Middle East Monitor Conversations

Lebanon, a failed state: MEMO in conversation with Mohammed Kozbar Join us for a conversation with Mohammed Kozbar as we discuss the economic and political collapse in Lebanon and what's next in the country's future.A Lebanese national, Kozbar is the Deputy Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and the Chairman of Finsbury Park Mosque, one of the most prominent Islamic centres in the UK, and a member of the National Council of MCB. He holds a master's degree in Charity Management at St. Mary’s University. Kozbar is also a member of the Islington Faiths Forum representing the Muslim Community in North London and was a regular IB Times UK and MEE columnist. He sits at the diversity panel of the ITV London news and is a member of the Police Islington Advisory Group (IAG) and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) London Scrutiny and Involvement Panel in hate crimes.

Join us for a conversation with Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University Kali Rubaii. Dr Rubaii has studied the environmental and health impacts of the US occupation of Iraq including birth defects, rapid climate change,  soil degradation and the outbreak of disease. We discuss how the US occupation still impacts Iraq's health and environmental sectors with disastrous consequences. Kali Rubaii is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University. She is currently conducting two research projects: Taking toxicity as an analytic for material politics, she is working with a team of doctors, epidemiologists, and environmental activists to document the links between the epidemic of birth defects in Fallujah and military environmental damage. She is also researching the corporate-military enterprise of concrete production in post-invasion Iraq and how it enforces global regimes of class and citizenship. 

Dr Melis HafezAuthor, Inventing Laziness: The Culture of Productivity in Late Ottoman SocietyIs laziness a new phenomenon? MEMO in conversation with Melis HafezJoin us for a conversation with Dr Melis Hafez on how the concept of laziness and productivity took off in the 19th century Ottoman Empire. Hafez is an Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. She received a PhD in History from UCLA. Her research is focused on the cultural history of the Ottomans during its last century when the empire experienced land losses, social and economic upheavals, wars and violence, along with extensive, transformative reforms. Her book 'Inventing Laziness: The Culture of Productivity in Late Ottoman Society' was published in 2021 and traces the development of a binary between work and laziness during the last century of the Ottoman Empire. 

Join us for a conversation with Executive Director of EuroMed Rights Rasmus Alenius Boserup as we discuss how the EU and European member states have reacted to the far-right Israeli government and how the bloc could act. Boserup previously worked as senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies focusing on power and politics in the Middle East and North Africa. Prior to this, he served as Executive Director of the Danish-Egyptian Dialogue Institute in Cairo.He holds a doctoral degree in culture and civilisation from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and a PhD in Arabic Studies from the University of Copenhagen.

Join us for a discussion with Kevin Jones on Iraqi poetry, British colonialisation, national building and resistance. Kevin Jones is an Associate Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the History Department at the University of Georgia. He earned his PhD in History from the University of Michigan in 2013 and served as Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the George Washington University Institute for Middle East Studies in 2013-2014 before accepting his current position at the University of Georgia. He has published two articles about Iraqi cultural history and Middle Eastern labor history in Social History. His first book, The Dangers of Poetry: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in Iraq, was published by Stanford University Press in September 2020. The book demonstrates the unique contribution of nationalist and communist poets to the cultural politics of anticolonialism and national liberation in twentieth-century Iraq. 

Join us this International Women's Day as we talk to Bayan Abu Salameh who is working on building and launching Palestine's first satellite and talking about the challenges she has faced and barriers she has broken as a female Palestinian engineer.A mechanical engineer graduate from Birzeit University, Abu Salameh - who is from a small village near Jenin called Faqua - was awarded the Chevening Scholarship, funded by the British government, to study at Queen Mary University, where she successfully designed and analysed what she hopes will be the first Palestinian cube satellite and named it Palestine_1. She is now completing her postgraduate studies at Imperial College London and undertaking further research on her space project which will study urban growth and water resources in the MENA region.

Join us in our discussion with Professor Philip Wood on medieval Arab Christian political thought and his book the Imam of the Christians. Philip Wood is Tejpar Professor of Inter-religious studies at Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations. He is also Head of Education for the MA programme in Muslim cultures.He is a historian of the Middle East, and focuses on the experience of Christians in the early Middle ages (roughly 500-900). His most recent monograph, The Imam of the Christians. The World of Dionysius of Tel-Mahre (750-850) (Princeton, 2021) considers the experience of Christians under the Abbasid caliphate. He is also interested in contemporary discussions of social integration and religious education, and he has recently published an edited volume on theory and method with Leif Stenberg, entitled What is Islamic Studies?: European and North American Approaches to a Contested Field (Edinburgh, 2022).

Join us for a conversation with Justin Stearns as he tells us about his work on 17th century Morocco, the history of the natural sciences and medicine before colonisation and the state of archives in the Arab World. Justin Stearns received his BA in English and History from Dartmouth College in 1998, and his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2007. He is Professor of Arab Crossroads Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi.  His research interests focus on the intersection of law, science, and theology in the pre-modern Muslim Middle East. His first book was a comparative intellectual history of Muslim and Christian understanding of contagion, especially in the context of the plague, entitled Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Pre-Modern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). His book on the social status of the natural sciences in early modern Morocco entitled Revealed Sciences: The Natural Sciences in Islam in Early Modern Morocco (Cambridge University Press) was published in 2021, and the first volume of his edition and translation of al-Yusi’s (d. 1102/1691) Discourses appeared with the Library of Arabic Literature in 2020. He is currently working on the second volume of The Discourses and together with a group of students is engaged in a long-term project to establish a searchable database of all catalogued Moroccan manuscripts. 

MEMO spoke to the Executive Director of Muslim Aid Sweden, Mehmet Kaplan, about the relief efforts on the ground in Turkiye following the deadly earthquakes that rocked the country and neighbouring Syria on 6 February 2023

Join us for a conversation with Hassan Al Kontar, a Syrian refugee who became a Canadian citizen after making headlines around the world in 2018 when he was stranded in Malaysia's Kuala Lumpur International Airport for seven months. Hassan will discuss his experiences in navigating his unique challenges and provide an insight into the common Syrian refugee experience over a decade on from the start of the Syria war. Hasan is the author of 'Man@the_Airport: How Social Media Saved My Life—One Syrian's Story'.