Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"Britain isn't racist." The likes of Hancock and Johnson are unsurprisingly in denial. Johnson nuanced his opinion by saying that Britain is "much, much less racist" than the U.S, for example. Johnson and his ilk have also condemned the "thuggery" of those who pulled down Colston statue, saying that the protesters must have followed the right/legal channels, not taking direct action.   Actually, that's what the campaingers have done for years, but with no change. The campaign of Rhodes Must Fall is a case in point. -------- For the [Rhodes Must Fall] movement’s vocal critics, it has been commonplace to observe, euphemistically, that Rhodes was “a man of his time”, by way of suggesting that his time has nothing in common with our own. But if you replace the word “British” with “western” and “United Kingdom” with “the west”, you find this statement in his will encapsulates not only Rhodes’s vision but a vision of the world today, one that ha...

Rodinson "mobilised Ouzegane’s point of being less concerned about whether Muslim dogmas were true or false, than with seeing Islam principally as a social and political instrument... Rodinson considered Islam as neither a good nor a bad ideology a priori, but rather insisted on the need to produce analyses of the religion that account for its social conditions in which it developed. As he wrote at the beginning of the his book  De Pythagore à Lénine , ‘the best way to comprehend nothing of a phenomenon is to isolate it, and to consider it, from either the interior or the exterior, as if it is the only one of its type." The Thinker and the Militant

Erotica Nowadays credited to a fifteenth-century Egyptian polymath called Jalal adʹDin al-Suyuti, "The Book of Exposition" is an exploration of promiscuity under the societal constraints of the Arab-Islamic world, using bawdy and salacious scenarios to stimulate and evoke fantasies in the readerʹs mind.  The Book of Exposition by al-Suyūti

Charles Baudelaire, Jane Jacobs, Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, Karl Marx

Edward Said London Lecture 2018 An event in one of the most expensive areas of London for some middle class intellectuals!

Sartre est effectivement resté constant dans son philo-sionisme fondamental. Peur de passer pour antisémite, sentiment de culpabilité devant l’Holocauste, refus de s’autoriser une perception en profondeur des Palestiniens comme victimes en lutte contre l’injustice d’Israël, ou quelque autre raison   ? je ne le saurai jamais. Tout ce que je sais, c’est que, dans sa vieillesse, il n’était guère différent de ce qu’il avait été jadis : la même amère source de déception pour tout Arabe, Algérien excepté, qui admirait à juste titre ses autres positions et son œuvre.  Ma rencontre avec Jean-Paul Sartre

Celebrating empire: that woman on the ten-pound note. Jane Austen

Orientalism

"30 years later, the point of conflict between Said and de Beauvoir is still hotly debated following Western assaults on hijabs, niqabs, burqas and other traditional Muslim attire. The defense of these garments, taken on by thinkers like Saba Mahmood and Lila Abu-Lughod is often deeply indebted to Said’s work on racist Western conceptions of the East." "A bitter disappointment": Edward Said on his encounter with Sartre, de Beauvoir and Foucauld and  Edward Said's diary 

Pro-Israeli 'gatekeepers" at California University

An animated introduction to Said's Orientalism  and beyond Said's Orientalism Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse