Beirut-based Fiction & Other Writings
If all roads lead to Rome, is Lebanon’s road to secularism doomed from the start?
When I look back at the beginning of our road to secularism, I see an empty path that slowly gained loyal adherents along the way. I see glimmers of hope from those that believed that one day, no matter how far, they would not be forced to go to Cyprus to have a civil marriage. Continue reading “The Road to Secularism – Part III”
Mine have always been; through war and peace, stagnation and change, hope and despair.
Welcome to “Eye on the East,” a follower of history, politics, society and culture of the Middle East and broader Arab world. Continue reading “Are your Eyes on the East?”
We meet them after they have given the world their last breadth. Their bodies bearing witness to what they could fight against no longer, for those who only dared to look. Their eyes bearing witness to their innocence and youth, for those who could only see. We become surrounded by their images, their stories and their dreams. We feel we have known them and that part of us has died with them. We feel we are one and the same and that we must go on so that their deaths not be in vain. These are the children and the young revolutionaries of the Middle East… Continue reading “In Memory of the Children”
If a picture is worth a thousand words, can I choose two and not be blamed for talking too much? Continue reading “Thousands of Words”
Sir Isaac Newton once noted that “every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed.” Also known as the first of his three Laws of Motion, Newton’s basic idea is that an object that is not moving or moving in a constant speed in a straight line will stay like that until something pushes it or blocks its path. And for as much as I have been observing, reading about and analyzing Arab uprisings these days, I haven’t found a more simple explanation for them as this. Continue reading “Laws of Motion”
The years have not been able to erase one of the first and most valuable lessons in politics and on the dynamics of international relations that I learned, only reinforce it. Continue reading “No Permanent Friends, No Permanent Enemies”
“In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.”
– Alexis de Tocqueville
In a revolution, the beginning should not be marked by the first calls to mobilize against the existing order, but as the fruits of mobilization translate into concrete action to transform given the defeated order. The end, therefore, is the culmination of implemented change with a clear vision for the new, and hopefully better, order. Continue reading “The End of a Revolution”
A lot has been written, is being written, and will be written on the 2011 Arab Revolutions: the surreal way in which one country after the other finally gave in to the will of the people, the way preemptive reform proved a futile tactic of political systems to gain the time they no longer controlled, the way dictators fled in shame as all their ill-gotten wealth could no longer buy them the power they still vied for. But more importantly, there is the People… Continue reading “When Bullets No Longer Kill”
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