Latest
01 April 2013
The events unfolding around the political arrest of an apolitical businessman tells the story of a politically troubled country. The author of Guban, Abdi Latif Ega, cleverly weaves the social, environmental, cultural and ...
20 March 2013
In Covarrubia’s seventeenth century dictionary Tesoro de La Lengua Castellana O Española, moro (from the Latin Maurus) is defined as “one from the province of Mauritania.” The term is meant to be used pejoratively as in the ...
19 March 2013
Ibrahim El-Husseiny wrote the play “Comedy of Sorrows” only a few months after Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s resignation in February of 2011. As such, it was one of the very first creative pieces produced in ...
09 March 2013
Distinguished by their ability to imagine the unimaginable and assign meaning to meaningless, human beings have always been meaning-seekers, and therefore myth-makers. Mythology could be about the ...
08 March 2013
From The Sunday Observer of October 22, 1944
"Freedom must be an Ideal with a Social Content"
The following message was sent by Mr. M.N. Roy to the Bengal Provincial Conference of the Radical Democratic Party held on ...
06 March 2013
A Harlem state of mind. Music. Rhythm. Black beauty. Soul. Culture. Defiance. Harlem intrigues and inspires. Harlem has also innovated and has been invaded. By police. By white real estate. By capitalism. While ...
01 March 2013
January 10th, 2013 marked one of the worst episode of Shia genocide in Pakistan when two bomb blasts targeting the Hazara Shia community, killed almost 200 people in a busy marketplace in Quetta. The Hazara Shias, who have ...
27 February 2013
“..People sometimes ask...why the Pope does not introduce this or that reform? The true answer is that a revolutionist is not the kind of man who becomes a Pope and that a man who becomes a Pope has no wish to be a ...
24 February 2013
Written in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Mahmood Mamdani’s 2005 book Good Muslim, BadMuslim historicizes the violence of terrorism. It extricates terrorism from the narrow morality that arises from the convergence ...
20 February 2013
V.S.ACHUTHANANDAN by Prof. Prabhat Patnaik
(scroll down for the video)
It is difficult these days, after the end of the classical period of Communism, to find a Communist leader who enjoys such mass popularity as ...
12 February 2013
These pictures were taken at the Dalit Adivasi Mahasamelanam, in November 2012, where tens of thousands of Dalits and Adivasis, including families of men, women, children, the elderly and in some cases, entire village ...
02 February 2013
"Egypt is heading towards civil war", composer Mohammed Fairouz plainly states in discussion of his opera, Sumeida's Song, which premiered at the Prototype Festival in SoHo. Civil war is perhaps too strong a word to describe ...
01 February 2013
Please watch this important video: "http://www.youtube.com/embed/yI9CxJAT3ZE"
Statement from the South Asia Co-ordinator, Baraza Online:
Please watch this insightful video (produced by DalitCamera), which is perhaps the ...
17 January 2013
On February 28th and March 1st 2013, the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University will be hosting its annual graduate conference. Titled “Paradigmatic Conflict and ...
25 December 2012
On December 16, a 23 year-old woman was brutally gang-raped, within an inch of her life, in a public bus with an illegal license that was driving through the streets for half an hour, unnoticed. Like Khaled Mohamed Saeed and ...
18 November 2012
I was raised in Turkey in a practicing Muslim family dedicated to fighting against the Kemalist secular ideology of the state, and attended a public school where this official ideology was taught with a passion. I quickly ...
04 November 2012
Our second feature piece has been produced by two young scholars: Lakshmi Gopal and Taylor Moore, working out of New York and Cairo respectively. Over the course of several months and the length of an ever-expanding ...
04 October 2012
[from Old Friend, We Made This for You]
WAITING FOR METRO
i)
i have a gun
in a Hardo Bread bag
waiting for Metro marching from the marshlands of Suburbia,
to occupy our lands
waiting
the snails will ...
04 October 2012
"State, Culture and Human Imagination"
The Global Scholars Project, which focuses annually on the works of three scholars of the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa, is an articulation of the intellectual pursuits ...
