Stanford University Press Blog

Lebanese Uprising

The corruption of debt.

HICHAM SAFIEDDINE

Beirut 2019– Protest against Lebanon's council of ministers. Photo taken by Jessica Wahab, the license holder is NicolasGaron - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0. Image has been cropped.  Via Wikimedia Commons.

 

There is no shortage of corruption in Lebanon. According to Transparency International, people in Lebanon are the most likely in the MENA region to describe their politicians and state institutions as highly corrupt. From the smallest bureaucratic transaction to the largest government contract, billions of dollars are drained from people’s pockets through bribery and from the public purse through embezzlement. But the focus on liberal forms of corruption, as defined by Transparency International and other international actors, has reduced the crisis to a problem of bad governance. The ready accusation of “endemic” or “rampant” corruption is proposed by global consultancy groups, parroted by Western political leaders, and put to government officials by Western mainstream media. Such accusations are coupled with a rehearsed formula to solve the crisis: austerity, more transparency, an end to clientelism, and drastic fiscal reforms. 

Such a diagnosis sits well with elites in the Global North eager to exonerate themselves and lay all the blame on their Global South counterparts. It also drowns the debate in legal and financial jargon about the rule of law and fiscal mismanagement, with few results. Lebanon’s law against unlawful enrichment was passed 20 years ago but undermined whistleblowers rather than perpetrators.Meanwhile, other major and invisible sources of corruption, such as chronic debt, are either discussed in passing, or invoked to justify more of the same antidote: austerity measures that include cutting major social services, and subsidies that benefit the majority of the population. Outwardly, these cuts are about ending corruption. In effect, they redirect government expenditures to service public debt - that is, pay the rich lenders - and make way for profitable foreign investment. In Lebanon, corruption induced by debt has reached gigantic proportions, with serious consequences for the state and society alike. Debt is the primary source of lawful enrichment. Lebanon has become the world’s third most indebted nation, with public debt estimated at $80bn in 2018 - a whopping 151 percent of GDP.

Exile

Sato Moughalian, author of Feast of Ashes, on the beginnings of the Armenian Genocide.

SATO MOUGHALIAN

Between 1915 and 1916–  A refugee Armenian woman and child receiving food aid. Public Domain. By American Committee for Relief in the Near East,REPRODUCTION NUMBER: LC-DIG-ggbain-26556. Via Wikimedia Commons.

 

In light of the passing of Tuesday’s House resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide we present an excerpt from Feast of Ashes: The Life and Art of David Ohannessian» by Sato Moughalian. It is our hope the following excerpt will provide historical context on why this resolution is important.

On March 18, 1915, on the western front, British and French naval forces launched a campaign to breach the Dardanelles strait—the narrow waterway separating Europe from Asia—and enter the Sea of Marmara, aiming their warships for the capital and the Black Sea. The Allied armada suffered fierce bombardment. Three Allied battleships sank, one with more than six hundred men onboard. Three more ships were badly damaged.

The British Fleet admiral⁴⁸ called off the offensive. The Royal Navy regrouped, summoning Australian and New Zealand battalions from Egypt as well as Indian Army troops.⁴⁹ When the reconstituted Allied fleet returned to menace the Aegean waters once again, the Ottoman War Ministry dispatched gendarmes into the interior to search Armenian homes and schools for hidden weapons and evidence of treachery. The smallest suspicion of disloyalty to the regime was cause for punishment.

In late March, days after the Dardanelles attack, Turkish gendarmes began to raid Armenian homes and properties in the provincial capital of Brussa, where Ohannessian had recently spent time restoring the tiling of the Green Mosque. One Sunday at dawn, officers entered the city’s Armenian Orthodox church, smashing walls in a fruitless search for arms. The police arrested nearly two hundred and fifty Brussa Armenian intellectuals and business and religious leaders. Thirteen were hanged immediately, and the others were exiled to the interior, tortured, and shot.⁵⁰ Afterward, chetes burned their bodies.⁵¹

In Constantinople, Young Turk leadership, fearful of foreign reprisals for the growing numbers of mass arrests and executions of Armenians throughout the provinces, set a powerful plan into motion. Secreted from the gaze of the capital’s large European community, members of the State Security Directorate and the police force’s Department of Political Affairs composed blacklists of the capital’s most influential, active, and accomplished Armenians. They were all to be exiled into the Anatolian interior. A spy network, directed by Constantinople’s police chief and his assistant, surveilled the subjects carefully, noting their daily movements. The committee hatched a scheme for hundreds of officers to mobilize and apprehend more than two hundred eminent Armenians in a single, grandly orchestrated strike.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Turns Towards Hollywood

Going beyond the label of propaganda in regime media.

