Muhammad Dibo News Today

I walk through the city with a surprising sense of belonging, and I see copies of my novel in the storefronts. My eyes catch the title, the “New Release,” my name as the author. Where, then, does a writer belong, if not the land in whose language they now write, where they publish, and where their books are displayed on shop shelves and in window displays?

Omar fled Syria in 2015 and today lives openly queer in Berlin. This is his/her story of self-discovery.

Our illustrator revisits the story of the literary publication known only as “the pamphlet”

Read this interview in its original Arabic here. Syrian writer and poet Faraj Bayrakdar has long been known as a staunch opponent to the Assad regime. In the 1970s, he and other left-leaning writers took part in editing and publishing an underground literary zine known only as “the pamphlet.” They printed in secret at library […]

For decades, the Assads have tried projecting an image of themselves as “secular” bulwarks against religious extremism. All the while, they’ve been shoring up the powers of loyalist religious institutions and stoking sectarian divisions as a tool for control, argues Joseph Daher.

"This type of intimacy and comfort with which we used to meet friends has been lost by Syrians in exile, replaced with a pathological nostalgia. Now we don't know what we really want."

Thousands of miles from home, families from present-day Syria and Lebanon rebuilt their lives from scratch in far-flung places across Iowa, the Dakotas and elsewhere in the Midwestern United States. They became homesteaders, peddlers and community leaders.