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In the post-Arab uprisings era, Arabic alternative artists, especially in the Gulf, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon, became a recognizable medium for promoting a specific individualist lifestyle based on fetishizing identities and commodified music catered to satisfy immediate needs...

One Thursday afternoon in mid-August 2011, I was sitting in a minivan on the road heading from Damascus to Homs. The boiling heat melted my joints. It was muggy, and it took a long time to pass through the sluggish traffic on the main roads leading out of Damascus. Wide boulevards shrunk to a si..

Not Just Another Day

On the morning of the second Sunday of May 2011, Beirut was sluggishly waking up. Nothing seemed unusual or special, apart from some intruding grey clouds leftover from the harsh winter of that year. Clouds or not, it was a ..

During a misty summer dawn, on Friday 30 June 2017, Lebanese Army Forces (LAF) troops—reinforced with several tanks—stormed two Syrian refugee camps located on the outskirts of Arsal, in northeast Lebanon. The first, al-Nour Camp, is located in Jafar. The second, Qara, is located in ..

Whenever memories take me back to the time when the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) had just ended, one sound always echoes along the scenes: it is the special voice of that one singer who will always function as an anchor pinning down that particular slice of my remembrance of the past. Born in ..

On 2 March 2016 Lebanon woke up to the news that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) had declared Hizballah a terrorist organization. Many perceived this as a kind of patriarchal collective punishment. Spearheaded by Saudi Arabia, the desig..

[On 22 August 2015, what had in previous weeks been a small protest against the breakdown in garbage collection in Beirut turned into a major anti-corruption demonstration calling for fundamental political and economic change in Lebanon. The protesters have been met with escalating repressiv..

Over the last six years, violence has sporadically burst out in Tripoli’s impoverished neighborhoods. Walking the narrow alleys, one starts to feel the ongoing discontent of angry men who, like glowing embers, constantly flare up in conflict. Whether it is thr..

Spring has just landed in Lebanon. Its warmth and colors soothing the dried winter skin of the vast majority of Syrian refugees who resisted icy temperatures and freezing to death underneath thin canvas tents. Lebanon is now home to approximately one million Syrians, displaced from their war-rav..