by Zahra Hankir
All the rest of my thanks to Lina Ejeilat, Ahmad Ghaddar, Loubna El Amine, Amal Rammah, Sahar Tabaja, David Kenner, Laura Hurst, Natasha Doff, Dave Mayers, Andrea Stanton, André Heller Pérache, Melanie Huff, Maggie Thomas, Jennifer Powell, Juliana Yazbeck, Alice Fordham, Tamara Walid, Kathleen Brooks, Ghada Nouriddin Salhab, Muhammad Darwish, Yara Romariz Maasri, Dalila Mahdawi, Gaia Pianigiani, Erika Solomon, Kassia St. Clair, and Patrick Kingsley for their suggestions, support, encouragement, and editorial advice (and for answering my panicky emails and WhatsApp messages).
A special shout-out to Simon Akam, for always telling me to go for it, and to Sherine Natout, my first and biggest supporter. And finally, to my family, in particular my mother, Mariam—who is incidentally also this book’s talented translator—and my sister, Yasmin: the most resilient Arab women in my life.
Notes
Introduction: Sahafiya
I come from there: Mahmoud Darwish, “I Come from There,” accessed via https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/i-come-from-there/.
her friends advised her: Homa Khaleeli, Aisha Gani and Mona Mahmood, “Ruqia Hassan: The Woman Who Was Killed for Telling the Truth About Isis,” The Guardian, January 13, 2016, accessed via https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/13/ruqia-hassan-killed-for-telling-truth-about-isis-facebook.
In January 2016, her brother received: Homa Khaleeli, Aisha Gani and Mona Mahmood, “Ruqia Hassan: The Woman Who Was Killed for Telling the Truth About Isis,” The Guardian, January 13, 2016, accessed via https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/13/ruqia-hassan-killed-for-telling-truth-about-isis-facebook.
some of the most dangerous: Institute for Economics and Peace, “Global Peace Index” (2018), accessed via http://visionofhumanity.org/indexes/global-peace-index/.
the region continues to rank: World Economic Forum, “The Global Gender Gap Report” (2018), accessed via http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2017.pdf.
the most difficult: Reporters Without Borders, “RSF Index 2018: Hatred of Journalism Threatens Democracies” (2018), accessed via https://rsf.org/en/rsf-index-2018-hatred-journalism-threatens-democracies.
the second-deadliest country: Reporters Without Borders, “47 Journalists, Media Workers Killed in First Half of 2018, RSF Says” (June 2018), accessed via https://rsf.org/en/news/47-journalists-media-workers-killed-first-half-2018-rsf-says.
Love and Loss in a Time of Revolution
“The war in Iraq is indeed”: Anthony Shadid, “In Iraq, the Day After,” Washington Post, January 2, 2009, accessed via http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/01/AR2009010102079.html?noredirect=on.
On a Belated Encounter with Gender
“I have been pressured”: Carol Hanisch, “The Personal Is Political,” 1970, accessed via http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html.
“cool young women”: In Aishwarya Subramanyam, “I Get So Annoyed When ‘Cool’ Young Women Say They Are Not Feminists: Arundhati Roy,” Huffington Post, July 2016, accessed via https://www.huffingtonpost.in/aishwarya-subramanyam/arundhati-roy_b_10770790.html.
“Power,” she writes, “can be invisible”: Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
“Death is the sanction”: Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999).
Spin
The fact that I am writing: Gustavo Pérez Firmat, “Dedication,” in Bilingual Blues (Tempe: Bilingual Review Press, 1995). Used with permission.
Three Girls from Morocco
Dear Muslims, Immigrants, Women: Facebook post, accessed via https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/dear-muslims-immigrants-women-disabled-lgbtq-folk-and-all-people-of-colori-love-/1193182187387364/.
Words, Not Weapons
damned are the thugs: Al Sahafa, September 26, 2013.
“Islamic regimes are concerned”: Shamael Elnoor, Al Tayyar, February 2, 2017.
“This vain woman thinks”: Al-Tayyib Mustafa, February 12, 2017, accessed via http://assayha.net/play.php?catsmktba=16748.
