ماذا يستطيع الحراك؟ جدل المتخيّل والضروري

What Can the Movement Do? The Dialectic of the Imagined and the Necessary

Bidayat

The Hirak faces a paradox between the dream of radical change and the necessity of resisting the crisis; if it keeps demanding the impossible without achieving the necessary, it will fail to secure the rights of the popular majority.

من يوميّات الحراك الشعبي

From the Diaries of the Popular Movement

Bidayat

The October 17 uprising erupted as popular anger against a corrupt ruling class, but it is threatened with co-optation or suppression unless it organizes itself and adopts clear demands to confront austerity plans and overcome sectarianism.

مذكرات جارالله عمر

The Memoirs of Jarallah Omar

How could he support one-party rule in the South while fighting to overthrow it in the North? He opposed both war and secession — both sides called him traitor, then assassinated him.

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.

الثورة السلمية في عظمتها وحدودها

The Peaceful Revolution in Its Greatness and Its Limits

Bidayat

The Sudanese peaceful revolution succeeded in overthrowing the dictatorship and imposing a partnership with the military, but it faces major challenges in holding perpetrators accountable and securing genuine civilian authority over the army and security forces.

السودان، الجزائر، إلخ. استئناف البدايات

Sudan, Algeria, Etc.: Resuming the Beginnings

Bidayat

The popular movements in Sudan and Algeria represent a resumption of the 2011 uprisings, posing the challenge of achieving genuine change that expresses the will of the people in the face of authoritarian regimes and the interference of old and external powers.

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.

الحراك الشعبي في العراق ولبنان ملفات الفساد بيد الناس

The Popular Movement in Iraq and Lebanon: Corruption Files in the People's Hands

Bidayat

In the name of religion, the thieves robbed us — sectarianism isn't the cause of corruption but its cover, and the World Bank fights "corruption" with the privatization that produces it.

كيف نفهم ما يجري في لبنان؟ حوار مع «فواز طرابلسي»

How Do We Understand What Is Happening in Lebanon? A Dialogue with Fawwaz Traboulsi

The October 17 uprising is unprecedented in its peaceful popular movement against Lebanon's post-civil war system, yet it faces a paradox between its aspirations for change and the challenges of "excess of politics" and lack of cross-sectarian organization.

الثورات في المرحلة الانتقالية

Revolutions in the Transitional Phase

Bidayat

Four rulers fell but "transitional phases" became new battlegrounds — Heikal dismissed the Brotherhood's "Renaissance Project" as meaningless words. Yemen's precedent: a coup in civilian clothing.

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.

Our Lady of the Rocks

A literary text on Dhofar: a Freudian slip of the camera turned a shepherdess into a madonna — the tubercular woman asks for medicine from strangers who carry everything except what helps, and the unknown name endures across wars and exiles.

The Left in Time of Revolution

Bidayat

A founding essay in Bidayat: the Arab uprisings are a movement against neoliberalism—"the people want" is popular sovereignty above all others, and "work, freedom, bread" places unemployment at the heart of democracy.

Revolutions bring down ideas as well!

Heinrich Boll Stiftung

Revolutions do not merely change governments; they shatter the ideologies that made those governments seem permanent and legitimate, and undermine decades of intellectual frameworks that naturalized authoritarian rule.

شؤؤن الاوسط

Middle East Affairs

We explained absences—'why no democracy?'—instead of analyzing what exists: the mechanisms of authoritarian systems. Hope, not optimism.