Lecture for NYU Abu Dhabi 21 April 2021
Germany and the Arab dimension (lecture)
Category: Berlin Chronicles
Berlin dazu verdammt: immerfort zu werden und niemals zu sein
“Berlin is a city condemned forever to becoming and never to being” (1910) – Karl Scheffler
The New Arab International Capital
I was interviewed, along with Leila Chamma, Ramy al-Asheq, and Liwaa Yazji, for a feature piece in exBerliner magazine on Berlin as the “new Arab intellectual capital”. The print issue is out now in Germany (1 February 2021), you can download the PDF version of the print article or read the online version (or in German) which is now available (19 April 2021).
In the Eyes of the Beholder: The World, the Other and the Self from Arab and German Perspectives (Berlin)
The event on knowledge production took place at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities on 18 January 2020. I argued that if we do not address the scourge of passport restrictions and visa regimes, then the pace and orientation of holistic, transnational, and interdisciplinary knowledge production in the Arab world will continue to be skewed.
AGYA blurb: “With its contribution, AGYA invites the visitors to a critical examination of established concepts and patterns of perception of the world, the other and the self from German and Arab perspectives. AGYA is proud to present a program ranging from a panel discussion on ‘Scientific Worlds: Critical Reflections on Knowledge Production’, over a book launch of ‘Insatiable Appetite. Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond’ edited by AGYA alumni and enriched by a tasting of different Hummus recipes, to a poetry slam and a photo exhibition on ‘Images of the Self and the Other in the Levant’”
The Arab World, Exiles and the Political Imagination (lecture)
Young Arab Thinkers Event
I gave a day workshop to many young bright thinkers from across the Arab world visiting Berlin at the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. 
Berlin als Zentrum des arabischen Exils (A feature report on German TV)
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.”
Production of the feature report on the Arab Berlin exile essay
A feature report on the Arab Berlin exile essay was aired on the Kulturzeit program on the German 3sat channel (17 September 2019). 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.”
TV report on the Arab Berlin exile essay
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.”
Exiled in your Room: Reframing Alienation and Rootlessness through the Language of Metaphor (workshop)
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.
Visually mapping Czech philosopher Václav Havel’s political thought
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.
