On Tuesday, April 2nd 2013, the symposium “Youth Voices in the Arab World: The Arts as an Agent of Social Change” was held in Weinstein Auditorium. The symposium ran all evening and included a panel discussion, refreshments, the play Palestine and a closing question and answer session. The panel discussion focused on the role of the arts as an agent of social change in the Arab world. The panelists included members of the TEAL-ONE97 Arab North Africa Music Project; Amahl Bishara, an assistant anthropology professor at Tufts University and researcher on media, the state and human rights and Jennifer Pruitt, lecturer in Art at Smith, whose focus included the street art of the Egyptian revolution.

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Islamic art is not an easy term to define because of its territorial diversity stretching across 14 centuries and covering areas as varied as calligraphy, painting, ceramics, textiles and architecture among others. The First Edition of the Muscat Art Festival, themed Creative Process and part of the Muscat Festival 2013, brought together eminent experts Venetia Porter, from the British Museum, London, Ahmed Moustafa from UK and Charbel Dagher from Lebanon to present various perspectives at the inaugural conference of MAF on ‘Islamic Art’, at the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque.

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She’s not a hermit, though in other times she could have been. Her job is not in keeping with the times: she repairs the clocks in the Ottoman palaces. Şule Gürbüz is the only woman in the world to be an expert in mechanical clocks and author of two collections of stories which are small jewels of contemporary Turkish literature: Zamanin Farkinda (Aware of Time, 2011) and Coskuyla Olmek (Die Enthusiastically, 2012).

Read More: Sule Gurbuz