4. FUSE WITH

Once in a city faraway in the desert, a local sheikh was very fond of racehorses. His horses were haughty, fine, proud and as fast as an arrow. Unfortunately, they were also sensitive and lacking in stamina.

One day, he was riding outside the city and was overtaken by a farmer on his wild and scruffy-looking horse. Outraged, the sheikh raced after him to teach him a lesson. He easily caught up, but then the farmer who was as proud as the sheikh raced after him. They ran for miles. And miles. And eventually the sheikh’s horse pulled up with exhaustion. The farmer’s horse seemed barely out of breath.

The farmer was too proud to sell his horse, although the sheikh begged him. But after haggling long into the night, they reached an agreement. They would breed their horses. The farmer would run a stud farm and would keep the income from that. And the sheikh would continue to race the horses and keep the income from that.

Their plan was a big success. The crossbred horses won race after race for the sheikh. And the farmer became even richer than the sheikh, by breeding horses for all the disgruntled owners that had lost to him.

These stories are about how brands Made With syntheses of East and West are bringing something more human and rooted to modernity. We see how the Interland is a state of mind, a commitment to “and” (rather than “or”). As explained by Elif Shafak, the novelist; by designers at the Lost City of Arabesque event; by the authors of a report on The Mind of Turkey; and by Serdar Erener, its leading adman. Also as epitomized by the AKP party of Turkey, and by Nada Debs, the Beirut designer who combines Japan and Arabia into a new fusion that makes poetic, universal sense.

East and West are often used as if they were mutually exclusive categories – static and eternal. There is, however, one city where you quickly learn to mistrust the two concepts. In Istanbul, you understand, perhaps not intellectually but intuitively, that East and West are ultimately imaginary ideas, ones that can be de-imagined and reimagined.³⁷

Elif Shafak, who wrote these words, is a Turkish novelist, born in France, raised jointly by her modernist diplomat mother and her traditional, religious grandmother. Shafak writes her novels by a process of “commuting between languages”; a typical book would be written first in English, then translated into Turkish. She then corrects this translation, and from that goes back and corrects the English version. Shafak is fond of quoting a saying of Rumi that one should be like a compass, with one leg rooted in the local, and another traversing a broad circle of the universal. And this mixing of languages is more than a stylistic device:

I believe in the depth and beauty of syntheses. When I am writing fiction, I like to combine the heritage of women and the oral culture with the foundations of written culture, which is more male-dominated. In a similar way, I like to combine Eastern and Middle Eastern techniques of storytelling with Western literary styles.

That kind of synthesis is the subject of this chapter. Many of those featured do have a foot in several cultures; and not necessarily only West and East. But before we explore their work, we need to pause to understand what these syntheses are for.

In postmodern art, we are used to creation without any purpose or meaning – rather that clashing combinations are being used for effect, or out of irony and distance. The overriding message being “take your pick and mix”. Academics Georg Stauth and Bryan Turner (1988) wrote this about the postmodern condition:

Since we live in a world of mere perspectives, the absence of stability in ethics and values results in a certain loss of direction which in turn leads to pessimism, disenchantment and melancholy. The world has become unhomelike, because we have lost all naivety and all certainty in values… a collective sense of homelessness.³⁸

The creators in this chapter do not share this homeless worldview. They do still have roots. They are committed to both the truth of their traditions and the new realities they have to face. This implies a positive role and meaning of the syntheses: Revitalization (a term from anthropology) meaning a deliberate, organized and conscious effort by members of a group to recreate their shared culture.

The point of syntheses within a revitalization process is to join old symbols and customs to new lifestyles. The result is liveable because it has continuity with existing culture; that vast rambling storehouse of heritage, habits, symbols, recipes, power words, rules of thumb, motifs… And workable because it is adapted to new challenges and opportunities arising from the current environment. Revitalization places these Made With brands as first sketches of a possible future; as symbols of becoming rather than just adaptation. It is not about outside cultures learning to fit the West, or trying to catch up, but rather being able to lead beyond the West in a new direction.

Let’s head now to Istanbul, the city Shafak evokes as a kind of cosmopolitan crossroads of all humanity. The first person I met there on a recent trip was Haluk Sicimoğlu, strategist at advertising agency Alice BBDO and co-author of a series of reports on The Mind of Turkey.

You don’t have to Westernize, you just want to be modern. You can enjoy the merits of life, the high standards, but still be a Muslim. You don’t want the lifestyle of the West, just its comforts.

