التفكير الاجتماعي في أزمنة التحولات الكبرى

Social Thinking in Times of Great Transformations

SifR

What is needed are forces that translate Palestine into questions of power and livelihood — not rhetorical solidarity while neoliberalism devours the rest.

Democracy in the Arab World

The Arab ruler concedes everything to Washington and nothing to his people — a pyromaniac firefighter.

Social Thinking in Times of Great Transformations

The left must translate Palestine into questions of power and livelihood — not rhetorical solidarity while neoliberalism devours the rest.

غزة – فلسطين والصراع العربي الاسرائيلي

Gaza - Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

From the 1982 Beirut siege to Gaza today, the AI-powered brutality of the occupation is revealed against the backdrop of popular resistance, Arab regime complicity, and an unprecedented surge of global solidarity.

عن الطوائف والطبقات والحروب الاهلية

On Sects, Classes, and Civil Wars

The weakest expression of societal and power relations is the political one — manufacturing experience demands tools beyond politics.

قراءة غرامشي في العصر النيوليبراليّ

Reading Gramsci in the Neoliberal Age

Gramsci in the neoliberal age: hegemony through consent, not coercion — "common sense" makes the ruling class's interests seem natural.

Edward Said in Translation – The personal and the academic

A lecture on translating Said and the friendship: "Your language is convoluted—I plan to deconstruct it and reconstruct in Arabic." Twenty years barred from the US, and emails about Tahiyya Karioka, Cyd Charisse, and Oslo as "the peace of the weak."

Mamdouha Bobst Center for Peace and Justice – Princeton lecture

A Princeton lecture: neoliberalism banned "social justice" for a quarter century—and the Arab revolutions diagnosed the problem: unemployment, despotism, class inequality. No military solution to ISIS, only drying up its social sources.

Social Justice Lecture

A lecture: the Arab revolutions are a critique-in-practice of neoliberalism—the World Bank forgot about job creation, and "we are ruled by Ali Baba and the forty thieves—and they don't even reach forty."

حفريات السماء – حفريات الارض

Excavations of the Sky - Excavations of the Earth

What began with a plane landing in Damascus ended in barrel bombs above and wells dug below: modernity from the sky, resistance from the ground.

السحابة بظهرها المحني

The Cloud with Its Hunched Back

The jailer is one, and poetry's remaining task is to turn cloud, wheat, and despair into a language of resistance.

مداخلة ندوة القاهرة عن «ثورات الكرامة العربية » في الثورة بما هي نقد فكري

Intervention at the Cairo Symposium on "Arab Dignity Revolutions": On Revolution as Intellectual Critique

Revolution as intellectual critique: the Arab revolutions proved Arabs are not an exception to history. "Dignity" is not culture but a material demand — work, bread, freedom.

بيني وبينك الياسمين – الى عاصم الجندي

Between You and Me, the Jasmine - To Assem al-Jundi

A dedication to Asim al-Jundi, the friend reborn after a bullet from the 'Arab silencer,' who held fast to his grand dreams, and between them, jasmine remains a symbol of their enduring bond.

مداخلة ندوة الكرامة

Intervention at the Dignity Symposium

The people want the fall of the regime—but rulers fell, not systems, and whoever won power was the most centralized, most ideological force.

Arab Revolution – AUB

The Arab revolutions are directed not only against the present but against the "until now"—the moment when the voiceless make the experts voiceless.

Mai Masri 3000 nights

An introduction to Mai Masri's film: her films are about women and children not as victims but as resisters—and a child born in prison asks: "What is a bird?"

Social Justice is back? – Princeton lecture

Is social justice back? Neoliberalism banned it for a quarter century—and the Arab revolutions brought it back with "The people want": a return to the concepts of the national liberation phase.

مناسبة لقائنا معا هذه الليلة لا تحتاج الى كلمات

The Occasion of Our Meeting Tonight Needs No Words

Omar Amiralay saw the dam cracking and the people saying: I am the river — how painful that he is not among us to share the Flood.

عمر اميرالاي

Omar Amiralay

He saw the dam cracking and heard the people say: I am the river — how painful that he is not among us to share "the flood in the land of the Arabs."

العروبة والأيديولوجيا القومية: عروبة الحاضر

Arabism and Nationalist Ideology: The Arabism of the Present

Between the glorious past and the promised future lies the entire subject—the present. No Arabism without the value of work against "rentier laziness."

في تكريم اتيل عدنان

In Honor of Etel Adnan

She captures Duke Ellington in five words: "He turns noise into velvet" — and tells the poets: "Change the world or go home!"

On Etel Adnan

A tribute to Etel Adnan: "she transforms noise into velvet," and woman is what man lost since Adam—his paradise lost. "Change the world or go home!"

كلمة تقديم لمحاضرة نوام تشومسكي/ الاونسكو

Introductory Remarks for Noam Chomsky's Lecture / UNESCO

Noam Chomsky is presented as a thinker who combines humility with extreme sensitivity to injustice, a critic of American imperialism, an advocate for freedom and equality, and a supporter of resistance against occupation.

محيي الدين اللبّاد وثقافة العين

Mohieddin al-Labbad and the Culture of the Eye

A lifetime project to revive Arab eye culture: the book as hospitality — three-quarters for the writer, one-quarter blank for the reader. Before al-Jahiz's duck: "This is not a duck!"