[Editor’s note: This article is the fifth in a series published in collaboration with Mada Masr to mark the tenth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. It is also available in Arabic.] A tradition is unchanging rules that govern human action, a revolution is a transformative event that follows no predetermined path. As far as a “revolutionary tradition” is a contradictory term, it also tends to obliterate the revolutionary…

[Editor’s note: This article is the fourth in a series published in collaboration with Mada Masr to mark the tenth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. It is also available in Arabic.] Among the three interpretations of the French Revolution discussed by French historian François Furet, Auguste Cauchan’s approach stands out. A conservative and anti-revolutionary Catholic theorist, he characterizes the Revolution as a radical departure from the language and…

[Editor’s note: This article is the third in a series published in collaboration with Mada Masr to mark the tenth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. It is also available in Arabic.] In the experience of Syrians’ dispersal and our diaspora—and before it, during the revolution, with its territorial shifts from one region to another in Syria—we were offered a paradox and rare opportunity. This was for Syrian groups…

[Editor’s note: This article is the second in a series published in collaboration with Mada Masr to mark the tenth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. It is also available in Arabic.] The embodied insight I gained the evening of Mubarak’s abdication in February 2011 is that absolute freedom corresponds to the feeling of being trapped in a crowd. This doubled-edged sentiment has allowed me to…

[Editor’s note: This article is the first in a series published in collaboration with Mada Masr to mark the tenth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. It is also available in Arabic.]   It is the tenth anniversary of the Arab Spring, and we can’t quite escape the act of remembrance. Yet, rather than reenacting facile modes of nostalgia or tragic lamentation, we opt to remember with…

In the small German city of Koblenz, at the intersection of the Rhine and Moselle rivers, half way between Frankfurt and Bonn, a landmark trial of historic significance for the Syrian conflict has been underway since April. Colonel Anwar Raslan, the former head of investigations at the Syrian regime’s “Branch 251” detention center in Damascus (better known as the “Khatib Branch”), faces multiple charges of…

A new book by Yasser Munif conceives of the Syrian revolution and later war as nothing less than a battle for life itself against a vast state-operated machinery of death.

[Editor’s note: This article is a response to “On the crisis of Islam: In defense of discussion,” by Farouk Mardam Bey, Ziad Majed, and Yassin al-Haj Saleh, also published today by Al-Jumhuriya English. An Arabic version may be read here.]   In their article, “On the crisis of Islam: In defense of discussion,” Farouk Mardam Bey, Ziad Majed, and Yassin al-Haj Saleh argue that the…

[Editor’s note: This article is one of two published by Al-Jumhuriya English today on the “crisis of Islam;” the second is a rejoinder by Abdul-Wahab Kayyali, titled, “On the crisis of Islam: Muslims and the question of equality.” An Arabic version of this article may be read here, while a French version was published in Le Monde.]   The murder last month of the French…

As the French President Emmanuel Macron strolled down a Beirut street named after the first French High Commissioner in Syria and Lebanon, Gen. Henri Gouraud, two months ago—one century almost to the day since the same Gouraud decreed the very creation of French-occupied “Greater Lebanon”—a petition calling for the return of French colonial rule in Lebanon gathered over 60,000 signatures. So rife did talk of…