Between the Explosions
Our memory is far from an ideal: Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Random House, 2017).
“We look at the past from today”: Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War.
An Orange Bra in Riyadh
“His teeth are naturally immune”: Quote appeared in a special, English-language issue of Al-Zahf Al-Akhdar, a Libyan newspaper, in September 1999.
Un-forbidden love: Arab News, February 15, 2018, accessed via http://www.arabnews.com/node/1246766/saudi-arabia.
Dying Breed
most dangerous country in the world: Committee to Protect Journalists, “Algeria Government Restrictions on the Foreign Media” (1999), accessed via https://cpj.org/1999/09/algeria-government-restrictions-on-the-foreign-med.php.
“Journalism met the market”: Richard Sambrook, “Are Foreign Correspondents Redundant?,” Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, 2010, accessed via https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2017-12/Are%20Foreign%20Correspondents%20Redundant%20The%20changing%20face%20of%20international%20news.pdf.
eighteen newspapers and two chains: Jodi Enda, “Retreating from the World,” American Journalism Review, December/January 2011, accessed via http://ajrarchive.org/article.asp?id=4985.
“caught in a twilight zone”: Roula Khalaf and Najmeh Bozorgmehr, “Tehran Enters Twilight Zone,” Financial Times, 2009, accessed via https://www.ft.com/content/4ef2c51e-6013-11de-a09b-00144feabdc0.
“towards raw, dramatic video”: Lindsey Hilsum, “The Smartphone War,” New York Review of Books, April 2018, accessed via https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/04/19/syria-smartphone-war/.
“To be a journalist is to bear”: Roger Cohen, “A Journalist’s Actual Responsibility,” New York Times, July 6, 2009, accessed via https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/opinion/06iht-edcohen.html.
“If we ever hope to explain”: Bill Schiller, “Even in Digital Age, ‘Being There’ Still Matters in Foreign Reporting,” September 2010, accessed via http://niemanreports.org/articles/even-in-digital-age-being-there-still-matters-in-foreign-reporting/.
About the Contributors
Donna Abu-Nasr is Bloomberg’s Saudi Arabia bureau chief, responsible also for Bahrain and Yemen. Abu-Nasr has covered Saudi Arabia intermittently since January 2002, first as a reporter for the Associated Press before opening the agency’s first bureau in the kingdom in 2008. She started her journalism career with the AP in Beirut in 1987. Since then she has reported on politics from most countries in the Middle East, including Syria and Yemen. Abu-Nasr also spent three years in Washington, D. C., starting in 1996. She joined Bloomberg News in Bahrain in 2011.
Aida Alami is a Marrakesh-based freelance journalist who’s frequently on the road, reporting from North Africa, France, and, recently, the Caribbean. She regularly contributes to the New York Times, and her work has also been published by the NYR Daily, Middle East Eye, Al Jazeera English, and Foreign Policy. She earned her bachelor’s degree in media studies at Hunter College and her master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University. She mainly reports on human rights, politics, immigration, and racism. Alami currently is directing a documentary feature on antiracism activists and police violence in France.
Hannah Allam is a national security reporter at NPR, focusing on extremism of all kinds. Before that, she spent two years covering U.S. Muslim life as a national reporter at BuzzFeed News. Previously, Allam spent a decade at McClatchy, serving as Baghdad bureau chief during the Iraq War and Cairo bureau chief during the Arab Spring uprisings. She has also reported extensively on national security and race and demographics. Her reporting on Muslims adapting to the Donald Trump era won national religio
n reporting prizes in 2018. Allam was part of the McClatchy teams that won a Polk Award for Syria reporting and an Overseas Press Club Award for exposing death squads in Iraq. She is on the board of the International Women’s Media Foundation and was a 2009 Nieman Fellow at Harvard. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Jane Arraf is an award-winning international correspondent with National Public Radio, based in Cairo and covering Iraq and other countries for the U.S. broadcaster since 2016. She previously held posts at CNN, Al Jazeera English, the Christian Science Monitor, and Reuters, as well as assignments for NBC News and PBS NewsHour. While her work has taken her all over the region and indeed beyond, she has reported extensively on Iraq for more than two decades. She was CNN’s first permanent Baghdad bureau chief starting in 1998 and senior Iraq correspondent from 2003 to 2006. Her coverage has included the Iraq War in 2003, the battles for Fallujah, Najaf, and Samarra, the rise of ISIS, and the country’s humanitarian situation. Arraf is a former Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow and a Peabody Award winner. She studied journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Lina Attalah is the editor and cofounder of Mada Masr, a Cairo-based news website. She has worked as a journalist and editor for more than a decade, reporting mostly in Egypt but also in Syria, Gaza, Iran, and Sudan. Prior to Mada Masr, Attalah was the editor of Egypt Independent, another Cairo-based news website. She holds a degree in journalism from the American University in Cairo.
