Thinking Fits

Lebanon seduces. That’s what every smitten foreigner—and they are many—will tell you. There is a sultry feel to the place, they say; seedy, perhaps, yes, and intoxicating all because of it. It could very well be Lebanon’s blithe openness to life’s best and worst possibilities that gives it this special glow even though it actually makes it stink. The taste of the West flirting shamelessly with that irresistible whiff of the

Our politics is a narcissistic, shrill creature, isn’t she? There is no hope for perils of the tight-lipped kind in her presence. She raves and rants and kills, shoving shyer tragedies to the back pages, as if our center stage is only for cataclysms that come with ticking bombs. And what an ungrateful prima donna she is, for where would she be, who would love her, who would even give her a second glance if it were not for the

Our politics is a narcissistic, shrill creature, isn’t she? There is no hope for perils of the tight-lipped kind in her presence. She raves and rants and kills, shoving shyer tragedies to the back pages, as if our center stage is only for cataclysms that come with ticking bombs. And what an ungrateful prima donna she is, for where would she be, who would love her, who would even give her a second glance if it were not for the

“They killed female goats because their reproductive organs were uncovered and their tails were pointed upward, which they said was haram (profane). They branded cucumbers as male and tomatoes as female, and they forbade our women from buying cucumbers….”
(Hameed al Hayess, one of Anbar’s tribal chiefs on the wondrous teachings of al Qaeda. Quoted in a Reuters article in August).

Touch us women, in much of the Middle East, and you touch the essence of life. This is how entangled our story has become with that of politics and culture and religion.

Call it destiny, the way we find ourselves, willingly or not, at the center of our societies’ passionate quest for identity. In a century of existential struggles, large and small, real and imagined, we could be the clearest expression of a beleaguered people’s thirst for a sense of

Two episodes back-to-back–Alia Magda al-Mahdi’s nude stare beckoning a challenge to Egyptians and their uprising, and the beating of columnist Mona Eltahawy in the Interior Ministry that smacked of sexual assault—have thrust women back into Egypt’s burning arena after months of fade out.

All countries living on the edge overflow with paradox. Because of war or famine or internecine conflict or fratricide or the hell of it all, humanity gets to showcase its demons only to egg on the angels. Like that, destruction wrestles with creation, lunacy with sobriety, gunfire with poetry.

There is a name for it, this meandering existence: these blocks of concrete that line the sidewalks; those checkpoints that shield our suicide bombers’ favorite spots; the embassies impregnating themselves in the middle of bustling neighborhoods; the security barriers that usher you in and out of no-go zones wringing the houses of every other big chief.

After the 1967 catastrophe, several particularly mean jokes started making the rounds about Gamal Abd al Nasser. Even we, nappies barely dry, would throw them around laughing, as if to usher in the post-Nasser era.
The meanest of the jokes went like this:
After the ’67 defeat, Nasser stood, chastened, on the presidential balcony to deliver a speech to the throngs.