Yesterday
Najati Sidqi, "Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist: The Secret Life of Najati Sidqi" (U Texas Press, 2025)
In the public eye, Najati Sidqi was known as a journalist and writer, a translator of Russian classics, and an outspoken opponent of Nazism. However, Sidqi concealed a critical component of his life from the world and his family. He was an underground activist for the Palestinian ... Show More
25m 54s
Jan 29
Yossef Rapoport, "Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Today, much of the Middle East is “Arab”—an identity that now extends across North Africa and up through the Near East to Syria. Yet how did this region become Arab? How did this identity spread? Was it due to migration, or conquest? Historian Yossef Rapoport, in his book Becomi ... Show More
41m 38s
Jan 26
Adam Bursi, "Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
Adam Bursi’s Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam (Edinburg University Press, 2024) uses writings by early Muslims to map a history of material objects, relics, and tombs of prophetic figures as they were conceptualized in the 8th and 9th centuries. The ... Show More
56m 59s
Jun 2021
Syria’s Top Goon: Art and the Arab Spring
BBC Arabic reporter Dima Babilie marks 10 years since the Arab Spring and speaks to poets, film-makers and artists about how that moment of revolutionary change transformed their lives, their countries and their art. When the protests first broke out in Syria, Dima was a student ... Show More
27m 36s
Nov 2022
Arabian queens, Bangladeshi mothers and women's tales
Shahidha Bari looks at the voices of women emerging from new writing in novels, plays and histories. Zenobia, Mavia, and Khadijah are Arabian queens and noblewomen who feature in the new book by Emran Iqbal El-Badawi which looks at the way female rulers of Arabia were crucial in ... Show More
44m 52s
Feb 2015
Alina Garcia-Lapuerta, “La Belle Creole” (Chicago Review Press, 2014)
One of the fundamental functions of biography is the preservation of stories. But it also acts to resurrect the stories that may have fallen from view, reinvigorating the tales of people who, with the passage of time, have become merely names on plaques. In La Belle Creole:The Cu ... Show More
38m 49s
Family stories are the texture of the human fabric. From every land, from every time, they bring the past to life for young ears.
In the beginning of the twentieth century, when there were no borders in the Middle East (it was then called la grande Syrie), Elia Zughaib grew up first in Damascus, then in the mountains of Lebanon. In a rural culture, animals a ... Show More
<p>This is a conversation with <a href="https://twitter.com/anajibakhti">Naji Bakhti</a>, author of the novel <a href="https://www.influxpress.com/between-beirut-and-the-moon" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank"><em>Between Beirut and the Moon</em></a> (2020), published by ... Show More
