Heavy Metal: Carnage and commotion in the oil fields of Kirkuk

Texas wildcatters, Moscow oligarchs, child soldiers in Luanda, Baku belly-dancers, highwaymen in Tbilisi and African dictators. But this was more than we’d hoped for…

Serge Michel

Women Under the Sun: Ajram Beach for women only

It is uncanny, certainly unbecoming, to claim that a social realm shaped by antiquated segregation of gender should be hailed as the theater for anything life-affirming.

Rasha Salti

Roots of Rebellion: Beards and beyond in Iran

It seems that “unconventional” hairstyles are this season’s taboo in the Islamic Republic…

Coco Ferguson

Looking for Ali: Notes from “How I learned to stop worrying and love the spectacle”

In a critical studies course I taught at New York University a few years ago, I showed my students nineteenth and twentieth century American photographs of lynchings…

Lawrence Chua

From Trash Heap to Emerald Lung: The Aga Khan Trust’s ambitious Al Azhar Park

There is something Augustinian about the Al Azhar Park in that it evokes a city of God surrounded by a seemingly endless city of Man…

Issandr El Amrani

Architectural Reading: Cairo’s Al Azhar Park

In a city in which cemeteries double as residences, where life and death can occupy the same spaces in myth and reality…

Sadia Shirazi

Hair Is for Headbanging: Heavy metal in Iran

A strangely easy coexistence of the macabre and the mundane met us at every juncture as we peered into the Islamic Republic’s metal scene.

Sohrab Mohebbi, Coco Ferguson

Little Prince Gets Political

As much as I want to resist it, Prince and Madonna will be forever linked in my mind. The two are linked not only because they made us want to be teen sluts…

Mary Blair Taylor

Great Looking

GLH stands for “Great Looking Hair.

Bidoun

Prime Time Ramadan

Stephanie Keith

Shelf Life: Archives and the economics of suspicion

As a matter of policy, the CIA publishes archival material only several decades après le fait.

Tirdad Zolghadr

Going Places: A project for public buses in Cairo

Going Places: A Project for Public Buses is happening on Cairo’s crosstown buses from October 2003 to March 2004.

Hassan Khan, Iman Issa, Maha Maamoun, Basim Magdy

Lather and Rinse Well: A Conversation with Soapkills

Zeid and Yasmine Hamdan are Soapkills, a young band looking to express the feelings of the post-civil war generation in Lebanon.

Alia Rayyan

Another Resolution

Akram Zaatari