Essays
New Voices of Rebellion Rise in Cuba
Cuba’s dictatorship retained an allure for many on the global left. But this adulation of a totalitarian system is not stopping those facing down Cuba’s dictatorship on a daily basis from keeping the island’s culture and desire for freedom alive.
Revolutionary Wit
No one escaped Raed Fares’ brutal criticism: U.S. presidents, Russia, Iran, the United Nations – everyone who was witnessing the Syrian war and doing nothing to stop it.
Blurred Lines
The Middle East’s post-Ottoman borders are seen as an ugly embodiment of the way colonialism, nationalism and the 20th-century state dismembered the region. But the Middle East’s new political regimes solidified these lines in the sand with fortified borders.
Fifty Years after Lebanon’s Last State-builder
Chehab’s central idea – replace the missing sultanate with a modern nation-state and a government guided by the consent of the governed – remained fixed in the minds of his most fervent supporters. Yet even they found themselves either exiled or politically marginalized within Lebanon.
Requiem for a Revolution
Algeria's 2019 revolution reinvigorated the Arab world. But a year and a half later, it has fallen prey to the same failures of the region's other movements for change. An essay detailing the rise and fall of the Hirak protest movement.
The Riddle of the Sinai Sphinx
A small sphinx in the Sinai’s Temple of Hathor had carried a riddle for millennia. In solving it, archaeologists discovered how turquoise miners from the East had replaced hieroglyphs with letters and invented the alphabet.
It Felt Like Love
It felt like love, that initial part of the thawra. Like love, there was a total transformation of consciousness from the solitary I to the rapturous we, only here we was the people, al-shaab, al-shaab al-lubnani.