NARGES BAJOGHLI

Parade of IRGC tank transporters. Photo by Mohammad Sadegh Heydari via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC Attribution 4.0 International

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A professionally produced video surfaced on Iranian social media the last week of August. A young soldier in the Revolutionary Guard stands on a train in the Tehran metro. Some young boys around him begin to beat-box and the soldier raps to the passengers:

 

Why are you sitting

Join me

We are all from one home

In happy times and hard times, sticking together is what endures

Our future is bright, as long as we stick together

We all have to be ready to heal each other’s wounds

 

Given the passengers reactions in the video it becomes obvious that the rapper and his beat-box boys have shown up unannounced on the metro train. The intention seems to be a depiction of the Revolutionary Guard as “of the people,” a soldier who at once is connected to the tired commuters as well as has the attention of the younger riders who are supposedly enjoying his rhymes. The camera focuses on ordinary passengers, who either look on amused or indifferent as the soldier raps about unity in the face of economic hardship from US sanctions. Not only do the lyrics communicate national unity in the face of domestic and international pressures, but the video forefronts passengers who are read as working and lower-middle class Iranians. The rapper is a young soldier in the Revolutionary Guard, immune from accusations of grift, corruption, and the accumulation of vast wealth that his older counterparts are widely critiqued for by Iranians today.

When the music video ends, the only credit reads: Director: Eighty Million Iranians.

How do we make sense of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard – an organization now formally designated a “foreign terrorist organization” by the US government – beatboxing and producing rap videos that claim to speak on behalf of a nation? There’s nothing new about national militaries using media to conjure unity. So, what’s the big deal here?

Finding hidden imagery in an Illuminated Page

A guided tour of the Zeytun Gospel’s Canon Tables reveals the extraordinary life of a matchless Armenian artwork

HEGHNAR ZEITLIAN WATENPAUGH

A bifolium of two different sets of illustration from the Getty display of the Zeytun Gospels canon tables. Photograph: J. Paul Getty Museum. Ms, 59, fols 3v-6r. Digital image courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program.

Consider this page from the Canon Tables of the Zeytun Gospels, now at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

The illuminated page features an architectural frame supported by three columns. Between the columns are golden grids that contain letters written in the Armenian alphabet. The letters stand for numbers, and the grids are concordance lists of passages that relate the same events in two or more of the four Gospels. In the Middle Ages, canon tables almost always preceded the Gospels. They occupied several pages and were among the most elaborately decorated passages in a manuscript. The Canon Tables of the Zeytun Gospels were created in 1256, the first signed work of Toros Roslin, now recognized as the greatest medieval Armenian illuminator. On this page, you see areas of geometric ornament enhanced with gold ink and jewel-like colors. When you look closely at the ornamental field, you find pairs of partridges and blue birds hidden in the gold leaf, pecking at tendrils. There are two faces staring out from the upper section, their expressions enigmatic. The column capitals are actually ox heads rendered in blue. Plants and animals surround the architectural frame. At the top of the page, two roosters stride confidently towards a jeweled vase, their tail feathers outlined in gold. Flanking the frame are floral motifs and pomegranate trees where two species of birds frolic.

 

One of the matching pairs of Canon Tables by Toros Roslin. Ms. 59,  fol. 5v and 6r. Digital image courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program.

Roslin conceived of his canon tables as matching pairs. When you opened the book, they appeared on two facing pages that echoed each other’s decoration. You can see how the matching page features a similar arrangement, with the same roosters, ox-head column capitals, and pomegranate trees (see Ms. 59, fol. 5v and 6r). As your eye travels from one page to the other, you delight in discerning differences: the roosters nibble at the bottom of the vase rather than striding towards it, the birds are all different, and on the lower row they peck at the column capitals. The hidden faces in the architectural frames have vanished, leaving behind indigo arabesques emerging from horns of plenty.

History Stands alongside the Woman in the White Tobe

The Legacy of Sudanese Fashion and Politics

MARIE GRACE BROWN

Three female students at Khartoum University, two of whom are in white tobes; Khartoum, 1951. Sudan Government photograph: Crown copyright. Reproduced by permission of Durham University Library.

