Making a mark
In business, belly dancing, shop owner gives global flavor to Austin.
From the outside, Zein Al-Jundi’s store looks like many other Central Austin shops of a certain vintage. It’s tucked into a nondescript shopping strip at the corner of Duval and 51st streets.
But inside, the Arabic Bazaar unfolds in gleaming nooks and crannies. Its rooms and shelves spill over with gold-threaded fabrics, handblown tea glasses, pashminas and carpets and fine jewelry, pierced Moroccan lanterns, inlaid parquetry tables and handsome backgammon sets. Syncopated music wafts through the air like incense, and ornate belly dancing costumes entice the browser.
It’s a world that Al-Jundi has worked very hard to create. It’s a microcosm of her many lives and loves.
“If you had asked me years ago that this is where I would be, this is what my life would be, I would not have believed you,” she says with a laugh. “Sometimes the reasons behind getting into something can be so trivial, but then it changes the rest of your life!”
Singer, belly dancer, concert producer, D J, travel guide, fitness instructor, world-music promoter, wanderer of medinas and marketplaces — Al-Jundi has been all these things. And yet when she moved to Austin from Syria in 1985 to attend the University of Texas, she could never have foreseen these interwoven paths. She simply came here to join her siblings, who’d also left Damascus to attend UT and seek greater freedom as Christians (their mother’s father was a Christian minister and their father’s father a Muslim sheikh, and while both families were of Syrian descent, the children grew up attending church.) Once in Austin, she married a Texan and had two sons.
“That all seems like a lifetime ago,” she says. “In some ways, I guess it was.”
When her marriage ended in divorce in the late ’80s, Al-Jundi began teaching fitness and aerobics to make ends meet as a single parent, distinguishing her classes with her eclectic music selection — largely Arabic, Latin and African.
“My life here (has been) just a sequence of different things, one that leads to another, without any sort of master plan,” she says.
In the mid-’90s, Al-Jundi worked as a DJ and program director at KOOP Radio, then began promoting and pro
ducing world music and dance; she soon formed World Music & Dance Productions to bring international artists to Austin. But as a former musical prodigy in Syria, Al-Jundi felt the inevitable pull of the stage and began singing in classical Arabic concerts around town. By the 2000s, she’d segued into a second musical career, releasing two CDs (“Traditional Songs From Syria” on AR CM usic in 2004 and “Sharrafouni,” compositions of her own released by WMD Productions, in 2010). Meanwhile, she’d also become a go-to resource in Austin for belly dancing and colloquial Arabic language classes.
All these things led AlJundi to open her store on Duval, which debuted Aug. 27, 2001 — two weeks before 9/11. Although the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon didn’t affect her business, the event created tension and uncertainty for
many Middle Eastern people, and Al-Jundi wasn’t sure how her new store would be affected
Over the years, the Arabic Bazaar has survived against overwhelming odds and setbacks — multiple break-ins, stolen computers, stricter and stricter import regulations on her merchandise, the economic crash of ’08’09, increasingly polarized political climates. Add to that the usual slings and arrows of running a local brick-andmortar in a global/online retail culture.
But Al-Jundi saw a big- ger picture: “During all the rough years when I was struggling — an d I still am in a way — I was so stubborn not to close the business. I’m like, the way this
all has happened cannot be abad thing. This is going to take me where I need to be. And where I need to be is not so much a ‘successful’ shop owner or retailer. But to create something that leaves a mark — a mark on Austin, a mark on the world, that opens people’s eyes, minds and hearts to where Icomefrom.”
Al-Jundi was a child prodigy in Syria, one of six children of the late revered poet Ali Al-Jundi and part of an influential family whose members held important government positions before the Assad era — her uncles were ministers of labor and ambassadors to Egypt and France before the coups of the 1960s. But it wasn’t political threats that led her and her siblings to cross the ocean westward, but simply the desire to attend school in the U.S. and have a freer life.
Her artistic career began at 5 when a Syrian TV producer discovered her extraordinary singing voice through some of the Al-Jundis’ neighbors.
“I didn’t have training; it was just somethin gId id,” Al-Jundi says. “I would always sing, and my neighbors always just knew that I was that little girl who loved to sing.”
The producer booked her as the soloist in a major concert, where she was accompanied by the national orchestra and a chorus of 50. In the audience were government dignitaries, includ- ing future Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, a general in
the army at the time, who was seated in the same row as her father.
“To this day, I still remember all the songs I sung, and I sometimes still sing them,” Al-Jundi says.
She went on to become a national singing sensation, featured prominently on Syrian radio and TV, and she can recall going to pick up her paycheck each week and being the youngest per- son in line by a mile.
“When I grew up, it was very different in Syria than it is now,” she says, cloak- ing her sadness about what’s become of the country. She contemplates how eerily prescient her father’s poetry was.
“My father is o ne of the most revered poets in the history of Syrian literature. He was one of the leaders in what is considered to be modern poetry in Syria,” AlJundi says. “It was never love poems or things about mundane life. It was about polit- ical oppression .…Iremember my mom saying, ‘Ah, your Dad’s poetry, it’s just so gloomy, it depresses me.’ And it is incredible — if you read his poetry now, it’s as if he had a vision of what was to become of Syria. His writing became almost like a prophecy of sorts. I can’t read it right now because it gives me such chills.”
Because of his ideology, Ali Al-Jundi’s poetry was banned, and for a number of years he was forced into
hiding. Eventually, though, he emerged from the shadows and lived peacefully in Syria until his death in 2009.
This cultural legacy, this straddling of two worlds, is the stuff of Zein Al-Jundi’s DNA. Having studied architecture and urban design at UT, she bridges multiple disciplines, not just singing
and dancing. And although she is currently focusing her energy on her store and her belly dancing classes, Al-Jundi says she has every intention of returning to her earliest, truest love: making music.
“It’s my passion, my true calling, what I believe I was put on this Earth to do,” she says. “You know, everybody relates to music. It’s in our human nature. And sometimes a song can actually start the process, cross the bridges.
“I have seen it so many times, with people who have come to my shows, with peo
ple who have listened to my radio show, with people who have come to the store and admired a piece that is just beautiful.”
Al-Jundi says she hopes to one day be able return to Syria, to visit family if not to purchase items for her store. (For the past five or six years, her buying trips have been limited to Turkey, Morocco, Egypt an dsome times Lebanon.) But she knows that homecoming may be a long, long way off, and she takes thatins tride.
“You know, I’m part of Austin. I’ve been here most of my life,” she says. “To me, so much of the wonderful, beautiful things about Ara
bic cultures don’t get talked about here. People don’t know these thin gs, peo ple don’t get to know Arabic people. And cautiously, cautiously, together with others, I’m so delighted and honored to have been able to kind of help bring some of that about, to help expose people in Austin and open people’s minds to the beautiful aspects of Arabic culture.”