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Category: EUME

Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe (EUME) is a multi-disciplinary research program at the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien. The guiding idea of EUME is to explore the historical, political, religious, social and cultural interconnections and demarcations that link and divide Europe and the Middle East. In contrast to thinking in terms of opposites and dichotomies, the diverse processes of reception and translation, common historical legacies, and the mobility of persons, ideas, and societies are to be brought into focus.

Editors: Georges Khalil, Claudia Pfitzner, and Chiara Midulla

A man in a white shirt with long dark hair.

Writing Poetry and Writing Criticism are not at all Distinct Categories of Creation ‒ 5in10 with Ammar Kandeel

Ammar Kandeel is a literary and art critic whose work lies at the intersection of visual culture, decolonial studies, and literary/art theory. His main research area spans issues of Palestinian transnational creations and self-representations. He earned his PhD from the University of Montpellier 3 with a dissertation analyzing Edward Said’s writing of the critical discourse on orientalism. Recipient of postdoctoral mobilities (funded by the FMSH, ACSS, UNIMED, and Columbia Global Centers – Amman), Ammar’s research focuses on Palestinian testimonial strategies and agency across various mediums. In the academic year 2025/26, he is a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.

A Renaissance painting of hell by Hieronymus Bosch.

Cynical Uses of Suffering: Gaza, Antisemitism, & the New Digital Right

By Aya Labanieh. During the pandemic, the landscape of the Anglophone Internet, especially in North America, drifted rightward—rewarding influencers who churned out pandemic disinformation and conspiracy theories with high engagement, fame, and easy income. The popular term online for such a person is a “grifter”: someone who betrays their convictions, political or otherwise, for material gain, transforming what they claim to believe based on what is trending or what sells. While one can never be sure what a particular influencer truly believes, especially since many content-creators became as radicalized as their own audiences during lockdown, grifters can serve as useful indicators of where money can be made online.

A person wearing blue gloves is holding a poster with Arabic text and an image of wheat.

Food is Where all my Interests Meet – 5in10 with Omri Polatsek

Omri Polatsek is a historian of science, technology, and the environment, with a regional focus on Egypt and the Middle East. He is a doctoral student at the International Max Planck Research School “Knowledge and Its Resources: Historical Reciprocities” at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte and a researcher at the “History of Technology” Department at the Technische Universität Berlin. Before joining EUME, Omri was an affiliated researcher at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient. He holds an MA in Global History from Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a BA in Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science from Tel Aviv University.

An illustration of a power cable in the shape of Iran.

Epistemic Siege: Digital Blackout and the Fight for Meaning in Iran

By Fatemeh Shams. When the first U.S.-Israeli bombs started falling on Tehran on February 28, 2026, it wasn’t just the noise and destruction that shocked Iranian citizens. The nationwide digital blackout imposed by the government and the darkness that followed exacerbated the fear of millions of Iranians, who were cut off from any communication with the outside world. Almost overnight, Iran was thrown into a near-total digital silence. News of the outbreak of war arrived only in pieces, if at all. This was deliberate and tactical: the blackout cut off families and isolated communities, turning simple facts into rumors and confusion.

A group of women dressed in black dances while holding colorful handkerchiefs.

Iran: A Nation Inscribed Anew in Joyful Mourning

By Nahid Siamdoust. These days in Iran people are marking the 40th day after the passing of the thousands who were killed in the January 2026 protests, an Islamic tradition that symbolizes the closure of the mourning period. Reports and videos from the country show hundreds of people gathered, clapping in honor of the dead and singing the national anthem, in unconventional ceremonies that are more akin to political events than personal commemorations. In rejecting long entrenched traditions of collective mourning, these Iranians are enacting a new articulation of national identity, one that refuses to trade in the same language of the Islamic Republic.

Old black-and-white photo of three people, from left to right: A man with glasses wearing an uniform and a black hat, a boy with short hair, an older boy in the same uniform and hat.

Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist

By Najati Sidqi, Introduction by Margaret Litvin. In the opening chapter of his posthumously published memoir, the activist and intellectual Najati Sidqi (1905–1979) reminisces about the cultural heterogeneity of his birthplace Jerusalem. In 1924, he became one of its first Arab members of the Palestine Communist Party (PCP). The PCP rejected both British imperial rule and Zionism, which they considered “a bourgeois movement that benefited only wealthy Jews. They insisted that their party, which “was for all inhabitants of Palestine,” could “reconcile the interests of the working classes” of Jews and Arabs alike.

A mural showing Baschar al-Assad holding a sign that reads "Syrial killer".

Staying With Uncertainty: Syrian Intellectual Life in Germany

By Anne-Marie McManus. In a recent essay published by Reset Dialogues on Civilizations, Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab called on scholars to attend closely to the forms and concerns that shape contemporary Arab thought, locating its newness in the uprisings of 2011 and the ruptures that followed. In his response, included in the broader dossier, Samer Frangie cautioned that the category of “Arab thought” functions as a “historiographical device,” one that has brought together “dispersed, contradictory, and elusive acts of” intellectual production under a shared political horizon.

Colorful graffiti showing a blue flower in the center.

“Revolution has become more conceivable today”

By Nahid Siamdoust. For four decades, the Islamic Republic has systematically repressed internal opposition: targeting civil, labour and women’s rights activists through imprisonment, exile and violence, leaving Iran without a structured political alternative. Nevertheless, Iranians have risen up several times in nationwide protests to demand more rights and freedom. Is Iran’s regime at a breaking point? The economic crisis is central to the recent protests, argues EUME-Fellow Nahid Siamdoust. She assesses the significance of the recent uprising, examines its potential leaders and outlines five possible scenarios for what comes next.

Six men listening to the portable radios in their hands, looking happy.

UnArchive: Sonic Materialities and Sound Media of Migration

By Nazan Maksudyan. The cultural history of labor migration is a well-established field with a rich body of scholarship. However, the production of everyday life by labor migrants through sonic means, and the sound cultures shaped by experiences of displacement, have received comparatively little attention. In this short intervention, following Tom Western, I argue that sound is a central dimension in understanding and representing migration, making it necessary to integrate sound studies into migration history. I further emphasize the audibility of migration and propose that it is possible both to listen to and listen with migration.

A woman with long dark hair holding a microphone.

“There is no way to look a conspiracy theory in the eye” – 5in10 with Aya Labanieh

Aya Labanieh is a scholar of empire, conspiracy, media, and memory culture. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and is presently a fellow at Columbia University’s Narrative Intelligence Lab and a research affiliate with the EUME research program’s project SYRASP at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. Her work contends with the intertwinement of conspiracy, memory, and power in Anglophone and Arabophone literatures and mediaspheres—spanning genres of dystopian science fiction, radical Internet subcultures, and the memoirs of agents and spies.