Sicimoğlu was recounting to me the narrative he felt had made the current AKP Turkish government so popular and successful. And he told me “when people hear that, they relax; become more comfortable and open-minded”.

The AKP is an Islamist party, a close relative of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Prime Minister’s wife wears a hijab (in a country previously so secularized that wearing a veil was banned in university and in parliament). The AKP is not remotely reticent about speaking out for religious traditions and the glorious heritage of Turkey’s Ottoman past. And yet this government brought ten years of stability, creating the base for an economic boom. Haluk Sicimoğlu told me that their synthesis involved more than just resolving the tradition vs. modernity split. The Muslim world, Haluk told me, was in quite a confused state; “trying to find ways of dealing with consumerist culture and fate – how the two can go together”. But he said that Turkey was learning very fast how to survive and “compete as a soft power within a modern capitalist world”.

Another key dichotomy where the AKP’s best of both worlds narrative played out, Haluk told me, was that between individual and collective. In developing countries and especially in the Muslim world, he told me, family and community are central; “we are very much a ‘we’ people”. Hence you live among the lives of those around you, you are expected to help each other, and that’s seen as just the way of life. There is also a very paternalistic culture, with men as the head of households, and organizations like families tending to have a patriarch who should be obeyed. “But,” Sicimoğlu pointed out, “that has to be juxtaposed with every human being’s need for individualism, and for an individual identity.” And the opportunities for individuals to develop and thrive had tended in the past to be quite limited; “whether in sport, in your profession, in a passion or hobby: there hadn’t been the sort of infrastructure for people to learn, develop, grow, try things for themselves”. And so while Turkey was very adequate in providing all the basic needs of food, shelter, community, security, when it came to self-actualization, then the problems began. This is where the AKP party and also Muslim civil organizations like Fethullah Gülen had been so strikingly successful in playing what Haluk described as “a new chord” – by weaving a different story between self and others:

You have a great potential, you could be a great lawyer, doctor. I know you are working hard but there is no-one holding your hand – it is up to you to grow and excel but with our path the community will support you – the community that you thought could hold you back will actually prove the best path to self-actualization.

Sicimoğlu told me that while constantly reassuring the people about continuity of traditions, the AKP party in government (now they had been in power for ten years) had become adept at scanning international policies and models and picking out the pieces that would work in Turkey. And at avoiding imposing any Western models that could jar. Also, the government itself was so relentlessly hardworking that even its critics could see that it was struggling to deliver on its promise of a strong community to empower individuals. This was an impression reinforced by senior members of the government coming not from intellectual elites, but from the heart of the country.

A concrete example of this political narrative in action is the FATIH project, bringing 21st-century IT to every schoolchild in Turkey. The acronym stands for Movement to Increase Opportunities and Technology (F.A.T.I.H. in Turkish). But, as every Turkish schoolchild would hopefully also know, Fatih was the name of the conqueror of Constantinople (now Istanbul) and hence the founder of the Turkish Empire. Prime Minister Erdogan spoke at an inauguration ceremony to mark the delivery of the first computer tablets at a school in Ankara:

As Fatih Sultan Mehmet ended the Middle Ages and started a new era with the conquering of Istanbul in 1453, today we ended a dark age in education and started a new era, an era of information technology in Turkish education, with the FATIH project.

The project will cost billions and aims at the elimination of textbooks, in favour of digital texts. As well as computer tablets for every schoolchild, the programme will include digital whiteboards in 570,000 classrooms and regional teleconference facilities, to help educate the educators. It’s a big cost, but also an investment in the Turkish economy. Firstly, these electronics supply contracts will also provide a huge stimulus for the Turkish manufacturers. And secondly, it stands to create a level of computer literacy and competence in the workforce to rival other leading IT nations.

Serdar Erener, Turkey’s most famous advertising creative, founded Alametifarika, the biggest independent ad agency. He is also a leading public intellectual. Erener was intrigued by my book. He told me that the Turks in general did not regard themselves as part of a broader region. Yet in his experience, they had much in common with places like Egypt, Lebanon and North Africa and “any place the Ottoman Empire tried to rule”. Erener comes from a family steeped in religious tradition – some of his ancestors having shrines and museums devoted to them – but his father was a staunch secular modernist, a dogmatic Republican lawyer who sent his son to the American school. Serdar quoted a Persian poet to illustrate his position: “I am not within time exactly, nor out of time either”. He said that today he feels very much in touch with his traditions, and at the same time totally removed from them. And it’s this dual perspective, he thinks, that has been helpful in producing advertising that touches a nerve. The key contribution he feels that he and a group of others have made is in changing the underlying presumption that the advertising in Turkey is based upon:

Before us, the ad style in Istanbul was quite pretentious. It represented the world view of a pro-West cultural business elite who think Turkish people should look the way that people look in their commercials. What we did was put the real face of Turkey into our advertising; folk people, women with veils, Kurdish kids, people who speak broken Turkish.

