jumping over the track that once connected Jordan’s capital to Syria, Palestine and Saudi Arabia. It’s been almost a decade since the last train to Syria departed from Amman’s train station. With the railway largely abandoned, families stroll along the line built […]
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AL ARABY (13/6/2019) Last year, Lisbon’s Islamic Community celebrated its 50th anniversary. The community was established by migrants in the 1960s, but Islam has much more ancient roots in Portugal. “Islam is in Portugal’s soul,” said the Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa while standing at the entrance of the Central Mosque of Lisbon for the […]
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Where Christians pray facing Mecca
QANTARA (27/5/2019) Archaeologists in Mertola have spent the last 40 years looking for traces of Portugalʹs Islamic past. What they found shows that Islam is not alien to Europe and has in fact deeply influenced Portuguese history and culture. When archaeologist Claudio Torres first visited Mertola, a small town in the south of Portugal, he […]
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Echoes of al-Andalus: The Portuguese town celebrating its forgotten Islamic past
MIDDLE EAST EYE (23/5/2018) An imposing building with cylindrical towers stands out on the steep hill of Mertola, a southern Portuguese town on the banks of the Guadiana river, not far from the Spanish border. Is it a church with a mihrab? Or a mosque with a cross? The whitewashed building with horseshoe arches is […]
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A língua do outro
CERCHI NELL’ACQUA (DEZ 2018) Em Março de 2016, Hasan Aldewachi, um cientista iraquiano, foi expulso de um voo Easyjet porque a mensagem que estava a escrever no telemóvel em árabe foi vista como suspeita por outros passageiros e denunciada à polícia. Em Outubro do mesmo ano, Khairuldeen Makhzoomi foi obrigado a sair de um avião […]
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A Índia não estava coberta: descobrir a presença portuguesa em Cochim
BUALA (4/2/2018) “Foi a pimenta que fez Vasco da Gama atravessar os mares, da torre de Belém em Lisboa até à costa de Malabar”, explica o escritor indiano Salman Rushdie no romance O último suspiro do mouro, a crónica de uma família indiana com ascendência portuguesa na cidade de Cochim, no sul da Índia. Rushdie descreve […]
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