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الآن . . . القسم العربي بحلة جديدة
Jadaliyya Launches Photography Page (click here!)
Call for Photos: Become a Contributing Photographer at Jadaliyya
Too Close for Comfort: Syrians in Lebanon
[The following report was issued by International Crisis Group on 13 May 2013.] Too Close for Comfort: Syrians in Lebanon Executive Summary Syria’s conflict is dragging down its neighbours, none more perilously than Lebanon. Beirut’s official policy of “dissociation” – seeking, by refraining from taking ... Read More »
New Texts Out Now: Wendy Pearlman, Emigration and the Resilience of Politics in Lebanon
Wendy Pearlman, “Emigration and the Resilience of Politics in Lebanon.” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XXI No. 1 (Spring 2013). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Wendy Pearlman (WP): Five years ago I began to read widely about Lebanon in preparation for a trip there. While there are so many fascinating ... Read More »
New Texts Out Now: Simon Jackson, Diaspora Politics and Developmental Empire: The Syro-Lebanese at the League of Nations
Simon Jackson, “Diaspora Politics and Developmental Empire: The Syro-Lebanese at the League of Nations.” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XXI No. 1 (Spring 2013). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Simon Jackson (SJ): The article draws on my current book project, provisionally titled Mandatory Development: ... Read More »
Windows to Refuge: Camp Life through the Eyes of Palestinian Youth in Lebanon
“The pact that binds us to photographers puts our sight in their hands.” (From the introduction to Lahza, a book of Palestinian children’s photographs by ZAKIRA, Amers Editions, Beirut, 2009.) The Project These photographs were taken in July 2012 by Palestinian youth living in four out of the twelve refugee camps ... Read More »
Pierced Memories: The Lebanese Archive of Diab Alkarssifi
[Text by Ania Dabrowska, photos courtesy of Diab Alkarssifi.] The Lebanese Archive of Diab Alkarssifi is a project about a collection of photographs belonging to an ordinary man with a passion and a story. It is also a project about the process of an artist (myself) transforming this collection into an archive within ... Read More »
The Active Feminine: Performance Art in Lebanon with Reference to Marya Kazoun
In the setting of the current Arab art boom and the political flux ignited by regional uprisings, the difficulty in differentiating between performance art and activism increases, further intertwining the abstract borders that divide them. Nonetheless, while activism pushes its way as a societal form of rejection, ... Read More »
Call for Papers -- Wither the Nation? National Identity in the Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Middle East and South Asia (25 May Abstract Deadline)
Whither the Nation? National Identity in the Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Middle East and South Asia 27 - 29 September 2013 Beirut, Lebanon The Orient Institute and the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut will be convening a two and half day conference in ... Read More »
Palestinian Refugees from Syria in Lebanon
[The following report was issued by American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA) in April 2013.] Palestinian Refugees from Syria in Lebanon A Vulnerable Community Following their expulsion from Palestine in 1948, many Palestinian intellectuals, businessmen, and craftspeople fled to Syria and ... Read More »
There Can Only Be One: Tamam Salam and Lebanese Politics
On Saturday 6 April 2013, the Lebanese Parliament overwhelmingly nominated Tamam Saeb Salim Salam to become the new Prime Minister. That the premiership in Lebanon should return to Beirut is not strange in and of itself. However, the return of the premiership to the Mseitbeh residence of the Salams—an old notable ... Read More »
تمام سلام رئيساً للحكومة اللبنانية: شركة غير تنافسية
أن تعود رئاسة مجلس الوزراء إلى بيروت ليس بالأمر المستغرب. أما أن تعود إلى "دار المصيطبة"، دار آل سلام، التي كانت محوراً للسياسة اللبنانية منذ ما قبل الاستقلال العام ١٩٤٣، فهذا ما يطرح العديد من الأبعاد التي ربما تكون فقدت معانيها التقليدية ويساهم في المقابل بتقديم تفسيرات جديدة حول واقع السياسة اللبنانية وما ... Read More »
أحمد الواصل عن "الخروج من المعبد" أو الهدم طريق الغناء العربي
