Qifa Nabki
Qifa Nabki
The Eagle Strikes Back: Okab Sakr vs. al-Akhbar & OTV
My, my, my… what a tangled web we weave. The embattled Lebanese MP Okab Sakr treated us to a dizzying piece of political theater today (reminiscent in all of its finger-pointing and high inflection to the most spirited performances of the great master himself) and promised that there would be more to come, thereby threatening … Continue reading
Okab Sakr, Purveyor of Fine Armaments & Explosives
It’s a little late in the game for me to hide the fact that I’ve long cultivated an unhealthy obsession with Okab Sakr and his formidable rhetorical skills. His performances on the Lebanese evening talk show circuit are the stuff of legend (see here and here for only a couple of my purplest paeans to … Continue reading
Syria’s Culture War
Here’s a recording of a short interview I did with the Watson Institute for International Studies here at Brown University. I wrote about some of these themes in a piece for the Times last year (“Syria’s Defecting Bloggers”), which you can find here, and have generally been interested in the problems of representing reality in … Continue reading
The Rolling Stones of Morocco: Nass el-Ghiwane
A million years ago, I spent some time living in Morocco hanging out with Nass el-Ghiwane, the great shaabi ensemble that more or less invented the modern Moroccan popular song. I wrote about the experience in an article for Transition magazine: Nass el Ghiwane debuted in 1971, when Omar Sayyed was twenty-four years old. All five members sang, … Continue reading
Exclusive: NOW Lebanon Opinion Piece Taken Down Because of Editorial Line Violation
As we noted yesterday, a NOW Lebanon editorial surprisingly critical of Saad al-Hariri (“The Baby and the Bathwater”) was taken down without a word of explanation by the editors. After Beirut Spring and I pointed this out, the article was restored with the following disclaimer: NOW Lebanon has intentionally removed this article from the site. It was not … Continue reading
Qifa Nabki 
And the people say…