جميل المعلوف: الاتحاد العربي والعلمانيّة

Jamil al-Maalouf: Arab Union and Secularism

Bidayat

Jamil Maalouf, a pioneer of Arab unity, saw radical secularism, the separation of religion and state, and women's liberation as the key to the East's salvation from its misery and its progress.

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."

قصة حوار لم يتم

The Story of a Dialogue That Never Was

Bidayat

He chose his "inveterate friend" as interviewer, then reclaimed the answers before they were copied. Only the questions remain from a dialogue that never happened.

No Freedom Without Equality

Heinrich Boll Stiftung

There is no genuine freedom without social equality; separating political liberty from economic justice empties it of its content and renders it an illusion.

Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq: An Arab Traveler in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Beyond

Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, the rebellious Nahda thinker, bridged the gap between East and West, advocating for freedom, equality, and women's liberation, facing censorship and marginalization.

Ahmad Faris Shidyaq: An Arab Traveller in 19th Century Europe

Shidyaq: a deacon who converted, the first Arab socialist—and 121 years on, his Muslim name still embarrasses his Maronite village.

Does Guilt Matter?

Does guilt matter in politics? The paper interrogates the suppression of collective guilt in post-war Lebanon, calling for the restoration of the memory of causes, not just violence, as a condition for conscious forgetting that enables coexistence.

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!"

Interview on Noam Chomsky

LBC

Fawwaz Traboulsi reviews Noam Chomsky's dual significance as a linguist and critical thinker who exposes mechanisms of power, applying his approach to contemporary Lebanese and Arab issues, warning against the nation's transformation into client states due to the criminal use of oil.

Orientalizing the Orientals: The Other Message of Edward Said

Edward Said's "Orientalism" reveals another, less-discussed message: how Arab intellectuals internalized Orientalist frameworks and reproduced them in their self-representation.

We the Arabs, the Holocaust, and Palestine

As-Safir

Holocaust denial discourse is "a hallucination obsessed with the West"—the crime was European against Europeans, and Nazi theories ranked Arabs lower than Jews. Better to investigate Israel's crimes than to deny the Holocaust.

AHDR: a critique

300 books translated per year is an unreliable figure—and culture is used to mask neoliberal agendas: unemployment cannot be solved by translation but by productive economies. The Alexandria Charter is a shopping list, not a roadmap.

Edward Said’s Orientalism revisited: translations and translators

A reading of Said's evolution: from Orientalism to "Imperialism is the export of identity"—warning against self-orientalizing and Occidentalism alike, and admitting his book sometimes relapses into what it critiques.

Edward Said’s Late Style

Three moments of Said: from critiquing Orientalism to "identity is its owner's creation, not the inheritance of a past"—and reducing imperialism to knowledge/power sanitizes it of occupation and exploitation.

Cruelty and silence in perspective – on Kanan Makiya’s book

Makiya cuts quotes to prove a uniquely Arab "cruelty"—while he himself worked for Saddam's regime: "somebody had to do it."