In this post, I shall meander simply because I want to.
My first time in Cairo was in 1974. On the drive from the airport to the hotel, I remember looking out of the window and thinking to myself, I’ve been here before. Home!
Writing This Arab Life was the first time I sat down to make prose of my emotions.
And only when I finished the manuscript did it occur to me that it revealed itself through juxtapositions, the most poignant among them that of Amman and Beirut;
Since 2019, when the Lebanese experiment officially unraveled, the topic of conversation among the chattering class has been about the shape of the coming collapse. What could we expect to emerge from the wreckage of a broken Lebanon?
Last week was momentous for Lebanon. Our state, with the guiding hand and the blessings of Hezbollah, the resistance movement and political powerhouse, signed a formal maritime border agreement with Israel.
Palestine on the Precipice? For Arabs on the other side of the fence, Palestine has always had that unique quality of being very near and unbearably far away. It sits so well at the heart of our identity, perhaps the only distinct object of passion and longing in an otherwise very fluid self. It’s not …
What’s With the Veil? What’s left to say about the veil? After all these years, one would have thought very little. But apparently, there’s still much ground to cover. As proof of its eternal relevance to the times, because our times are always tortured, here it is again, in Iran, at the forefront of the …
A Season of War This is a season of war: here in the Fertile Crescent, there in the North and Horn of Africa, in Europe between Russia and Ukraine… The statistics alone are enough material with which one can draw the starkest of portraits of this age. But along with the faces of war’s victims, …
The Old Amman and its il-Madineh At a small dinner party a few years ago in Beirut, I met George Arbid, then professor of Architecture at AUB and co-founder of the Arab Center for Architecture (ACA). He told me he was working on a region-wide project on monuments to modernity in Arab metropolises–or something to …
Return to Hadath “ Ya, madame,” he shouted from the third floor balcony. I think I finally heard him the third time around. “ My grandfather lived here a long time ago,” I reassured him, instinctively knowing what brought him out. “I just wanted to take a photo or two of the old place.” He …
As The Lebanese Elites Play House… When the 2019 protests in Lebanon began to fizzle, a few of us sat over dinner discussing what might be the key lesson of that season of discontent. The most chilling one so far, I said, is that the ruling cabal realized they can pretty much do whatever they …
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