The Lede

In May 1948, at the onset of the Arab-Israeli War, Egyptian soldiers crossed into Palestine at Rafah as military leaders promised a swift victory. Yet despite their defeat by the year’s end, this war would give way to military rule less than four years later. “A military loss was not what Egyptians expected,” historian Chloe Bordewich tells New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson in The Lede. Egyptian m...

Tunisia was the cradle of the Arab Spring, and had been hailed as its biggest success story. But President Kais Saied’s new constitution, narrowly approved in a controversial referendum last July, has changed that. “Kais Saied has unchecked power,” Mohamed-Dhia Hammami tells New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson in The Lede. “Even under Ben Ali, we used to have some sort of balances and checks. There...

One year after the fall of Kabul, this special anniversary episode of The Lede looks back on the momentous events of Aug. 15, 2021, and explores how Afghanistan has fared in the aftermath. New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai talks to Afghanistan correspondent Fazelminallah Qazizai, who was in Kabul the day it fell, about what the first year of Taliban rule has looked like from the ground. He also...

What if you woke up one morning to discover everything you knew about the world was wrong? That all the truths you’d been taught to take for granted were actually lies? For author and political philosopher Lea Ypi, that’s not a hypothetical question. In her recent memoir “Free: Coming of Age at the End of History,” she tells the story of growing up in communist Albania only for the regime to colla...

Selma Dabbagh is a British-Palestinian writer and the editor of the 2021 anthology “We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers.” Through poetry and short stories, novel excerpts and letters, the collection pulls from more than 1,000 years of Arab women’s writing — from pre-Islamic poetry to contemporary fiction. “There seemed to be something so modern and pithy and frank and refreshi...

The Ottoman sultans reigned for more than 600 years. In that time, they conquered almost all of what we consider to be the Middle East today, as well as North Africa, parts of East Africa and Southeastern Europe. But over the course of the 19th century, their power waned, and the beleaguered empire finally collapsed after a bitter defeat in World War I. Their fall created the Middle East as we kno...

Maz Jobrani is a comedian, actor and writer who lives in Los Angeles. In this podcast, he joinsNew Lines Magazine's Anthony Elghossain for a conversation on comedy and life. He talks about how he got started in comedy, what it was like playing terrorists on TV and how he broke out of the box as a comic observer on issues great and small—from the geopolitics of the so-called War on Terror to the Le...

Lebanese poet Zeina Hashem Beck has been publishing poetry in Arabic and English for over a decade. Her latest collection of bilingual poems, titled “O,” was published at the beginning of July. In this episode she joins New Lines Magazine's Rasha Elass to share her thoughts on what inspires her bilingual verses and how they intertwine over themes of language, country and womanhood. They talk about...

Since Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, there has been a renewed interest in the wealth and influence of Russian oligarchs in the U.K. Moscow’s elites have bought mansions in London’s ultra-exclusive neighborhoods and send their children to British private schools. But Russians are not the only ones taking advantage of Britain’s willingness to turn a blind eye to overseas corruption. Inves...

Ibn Arabi was a 12th-century philosopher, poet and “one of the great spiritual teachers of the Muslim world.” Both his philosophical works and his poetry have been translated countless times, most recently by Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger in their highly experimental 2022 collection “Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi.” In this podcast, the two join New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson to talk about...

The First World War put an end to 600 years of Ottoman rule. Buoyed by promises of self-determination on the part of the victorious powers, the region’s peoples prepared for a future free of imperial rule. They were to be bitterly disappointed. European rhetoric about self-rule had never been sincerely intended to apply to non-Europeans — which was made brutally clear by Britain and France as they...

The bishop of Toledo, Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada, wrote “Historia Arabum” in the 13th century. The book is one of the earliest accounts of Arabic history written by a Western author. It was translated from the original Latin into Arabic by Aymenn Al-Tamimi, a nonresident fellow at the New Lines Institute and a Ph. D. student at the University of Swansea in Wales. In this podcast, he joins New Lines M...

At a moment when it seems as if Americans can’t agree on anything — when political divisions seem to run deeper than they have since the Civil Rights Movement — political scientist, professor and pundit Yascha Mounk of Johns Hopkins University remains optimistic that an answer can be found. His latest book, “The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure,” combs t...

