Friday 25 November 2011

Siem Reap Journal:Issue #4

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved

The Angkor Photo Festival is continuing its momentum, with today's penultimate night including a slideshow of the 5 finalists and the result of the inaugural Reminders Project Asian Photographers Grant. One of my favorite photographers, Shiho Fukada, is one of these five.

Since it's Friday, I dropped by the Siem Reap solitary mosque to explore whether there's anything worthwhile to document. Each Muslim community in Cambodia has a hakem who leads the community and the mosque, an imam who leads the prayers, and a bilal (as in Bilal, the Prophet Muhammad's muezzin) who calls the faithful to the daily prayers.

I met a few of the community members, one of whom spoke a reasonably fluent Arabic. While some of the Cham go to study the Qur'an at Kelantan in Malaysia, he learned it in Phnom Penh.

The two children were running around in the mosque, and the boy in particular was a bundle of energy.

REI | De Las Flores

REI by Tewfic El-Sawy on on Exposure