09 September 2012
The renowned writer, journalist, director, and producer, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas narrates an important encounter that took place between Gandhi and Hakiman, an elderly weaver woman from Panipat. The story provides important ...
06 September 2012
Multiple attacks on Sufi religious and historical sites last week highlight two threats to Libya’s democratic transition: Islamic extremism and the failure of the government to take action. On 25 August, Salafist extremists ...
23 August 2012
On Sunday, August 12th a rally of over 60,000 people was held in Bamako to call for a peaceful resolution to the ongoing violent crisis in northern Mali. This “national peace and reconciliation” meeting was organized ...
03 August 2012
This July Morocco celebrated Throne Day, in celebration of King Mohammed VI’s ascension to the throne thirteen years ago. He seems to have much to celebrate; time and again, the crown asserts itself as secure against ...
03 August 2012
According to Foucault, the production of discourse in every society is simultaneously controlled, organized, selected and redistributed according to particular procedures. These procedures are meant to “avert its [the ...
03 July 2012
He caught up with me as I turned the corner in Connaught Place (C.P.), the shopping hub in central Delhi where I had been running some errands. He was fair-skinned and wearing a checked shirt, jeans and bright ...
24 June 2012
While studying in Cairo in 2009, taxi drivers would often ask me if I studied at Al-Azhar University. Although I was conversant in the Egyptian dialect of Arabic, several of my syllables strayed from native ...
25 May 2012
Dr. Livingstone, may not be such the hero we once presumed.
New digital imaging technology and a team of scholars have recovered David Livingstone’s faded journal entries from the period when the colonial era ...
27 April 2012
B.R.P. Bhaskar is one of Kerala’s most respected journalists, an avid blogger and currently a columnist for Gulf Today. He “started his career in journalism in 1952 and has worked in The Hindu, Statesman, Patriot, ...
26 April 2012
My father is an art historian. One of the criticisms I remember him leveling against non-art historians over breakfast was that “x doesn’t know how to read an image.” I had always assumed this was one of those ...
25 April 2012
Coverage of the conflict that brought the end of Gaddafi's 42-year regime over Libya exposed some of the weakest points in the ways we conceive of geographical categories. Rebel forces accused Gaddafi of using “African ...
18 April 2012
Bab’Aziz, the Prince who Contemplated His Soul. Directed by Nacer Khemir. Switzerland /Hungary /France /Germany /Iran /Tunisia /UK, 2005.
“Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man ...
18 April 2012
Mahatma Gandhi
Satyagraha, loosely translated as noncooperation, was a non-violent “alternative to conventional rebellion,” that Mahatma Gandhi constructed in response to discrimination against Indian expatriate ...
04 April 2012
Islamic Studies
A recent feature article published in the McGill Daily--my alma mater’s independent newspaper--recounted the detainment of Islamic Studies PhD student Pascal Abidor during a trip home to New York from ...
04 April 2012
In 1949, Ali Bakathir published The Tragedy of Oedipus. His Oedipus was not the one that we are familiar with. This Oedipus knows from the beginning of the play that he is Laius’ murderer and that the Oracle says ...
02 April 2012
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visits the Natanz Uranium Enrichment Facility some 200 miles south of the capital, Tehran, Iran. (AP)
The big, bad Iran nuclear threat is one of the American news media’s favorite ...
29 March 2012
A month ago, few would have suspected that Mali’s government was in line to have its power usurped by its 7,500-man army. President Amadou Toumani Touré, whose present whereabouts are unknown, has been lauded for his ...
29 March 2012
Tunisia: January 16, 2011. Demonstrators outside the Tunisian interior ministry, photographed by Lucas Dolega of EPA.
The global wave of protests presently underway has ushered in a new crisis in the interdisciplinary ...
29 March 2012
Ashraf Khalil’s Liberation Square offers a gritty and engrossing account of the events that took place in Egypt in 2011, using the voices of both Egypt’s most prominent political observers and the activists who ...
