A Quote by Jonathan Demme
Especially after the Twin Towers, we're so terrified of 'Arabic' people. And talk about stereotypical negative portrayals of people of certain groups, if you look at the portrayal of Arabic people in Hollywood films, it's just appalling. They've always been just the easiest of targets - along with native Africans and what have you.
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I'm very proud that I can be myself. I'm not trying to be Arabic, I'm just being me, and I happen to be Arabic. I think that might be refreshing to some people, and it's a bit more realistic than these pantomime villains we've seen before.
There are only a few safe targets left, just a few groups of people you can say anything negative about without getting in trouble for it. I've made a list of safe targets and I probably ought to stick to those. Politicians, for instance. You can say anything you want about them, and it doesn't matter how unfair you are. People seem to like it.
I couldn't know about my culture, my history, without learning the language, so I started learning Arabic - reading, writing. I used to speak Arabic before that, but Tunisian Arabic dialect. Step by step, I discovered calligraphy. I painted before and I just brought the calligraphy into my artwork. That's how everything started. The funny thing is the fact that going back to my roots made me feel French.
There's a big difference between the Arabic and Western scales. One uses quarter tone system and one doesn't. So in order for me to compose real Arabic scale melodies, I would need an Arabic keyboard, and I don't have one. So I had to compose Arabesque melodies.
It sometimes happens to me while writing, that I seek a word; mischievous as it is it appears in English, it appears in Arabic, but refuses to come in Hebrew. To some extent I made up my Hebrew. Unquestionably, the influence of Arabic is dominant, my syntax is almost Arabic.
In Hollywood, there is one dominant voice. It is a white, male, straight gaze. When I talk about positive portrayals of black people and women, I'm saying complexity. I'm not saying goody-two-shoes, everything's okay. No. The positive view of me is to see me as I am: the 'good,' the 'bad,' the gray. That is a positive portrayal.
A lot of people they don’t know that Africans even named the stars, that different peoples, different so-called native peoples, have their own names for the stars, and have star charts just as accurate as the Chinese star charts, which are more ancient than the European star charts or even the Arabic ones or the star charts of the New World civilizations. Everybody’s got their own cosmology. Everybody’s got their own description of the universe.
I went to a mosque in Philadelphia with [my wife] in December 24, 1999. And we we went to this mosque in Philly, and I just had such a strong reaction to the prayer. And I was really emotionally - I felt really grounded at that time. And so to be in this prayer and the imam is doing the prayer in Arabic and I don't understand a word of Arabic but I just remember these tears just coming down my face and it just really connecting to my spirit in a way that felt like I needed to pay attention to that.
I think the media in general hasn't been very kind to fat women or fat people. We see so many insensitive portrayals of plus-sized people. That kind of stuff really affected me - not even necessarily the portrayal of fat people, but the absence of fat people.
All the sciences came to exist in Arabic. The systematic works on them were written in Arabic writing.
When you look at the Pueblo communities along the Rio Grande, when you talk to the Navajo people, the Ute people, and certainly the native peoples of California who still have their communities intact, it is what they have always known: that we are not apart from nature but a part of it.
During all the first part of the Middle Ages, no other people made as important a contribution to human progress as did the Arabs, if we take this term to mean all those whose mother-tongue was Arabic, and not merely those living in the Arabian peninsula. For centuries, Arabic was the language of learning, culture and intellectual progress for the whole of the civilized world with the exception of the Far East. From the IXth to the XIIth century there were more philosophical, medical, historical, religiuos, astronomical and geographical works written in Arabic than in any other human tongue.
The Arabic states have to be integrated into the Iraqi reconstruction. We need the help of the Arabic community, which understands its culture. Americans arrive, invade, occupy.
I read nasheeds (Islamic songs) in English, in Arabic. I read nasheeds even in Bangla language. Now I don't just travel to meet people from my own country but people from the entire ummah.
Even before I did stand-up, I've always been the kind of guy - and I talk about it on stage - who says I like people and I always look for the good in people. I say, 'Every person has something good about them, if you can just find it.'
I just feel not many people hear that you should feel good inside and feel happy within your soul, instead of needing to look a certain way, so I always try and talk to people about that.
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