Follow Us
From the Editors
Jadaliyya Launches DARS Page: Daily Acts of Resistance and Subversion
Tadween Publishing Blog is here! Check it out
Jadaliyya's first book is now available! Click here.
Want to find out about new books? Visit our expanding NEWTON page. Click here.
Interested in writing a Review for Jadaliyya? Visit our Call for Reviews here.
الآن . . . القسم العربي بحلة جديدة
Jadaliyya Launches Photography Page (click here!)
Call for Photos: Become a Contributing Photographer at Jadaliyya
![[ملصق المعرض]](/content_images/3/hero2_wonderland.jpg)
![[رسم روزينا فوغيل مان]](/content_images/3/hero2_karlmarks.jpg)
![[An anti-Muslim Brotherhood march in Cairo commemorating the second anniversary of the January 25 Revolution. Photo by Gigi Ibrahim]](/content_images/3/hero2_mclarney.jpg)
![[بوصلة المصدر وكيبيديا]](/content_images/3/hero2_bosli.jpg)
![[ملصق المعرض]](/content_images/3/herosm_wonderland.jpg)
![[رسم روزينا فوغيل مان]](/content_images/3/herosm_karlmarks.jpg)
![[An anti-Muslim Brotherhood march in Cairo commemorating the second anniversary of the January 25 Revolution. Photo by Gigi Ibrahim]](/content_images/3/herosm_mclarney.jpg)
![[بوصلة المصدر وكيبيديا]](/content_images/3/herosm_bosli.jpg)
Arab Uprisings and Middle East Studies: Roundtable with Beshara Doumani, Charles Hirschkind, Saba Mahmood, and Stefania Pandolfo
![[Image from unknown source.]](/content_images/3/sm_ucbroundtable.jpg "[Image from unknown source.]")
This is an audio recording of an informal roundtable on how the recent popular uprisings in the Arab world have impacted research and teaching on the Middle East in the various disciplines. The roundtable was held on May 2 at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) as part of the Luncheon Seminar, a monthly gathering of faculty and graduate students at UCB who work on the Middle East and North Africa and Islam-related topics. This roundtable capped five meetings of the Luncheon Seminar during the Spring 2011 Semester, all of which were focused on the impact of the Arab Uprisings on our work and understanding of this region. Beshara Doumani, Stefania ...
Keep Reading »Awakening, Cataclysm, or Just a Series of Events? Reflections on the Current Wave of Protest in the Arab World
![[Image from guardian.co.uk]](/content_images/3/sm_an-interactive-timeline-of-middle-east-protests-from-guardian-co.jpg "[Image from guardian.co.uk]")
Perhaps the best starting point for understanding the current remarkable wave of protest spreading across the Arab world, would be to examine the nomenclature used to describe or frame it. To some observers it is seen as a ‘cataclysm.’ Others speak of the ‘contagion effect’. Still others might see it as simply a series of (fortunate or unfortunate) events not significantly related to each other. The terminology we use influences the conclusions we draw. We can see this if we juxtapose this Western branding which invokes undesirable images with the terms used by many commentators in the Arab world such as a ‘blossoming’ or ...
Keep Reading »Faraj Bayraqdar, Excerpts from "Mirrors of Absence" II
![[Art by Sabhan Adam (b. Al-Hasaka, Syria, 1973). Image from Unknown Archive]](/content_images/3/sm_Sabhanfaraj.jpg "[Art by Sabhan Adam (b. Al-Hasaka, Syria, 1973). Image from Unknown Archive]")
This is the second part of selected excerpts from Faraj Bayraqdar's "Mirrors of Absence," written in Saydnaya Prison, Syria, between 1997-2000. The first part was published last week. Mirrors of Absence 40 It is neither bias nor bragging there is no graveyard in this world or the next bigger than this one: what I call my country 41 What happens when they open the gates? What happens when they shut them? as if a heavy glass sky is ripped from its seventh heaven Its fall grinds ears nothing but the bubbles of silence and the rattle in times throat 42 If I don't even own myself Why ...
