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Lebanon
New Texts Out Now: Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education
Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Betty S. Anderson (BSA): I always joke that I conceived the project in the pool of the Carlton Hotel in Beirut. In June 2000, I visited Beirut for the first time so I could attend an Arab American University Graduate (AAUG) conference. One day, I walked with some friends all along the Corniche and up through the American University of Beirut (AUB) campus and then back to the hotel. Since it was late June and ridiculously hot, the only option at that point was to jump in the pool as ...
Keep Reading »Watching Cairo from Beirut
![[Protest in Tahrir square on 18 November 2011. Image from Wikimedia Commons.]](/content_images/3/sm_TahrirNovember18th.jpg "[Protest in Tahrir square on 18 November 2011. Image from Wikimedia Commons.]")
I was in Lebanon, about six months into my dissertation fieldwork. As the crowds in Tahrir grew day by day, and all the world watched, I felt at first that I was watching an important symbolic act that would surely fail. Who could imagine that Mubarak, who had the support and blessing of the United States, would be ousted from his forty-year rule? When protests continued despite the violent tactics of the regime, my amazement grew. Due to the Internet and cellular phone blackouts, I was unable to connect with friends in Cairo; I wondered what daily life was like amidst the chaos. While geographically I was close to the events unfolding, Cairo never ...
Keep Reading »Legal Agenda on Jadaliyya!
![[Legal Agenda logo. Image from legal-agenda.com]](/content_images/3/sm_mufakkira1.jpg "[Legal Agenda logo. Image from legal-agenda.com]")
The Legal Agenda is a critical and multidisciplinary non-governmental organization, based in Lebanon, that monitors and analyzes law and public policy in Lebanon, specifically, and the Arab region, generally. The Legal Agenda publishes a quarterly magazine, organizes regional conferences, commissions studies, and hosts panel and open discussions. In doing so, the organization provides a forum for citizens, experts, and researchers to analyze, critique, and debate local and regional legal developments with an emphasis on public accountability. The Legal Agenda explores the law’s influence on and capacity to empower, marginalized groups, including refugees, prisoners, ...
Keep Reading »Letter to Lara Fabian
![[Lara Fabian's facebook page. Image from facebook.com]](/content_images/3/sm_LaraFabian5.jpg "[Lara Fabian's facebook page. Image from facebook.com]")
[The following letter was sent to the artist Lara Fabian on 15 January 2012 by the Campaign to Boycott Supporters of "Israel" in Lebanon.] Beirut, 15 January 2012 Dear Ms. Lara Fabian, Greetings from Beirut. You have declared your full support for Israel. You have sung on its sixtieth "anniversary," which means sixty (by now sixty four) years of ethnic cleansing, house demolitions, apartheid, colonial settlements, and denial of the rights of millions of Palestinian refugees, including about four hundred thousand in Lebanon alone, to go home. You have sung a Zionist song in Hebrew and declared your "love" for Israel when you ...
Keep Reading »Psychedelic Soup for the Sectarian Soul
Where Do We Go Now? Directed by Nadine Labaki. Lebanon/France, 2011. There is a heartbreaking scene towards the end of Wa-hala’ li-wayn (Et maintenant on va où? Where do we go now?), the second feature film from Lebanese writer, producer and director Nadine Labaki. A teenaged Muslim boy named Hammoudi (Mostafa Al Sakka) who has playfully stolen a cap from his Christian neighbor, Nassim (Kevin Abboud), gets marched over by his mother Afaf (Layla Hakim) to Nassim’s house in order to return it. Hammoudi thinks Nassim is sick inside his room, unable to move or even to speak, so he makes a heartfelt apology through the door. He says he is sorry for picking on ...
Keep Reading »The Unknown Hell of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon
![[Bourj al-Barajneh Camp. Image by Tom Charles.]](/content_images/3/sm_BourjalBarajheh-1.jpg "[Bourj al-Barajneh Camp. Image by Tom Charles.]")
For the past sixty-three years, millions of Palestinians have lived as refugees in areas of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and in surrounding countries. The United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) describes their plight as “by far the most protracted and largest of all refugee problems in the world today." Three-quarters of all eleven million Palestinians throughout the world are refugees, though their plight is often ignored. Many key issues in the Middle East, political and humanitarian, arose as a consequence of Israel’s denial of the right of refugees to return to their land. Multiple international treaties and conventions recognize the ...