 

By now the image is familiar. A lone woman, with arm outstretched, stands on top of a car in a crowd of protesters. She is dressed in an impeccable white cotton garment, called a tobe; her gold disk earring catches the fading evening light. The woman, identified as university student Alaa Salah, is one of thousands of Sudanese who have been demonstrating against the government since December 2018.

For those unacquainted with Sudan’s history, the aesthetics of the photo are what make it so striking. The soft folds of the tobe and the oversized earring stand in sharp contrast to the surrounding sea of smartphones. But for Sudanese audiences, the tobe is an instantly recognizable marker of national identity. Many have noted the garment’s links to kandakas, the Nubian queens of the Kush dynasty (established in the eighth century BCE). But Salah and her white tobe also reference a more recent history of women’s public engagement and activism: a moment in which Sudanese fashion and political protest operated hand in hand.

Meaning “bolt of cloth,” the tobe is a rectangular piece of fabric –several meters long, which Sudanese women wrap around their bodies and heads whenever they are in public. First introduced in the eighteenth century, the tobe did not gain widespread popularity until the twentieth. Young girls donned the tobe on their way to school and a nascent class of professional women: teachers, nurses, and midwives all adopted the white tobe as their uniform. This connection to women’s progress earned the tobe its status as Sudan’s “national costume.”

Iran and the Crisis of International Reputation

Why the Iranian Jewish Community is Not a Paradox

LIOR B. STERNFELD

January 16, 2015- Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry prepare meet at the Palais Coburg Hotel in Vienna, Austria to discuss the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

 

As the world marks the 40^th anniversary of the 1979 Revolution, Iran is still considered an anomaly among the nations of the world, seen as a fanatic country that is paradoxically both “Islamic” and “Republic.” This oddity allows western observers to exclude Iran from the moral framework we apply to other countries and blatantly ignore complexities that may force us to change our view. The relationship between Iran, Israel, and the U.S. merits unpacking, especially after the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) made through the diplomatic efforts of the EU, the Obama Administration, and Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Despite the broad consensus of intelligence agencies worldwide (including American and Israeli) that Iran continues to abide by the parameters of the agreement, Israel has pushed for JCPOA’s revocation since day one, and Trump made it one of his campaign promises. Prime Minister Netanyahu has insinuated that Iran is inherently anti-Semitic, stating "Iran is committed to Israel's destruction” and  has alleged  that Iran is planning a genocide against Israel (a sentiment VP Pence reiterated just recently). Netanyahu makes these allegations of Iran’s antisemitism when advocating for annulling the agreement, and as we have recently seen in the U.S. antisemitism is an elastic concept. The U.S. followed suit to justify the withdrawal and imposition of new crippling sanctions on Iran.

Dehumanizing Iran with these disingenuous, broad-brushed generalizations is necessary when presenting it as an irrational and anti-Semitic state.  This dehumanization allows the world to ignore both Iran’s commitment as a signatory to the agreement and the effects of the sanctions on the Iranian people, and while the Iranian regime has a lot to answer for, it is mostly for crimes against the Iranian people, not reckless international behavior. The same dehumanization contributes to the  dismissal of the Iranian Jewish community and the reduction of their existence to merely a fig leaf for the Iranian government to insulate against accusations of anti-Semitism. Iran and Iranian Jews share a long and winding history, which cannot be simply reduced to whether Iran is or is not anti-Semitic.

The Second Revolution

Negar Mottahedeh, author of Whisper Tapes, on the women's demonstrations of 1979 in Iran.

NEGAR MOTTAHEDEH

A group of women hold hands during an anti-Shah rally. ©2019 David Burnett/Contact Press Images

 

International Women's Day. March 8, 1979  Tehran woke up to snow and to the news of Ayatollah Khomeini’s new pronouncement on mandatory veiling only days after the victory of the Iranian Revolution. The snow made it hard to move around the capital. Iranian women poured onto the streets regardless, carrying umbrellas with handwritten slogans on them, chanting against the imposition of compulsory veiling. Men were also on the streets. But most of them came in support of Khomeini, the leader of their revolution, and his new decree. They occupied the main streets and squares of the city, blocking the women’s procession and chanting the taunt Ya roosari, ya toosari, “Cover your head, or be smacked in the head.”

