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This article examines Sahar Khalifeh’s novel Wild Thorns through the perspective of temporal disruptions as a means of decolonial resistance. Khalifeh’s text, situated in the Israeli-occupied West Bank post-1967 war, critiques colonial structures that constrain Palestinian existence and autonomy. This analysis employs Walter Mignolo’s concept of border thinking, María Lugones’ colonial/modern gender framework, and Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of chrononormativity to demonstrate how Wild Thorns utilizes narrative techniques such as fractured chronology, shifting perspectives, and deliberate omissions to generate temporal disjunctions and counteract the colonization of Palestinian time. The novel’s refusal to follow linear narrative progression becomes a prerequisite for decolonial resistance, allowing characters to reclaim temporal sovereignty despite the occupation’s attempts to regulate Palestinian temporality. This article examines how everyday activities and minute details in the novel disrupt the colonizer’s fantasy of a static, pre-colonial time, revealing how Khalifeh’s text creates alternative temporal frameworks that allow for Palestinian agency and resistance. This study contributes to decolonial literary theory by demonstrating how temporal ruptures in fiction can challenge colonial power structures and open up possibilities for alternative futures.

While the vehemence and shock of the debates triggered by the post-9/11 measures taken by the George W. Bush administration may have faded, they never fully accounted for all the devastating changes to the law that the war on terror wrought.The measures have centered on two prongs: 1) holding "enemy combatants" in indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay; and 2) using torture against those same detainees, or what was referred to as "enhanced interrogation" techniques.In parallel, liberal critics of indefinite detention and torture were quick to argue that criminal prosecution in federal court was the panacea to the Bush administration's irregular and dubious methods, particularly because it held those convicted of terrorism-related offenses for many years in federal prison.This was always a nave and blinkered view for having produced hapless defendants, who were convicted of dubious charges like material support and faced many years in prison, often cajoled and pressured by informants targeting Muslims willy-nilly.The most cursory look at what terrorism prosecutions produced reveals a system more concerned with projecting an image of ensuring security, usually where the threat was, at best, highly exaggerated and, at worst, completely made up.Outside the realm of the nation's law reviews, very few publications have grappled with the phenomenon of terrorism prosecution at greater length.In 2014, Human Rights Watch published a report that was limited to the human rights implications of criminal prosecutions of terrorists post-9/11.Also in that year, the investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson released The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism, which narrated the stories of several prosecutions in great detail.A pattern emerged in which the FBI unleashed a wave of informants into Muslim communities all over the country, with little to no preexisting suspicion that anything dangerous was afoot, entrapping guileless individuals who were more of a danger to themselves than anyone else.Rather than revealing that real danger was afoot, the book exposed the FBI's belief that

Usrat Al-Jabal': The Politics of Space in Hussein Barghouthi's Among the Almond Trees" argues that Hussein Barghouthi's memoir utilizing the ruins of the monastery in Kobar as a portal for "ancestral memories" "disrupt" colonial narratives that rely on linearity in imagining space and temporality.Barghouthi's treatment of the landscape as a dynamic player makes the memoir "a site of ecological and anti-colonial resistance.The argument relies on solid theory such as Derrida's concept of hauntology.Asma Hussein's "Refaat Alareer's 'If I Must Die': The Death of the Author, the Afterlife of the Tale" discusses Alareer's poem "If I Must Die" as a culmination of his trajectory in resisting oppression through "the performative role of tales and storytelling."The article examines the complex relationship in the poem between storytelling, mortality, and resistance."The article studies the way in which Alareer transforms storytelling to a "mode of cultural survival" while anchoring his universal poem to Gaza/Palestine.Mohamad Mokdad and Omar Abou Taha's "The legal effects of the maritime border demarcation agreement on the Lebanese state" advances a legal analysis of Lebanon's maritime frontier delimited by the agreement with Israel, signed on October 27, 2022.The article discusses the studies conducted during the negotiations and the political pressure exerted on Lebanon by the US to arrive at a weak agreement for Lebanon.The article points out the "legal gaps" in the agreement and potential avenues to correct those gaps in Lebanon's favor.