Keep Reading »Quiet Crossings, Kinship, and Intimacy in Lebanon and Northeast Syria
George Awde, Solo Show at the Korn Gallery, Curated by Rebecca Soderholm, September 7 – October 14 George Awde’s first US solo exhibition offered an arresting and intimate look at the production of masculinity and kinship at the interstices between Syria and Lebanon. Awde, an American-born artist of Lebanese descent, is a photographer and educator who works in the US and Beirut. He received his BFA in painting from Massachusetts College of Art in 2004, and in 2009 he received his MFA from Yale University in photography. His work has been exhibited internationally. In this exhibition, Awde offers viewers painstakingly detailed photographs rich with quiet emotion that ...
Keep Reading »The Making of a Secular Democracy: Law, Marriage, and Empirical Irrelevance in Israel and Lebanon
![[Left: Israeli couples marrying in Cyprus. Image from Reuters. Right: Travel agency advertisment in Lebanon. Image from unknown archive.]](/content_images/3/sm_Screenshot2011-10-28at11.21.42AM.png "[Left: Israeli couples marrying in Cyprus. Image from Reuters. Right: Travel agency advertisment in Lebanon. Image from unknown archive.]")
On any given weekend, Israeli and Lebanese citizens can be found standing together in an orderly line before a Cypriot magistrate. They shuffle forward, couple by couple, in line to get married. The distance to Cyprus is roughly the same for an Israeli or a Lebanese couple, as is the reason why these couples choose to get married there. And no, it is not due to the beautiful weather, the beaches, or the nightlife in Cyprus, which most Israelis and Lebanese would insist to the reader, with a swish of nationalist bravado, are inferior. These are not marriages between Lebanese and Israelis. Rather, these couples leave their countries and travel by boat or by plane to a ...
Keep Reading »Humanitarian and Humane Subjects in Lebanon: The Problem of Social Change
![[A Lebanese Red Cross Worker in a Bombed Ambulance in 2006; Image by Ali Hashisho for Reuters]](/content_images/3/sm_opr02EYH.jpg "[A Lebanese Red Cross Worker in a Bombed Ambulance in 2006; Image by Ali Hashisho for Reuters]")
The ubiquitous presence of humanitarian organizations in Lebanon since the 2006 war has created a variety of well-paid jobs and careers and sought to produce new forms of Lebanese subjectivities. Primarily, the humane subject who performs humanity as an ethical sentiment of traumatic shock when faced with dehumanizing violence and the humanitarian subject whose activism regulates violations of human rights.i While the former has been met with resistance in Lebanon, at least within certain social classes and communities, the latter has become a powerful subjectivity whose critical way of belonging to the Lebanese state might be eroding the possibilities for a real and ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Max Weiss, "In the Shadow of Sectarianism"
Max Weiss, In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi`ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Jadaliyya: What made you write this book? Max Weiss: I suppose the central question at the heart of my book is: How did the Lebanese Shi`a become sectarian? Amidst the flood of writing about the rise to prominence and influence of the Shi'i community in Lebanon during the second half of the twentieth century—with starring roles for Imam Musa al-Sadr and his Movement of the Deprived, and subsequently-emerging figures associated with Hizballah—there was very little appreciation of the fact that the community's empowerment and ...
Keep Reading »What Is Cultural Terrorism?
As a well disciplined anthropologist I have learned to be weary of the word “culture.” In fact, it is difficult for me to write the word without using scare quotes. But after Lebanese boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) activists scored an important victory last month, the word has been everywhere in my online universe. Following BDS actions that highlighted Lara Fabian's recent Israeli Independence Day (which marks the Palestinian naqba) performance, Fabian cancelled her planned concert at the ...
Keep Reading »Suzanne Alaywan's The Gazelle's Throw
[Suzanne Alaywan was born in 1974 to a Lebanese father and an Iraqi mother in Beirut. Because of the war, she spent her childhood years and adolescence between Andalusia, Paris, and Cairo. She graduated in 1997 from the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University of Cairo. She has written thirteen poetry collections. The selection of poems below comes from her latest collection The Gazelle's Throw (2011). Her poetry and paintings are available on her website: ...
Keep Reading »Is the Special Tribunal for Lebanon a Quest for Justice or a Political Intervention?
In 2007, in response to a request by the 2005 Lebanese government, the United Nations (UN) Security Council established the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL). Based in the Netherlands, the STL seeks to prosecute those responsible for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and twenty-two others on 14 February 2005, as well as for a select number of other attempted assassinations in Lebanon between 2004 and 2006. Though Lebanon and the UN established the STL by treaty, the ...
