KtBlog
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…
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…
Head-Hunting
An excerpt from Rag and Bone, in which a soccer-playing Syrian calls Bashar al-Assad a lizard.
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
Revelation Road
After ditching the tour group, he’s got twenty-four hours and seven very important Turkish towns to see.
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…
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…
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…
