It happened quickly. On a lazy Thursday afternoon, somewhere in Amman’s Tla Al Ali district, Hamas leader Khalid Mishal saw nothing more than a blur of movement as he emerged from his car only to be faced with two unknown assailants. The sound of an explosion nearby, a tussle of activity as Mishal’s driver, Abu [...]

I read “If I Were Another”, a collection of beautiful poems by Darwish some time ago. The collection was released in 2009, and having purchased it in Beirut back in December, I thought today, the day that Darwish left us some two short years ago, was a symbolic day to retrieve it from my bookshelf [...]

On June 2, 2005, just weeks after the Cedar Revolution resulted in the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon, prominent Al Nahar journalist Samir Kassir started his car at 10:30am and seconds later he was dead. An outspoken critic of the Syrian regime’s political and physical presence within Lebanon, Kassir’s assassination sparked an investigation that [...]

One of my new year’s resolutions is to read a lot more. The problem is that I tend to make this resolution every year but life tends to get in the way. So this year I figured my blog could come in handy by providing me the space to review what I read; the good, [...]

Author’s Note: I decided to write this disclaimer after I finished writing this post for the sole purpose of encouraging anyone wishing to comment on the post or the subject matter that there is a need to read the post all the way through. It should also be noted that I have not read the [...]

FP Passport has an interesting feature on what is best described as “graphical journalism”. The book, “After 9/11″, is essentially a graphical representation of the 9/11 Commission report. You can hear about the artists/authors on NPR. The reason I wanted to post this is mainly because I am always fascinated, if not infatuated, with how [...]

Remember this big cultural phenomenon about a boy wizard named Harry Potter? Well, if you do, you might be interested to know that the Arabic version of Harry Potter has just been banned. Ponder that for a moment. I know. It’s heavy. Let it sink in. Oh, wait. This time, the ban is actually political [...]

While I tend to read a lot of books, for some reason, I tend not to review (hardly) any of them on the Black Iris. It might have something to do with the difficult task of summing up a book in several lines, that took several hours, stretched across several days to read/experience. Also I [...]