New Lines Magazine Just three weeks following my release after 16 years in prison in Syria, I started translating a book into Arabic. The book was “Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order,” by Noam Chomsky. It had taken me some time to realize that the leading linguist and the harsh…

Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) In the week since Russia's invasion began, Syrians opposed to President Bashar al-Assad might come second only to Ukrainians themselves in following every horror of the war that Vladimir Putin's regime is waging in Ukraine. The reason behind this curious situation, of course, should be quite apparent. Russia…

International Politics Reviews (2022) The problems of genocide: Permanent security and the language of transgression is of great importance in the richness of its content, the strength of its main thesis, its extensive documentation, and its critical approach to Holocaust scholarship and memory. One does not often encounter this combination of attributes in Western writings…

LCB diplomatique This photograph was taken in our house, my wife Samira Al-Khalil and me (Samira leans her head on my shoulders at the back), in the Qudsayya suburb to the west of Damascus towards the end of 2005. The photograph encompasses a lot of Syria’s history in the last half century, without being a…

PEN/Opp publishes “Crisis and unrepresentability” – a new written lecture by the Syrian author, thinker and the Tucholsky Prize winner Yassin Al-Haj Saleh. The lecture was previously presented in Sweden on the 28 of August at the School of Gerlesborg and the 29 of August at the World Culture Museum as part of a conversation…

Henna The Atrocious and Its Representation: Deliberations on Syria’s Distorted Form and Its Tumultuous Formation, by Syrian intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh, was recently published by Dar al-Jadeed. The Lebanese writer, publisher, and intellectual Luqman Salim had been supervising the editing of this book when he was assassinated in Lebanon, February 4th, 2021. Salim was shot…

Al-Jumhuriya   Dedicated to Kelly and Steve. In the West today—and, consequently, around the world—there are three dominant discourses about Syria (and the Middle East more generally). The first is geopolitical; the second culturalist or civilizationist; and the third might be called top-down anti-imperialist. In analyzing these three, along with the ways in which Syria’s…

DAWN- dawnmena.org Before the Syrian uprising ten years ago, there was a scarcity of literature by Syrians about the country during the long decades of the Assad family rule. No doubt, this scarcity in cognitive representation derived from the void in political representation, especially during the decades of the 1980's and 1990's, a brutal and…

Qantara.de A tradition is unchanging rules that govern human action, while a revolution is a transformative event that follows no predetermined path. As far as a "revolutionary tradition" is a contradictory term, it also tends to obliterate the revolutionary event and impose its rules upon it. This is remarkably evinced in the communist "hard tradition",…

Versopolis Review By March 2021, a whole decade will have passed since the popular uprising in Syria started, and a titanic tragedy has been unfolding itself. What is so crushingly peculiar about these ten years is that Syrians have no promises whatsoever that things will be better, or even that the worst is already behind…