Category: Michaelmas 2025
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For decades, the Assad dynasty ruled Syria with an iron fist, first under Hafez al-Assad and then his son Bashar. The uprising of 2011 was crushed with brutal force, leaving more than 600,000 Syrians dead and millions displaced. On 8 December 2024, after weeks of escalating unrest, the Assad regime was finally overthrown. A transitional…
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The qaṣīdah poet is not simply a neutral observer—he is a character whose presence is felt. This character is not a reflection of his ‘authentic’ self in the modern romantic sense, but a role he performs. As the qaṣīdah evolves as a genre, it demands a different sort of performance. While the pre-Islamic poet casts…
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Prior to the turn of the century among both near-Eastern and Western scholars, the status quo narrative of Mongol conquest, expansion, and rule of Eurasia from the 13th to 15th centuries gives the Mongols an overwhelmingly singular reputation: brutish, merciless, and unintelligent. In the past few decades, however, the tide of this characterisation in scholarship…
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“يا للغرابة. يا للسخرية. الإنسان لمجرد أنه خلق عند خط الاستواء، بعض المجانين يعتبرونه عبدا وبعضهم يعتبرونه إلها.” “How strange! How ironic! Just because a man has been created on the Equator some mad people regard him as a slave, others as a god. Where lies the mean? Where the middle way?” This is the…
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As an Arab, it’s a complete toss up whether you end up spawning as a Levantine Arab in war-torn Palestine, or a Gulf Arab living a life in London so lavish that it’s unfathomable to the average person, or if you spawn as a North African, risking your life to cross the Mediterranean for a…
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Can a writer give voice to the silenced without speaking over them? This question lies at the heart of the controversy surrounding Kamel Daoud’s Houris (2024), a brutal yet beautiful novel that has won France’s prestigious Goncourt Prize while triggering legal action and ethical outrage in Algeria. The book gives a harrowing account of the…
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Dahieh, in south Beirut, seems a typical, poor neighbourhood. It’s crowded and difficult to navigate. It’s mostly Shīʿī. It’s dotted with billboards showing pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini, Ḥasan Naṣrallāh and other Shīʿī leaders and martyrs. Many women veil, the Muslim call to prayer is omnipresent and sermons are regularly heard on the radio. The rhythm…
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It is no secret that the history of Arabic studies at Oxford is inseparable from British imperialism. Our department’s name change in 2022 did not paint over its orientalist past – nor should it, or did it, try to. On the surface, times may have changed since the study of “oriental” languages and cultures was…
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Once a bastion of free speech, it is incontestable that Tunisia is regressing. From the small coastal town of Sidi Bouzid emerged the Arab Spring, the series of political uprisings and rebellions that spread across Arab nations in 2011, including but not limited to Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. Tunisia was idolised as the archetype…
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Tapestry of Life And if anguish is what provides inspiration, let it be No further and no clearer the whole truth you will see If you pull at the threads at the raw edges of your life Is that not a kind of practice that encourages your strife? To feel sorry for ourselves, why do…
The Oxford Arabist 