Follow Us
From the Editors
Jadaliyya Revamps Arabic Section . . . click here
Jadaliyya Launches Arabian Peninsula Page . . . Click here!
الآن . . . القسم العربي بحلة جديدة
The Culture Page Returns . . . . click here
Jadaliyya launches its new Syria page . . . Click here.
Want to find out about new books? Visit our expanding NEWTON page. Click here.
Call for Photos: Become a Contributing Photographer at Jadaliyya
Internship Opportunities at ASI (Jadaliyya, Arab Studies Journal, FAMA). Click here!
The Jadaliyya Egypt Elections Watch page archives! Click here for comprehensive coverage.
Interested in writing a Review for Jadaliyya? Visit our Call for Reviews here.
Why Egypt's Progressives Win
![[Women protesting in Tahrir Square; Image from AP]](/content_images/3/sm_Amar1.jpg "[Women protesting in Tahrir Square; Image from AP]")
On 6 February 2011, Egypt’s hastily appointed Vice President Omar Suleiman invited in the old guard or what we could call the Businessmen’s Wing of the Muslim Brothers into a stately meeting in the polished rosewood Cabinet Chamber of Mubarak’s Presidential Palace. The aim of their tea party was to discuss some kind of accord that would end the national uprising and restore “normalcy.” When news of the meeting broke, expressions of delight and terror tore through the blogosphere. Was the nightmare scenario of both the political left and right about to be realized? Would the US/Israel surrogate Suleiman merge his military-police apparatus with the power of the ...
Keep Reading »State Culture, State Anarchy
![[Gaber Asfour Sworn in as Minister of Culture. Image from Alarabiyya]](/content_images/3/sm_EGYPTCABINET.jpg "[Gaber Asfour Sworn in as Minister of Culture. Image from Alarabiyya]")
Mubarak told Christiane Amanpour that Egyptian “culture” was anarchic in nature—and that chaos would break out if he stepped down. So, Egyptians are barbaric and can be tamed only by the strong hand of a loving father—what else is new? This is not just what Lord Cromer used to say, it is exactly what the autumnal patriarch has been saying for twenty years now, channeling the stark (and false) choice once proposed by Matthew Arnold, "culture or anarchy." The slogan analog appeared on signs carried by Mubarak’s goon squads this week: “Thirty years of stability, Nine days of chaos.” While “culture” has little to do with the underlying demands of the people ...
Keep Reading »Impromptu: The Cairo Commune
![[Egyptian protester hooked to an IV drip, image from unknown archive]](/content_images/3/sm_An-Egyptian-anti-governme-006.jpg "[Egyptian protester hooked to an IV drip, image from unknown archive]")
They fought tooth and nail Wednesday night and defended al-Tahrir Square after a long day during which the last Pharao played his last card by unleashing his hired dogs to attack unarmed protesters who shook the earth in Egypt under his throne. When darkness fell, those heroes persevered despite a rain of rocks, Molotov cocktails and sniper bullets. They barricaded themselves and sealed the entrances to al-Tahrir. Their real barricades, however, were their hearts and spirit and those supporting them. Hundreds were wounded and some lost their lives. Their spirits were hovering over al-Tahrir, waiting and looking down at their comrades who were determined to defend the ...
Keep Reading »Singing for the Revolution
![[Nigm and Imam Performing, Image from Unknown Archive]](/content_images/3/sm_7449-imgcache.jpg "[Nigm and Imam Performing, Image from Unknown Archive]")
So was it Wikileaks, Facebook, or Twitter? Perhaps all three contributed to the revolutionary winds in the Arab world? This is one of the questions repeated ad nauseam by a great number of commentators and parroted by many in the United States and elsewhere in the “civilized world.” Others wonder if perhaps it was Obama’s speech in Cairo or even the Bush doctrine (for Fox-infested minds and they are many)? Yes, new technologies and social media definitely played a role and provided a new space and mode, but this discourse eliminates and erases the real agents of these revolutions: the women and men who are making history before our eyes. Members of our species have done ...
