The Markaz Review

رسم بلا عنوان لأوبري بيردزلي “كاد ’النمر الأبيض‘ أن يلتهمني”، هذه العبارة المعروفة للكاتب الهندي أرفيند أديغا، الفائز بجائزة بوكر الدوليّة العام 2008 عن روايته “النمر الأبيض”، تلخّص حال الكثير من الكتّاب الفائزين بجوائز أدبيّة تجلب لهم الشهرة والأضواء والأنشطة الاجتماعيّة والثقافيّة حول العالم، مع ما تحمله من أمان ماليّ واعتراف معنويّ وتكريس. لكنّ الكتّاب والنقّاد والمراقبين لحركة الجوائز وحال الفائزين بها يُجمعون على لحظة الارتباك والتوتّر والقلق التي يعيشها الفائز غداة التتويج.

My mother is one of several Syrians I know who believe that Asma al-Assad is not actually Sunni: that her family is secretly Alawite, or that she converted to Alawism. I’ve heard versions of this claim from friends and relatives and seen it circulated through social media and word of mouth, though never accompanied by evidence. And yet my mother maintains it and has repeated it to me numerous times.

Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza, by Fady Joudah Milkweed Editions 2026 ISBN 9781639551989 i. The museum is a site of care and conservation. A space of enlightenment. The museum is built on colonial plunder. The museum is built on human remains. The violence of the museum is not incidental. The object on display is detached from its original world, stripped of ritual and communal meaning, reframed as “heritage” under western epistemologies. The museum has great lighting.

Lara Sheehi will already be known to many who strive to think, write, and organize at the vanguard of anti-imperialist, anticolonial, and anti-Zionist struggle around the world. A Lebanese Arab clinical psychologist, Sheehi is a founding member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, serves on the advisory board for Forensic Architecture, and frequently collaborates with prominent leftist outlets in addition to producing her own podcast, Psychic Militancy.

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https://themarkaz.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Interesting-Recording-.m4a You’re looking at one of Samir Sayegh’s calligraphic creations, Freedom. It sits across from me in my office. The first sight, every morning, gifted by a friend. A while back, a tired cliché started making the rounds: interesting times. I do not recall ever having had the pleasure of enjoying a single uninteresting day in these Levantine parts, but all the same, we are well beyond interesting now.

I first became aware of Assal Rad and her work on Twitter, back when it was still called Twitter and felt, for all its faults, like a real community. It was the spring of 2021, and Israel was bombing the Gaza Strip at the same time as it was undertaking both legal and military efforts to expel six Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem, an area, even according to the sanitized western narrative, considered to be under illegal Israeli occupation.

The Shadeless Border: A Novel, by Jiyar Jahan Fard (translated by Chiya Parvizpur) Common Notions Press 2026 ISBN 9781945335709 The Shadeless Border—the debut novel by Kurdish author, folklorist, and linguist Jiyar Jahan Fard—gives much-needed voice to the contested Kurdish-populated border regions between Iran and Iraq. This voice is figurative and literal, with the border itself narrating didactic, philosophical stretches of this exploratory and ambitious work.

"زائد وناقص ٢"، سلوى روضة شقير ربما لم يبق من الرواية غير أسلوبها وطريقة سردها. ليس الأسلوب، أسلوب أي كاتب، أقل من الإبداع نفسه. إنه أقرب إلى ابتكار وخلق منه إلى طريقة معهودة في الكتابة. على الأرجح هو مقابلة وتضاعف، تركيز أقرب إلى ازدواج وتناقض. مقابلة ما لم يكن مرئيًا من قبل، وتضاعف حدثٍ كان في البداية هامشيًا ثم تحول إلى بؤرة وإلى مركز، وتناقض لا يبحث عن تفسير ولا شرح. يحدث أن يمدح أحدنا الإحاطة والتمكّن من الأسلوب. وهذا عادة غير مستغرب، بل قد يكون بمثابة نصيحة دائمة.

"A Women's World," Omar El Nagdi (detail). We run into each other outside the only public library in town. It is the cusp of summer, the crabapples flowering like a dusting of snow. Maybe it’s to finish her cigarette or maybe it’s the comfort of seeing another Muslim in a strange place, but she lingers in conversation and I do too. It’s almost like we’re back at the law faculty all those years ago, before she dropped out. I shift the box of paperbacks awkwardly, from under one arm to the other.