Category Rand
Reading Susana Galan’s piece on the Women2Drive resistance movement, I cannot help but think of Pascal Menoret’s meditation on youth resistance movements in Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism and Road Revolt. Menoret’s book documents the development of ‘joyriding’, a phenomenon of… Continue Reading →
I hate Israel and I’ll say it if they ask me Even if they murder me or put me in jail I hate israel eeeeeeeeeeeeh I love Husni Mubarak cause he has a big heart if he steps forward, he… Continue Reading →
In 2001, a song entitled ‘I Hate Israel’ rocked airwaves across the Arab world. Set to popular Egyptian folk beats, ‘I Hate Israel’ was penned in response to the Second Intifada or Uprising of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories in… Continue Reading →
Throughout our class, we have been displacing the concept of ‘the clash of civilizations’. This concept not only pits ‘the East’ against ‘the West’, but also it assumes that each entity is a coherent and whole one. Alas, the cultural… Continue Reading →
Somos Sur or We are the South, Tijoux and Mansour chant, singing for ‘the silent, the subdued, the oppressed’. This song or -more aptly- anthem of resistance is worth analyzing for two primary reasons: their strategy of transnational solidarity and… Continue Reading →
Being in the -albeit virtual- presence of Riz Ahmed was unexpectedly heavy. As someone who can easily be reduced to Muslim, Iraqi, Arab, Female, Bourgeois, labels are and have always been a straitjacket. Of course, I have had moments… Continue Reading →
An unchallenged notion that seems to exist not only among individuals in the Global North, but also among elites and some of us in class, as well, is that the Muslim-majority societies, especially those in the Arab states, are largely… Continue Reading →
In 1993, U.S. American political advisor and Harvard professor, Samuel P. Huntington published his hypothesis, The Clash of Civilizations, in which he posited that identity politics, mainly cultural and religious, would pose the biggest threat to post-Cold War U.S. Specifically,… Continue Reading →