Keep Reading »Between Massacre and Genocide: On Eric Friedler's "Aghét: Nation Murder"
The equation of German documentary filmmaker Eric Friedler’s Aghét: Nation Murder (2010) is of two parts: aghét and genocide. The film’s voice-over proclaims that aghét (whose literal meaning is catastrophe) is the word Armenians use for what was visited on their ancestors during and immediately after World War I. In interviews and in post-screening Q & A sessions, Friedler has repeated the same assertion. But I doubt that I am alone in asking: Is it really so? Are these two terms—catastrophe and genocide—co-equals in the interior conversation around the genocide? Its noble intentions unscathed, Aghét leaves at least its Armenian viewers not only with the ...
Keep Reading »النكبة بثلاثمئة كلمة وأكثر
![[من أعمال الفنان الفلسطيني سليمان منصور]](/content_images/3/sm_ds-Rafia_PL02.jpg "[من أعمال الفنان الفلسطيني سليمان منصور]")
كيف نكتب "نكبة" بالعربية؟ ربما هذه أول مرة أكتب هذه الكلمة وأكتب عنها بالعربية. الآن، في منتصف العمر وفي آخر الدنيا، أجلس بجانب طاولة خشبية مستديرة في شقة استوديو تقع على تلة مرتفعة في غابة تشرف على مضيق بيوجيت في جزيرة "ويدبي". أجلس في هذا الركن الساكن للشمال الغربي للولايات المتحدة، بالقرب من المحيط الهاديء، وأحدق برذاذ مطر أيار. أشعر بثقل في قدمي. هل مهّمة الكتابة عن النكبة مرعبة إلى حد التّسمر في المكان؟ أم هي القوة المغناطيسية التي تشق باطن الأرض لهذا القطب من العالم، لتشّدني بقوة إلى فلسطين وذكرى أيار آخر؟ أم هي الرهبة السحرية لانسجام السماء الرمادية والأمواج الضبابية مع الخضرة الدائمة لأشجار بلوط وسرو ترتفع إلى السحاب كشهادة شامخة على إبادة ...
Keep Reading »لم تعن لي شيئاً
لم تكن النكبة تعني لي شيئاً. مالي أنا وعام ١٩٤٨الذي لم اشهده ولا علاقة لي به أصلاً؟ كان لحلول ذكراه في كل عام طعم ورائحة كريهة، كانت تأتيني على هيئة تضامن وشفقة من قبل من أصر والداي على تسميتهم "إخوتنا العرب." لكن هذا التعاطف سرعان ما كان ينكشف على حقيقته بعد أيام من مرور "عيد الحزن": كنتو هربتو ليه وسبتو بلدكم؟ مش لو كنتو فضلتو كان اشرفلكو؟ ما كانش حالكم بقى كدة... هيه، على العموم إحنا عملنا اللي علينا وزيادة والباقي عليكو انتو. كنت أقص حذافير هذه المحادثات المتكررة على والديّ بحماس واستنكار وبواقي انتماء عروبي يأبى أن يتلاشى. لكن أسئلة رذيلة لم تكن لتتركني وشأني بعد كل ذكرى سنوية: حقاً، لماذا هربتم؟ هل كان الهجوم الصهيوني بهذه الشدة؟ ...
Keep Reading »Review Roundtable Part I: Goldstone and International Law
The Goldstone Report gained its prominence because of its UN auspices and the high credibility of Richard Goldstone as the Chair of the Fact Finding Mission appointed by the Human Rights Council. Other reputable inquiries (John Dugard’s parallel mission set up by the Arab League, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch), aside from a host of journalistic and credible eyewitness accounts, converged on the overall criminality under international law of Operation Cast Lead. The video reports, together with the 100:1 casualty ratio, reinforced this impression, which has since been further validated by the testimony of IDF soldiers, diaries of persons living in Gaza at the ...
