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Lebanon
2011, A Memory From Lebanon
![[Children Displaced by War in 2006. Image from electronicintifada.net]](/content_images/3/sm_lebanon-children.jpg "[Children Displaced by War in 2006. Image from electronicintifada.net]")
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 envious of the memories they would have of that moment. Where were you the night Mubarak was finally overthrown? What were you doing when Ben Ali finally boarded that ...
Keep Reading »Jadaliyya Articles by Co-Editors Anthony Alessandrini and Maya Mikdashi Nominated for Award - Vote Now!
![[Image from 3quarksdaily.com]](/content_images/3/sm_3qdmayatony.jpg "[Image from 3quarksdaily.com]")
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 E-zine Writing on Politics and Social Science." Public voting will narrow the list of nominees down to the top-twenty, from which the editors of Three Quarks Daily ...
Keep Reading »Job Announcement: Assistant Professor in International Studies (IR/CP)/Middle East (American University of Beirut)
![[AUB logo. Image from aub.edu.lb]](/content_images/3/sm_AUB-Logo-Centered224.png "[AUB logo. Image from aub.edu.lb]"){kind=logo}
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 particularly interested in seeking a scholar who can complement the department’s existing areas of expertise. The department has recently revised its undergraduate and ...
Keep Reading »Kherrberr: The New Lebanese Media Monitor on Gender Discrimination
![[Image from kherrberr.org]](/content_images/3/sm_kherrberr.jpg "[Image from kherrberr.org]")
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 stereotypes. The last thing women in Lebanon need is further discrimination. Thus, a group of independent activists, not affiliated with any organizations, associations, or ...
Keep Reading »What is a Virgin?
![[Female anatomy. Image from unknown archive]](/content_images/3/sm_Slide16.JPG "[Female anatomy. Image from unknown archive]")
* 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, the wife and husband have filed separate appeals at the Druze Court of Appeals, but for opposing reasons. The husband has sought to overturn the ruling, which grants ...
Keep Reading »Resistance and Revolution as Lived Daily Experience: An Interview with Leila Khaled (Part 3)
![[Center: Leila Khaled. Image from unknown archive.]](/content_images/3/sm_leilacamp.jpg "[Center: Leila Khaled. Image from unknown archive.]")
[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 its members would splinter off and develop new organizations, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). This decade also marked important shifts ...
Keep Reading »The Keys to Birweh [Gone to Palestine: 9]
We went to visit Shatila camp where our friend Lula was teaching English. We knew the camp was important. We knew that it was a center of the struggle for many reasons. We knew that this was the place where hundreds of women, children and men were massacred over a few days in September 1982. We knew who the murderers were. We knew who trained them. We knew who supplied the weapons. We knew who promised to provide security for the camp when the PLO evacuated. We knew that the camp was leveled in 1985 to punish the people for allowing the men to come back. We knew all this because we’d read these facts in books, we’d seen the pictures, and we’d listened to eye-witnesses. ...
Keep Reading »Kamal Salibi (1929-2011)
![[Image from Wikimedia Commons.]](/content_images/3/sm_-K.Salibi-1-July_09.jpg "[Image from Wikimedia Commons.]")
Scholars of Lebanon collectively grieved at the news of the passing of Kamal Salibi, eminent historian, professor, and prolific author, on Thursday, 1 September, 2011. Salibi spent most of his academic career as a faculty member of the Department of History and Archeology at the American University of Beirut (AUB), from 1953 until 1998, at which point he was appointed Professor Emeritus. Not only did he help shape the world view of undergraduates for over four successive decades, one would be hard pressed to find a single graduate student of Lebanon– or, indeed, trained in the historiography of the Middle East– in any academy whose intellectual foundations were not in ...
Keep Reading »Haletna bel Romancy
![[Concert poster, Hamra Street, Beirut. Photo by Rayya El Zein.]](/content_images/3/sm_elzein2.jpg "[Concert poster, Hamra Street, Beirut. Photo by Rayya El Zein.]")
Concert Review and Interview: Mashrou' Leila, Beirut Hippodrome, July 29, 2011. Yalla, conjure your stereotype. Humid, jasmine-scented nights; hot, diesel-loaded days; pockmarked buildings; the blue Mediterranean crashing on the popular Corniche boardwalk; Lebanese women; Lebanese men; the middle of 2011 in the middle of the Middle East…a thousand and one nights? Go for it. Get yourself an image of Beirut. Beirut, the fortress of yesteryear, the metropolis of tomorrow, the quagmire of the present: constantly the contradiction. She rocks somewhat patiently in the summer of 2011, sometimes nodding off to summer doldrums, sometimes bracing herself for what seem like ...
Keep Reading »General Suleiman, Reggae & Defamation: Interview with Zeid Hamdan
![[Zeid Hamdan. Image from tanyatraboulsi.com]](/content_images/3/sm_DSC_4462-450x299.jpg "[Zeid Hamdan. Image from tanyatraboulsi.com]")
On the old white door to his apartment, there’s a note from the neighbors saying “Welcome home”. But friends and family are not the only ones relieved to see Zeid Hamdan out of jail. Only a few hours after the Lebanese musician was detained on Wednesday for “defaming the president” in his 2010 song General Suleiman, word had spread across Lebanon and beyond. Out of jail since three days, Zeid met with Mashallah News to talk about the detention, censorship, and his message of love. Jenny Gustafsson (JG): What happened on Wednesday? Zeid Hamdan (ZH):I was asked already the week before to come to the General Security office to explain things about my song General ...
