Furriners

Felicia Lee has an article in The New York Times about a large Muslim city (surprise, it's New York):

The hookahs looked like exotic animals lurking in Hookahnuts, a shop for gifts and food in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. In various shades of red, blue and green, these water pipes, used to smoke flavored tobacco, were the most vivid sign of the shop’s Middle Eastern culture, presented among an eye-catching array that included intricate wooden trays, imported chocolates, and delicate cups and saucers for Arabic coffee.
A colorful poster taped to the door advertised a souk, an outdoor market to be set up near the Brooklyn Academy of Music this weekend, offering food, crafts and music from various Muslim cultures. The souk is part of a bigger event: a 10-day festival of dance, art, theater and music called Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas that begins on Friday night.
In this part of Brooklyn, with its low-slung buildings and leafy streets, Muslim culture can be seen in many of the stores along the bustling Fifth Avenue commercial spine, roughly between 65th and 85th Streets: bookstores, cafes, shops with halal meat and olive oil soap.
Bay Ridge, first settled in the 1600s, has been home to successive generations of Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, and Italians, among others. These days, in its jumble of Greek and Chinese restaurants, churches, synagogues, and mosques, the neighborhood is something of a small-town United Nations.
The Muslim Voices festival, which continues through 14 June, will showcase the works of artists from countries like India and Indonesia, Egypt, and Morocco. At a cost of $2.5 million, and with participation from some of the major arts organizations in the city, the festival has everything from Arabic hip-hop to the Sardono Dance Theater, created by the Indonesian dancer and choreographer Sardono Kusumo, and will feature more than one hundred artists, some local, some from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Not all are Muslim, but their work is rooted in places that have been influenced by Islam or where it is the predominant religion.
The three festival sponsors— the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Asia Society, and the Center for Dialogues at New York University— hope to foster a greater understanding of Muslim culture at a time of tension and misunderstanding between Western and Islamic societies. The idea for the festival was set in motion several years ago with a conversation between Karen Brooks Hopkins, the president of the academy, and Mustapha Tlili, the director of the Center for Dialogues.
“Muslims know much more about Western culture than the other way around,” Mr. Tlili said. “We are at a point, with the Obama administration, of changing the political discourse. Culture, in this way, can have a role in changing perception.”
Sabah Jammal, an owner of Hookahnuts, at 7214 Fifth Avenue, whose ancestry is Lebanese, said: “The arts are a universal language. How do Americans know Lebanon? Through the cinema.”
A stroll along Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge certainly offers a glimpse into Muslim culture. At night, young people crowd into places like Star’s Cafe at 7130 Fifth Avenue, which has two big flat-screen TVs and a menu that includes Arabic and American coffee. Issa Odtallah, the owner, is from Jerusalem. He also had the souk poster in his window. “It’s good for this country,” he said of the festival. “This is a way to just talk together.”
On this avenue, sightseeing can spark conversation. The Alpine Cinema, near Bay Ridge Avenue, is next door to the storefront Musab Bin Omair mosque, which in turn is near a boutique where all the female mannequins wear head scarves. Interested in reading about the culture? Check out Islamic Books & Tapes at 6805 Fifth Avenue.
On the streets, teenagers in baggy pants walk past veiled women pushing strollers. Beauty salons advertise that they have private rooms for covered women. On Friday afternoons around 2, after a prayer service at the mosque, dozens of young men pour into the streets.
If you’re hungry, stop in at Al Safa Restaurant at 8002 Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge and ask for Arabic pizza. “This is going to be good,” its owner, Zein Safa, said of the arts festival. He saw it as a chance to change the persistent negative news media images of Muslims.
After a cup of strong, aromatic coffee at Mr. Odtallah’s cafe, dessert might come to mind. At Sweet Arayssi at 7216 Fifth Avenue, Rima Arayssi and Amal Zantout, the sisters who run the store, stepped out of the kitchen. Their great-grandfather Said Arayssi established the pastry business back in Lebanon in 1844; their father owns the store. They hand visitors a detailed price brochure with the family history and photographs of treats like maamoul pistachio (a butter cookie filled with pistachios) and aich el saray (dough immersed in syrup and filled with cream). The sisters said that the idea of Islam too often begins and ends with discussions of Arabs (one group among many in the Muslim world) and only a vague knowledge of the many countries where Islam is practiced. “They think of Lebanon as a place of camel and sands,” Ms. Arayssi said.
In contrast to Bay Ridge’s neighborhood feel, Muslim Voices begins with an international superstar. The Senegalese musician Youssou N’Dour, with his band the Super Étoile will take the stage at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House on Friday night. “Music is a language between a lot of people around the world, maybe the first language,” Mr. N’Dour said recently by telephone. “If you use this language, with art, with cinema, peace and understanding will come faster than it does coming out of politics.” Among other highlights of the festival, which has events all over the city, are the New York premiere of I Bring What I Love, a documentary about Mr. N’Dour’s life and the making of Egypt, his Grammy Award-winning album (in collaboration with the Egyptian composer and producer Fathy Salama and that was released in this country in 2004), which offers a tribute to the scope of Islam in West Africa.
The filmmaker Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, a 30-year-old who grew up on the Upper East Side with a Chinese mother and a Hungarian father, picked Mr. N’Dour as a subject, she said, because she found Egypt a beautiful, brave record. Mr. N’Dour and his music, she said, presented “a different face of Islam when we weren’t hearing other voices.”
Among the dozens of events unfolding throughout the city during the ten-day festival are an adaptation of Richard III as an Arab tragedy by the Sulayman Al-Bassam Theater (Kuwait); the Pakistani singer Faiz Ali Faiz and the pianist and singer Craig Adams and the Voice of New Orleans, in a concert that combines gospel music and the 700-year-old tradition of Sufi praise music. On Friday and Saturday BAMcafé will host free concerts featuring Muslim artists in New York.
Other prominent institutions are hosting some of the festival’s events. On Wednesday, at the American Museum of Natural History, is a screening of the Imax film Journey to Mecca: In the Footsteps of Ibn Battuta, an adventure story of the journey of the scholar and traveler Ibn Battuta out of Morocco in 1325. Through 1 September, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has an installation of Islamic calligraphy from the 8th to the 19th century.
The Brooklyn Academy of Music has earned a reputation for its cultural offerings from around the world, but “it is certainly easier to bring things European here,” Ms. Hopkins said. “The idea was to educate, so we wanted it as wide geographically and from as many genres as possible.”
The cross-cultural dialogue will be explicit as well. About fifty artists, scholars, and religious and community leaders from around the world will gather at the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge in Brooklyn Heights on Saturday and Sunday to discuss new ways to use cultural diplomacy and gain audiences for Muslim artists. The sponsors of Muslim Voices said they hope for a bit of understanding and connection that will begin to flow along with music, or the dialogue in a play or a certain dance move. “It is transformative because it’s your senses,” said Vishakha Desai, president of the Asia Society.