Keep Reading »Review Roundtable Part III: Goldstone in Political Context
The political dymamics surrounding the report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (commonly known as the Goldstone Report) provide a number of interesting insights into the recent evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It bears recollection that the report was produced during a period when the Palestinian leadership was engaged in what has been characterized as serious permanent status negotiations with Israel. Yet the vast majority of Palestinians seemed more interested in the deliberations of Judge Richard Goldstone than those of President Mahmoud Abbas. This reflected more than widespread Palestinian indifference to diplomacy ...
Keep Reading »First Jadaliyya Co-Sponsored Conference on "Teaching the Middle East After the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions"
![[This conference is NOT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC]](/content_images/3/sm_TME.jpg "[This conference is NOT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC]")
As part of the Arab Studies Institute, Jadaliyya is fortunate to be co-sponsoring this 40-participant (closed) conference on "Teaching the Middle East After the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions: Beyond Orientalism, Islamophobia, and Neoliberalism" (see list of co-sponsors and participants/presentations below). In due time, the conference proceedings will be made public, including a video, potentially. The material will be part of Jadaliyya's new Pedagogy Section which will be announced shortly (sneak peak here). The conference, co-sponsored by George Mason University's Middle East Studies Program and Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies, is ...
Keep Reading »New Hope on the Nile
![[Image from http://blog.gohoto.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/River-Nile-Egypt-Gohoto.jpg]](/content_images/3/sm_River-Nile-Egypt-Gohoto.jpg "[Image from http://blog.gohoto.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/River-Nile-Egypt-Gohoto.jpg]")
A new, post-Mubarak Egypt has given both Egyptians and other Arabs alike, hope that Egypt can once again reclaim its role as the focal point from which Arab culture and politics emanate. The opening up of the Rafah border crossing into Gaza and the active promotion of a unity government in the Palestinian Territories are both indications that this is slowly happening. However, Egypt’s regional affiliation is not only with the Middle East, but extends towards its riparian partners along the Nile as well. And on that front, events in the immediate months after the fall of Mubarak indicated that an Egypt in transition, unable to take firm political positions, could be taken ...
Keep Reading »Israel's Blockade of Gaza is Cracking
![[Image from travelpod.com]](/content_images/3/sm_1.1243624140.rafah-border-sign.jpg "[Image from travelpod.com]")
Egypt has announced that it will open its border crossing with Gaza on a permanent basis thereby reversing Egypt’s collusion with Israel’s blockade regime. The interim Foreign Minister, Nabil al-Arabi, has described support for the blockade by the previous Egyptian regime as "disgraceful." While Israeli officials have responded to this announcement with alarm they have limited capacity to undermine the new Egyptian government’s prerogative. Since the capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in June 2006, the Rafah crossing has been closed to Palestinians in Gaza except for “extraordinary humanitarian cases.” In June 2007, after Hamas' ...
Keep Reading »Culture IV
This is our fourth weekly edition of Jadaliyya's Culture. Previous weeks can be found here, here and here. This week, with Hamdy El-Gazzar's قالت الجدة ("Quoth the Grandmother," trans. by Alex Ortiz), we initiate Hakadha narwi al-thawra, a new series of fiction from the revolutionary Arab world. In future weeks, we will be bringing more Arabic fiction (and translation) in this vein. Also this week: Excerpts from “Mirrors of Absence," by dissident Syrian poet Faraj Ahmad Bayraqdar, trans. by Sinan Antoon. "The Language of Almonds" a short film tribute to Palestinian poet Hussein Al-Barghouti by Salim Abu Jabal. "The ...
Keep Reading »Shiaphobia Hits Kuwait
If you ever talk to Kuwaiti Shias over 40 years old about discrimination against the Shia in their country, they might mention how they have been mistreated, on different levels, during the Iran-Iraq War. Then they would quickly tell you how the Shia proved their detractors wrong when they became part and parcel of the Kuwaiti resistance during the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. That the Al Sabah government was deeply betrayed by Saddam Hussein, whom they had supported in his war with Iran only a few ...
