There is an interview in Arabic with Anouar Majid about democracy int he Arab World on the website of the Moroccan journal al-Masa’. This was conducted last May or June 2012. Parts were published in Akhbar al Youm and Al Masa’ just published another part recently and added some parts that had already been published.
Photographer Rémi Ochlik who was killed last year in Syria at the age of 28 (Photo: Corentin Fohlen)
By Adeline Sire, PRI’s The World, February 1, 2013
Many journalists have died covering the Arab uprisings.
Last year, 17 were killed in Syria.
One of them was award-winning French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik.
He was only 28-years-old.
Ochlik documented the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.
Then last year, he headed out to Syria. Continue reading Remembering Arab Spring Photographer Rémi Ochlik
The moral ambiguity of Homeland or Argo is a fitting tribute to the reality of US Middle East policy
by Rachel Shabi, The Guardian, Monday 14 January 2013
America’s Middle East policy has been enthusiastically endorsed. Not at the UN or Arab League, however, but by the powerbrokers of Hollywood. At the Golden Globes, there were gongs for a heroically bearded CIA spook saving hostages and American face in Iran (the film Argo); a heroically struggling agent tracking down Bin Laden (Zero Dark Thirty) and heroically flawed CIA operatives protecting America from mindless, perpetual terror (TV series Homeland).
The three winners have all been sold as complex, nuanced productions that don’t shy away from hard truths about US foreign policy. And liberal audiences can’t get enough of them. Perhaps it’s because, alongside the odd bit of self-criticism, they are all so reassuringly insistent that, in an increasingly complicated world, America just keeps on doing the right thing. And even when it does the wrong thing – such as, I don’t know, torture and drone strikes and deadly invasions – it is to combat far greater evil, and therefore OK.
When I saw Argo in London with a Turkish friend, we were the only ones not clapping at the end. Instead, we were wondering why every Iranian in this horribly superior film was so angry and shouty. It was a tense, meticulously styled depiction of America’s giant, perpetual, wailing question mark over the Middle East: “Why do they hate us?” Iranians are so irked by the historically flimsy retelling of the hostage crisis that their government has commissioned its own version in response.
Zero Dark Thirty, another blanked-out, glossed-up portrayal of US policy, seems to imply that America’s use of torture – sorry, “enhanced interrogation” – is legitimate because it led to the capture of Osama bin Laden (something that John McCain and others have pointed out is not even true). Adding insult to moral bankruptcy, the movie has been cast as a feminist film, because it has a smart female lead. This is cinematic fraud: a device used to extort our approval. Continue reading And the winner is … Islamophobia
Image source: alhadath.yemen
The demise of Bashar al-Assad continues its downward spiral with bodies strewn all over Syria in the process. What makes him hang on? Can he not see what just about every pundit outside of Syria and increasingly most Syrians see in blood red letters: mene mene tekel upharsin? Even vain Belzhazzar saw the gig was up in Babylon when those lines cracked his banquet hall. Or is he raving mad in the style of Nero, who plucked his lyre while Rome burned? Or is he just a chicken without a head, but who is still trying to bury his head in the sand?
He hangs on for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, because for the time being he can. Russia has not yet told him he has to go and the United States has basically given him leave to do whatever he wants to his own people except gas them. The military has not yet deserted him in sufficient numbers and they are, thanks to Russia, very well armed. Even the hint from the U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi that Assad has been in power long enough is not likely to move the last of the pre-Arab-Spring dictators (not counting kings, sultans and emirs for life) into retirement.
The Syria of 2013 is not that conquered by Umar ibn al-Khattab, not that of Ayyubid Saladin, nor that run over by the Mongols, nor that ruled briefly at the end of World War I by Faisal of Arabia (patron of Lawrence of Arabia and vice versa), nor that which joined the ill-fated United Arab Republic initiated by Gamal Abd al-Nasser in the 1960s. But there are indeed historically-stretched fault lines. Continue reading More of the Sham of al-Sham
The current cover of about-to-be-print-defunct Newsweek asks a question that could be seen as an old (and oh so tired) joke:
Who’s there?
Jesus.
Jesus who?
Jesus who? After 2000 years you still don’t know who Jesus was?
Perhaps Newsweek is reduced to the digital because it took so long to follow up on Time Magazine‘s 1966 cover that asked “Is God Dead?” Both are questions that beg further questions. For Time, which God? For Newsweek, which Jesus? For that matter, it could also be asked which Moses, which Muhammad, which Buddha, which Krishna, which Ishtar, which Baal, which Zeus, which Napoleon, which Joseph Smith and which Elvis? In all but the last three choices above, no historian can ever answer the question, and even Napoleon is philosophically iffy.