Keep Reading »“Our Assessment Is That the Egyptian Government Is Stable”: Thinking of Cairo from New York (Updated)
![Tahrir Square, Cairo [BBC]](/content_images/3/sm_164101_10150130031259750_588724749_7770301_1722812_n.jpg "Tahrir Square, Cairo [BBC]")
As Jadaliyya's Tough Niece reminds us (My Mother and My Neighbor's Dog on the Tunisian Revolution and Its Aftermath), there has been a lot of fairly uninformed stuff written in the blogosphere about Tunisia and its aftermath, rhapsodies about the revolutionary role of social media and overconfident assessments about what will happen next. I hesitate to contribute to this outpouring. And yet I find it impossible not to write something about Cairo, something for Cairo, just before the breaking of dawn on a day that promises to bring the biggest wave of protest so far. Seeing photos of the thousands upon thousands of people rallying in Midan Tahrir, reading accounts ...
Keep Reading »Islam in American Barrios & Prisons: Converts Reclaim Moorish Spain, Reject Church
![[Image by SpearIt]](/content_images/3/sm_SpearIt.jpg "[Image by SpearIt]")
For those in the US typically designated as “Latino” or “Hispanic,” the historical legacy of Islam plays a role similar to that in the African-American context. As the term “Moor” was embraced by various African-American leaders to unite poor, disenfranchised blacks with the glory of Islam, the connection to Moorish Spain provides a powerful tool to re-imagine Latino identity. Converts learn that popular Latin American terms like ojala (“may God will”) derive from the Arabic allah and that their African ancestors used to chant “Allah, Allah, Allah,” which in Spain became “Ole, Ole, Ole.” Such connections offer evidence of Islam’s influence on Spanish pedigree, regardless ...
Keep Reading »"ما خفي كان أعظم: عن "خائف إلى الأبد [Sayed Kashua - Forever Scared]
” إنني أخاف من السيارات، من الكلاب، من الأفاعي، أخاف من الطائرات، والمروحيات، من الدبابات والجنود. أخاف من العمليات الإرهابية. أخاف من اليهود، أخاف من العرب، واخاف أن يضعونا يوماً ما في مخيمات لللاجئين.“ (سيد قشوع، صحيفة هآرتس، 2002) بهذا الإقتباس يبدأ أول مشهد في الفيلم الوثائقي ”خائف إلى الأبد“ (2009) وهو من إخراج الإسرائيلية دوريت تسمباليست (العنوان بالانجليزية يختلف عن العنوان العبري للفيلم وهو ”خائف منذ الطفولة“) ومدته 50 دقيقة تقريباً ويعرض في الكثير من المهرجانات الأوربية هذ العام. يأخذنا الشريط في رحلة إلى عالم الصحفي والكاتب الفلسطيني سيد قشوع الذي اختار لإسباب عدة الكتابة بالعبرية. أصدر قشوع حتى الآن ثلاثة كتب ” العرب ...
Keep Reading »Divine Failure & A Letter to my Ancestor
![[Image from unknown archive]](/content_images/3/sm_monkey_smoking_1a.jpg "[Image from unknown archive]")
Divine Failure He always sat in the front row in that divinity school in a faraway galaxy. He listened devoutly to the teacher and wrote every word that came out of his mouth. He was a diligent god who memorized all the secrets and tricks of creation by heart, but he lacked talent. And thus, when he was given all that space after graduation, he took a jab at creating the Sun, just as he’d learned in Genesis. But he created dead stars instead and dumped them into the garbage bin of eternity. After thousands of such dead stars, he finally managed to make the Sun. Then it was time to for the Moon. That exercise produced piles of black holes and disfigured moons still ...
Keep Reading »Locations [Gone to Palestine: 5]
![[Image from author's archive]](/content_images/3/sm_BeitJiz-House.jpg "[Image from author's archive]")
We chose the hamlet of Beit Jeez in from the hundreds of Palestinian villages that were cleansed in 1948. Maryam was scouting locations for her film, and she was looking for a ’48 village where one scene in particular needed to be shot. It was the scene where the protagonist and his girlfriend go after robbing the bank, the place they hole up while they decide whether to continue going on with their crime spree, or to leave for good. It was important that it take place in the ruins of a ’48 village. Her travels had taken her all around, from the areas around Umm al-Fahim in the triangle, to old villages in the plain between Acre and Haifa, to even the upper Galilee, to ...