Keep Reading »Culture V
This is our fifth weekly edition of Jadaliyya's Culture. Previous weeks can be found here, here, here and here. This week's offerings include: The conclusion of Sinan Antoon's translation of "Mirrors of Absence" by Syrian dissident poet, Faraj Ahmad Bayraqdar. Khaled Mattawa translates, Keep Reading »
Rajab Buhwaysh, "No Illness But This Place"
This long poem is from the concentration camp of El-Agheila in Libya, is one the most criminal chapters in the history of colonial Africa. The Italian colonization of Libya began in 1911, but in the east it was successfully resisted by the Sanussiyya movement for more than two decades. When the Fascists rose to power in Rome in 1922, colonization efforts intensified in order to pave the way for settlement programs—and the resistance intensified in kind under the leadership of Umar al-Mukhtar. By ...
Keep Reading »The Long and Invisible Road
Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel. Directed by Michel Khleifi & Eyal Sivan. Belgium/France/Germany/UK, 2003 Today Palestinians commemorate the nakba, or day of catastrophe. At the same time, the state of Israel seeks to criminalize this expression of an autonomous Palestinian national consciousness, which threatens to fragment and disrupt Israel’s historical self-narrative. This year, the nakba finds itself in the shadow cast by the Israeli Knesset law, approved on 23 March 2011, ...
Keep Reading »حين تطير الفراشة بعيداً عن النكبة
أعطى اللورد آرثر بلفور وزير خارجية بريطانيا وعده لإقامة دولة لليهود عام 1917، وهو ذات العام الذي ولد فيه العالم الأمريكي "إدوارد لورنتز" Edward Lorenz مبتكر نظرية "أثر الفراشة" The Butterfly effect. ويأتي إسم النظرية من استعارة لفظية تشير إلى أن الفروق الصغيرة في المرحلة الأولى لنظام ديناميكي متحرك، قد تنتج عنها في المدى البعيد فروق كبيرة.. حيث تتوالد منها سلسلة متتابعة من النتائج بشكل غير متوقع. وحسب نظرية لورنتز فإن رفـّة جناحي فراشة في الصين قد تحدث تغييراً طفيفًا في ...
Keep Reading »Jadaliyya Review Roundtable on "The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict"
“Reports come and go. This is one of the tragic truths of the literature of human rights violations. Hard-working researchers scour the rubble of war zones for fragments of evidence — of war crimes, crimes against humanity, other violations of life and freedom — only to watch their findings sink into the oblivion of forgotten documents.” So begins the editors’ note to the collection The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict, edited by Adam Horowitz, Lizzy Ratner, ...
Keep Reading »Review Roundtable Part II: Goldstone and Accountability
On December 27, 2008, Israel began aerial strikes on the Gaza Strip, home to 1.5 million Palestinians, three-quarters of whom are refugees, who could not, because of Gaza’s sealed borders, become refugees of war. Within a week, amidst the rubble of hospitals, mosques, government ministries, factories, and schools, Israel initiated a ground offensive that no more distinguished between civilians and combatants than did its “smart” bombs. On the fourteenth day of the offensive, in the run up to a buoyant ...
Keep Reading »"يوسف رخا: مقطع من رواية "كتاب الطغرى
مقطع من القسم الثامن، كوم شجر أو الكتاب العمري: ما أتم به الراوية أحداث كتاب الطغرى مشاهد معنونة بأبيات سلطان العاشقين من الإثنين إلى الخميس، 16 إلى 19 أبريل أسافر عن علم اليقين لعينه، إلى حقه حيث الحقيقة رحلتي الصراحة هي لما ركبتْ جنبه بعد أكثر من ساعتين بشوية – مصطفى مضّى الوقت يفقّر في كافيه بينوز، وراء متحف الخزف عند المدرسة البريطانية – تَذَكّر لحظة ما سحبت يده اليمين لتنظر إلى الخاتم: «آه يا عم خواتم بقى وكده!» كان فيه سخونة أو كهرباء في أصابعها، طاقة تنبّئ بشيء عليه أن يتجاهله. «حلو ده...» ورجع ...
