January 5, 2016 edition

Perhaps Apocalypse Now! is being shown right now in the Middle East. Not as a film.
On 5 July 2014 at the Al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, Iraq, someone calling himself Abu Bakar al-Baghdadi appeared and gave a Fasting Month sermon. He was wearing a black turban and a black robe, he was heavy-set and had a scary face with thick eyebrows; somehow, some procedure led him to being considered the Caliph, the world leader of the Islamic ummat. And from then on, a series of confusing reports have been flowing via the world media about what in English is called IS, Islamic State, or Daesh, an acronym from ad-Dawlah al-Islmiyah fi'l-Irq wa-sh-Shm.

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More Sidelines articles in other editions

December 29, 2015 edition

Stepan: Only bombs are revolutionary
Almost half a century ago, Arief Budiman translated Albert Camus' play Les Justes into Indonesian with the title Teroris (The Terrorists), and it became the Camus play most often performed in Indonesian cities.

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December 22, 2015 edition

In the early winter of 1956, when Ben Anderson was aged 20, something happenedsomething that changed the course of his life.
That day, on the campus of the University of Cambridge, a group of Indian and Sri Lankan students were voicing impassioned protest. Ben, who was in his last year in the Classics Department, went to listen. But suddenly some English youths started singing God Save the Queen and assaulted them. They smashed and beat up the thin dark-skinned students who were demonstrating. Ben, a short-sighted and puny young Irishman, tried to break things up. But he got punched himself. "I had never been so angry in my life," he later said.

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December 15, 2015 edition

Life is not a framed map. But it seems that people easily forget this, when history becomes a finished storyprior to conquest.
There is an anecdote from the 18th century when Europeans were sailing to all corners of the earth as explorers, and later (or simultaneously) as colonizers. One day in 1787, La Prouse, a French admiral of the fleet, arrived in China aftersailing around the Pacific Ocean for a hundred days. You could call it a scientific expedition: La Prouse took with him 10 scientists. They wanted to map the coast of Sakhalin Island.

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December 8, 2015 edition

The word 'Islam' is touted almost daily with anger, fear or reverence. At the same time, suicide bombs explode and destroy, beheadings take place in front of television cameras, girls are kidnapped and historic edifices are blown up. So what does the word mean actually?
"Islam is not a religion of peace," writes Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her recently published book Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now.

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December 1, 2015 edition

A large sprawling city, a cosmopolis that turns everyone into both a stranger and a visitor liberated in nooks and crannies without addressesprobably this is what makes Paris and New York difficult to forget.
"There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it..."

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November 24, 2015 edition

In that embattled territory, children were watching the Charlie Chaplin film, The Kid. They laughed uproariously. Their parents or older siblings were probably keeping watch on the border with their rifles cocked, but in Rojava, in the area of North Syria occupied by the Kurds, there was a pause in war, and people were building hope.
Who knows for how long?

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