"Our inheritance was left to us by no testament" – René Char
I will be giving a seminar “How society functions under authoritarian repression in the Middle East” at the Amsterdam Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Amsterdam on 7 November 2019, at 11am.
I will be giving a talk and participating in a debate before an audience of EU and MENA youth hosted by the Friends of Europe (FoE) and the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation (ALF) on 4th and 5th November 2019 in Brussels.
“In an era in which we are facing global issues that demand quick and effective collective action, such as climate change, migration and growing inequalities, both politicians and citizens appear to be distracted and paralysed by polarisation. Trust in the rational and stable middle ground of deliberative party politics is disappearing, with people instead opting for strong emotions, populistic rhetoric and big personalities. Issues related to national identity, cultural values and ethnic origins have been prominent in the political debate worldwide, causing not only political division, but also cultural and social polarisation.
Many governments are unable to respond adequately to the growing social, ethnic and religious conflicts – or oftentimes even foment these tensions. Instead, antagonistic narratives seem to be the only way of conceiving the vote. Societal debate has been hijacked by the more extreme movements that instigate high-tension debates, in which more moderate voices and much needed debates about common concerns such as climate change are losing power and influence.
What is the glue binding us together for the future? What can be done to encourage moderate voices? How can we counter social and political polarisation?”
I gave a day workshop to many young bright thinkers from across the Arab world visiting Berlin at the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. 
A feature report on the Arab Berlin exile essay was aired on the Kulturzeit program on the German 3sat channel. Click here to watch the video.
“Berlin wird immer mehr zu einem Ort, an dem sich Künstler und Intellektuelle aus den arabischen Ländern zusammenfinden, um das Erbe ihrer Revolution zu retten.”
A feature TV report Berlin als Zentrum des arabischen Exils (in German) on the Arab Berlin exile essay was aired on the Kulturzeit program on the German 3sat channel (17 September 2019). The video can be watched below.
“Berlin wird immer mehr zu einem Ort, an dem sich Künstler und Intellektuelle aus den arabischen Ländern zusammenfinden, um das Erbe ihrer Revolution zu retten.”
Osnabrück University – 10.30-11.30am, 5 August 2019
Edward Said wrote that exile is “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home.” Additionally, exile transpires irrespective of one being banished from the homeland, as the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once put it, “Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.”
With this backdrop, the workshop will seek to crystalize the phenomenon of exile, its toxins and “antidotes,” by developing the language of metaphors that can add linkages between the individual and the public, individual and the narrative, individual and the world. Globally, the metaphor has come under assault by the forces of literalism allied with declining education standards, distraction as a modus operandi, and neoliberal modernity that not only has little patience for the poetical intangibles and non-metricised languages, but has discarded vision and meaning in favour of addition and acceleration that operates through consumer desires, individual anxieties, emotional manipulation, and false promises that repeatedly drag humans away from the realm of communal authenticity.
The metaphor when employed compellingly in language, can add depth to the dizziness of exile, inject a re-perception of social problems, furnish a re-analogisation of the world, and kindle a reconstruction of imagination capacities needed for political thinking that can aid in a type of discerning navigation through a political and moral quagmire.
The workshop is part of the “Refugees and Home-Making in Osnabrück” event that merges academia and art and will be held at Osnabrück University from 5th until 7th August 2019.
I will be giving a workshop session on 19 July at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen on how to visually map Czech philosopher Václav Havel’s political thought into a working methodology and reconceptualisation of his line of thinking for specific milieus in today’s Arab cities. This is part of the third annual conference on Private Pieties: Mundane Islam and New forms of Muslim Religiosity that will explore methods and concepts in undersanding the changing role of the religious, civic, and secular in Muslim societies.
It was an intense but rewarding conference of 140 experts from around the Mediterranean at the annual EuroMeSCo conference in Barcelona, 18 and 19 June 2019. The event reconfirmed how much the Mediterranean world needs to work with each other to fix the endless overlapping problems plaguing the countries hugging the splendid middle sea. Climate change was voted the most pressing issue and the one most likely to bring all countries on board to tackle it. The paper I presented was titled “Does the digital realm fragment civil society?” I am working towards publishing it with EuroMesco by the end of the year.
I’m giving a talk (in Arabic) on 22 May 2019 at Human and the City for Social Research that explores Alexandria’s loss of public beaches and public spaces.
Click here for the Facebook event.
