President Michel Aoun told his citizens, with all sincerity and frankness, years ago, that Lebanon was going to hell, and they did not believe him. Not because they didn’t trust him, but because they didn’t want to go to a place they have heard so much about. Later, the president said he “will…

The truth is that the forum was a rally or a festival. Mohammed Fahad al-Harthi has never taken on a role in the media that he didn’t excel at. The forum was a dazzling and remarkable display of Saudi Arabia’s capacity for organization and achievement when its officials take charge. The …

As crises and disasters storm through the region, the afflicted have found a steady helping hand in its immigrants. The community of around four million Turkish-German dual nationals was the first to help its kin. The approximately one million Syrians who had taken refuge in Germany amid the…

The “Fakhr El-Din” play by the Rahbani brothers begins with the scene of actor Roger Assaf sitting in a public place trying to listen to what is happening around him. A passer-by suspiciously asks him: “What are you doing here?” With his apparent naivety, he replies: “I am spying.” At a time…

Writing for ‘Egypt Today,’ Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim claims that Egypt, the poorest country in the Arab world besides Yemen and Sudan, is currently home to 10 million refugees, 5 million from Sudan, 3 million from Syria, 1 million from Iraq, and half a million from Palestine. He…

Back when Martyr’s Square was the commercial hub of Beirut, a group of Moroccan immigrants scattered across its outskirts constituted one of its hallmarks. Each of them carried long beads with which he would foretell the future of passers-by and tell them of the fortunes about to fall into their…

I don’t know if I will come to love China one day. I don’t like ambiguity in life, be it individual, group, or nation. The late, beloved Amin al-Hafez always returned from parliamentary conferences around the world irked by the Chinese delegations. He said his Chinese colleagues would laugh, or…

In 1927, the weekly magazine TIME launched its Person of the Year issue, where its writers would choose at the end of every year one person to be on its cover. This person would be someone they considered the most distinguished at the international level. They may be political, social, or…

Two phenomena dominated the past year: women and protests. Alaa al-Saleh led those unyielding and spontaneous protests that ended Omar al-Bashir’s reign that had run for thirty years and could have gone on forever, as the custom for Arabs and Africans, who grasp power through a coup and only come…

At an event I was invited to by the Fouad Chehab Foundation last summer, I gave a talk on Russian-Lebanese relations, while the Russian ambassador, Alexander Zasypkin, gave a talk on the same topic. During my talk, I chose to address the positive Soviet positions on Arab issues, particularly…