While tapping into folk culture, Erener’s agency is also committed to creating instant fame and modern appeal for its clients; as with its Pepsi commercials, featuring a famous transvestite singer. I was intrigued to know how that had come about.

Serdar said that Pepsi adverts in the past had featured American style pop stars drinking from little glass bottles and cans. Whereas the reality was that Pepsi was bought in huge supermarket multipacks of large plastic bottles, by housewives that wear veils (as 70% of women in the country do). So it needed a bridge, a way to connect with people. It was never going to be “local” but it could be populist.

Pepsi had lost ground thanks to a previous client of Erener’s agency – Cola Turka (the local challenger). This had hit a popular note of what Erener called “positive nationalism”. Their commercials featured American actor Chevy Chase, who every time he sipped Cola Turka would speak Turkish, break into a Turkish children’s song from the 1930s, or start eating doner kebabs. In one ad, Chevy Chase even sprouted a bushy (typically Turkish) moustache. Quoted at the time, Erener had said, “You are drinking America, rather than a soda”. These ads were controversial because they aired in 2003, the time of the Iraq war, and there had been clashes at the border between American and Turkish troops. Cola Turka belongs to Ulker, a multibillion confectionary company that exports to over 100 countries and recently purchased Godiva. The founder Murat Ulker was a pious, frugal and hard-working Muslim famous for his incredibly fair, trustworthy and generous dealing with partners, suppliers and even rivals. His hardworking family went on to build an efficient distribution network and a dynamic modern FMCG company. They certainly had the resources and reputation to mount a challenge in the local soft drinks market. And it worked. Cola Turka made a serious dent in Coca-Cola (who were reported to have dropped their prices by 10% in response). But it was Pepsi that most lost share and position. Little wonder that eight years later, Pepsi would go to Erener to see if he could work his magic and help them regain relevance in Turkey.

Alametifarika’s first campaign for Pepsi had featured Seda Sayan, singer and TV personality, who Erener told me was the Turkish equivalent of Oprah Winfrey. Sayan, blond and bubbly and dressed in a Pepsi-branded uniform, travelled through the back streets and villages of Turkey, driving a Pepsi truck and giving away money and mobile airtime minutes while singing the catchy tune “Pepsi makes your day”. The campaign continued in a similar vein the next year, with popular actor Kenan Imirzaliogu, who was later joined by actress Hulya Avsar. The campaign toed the line between tradition (holding a Ramadan dinner with friends) and modernity (giving away Toyota cars). For the next phase of the campaign, Erener and his local Pepsi client had been keen to use a famous Turkish-Kurd folk singer. A strong statement indeed, given that music with Kurdish lyrics had in the past been banned in Turkey. It was Recip Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister, in a gesture of unity and reconciliation, who had overturned the Turkish government’s 30-year campaign to obliterate Kurdish language, television, literature and music. The American parent company at Pepsi, however, blocked this casting choice because the singer, although respectable today, had in his past gained a criminal record. The local Pepsi team were outraged at this interference and urged Erdogan and his team to find someone else who would be as scandalous, progressive and populist. Hence Azra. A glamorous classical Ottoman-style singer. Exiled to Germany by a previous military government. And incidentally, Turkey’s most famous transvestite. When the campaign broke, it created a huge stir, with its risqué running gag of the three naïve boys next door who keep popping round for Azra’s help and advice because (apart from being stricken by her beauty and sex appeal) they have run out of Pepsi, or mobile minutes.

Erener told me that in recent years, things had been changing fast in Turkey. Nowadays his “folksy, street life” style of advertising was not a new thing anymore because it was widely imitated, in execution if not entirely in spirit. He said that the Muslim sensibility once under political repression – labelled “Fundamentalist” – was now free to become mainstream. While from the outside it might look like Turkey was enjoying an economic boom, from the inside it was much more of cultural shift. Erener described the effects as being like “a nation coming to its senses and realizing who we are. No-one even knows where this will lead”.

