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A New Kind of Armenian-Turkish Reconciliation

9 Feb 23 2012 by Jennifer Manoukian

In October 2011, the newly renovated Sourp Giragos Armenian Apostolic Church reopened in Turkey’s southeastern province of Diyarbakir. Among the hundreds gathered to celebrate its first mass in over ninety years were local men and women who had chosen the occasion to be baptized into the Armenian Apostolic Church. Raised as Sunni Muslims, these men and women were the children and grandchildren of Armenians who had converted to Islam to escape persecution in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. Living in a society that glorified cultural homogeneity and in a country that still bore the scars of its Ottoman past, the first generation of converts often kept their ...

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Decolonizing Islamophobia in France: An Interview with Houria Bouteldja

1 Nov 22 2011 by Tala Khanmalek

[Houria Bouteldja. Photo credit Tala Khanmalek.]

I met Houria Bouteldja in Paris, France at the Institut du Monde Arabe, a building whose architectural majesty overcasts those around it, including the Notre Dame. Although it was built to raise cultural awareness (and in accordance with eighteen Arab countries), Houria, spokeswoman of Les Indigènes de la République, reminds me that it signifies much more. Like the country’s shifting national identity, the building is itself in motion, its very walls are apertures that open and close every hour to control light. Founded in 2005 and now a political party as well (Parti Des Indigènes de la République), Les Indigènes de la République is foremost an antiracist organization ...

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If the Libyan War Was About Saving Lives, It Was a Catastrophic Failure

0 Oct 27 2011 by Seumas Milne

[Anti-Qaddafi fighters gesture to the crowds in front of a Kingdom of Libya flag during celebrations in Benghazi on 23 October. Image by Esam Omran Al-Fetori/Reuters]

As the most hopeful offshoot of the "Arab spring" so far flowered this week in successful elections in Tunisia, its ugliest underside has been laid bare in Libya. That's not only, or even mainly, about the YouTube lynching of Qaddafi, courtesy of a NATO attack on his convoy. The grisly killing of the Libyan despot after his captors had sodomised him with a knife, was certainly a war crime. But many inside and outside Libya doubtless also felt it was an understandable act of revenge after years of regime violence. Perhaps that was Hillary Clinton's reaction, when she joked about it on camera, until global revulsion pushed the US to call for an ...

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The Others, the Elsewhere of Our Here

0 Oct 13 2011 by Anthony Alessandrini

John E. Drabinski, Godard Between Identity and Difference. New York and London: Continuum, 2008. John Drabinski’s Godard Between Identity and Difference is a rare thing in the world of contemporary academic writing: a book that reveals the author’s personal, idiosyncratic, and loving relationship with his subject. The reader comes away from this book not merely impressed by its arguments and enlightened by its readings, but also moved by its passion. One feels that one has just had an extended discussion with a smart and funny friend at a bar or a diner after coming out of an all-day Godard festival. From the book’s opening acknowledgments, which include, in addition ...

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Hope, Translated

0 Aug 03 2011 by Anny Gaul

[A view of Spain as seen from Tangiers. Photo by Anny Gaul.]

Laila Lalami, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2005. Tahar Ben Jelloun, A Palace in the Old Village. Translated by Linda Coverdale. New York: Penguin, 2011. Already, the narratives of the Arab Spring dominating the American media have a nebulous relationship with the human stories behind the events. The deaths of Mohammed Bouazizi and Khaled Said usually mark the beginning of the story, to be sure. But beyond a handful of famous and visceral anecdotes, most coverage has favored broader themes more familiar (and arguably more palatable) to American audiences: the triumph of social media, for example, or the abuses of dictators. This is ...

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Algeria's Impact on French Philosophy: Between Poststructuralist Theory and Colonial Practice

0 Jun 06 2011 by Muriam Haleh Davis

[Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida. Image from the University of Chicago Chronicle.]

Pal Ahuluwalia. Out of Africa: Post-Structuralism’s Colonial Roots. New York: Routledge, 2010. Jane Goodman and Paul A. Silverstein (eds). Bourdieu in Algeria: Colonial Politics, Ethnographic Practices, Theoretical Developments. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Christopher Wise. Derrida, Africa and the Middle East. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. In the past few years, there appears to have been a falling out between Middle Eastern studies and post-structuralist theory. Edward Said’s Orientalism remains necessary reading for most graduate students, but the surrounding debates in post-colonial and post-structuralist theory have fallen decisively out ...

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Sanctioning Iran: An Interview on Iran's Ruling Bloc, Internal Strife, and International Pressure

0 Jan 05 2012 by VOMENA

On the last day of 2011, US President Obama signed into law a military authorization bill containing a provision that imposes new sanctions presumably in order to punish Iran for its nuclear program. The sanctions force foreign financial institutions that do business with Iran’s central bank to choose to either end that business or be blocked from the US economy. In a parallel development. On 3 January, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé said he had no doubt that Iran was developing nuclear weapons and ...

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Four Poems by Mohammed Khair-Eddin

0 Nov 16 2011 by Gaelle Raphael

Mohammed Khair-Eddine (1941-1995) is considered one of the most compelling Moroccan writers of the twentieth century. Born and raised in the southern Berber Moroccan town of Tafraout, Khair-Eddine moved to France in 1965. In 1979 he returned to Morocco where he lived until his death in Rabat in 1995. Mohammed Khair-Eddine, along with Abdellatif Laabi and other Moroccan poets, founded the review Souffles in which they articulated “a new Maghrebian aesthetics that would include both a philosophy of action ...

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A Syrian American in Paris

3 Oct 18 2011 by Amal Hanano

Last week, on the day after the day Steve Jobs died to the rest of the world, on another bloody Friday in Syria, Mashaal Tammo was murdered. Tammo, a beloved Kurdish activist and leader, member of the newly-formed Syrian National Council (SNC), was gunned down by four men in his home in the northeastern city of al-Qamishli, one day before the SNC was scheduled to meet in Cairo to elect its leaders. Tammo was killed by “armed gangs” according to the Syrian government-controlled media, and by ...

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The Shibboleths within Albert Memmi's Universalism

2 Oct 08 2011 by Dina Jadallah

Albert Memmi, Decolonization and the Decolonized. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. “What? Post-colonialism? Have they left?” - Aborigine activist Bobbi Sykes’ comment at an academic conference on post-colonialism[1] Is there a place for “Muslim” or “Arab” peoples in “Western” “universal” values of equality, freedom, democracy, rights, and so forth? Both categories frequently subsume religious and/or ethnicized (mis)conceptualizations in current Western discourse. ...

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Greece and the Gods of Neoliberalism

0 Jul 15 2011 by Khalil Bendib

Just as Zeus put Hercules through a series of humbling labors not so long ago, so too do the Gods of neo-liberalism and colonialism today put Greece’s current fearless leader through many an unsavory janitor’s task. A dirty job, but someone has to do it...

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French Wildflowers and Algerian Gangsters: Humanism and Violence at the Movies

2 Mar 16 2011 by Muriam Haleh Davis

Des hommes et des dieux (Of Gods and Men). Written and directed by Xavier Beauvois. France, 2010. Hors la loi (Outside the Law). Written and directed by Rachid Bouchareb. Algeria/Belgium/France, 2010. Recently, two movies have offered Algeria a starring role at the post-colonial box-office. Des hommes et des dieux (Of Gods and Men), which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival and César award for Best Film, is the story of seven Trappist monks who lived in Algeria during the civil-war of the ...

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