KtBlog

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Dear Cruelest Month: Spring Isn’t Arab

Once upon a time we lay in bed trying to imagine what shelling sounded like. We being me and the man I loved. Ah, those early days of my Orientalism and our naïvete. It was winter,2012, and I had started sleeping in the storage space above my kitchen. It was the only place in my…

Photo by Sam Kestenbaum

Dream Palace of the Revolution

How will Yemen’s sacred places of protest be remembered?

Teddy Club in Haifa. Photo by permission of Janine Sarai.

Black Among Blacks

2Pac and MLK in an Ethiopian Café in Israel.

Killing the Buddha

Egypt For Everybody

Immediately following the Egyptian revolution, my friend Greg Berger, a filmmaker, and journalist Al Giordano, of Narco News, went to Cairo to make a series of short videos with the activists who made it happen, “A Video Manual on How a Civil Resistance Was Built to Win.” Some of you are probably ready to click…

Posters of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus.

Head-Hunting

An excerpt from Rag and Bone, in which a soccer-playing Syrian calls Bashar al-Assad a lizard.

"The Fall of Man, after Hendrick Goltzius" by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com, via Flickr.

Edens Everywhere

It wouldn’t be paradise if it weren’t already lost.

Killing the Buddha

Martyrdom Makeover

New from me at Religion Dispatches: The idea of martyrdom hasn’t been in very good shape lately. One common usage of it—“I’ll not be made a martyr!”—refers to the prospect of somewhat tragic but mostly useless suffering, perhaps in the service of a delusional cause, religious or otherwise. Another appears regularly in the news with…

Killing the Buddha

Solidarity

More rallies in New York City showing solidarity with the people facing upheaval and violence in the Middle East. Shameel Arafin, the photographer we introduced you to last week, was back out on the streets. Here are some images…

Killing the Buddha

Killing the Buddha in Cairo

Anthony Shadid, in The New York Times: Tens of thousands of protesters who have reimagined the very notion of citizenship in a tumultuous week of defiance proclaimed with sticks, home-made bombs and a shower of rocks that they would not surrender their revolution to the full brunt of an authoritarian government that answered their calls for…

Killing the Buddha

Cairo: Water Cannons and Wikileaks

My Egyptian dad called, late one night from our home in Alabama, with an urgent question: “What is Twitter?” It was all over the breaking news: the mass protests that may end Mubarak’s 30-year rule, organized largely on Facebook and Twitter. At 72, my dad’s never used a social-networking site. But he’s excited about the…

Today in Cairo, via Twitpic.

Today in Cairo

Prayers and a water cannon.

th-makkah-clock-royal-tower-10

My Mecca Is Taller than Yours

Check out these crazy photos of the Mecca Clock Royal Tower now under construction. Upon completion, this tower will be the second tallest building in the world, at around 1,900 feet high. The building will be host to a lunar observatory, an Islamic heritage museum, a mechanism for the call to prayer, a gigantic clock…

"'Western Wall' Jerusalem, Israel" by Minamie's Photo, via Flickr.

Next Year In Jerusalem?

It’s not my holy land.

"Blue mosque tourist" by Prof-B via Flickr

Revelation Road

After ditching the tour group, he’s got twenty-four hours and seven very important Turkish towns to see.

Killing the Buddha

Travel in the Holy Land a No Go

According to the US State Department’s travel warning for Israel, West Bank and Gaza  travelers to the Holy Land can be greet not with signs of peace but further travel restrictions. In June 2009, the Israeli government began selectively limiting certain travelers to either the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, or to…

Killing the Buddha

Unspun

I join Chris Hedges and General Brent Scowcroft as a talking head for Al Jazeera’s new documentary news program, Faultlines, about religion in the military. I was invited to be on the show because of my recent Harper’s story on the subject, “Jesus Killed Mohammed,” in which I write about the growth of a militant…

Killing the Buddha

Ghosts of Cairo

Anthea Butler hears the ghost of Malcolm X in Obama’s Cairo speech. “So the past isn’t over until we understand it,” writes poet Lawrence Raab in his new book, The History of Forgetting, “which is one of the reasons / ghosts keep appearing.” Obama’s speech will not allow them to rest, says Alexander Cockburn. “There…

Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney at prayer

The Full Armor of God

Donald Rumsfeld took the LORD’s name in vain.