Serdar Erener had recently been asked by some financiers from the West what was going to happen. And Erener had told them: “Expect a future that is more modern, and more Muslim.” As he explained:

It’s really similar to my own position, because the Muslim tradition has no objection to salesmanship. In fact, it promotes it very strongly. The Prophet himself was originally a merchant. And doing business in a good way, working as hard as you can, is seen as a virtue. People forget that while Muslims put their faith in God, they are not fatalistic, but rather that they do so under a principle which says: you work very hard and you do everything you can; and then and only then do you leave the rest to God.

Serdar Erener showed me an article he had been reading that day by a friend of his. It was about the rise of a new bourgeoisie. Contrary to the expectations raised by phrases like “New Middle Class” in Western books about the developing Islamic world, they happened also to be rooted firmly in traditions. Erener contrasted this with the old elite who had been brought up with a Western education, who still constantly read, watched and slavishly followed whatever intellectual fashion happened to be in vogue in the West. And yet the new elite was also modern and modernizing. The author of the article, for instance, was a woman who headed a national business association.

Erener told me that the former pro-West elite still accounted for the majority of those who I would meet in the ad industry.

You will hardly find anybody who is unbiased about our Prime Minister. I am probably still the only person who has openly declared what good the governing party has done for this country in last ten years.

And Serdar Erener told me that their opposition, as if expecting a return to the old days, was probably a mistake. Erener told me that the new establishment – in perfect rapport with the values and aspirations of the majority – was by now so established that the elite minority would have to start to get the message. “It’s like in Tahir Square, when they held up the sign saying GAME OVER.”

The situation in Egypt was similar, he told me. Despite all the controversy in the media, 56% had said yes to the constitution. The only opposition was from Cairo where the majority said no. He told me that there was a similar opposition between the cities (Istanbul, Ankara and Ismir) where a Westernized lifestyle was more prominent, and here you get vocal opposition to the government. Whereas in the rest of the country “you will see no opposition in terms of cultural values and what governs people’s lives”. Erener told me he was planning to shoot a video to make this point, by filming a crowded street, but then digitally replacing the head of every man and woman with that of Mr & Mrs Erdogan.

Serdar told me that he still meets opposition to this point of view, not only in his industry, but among Westernized clients. He told me of a recent client (a microcredit organization) request that at least 50% of the women featured in their recent publicity materials were unveiled. The national average said it should be only 33% unveiled. And in terms of the (rural, poor) population who would be likely recipients of microcredit loans, it would probably be more like 1%. The politics of representation in such advertising are always fraught, because there is a balance between perpetuating stereotypes and also presenting images that appeal to the donor or supporter population. But Erener has a point; if nearly all your rural poor client population wear veils, it is strange to hide this. His advertising for years has – in contrast with the Westernized prejudices – been trying to show life as it actually is, veils and all.

Not that walking this line between traditions and modernity was always easy. The Pepsi account had been “realigned” by the global brand owner, he assumed (besides the political machinations of the international agency group) because the campaign featuring Azra, the transvestite Ottoman singer, was seen as going a bit too far. It is interesting that what was deemed perfectly acceptable in the paradoxical traditional-yet-modern Turkey, might be blocked by a more conservative American corporation.

Erener felt that the real debate among a generation experiencing such rapid change was about “how to be a good Muslim when facing a shopping mall civilization. Do we really want to define ourselves through Jeep Cherokees and Prada?” While the debate between the Republican nationalist secular elite and the new guard was effectively long over, the new elite had yet to fully work out its own identity. And that was where the symbols and signals of his work could play a role.

In Turkey, outside the world of dotcoms and ad agencies with trendy offices, there has been a phenomenal rise of more traditional Anatolian entrepreneurs – an example of the new establishment Erener was describing. Covering this story, the BBC interviewed entrepreneurs from Keyseri in Anatolia – an “Islamic heartland” whose population tended to be devout, conservative Muslims. The BBC interviewed the former mayor, Sukru Karatepe:

People in Kayseri also don’t spend money unnecessarily. They work hard, they pride themselves on saving money. Then they invest it and make more money. In fact, in Kayseri, working hard is a form of worship. For them, religion is all about the here and now, not the next life. Making money is a sign of God’s approval, and this is also similar to what Weber said about the Calvinists.³⁹

Gerlad Knaus of the European Stability Initiative think tank, who produced a report on these so-called Islamic Calvanists, told the BBC:

