Global Thought
The Jewish-Arab Novelist
The novelist Sami Michael died last year aged 97. Born and raised in Baghdad, he introduced characters previously marginalized or omitted in Hebrew literature: immigrants, Mizrahim, women and especially Arabs. His portrayals are sympathetic but unsparing, and his writing tackled issues central to Israeli society that were previously cloaked in silence.
The Boundaries of Liberalism
Can liberalism understand — and counter — strongman politics? In the wake of Trump’s reelection, the Egyptian writer Mahmoud Hadhoud spoke to the American legal theorist Paul Kahn in search of lessons for the Arab world.
The Contradictory Legacy of an Egyptian Sociologist
Saad Eddin Ibrahim spent his life and career speaking up for civil society and democratization in the Arab world, building bridges between his work in academic sociology and his political advocacy. Then he abruptly degenerated into an apologist for authoritarian counterrevolution.
The Development Economist Leading Bangladesh’s Transitional Government
The student protesters who toppled the Bangladeshi government chose Muhammad Yunus, “banker to the poor” and Nobel Peace Prize winner, to lead the country’s transitional government. Yet it remains to be seen how the vision and experience he brings from outside politics might shape the nation’s future.
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.
Gaza and the End of the Culture War as We Know It
Wasn’t it the left that pushed for speech codes, deplatforming speakers and canceling events deemed potentially offensive to some groups before the tables turned on Oct. 7? Did they really think that no one would notice the irony?
A Historical Novel Charts the Inner Life of the Philosopher al-Ghazali
Ahmed Vall Dine’s novel “Danishmand” (“The Wise Master”) is not simply a work of historical fiction. By imaginatively documenting the life story of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, one of the most prominent figures in the Islamic intellectual tradition, it allows us to join him on his spiritual quest.