27 March 2012
Eklavya Practicing Archery Y. G. Srimati (Indian, 1927–2007)
The story of Ekalavya is one of the many stories in the epic Mahabharata about the Bharata dynasty, and Vyasa is regarded as its author. Vyasa told Ganesha ...
27 March 2012
As the 117th Patriarch, Pope Shenouda III led the Coptic Orthodox Church over four decades. Courtesy of St-takla.org
The Passing of Pope Shenouda III and the Perpetuation of “Sectarian” Discourse in a Media Context
Pope ...
23 March 2012
Ancient Sanskrit Writing
This January, roughly 2,300 years after the composition of Pāṇini’s definitive Sanskrit grammar, scholars congregated in New Delhi to present papers on the massive and enduring cultural system ...
23 March 2012
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
In March 2010, he left a national dialogue session with other Lebanese politicians, because he was “sleepy and hungry.”
In December 2010, responding to alleged statements ...
21 March 2012
Palestinians hold flags during a protest against Israeli attacks on Gaza. Courest of Welt Online
Last Friday, the Israeli Air Force killed two members of the Palestinian Resistance Committee in Gaza, who were believed ...
19 March 2012
Elections in Senegal
Elections in Senegal have a long history, going back to 1848 when the citizens of Saint-Louis and Gorée were granted universal (male) suffrage. Although limited in scope, this electoral political ...
19 March 2012
Water Access in Palestine.Image from Olympiarafahmural
“Israel is a small piece of land. We are not even 1 percent of the Arab space, you know. We don’t have water. We don’t have oil. Our greatness, if one may say ...
15 March 2012
Indian National Congress
The first round of the 2012 elections has taken place in India. Of the seven legislative assemblies whose tenures expire in 2012, five states (Goa, Manipur, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and ...
12 March 2012
Picture from Center for Middle Eastern Studies
During my final year as an undergraduate student in Canada, I took a class taught by a professor whose monograph–which was required reading–argued that conflict, ...
12 March 2012
Picture from PressTV.ir
Earlier this month, Occupy AIPAC convened as the national AIPAC conference took place in Washington, D.C. With the drum beats heralding war with Iran growing louder, what seemed lost in both ...
09 March 2012
Photo by Glenna Gordon (Click the link for more information about the photograph)
The blog Africa is a country sums it up nicely:
“The heroic Jason Russell makes a film in order that everyone in the world should ...
08 March 2012
April 9
Cover of the book Padma Surkh Hai
The planes that we had been waiting for since the day before yesterday arrived today. Bombing appeared to be imminent, so everyone rushed beneath the staircase. But when I watched ...
05 March 2012
NYPD surveillance of Muslims, particularly the surveillance which occurred on college campuses (including Columbia University), is controversial in part because of the strong rhetoric on both sides of the issue. The ...
03 March 2012
Professor Mahmood MamdaniThe good folks over at Africa is a Country (If you don’t know it, click this link now!) are running an unabashedly inconclusive poll of who might be named the most influential African intellectual ...
03 March 2012
Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is upon us again, and while Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (C-SJP) sets up on College Walk, pro-Israeli organizations ranging from Hillel to LionPAC, and the Israeli Ministry of ...
20 February 2012
It is September 2009; I’m in Upper Egypt, on this particular night, at the monastery and commemoration site of three martyred youth of Coptic history in a suburb of Luxor. As I passed a pathway littered with garbage set ...
03 February 2012
Markets, Manthia Diawara has written, are the best reflections of society. His discussion, in the West African context, emphasizes markets as grand public spaces of experience and exchange, “a meeting place for the employed ...
03 February 2012
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Being a YouTube celebrity requires cutting edge creativity, cunning new media awareness, or utter obliviousity - I like to think of myself as a paragon of all of these.
03 February 2012
After 42 years under the tight grip of Muammar al-Gaddafi, Libya is not only experiencing a political revolution but also a media revolution. The tightly controlled state-run media of the Gaddafi regime allowed no room for ...