When Amjad Youssef met “Anna,” a young Alawite Syrian who was studying abroad, the military man was skeptical at first. But as the months unfolded, he began to open up to his fellow pro-regime partisan over Facebook. What he didn't know was that Anna had been created by genocide researchers Annsar Shahhoud and Uğur Ümit Üngör. In this podcast with New Lines Magazine's Rasha Elass, they talk about...

Marcel Kurpershoek is a former Dutch ambassador and accomplished scholar at NYU Abu Dhabi. His most recent work is “Love, Death, Fame,” a translation of poems by al-Mayidi ibn Zahir, a 17th-century poet from what is now the United Arab Emirates. In this podcast, he catches up with New Lines Magazine's Kevin Blankinship to talk about Nabati poetry, the thousand-year-old oral poetic tradition of the...

For six centuries, the Ottoman Sultans held dominion across most of the Middle East, North Africa and Southern Europe. But by the eve of the First World War in 1914, the empire was already in steep decline. It is at this moment of crisis that the preeminent historian Eugene Rogan begins his bestselling book “The Fall of the Ottomans.” In this podcast, he talks to NNew Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Ya...

William Maynard Hutchins is a professor emeritus at Appalachian State University and an award-winning translator of Arabic literature, most famous for his work on “The Cairo Trilogy” by Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. In this podcast, he joins New Lines Magazine's Kevin Blankinship to discuss his long and storied career. They discuss how he began his career, what it was like working with f...

Ahmed El Shamsy is an associate professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago. As part of a new series from New Lines Magazine big ideas from history, El Shamsy joins culture editor Lydia Wilson to talk about how the Middle East changed in the age of printing. They discuss how the “European book drain” induced the Arab world’s adoption of the printing press, why printing enabled a revi...

Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton has circled the globe three times in pursuit of the Earth’s rarest sounds. His sound portraits record quickly vanishing natural soundscapes. In this episode he joins New Lines Magazine's Rasha Elass to talk about the quiet he found during the pandemic, when human noise pollution subsided, and what that brief but profound period of respite can teach us about our wo...

Author and historian Haris Durrani speaks to New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai about representation and religion in the classic sci-fi novel “Dune” and its recent film adaptation. They discuss how the book’s Islamic themes are ignored or missed by non-Muslim audiences, why Hollywood fails at representing the Middle East on screen and how a new generation of Muslim authors is changing science fi...

Pakistani writer and novelist Fatima Bhutto speaks to New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai for this podcast about what we mean when we talk about political fiction — and how the stories we are most attracted to reflect not just the world we live in but what we think that world should be. They discuss why she decided to be a writer, rather than a politician like her aunt Benazir Bhutto, why the CIA...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shattered the precarious geopolitical balance in Eastern Europe. Yet the ripple effects from the conflict extend far beyond that region. In this podcast presented by New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai, Lydia Wilson reports from Amman where she speaks to freelance journalist Suha Ma’ayeh and international relations expert Amer Al Sabaileh about the impact the war...

The Arab world has a rich literary heritage and a vibrant contemporary literary scene which has attracted many English speaking readers – Arabic is one of the top-ten most translated languages for American audiences. But the process of translation is complex and often politically fraught. In this podcast, Reem Bassiouney, sociolinguistics professor and award-winning author of Sons of the People: T...

As Ukraine braces for a fourth week of war, Syria marks 11 years of brutal fighting. The same Russian bombs pounding Kharkiv have been continually used against Syrian cities like Idlib and Aleppo since Vladimir Putin intervened in 2015. In this podcast, Anand Gopal, award-winning journalist and author of “No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes,” joins N...

Eight years before the recent Russian invasion, a popular uprising in Kyiv overthrew the old Moscow-backed government in favor of moving toward the European Union — an act for which Russia has been punishing Ukraine ever since. It is those events that inspired Kalani Pickhart’s recent novel, “I Will Die in a Foreign Land.” Hailed as one of the best books of 2021, it has found renewed relevance in...