Keep Reading »Bodies Moving to Memory
antinormanybody. Curated by Barrak Alzaid. Organized with the support of Kleio Projects & International Resource Network. June 23 – August 10, 2011. Kleio Projects: 153½ Stanton Street, New York, NY. I wandered the Lower East Side on a sweaty summer morning in search of Kleio Projects Gallery, curiously located on 153 and a half Stanton Street, feeling like a young Harry Potter on his first visit to King’s Cross Station, trying to find the peculiarly titled Platform 9 3/4. I entered the small, conspicuous gallery after spotting it, feeling disoriented from the heat. I tried to forget about my own uncomfortable body and to take stock of the portraits, both still ...
Keep Reading »Sowing the Arab Spring
Rami Zurayk, Food, Farming and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring. Charlottesville, VA: Just World Books, 2011. Is there a link between the decline in the availability of hearty village bread in Lebanon and the Arab revolutions of the past several months? In Food, Farming, and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring, Rami Zurayk, Professor of Agronomy at the American University of Beirut, answers in the affirmative and goes on to show why. Food could be fairly described as the book version of Zurayk's essential blog "Land and People." Like the blog, the book covers a wide range of topics, from Israel-Palestine to international trade to food production, small-scale ...
Keep Reading »The Unknown Hell of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon
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 ...
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 ...
Keep Reading »The Making of a Secular Democracy: Law, Marriage, and Empirical Irrelevance in Israel and Lebanon
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 ...
Keep Reading »Humanitarian and Humane Subjects in Lebanon: The Problem of Social Change
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 ...
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 ...
Keep Reading »Nour Merheb, RIP (1985-2011)
On September 16, 2011, Nour Merheb killed himself. Nour did not leave a wife, husband, or children behind. He did not publish any books, did not write opinion pieces for influential newspapers, and did not parade himself in front of television cameras to provide expert opinions. He did not die in a protest facing down an authoritarian regime, he was not killed by an occupier's bullet, and his death will not inspire a popular uprising in Lebanon. He was not what academics would call an intellectual, nor ...
Keep Reading »Honoring the Law: Honor, Gender and Crime in the Lebanese Penal Code
Last month the Lebanese judiciary repealed an article of the penal code commonly referred to as “the honor crime” law. Years of pressure from activist groups and national and international human rights non-governmental organizations led to the repeal of article 562. Its text stated that a man who “finds his wife or his sister or one of his female agnates in the act of (witnessed) illegitimate sexual relations and kills or harms one of the actors” can receive a lesser sentence from the presiding judge. ...
Keep Reading »A Light Bulb
Last summer, I posted a piece about electricity outages in Lebanon. In the year that separates that article from this one, one March 14 led Lebanese government has been brought down and another March 8 led government has been formed. Popular uprisings have swelled the Arab world with possibility as Ben Ali, Mubarak, and now Gaddhafi were overthrown. The US-Saudi-Israeli mix and match trifecta has seen its influence waning, and is leading counterrevolutions in Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria. ...
Keep Reading »The Space Between: March 14, March 8 and a Politics of Dissent
This week a pro-Syrian protest was staged at the Syrian Embassy in Beirut. A group of about fifty people gathered to express their solidarity with the Syrian people against the atrocities currently being committed by the Asad regime. As reported in Jadaliyya and elsewhere, this pro-Syrian protest was met violently by pro-Asad counter-demonstrators. Many of the pro-Syrian protestors sustained injuries, some of which were serious enough to require trips to the emergency rooms of nearby hospitals. ...
Keep Reading »Press Release by Solidarity Protesters that Were Violently Dispersed in Beirut
[The following press release was issued on Thursday August 4, 2011, by the protesters that gathered outside the Syrian Embassy in Beirut on Tuesday, August 2--to protest the Syrian regimes violent suppression of the uprising in the country--and that were subsequently violently dispersed by pro-regime counter-demonstrators. An English translation is forthcoming. For a detailed account of the protest and it's violent dispersion, see Jadaliyya's One Night in Hamra.] بيان صحافي الشبيحة يعتدون ...
Keep Reading »One Night in Hamra
[The following is an eye-witness account of the violent dispersion of an anti-regime protest that took place this past Tuesday outside the Syrian Embassy in Beirut. The author of the report-back has chosen to remain anonymous.] Last Tuesday evening at around 8 o’clock, a group of people gathered at the Syrian Embassy in Beirut in order to protest the ongoing atrocities committed by the Syrian regime against the Syrian people. Earlier that day I had received an email, part of a “secret email chain,” ...
Keep Reading »What is a Citizen? (Or, What if Layla Were Prime Minister?)
On the surface, the question “What is a Citizen?” seems easy to answer. A citizen is a person who is endowed with legal rights by, and duties to, the country of which one is a citizen. Thus, a U.S. citizen is someone who is allowed to vote in U.S. state and federal elections, to serve in the U.S. armed forces, to pass that citizenship on to their spouse and/or children, is entitled to state and federal social services, and who must file state and federal taxes. Similarly, in Lebanon, a citizen must also ...
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