Those doing business in Kayseri themselves argue that Islam encourages them to be entrepreneurial. They quote passages from the Quran and from the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, which read like a business manual. They tell me it’s important to create factories, to create jobs – it’s what our religion tells us to do.⁴⁰

This thoroughly modernist and entrepreneurial and, at the same time, religious traditionalist spirit is very close to the heart of the Turkish AKP ruling party. As the Deputy Prime Minister, Abdullah Gul (himself an Anatolian) explained to the BBC:

The most important thing to ask is what kind of modernism do we want? Are you living in this world, or are you dreaming? The people in Kayseri are not dreaming – they are realistic, and that’s the kind of Islam we need. They go to the mosque, they lead pious lives, but at the same time they are very active economically. This is what modernism means to me.

Turkey sees this as a unique national development, but the same Islamic work ethic will be familiar to anyone who has close contact with the waves of immigrant Muslim entrepreneurs that settled in Europe from South East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. A classic paper in the Journal of Psychology by Abbas Ali also found a similar work ethic in Arab countries, which he defined through a basket of 17 key attitudes that are quite evocative (and seem relevant to numerous case studies in this book):

Islamic Work Ethic Scale (from Ali, 1992⁴¹)

1. Laziness is a vice

2. Dedication to work is a virtue

3. Good work benefits both one’s self and others

4. Justice and generosity in the work place are necessary conditions for society’s welfare

5. Producing more than enough to meet one’s needs contributes to the prosperity of society as a whole

6. One should carry work out to the best of one’s ability

7. Work is not an end in itself but a means to foster personal growth and social relations

8. Life has no meaning without work

9. More leisure time is good for society

10. Human relations should be emphasized and encouraged

11. Work enables man to control nature

12. Creative work is a source of happiness and accomplishment

13. Any person who works is more likely to get ahead in life

14. Work gives one the chance to be independent

15. A successful person is the one who meets deadlines at work

16. One should constantly work hard to meet responsibilities

17. The value of work is delivered from the accompanying intention rather than its result

There are two points to note here in passing because they play a big role in this book.

Firstly, joy, happiness and personal development are placed together with work in this scale. The Western image of happiness is that it is found outside work, in escape from work, and that we need to seek a “work-life balance”. Meanwhile, the Islamic ethic, while acknowledging the value of leisure time, is also attuned to the happiness, development, fulfilment and joy to be found through achievements within work.

Secondly, the ethical side – working not just for yourself but for “others” and “society” – is central. Not that there aren’t also strong explicit ethics within this Islamic tradition of giving something back over and above work. But the integral responsibility to do good work in every sense puts this culture in an advanced position relative to the Western “CSR” as all too often an afterthought.

Back to the theme of cultural fusion, a group of creative industry professionals met up in Dubai for an event in 2012 called The Lost City of Arabesque, to discuss the place of Arabic culture in their work. The event was organized by Nuqat, a Kuwait-based organization founded by leading figures in advertising, PR, digital and design, whose aim is to revitalize the local creative industries. The speakers were a mix of local leading lights, plus creatives from across the Middle East and North Africa, and beyond. I wasn’t at the event – but thankfully local design blogs were, and I am indebted to their note-taking, especially that of khaleejesque.com whose session-by-session write-up and interviews from the event I have drawn from below.⁴²

Nuqat’s aim with this event was to bring together the Arab creative community to consider the revival of the lost heritage and artistic forms of Arabesque; not in a nostalgic way, but reinvented to fit with modern lives and identities. As their website explains:

A culture that is unique, not copied or duplicated from other cultures, a culture that interprets our past, and speaks out in a modern voice, ahead of change.

Twenty-three creatives spoke at the event, representing various disciplines including architecture, interior design, fashion, jewellery, graphic design and typography.

Kameel Hawa is director of the Al Mohtaraf design house with offices in Beirut and Saudi, known most of all as designers of exquisite Arabic fonts such as that used for the redesign of Saudi Newspaper Al Jazirah. The agency’s recent work also includes brand identity design for ZSL, the Saudi Football League, and naming and branding the Sülaymaniyeni development in the historic centre of Istanbul. In developing the name, the agency combined “yeni” meaning new and Sülaymaniye being the old name for the area – referring to Süleiman the Magnificent. Interviewed at the event, Hawa talked about how modern and Western are not necessarily the same thing:

Modern culture today is more about the mechanism of human life, rather than the cultural content. One might say that modernity can be summed up as the “worship” of change.

