16 March 2021
Syrian writer and former political prisoner Yassin al-Haj Saleh talks revolution, Europe’s Syrian diaspora, and being “tragically hopeful” with Le Monde’s Christophe Ayad on the occasion of ten years since the Syrian uprising.
Culture
The “crisis of Islam” lies not only in the violent extremist minority, but in a more widespread rejection by mainstream Muslims of the principles of equality, tolerance, and free expression, argues Abdul-Wahab Kayyali in response to Farouk Mardam Bey, Ziad Majed, and Yassin al-Haj Saleh.
As the dust settles after Beirut’s port massacre, a profound sense of disorientation and uncertainty about the future envelops the city.
A quick English summary of our Arabic news coverage this week.
From the xenophobes who demonize them to the well-meaning friends who assume they must be devout conservatives, Syrian refugees in the West face stereotypes from all sides. Worse, some have begun internalizing and turning these prejudices on their compatriots, writes a Syrian in Paris.
A quick English summary of our Arabic news coverage this week
Just as Oedipus, an immigrant of Phoenician descent, had to solve the Sphinx's riddle to save his besieged people, so Syrians today—and, in fact, all of us—face a new set of perplexing, life-or-death questions.
Aside from all the lives it’s extinguished, the Assad regime has destroyed or damaged multiple UNESCO World Heritage sites across Syria. Why do archaeologists and professed heritage-lovers continue to laud it as a defender of civilization?
Islam, culture, nationalism, revolution, exile, and the West's anti-democratic Middle East policies are just part of the ground covered in this in-depth interview, to be published in the upcoming book, Dissidents of the International Left.
Animals have not fared well at militants’ hands in Syria over the past seven years, though civilians have been kinder. Dr. Uğur Ümit Üngör traces the shifting role and symbolism of animals in Syria’s recent history.
In 2013 in Ma’arrat al-Nu’man, a statue of the famous local-born 11th-century poet al-Ma’arri was decapitated by jihadists as a symbolic threat to their moderate rivals. Today civil society activists have restored the site as a fledgling cultural center, imperiled by the same jihadists now effectively besieging the city.