“True Happiness and Joy”
Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. He was the author of 40 novels, 350 short stories, and five plays. When I was in Palestine in 2003, I would read…
Category: Middle East
Hearts and Minds, Revisited by Mark Chmiel and Andrew Wimmer
This article was first published at Counterpunch, January 12, 2005. The ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there. –Lyndon Johnson, on Vietnam There is…
Bourdieu on Algeria
The somewhat exalted libido sciendi that drove me, rooted in a kind of passion for everything about this country, its people and its landscapes, and also in the dull but constant sensation of guilt and…
Dear Randa
6 September 2009 Dear Randa, Given how busy you must be, I can’t imagine that you would have brought along with you Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. I…
Correspondence/1197
Dear Yehudit So, this month, in addition to reading Dorothee Sölle (superb!) I am also reading a lot of Nawal El-Saadawi Egyptian novelist, physician Thorn in the side of patriarchy She reminds me of you You…
Summer Reading, 2009
I recently found this in an old file… CHINA Annping Chin, The Authentic Confucius: A Life of Thought and Politics David Hinton, Selected Poems of Wang Wei D.C. Lau, trans. Mencius Andrew Plaks, trans.,…
Share the Wealth with Jason Makansi: Writing the Journey to the Center: Ethnic Delinquency, Young Adult Activism, Professional and Fiction Writing, and the Lifelong Struggle to Get What’s on the Inside to the Outside
It’s a great time to be half-Greek and half-Syrian! Never has my heritage been so aligned with the headlines. One country is the poster child for global economic failure, the other for geopolitical failure. Every…
The Way It Looked in 1996
The main intellectual task is to confront the Israeli conscience with the serious human and political claims of the Palestinians: these require moral, intellectual, cultural attention of the most profound kind, and cannot easily be…
Our Gifts to the World (A Very Partial List)
Please remember Victor Jara, In the Santiago Stadium, Es verdad – those Washington Bullets again —The Clash Washington Bullets (We’re still making the world safe for democracy) Washington Little Boy and Fat Man (We stand…
What You Understand Depends on Where You Stand/2
Overcoming Speechlessness is a short book on poet and novelist Alice Walker’s travels to Rwanda, Congo, and Palestine where she bears witness and attends to heartbreaking tales of atrocity, devastation, and cruelty. Yet, she is…