The Dissenters, Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha expands the usual subject matter of the 2011 Egyptian revolution to deliver a bold and perplexing story about a Cairene woman's voracious desire for freedom on all fronts.The novel is Rakha's first to be written in English and his first to center a female subject, a sharp departure from his novel The Crocodiles (2013) and its acclaimed sequel Paulo (2016).The Dissenters weaves colloquial Egyptian-Arabic transliterations and French interjections with a robust English lexicon, reflecting the complexity of Egyptian aristocracy at the fringe of modernity.From its opening pages, the novel postures political despotism, sectarian violence, and patriarchy as interlocking systems of oppression in modern Egypt.The novel spans 70 years of Egyptian history and presents a fresh perspective on the all-too-familiar trope of post-Nasser Arab melancholy.In Rakha's narrative, Egypt's history is narrated as the macrocosm of the eventful life of a single Egyptian woman who goes by many names: Amna, a name assigned by a pair of maladroit aristocrat parents; Mouna, a name proscribed by a despondent husband and three children; and Nimo, a nickname used by wayward friends in her youth.The Dissenters illustrates the multitude of roles that Mouna (as the character prefers to be called) undertakes throughout her life: a patronizingly pious matriarch; a secret agent to the Nasserist regime in the 1960s; a feminist and anti-Islamist activist in the 2011 Tahrir Square demonstrations; and a cunning translator and businesswoman -to name only a few.Rakha, however, uses a male narrator, Mouna's middle-aged journalist son, Nour, to tell the larger part of Mouna's -and by extension Egypt's -history.After his mother's death in 2015, Nour frequents the attic of his soon-to-be-sold family home and vicariously experiences the events of Mouna's life through what he calls "attic visions."Via erotic, almost incestuous, hallucinations, Nour rediscovers the mother he and his two younger siblings have long misunderstood.The narrator reminisces, fabulates, and feverishly recounts Mouna's life in letters to his

Emerging from the confluent processes of translation, research, and discussion that shaped Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings (2024), this article consists of a set of reflections on the notebooks composed by Kanafani during an earlier, formative period of his political thought. The analyses that follow are based on three unpublished translations of texts from the mid to late 1950s: “A Methodology for Implementing Arab Socialism,” “The Arab cause during the era of the United Arab Republic,” and “Marxism in Theory and Practice: A Discussion.” Setting the context for the distinct themes that occupied Kanafani as a young Arabist, contributors to this study trace the engagement of the writer with socialism, as a dynamic process with the most oppressed sections of humanity as its basis. Read together, the reflections offer new grounding to understandings of political development, and the role played by Marxism in the transformation of the Arab Nationalist Movement and its adherents.

This article delves into the intricacies of memory, resistance, and identity within the context of Palestinian experiences, as portrayed in Hala Alyan’s novel, Salt Houses. This study examines the profound impact of rememory on the collective consciousness of a Palestinian family haunted by forced expulsions, upheavals, and the enduring cycle of occupation and forced migrations. The essay underscores that residual elements of past are not a passive recollection but active agents that shape the present and future. It highlights how traumatic pasts, passed down through generations, become an enduring legacy, connecting history with contemporary realities. Drawing on the characters’ experiences, it showcases how the struggle for identity and resistance against displacement is interwoven with the memory of ancestral trauma. Furthermore, the research explores the role of elder Palestinians, especially grandmothers, in preserving cultural heritage and transmitting stories that bridge generations. These narratives serve not only to understand history but also as a means of challenging occupation and advocating for the right of return. The article investigates the dissonance between imagined homelands and present-day realities, shedding light on the challenges faced by subsequent generations attempting to reclaim their heritage.

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ) is a peer-reviewed journal on the Arabs, their culture, history, and institutions.