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.

الاقتصاد والطوائف في نشوء «لبنان الكبير»

Economy and Sects in the Genesis of "Greater Lebanon"

Bidayat

The emergence of 'Greater Lebanon' was not merely a response to sectarian desires but a comprehensive French colonial operation that instrumentalized economics and sects to define an entity serving its interests in controlling Syria.

ملاحظات على خطاب الجنرال غورو

Notes on General Gouraud's Speech

Bidayat

Gouraud laments the absence of Lebanon's delegates — one is absent because he himself ordered his arrest, while his brother the Patriarch sits at his right.

مئوية لبنان: البدايات، المحطات، العلاقات

Lebanon's Centenary: Beginnings, Milestones, Relations

Bidayat

This special issue investigates Lebanon's centenary by examining its colonial beginnings and revealing how "Greater Lebanon" was founded on French economic interests and the instrumentalization of politicized religious minorities.

علاء الدين العالم – محاورة فوّاز طرابلسي

Alaa al-Din al-Alem - A Conversation with Fawwaz Traboulsi

The October 2019 uprising is a historic break with the post-war neoliberal 'reconstruction' system, facing the challenge of building independent leadership to resist austerity and hold the corrupt accountable.

من سويسرا الشرق إلى هانوي العرب تاريخ مختصر لصورة بيروت

From the Switzerland of the East to the Hanoi of the Arabs: A Brief History of Beirut's Image

Bidayat

Beirut, port for assembling cities — from "Switzerland of the East" to "Hanoi of the Arabs": every image has its political and class context.

مقالات عن سورية ولبنان، ١٨٦٠

Articles on Syria and Lebanon, 1860

Bidayat

Translation: Marx in 1860 reveals great-power horse-trading over Syria's corpse — but neglects the internal causes: the collapse of the muqata'ji system and peasant uprisings.

مدينة في مرفأ – قصة موجزة لبيروت ومرفأها

A City in a Port - A Brief History of Beirut and Its Harbor

The Beirut port explosion reveals the story of the city and its port, and how the latter was central to Beirut's rise, the formation of Greater Lebanon, and the shaping of its economic and political destiny, until it became the almost sole gateway to the Arab interior.

مثقفون في حوداث الـ١٨٦٠

Intellectuals in the 1860 Events

The 1860 civil war didn't only produce victims — it produced intellectuals. The Nahda wasn't born from "contact with the West" but from the cracks of civil war itself.

Interview L’Orient Le Jour – “Fratricide et guerre civile”

L'Orient Le Jour Interview - "Fratricide and Civil War"

L'Orient Le Jour

An interview about The Blood of the Two Brothers: in civil war, the executioner hides in the victim's body—what is needed is not remembering the horrors but remembering the causes.

Ahmad Faris Al-Shidyaq: In quest of another modernity

Cambridge University Press

Al-Shidyaq, bearer of "the possible modernity": Work, not Education, as the motor of renaissance; the repression of female instinct as the basis of male domination—and peasant revolts, not the European "spark," as his context.

عصام النقّري (ابو ربيع)

Issam al-Naqqari (Abu Rabi')

Survived war and resistance unscathed — killed by a hit-and-run whose driver fled. The easiest thing in this country: commit a crime and escape punishment.

بيت المنازل الكثيرة – لا يتأسس على الثقافة وحدها

A House of Many Mansions - Is Not Built on Culture Alone

Review: Salibi demolishes all of Lebanon's founding myths — then replaces them with a new "cultural uniqueness." Must Lebanon invent a new distinctiveness after every catastrophe just to survive?

مقابلة مجلة – المستقبل العربي

Al-Mustaqbal al-Arabi Magazine Interview

Al-Mustaqbal Al-Arabi

From memoir to sectarianism, one thread runs through it all: no Marxism as a closed creed, no unity as nostalgia, but history understood from inside its conflicts.

التعريف والمسيرة

The Definition and the Journey

To history through lived experience rather than the university, and to writing as a way of forging experience: that is how the “young man in red” deepened in color.

كمال صليبي – مصالحة اللبنانيين مع تاريخهم

Kamal Salibi - Reconciling the Lebanese with Their History

The civil war as a war of narratives over history — Salibi's equation: Arabs will not be Arab again without Arab Christians.

Genealogy: Science or Practical Illusion?

Genealogy is "practical illusion" per Ibn Khaldun: its utility lies not in knowledge but in cementing solidarity and "social honor"—and families accept from their own history only what pleases them.

بين محمد سعيد الزعيم وجبرائيل منسى

Between Muhammad Said al-Za'im and Gabriel Menassa

Menassa: "we import or we die." Za'im: "exchange benefits, don't impose interests." The paradox: what colonialism united, independence divided.

تقديم لـ-تاريخ البقاع

Introduction to the History of the Bekaa

A boy before a locked library in Zahle — and a historian who broke Mount Lebanon's monopoly on Lebanese history. History won't be written by sectarian consensus: either unanimity or veto.

The Woes of Confessionalism

As-Safir

Translation of two columns from as-Safir: Yousif Bey Karam said it in 1867—sectarian division invites external domination. The question: "Do we change the system or the people?"

سمير قصير، كيف أضعتك؟

Samir Kassir, How Did I Lose You?

As-Safir

"Samir Kassir, how did I lose you?" is a personal elegy that goes beyond physical loss to a political and intellectual estrangement, as "false heirs" attempt to erase Kassir's true legacy by presenting his final years as his entire life.

جنازة صاروخ

A Rocket's Funeral

As-Safir

Not a rocket's funeral but an illusion's — "they study their defeat to learn, while we don't even acknowledge our victory." The camel remains and Sharon fades.

Lebanon on the Brink

As-Safir

Translation from as-Safir after Gemayel's assassination: sectarian division invites external domination since 1867—and when the Lebanese unite, they do so despite the confessional system and against it.

خاف الطغاة فقتلوه

The Tyrants Feared Him, So They Killed Him

Tyrants feared him and killed him — because he said with brazen simplicity that democracy is the road to Palestine. A free man whose prisons can no longer hold everyone.