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France

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

[Image from muslimvillage.com]

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 urged the European Union to follow the United States and adopt stricter sanctions by freezing Iranian central bank assets and imposing sanctions on Tehran’s oil exports ...

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Four Poems by Mohammed Khair-Eddin

[Mohammed Khair-Eddin. Image from Unknown Archive]

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 and a poetics of dream,” transcending the colonizer/colonized dialectics on which the previous generation of writers was fixated.[1] Hédi Abdel-Jaouad writes, “Along with ...

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A Syrian American in Paris

[Syrian flag at protest held in Paris in honor of Mashaal Tammo. This and all other images in this post by Amal Hannano.]

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 “armed government-funded gangs” (shabiha)—aka Syrian security forces, according to the Syrian people. Yes, nothing has changed, seven months in and here we are, still ...

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The Shibboleths within Albert Memmi's Universalism

[Cover of

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. Every day in the news, there is at least one item that reveals (again) the hypocritical duality that bifurcates “West” from Other. The duality undergirds debates and ...

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Greece and the Gods of Neoliberalism

[Image from unknown source]

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

[Image from the publicity poster for

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 1990s. Hors la loi (Outside the Law), which is directed by Rachid Bouchareb (who previously directed Ingidène) and received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language ...

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Decolonizing Islamophobia in France: An Interview with Houria Bouteldja

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 ...

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

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 ...

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The Others, the Elsewhere of Our Here

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 ...

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Hope, Translated

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 ...

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

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 ...

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