Keep Reading »On Representational Paralysis, Or, Why I Don't Want to Write About Temporary Marriage
![[Image from unknown archive]](/content_images/3/sm_Picture3.png "[Image from unknown archive]")
For the past few years, I have been working with a colleague on a collaborative project about leisure in the southern suburb of Beirut. Along the way, there was a moment when we thought that new ideas about temporary marriage among Shi‘i Muslim youth would be a significant part of it. We eventually abandoned that possibility, for reasons that included changes in our primary interests and the difficulties of interviewing young people about what remains for the most part a socially stigmatized practice in Lebanon. But the most powerful reason impacting our decision to write less about temporary marriage has to do with our hesitance to contribute to an ...
Keep Reading »Revolutionary Contagion: Morocco and a Plea for Specificity
Since January 15th, media discourse on the Arab world has almost uniformly coalesced around a single term, “contagion.” This is a telling semantic choice given the word’s broader associations with disease; a synonym for “infection” or “contamination,” it carries rhetorical connotations that are hardly subtle. The Wall Street Journal has analyzed Egypt’s “contagion risk” (Feb. 1st) and in the past two and a half weeks The New York Times has published at least half a dozen articles on the topic, with the ...
Keep Reading »Looking to Egypt, Again
I grew up hearing about Egypt. The Egypt of those stories, woven inextricably into the memories of my father and his brothers and sisters, was always one of strength, inspiration, beauty and steadfastness. It was the Egypt of Nasser and Um Kulthoum, of Arab Nationalism and of the Bandung Conference. It was the Egypt of solidarity with Palestine. As a child in Beirut, that place seemed as close as the catch in my father’s voice when he would talk about hearing Nasser on the radio. As I grew older, I ...
Keep Reading »Everything Is Illuminated
Everything is exposed. Every crack is showing. Protesters throughout Egypt have put their bodies on the line day after day, their vulnerable, breakable bodies, and with their bodies, they have forced, each day, a bit more of the story to become illuminated. Anyone familiar with the combination of brutality and tactical expertise possessed by the Mubarak regime could not have been surprised by the savage strategy that has been aimed at unarmed protesters in Cairo and throughout the country over the past ...
Keep Reading »The Poetry of Revolt
[This post was selected as one of three winners in Three Quarks Daily Arts & Literature Prize] It is truly inspiring to see the bravery of Egyptians as they rise up to end the criminal rule of Hosni Mubarak. It is especially inspiring to remember that what is happening is the culmination of years of work by activists from a spectrum of pro-democracy movements, human rights groups, labor unions, and civil society organizations. In 2004, when Kefaya began their first public demonstrations, the ...
Keep Reading »Cartoons: Tunisia and Recent Events
Original cartoons for Jadaliyya by Khalil Bendib. [Jadaliyya is inaugurating its cartoon and arts sections. We encourage the submission of cartoons and other art work. Email your material to post@jadaliyya.com]
Keep Reading »وحدة عداء المسافات الطويلة [The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner]
يبدو أنه سيحقق وقتاً جيداً اليوم. الميل الأول انتهى. ٥ دقائق. يعدو ويعدو ويعدو. تنطلق أفكاره. يفكر أنه فعلاً محظوظ ليتم اختياره للمشاركة بالسباق. يفكر أن صحته تتحسن، ونفسيته تتحسن. يفكر أن هذا كله لن يعني شيئاً بعد بضعة أشهر. ينظر مرة أخرى إلى الساعة. حان وقت الغيار الثاني. الغيار الثاني صار أسهل. أصبح أكثر قدرة على السيطرة على جسده. في البداية كان يشعر أن جسده عدوه. أنه في معركة دائمة معه. أن جسده يخذله في أي فرصة تسنح له. أما الآن فجسده قطع خط الحصار وأصبح حليفه. كأنهما رفيقان في تنظيم، يتعاونان ...