["كتب" هي سلسلة تستضيف "جدلية" فيها الكتاب في حوار حول أعمالهم الجديدة، نرفقه بمقاطع من الكتاب.] أحمد الواصل عن "الخروج من المعبد" أو الهدم طريق الغناء العربي: محاولة لقراءة الهوية والذاكرة العربية والمسكوت عنه مشروع قادم ... أن يكون الغناء العربي بمدارسه ومراكزه، واتجاهاته وروزه ... Read More »
Women Under Seige: Stateless in Lebanon
Lebanon, and its capital Beirut, are often represented by the media as islands of freedom in the Middle East. The well-heeled neighborhoods of Achrafieh and Downtown are reminiscent of a Parisian boutique; while nightlife in Gemmayze and Hamra could compete with the scene in Berlin. But, behind the glossy images of ... Read More »
Melancholia and the Possibility of a Geopolitics of Mourning
Nouri Gana, Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011. In the preface to his recent book, Signifying Loss, Nouri Gana argues that “[i]n a world marked by the swift and sanitized infliction of loss and suffering, especially as a result of the insidious ... Read More »
Ghosts of Comfort and Chaos
When I was invited to write this article for the series Visuals in 1500, I was asked to begin with an image that would help clarify my thinking about the work I do as a visual artist. I decided to focus on a little-known painting that I first became familiar with through a reproduction in Kamal Boullata’s book ... Read More »
Reconciling Return and Rights: Palestinian Refugees and the Emergence of a "Political Society"
Analyses and debates on the reconfiguration of rights, democracy, social justice, and dignity in the Arab region suffer from a chronic methodological nationalism—which perpetuates the idea that people seek and fight for rights and self-determination solely in their national state and territory, seen as the natural ... Read More »
A (Neocolonial) Musical Introduction to Lebanese Political Actors, complete with Wikipedia Hyperlinks
Lebanon has been in the news a lot lately. From union strikes to legal advocacy to intermittent Sunni-Shiite violence to daily Israeli violations of Lebanese sovereignty to the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees currently living in Lebanon to the election crisis to the resignation of Prime Minister Miqati, ... Read More »
بورتريه غير وافٍ عن بسام حجار
قيل فيه كلام كثير. أصدقاء وشعراء ونقاد وفنانون وزملاء مهنة ودارسون اجتمعوا حول ورق الصحف ليملؤه في اليوم التالي لوفاته. كان رحيل بسام حجار في السابع عشر من شباط 2009، بمثابة فاجعة أدبية. حتى أولئك الذين نبذوه مهنياً، وتناقلوه من قسم ثقافي إلى آخر، حزنوا من أجله، وربما ندموا. ذلك أن رحيل ذلك الرجل الخجول لم يكن مجرد ... Read More »
Petition: Stop the "Green Building" Draft Law in Lebanon
For the past six months, the Lebanese government has been stalling in implementing the salary adjustment and wage scale for public employees it had approved in September 2012. The last few weeks have seen an increase in workers’ unions' organized strikes across Lebanese cities demanding the immediate application of ... Read More »
أطياف الربيع العربي فوق بيروت
لطالما شكلت المطالب المعيشية في لبنان مادة للنكايات السياسية ليس إلا. وكثيراً ما ارتضت الحركة النقابية اللبنانية التي كان الاتحاد العمالي العام يشكل فصيلها الأبرز، أن تتحول إلى ما يشبه الأداة في يد قوى سياسية تستخدمها ساعة تشاء، وتلوك خطابها المطلبي، قبل أن تتخلى عنها وعن المطالب التي رفعتها، عند أول ... Read More »
Lebanon's Sect Addiction
Lebanese MPs outraged secularists and campaigners opposed to sectarian politics this past week by provisionally approving a voting law that would make it so citizens could only vote for candidates of their own sect. The so-called Orthodox Gathering draft law still needs to pass a parliamentary vote—but activists and ... Read More »
February Culture
Jadaliyya's February Culture Bouquet is our most colorful so far! Our new series Visuals in 1500 returns with contributions by artists Doris Bittar and Sundus Abdul Hadi. Pierre Joris and Habib Tangour share their introduction and selections from their massive anthology of written and oral literature of the Maghreb. ... Read More »
Watching Jacob
In the late 1980s to mid-1990s, Eugène Delacroix's wall painting "Jacob Wrestling with the Angel" at San Sulpice in Paris became a symbolic and iconic painting for me, a prism that reflected East and West dynamics. This exploration turned to obsession. However, before I delved into this painting and many ... Read More »
