The Crescent Moon: The Asian Face of Islam in New Zealand

The Crescent Moon: The Asian Face of Islam in New Zealand

Ans Westra & Adrienne Jansen

Percy Thomson Gallery
Prospero Place, 56 Miranda Street, Stratford

17 August – 8 September 2019

Opening Saturday 17 August at 1:00pm

Conversation with Ans and Adrienne Sunday 18 August at 1:00pm.

Ans Westra Fazilat Rashid 2009
Fazilat Rashid’s four children have grown up in New Zealand. Best of both worlds, she says. Fazilat and her husband came to Auckland in 1980, after living in Muscat in Oman, and Dubai. She graduated in Microbiology, and played tennis for her university in Karachi, Pakistan. She works for the Auckland Regional Migrant Service.

In 2009, in a new post 9/11 era, photographer Ans Westra and writer Adrienne Jansen traveled through the country, catching up with Muslims in their everyday lives to produce a book designed to address misconceptions and stereotypes that had risen about Islam.

They met a very diverse group, ethnically, culturally, and theologically.

The Muslims whose thoughts and portraits appear in this exhibition represent many strands of Asian Islam experience that have converged in New Zealand.

Some are recent immigrants, many other voices in the exhibition speak as Kiwi-born. All express an emergent indigenous Islam in the Asia-Pacific region.

There are lawyers and farmers, computer trainers and butchers, fourth generation New Zealanders and new migrants. They talk with disarming honesty and humour about the media, about identity, about their faith – but mostly they just talk about their lives as Muslims in New Zealand.

View a selection of the photographs on the PhotoForum website

Read article about the exhibition from the Taranaki Daily News