Samir Atallah

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…