“Our inheritance was left to us by no testament” – René Char
I’ll be presenting a short talk on the Theatre of Thought project in Egypt and the ways in which philosophy can be brought to the public to address social problems.
The panel session starts at 3pm, 9 November 2019, at Freie Universität Berlin, Silberlaube Hörsaal 1a, as part of the AGYA conference that explores the place of humanities in Germany and the Arab world.
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. 
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.
I will be giving a lecture in Berlin on 10 May 2019 at the Volksbühne Berlin which will be based on the essay I wrote in January: On the Need to Shape the Arab Exile Body in Berlin. There will also be three short films shown by Syrian filmmakers and students from Bard College Berlin: Wafa Mustafa, Anas Maghrebi, and Rafat Alkotaini. As well as practitioners in political change will be present. One of the primary aims of the event is to critically engage with the essay, lecture, and films by endorsing or challenging the arguments put forth. Above all, the event is an experiment and exercise in thinking and action in times of gloom and uncharted waters.
The event is organised by Bard College Berlin and the below details and abstract is taken from the Volksbühne website.
Grüner Salon
Diskurs / Discourse
Englisch / English
Einlass 18:00 / Doors open 6pm
“Perhaps it takes an outside perspective, one familiar with the language born of the 2011 Arab uprisings and with the experience of so-called ‘failed’ revolutions to indicate new ways out of an impasse. Egyptian sociologist Amro Ali offers such a perspective: he recently penned an essay characterizing Berlin as an exile capital with enormous potential to be a meaningful political laboratory. The networks of exile have the potential to release immense intellectual and artistic energy into the city, yet the urge for fundamental political change that could emanate from it tends to fizzle out. The fragmentation and lack of political efficacy, which prohibit any capacity for action, raises the question: how could these Arab diasporic spaces overcome their paralyzing political despair and inactivity? Arab Berlin, after all, echoes what New York was for Jewish exiles fleeing Europe in the 1930s and 1940s or Latin American exiles making a home in Paris in the 1970s and 1980s.
In the first part of the evening, Amro Ali will present his ideas on the challenges facing the burgeoning of this political body, and propose a new type of beginning. A beginning for a political discourse in a new, revolutionary, but non-violent “language of consciousness” that respects the dignity of fellow human beings and seeks to enlarge their common space. A beginning through “poiesis” and “praxis” beyond the diaspora, to reach a place where an Arab exile body can enter a shared conversation with other communities.
For the audience, we will specifically invite people from very different political contexts familiar with practices of fundamental change.
In the second part, three young Syrian filmmakers and students from Bard College Berlin, Wafa Mustafa, Anas Maghrebi and Rafat Alkotaini, will respond by showing short films that shed light on the experiences of exile in Berlin – namely, political experiences with an existential dimension in which every human being that prizes thought can access. These artistic contributions might serve as examples of the despair that foments political stalemate and inactivity. They also might be seen as a counter-argument to Amro Ali’s ideas of agency, or even furnish what Amro Ali is asking for, a new beginning that is urgent yet cautious and aware of its vulnerability.
Real Talk is a new series at Grüner Salon that renders visible the political discourse of the young, resistance-oriented, democratic and activist Middle-Eastern diaspora in Berlin and provides space for its debates. This series aims to make evident the transnational realities and struggles between ‘here’ and ‘there’; ‘then’ and ‘now’, differences which Nationalism seeks to deny and erase, and which reveal themselves in the Diasporas. The talks serve as a platform to explore the diaspora’s own thoughts and reactions to these realities. The series in the Grüner Salon aims to create a space where Syrian, Afghan, Yemen, Iraqi and other experts in various discursive and artistic discipline can discuss and perform their work.
The series is a cooperation between Bard College Berlin, the Volksbühne Berlin and the German Council on Foreign Relations. It offers a mix of lectures, short-films, panel discussions and performances discussing themes such as the struggle for survival of the civil society in the Middle East; the re-claiming of political agency; disappeared and missing prisoners; the fate of women in the revolution; the political dimension of the (post-)traumatic; the experience of statelessness; and other topics related to the diaspora.”