Nada Bakri is a Lebanese journalist who covered the Middle East for more than a decade for newspapers including the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Daily Star, an English-language daily published in Beirut. Bakri was based in Beirut and Baghdad throughout her career, covering major events, including the 2006 July War between Israel and Hezbollah and the Arab Spring. Bakri graduated from the Lebanese American University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and received a master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School. She currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her son.
Shamael Elnoor is a Sudanese columnist and editorial board member at Al-Tayyar, an independent daily newspaper, where she has worked since 2010. She holds degrees in psychology and philosophy from the University of Khartoum, as well as diplomas in media and diplomatic studies. Elnoor has been a journalist for more than a decade, having worked at a number of local Sudanese media outlets, including Al Shorooq TV and Al-Jarida, a newspaper. She regularly writes about subjects including corruption, civil liberties, political Islam, war, and conflict.
Zaina Erhaim is a Syrian journalist and senior media specialist with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. She received the first Women Rebels Against War: Anita Augspurg Award as well as the Peter Mackler Award for Courageous and Ethical Journalism, and was named journalist of the year by Reporters Without Borders in 2015. Her reporting has also earned her recognition from the Index on Censorship, Thomson Reuters, and Arabian Business magazine, which has listed her as one of the Arab world’s most powerful women. Erhaim has directed two series of short films focusing on the experiences of women during war. She currently resides in London, where she is a Ph.D. candidate for media and gender studies at City University.
Asmaa al-Ghoul is a Palestinian author and journalist who writes for Al-Monitor, a U.S.-based website specializing in Middle Eastern affairs. Al-Ghoul, who previously wrote for the Ramallah-based Al-Ayyam newspaper, was born in Rafah, Gaza. At eighteen, she won the Palestinian Youth Literature Award, and in 2012, she was awarded the Courage in Journalism Award by the International Women’s Media Foundation. Al-Ghoul has also worked for the Samir Kassir Foundation, which promotes media freedom in the Arab world. She is the coauthor of A Rebel in Gaza: Behind the Lines of the Arab Spring, One Woman’s Story, which was translated from French into English in 2018. Al-Ghoul currently lives in France with her son and daughter.
Hind Hassan is a correspondent for Vice News Tonight, covering news in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East for the TV program. Since joining Vice News, she has reported on a wide range of global issues, from the humanitarian crisis in Iraq and the battle against ISIS to the rise of populism in Eastern Europe. Hassan was part of the Vice News Tonight teams that won a Gracie Award for best news program in 2018. Prior to joining Vice News, she was a reporter at Sky News and a producer at Al Jazeera English during the Arab Spring. She is based in London.
Eman Helal is an Egyptian freelance photographer. Her work has been featured in various local and international media outlets, including the Associated Press, the New York Times, CNN, Polka magazine, and Stern magazine. Helal was a Human Rights Fellow at the Magnum Foundation, an international photographic cooperative, in 2013 and 2016. In 2014, she won first prize at Egypt’s Press Photo Awards. The following year, she participated in the twenty-second edition of the Joop Swart Masterclass. And in 2016, she received the Portenier Human Rights Bursary for her work on sexual harassment and human rights issues. Helal is currently based in Cairo, after spending a year studying at the Danish School of Media and Journalism.
