Just arrived in New York (to finish my Masters in Middle East Studies). Spent Sunday at Coney Island, among throngs of sunburnt New Yorkers lapping up the last days of summer. On the way back, riding the F train, I sit opposite a young drunk couple. They’re both baby-faced, pink from the sun, nursing big [...]

I was asked a while back to contribute a guest post to Washington Post reporter Jack Fairweather’s blog “Islam’s Advance” (about “Islam influencing and adapting to the modern world”).
I ended up writing on a phenomenon that has interested me for a while, every since I read Patrick Haenni’s great book “L’Islam de Marché” [...]

Egypt recently passed a new Child’s Law. One of the most controversial parts of the law was the criminalization of female circumcision, or FGM. I just did a story on this for yesterday’s edition of The World.
One things I discovered is that while the figure that’s commonly mentioned is that 96% of women in Egypt [...]

I was sent this image in an email forward.
The text says: “You can’t stop them, but you can protect yourself.”

Two obvious (and rhetorical) questions: Can we really not stop harassment? And does veiling really “protect” you?

We are launching a new blog under the Arabist umbrella. This is something we’ve been thinking of for some time and let’s just say that it’s going to be my summer project. Please check out The Arabist Review, which will be dedicated to covering arts and culture in Cairo and (hopefully) the Arab region. We [...]

For those who might be interested, I just did a story on the (continuing) bread crisis for the radio program The World.
In my visits to Cairo bakeries last week, I was amused and a bit disconcerted to see to what extent the bread shortage has already become a “sensitive” issue–one that gets enfolded, as [...]

 I just saw the movie that everyone is talking about in Cairo these days: Heyya Fauda (It’s Chaos). It’s the latest by Youssef Chahine, but unlike a lot of his work lately, it’s eminently entertaining. It’s also very political. The film opens with actual footage of the many street protests and altercations between demonstrators and riot police [...]

A few days ago, Human Rights Watch and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights published a report entitled “Prohibited Identities” about the discrimination of the Egyptian governments against those who either wish to identify as something other than the three “revealed” religions (Islam, Christianity, and Judaism) or those who wish to change their religion from [...]

The US Embassy recently produced a CD of old interviews from the Voice of America Arabic service archives. (VOA Arabic was canceled a while ago, to be replaced by the much-criticized, pop-heavy Radio Sawa). The interviews — of major Egyptian writers, artists, singers such as Naguib Mahfouz, Mohamed Abdel Wahab and Tahia Carioca — are [...]

I’ve been wanting to put up for a while this audio file of Ibrahim Eissa’s speech at the massive press conference at the Journalists’ Syndicate on September 14th. Here is one (poorly) translated excerpt.
“We succeeded in saving the soul of this umma, which seemed about to die in the hospital of President Mubarak, and which has [...]

When I was in New York last year, I heard about a new middle school that was going to open in Brooklyn and offer classes in Arabic. The Khalil Gibran school was going to be the first American public school to have “Arabic language and culture” as part of its curriculum. I’m pretty sure a [...]

The Sinai peninsula–sight of Egypt’s booming Red sea tourism, of presidential palaces and international conferences, of disenfranchised Bedouin tribes, arms and drugs smuggling, and several terrorist bombings–is a weird place. (Scott Anderson pointed this out in an excellent article in Vanity Fair a while back.)
Driving to a beach in Sinai last weekend, I ran [...]

The Brookings Institution put out a report last week that describes in detail the situation of the 1 to 1.5 million Iraqi refugees currently living in Syria (there are an estimated 2 million in the region, in addition to 2 million internally displaced).
The report discusses the reasons refugees are leaving Iraq: getting caught in [...]

The Kevorkian Center at NYU (were I currently study) organized a wonderful literary symposium yesterday. In the morning, Elias Khoury, Yitzhak Laor and Yael Lerer spoke of “Representations of the Other in Literature,” particulary Israeli-Palestinian literature.
I have just recently read Ghassan Kanafani’s novella “Return to Haifa,” which is generally considered to have the [...]

I got home this evening after a day spent at NYU at a very interesting literary symposium (that I hope to blog about tomorrow). Flipping channels, I happened on a segment of the PBS series “America at a Crossroads” called “The Brotherhood.” It’s interesting but I can’t help finding parts of it a bit tendentious [...]

We’ve all seen the massacres and crimes and atrocities that some US forces have committed in Iraq and Afghanistan–as inevitably as members of every occupying power before them.
But as this article in today’s Washington Post makes clear, what’s perhaps even more worrying are the actions of the 20,000 or so private security contractors in Iraq, [...]

Ever since I read this New York Times article a few days back about the identitarian fashion issues of Muslim American women I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what bothers me about it. It’s not just the article’s utter naiveté (the New York Times discovers that Muslim women–even veiled ones–care about fashion!) or the [...]

Yesterday I went to the Met to see this exhibit on “Venice and the Islamic World.” While not perfect, the show was facinating. Did you know the first Koran was printed in Venice in 1537? Or that Venetians learned the art of glass-blowing from the Arab world, Syria in particular?
There are many examples throughout [...]

I’ve been meaning to signal George Packer’s article “Betrayed” in the New Yorker from 2 weeks ago. I know the issue has been out for a while now, but this article is the definition of a must-read. Everything about it, including the accompanying photographs, is stellar reporting. Packer tells the stories of different Iraqis working [...]

As some of you may remember, I mentioned last week that Israeli Apartheid Week was held in New York. As we’ve all seen from the reaction to former President Carter’s recent book, some people find the use of the word “apartheid” offensive, shocking, or far-fetched. Even within the Palestinian solidarity movement, there has been some [...]