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Real Talk: zur Möglichkeit des politischen Neuanfangs in der arabischen Diaspora
“Vielleicht braucht es eine Außenseiterperspektive, um Wege aus der Sackgasse der politischen Verzweiflung zu weisen. Eine Perspektive, die allerdings vertraut ist mit der Sprache und den Erfahrungen der arabischen Revolutionen. Der ägyptische Soziologe Amro Ali beschrieb jüngst in einem Essay Berlin als Hauptstadt des arabischen Exils, mit dem Potential, ein Laboratorium für politische Aktivität zu werden. Die Netzwerke des Exils setzen in Berlin enorme intellektuelle und künstlerische Energien frei. Doch ihr Drang nach politischer Veränderung verpufft bisher. Die Zersplitterung und der Mangel an politischen Rechten und an politischer Organisation machen sie handlungsunfähig und werfen die Frage auf: Wie könnten die Räume der arabischen Diaspora die lähmende Resignation überwinden? Die Bedeutung, die Berlin heute für das arabische Exil hat, reicht ja durchaus an die Bedeutung heran, die New York in den 30er und 40er Jahren für das jüdische Exil und Paris in den 70er und 80er Jahren für das lateinamerikanische Exil hatten.
Im ersten Teil des Abends wird Amro Ali über die Herausforderungen und Schwierigkeiten sprechen, die es dem arabische Exil so schwer machen, eine politische Instanz zu werden, und er wird einen Neuanfang vorschlagen. Einen Anfang für einen politischen Diskurs in einer neuen, revolutionären, aber gewaltfreien „Sprache der Bewusstheit“, die die Würde der Mitmenschen respektiert und ihre gemeinsamen Räume zu vergrößern sucht. Einen Anfang durch „Poiesis“ und „Praxis“ jenseits der Diaspora, um dorthin zu gelangen, wo ein Gespräch mit anderen politischen Netzwerken und Kreisen möglich ist.
Im zweiten Teil werden drei junge syrische Künstler*innen und Studierende am Bard College Berlin, Wafa Mustafa, Anas Maghrebi und Rafat Alkotaini, mit Kurzfilmen reagieren, die die Exilerfahrung in Berlin beleuchten – als politische Erfahrung mit einer existentiellen Dimension, die jedem sensiblen Menschen zugänglich sein müsste. Diese künstlerischen Beiträge illustrieren einerseits die Verzweiflung, die der politischen Resignation und Untätigkeit zugrunde liegt. Sie könnten sogar als Widerspruch zu Amro Alis Ideen aufgefasst werden. Andererseits sind sie vielleicht selbst schon ein erster, drängender und doch vorsichtiger Schritt hin zu dem, was Amro Ali vorschlägt.
Real Talk ist eine neue Reihe im Grünen Salon, die den politischen Diskurs von jungen, widerständigen, demokratisch-freiheitlich gesinnten Diasporas des Mittleren Ostens in Berlin sichtbar und diskutierbar macht. Es geht um die transnationalen Wirklichkeiten und Kämpfe zwischen dem „hier“ und dem „dort“, dem “damals” und dem “jetzt”, die der Nationalismus auszuradieren sucht und die sich in den Diasporas zeigen. Die Serie gibt syrischen, afghanischen, irakischen und anderen Intellektuellen und Künstler*innen eine Plattform, um politische Themen gemeinsam mit Expert*innen in unterschiedlichen diskursiven und/oder künstlerischen Formaten zu diskutieren.
Die Serie ist eine Kooperation zwischen dem Bard College Berlin, der Volksbühne Berlin und der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik. Vorträge, Kurzfilme, Paneldiskussionen und Performances werden die Abende prägen. Der Überlebenskampf der Zivilgesellschaften im Nahen Osten, die Rückgewinnung politischer Handlungsfähigkeit, die in den Gefängnissen Verschwundenen, die politische Dimension des (Post-)Traumatischen, die Erfahrung von Staatenlosigkeit, das Schicksal der Frauen in der Revolution – diese und andere, Diaspora und Welt verbindende Themen werden zur Diskussion stehen.”