Drawing on research from his ICWA Fellowship, Fellow Jonathan Guyer’s current feature in Rolling Stone explains how a young Egyptian writer ended up on the wrong side of the law. “Inside the Strange Saga of a Cairo Novelist Imprisoned for Obscenity” investigates the case of Ahmed Naji, a thirty-year-old writer whose struggle reveals the state of culture, law […]
A year ago, the Walikota [mayor] of Banda Aceh made headlines by declaring Valentine’s Day haram [forbidden]. “Many Muslim youth in Banda Aceh are sending Valentine’s day greetings via social media. And it is the responsibility of the city government to ensure this does not happen again…Muslim youth should certainly not be celebrating non-Islamic culture,” […]
Past Fellow and Trustee Warren Unna – a devoted friend of the Institute, its staff and members – died on February 9th at age 93. Warren was an ICWA Fellow from 1958-59 and had two stints as an ICWA Trustee from 1981-87 and from 1990-96. He served as Board Chair over the period, 1983-85. Throughout […]
“Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads,” goes the adage. At the Cairo International Book Fair, where hundreds of publishers and thousands of readers gather each winter, everybody writes, publishes, and reads. While the sclerotic institutions of state-funded culture remain conservative forces with an outsized role in Egyptian letters, independent publishers continue to push the […]
ICWA is thrilled to announce that recent Fellow Malia Politzer’s article ‘The 21st Century Gold Rush: How the Refugee Crisis is Changing the World Economy‘ has won both a National Magazine Award and and an award from the Overseas Press Club. Politizer was a ICWA Fellow from 2013-2015 based in Spain and wrote about the […]
Past Fellow Neri Zilber (@NeriZilber), a journalist and adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Tel Aviv, talks about how Israelis and Palestinians are reacting to Trump’s first 10 days in office. Listen now. […]
Like any other spiritual or human endeavor, Islam is a plurality resounding in harmonies and, at times, disharmonies. I began learning about this faith and its people as a college freshman in 2001. As a journalism student at the University of Missouri, I was asked to reflect critically on media packages that paired footage of […]
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us… And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own […]
FOREIGN POLICY (Jan 20, 2017) –Past Fellow Neri Zilber explains how the Israeli government is anticipating the Trump Presidency. […]
One “is either a Cairo person—Arab, Islamic, serious, international, intellectual—or an Alexandria amateur—Levantine, cosmopolitan, devious, and capricious,” the scholar Edward Said once wrote.[1] I must be both. Over the past decade, I have had a love affair with Alexandria. Exit from the train station, and pop into a little toy taxi, a Russian-made Lada, that […]