Given this, the task is not just to adopt modernism wholesale but also to tackle some of its dilemmas. Hawa pointed to France and Italy, which have also attempted to counterbalance the engulfing nature of modernity by cherishing some of their traditional ways of life. The challenge for Arab societies was to step into the modern age, preferably in a way that was unified economically (to match the strength of the EU and other such blocs), but could still be diverse in their cultural contributions. It was all a matter of being open to global influences and tastes, but also valuing your own contributions as “inheritors of a great culture and members of modern society at one and the same time.” Hawa spoke about how his own agency, Al Mohtaraf, had taken this duality of cultural authenticity and modern design values into the heart of its work and practice. Although he added that good creative work was never the result of some strategic intent or rational analysis, but “honest, original and enthusiastic practice. We do what we really like, and strongly feel for”.

Another speaker at The Lost City of Arabesque was Salem Al Qassemi, founder of Fikra, a design studio specializing in bilingual typography and identity creation. Al Qassemi in a talk entitled “Arabish” spoke about the way that numbers and letters were being used on the internet to Arabize. After founding Fikra in 2006, Al Qassemi had worked on several bilingual branding projects; i.e. brand identities that are represented in both Arabic and English. He became fascinated by this bilingualism as a kind of key to the culture of UAE. To explore this subject, he undertook postgraduate research at the Rhode Island School of Design. More recently, Al Qassemi had been working with a think tank to map the collaborative networks between designers in the Arab world. He is also working on the rebranding of the UAE pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Mixing languages in the way Al Qassemi describes (Arabish) has long been a staple of futuristic fiction. In Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, the teen subculture had developed a language called “Nadsat”, which is peppered with borrowed Russian words as well as creative twists of English slang. Burgess, a keen linguist, would have been fascinated by the emerging culture of 3rabeezy, as Arabish is known among youth in Lebanon and across the Gulf. It is used as a kind of slang in social media and chat rooms – for example, as in this forum post:

al7een a9ln tlagi kl mjmo3a laha 6reegt klam mo3ayyana or words mo3ayyana mn e5tera3hom … y3ni 7tta fe almkan alwa7id t5tlif feeh al-lahjat…

How this works is a mix of transliteration, where the Arabic and Latin letters have a similar sounding equivalence (for instance aleph and a) and introducing the numbers when there is an Arabic letter with no direct equivalent, for instance the 3 in 3rabeezy is a letter “ayn” (the Arabic letter looks a bit like a 3, only mirrored).

3rabeezy was originally needed in forums like IRC chat that didn’t support alternative character sets. But lately it has come into more general usage as an informal way of sending short messages among young people. Because of its very widespread use, Google Translate, Microsoft Maren and other similar tools will automatically convert text written in 3rabeezy into Arabic characters proper. Of course, with this being the way that youth communicates, it has now been incorporated into branding too. For instance, Sami3ny is a mobile phone service that allows people calling you to hear music of your choice in place of the usual boring “ring ring” sound. Sami3ny is slang for “let me hear it”.

Another speaker at The Lost City of Arabesque whose work explores contemporary re-expressions of Arabic culture was Rana Salam, a designer well known in London for images drawn from her enormous archive of Arabic Pop Art. Her work has featured well beyond Arabish brands – working with Paul Smith, Liberty, Harvey Nichols and Itsu. Salam’s signature is her flamboyant, confident, emotional (almost tropical) use of colour. In an interview on a design blog with Sophie Maxwell, Salam said that:

Despite being in London for over 25 years, and having had my design training in the UK, Beirut and the Middle East still remain a source of inspiration for me in all aspects. This is done when I design, cook and how I feel. Colour is very natural to me, and it’s a language I feel speaks stronger than anything. It sets the mood for everything, and therefore it’s a valuable tone that I use in my work. Colour is very powerful. It is also an attitude.⁴³

At the Arabesque conference, Rana told the designers to be more confident about their heritage. That there was a real interest and currency to Middle Eastern-rooted design in the West.

Rana Salam has since returned to Beirut and now faces the challenge of not being the only Arab-accented designer in town. Doubly so, since while Rana was away, her signature style has been much copied; even if she is “the original”. In her most recent work, Salam has been exploring the local diversity and specificity of the culture of her client projects. For instance, her designs for Ayamme, a Kuwait restaurant, drew upon research trips to local markets making apparent the influx of cheap, brash, plastic Chinese goods. Salam set out to adapt this global design kitsch:

The floral design comes from the trays that the Sha’aby use in the streets and markets and we glamorized it for the high-end consumer. But the floral design is a Chinese design and this is what the locals use. And although the Kuwaiti ladies would usually avoid this, I am saying, no, we must celebrate it. We call it Sha’aby Chic.

