The Syrian novelist Roza Yassine Hassan A Syrian novelist and writer, Roza studied architecture but has been working as a journalist for years , writing for various Syrian and Arabic periodicals. Her first novel Ebony won the Hanna Mina Prize and her third novel Guardians of the Air was long-listed for the Arabic Booker Prize in 2010. In 2009, Hassan was chosen as one of the Beirut39, a group of 39 Arab writers under the age of 40 chosen through a contest organized by Banipal magazine and the Hay Festival.
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51