The Syrian American Director, Mustafa Akkad, died on Friday alongside his daughter, of wounds sustained during the recent terrorist bombings in Amman. He was 70 years old. Continue reading “A Star is Dead!”
Category: Culture
Heretical Thoughts!
What is the meaning of national belonging and cultural authenticity in the Age of Globalization? Being true to oneself might indeed be the best strategy for coping with this Age, or any other age for that matter. But how can one be true to a divided fragmented self?
Another Evening to Forget!
It’s been a while since I had such an outing with Mom. Indeed, we used to attend many of these functions together – receptions prepared by embassies to commemorate their national days, parties arranged by some production company to celebrate the successful end of a series, and celebrations arranged by Syria’s public TV, Theater, Radio, or the Artists Guild itself (as indeed was the case this time around) meant to commemorate some event or other. Continue reading “Another Evening to Forget!”
In Syria, Building a Civil Society Book by Book
The Chronicle of Higher Education
BYLINE: KATHERINE ZOEPF
Damascus, Syria
Leave it to others to devise grand programs for bringing democracy to the Middle East: Ammar Abdulhamid wants to lay the intellectual foundations of citizenship one book at a time.
Two years ago, with a small group of Syrian writers and academics here, Mr. Abdulhamid, a 38-year-old American-educated historian and novelist, founded DarEmar, a nonprofit publishing house dedicated to making canonical works of Western philosophy, social science, and literature available in Arabic. His goal, he says, is to print books that will foster “debate on a broad range of issues pertaining to civil society and democratization.” Continue reading “In Syria, Building a Civil Society Book by Book”
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 