Blogs
Unconventional – and sometimes provocative – insight from critical voices.
on :
Saturday, 6 Apr, 2013
Elias Khoury’s latest novel to be published in English, White Masks, is actually a work from 1981, written in the heat of the Lebanese Civil War on the eve of the Israeli offensive against Beirut. We need to dig deep into Khoury’s back catalogue: the fact is, he does not write enough. He recently said, “I write, and then I rewrite. And when I have a book that is finished, done, I don’t publish it. I rewrite it again, from zero.” A man so painstaking is never going to be prolific. K...
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A nineteen-year-old woman should be free to publish topless photos of herself, and death threats against her need to be investigated. Tunisia is, after all, a vibrant democracy where different opinions have co-existed since the toppling of Ben Ali’s government in 2011.
Amina “Tyler”, as she is nicknamed, says that she intended to protest the oppression of women in Tunisia. This has been a recurrent sentiment since the rise of the Islamists, and it is in part well-founded: a virulen...
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Thursday, 4 Apr, 2013
Various newspapers and websites recently revealed—some sensationally and others less excitedly—that the Sultanate of Oman had granted political asylum to four members of the fa...
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Wednesday, 3 Apr, 2013
If confirmed, recent reports about the use of chemical weapons in Syria, in Kahn Al-Asal last month and in Homs in December 2012, possibly signal that President Bashar Al-Assad is ...
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Tuesday, 2 Apr, 2013
It is only a fish restaurant, but Memet gasps with surprise when he sees it. “I’ve never seen this in Diyarbakır before,” he says. “The sign is written in Kurdish.” ...
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President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his faction are preparing for their biggest political fight ever. This time, Ahmadinejad will not face off against the Green reformist opposition ...
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on :
Friday, 29 Mar, 2013
The Atlantic magazine’s recent profile of Jordan’s King Abdullah has embarrassed the royal court and unleashed a wave of criticism against the monarchy. Despite the embarra...
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on :
Friday, 29 Mar, 2013
During the ten years since the US-led invasion of Iraq, we have been bombarded by statistics that purport to indicate levels of progress in the country. Statistics and numbers take...
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on :
Thursday, 28 Mar, 2013
“There is peace between Israel and some Arab countries, but it is a cold one. The exchange in tourism is not that significant. This has not been the case between Turkey and I...
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Tuesday, 26 Mar, 2013
Now that US President Barack Obama has returned to Washington and the dust is settling on his visit to the Holy Land, we can take stock of what actually transpired during his t...
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