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Hegel's dialectic in three pictures.

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The American left-liberals are defending Israel on American chauvinist grounds and right wing Americans like Tucker Carlson are critiquing Israel on American chauvinist grounds.

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The best books I've read on identity, nationalism & nationalist categories in MENA are Saviours and Survivors by Mahmood Mamdani; Forgotten Voices by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida; The Invention of the Maghreb by Abdelmajid Hannoum; Colonial Effects by Joseph Massad; Age of Coexistence by Ussama Makdisi;

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This book was recommended to me a while back, & honestly, it is pretty bad for a scholarly work. The book is 33 years old, but the heavy reliance on Hegelian thinking, the inability to take a subaltern view, & the heavy reliance on eurocentric notions of identity and the nation-state makes this bad

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Fathel @fath0039.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

To understand contemporary Saudi Arabia, the two best books in my view are these two best books. Most commentary, even from fairly well-informed people still fundamentally misunderstand the workings and makeup of the Saudi state.

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My favourite read so far this year. It is about Algeria, but so much more than that. It explores how grief, mourning, identity, and many other themes are explored in literature, poetry, and music. It is as rich in theory as it is historical detail.

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Mae Nick Phra Khanong @nickjbrumfield.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I do appreciate the RAF veteran with a death wish tho if only all British air policemen operating in the interwar Middle East could have been so suicidal

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Fathel @fath0039.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The far right melancholy we see with how they are obsessed with this fatalistic notion of decline is seen in their lamentation of Rhodesia. It was a failed project, but it represents the last gasp of sorts or attempt to save early 20th century white supremacist settler colonialism in Africa.

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The notion that Arab states need more statist nationalism as promoted by a bunch of commentators is misguided. There's not disagreement about who belong, but who is sovereign. Palestinians are excluded of course, but none of the other communities are. It's about which group determines the trajectory

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How the French fundamentally misunderstood the communal role of the private synagogue in Algeria. They imposed their European Catholic view of religious institutions on Algerian Jews. If you're familiar with North African sufism, you can see the how these synagogues functioned similar to Sufi lodges

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I listened to a podcast and the topic was James C. Scott's book Seeing Like a State: their conclusion about the book was that socialism was bad and that neoliberalism was good. Talk about missing the point of the book.

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There is this guy on TikTok who recommends nonfiction books and often he'll recommend pop history books and call them revelatory, but he'll throw in a serious academic book sometimes too. The inconsistency is just baffling. How can you read Formations of the Secular and then recommend Bernard Lewis?

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I don't think we are there yet, but it reminds me of the general Islamophobia that was very prominent among American leftists and liberals. Increasingly we are seeing the same adoptions of cultural essentializations. What Mahmood Mamdani calls Culture Talk in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.

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That James C. Scott book is just starring at me.

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I ordered this book months ago, and it has finally arrived. This was probably the first book to focus on the Nasserite period and Nasser on its own terms and not filtered through the lens of American Cold War hysteria.

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If you trace the genealogy of king/kingdom in the Arab world, the term & system is only roughly a century old & was formulated by the British & adopted by princes & sultans in order to legitimize themselves over local rivals and extend political legitimacy to what was prior religious legitimacy.

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On how France "civilized" the Jewish domestic spaces in Oran and Algiers. Besides the typical French orientalism and racism (that followed the Catholic backlash to the French Revolution) there is an interesting parallel between how French Jews saw Algerian Jews and Zionists saw Palestinian Jews.

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Fathel @fath0039.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

We really live in a time of unprecedented elite impunity (in the west) The death of third worldism and the rise of neoliberalism have really depoliticized and demobilized publics across the world. From financialization and conglomerization to NGOs destroying traditional modes of worker resistance.

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They should have made it into a 13 minute Subway Surfers video with an AI voice over. Communicate with Americans on their terms!

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Nathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Iran released a 26 page missive to the American people about Trump's war against Iran. I am mostly reflecting on their expectations for American's reading comprehension and stamina img9.irna.ir/d/r2/2026/09...

img9.irna.ir

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Fathel @fath0039.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

One way France tried to violently assimilate Algerian Jews was by closing down private synagogues and replace them with large ones controlled by the French state and led by French rabbis (Arabs of the Jewish Faith; Schreier, Joshua)

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Fathel @fath0039.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

This is no different from the right wing historians in New Zealand who defend the dispossession and marginalization of the Maori by defining all conquest, state formation, assimilation, and migration through history as settler colonialism, which is absurd.

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They are stateless people or people who cannot return. They are part of no nationalist narrative and thus have no place. At most they can be subjects in confined, surveilled places that acts as ways for Arab governments and just poor countries in general to extract rents from the EU/US to keep there

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This is just one manifestation. The Gaza genocide has made me seriously rethink nationalist categories and notions of citizenship in new ways. Palestinians and refugees are not even afforded the diminishing rights of minorities, but are made to be out-of-sight and contained.

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Bourgeois statist nationalism in the Arab region is necessarily anti-Palestinian from my view, especially with the weaponization of citizenship. Joseph Massad in his book Colonial Effects outlined this, even though the book could use a more subaltern approach to see how it acted and negotiated.

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This also reflects in broader class dynamics. There very much is a colonial attitude from upper-middle-class urbanites towards the rest of the country and especially refugee/Palestinians. Anti-Palestinianism is endemic in most Arab countries, though it manifests in different ways depending on class.

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The way borders and belonging are embodied are at least by more privileged urban sectors are articulated in opposition to these "statless zones" where refugees are dumped. It becomes a very top-down parochial embodiment of these concepts that are then imposed on the rest of these countries.

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Has anyone read Decolonizing Universalism by Serene Khader?

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Has anyone read Decolonizing Universalism by Serene Khader?

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Borders are talked about in very securitized ways in Mena, especially by think tanks & NGOs. There is also an obsession with these "stateless zones" where refugees can be dumped and managed. This Seeing Like a State approach is very toxic is now part of everyday governance and vocabulary in Mena.

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Laura Robson's two books: Human Capital and Partitions helped inform my view on this. Nandita Sharma's book, Home Rule as well. The politics of refugee resettlement, partitions, and immigration sentiments. And the dead-end politics of the nation-state.

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