Keep Reading »Saudi Women: "I Will Drive Myself Starting June 17"
[The following announcement was originally released in Arabic, and can be found here. Translation by Ziad Abu-Rish and Khuloud.] Us women in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are the ones who will lead this society towards change. While we failed to deliver through our voices, we will not fail to deliver through our actions. We have been silent and under the mercy of our guardian (muhram) or foreign driver for too long. Some of us barely make ends meet and cannot even afford cab fare. Some of us are the heads ...
Keep Reading »From Gun to Pen: The Palestinian Revolution Lives
This Is My Picture When I Was Dead. Directed by Mahmoud Al-Massad. Netherlands/Jordan, 2010. ‘If you don’t know Ma’moun Mreish, you don’t know the history of the Palestinian Revolution.’ This line is key to the mixture of personal and national history presented by director Mahmoud Al-Massad in This Is My Picture When I Was Dead. It begins with the shooting of father and son, Ma’moun and Bashir Mreish, in Athens in 1983, one of many Mossad assassinations of senior PLO cadres. The film then hints, and ...
Keep Reading »Arab Spring or Arabian Summer?
After over a decade-long search, the Obama administration is gloating over the murder of the Western world’s most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden, making him the third Reagan-supported criminal (after Saddam Hussein and Augusto Pinochet) to die since the turn of this century. As the United States celebrates the death of its staunchest enemy and steals the world media’s attention from the bloody protests in Syria and Yemen, the ‘Arab Spring’ perseveres into its fourth ...
Keep Reading »The Bawwab's Daughter
I was staying with friends in Maadi, a noisy, dusty suburb south of Cairo. One of the most striking features of this neighborhood — actually its own city — is that many of the expats who live there persevere in the spurious claim that it is quieter and greener than the neighborhoods of the city center. In any case, there is no dispute about this: Maadi is far away from the city center and, unlike Cairo, no one would travel hundreds of miles just to visit it. Despite my strong objections to the ...
Keep Reading »Hot on Facebook
.كثيرا ما تفرض مثل هذه الظروف أسئلة ملحة حول الجناة والاهداف التي من أجلها ضحى الشهداء بأرواحهمclick | email | tweet
.jpg){kind=small}
From Jadaliyya Reports
Top Jadaliyya Tags
Jadalicious / جدلشس
Noteworthy
Twitter Updates
Jadaliyya Features
.jpg)
Latest Entries
View All Entries »- Tadween Roundup: News and Analysis from the Publishing/Academic World
- Syria Media Roundup (May 23)
- Asfari Institute Inaugural Conference: New Spaces of Civil Society Activism in the Arab World (Beirut, 23-24 May)
- Women's Rights in the Egyptian Constitution: (Neo)Liberalism's Family Values
- مسخ الذاكرة
- New Texts Out Now: Louise Cainkar, Global Arab World Migrations and Diasporas
- Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup (May 21)
- إعادة الحساب الدائمة: إساءة فهم سوريا بعد سنتين
- From al-Araqib to Susiya: Forced Displacement of Palestinians on Both Sides of the Green Line
- إعجام
- كارل ماركس واليسار في لبنان
- Picturing Algeria
- Egypt Media Roundup (May 20)
- Last Week on Jadaliyya (May 13-19)
- Jadaliyya's Occupation, Intervention, and Law Page Resonates
- Al Jazeera Management Orders Joseph Massad Article Pulled in an Act of Pro-Israel Censorship
- سعادت حسن منتو: قصة قصيرة
- Reports Roundup (May 18)
- Injuries, Arrests and House Raids: The Case of a Bahraini Family
- الليبرالية الفلسطينية أمام القضاء الإسرائيلي
Pages/Sections
Archive
©2010-2013 by the Arab Studies Institute. All Rights Reserved. info@jadaliyya.com
site by concepcion design