Keep Reading »Sexual Violence Is A Crime, Sometimes
I am against rape. I don't think this is a very controversial position to take. People should not be forced physically or coerced emotionally into having sex. I don't care what the gender makeup of the people in question are, and I don't care what their relationship is. Not everyone agrees with this position. In many countries, sexual consent is an implied provision of a marriage contract. The idea is that when two people get married, they are granted rights to each other's bodies and their resources ...
Keep Reading »2011, A Memory From Lebanon
When the revolutions began in March of 2011, I was envious. It is not easy to admit this. Back then, before the revolutions turned bloody, before Libya and Bahrain and Syria and before the continuation of a military state in Egypt, the possibilities seemed contagious. But even then, while in the fever of January, beneath a desire for revolution, I understood that I would not see a similarly broad based and successful uprising in Lebanon. Watching the swell of people in Tahrir Square on television, I was ...
Keep Reading »Jadaliyya Articles by Co-Editors Anthony Alessandrini and Maya Mikdashi Nominated for Award - Vote Now!
We are very excited that both Jadaliyya Co-Editors Anthony Alessandrini's article, "Palestine in Scare Quotes: From the NYT Grammar Book," and Maya Mikdashi's article, "The Marriage of Sexism and Islamophobia: Remaking the News on Egypt," have been nominated for the Three Quarks Daily Prize in Politics and Social Science. Show your support of Anthony Alessandrini and Maya Mikdashi's pieces as well as Jadaliyya by participating in the public voting for "Best Blog or ...
Keep Reading »Job Announcement: Assistant Professor in International Studies (IR/CP)/Middle East (American University of Beirut)
Faculty Position - International Studies (IR/CP)/Middle East Application deadline January 23, 2012 The Department of Political Studies and Public Administration (PSPA) at the American University of Beirut (AUB) invites applications for a full-time, open rank position in international studies with an interest in topics relevant to the politics of Middle East and/or North Africa to begin September 15, 2012. We will consider applicants of any subfield in political science or a related field. We are ...
Keep Reading »Kherrberr: The New Lebanese Media Monitor on Gender Discrimination
Kherrberr is a media monitor that specializes in overseeing the different types of gender discrimination, including biases based on color, race, religion, appearance, sexual orientation, and social class. In Lebanon, women do not have the most basic rights. There is a continued absence of laws that protect them from family violence and they are barred from passing on their Lebanese nationality to their spouses and children. They also remain imprisoned in a regime of physical and gendered ...
Keep Reading »What is a Virgin?
* What follows is a germ of a longer and more detailed piece. The names, dates and places related to this court case have been omitted in order to protect the anonymity of the plaintiffs. In recent years, the Lebanese Druze Court of Appeals adjudicated a particularly ugly divorce. The case concerned a young couple who had recently been married and divorced by the Druze Court of First Instance, which had found both members of the couple equally responsible for the failure of their marriage. Undeterred, ...
Keep Reading »Resistance and Revolution as Lived Daily Experience: An Interview with Leila Khaled (Part 3)
[This is Part 3 of a translated transcription of a series of interviews conducted by the author with Leila Khaled during the summer of 2007. Click here to read the Introduction to the interview, here to read Part 1, and here to read Part 2.] The 1960s were particularly formative for many activists and thinkers in the Middle East, Leila Khaled among them. It was the high point of the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), one of the major political parties of the period. Many of ...
Keep Reading »Jadaliyya Launches Syria Page
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Jadaliyya Launches O.M.A.R.
Egypt Page
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Latest Entries
View All Entries »- It Is What It Is
- New Texts Out Now: Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education
- Plundering the Past: Scholarly Treasures
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- Remembering Anthony Shadid
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- نداء الأسير خضـر عدنـان إلى العالم
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- "Violating Sacred Values" in Morocco: Free Speech with an Exception
- Our Friend Anthony Shadid's Stories
- Statement on Hunger Strike of Khader Adnan by Palestinian Human Rights Organizations
- Struggles That Fueled a Revolution
- Immunity, Accountability, and the Arab Uprisings: Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat Discusses the Role of the Human Rights Community
- Anthony Shadid Is No Longer with Us
- Patent for an Invented People
- The Insha'at Exodus
- New Texts Out Now: Lila Abu-Lughod and Anupama Rao, Women's Rights, Muslim Family Law, and the Politics of Consent
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