Bushehri Music and Dance in Louvre Museum: A Performance by Shanbehzadeh Ensemble



Persian Gulf Coast in Bushehr



Bushehr (Persian:بوشهر /Būšehr/), pop. 165,377 (in 2005), is a city on the southwestern coast of Iran, on the Persian Gulf. It is the chief seaport of the country and the administrative centre of Bushehr province. Its location is 28° 59' N, 50° 49' E, about 1,281 kilometres (796 mi) south of Tehran. The local climate is hot and humid.  (From Wikipedia)



Shanbehzadeh Ensemble

Shanbehzadeh Ensemble (Persian: گروه شنبه زاده) is an Iranian folk band, formed in Bushehr in 1990. The band offers a rare aspect of the traditional music and dance of the Persian Gulf, more specially of the province of Bushehr, south of Iran and bordering Persian gulf.

The principal instruments of the ensemble are the neyanbān (bagpipe), neydjofti (flute), dammām (drum), zarbetempo (percussion), traditional flute, senj (cymbal) and boogh (a goat’s horn). The Ensemble has delighted audience in Iran, Europe and North-America. (From Wikipedia)

Tehran Today (1977) by Khosrow Sinai

 



Khosrow Sinai



Khosrow Sinai (Persian: خسرو سینایی , born 19 January 1941 in Sari, Iran) is an Iranian film director. His works are usually based on social documentations. He was the first Iranian film director to win an international prize after the Islamic revolution in Iran. He is also known as an Iranian scholar and has been awarded the prestigious 'Knights Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic'.

A picture of University of Tehran around the time Sinai's film was made

Forgotten Iran (1971) – a film by Claude Lelouch

French Director Claude Lelouch

Claude Pinoteau and Claude Lelouch shot their documentary just after the Persepolis Celebrations in 1971. They decided to address the urban transformations and cultural emancipation that the country was subject to by the early seventies. (From Wikipedia)

Welcome to Tehran - a journey by Rageh Omaar

Rageh Omaar

Welcome to Tehran (1 x 90 min) is an observational documentary that sets out to look at the region and its people not through politicians, officials and analysts but through the eyes of ordinary Iranians.

Omaar has visited Tehran - the region's capital - once before as a news reporter, filming the incendiary demonstrations and recording the uncompromising statements from officials since the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

But his experiences of being in the city never left him.

He says: "There is an energy and vitality to the place that is completely different from the usual images we in the West have of it. And that's why I wanted to return."

In making the film, Omaar tried to see Iran from the inside by visiting people's homes and travelling through a rich variety of neighbourhoods and districts of the city.

Omaar and Producer/Director Paul Sapin struggled for a year to get the right kind of access which gave them the freedom to fully explore these rarely filmed areas.

The film is told as a journey through Tehran but also as a very personal essay by Omaar as he digs deeper into this complex and fascinating society.

Omaar's journey takes him under the skin of the city and he meets with local people who share with him their personal stories and feelings about the current state of affairs in Iran.

There are stories of taxi drivers; wrestlers; business women; people working with drug addicts and the country's leading pop star and his manager - the Simon Cowell of Iran - who drove Omaar around Tehran in his Mercedes-Benz.

Paul Sapin says: "Iran has become a closed society to the West and it is a real challenge to produce a genuine documentary in this region due to problems with access for Western journalists, but wherever we went, we were met with warmth and hospitality.

"Iran is not the austere, humourless place we're led to believe and that was certainly Rageh's experience." (From BBC)

Timothy Winter: The life and works of al-Ghazali

Al-Ghazâlî

Al-Ghazâlî (c.1055–1111) was one of the most prominent and influential philosophers, theologians, jurists, and mystics of Sunni Islam. He was active at a time when Sunni theology had just passed through its consolidation and entered a period of intense challenges from Shiite Ismâ’îlite theology and the Arabic tradition of Aristotelian philosophy (falsafa). Al-Ghazâlî understood the importance of falsafa and developed a complex response that rejected and condemned some of its teachings, while it also allowed him to accept and apply others. Al-Ghazâlî's critique of twenty positions of falsafa in his Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahâfut al-falâsifa) is a significant landmark in the history of philosophy as it advances the nominalist critique of Aristotelian science developed later in 14th century Europe. On the Arabic and Muslim side al-Ghazâlî's acceptance of demonstration (apodeixis) led to a much more refined and precise discourse on epistemology and a flowering of Aristotelian logics and metaphysics. With al-Ghazâlî begins the successful introduction of Aristotelianism or rather Avicennism into Muslim theology. After a period of appropriation of the Greek sciences in the translation movement from Greek into Arabic and the writings of the falâsifa up to Avicenna (Ibn Sînâ, c.980–1037), philosophy and the Greek sciences were “naturalized” into the discourse of kalâm and Muslim theology (Sabra 1987). Al-Ghazâlî's approach to resolving apparent contradictions between reason and revelation was accepted by almost all later Muslim theologians and had, via the works of Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126–98) and Jewish authors a significant influence on Latin medieval thinking. (From Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)



Timothy John "Tim" Winter (Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad)



Timothy John "Tim" Winter (born 1960), also known as Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad, is a British Muslim researcher, writer, columnist and teacher. His profile and work have attracted media coverage both in the Muslim World and the West. Conversant in both traditional Islamic scholarship and Western thought and civilization, Winter has made contributions on many Islamic topics. (From Wikipedia)