32 by Sahar Mandour
[Sahar Mandour was born in Beirut in 1977 to an Egyptian father and a Lebanese mother. She is a novelist and journalist. She has been working for As-Safir newspaper since 1998, and is currently on a fellowship at Oxford University, where she was selected for the Said-Asfari Fellowship at the Reuters Institute for the ... Read More »
Don'ti Mixi: A Song by The Great Departed (Video)
The following song/video was released by a recently formed Lebanese band, The Band of the Great Departed (Sandy Chamoun, Imad Hsheishou, Abed Qbeisi, Ali Al-Hout, and Khaled Soubeih). The song was inspired by Egypt's President Morsi. During a recent talk in Germany, Morsi mixed Arabic and English while ... Read More »
Highly Unorthodox: The Week Lebanon Went Secular (And Ended Up More Sectarian Than Ever…)
When some future historian writes a chronicle of twenty-first-century Lebanon, she will likely devote a bemused footnote to the odd events of February 2013, when the country’s leaders saw fit to tear down a pillar of the confessional regime one week, only to erect another one a week later. On 11 ... Read More »
Civil Marriage Fatwas, the Lebanese State, and Renegade Bacteria
For some philosophers, the condition of being contemporary is to actually be anachronistic to and critical of the present, to see its darkness, and to avoid being absorbed by the vortex of neo-liberal capitalism, not to mention by the devastating logics of Lebanese political discourse. When the Sunni Mufti of Lebanon, ... Read More »
The Onion to Sue Lebanon for Making Its Headlines Look Reasonable
It emerged today that the American satirical magazine The Onion is to sue Lebanon for unfair competition practices and for making its headlines look totally reasonable. The Onion is demanding millions of dollars in compensation, claiming that the small Mediterranean country has "ruined the business of writing ... Read More »
أزمة معرض الكتاب العربي، بيروت، عابرة أم مؤشر انهيار؟
الأزمة التي رافقت معرض بيروت للكتاب العربي (ديسمبر 2012) والتي ضج بها الإعلام وفند أسبابها ومظاهرها وضاقت بها دور النشر- كما الكتّاب. هذه الأزمة لم تأتِ دفعة واحدة. فالمعرض، الذي أرسى، خلال عقود طويلة، مساحة صلبة من التبادل الثقافي في الداخل ومع الخارج، أخذ منذ سنوات في التراجع. ضعف إقبال الجمهور عليه كما على الأنشطة ... Read More »
Misery Beyond the War Zone: Life for Syrian Refugees and Displaced Populations in Lebanon
[The following report was issued by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on 6 February 2013.] Misery Beyond the War Zone: Life for Syrian Refugees and Displaced Populations in Lebanon Executive Summary The ongoing crisis in Syria is forcing ever more Syrians to flee their homeland in search of safety. ... Read More »
Los Angeles Event: Sex and Sectarianism in Lebanon (20 February 2013)
Sex and Sectarianism: Recognition and the Disarticulation of Madhhab/Sect and Sex/Gender in Lebanon A lecture by Maya Mikdashi Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, the UCLA Islamic Studies Program, and UCLA School of Law Critical Race Studies Program, and the Arab Studies Institute ... Read More »
Syrian Population Regression
Population: ~ 22.5 Million
2011: 5,800+ (killed)
2012: 60,000+ (killed) and 500,000+ (external refugees)
2013: 70,000+ (killed) and 1,000,000+ (external refugees)
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Syria Map and Stats
Population: 22,517,750
GDP: $107.4 billion
Unemployment: 8.3%; Youth Employment (ages 15-24): 19.1%
Internet Users: 4.469 million
Exchange Rate: ~ 98.00 Syrian pounds per US dollar
GDP Growth Rate: 3.2%
Military Expenditures: 5.9% of GDP (World Rank: 10)
Health Expenditures: 2.9% of GDP (World Rank: 180)
Population Growth Rate: 0.913%
Age Structure: 0-14 years: 35.2%; 15-64 years: 61%; 65 years and over: 3.8%
Literacy: 79.6%
Religious Demographics: Sunni Muslim 74%; other Muslim (includes Alawite, Druze) 16%; Christian (various denominations) 10%
Ethnic Demographics: Arab 90.3%, Kurds, Armenians, and other 9.7%
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Latest Entries
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- On the American Association of University Professors' Opposition to Academic Boycotts
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- النكبة، هنا، الآن
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