This touches on a truth at the heart of this book. Many traditional folktales point to the idea that to find something of great value, you have to look in humble places. Cinderella, for instance – from the prince’s point of view. That is a creative truth that might be general to emerging markets themselves, of looking to their own roots which may seem humble but offer better foundations than the gleaming West.

One of Salam’s collaborations on her return to Beirut was with furniture and interiors designer Nada Debs, who is the perfect example of synthesis, revitalization and brands Made With a very different sensibility to those in the West. After a long exchange of emails, and missing each other in Beirut, I finally caught up with Nada Debs on that epitome of modern communication: Skype.

“Islamic design is pure geometry” Nada Debs told me after I explained some of the themes this book was about. “It has nothing to do with the ego. It is about the universal part of being human.” Debs readily agreed that this was a tradition of working from the Self, not working from the ego:

If you look at the tradition, the great designs of the past, nobody knows who actually made all this work. There isn’t one name. In the West, you know who the architect was, or that the artist was Da Vinci. Our culture wasn’t about ever about the person who made it, it was just the craft.

Nada Debs’ own work, she told me, was born out of a fascination with patterns. The more she studied them, the more absorbing and rewarding she found them. Nada told me she is still at an early stage of her apprenticeship with Islamic geometry. For now she is comfortable with simple geometric shapes – with triangles and polygons. As the years and decades go by, she “hopes to progress” to fuller patterns.

The fascination and universality, she told me, had something to do with “having no beginning and no end”. And it is also pure synthesis. “It is not about this or that, it is about this and that.” It was the and that fascinated her most. Perhaps because it connected with her own background. She described how she found what was for her:

…a personal Silk Route. Picking up ideas in the same way as blue and white Chinese porcelain was brought to Istanbul, or learning how to make silk brocades, or the inlay work I use now, and damasks, originally from China and India – all of it part of today what you’d call the Ottoman style, the basis of the furniture of the Ottoman Sultans.

Debs told me that her personal Silk Route had started when she grew up in Japan, where she absorbed a deep sense of minimal purity. Educated in the Rhode Island School of Design in New York, she then absorbed the beauty of functionalism – “you know, like Shaker furniture, nothing irrelevant or decorative in the design”. Nada had also absorbed their modernism combining the plastic potential of new materials like Plexiglas, with new ways of working with old materials like metals. Then Nada moved on to England where “all you see is crafts and antiques”. By now making her own furniture, Debs started using craft techniques like marquetry, but doing so in a modern way. And then finally she moved back to Lebanon, her home country, and found it awash with emotion and ornament, but also with the Islamic geometry and the very detailed and developed craft.

As she tells it, Nada Debs then just “put it all together in my work”. But it can’t have been easy to do. On the face of it all, these styles contradict. Furniture is either starkly modernist and functional, or it is florid and ornamented. How can it be both? As Debs’ work shows, it can be both and more, but through creating a hybrid that allows the spirit of all to combine.

Nada told me that more than anything what she had come to value was the craft element, working with artisans, the magic they worked with materials. And with this as a kind of anchor, the other accommodations become possible.

I came from a school of thought that said ornament is a big “no no”. That it is just a surface element. But then it kept touching me emotionally. People are so attracted to patterns. They have no beginning and end. You get mesmerized. I’m sure there is a scientific background to this. You can take a child and put them in a desert – and they will probably draw circle. A child in the snow in Alaska will do the same. It is the most universal element in a human being.

Being surrounded by and also carrying so many cultures, Nada felt that what she was really doing with patterns was “bringing parts of myself together. It goes deeper than what we see. It’s about emotional design”. In working with patterns, Debs had held back, taken a minimal line. “I do work with patterns but only as far as going into a polygon – square, circle, triangle. That means I keep it as pure as possible. Then from that I will probably start recreating the shapes, layering them, shadowing, or superimposing.”

Debs told me that her company, her first collection and what she thought of as a big part of her ethos was contained in the name: East and East. Both Easts she had grown up with – the Arab East and the Japanese East – were very rich within their own culture. And together they represented “a whole side of the globe that was relatively unexplored in the West. At least in a deeper way of (not just picking up an accent) but really deeply understanding from the inside what it meant and how it had evolved”.

