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.

لبنان البدايات في سيرة مثقف حداثي — مراجعة كتاب جاد تابت

Lebanon's Beginnings in the Biography of a Modernist Intellectual - A Review of Jad Tabet's Book

Tripoli was annexed to Greater Lebanon to prevent it becoming Syria's port — it remains the poorest city on the Mediterranean.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

ماذا ينفع الشعور بالذنب؟

What Good Is Guilt?

The "culture of humiliation" is surprised by revolutions — and Israel's "David" had double the combined Arab armies in '48. In civil wars: a duty to remember and a necessity to forget.

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.

Do Collective Rights Contribute to Conflict Resolution? The case of Lebanon

Politicized sects are enlarged patronage networks shielding members from the market and covering predation—and the solution lies in the existing constitution: a Senate for sects, a non-sectarian House for citizens, plus social justice.

ليس بالثقافة وحدها يحيا الانسان

Man Does Not Live by Culture Alone

When culture turns into a ready-made identity, politics and economics disappear, and a society lacking production is told to settle for a “knowledge society.”