MER Article The Intellectuals and the War Edward Said is Parr Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, a member of the Palestine National Council and a contributing editor of this magazine. Along with Noam Chomsky, he is one of the foremost opposition public intellectuals in the United States, a role he plays in the Arab Barbara Harlow • 15 min read
MER Article Choueiri, Arab History and the Nation-State Marxism in the United States developed on the margin of society. Shunned by organized labor, it has confronted this society as an outsider. Until the 1970s, the most successful American Marxist works of scholarship were macro studies by economists, written as if from a distance and emphasizing econo Peter Gran • 3 min read
MER Article Cooke, War's Other Voices Miriam Cooke, War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Cambridge, 1988). Barbara Harlow • 4 min read
MER Article Satanic Verses in Detroit Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence of February 14, 1989 continues to affect the lives of people far removed from its original target -- author Salman Rushdie. More than a year later, in Dearborn, Michigan, local sympathizers of the ayatollah within the Arab American community disrupted a talk on Ru Nabeel Abraham • 5 min read
Prison Text, Resistance Culture The Israeli prison apparatus is a critical and contested site in the manifold struggle to control communication and information in the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. During the two decades of occupation before the intifada, prisons in Israel and the Occupied Territories housed an aver Barbara Harlow • 6 min read
Our Fate, Our House Many Palestinian stories are the stories of sons: heroes or victims, Everyman or Superman. In the intifada, the rebellious young men, the shabab, have become the sons of all the people and their exploits legendary. Sahar Khalifeh’s stories, like her own life, are the stories of daughters, mothers a Sahar Khalifeh • 8 min read
MER Article Sacrilegious Discourse More than a quarter of a century after independence, the Maghrib’s Francophone literary output is flourishing. If one adds to this the Beur literature produced by second and third generation immigrants of North African heritage, Maghribi literature in French appears to be the single most important l Hedi Abdel-Jaouad • 8 min read
MER Article Toward a World Literature? The Prix Goncourt, always the biggest literary event of the year in France, became even more so in 1987, when the venerable Goncourt Academy named Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun as its eightieth laureate. In French literary circles, reaction to the selection of Ben Jelloun’s novel, La Nuit saerde Miriam Rosen • 12 min read
MER Article Harlow, Resistance Literature Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen Press, 1987) Resistance Literature is a wide-ranging and impressive critical study of the literatures of contemporary “Third World” liberation movements as they confront and alter the literary and political categories of the “West.” It is not Mary Layoun • 3 min read
MER Article Editor's Bookshelf (July/August 1988) The defeat of the Arab states in the June 1967 war was more than a military setback. It was also a blow against the radical nationalist project and its modern and secular cultural orientation which bonded the Arab world and the West even as it provided a framework for resistance to Western economic, Joel Beinin • 5 min read
MER Article When I Found Myself This story first appeared in Arabic in the Paris-based Kull al-‘Arab, September 3, 1986. The men in our unit branded me “the intellectual,” a term that connoted for them more sarcasm than conviction. They pronounced it in mincing tones, and played comically with its derivatives. This ought not, of Dia' Khudair • 14 min read
MER Article Letters (March/April 1986) Nuclear Dumping in Sudan and Somalia? (Author not identified) • 2 min read