Zeina Karam is an Associated Press journalist who has reported on conflict and transformation in the Middle East for two decades. She is currently the AP’s news director for Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, in charge of the agency’s video, text, and photo coverage. Karam was among the first foreign reporters to enter Syria after the Arab Spring protests erupted in 2011 and has covered the conflict on the ground and from her native Beirut. She played a leading role in the writing of a 2015 AP series of stories, “Inside the Caliphate,” which explored life under the Islamic State group. She also coauthored, alongside the Associated Press, the book Life and Death in ISIS: How the Islamic State Builds Its Caliphate.
Roula Khalaf is an award-winning journalist and the deputy editor of the Financial Times. Prior to this role, she served as the FT’s foreign editor and assistant editor. Her promotion to foreign editor came after she served for more than a decade as the FT’s Middle East editor, overseeing the launch of the Middle East edition and leading coverage of the financial crisis in the Gulf and, later, the Arab Spring. Khalaf joined the FT in 1995 as North Africa correspondent, and before that she was a staff writer for Forbes magazine in New York, where she focused on corporate reporting accounting. Khalaf holds a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University. Her series on Qatar won the Foreign Press Association’s Feature Story of the Year in 2013. She was named Foreign Commentator of the Year at the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards in 2016.
Nour Malas is a Syrian American journalist who has worked for the Wall Street Journal for the past ten years. As a Middle East correspondent, she covered stories on business, culture, and societies in transition in the Arab world. Her reporting has included the Arab Spring uprisings and the rise of a new global terrorist group; the people and communities caught in resurgent terrorism and war; and refugee crises that tested borders and security in Europe and beyond. She joined the newspaper’s U.S. reporting team in late 2017. Malas is a graduate of the American University of Beirut.
Hwaida Saad is a Beirut-based reporter and news assistant at the New York Times, where she has worked since 2007. She earned a degree in public relations from Lebanese University in 1993 and a master’s degree in education from Saint Joseph University, Lebanon, in 2008. She went on to hold various teaching, PR, and administrative roles. Following the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005, Saad had a short stint at the Boston Globe, spurring her career in journalism. At the New York Times, she has covered Lebanon and Syria extensively, writing about ISIS, the regional humanitarian crisis, and beyond.
Amira Al-Sharif is a Yemeni freelance photographer whose work focuses primarily on women, their lives, and their occupations. Her photography has been exhibited in countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Spain. Al-Sharif has worked for publications and organizations including the Yemen Observer, Yemen Times, Oxfam International, and UNICEF. She h
olds a diploma in documentary photography and photojournalism from the International Center of Photography in New York and a degree in English from Sana’a University. Al-Sharif has won awards for her work at the Yemen Ministry of Tourism.
Heba Shibani is a Libyan journalist and news producer. She has held positions at a number of Libyan and international media outlets, including Reuters, Libya TV, Alassema TV, and Alnabaa News TV. She has also worked as an international correspondent for Libya’s Channel in the EU. The civil war in Tripoli forced Shibani to flee Libya along with her family, in part due to her coverage of the conflict. Shibani currently resides in Malta, where she works as a media producer.
Lina Sinjab is a Beirut-based Syrian journalist and writer who currently works as a correspondent for BBC News. Prior to relocating, Sinjab was the BBC’s Syria-based correspondent since 2007. She has previously worked as Middle East regional editor at BBC World Service as well as a World Affairs reporter based in London. Her work has appeared in a number of global media outlets, including Newsweek and the New York Times. Sinjab holds degrees in English literature from Damascus University and read law at the Beirut Arab University before earning a master’s degree in international politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She has covered the Syrian uprising and its aftermath extensively, including the refugee and humanitarian situation and the rise of ISIS. In May 2013, Sinjab won the International Media Cutting Edge Award for her coverage of Syria.
Natacha Yazbeck is a Dubai-based Gulf and Yemen correspondent for Agence France-Presse. She has covered Lebanon, Syria, and Saudi Arabia for the French news agency. Yazbeck holds master’s degrees in sociology and communications from the American University of Beirut and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
