Absent
presence

Cesare plays with the Siqiliah ensemble

“At one point the Shaykh called for me and said: lift your finger and recite the shahada (declaration of faith).

He then gave me my name: Abdulkarim. When he left my stomach was in tangles. From that day on my life changed.”

“My mother was used to seeing me for lunch on Sundays. But with Ramadan I started making excuses. She insisted and after a few weeks I told her I could not eat that day.

She asked: ‘are you doing Ramadan?’ And I said: ‘yes’. And she replied: ‘are you an idiot?’ And pom, she hung up the phone!”

“When I first set foot in the mosque, I was a little intimidated. I had never had the courage to enter. But I was immediately welcomed.”

“This mosque was a deconsecrated church.

It was donated by the Palermo municipality to the Tunisian consulate who converted it into a mosque.

They put a wooden minbar (pulpit), and they put lines with tape so that people could line up correctly for prayer.”

“Today Muslims in Palermo are marginalised. They have few resources and spaces for worship.”

“They have to fund their own, with low incomes and there’s no support from the council

Some are old, dilapidated warehouses converted to mosques, but they are treated so well.

If a place is cared for, it can be very beautiful and tranquil. This is all you need to do the internal work.”

“I grew up in Palermo, but now I have my own way of being in my city. You are in the same place but you experience it differently.

I have had the opportunity to connect with different Islamic communities in Palermo, I developed the curiosity and openness to get to know them.”

“I began to realize that I had lived all along in an Arab city. I started seeing places that I had lived in for many years differently.

It was like reliving, revisiting them.

This continuity with the Islamic past became visible to me. It is still alive.”

“I converted to Islam and initially followed the Sunni way. Over time I grew closer to Sufism and developed an interest in music and spirituality. I then learnt about Alevism, particularly the form practiced by Kurds in Turkey.

I had many North African friends, and I was fascinated by the sacredness of friendship, which I also perceived in the Sicilian people.”

“I am a restorer, and I worked in the Monreale Cathedral on the restoration of the oldest floor mosaics. These mosaics communicated a deep spiritual mystery to me.”

“With oriental mosaics, circles intersect to create complex shapes, but these do not express the completeness of the design.

The Western approach to mosaic restoration limits the decoration to a pre-defined conceptual space, the Eastern one assumes that the decoration is infinite like the universe. I represent here only what is possible to bring into this space.”

“This instrument is similar to the Kurdish tambur, but it's Sicilian because I made it!

Music is my tool to search for inner peace, serenity, to find vibrations that lead me to centre that internal place that everyone identifies in a different way.”

“Instruments in Eastern music allow a progression of sounds from one note to another, unlike Western music which has half sounds, but doesn't use the full range of notes.

In Palermo we created a group called Siqiliah, using the Arabic name of ancient Sicily. We played music mixing North African and Turkish influences with sounds from the Sicilian tradition.”

“This instrument is similar to the Kurdish tambur, but it's Sicilian because I made it!

Music is my tool to search for inner peace, serenity, to find vibrations that lead me to centre that internal place that everyone identifies in a different way.”

“The cathedral of Palermo has a visible column at the entrance with an inscription from the Quran. In the apse area there are traces of muqarnas which belonged to the ancient mosque.

The rivers and cities have names that come from Arabic, as do many terms in Sicilian dialect.”

“Tunisia is much closer than Naples. So imagine how European we can feel in this part of the world. We are a Mediterranean country.”