When a senior Lebanese Hezbollah official talks about the criteria that make a president of the republic acceptable to the party, he mentions phrases and terms like: "American pressure does not scare him," "Israel fears him," "he defies...", "he stands strong... ", "he confronts..." The fact…

A week ago, a Lebanese newspaper published this piece of news in its culture section: The Cultural Councilorship of the Islamic Republic of Iran invites you to attend a seminar entitled “Desecration of Sanctities and The Perpetuation of Confrontation,” and the opening of an exhibition of caricature…

In the sense in which the leaders of the American Revolution, and the nation and state that emerged from it, are referred to as "founding fathers," “founding mother” could be used to describe Mahsa Amini in the future. That is, if Iran manages to survive its Islamic Republic experiment in one piece…

That we are all born with two eyes and one tongue suggests that looking and observing take precedence over speaking - that every time we speak, we should observe twice, and that we should observe twice before speaking once. Many in our region do not act on this premise in the slightest; as…

Some phenomena and events cannot be interpreted in themselves, not in as much as they can through what precedes them, and sometimes what succeeds them. The Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords, which was signed on this day thirty years ago, is one of them. Those who find fault in Arafat and his…

When the Ottoman Sultanate collapsed at the end of the First World War, the Arab Levant had two options: either accept the nation states that the British and French mandates come to us with, or try to build a state that encompasses all the communities and peoples of the region, such that the link,…

In Ancient Greece, persuasion played a major role in the public sphere; by extension, thinking played a major role as well. Because the Greeks had established direct democracy and jury trials, there was a sharp demand for arguments and reasoning that could be of use to the citizens of Athens in the…

Students of political science trace the concept of “sovereignty” back to a Frenchman by the name of Jean Bodin. Bodin was himself a politician, as well as a thinker and jurist. He lived in the sixteenth century, before the “Social Contract” school of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques…

It is widely believed that freedom, rights, and interests are the Arab Levant’s vehicle to national democratic change, that is, toward refounding its homelands. Here, citizens head to public squares and bring down a regime with absolutely no legitimacy that is contaminated by nasty interests; a new…

In various ways, philosophers and thinkers have said that life is absurd and futile, and that its culmination in death attests to its absurdity and affirms its futility. But what about when death is not merely an event that brings life to an end but is the very essence of life? This…