Keep Reading »Football and Violence in Jordan
On Friday December 10, 2010, Jordanian and international media reported on “clashes” after a football match between two teams that make up the biggest rivalry in the Jordanian Football Association (JFA): al-Faysali and al-Wihdat, both of which serve as the main recruiting pools for Jordan’s national team. Popular support for each of the teams is at least as indicative of political allegiances as it is of football appreciation. The al-Faysali team has popularly come to represent Jordanians of East Bank ...
Keep Reading »Entrapping American Muslims
2010 will likely be remembered by American Muslims as the most challenging year since 2001. While anti-Islamic rhetoric has been part of American culture for quite some time, this year brought a massive resurgence in Islamophobia. Less than ten months before the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, civil rights for Muslims in America have perhaps never been in greater peril than they are now. In addition to hate crimes like pipe bombs and arson at American mosques, recent revelations ...
Keep Reading »Howl [Gone to Palestine: 4]
Howl Considering the fact that our literature workshop at Birzeit almost didn’t take place at all, it was a real success. We’d applied for a grant to teach a workshop to Palestinian university students through a fund administered by the US Department of Education and the State Department’s Public Diplomacy program. Despite the contacts that the consul in East Jerusalem had set up with our colleagues at Birzeit, we had a difficult time making arrangements. The department chair was away for the summer and ...
Keep Reading »The American Granddaughter (A Review)
Many Iraqis returned to their country after the American invasion in 2003 as members of the entourage that accompanied the invading army and helped it administer its occupation. Some of them were translators recruited by companies back in the US where they were living either as refugees, residents, or Iraqi-American citizens. Some bought into the “liberation” narrative and believed they were helping the old country get back on its feet. Others were simply in it for the six-figure salary. Zina, the ...
Keep Reading »Infomous
About Culture
Jadaliyya’s Culture page is an open space for creative, original and creative texts about culture(s). Jadaliyya understanding of culture encompasses the production and dissemination of meanings in all sites, contexts and in a variety of media and genres.
.jpg){kind=small}
Hot on Facebook
“People protesting against Western-style economic policies and Western-supported authoritarianism are imagined instead to be protesting in favor of Western-style democracy. ”click me | أنقرني email quote to a friend
.jpg){kind=small}
From Jadaliyya Reports
Top Jadaliyya Tags
Jadalicious / جدلشس
- هشام صفي الدين: الإستبداد والثورة عودة الكواكبي
- The Idiot's Guide to Fighting Dictatorship in Syria While Opposing Military Intervention
- "We Will Not Recognize Criminal Israel," Says Brotherhood Leader
- الأزمة المعيشية الفلسطينية بين الإستهلاك والمديونية الأسرية والأمولة
- Revolutionary Contagion: Morocco and a Plea for Specificity
Noteworthy
Twitter Updates
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
Latest Entries
View All Entries »- "We Didn't Know It Was Impossible, So We Did It": The Quebec Student Strike Celebrates Its 100th Day
- Post-January 25 Iranian-Egyptian Relations: A New Dawn?
- Egypt's Working Class and the Question of Organization
- لماذا سأقاطع الانتخابات الرئاسية؟
- Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup (May 22)
- سنان أنطون: العراق تعمق فيه تشويه التاريخ
- Ali from Bahrain: How I Became a Refugee (In both Arabic and English)
- Interview with Egyptian Presidential Candidate Abdel Moneim Abul Fettouh
- About Last Night
- Last Week on Jadaliyya (May 14-20)
- O.I.L. Media Roundup (21 May)
- Egypt Media Roundup (May 21)
- "We are All Palestinian Prisoners": Exclusive Interview with Artist Hafez Omar (VIDEO)
- Al-Jazeera's (R)Evolution?
- Without Principle, There is Nothing: On the Undignified Politics of the American Task Force on Palestine
- The Melancholia of a Generation
- Egypt's Presidential Election: Meet the Contenders
- . . . مرايا تبحث عن محررين
- Iran Will Require Assurances: An Interview with Hossein Mousavian
- Arab Uprisings Symposium: Critically Assessing the Changing Landscape of Power and Players (Beirut, 31 May - 1 June 2012)
Archive
©2010-2012 by the Arab Studies Institute. All Rights Reserved. info@jadaliyya.com
site by concepcion design