The words ‘Turk’, ‘Arab’, and ‘Greek’ in the Ottoman Empire in 1899
While reading Khaled Khalifa’s beautiful, elegiac novel No One Prayed Over Their Graves, I noticed something that may not matter in the context of the novel, but is worth thinking about if you’re interested in the history of social categories that are taken for granted today. The narrator talks about a party thrown by a Christian woman in Istanbul to welcome the new century on the night of 31 December 1899:
The Sound of Crying
In 2024 I did the English subtitles for the short film Mal partum (English title: The Sound of Crying), a beautiful documentary about postnatal depression. Émilie D. used her personal experience to make a film that provides practical knowledge that we can all use.
Shady Lewis, On the Greenwich Line
The novel On the Greenwich Line, by the Egyptian writer Shady Lewis, came out in 2019. Since reading it in Arabic in 2023, I have given the original Arabic version or the French translation to several of my friends (there’s also a German translation), and now I will be giving other friends the English translation that is due out next month. With great sensitivity, Lewis has written a very funny comic novel about immigration, racism, and bureaucracy in London, where he is a social worker. In a lecture at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris in April 2023, he said that when the news is so full of horrors every day that we become inured to them, humour can revive our feelings. The treatment did me a lot of good.
Sherif Younis, The Sacred March
[English version of the text published in Spanish.1] Sherif Younis, الزحف المقدس: مظاهرات التنحي وتشكل عبادة ناصر [The Sacred March: The Demonstrations Against Nasser’s Resignation and the Formation of His Cult], 1st edition, Cairo, Dar Mirit, 2005. 2nd revised edition, Beirut and Cairo, Dar al-Tanwir, 2012, 196 pages. In June 1967, when Gamal Abdel Nasser’s military dictatorship in Egypt suffered a crushing defeat in the Six-Day War against Israel, Nasser immediately announced his resignation. Shortly afterwards, crowds demonstrated for two days across Egypt to beg him to change his mind, and Nasser responded to the outcry by remaining in office. In The Sacred March, the Egyptian historian Sherif Younis asks what led the Egyptian people to call for Nasser to remain in power. How did an authoritarian regime that was ruthless towards the population, and enforced political passivity by means of imprisonment and torture, manage to inspire such fervour? Some historians of Nasserism believe that these demonstrations were a response to the sincere emotions of the demonstrators, while others argue that they were organised by the regime. Taking an original approach to the study of Nasserism, Younis departs from these two interpretations. For him, the demonstrations in support of the leader, which were most likely spontaneous, were also a product of the ideology that the regime had put in place after the military coup of 1952.
How to make Arabic PDFs with Markdown and pandoc
Here’s one way to write Arabic articles in Markdown format and typeset them as PDF files. This assumes you’re using Linux or a similar environment, and are comfortable with the command line. The basic idea is to to use pandoc to convert the Markdown to $\mathrm{\LaTeX}$ markup, and tell pandoc to run LuaTeX to generate the PDF. You’ll need: A Markdown editor that handles Arabic text well. I recommend Obsidian, which is user-friendly and has good built-in right-to-left text support. You can add the Obsidian RTL Plugin to get a few improvements. A good Arabic font that’s convenient for text editing, such as Noto Naskh Arabic. Some good Arabic fonts for your PDFs, such as Amiri for body text and Cairo for headings. The LuaTeX typesetter, which you can get by installing TeXlive. If you’re not sure what you need, just install the whole TeXlive distribution. pandoc GNU Make An ordinary text editor for writing Makefiles and the like, such as Visual Studio Code. Top-level directory # Obsidian expects you to put Markdown files in a directory tree that it configures as a “vault”. You can have multiple vaults, but it stores its own configuration and plugins separately in each vault.