Jamelie Hassan
"Jamelie Hassan" by Randa Farah, Fall 2007, p. 152
Grassroots movements, world-renowned writers, scholars and artists have joined hands in opposing the war in Iraq, pointing to the benefits of dialogue and the dangers of monologue. The war itself has revived discussion of Samuel P. Huntington’s morbid theory that civilizations are inherently different and therefore doomed to clash. One piece of art challenging Huntington’s hypothesis is Jamelie Hassan’s Kian, which consists of a calligraphic representation of a single Arabic word. To find this piece of word art, conceptualized for a public space, one must visit King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario. In Arabic, kian is the abstract noun form of the verb “to be.” It also means entity, or the inner soul. A derivative of kian is al-Ka’en, the Arabic noun for being or Being, the latter in reference to God. Another important derivative is al-Kawn, which means the universe or cosmos.
As an artwork, Kian symbolizes the rich, tangled history of East and West so beautifully captured in Amin Maalouf’s Leo Africanus, which describes the life and journeys of Hassan bin Muhammed al- Wazzan al-Fasi, the Arab legal scholar born in Muslim Granada in the 15th century. The book opens with the following passage:
I, Hasan the son of Muhammad the weighmaster, I, Jean-Leon de Medici, circumcised at the hand of a barber and baptized at the hand of a pope, I am now called the African, but I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia…From my mouth you will hear Arabic, Turkish, Castilian, Berber, Hebrew, Latin and vulgar Italian, because all tongues and all prayers belong to me. But I belong to none of them.
—
When teaching my students about the contribution of the Arab-Muslim empire to European civilization, I draw their attention to the many English words that have Arabic origins: alchemy, algebra, algorithm, alkali, cotton, giraffe, hazard, lemon, lute, magazine, mocha, monsoon, muslin, racquet, sherbet, syrup, tariff and zero, for example.
In the context of London, Ontario, Kian attests to the long history of Middle Eastern migration to the city; Jamelie Hassan’s father, for example, settled in the city in 1914. The London mosque was established in 1955, the first in Ontario.
Canadian culture cannot be unscrambled from its eclectic sources, stretching back to indigenous inhabitants such as the Attawandaron, who lived in the London area before the first European settlers arrived. Kian thus signals a community that embraces knowledge and incorporates difference rather than excluding on the basis of it. As I marvelled at its brilliant green Arabic letters, I was aware of a public point of reference in London recognizing me—an immigrant from the Middle East—as part of the social and cultural landscape. Undoubtedly, the mounting of Kian in a public space, on the facade of a prominent educational institution, beckons the public to engage in a dialogue about our knotted histories. In this sense, Kian symbolizes time and space, together in the universe in peace.
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