Arriving at one of the squares of the Iranian capital, a high school student broke ranks with the rest of the women, shouting in defiance, Dar bahar-e azadi, jay-e azadi khali! “In the spring of freedom, it is freedom that is absent!” This was the ur-form of a chant that in turn evolved, as would a meme on social media platforms today. As mediating practices connecting protestors, such chants and slogans would be adopted, reused, reworked, and redistributed on handwritten posters and by word of mouth during the Iranian demonstrations of 1978–79, playfully and strategically creating new cultural ideas in response to changing political and social needs.

Their voices, confident and self-assured the women called out to the men:  Ma tamasha-chi nemikhahim, be ma molhaq shavid! “We don’t want spectators, come and join us!”

Tribalism in the Classroom

How British educational policy exacerbated social fragmentation in Palestine.

by SUZANNE SCHNEIDER

Inside a classroom in what was then British-ruled Palestine, circa 1925. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In April 1946 the Director of Education for the Government of Palestine, Jerome Farrell, penned a lengthy memorandum about the state of Jewish and Arab education. Directed to the Colonial Office in London and written during the waning days of the British Empire, Farrell’s memo came in the wake of two commissions (the McNair Commission and Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry) that examined the role of education in producing Palestine’s impending political crisis. One of the recurring themes in both commissions’ reports was the improper politicization of Palestine’s school for nationalist ends, a matter about which Farrell found himself in total agreement. What he could not agree with was the recommendation—found in both reports—that the government should grant both Jewish and Arab communities increased educational autonomy going forward. As he wrote,

if unselfishness, peace and goodwill are principal aims of education it will be difficult to reconcile the two relevant recommendations which each Report in effect makes and which, bluntly stated, are (a) that a ‘fiery nationalism’ shall be eradicated from the schools, (b) that control of education shall be vested in fiery nationalist politicians.

The attempt to keep politics out of the classroom did in fact represent a very real form of colonial power, one which labored for the preservation of British rule.

The Dead Negev Doctrine

By manipulating law and geography Israel is dispossessing the Bedouins of their historic lands.

by OREN YIFTACHEL, AHMAD AMARA, and ALEXANDRE KEDAR

Photo by Physicians for Human Rights. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

"When will the state understand that we are here to stay? These are our lands for hundreds of years; everybody knew this—the Ottomans, the British and the Israelis. These lands are our soul, our life, our identity. Even if they demolish Araqib 100 more times, we shall return". (Sayach Altouri, Shaikh of 'Araqib, January 4, 2018).

These words were spoken at a special event convened in the small village of ’Araqib following the release of the shaikh from a short period of custody for "trespassing" on his ancestors land. It also followed the 124th demolition of their village by the authorities, and the reconstruction of its modest homes by the Bedouin residents.

’Araqib is but one of many flashpoints in the protracted conflict over land in the Negev, where dozens of indigenous Bedouin communities, numbering 110,000 people, are still living in localities that are not recognized or planned, with their residents subject to more than 1,000 house demolitions per year (that’s four times the number of demolitions that occur in the occupied West Bank). The indigenous communities, who have lived in the area for hundreds of years, are denied basic services such as water, electricity, roads or schools.

As Bad As Death

For Syrians, military strategies of food deprivation, siege, and starvation are both present and past.

by MELANIE S. TANIELIAN

Photo by Ben White. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

In a Cairo newspaper, under the headline “News from Syria,” a journalist relayed a harrowing account of one family’s exodus from their war-torn home:

A Moslem family arrived in Egypt from Tripoli, Syria, about a couple of weeks ago. The account of their escape reads more like fiction than reality. During many a long night, patiently and secretly, the work of building a small skiff was carried on inside the house; and, as soon as it was completed, the frail boat was launched on a rather rough sea. Even the old mother was dumped down in the boat under the cover of darkness, and the journey to a place of safety—the name of which is withheld for obvious reasons—was a long drawn agony; the occupants of the boat were almost all the time waist deep in water, and it was only through tireless and desperate baling that the constant danger of sinking was averted. To have thus braved such a voyage the situation left behind must have been as bad indeed as death.

Today, this story of escape, of war-hardened migrants braving the waters of the Mediterranean, does not sound like fiction at all. The reality of the twenty-first century is that such perilous journeys in unsafe vessels remain one of the few options left for those fleeing wars and violence, and those seeking to escape economic hardships—conditions, in other words, “as bad indeed as death.” The sea, an unforgiving mediator on which many refugees have staked their lives, has taken its toll: The United Nations High Commissioners for Refugees reports that in 2015 over a million migrants (the daily average reaching 2,700), most escaping the ongoing conflict in Syria, arrived in Europe by sea. But this story of a desperate Syrian family fleeing their home by makeshift boat is not one of those stories: It is the account of a journey undertaken nearly a hundred years ago by a family whose trek was one among thousands in its own time, though few such journeys were remembered. And while it bears striking resemblance to what we see in the daily headlines of 2017, this article was documenting the trauma of another war, the First World War, that much like the chaos taking place today, made home front conditions unlivable.

