Featuring both Lucy Marryat photographic journey of Oman and Yoshi (Yusuf Misdaq’s) musical talent.
Lucy Marryat describes her journey for Altmuslimah:
I am on the roof. The sun is setting and it is prayer time. Young boys in white dishdashas follow their brothers, fathers, and grandfathers to the mosque. The women continue their work, children play, girls laugh, inside, behind closed doors. Prayers begin. Like smoke, the sounds drift through the palm trees creating a sonic opera being both mystical and profound, a synthesis of natural and electronic voices, an echo of my surroundings–part medieval, part 21st century.
This is 2009 and my fourth year in Oman. I am an English teacher, a Canadian/Brit who four years earlier interviewed for a job in a country about which she knew next to nothing. “What do you know about Oman”, a voice from Toronto asked. Well …
It is an impossible question to answer, even now some four years later. Whatever I knew before has been questioned, turned upside down and inside out. It has been thrown in the air and resettled into different forms but still resists a permanent fixing.
In 1970 Oman was a little known country living for the most part in the dark ages. The borders had been closed and tribal warfare and slavery was a fact of daily life in the not so very distant past. Today Oman bears little resemblance to this picture. Now, every child goes to school, most go on to higher education, all have access to health care, and young women are permitted to work.
Yet, the past is still very evident in the present. There is a sense of being in a time warp. I have been documenting this, often only one step ahead of the bulldozers. These pictures are evidence of a way of life in the process of disappearing, a world that has been upset and turned inside out and upside down by modernity. A world thrown up in the air and is resettling into different forms yet still resisting a permanent fixing.
About Altmuslimah’s Photographic Campaign:
The purpose of Altmuslimah’s visual campaign is to present Muslim men and women multi-dimensionally, figuratively speaking. The collection highlights the literary contributions of empowered Muslim American women; telling portraits of tenacious Muslim females, young and old; warm, loving Muslim men; the purity of spiritual devotion; and the dynamics of positive gender interaction in Islam.
Altmuslimah would also like to help spread the message by offering the embed link to other sites interested in featuring our photos. If you are a blogger or run a web magazine or other website, and are interested in supporting this mission to change the dominant image of Muslim men and women, please contact us at asma.uddin(at)altmuslimah.com.
