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When families from around the Arab world gathered for a picnic at the Alif Institute nearly two decades ago, they couldn’t have known that their act of community would blossom into a Southeast-wide cultural festival welcoming 7,000 people a year.

Then again, this convener and curator of Arab culture already had a history of small actions that added up to big results.

Alif Institute will host the 17th annual Atlanta Arab Festival Oct. 5-6 as it continues to mark its 20th year as a nonprofit showcasing Arab culture in Georgia.

Alif sprang from the Arab-American Women’s Society of Georgia, a group of recent arrivals who began building community in the mid-1980s, teaching Arabic and presenting in local schools during the pre-Internet days. Read the nonprofit’s full history here

The women’s group and others like the Arab-American Fund of Georgia created a base upon which community members like Haitham Haddad could build. When the women’s group lost their language classrooms at nearby Mercer University, many believed it was time for a new — and permanent — home.

Mr. Haddad, an architect by training, traveled to Paris in the early 1990s and marveled at l’Institut du Monde Arab’s wide-ranging impact on France’s understanding of the Arab world and its diverse nations.

He and others envisioned a similar institution, albeit on a smaller scale, for Atlanta’s growing Arab community, which had ballooned from 3,000 to more than 30,000 in the 1990s.

Galvanizing community support and donations, with some delays after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the fund purchased a building tucked away in an industrial area near the tangled interstate highways of Atlanta’s spaghetti junction.

The 10-acre site is where Alif now hosts art exhibitions, knitting groups, cooking demonstrations, language classes, cross-cultural trainings and film screenings, all with the mission of educating Atlantans about the Arab world and giving a diverse diaspora a place to gather.

“We represent kind of the entirety of the Arab world, 22 Arab nations, so it’s not from coming from one specific perspective,” said Alta Schwartz, operations director at Alif.

It’s on those same grounds that thousands will convene for the festival, a free celebration of Arab cuisine and culture that has become a fixture in the city’s international landscape.

Mouna Abdelhamid, Alif’s executive director, estimates that most attendees are from the Arab community, with many using it as an opportunity to introduce their culture to non-Arab friends. Some Atlantans of various backgrounds, however, have simply made it an October staple.

“It’s just something they’ve been doing for years. They don’t miss it. They come for the food, the music, the artists, the vendors,” Ms. Abdelhamid told Global Atlanta.

At a time of turmoil in the Middle East after the Hamas attacks on Israel nearly a year ago and the ensuing war that has killed tens of thousands including many civilians in Gaza, Alif, which is apolitical and non-religious, has seen newfound recognition of its value as a venue for dialogue grounded in culture.

“If we want to look at the positive out of this misery, it’s gotten way easier” to talk to groups from across the spectrum, Ms. Abdelhamid said.

Through art exhibitions and film screenings, Alif tells human stories that help contextualize conflicts and shed new light on the varied Arab experience.

Today’s moment is similar to what Ms. Abdelhamid, a Palestinian-born architect who grew up in Jordan and came to the U.S. 27 years ago, saw here during the post-9/11 years.

All of a sudden, everyday Americans who had felt insulated from danger were confronted with the reality of how discontent in one corner of the world could spill into another — a reality many Arab countries live with daily, which is why so many of them live and breathe politics, Ms. Abdelhamid said.

“The shift happened. You could start seeing it, people initiated conversations,” she said.

Similarly, today, Americans are now showing empathy, curiosity and even guilt over what’s happening in Gaza, Ms. Abdelhamid said, opening doors for dialogue that may have been closed before. This is all as Alif Institute is expanding its mission to include the preservation of culture to go along with moves toward understanding, education and appreciation.

Ms. Abdelhamid hopes this will take Alif to another level, leading to more exhibitions, research and archival work like the Arab-American stories Alif is compiling with StoryCorps through the Hikayat project.

“It took us 20 years to get to where we are and we have not reached yet where we want to get,” she said.

And for a community that is often stereotyped and asked to explain itself, the low-slung gray building on Marjan Drive has become a refuge.

“This is like a haven for them where they can actually just relax and don’t have to talk about this in that way — you can look at someone and they can understand. You’re both going through the same thing,” she said.

The community is blessed to have such a place of welcome, said Ms. Abdelhamid, who has been Alif’s executive director for more than three years.

“I keep reminding them that they’re very lucky to have a place that represents us in our entirety — Christians, Muslims, north, east, south, wherever you are, conservative, whatever you want to be, this is the place for you.”

Global Atlanta spoke with Ms. Abdelhamid the day after the 23rd anniversary of 9/11. She’d just returned to the office from a workshop at a local church aiming to help Atlantans move beyond the associations they’ve formed with a region viewed only as a place of oil and conflict — not for its thousands of years of rich history and culture.

She encourages them not to be politically correct.

“You cannot say something we have not heard before,” she said.

Such honest conversations exemplify the impact of Alif, whether the medium is an art exhibition, a language class or a cultural festival like the one coming up this weekend.

“You’re going to leave with an impression that might make you think twice.”