Given conditions on the ground, it is little wonder that Syrians today are following the same path trod by thousands of Syrians a century go, escaping their homes by any means necessary.

Israel’s Expanding Permit Regime

How racial hierarchy and bureaucracy are reshaping Jerusalem.

by YAEL BERDA

Separation wall between Israel and Palestine, 2005. Photo by Dafna Kaplan. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

For Palestinians living outside Israel’s 1948 borders, life is precarious and heavily regulated by a persistent procedural violence that limits their freedom of movement and shapes daily life. In the West Bank, impediments on the freedom of movement take the form of physical checkpoints, roadblocks, and a massive network of walls and fences manned by heavily armed guards and state-of-the-art surveillance technology. For Jerusalemites who are not Israeli citizens but hold identity cards distributed to them when Israel annexed the eastern part of the city in 1967, mobility has been somewhat easier. And though maintaining life in Jerusalem presents a financial and political burden to many Palestinian families, it’s a hardship many take on, as they understand that living in Jerusalem protects them from the draconian permit regime that restricts the mobility of neighboring Palestinians in the West Bank. At least, such was the case until recently.

Today, Palestinians who are stateless, but residents of East Jerusalem face a new threat to their political rights and freedom of movement in the form of new legal and bureaucratic plans to reshape the city through the exclusion of hundreds of thousands of residents from its jurisdiction.

Palestinians who are stateless, but residents of East Jerusalem face a new threat to their political rights and freedom of movement.

The new plan is yet another instance in which the Israeli government has attempted to move Palestinians from East Jerusalem to the occupied West Bank. For decades, the policy of the Israeli Ministry of Interior was called the “silent transfer,” which consisted of ever-mounting procedural demands to prove one’s center of life was in Jerusalem, or have one's residency status revoked. The building of the separation wall in the early 2000s caused thousands of families who had lived in East Jerusalem, beyond the wall encircling the West Bank, to seek housing, work, and education within the wall. This put extreme pressure on education, sewage, and welfare infrastructure—systems that were underfunded and underdeveloped compared to their counterparts in Jewish Jerusalem.

Remembering Refugee Children

Life for Iraqi Jews in Israel was not easy, particularly for the youngest among them.

by ORIT BASHKIN

Displaced Iraqi Jews, 1951. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Between 1949 and 1951, some 123,000 Iraqi Jews who were denationalized by the Iraqi state migrated to Israel. These Jews, I suggest, were not native sons returning to their homeland, but rather immigrants arriving at a new location, where they encountered prejudice and discrimination. Most of them resided in transit camps, known as Ma‘abarot. Originally, these camps were perceived as sites in which Jewish migrants would stay for only a brief period of time, yet many Jews remained there for much longer periods (between one to seven years), living in tents, huts, and shacks where poor sanitary and hygiene conditions, poverty, and neglect ran rampant.

The transit camps where Iraqi Jewish children resided were dangerous spaces.

 

Impossible Exodus » tells the story of Iraqi Jews' first decades in Israel, who, faced with ill treatment and discrimination from state officials, engaged in various forms of resistance.

My book, Impossible Exodus, sheds light on Iraqi Jewish life in the Ma‘abarot of Israel; on the communists and activists who participated in strikes, sit-ins, and demonstrations, on the Iraqi mothers who managed to get their children out of the cycle of poverty, and on the teachers who, without state permission, organized classes and schools. The most difficult chapter for me to write concerned Iraqi Jewish children, not only because these children were the fathers and mothers of childhood friends of mine but also because of the resonance of their experiences with those of current refugee children, Syrian and Yemenite in particular, who, like the Iraqi children whose history I was reconstructing, lost a sense of home and normalcy—and also because it is always difficult to write about the sufferings of the most helpless and vulnerable.

