If French President Jacques Chirac thought he’d burnished his reputation in the Muslim world for having opposed the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, he must have been surprised to find himself recently vilified in public squares, mosques, and universities from Cairo to Tehran. The proposed ban on the hijab, or Islamic headscarf, from French state […]
Lee Smith
Lee Smith is writing a book on Arab culture for Scribner.
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Reconsidering Said
When I was in graduate school in English literature during the 1980s, Edward Said was in many ways the exemplary intellectual. He was a serious scholar of literature who’d done much to introduce the heady work of that time’s major continental philosophers and theorists — especially Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida — to American audiences. […]