Egypt
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How Dubai Stollen Christmas
Bloodshed, flooding, people fleeing persecution, the fodder of biblical stories from the Holy Land. Only sadly they’re not ancient stories trotted out for the Christmas season. They are present day Christmastime in the birthplace of Christmas. But Noel in its current incarnation is supposed to be about fun. And really, why shouldn’t it be? A Continue reading
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The Green Food Season
The Levant is among the many places across the world where spring means baby lambs, tree blossoms and the new buds that will produce precious bounty in a two or three months. It’s also the green food season—when winter’s Swiss chard, dandelion greens, endive, escarole and so many other leaves recognized for being wiltable in Continue reading
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My Very Short Middle East Movie List
Recently a professor in the US asked me if I could put together a list of Arabic language films she might be able to use in her women’s studies and global studies classes. This is only a short excursion around 20 plus countries sharing a common language and multiple problems and plenty of quirkiness. Continue reading
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A Good Library is Hard To Find
What is more important in a library than anything else – than everything else – is the fact that it exists. ~Archibald MacLeish, “The Premise of Meaning,” American Scholar, 5 June 1972 The other day in Jordan, my mother made the day of a young Spanish woman with whom we were chatting by telling her Continue reading
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Work Horse in Egypt
My friend Natasha Ghoneim went to Cairo this summer, as she does most summers. But this time she went with the goal of finding some of the untold stories of the revolution. As Egypt’s revolution made clear, human rights are not something guaranteed to anyone, not just in the Middle East but in many places Continue reading
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The Right To Drive Well
I support jailed Saudi Manal Al Sharif’s right to drive. I support her right to join the men on the roads in her country, a country that has one of the highest car accident fatalities in the world, like most of the countries in the region. See, having spent big chunks of my life in Continue reading
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What Arabs Talk About At Dinner
On a recent work trip to Kuwait, my American colleague started chuckling while he listened to my Syrian cousin and me arguing about the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Is this what sitting down to dinner with family sounds like in the Middle East?” he asked. Yep. Pretty much always unless there is a divorce Continue reading
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Cue the Camels and the Donkeys…and the Cool Cats
It’s time that we get our Middle East animals straight. The other day when I was watching men on camels and horseback charge through Tahrir Square in Cairo, whipping demonstrators, I felt like I was witnessing a bad Hollywood remake of Ben Hur or any other “cue the camels” movie depicting battle in the Holy Continue reading
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Egypt, Revolution, and Kushari (Koshari)
As the people of Egypt rise up against three decades of corruption, they do so very aware of thousands of years of culture that includes the pharaohs, Cleopatra, some of the greatest scholarship and literature of the Arab world, the wonders of the Nile, the Suez Canal, the Aswan Damn—and, perhaps not as internationally renowned Continue reading
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NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS FOR THE MIDDLE EAST
I’m opposed to making lofty new year’s resolutions–aside from the token and easily forgettable “I’ll try to eat less chocolate”—as they sometime trivializes a dream. But I’m happy to make resolutions for others, kind of like the UN. Here are my new year’s resolutions for the Middle East, and I know they’re laced with loftiness Continue reading
Alia Yunis 