Berliner Tage der Arabischen Kultur

Cultural diversity enriches our lives helping us to learn from each other, understand different perspectives and dispel negative stereotypes about different groups. By interacting with people outside our own culture we can build bridges to trust, respect and understanding across cultures. Furthermore, cultural diversity helps to increase our level of understanding other cultures and avoid the tendency of imposing values and beliefs.

WASLA - Arabisch Deutsches Center für Dialog e. V. organized Berlin Days for Arabian Culture in WERKSTATT am Haus der Statistik, Alexander Platz for 3 days, from the 19th till the 21st of April 2019.

The festival was organized in partnership with local organizations, German stakeholders and Arab communities in Germany. There were music concerts, music workshops, book fair, handicrafts workshops, traditional dances, poetry sessions, movies presentations, children art activities and round table.

The diversity of the activities aimed to address to a wide audience and reunite people of different ages. The competencies of our permanent members helped in running the activities in such a way that the communication between generations was encouraged.

Some of the issues on which we focused were related to Arab women, social justice and women rights. Targeting parents we presented the suffering of Arab women; the first movie is about early marriage in Yemen "I'm Najoud 10 years old and divorced".

Furthermore, people were encouraged to share their personal experience related to the topic. We launched a campaign to raise awareness of parents about the negative aspects of early marriages.

The second movie is about social justice and women rights in Morocco. On the third day, a group of Egyptian women will perform a short artistic moment promoting gender equality.

We used the storytelling technique to encourage our audience, especially older people, to share their life stories which contributed to develop empathy and a closer connection among people.

The Festival's program included several activities translated into Arabic, German and English languages. Participants and audience were people of both genders aged between 6 and 65.