… What is going on now is a lot of testing of “red lines,” as everyone in Damascus seems to call them. People are saying things and publishing things. But many of them, like al-Bounni and Ammar Abdulhamid, who heads the minority-rights Tharwa Project, are engaged in a harrowing pas de deux with the government. Al-Bounni and Abdulhamid are both barred from leaving the country. Intelligence officials have interrogated Abdulhamid three times since January. Al-Bounni has seen his siblings and friends thrown in jail for peaceful political speech. No one testing the limits knows when the next crackdown might come or what will provoke it. Continue reading “Syria Squeezed: Are We Free Yet?”
Category: Profiles/Noteworthy Events
A Liberal in Damascus
The New York Times Magazine – Encounter
By LEE SMITH
When I first met Ammar Abdulhamid in Washington in the fall, the 38-year-old Syrian novelist, poet and liberal dissident had Damascus on his mind. He had received word from his wife back in Syria that the political situation at home was becoming more precarious for rights activists like himself. As a fellow at the Brookings Institution, he’d been meeting with leading figures in the Bush administration and writing articles in the Arab and Western presses that were sharply critical of the Syrian government; he simply didn’t know what to expect on his return. Now, sitting here in a Damascus coffeehouse in late January a week after his return, he is telling me that he had found reason for optimism about the country’s future in the least likely of places. Continue reading “A Liberal in Damascus”
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”
Scholar criticizes Islamic world, war on terror
Syrian analyst speaks on policy at Hopkins
By Frank Langfitt
By Frank Langfitt
At a town hall meeting here last night on U.S. foreign policy, a former Pentagon spokesman and a Syrian scholar found much to criticize not only in the Bush administration’s war on terror, but also in the Islamic world and the underlying causes of terrorism there. Continue reading “Scholar criticizes Islamic world, war on terror”
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 