Essays
When the President Spoke to Nubia
The question of whether Egypt’s first president delivered a speech in the threatened Nubian language of Kenzi is more than purely symbolic. It goes to the heart of questions of identity that have long plagued Nubia and its marginalized people, torn between their roots and the Egyptian nationalist project.
From Market Stalls to Mass Protests
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti’s legacy extends beyond being the mother of the legendary Nigerian musician and political activist Fela Kuti or the first Nigerian woman to drive. Bolanle Austen-Peters’ biopic reveals her role in Nigeria’s independence and women's liberation movements.
How a Now-Forgotten Assassination Almost Toppled Jordan’s Monarchy
A 1960 bombing that killed Jordanian Prime Minister Hazzaa al-Majali and 10 others nearly claimed the life of the young King Hussein himself. The unprecedented attack, which the monarch dubbed the “worst outrage in the history of Jordan,” was part of a broader turn across the Arab world toward darker and deadlier political norms.
How a Recent Religious Dispute Reflects Oman’s Long History of Tribal Politics
Disputes over the dating of Eid al-Adha in southern Oman led to arrests this year, as the minor point of religious observance revealed growing tensions over the place of the country’s tribes in its society and politics, an issue with a deep history and profound ramifications.
Centuries of Contempt Have Shaped the Slums of Tunis
A long history of contempt for the poor and displaced has shaped the underclass neighborhoods of Tunis. Yet such places, where young people’s options are often limited to crime, extremism and migration, have played an important role in the country’s recent past.
The Remarkable Overlaps in the Lives of Two Poets: One Chronicled the Nakba, the Other the Holocaust
Mahmoud Darwish and Avrom Sutzkever wrote sophisticated, modernist lyrical and prose poetry about the great 20th-century traumas of their peoples, the Nakba and the Holocaust, which they respectively survived. Their lives and the themes they explored in their poetry overlapped in extraordinary ways.
How Argentina’s Disappeared Took Center Stage in Paris
More than 30 years after the French Resistance had found its foothold in Buenos Aires, the Argentinian Resistance found its own in Paris. This iteration was bold, colorful and — in perhaps stereotypically Latin American form — theatrical, and the artist and intellectual-led movement would soon engulf the continent.