Weimar, Germany - An arts festival celebrating centuries-old Iranian culture began Tuesday in the German city of Weimar with the aim of halting a clash between Islam and Christendom. The Divan Festival was launched back in June in the Iranian city of Shiraz, fabled as the city of poets, wine and flowers, and this week it is the turn of Weimar, the central German home of the great German poets and writers, to reply.
Iranian literature, music and crafts will be on display till October 13, helped by funding from the German Foreign Ministry.
Curator Klaus Gallas said the fest would build a cultural bridge between the Islamic cultural world and Europe.
Among the performers in Weimar are the singer Zalar Aghili and his ensemble playing traditional Iranian music.
Mohsen Mirhmedi, a Berlin-based composer and scholar of religion, is to premiere variations on Iranian folk songs transposed into western compositions. Author Mahmud Doulatabadi is to offer readings from his novel The Colonel.
The word "divan" has passed into several western languages meaning a collection of poetry. This was inspired by the Divan of Hafez.
Its author, Hafez, was a Persian mystic and poet born about 1325 in Shiraz. Sams ud-Din Mohammed Hafez lived till 1390.
The book's title was mirrored by the West-Eastern Divan, the title of an 1819 collection of poems in a quasi-Persian style by Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832), who lived in Weimar and is revered as Germany's greatest poet, dramatist and novelist.
A 1999 West-Eastern Divan monument in Weimar, in the form of two high-backed chairs carved out of stone and facing one another, represents the two great national poets in virtual dialogue and recalls Goethe's cross-cultural interests.
