Contributors
Elias Muhanna
Elias Muhanna has contributed to The New Yorker since 2014. He is the author of “The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition,” and the translator, from the Arabic, of the fourteenth-century encyclopedia “The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition.” His essays and criticism have appeared in The Nation, the New York Times, and other periodicals. A scholar of classical Arabic literature and Islamic intellectual history, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, in 2012, and is currently a professor of comparative literature at Brown University.
All Work
- Punch Line Dept.
Karl Sharro’s Acid-Tinged Satire of the Middle East
On a trip to New York, the London-based comedian paid a visit to the Met in search of cultural ancestors.
February 4, 2019
- Culture Desk
A New History of Arabia, Written in Stone
How strange rocks—and an obscure language—are changing a decades-old academic consensus.
May 23, 2018
- Culture Desk
Mashrou’ Leila and the Night Club’s Political Power
Hamed Sinno, the lead singer and lyricist of the Lebanese group Mashrou’ Leila, may be the most prominent gay musician in the Arab world.
July 31, 2017
- News Desk
Is Lebanon’s New Electoral System a Path Out of Sectarianism?
The supporters of the new law hope that a political system built on the principle of fostering coexistence might be insulated from a region wracked by sectarianism.
June 29, 2017
- Culture Desk
What Gertrude Bell’s Letters Remind Us About the Founding of Iraq
Bell was entrusted by the British government, on the basis of her unparalleled knowledge of the region, to sketch out Iraq’s borders.
June 14, 2017
- Culture Desk
The Contradictions of Reza Aslan’s “Believer”
The scholar’s CNN show amounts to a canny sort of evangelism—not for any one religion in particular, but for his own brand of universal spirituality.
April 9, 2017
- News Desk
The Fate of a Joke in Lebanon
In a country with the most liberal press in the Arab world, three comic-book artists found out that you can’t say whatever you want.
September 26, 2015
- Culture Desk
Hacking the Humanities
In the past decade, digital scholarship has gone from being a quirky corner of the humanities to a mainstream phenomenon.
July 7, 2015
- Page-Turner
Iraq and Syria’s Poetic Borders
Despite the claims of Muslim extremists, the borders of Syria and Iraq aren't purely the product of Western colonialism.
August 13, 2014
