Forget traditional “heroes.” The protagonists of some centuries-old stories are social climbers and tricksters, even cheats and cowards.
Tag: Middle East
Syria’s Wartime Famine @100: “Martyrs of the Grass”
In the days leading up to the Muslim holiday of the Feast of Sacrifice ...
Islamic Alternatives to Global Finance
Across the Muslim world today ambitious experiments are underway to create an Islamic alternative to conventional finance. These initiatives are inspired by the ...
A City Plans for War
What if war was waged not with bombs but with blueprints? Urban planning’s promise of an improved city of the future is especially bright in postconflict cities, where planning is expected to bring ...
What Is at Stake in Yemen?
As a commodity in the United States, coffee has gone through three waves. In the early 20th century, with the advent of mass production and vacuum packaging ...
Syria’s Wartime Famine @100: “Martyrs of the Grass”
In the days leading up to the Muslim holiday of the Feast of Sacrifice (Eid al-Adha) in October 2013, several Syrian clerics issued a fatwa ...
We Didn’t Have Politicians Up to the Task: A Conversation with Kanan Makiya
As the Iraqi Army and coalition forces, supported by US airstrikes, enter the third week of a campaign ...
Against Despair
Despair is everywhere, and for good reason. Huge numbers of refugees are fleeing warfare and violence, while unceasing terrorist attacks are feeding the right-wing populist surge all across Europe ...
Taimani Alley, Kabul
Winters, before the paving of the neighborhood streets, when rain and snowmelt gathered in long puddles, or froze into broad ruts of broken ice and slush, the alley was a shortcut ...
Tales of the Interwar
Today, the once-provocative suggestion that we live in an age of interminable warfare has become a truism. The claim often takes the form of an observation about the post-9/11 syndrome that drives an ...
The Citizenship Business
In April 2015, men in hazmat suits and safety masks buried over two dozen bodies on the Mediterranean island-nation of Malta. The waterlogged corpses, victims of a capsized dinghy, had been desperate ...
Orange Alert
In our post-9/11 era, the phrase “national security” has become all too familiar. A simple Google search yields over 361,000,000 results, ranging from the National Security Council homepage to op-eds ...
The Rubble of Beirut
Lebanese author Elias Khoury’s latest novel to be translated into English, Broken Mirrors, is about identity and memory, destruction and displacement, exile and its internal ruptures. The book opens ...
Saving Muslim Women
The 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris—along with the brutal activities of ISIS—have spurred a resurgence of concern about Islam in Western media. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof fretted ...
Laughing with ISIS in Nablus
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. An American walks into a shawarma shop in Nablus. The man behind the counter, renowned ...
Comic Craft
Once upon a time—well, in 2007—a young hero—that is to say, a Swiss-American corporate attorney—traveled to a faraway land—okay, Dubai—to seek his fortune. Such is the silhouette of The Dog, the ...
Can Drones Have Ethics?
In this interview, Claire Richard and media studies professor Peter Asaro discuss the history of drone warfare and the troubling proliferation of new technologies that can surveil and kill from a ...
For the Love of Israel
In 1963, after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt exchanged a series of tense letters. Scholem, a renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism and himself a critic of ...
Wonders of Destruction in Arabic Fiction
Historians of war and society would like to believe that military conflicts have fixed beginnings and ends. Conventional depictions of the Lebanese civil war are no exception and typically confine ...
To Lose Everything (To War)
“What is it like to lose everything?” the young protagonist of Stephen Dau’s first novel, The Book of Jonas, is asked again and again by those hoping to fathom his experience of losing his entire ...
