Mustafa Fahs

The advisor to the Iranian Supreme Leader, Dr. Ali Velayati, went to extreme lengths in trivializing the lives of Lebanese people. He borrowed from religious text books to narrowly tailor his conception of the situation to his ideological priorities, disregarding the lived experience of the…

Armies exist to defend national borders and prevent adversaries from occupying their country. The Lebanese Army is no different; it has the same duties as all other armies. Lebanon is currently being subjected to daily Israeli strikes, and these cannot be called anything but assaults. Whatever the…

The Iranian citizen Ahmad al-Baldi and Tunisia’s Mohamed Bouazizi share many commonalities that neither the vast distance, nor the complex differences of the two countries’ political dynamics, nor borders, nor their ideological, ethnic, or linguistic differences can erase. The two young men,…

Forty years separate February 16, 1985, the day in which Hezbollah issued its founding statement, and November 6, 2025, the day it issued its “re-founding” yesterday. Forty, here, is not just a random number. In the view of the Sufis, it signifies passage from the outward to the inward, from…

A country that once took pride in its distinct sectarian diversity, Lebanon now finds itself overwhelmed by an excess of plurality, leading to the conflation of plurality and arithmetic being added to the longstanding conflation of sects and sectarianism. The late Imam Mohammad Mahdi Shamseddine…

This is nothing new; Iran is structurally split into “identity and politics.” This complex dynamic branches out of this binary into several social and cultural forces and groups, majorities and minorities, center and periphery, reformist and conservative, conservative and neo-conservative... a…

In Beirut, the next phase is no longer shrouded in secrecy. The question is no longer whether a new war will erupt but when? Everyone is asking “Emta el-harb,” (when’s the war in colloquial Lebanese. The question is “trending” on social media as part of a dangerous game to fragment Lebanon. At a…

Luxury cars, modern residential towers, the rehabilitation of infrastructure, and most notably, the restoration of the historic al-Rashid Street with its shops, bookstores, and cafes in the old city center: Baghdad is brimming with foreign delegations, suffocating traffic jams, and the bustle of…

Several weeks before the Israeli assault on the Qatari capital, US Special Envoy for Syria and Lebanon Ambassador Tom Barrack had said that Tel Aviv believes the Sykes–Picot borders as meaningless during an interview with Mario Nawfal. “In Israel's mind, these lines that were created by Sykes-Picot…

If the two sides of a dialogue are identical or nearly identical, it becomes nothing more than a conversation in which both repeat the same things back to each other, reproducing the same narrative. The absence of any back-and-forth can be deadly for those engaging in it: it drains vitality,…