Nada Debs told me that she liked the explanation of her work given to her by an architecture critic and friend:

In this East, we think about the Afterlife, like the infinite patterns, our souls going to the next world. It’s all born out of Islamic philosophy. But when it comes to Japanese Zen philosophy, it’s all about the moment. You know that you are going to die. By taking the feeling of both, the infinite and the moment, you can find balance between your heart and your mind.

Debs thought this type of synthesis was “of our times”. But she said it wasn’t that the universal nature of the work meant that everyone saw it the same way. More that it had something for everyone.

Europeans look at my work as exotic. The Japanese would say it just fits their homes, as it is both rectilinear and organic. In the States, they see it as very practical. Here (in the Arab world) people will emotionally relate to the patterns and through them to their own past.

I put it to her that it was therefore a kind of “design Esperanto” – a combined language designed to have familiar notes for all of its hearers. But she said in a way that the “made-up language” feeling was the kind of problem she was trying to resolve.

It’s the whole problem with me, that I needed to relate to everyone. I’m an Arab and I’m Japanese. It was so confusing. Who am I? What’s my identity? I found the answer in my work. And became fine with myself. I could be Arab and Japanese at same time.

Nada Debs told me about being in the American school in Japan and being told she was a Third Culture Kid – like the children at the school born to mixed-race parents.

If you have more than one culture then you are always seeking to look beyond. Being this and that. “And” rather than “or”. That is the whole key. If people accepted this more generally, it would prevent wars. I am just creating work that is representative of the truth of the world which is that only with the best of both, a bit from here and a bit from there, can we ever move forward.

Debs told me that her idea of holistic ways to join opposites had become a more general theme than just East and East cultural fusion. For instance, a new piece she was working on was called Lightness of Being. This combined a huge concrete slab of a table top with deceptively thin-looking legs and was covered with live materials – wood and mother of pearl inlay – in the shape of butterflies. She was fascinated with the contrast and the fusing of weight and lightness, inert industrial materials and emotional living ones. I told her it sounded more like a poem than a table. But as well as the craft, Debs told me that this kind of design took a lot of work in engineering, pushing the boundaries of materials, exploring new types of resin. So the modernity and tradition fused ran the whole way through the process and the story.

Nada Debs told me that what was most important in her work was the human element. Someone would tell her that there was a new machine that could do some of the inlay work. But she would reply that then “where is the love of a human being? And where will their minds go if they don’t have this kind of work to do?” She described watching her craftsmen at work. How although they might be unconscious of it, it was meditative, spiritual. She loved how absorbed and attuned they would be; the way they would focus on something for hours. Nada told me that she felt that this kind of work was healthy for the mind. That the way the Machine Age had taken it away was unacceptable.

We will disappear if we go on like this. That’s why the Eastern spirituality has been creeping into the West. Because it is so powerful. And so needed to be human. And craft is a big part of it.

As an example, she described a scene from the film Samsara where Buddhist monks paint mandalas with powdered inks on the stone floor, in intricate designs. “And then at the end they brush it away. Because it is the process that is important. Not the result.” That was the feeling Nada told me that she had, why she loved watching craftspeople work.

This chapter has been about people taking different parts of their own upbringing – none of it “other” or “foreign” to them – and creating new hybrids. The resulting syntheses are more universal. But they also help them and their audiences reconnect with opposites and polarities in more of a spirit of “and” than “or”. This requires getting inside the work, absorbing its meaning.

The resulting hybrids can be paradoxical, but are chosen because they work and make sense. I loved the story in an earlier chapter of the AKP party in Turkey scrapping school uniforms; allowing liberal kids to dress more freely, while traditional kids would also be free to dress more conservatively. As Erener says, it is hard to know where this will lead, but there is a sense of the culture working out its identity and its own version of modernity as it goes.

The examples of synthesis are not only serious (in not “taking the piss” but genuinely exploring the power of “and” – and not retreating from emotion). They are also warm, human, authentic, witty – as a design team called Bokja will say in the next chapter, “a smile in the home”. In this coming section, we will explore how layers of story and heritage can make experiences and products that have positive humanity (rather than just being less artificial)….

“We will disappear if we go on like this. That’s why the Eastern spirituality has been creeping into the West. Because it is so powerful. And so needed to be human. And craft is a big part of it.”

Nada Debs
Craftsman Working on Nada Debs Furniture, photograph by Mansour Dib