Middle East Research and Information Project

Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971

Hisham Aïdi

Hisham Aïdi is Senior Lecturer at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, and a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, working on a project titled “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-Arab

Current Analysis

Anti-Racism and Political Contagion From Save Darfur to Black Lives Matter

Fifteen years after his classic essay for Middle East Report, “Slavery, Genocide and the Politics of Outrage: Understanding the New Racial Olympics” Hisham Aïdi reflects on what has changed, and what has not, in the intertwined dynamics of Islamophobia, solidarity movements and anti-racism in the Un

Hisham Aïdi • 13 min read

MER Article

Juan Goytisolo

For the past 25 years, every evening around sunset, an elderly man could be seen gingerly crossing the Boulevard Pasteur, Tangier’s busy main thoroughfare. Shuffling toward the Grand Poste, he would walk slowly down the pavement to Café Maravillosa. Regulars would stand up to shake his hand. “Marhba

Hisham Aïdi • 40 min read

MER Article

The Grand (Hip-Hop) Chessboard

In November 2006, the film The Making of a Kamikaze by Nouri Bouzid, a respected Tunisian director, was screened to great fanfare at the Carthage Film Festival. The film, a collaboration between the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Tunisian Ministries of Interior, Defense and Culture, examines the grievances

Hisham Aïdi • 46 min read

MER Article

Slavery, Genocide and the Politics of Outrage

In October 1999, PBS aired The Wonders of the African World, a six-part documentary produced by the renowned African-American intellectual, Henry Louis Gates, wherein the Harvard educator travels from Egypt to Sudan and down the Swahili coast of East Africa and up though parts of West Africa examining the encounter

Hisham Aïdi • 48 min read

MER Article

"Let Us Be Moors"

“Seamos moros!” wrote the Cuban poet and nationalist José Martí in 1893, in support of the Berber uprising against Spanish rule in northern Morocco. “Let us be Moors...the revolt in the Rif...is not an isolated incident, but an outbreak of the change and realignment that have entered the world. Let

Hisham Aïdi • 33 min read

MER Article

Jihadis in the Hood

In his classic novel Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed satirizes white America's age-old anxiety about the "infectiousness" of black culture with "Jus Grew," an indefinable, irresistible carrier of "soul" and "blackness" that spreads like a virus contaminating everyone in its wake

Hisham Aïdi • 24 min read