Indeed, the transit camps where Iraqi Jewish children resided were dangerous spaces. Mothers aborted because ambulances could not reach these camps. Mice, rats, and insects threatened the children's health. In Jerusalem, land mines were found in the vicinity of one camp. In 1954, a child living in the transit camp at Holon was killed when he was playing by a dunghill, and an old shell exploded. As families were living in tents and shacks and lighting was mainly in the form of oil lanterns and candles, these temporary houses caught fire. A two-year-old baby was burned alive in one such fire; there were no water tanks to put it out and no phone with which to call the fire department. Near Haifa, three children met with the same fate when their tent caught fire. They were raised by their widowed father, who tried to commit suicide twice after the tragedy.

Global Media in the Holy Land

From satellite TV to contraband texts, media has played a critical role for Palestinians in Israel.

by MAHA NASSAR

Control room of Arabic-language satellite TV channel. Photo by Deirdre Kline, 2008. Public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).

Flip through some of the eight hundred or so Arabic satellite television stations available today, and you’ll find many programs that would look quite familiar to American audiences. On the popular MBC 1 station, you can watch Good Morning Arabs and Arab Idol, both of which are produced and hosted in Arabic, but have formats nearly identical to those of their American counterparts. Programming on MBC 4 would look even more familiar, with popular American shows like Project Runway and CBS’s The Talk broadcast in English with Arabic subtitles. The programs’ sidestepping of political sensitivities and frequent product placement exemplify the commercialized, corporatized global media that has come to the Arab world in recent decades.

But there is another type of global media, one with a longer and more interesting history. Long before satellite television and the internet became the primary modes of communication and entertainment in the region, written texts, especially books, newspapers, and journals, were being hand-copied, printed, sold, mailed, and smuggled across geographic and political divides. Far from being commercialized entertainment, this written media was utilized by political organizers and intellectuals to subvert official state narratives, challenge government policies, and connect otherwise isolated peoples to one another.

Hard Luck and a Dose of Pluck

A newly translated Judeo-Tunisian novella opens a window onto life under colonial rule.

a Q&A with LIA BROZGAL and SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

A young Jewish woman in Sfax. Source: Géographie pittoresque et monumentale des colonies françaises: Tunisie. Paris: Flammarion, 1906.

Published in Tunis in 1938, Ninette of Sin Street is one of the first works of Tunisian fiction in French and is now available in English for the first time. The story peers up at colonial society from the gutter, rather than down from the balcony of high politics. It is about ordinary, everyday life and, as such, is a study in power relations as they took shape on the ground and in the street, amidst the intricacies of French colonial rule, religious difference, and class discrepancy. This volume offers the first English translation of Vitalis Danon’s best-known work. Professors Lia Brozgal and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, editors to the English edition, answer some of our questions about the novella below.

 

Q:

Who and what is the story of Ninette of Sin Street about?

 

A:

LIA BROZGAL: Ninette tells the story of its titular protagonist, Ninette, a young Jewish woman living in the town of Sfax in the 1930s—a period during which Tunisia was under French rule. Ninette, as we learn, has grown up in poverty; she is an orphan making her way in a complicated, harsh world; she is destitute and has sometimes resorted to prostitution for a few coins. She is also the single mother of a little boy named Israel. Her primary concern, when the novella opens, is getting her son enrolled in the local Jewish school so that he can learn a trade and become, as Ninette says “honorable.” As she recounts her travails—always with a dose of pluck—we travel with her from the poor district of Sfax to Tunis, the capital, and back again as Ninette makes her way in the world.

Modern Iran in 8 Songs

From classical melodies to rap, Iran’s music reveals its long struggle for political freedom.

by NAHID SIAMDOUST

Public domain via Pixabay.

 

Soundtrack of the Revolution » offers a striking account of Iranian culture, politics, and social change to provide an alternative history of the Islamic Republic.

Music was one of the first casualties of the Iranian Revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini decreed early on that music was “opium for the masses” and so it was banned in 1979. But music has deep roots in Iranian culture and quickly crept back into public life. Indeed, in the absence of a free official public sphere, music has offered one of the most important vehicles for political expression in the face of government repression, creating a channel of mass communication that has transformed public culture within the limits of an authoritarian state. At the same time, Iranian music tells the story of the evolution of the state itself, from a severe republic of mourning to one that allows for a certain type of controlled fun. Now more than thirty-five years on from the revolution, both the children of the revolution and their music have come of age and the art they have produced offers a striking account of Iranian culture, politics, and social change. Taken together, the eight songs below shed light on issues at the heart of debates in Iran—about its future and identity, the quest for political freedom, and changing notions of religiosity.