Since this is the Christmas season that is consuming our time, let’s start with Jesus. Do you want the Jesus who is mortal or the one born of a virgin and equal to eternal deity? Be careful how you choose for you could end up (and it would be your end after the middle of the 4th century) being an Arian heretic rather than accepting the alternative of homoousious (a word worth looking up if only because it has a double o in the middle). Do you want the babe away in a manger while angels sang to shepherds and wise guys followed a star to Bethlehem? Then even the current Pope has his doubts. Do you want Jesus of the Gospels, who thought it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven and preferred the wisdom of children to the theologians of his day? Then think twice about applying for funding from the for-profit Andrew Carnegie’s trying-philanthropically-to-be-like-the-prophet Carnegie Foundation.
Do you want the Jesus that died for your sins so you could go on a crusade to the Holy Land and kill the infidels who had taken over Jerusalem? Continue reading Who was (fill in the prophet)?
In today’s New York Times, drive-my-Lexus-over-olive-branch journalist Thomas Friedman posts a column entitled The Full Israeli Experience. Having read the headlines in The Jerusalem Post, he begins his commentary on the violence in Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia alongside a missile defense drill in Israel. Through it all, muses the journalist, the Ministry of Tourism invites all comers to visit Israel for the “full Israeli experience.” Here is the gist:
The full Israeli experience today is a living political science experiment. How does a country deal with failed or failing state authority on four of its borders — Gaza, South Lebanon, Syria and the Sinai Desert of Egypt — each of which is now crawling with nonstate actors nested among civilians and armed with rockets. How should Israel and its friends think about this “Israeli experience†and connect it with the ever-present question of Israeli-Palestinian peace?
Ah, yes, poor Israel, mired in a political science experiment in which ideological hawks are pitbullied against “bastards for peace.” The idea that internal Israeli politics could as easily be characterized as doves vs “bastards for war” does not occur to Friedman, nor does he ever seem to fill out his own experience by reading Haaretz or conferring with Palestinian leaders, at least not to describe the “full” Israeli experience. Continue reading The Full Palestinian Experience
A Chronology of Nineteenth Century Periodicals in Arabic (1800-1900): A Research Tool
This website provides a chronology of nineteenth-century periodicals in Arabic.
Although it is meant to include all periodicals published in Arabic or in Arabic and in another language (like the usual pair of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish) or in Arabic written in a different script (like Judeo-Arabic) in the period from 1800 to 1900, this chronology is certainly incomplete. Furthermore, there remain numerous problems with dating and locating individual publications as well as identifying their owners, editors, or publishers. A common problem is that journals with different editors used the same title or the same editors published periodicals under different titles.
Thus, at the moment we consciously publish a working draft with the purpose of making our information available to the scholarly community. We welcome all readers to submit any comment, corrections, and new data via the email addresses provided in the “Submit comments” section. We would like to ask all contributors to always refer to the ID at the end of each row – in case of comments on existing entries – and cite their sources, as otherwise we cannot consider the submission for being included in the table. Every contribution will be acknowledged.
We chose to present the core data as a table containing information on titles, dates of first and last issue published, place(s) of publication, names of publishers and editors, language(s) of publication, and available collections. In addition, we provide various indexes of publishers and locations, as well as a bibliography of the most important secondary sources and available union catalogues. To search any part of the website, the browser’s search function should be invoked (Ctrl-F for Windows, Cmd-F for Mac OSX). Please keep in mind that unicode symbols adhering to the IJMES transliteration must be used.
For details, see the website at the Zentrum Moderner Orient.
Portrait of a lying woman, Antoine Sevruguin, Iran, 1901 (geheugenvannederland.nl).
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then one like this century-old photograph taken in Iran will leave the reviewer with no loss for words. Here is the quintessential native Ottoman Era odalisque to ogle at. A number of enticing props are they as well: the flowers in hand, the shoes on the bed at the end of a curvaceous bottom in corso flowing down the exposed torso, the half-hidden belly button, long pigtails and dark kohl-laced eyes. Not only is this figure exposed to the viewer, but she engages with a direct gaze, using a hand to cradle her head. Here, visually presented, is the Orient represented: a luscious and willing consort for the taking.
The photograph above is part of a series of Ottoman Era images from the Ottoman History Podcast, a radio program and Facebook site based in The Netherlands. The site has a splendid selection of photographs from the Ottoman Era, the vast majority of which are not odalisque cheesecake, and it is well worth perusing.
Regarding the photograph above, here is how the Facebook site describes it: Continue reading Orientalist Cheesecake