Alex is a Beirut-based writer, translator, and managing editor of Al-Jumhuriya English. His first book, 'Vintage Humour: The Islamic Wine Poetry of Abu Nuwas', is due to be published by C. Hurst & Co. in November 2017. He tweets @alexjrowell.
In his ninth letter to his missing wife Samira al-Khalil, abducted in Douma in 2013, Yassin al-Haj Saleh writes that “a crack in the wall of your dark prison” may now have opened.
From besieged Douma, the last remaining pocket of opposition-held Eastern Ghouta, Osama Nassar reflects on the fate awaiting him and his fellow residents as Russia and the Assad regime impose their “settlement” on the region’s starved and battered population.
In response to Vicken Cheterian, Yassin al-Haj Saleh argues the link between the Armenian genocide and today’s mass murder of Syrians is tenuous at best—and that both the killing in Syria and genocide in general are better understood in terms of state power than as ethnic or religious conflicts.
In a final death knell for the once-great magazine, Newsweek has stooped in recent days to printing crackpot conspiracy theories about chemical weapons in Syria.
The Coalition’s battle against ISIS in Raqqa is over, but the war between civilians and explosives left by the latter is only getting started, with the death toll of 300 growing daily as desperate amateurs risk their lives to clear homes for a paltry fee.
The feminist struggle can’t be separated from the democratic struggle, writes Maya Rahabi, explaining why Syrian feminists boycotted last week’s Sochi conference.
The Syrian opposition's regional backers may be willing to submit to a Pax Russica, but the opposition's boycott in Sochi showed they themselves are anything but.
The shocking jail sentence issued by Lebanon’s military court against journalist Hanin Ghaddar has been called “one of the worst free speech violations in years.”
The takeover by rebels of the regime’s most strategic remaining position in East Ghouta adds a new vulnerability on the fringes of the capital.
Like it or not, sectarian groups in Syria and elsewhere are real, and governmental systems cannot ignore them entirely in the short term, argues Dr. Loubna El Amine, in response to an earlier article by Dr. Rima Majed.
Islamists of widely divergent stripes, from peaceful quietists to radical activists, have repeatedly and pointedly declined to help attain justice for Douma’s kidnapped revolutionaries.
In this exclusive extract from his upcoming book, Alex Rowell argues there is no reason the Arabic wine poetry of Abu Nuwas cannot be called ‘Islamic’.
