Anthony Shadid

Remembering Anthony Shadid

admin — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 02:09:44 +0000

You can read the full New York Times page here.

“Anthony was first and foremost a witness — an incomparable, reliable witness.”–Bill Keller Columnist and Former Executive Editor, The New York Times

“Working with Anthony Shadid was always like seeing the Middle East for the first time.”–Michael Kamber, Photographer

“He was Skyping with his daughter, Leila, and immediately transitioned from being a fearless war correspondent to a simple, loving father.”–Lynsey Addario, Photographer

“He’ll be remembered for as long as reporters go to war.”–John F. Burns, London Bureau Chief, The New York Times

“His contagious smile and relentless good nature broke the ice with an ease that always left me in awe.”–Moises Saman, Photographer

Interrogating the NY Times’ Anthony Shadid

admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:26:17 +0000

Anthony talks to Aaron Ross at Mother Jones.

Mother Jones: What was it like growing up Lebanese in Oklahoma City?

Anthony Shadid: I had a great childhood. I think writers are always better off when they have more twisted childhoods, but I didn’t. There’s always a sense of community, of belonging to the Lebanese community, in Oklahoma. It’s remarkable, when I talk to other Arab-Americans, how closed and tight-knit the community was, everything from the church that everyone shared—they all came from the same town in Lebanon—to the food that was served on every holiday and almost every day. There was a sense of coming from someplace else and having to make it in the place they ended up, and there was a lot of pride in that. The one thing that shaped my life was when I was 15 or 16: I knew I wanted to be a journalist. And not just a journalist, but a journalist in the Middle East, and to go back to the Arab world and try to understand what it meant to be Lebanese.

MJ: What resonated with you the most as you researched your family’s history for the book?

AS: I didn’t know a lot about my great-grandfather who built the house, and I’d done interviews 20 years ago, even before I went to college. I started doing some interviews with elderly people in the family because I knew they would pass away and we would lose the power of their story. But I saw a certain resonance with my grandfather’s life and the decisions that he had to make in terms of his career and his family, in terms of sending his kids away. The more I learned about him, the more I understood him.

MJ: You write that some people in Marjayoun weren’t too happy about a past story you’d penned about the town. How do you think your book will be received?

AS: [Laughs.] I have no idea. I’m actually building a fence around the house right now because I’m worried the reception might not be all that great. I think people will understand what the town represents and what the town means, and be very proud of the book. I’ve tried to offer a memorial to what Marjayoun is and what it was and hopefully what it can still be. But, it’s a town, and a town is filled with gossip and rivalries and jealousies. I don’t think the reception is going to be universally the one I would’ve hoped for.

Anthony Shadid’s Interview on NPR’s Fresh Air

Anthony — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:32:21 +0000

A Foreign Correspondent Reflects On The Arab Spring.

Veteran war correspondent Anthony Shadid spent much of the past decade in Baghdad covering the Iraq war, first for The Washington Post and then for The New York Times. Last December, Shadid left Baghdad for his home in Beirut, Lebanon, where he’s been based for more than a decade.

“It was amazing to me how many conversations I was having with people about how dejected they were, how disappointed, how pessimistic they were about where the Arab world was,” he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “… And so remarkably, just a week or two later, the uprising began in Tunisia.”

Read the full article here, where you can also download and listen to the interview.

Anthony Shadid on Qatar

Anthony — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:24:04 +0000

Anthony talks to The Global Dispatches about Qatar

There has been a flurry of articles about Qatar’s “empire building” recently. Is this the correct way to describe what is happening in Qatar?
I wouldn’t really call it empire building, Qatar is defining where its pragmatic interests lie, and maybe there has been a bit of over-reach as well. At the heart of Qatar’s new policy there is a certain amount of ambiguity, evidenced by the fact that they are able to develop relations with parties that do not have similar interests, like Iran, the United States and Saudi Arabia to varying degrees. Qatar is clearly playing a more decisive role and is being more aggressive in promoting its interests. The difference may be that Qatar is now taking sides rather than maintaining its ambiguity in foreign relations. I think we are seeing a new stage in Qatar’s foreign policy. It is certainly a more aggressive approach but it is motivated by where Qatar’s interests will lie in the future. There is a pragmatism at the heart of this agenda.

What is Qatar’s agenda exactly?
Qatar is reacting to the fact that the traditional heavy-weights in the Middle East – namely Egypt and Saudi Arabia – are not playing their customary roles. There is a political void in the region that both Qatar and Turkey to some extent have stepped into. Qatar is trying to increase its influence by cultivating relations with the Muslim Brotherhood throughout North Africa. By doing this Qatar is hoping to guarantee its presence and influence in the region in the future. Given the recent regional unrest, Qatar is trying to get ahead of the curve.

Just looking at their foreign policy, they have interfered politically in Libya and Tunisia and to some extent Syria. They are financing the En Nahda party in Tunisia. What are Qatar’s intentions in Tunisia? Is it politics or business?
In Libya and Tunisia, Qatar has sided with the forces for change, the revolutionary forces; they very clearly took sides there. If you talk about the broader region including Morocco and Egypt, both Qatar and Turkey have tried to ally themselves with what would be termed the mainstream Islamist parties, the En Nahda party in Tunisia and the Freedom and Justice Party in Morocco.

So they are steering clear of the more hard line Salafists?
Yes, you have to keep in mind that Qatar is differentiating itself in terms of policy from Saudi Arabia, which would be more inclined to support the Salafists. This divergence is an important point. There is still a lack of clarity about who the Salafists are and what they want, but they would be more inclined to lean towards the Saudis. It has always been interesting to see how the Saudis and the Qataris have interacted with the Muslim Brotherhood. At times, the Saudis feel threatened by the Muslim Brotherhood, at times they see them as being ungrateful. Consequently they see the Salafists as a counterweight to the Brotherhood. Qatar and Turkey have been very clear though, in choosing to develop closer ties with the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the region.

Read the full article

“…wise, compassionate storytelling” : Review from Annia Ciezadlo

Anthony — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:14:03 +0000

“No one has chronicled the Middle East’s recent wars as brilliantly as Anthony Shadid, but in this moving exploration of home he takes us deeper behind the headlines and into his own family’s ancestral village. His wise, compassionate storytelling weaves together unforgettable characters, hilarious dialogue, cultural insights, and elegiac journeys into the past. This masterful narrative offers an intimate, lyrical portrait of a country we usually see only through the chaos of war. In rebuilding his family home in southern Lebanon, Shadid commits an extraordinarily generous act of restoration for his wounded land, and for us all.”

From Annia Ciezadlo, author of Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War

House of Stone Review from Dave Eggers

Anthony — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:05:14 +0000

“Six pages into this book, I said to myself, if Anthony Shadid continues like this, this book will be a classic. And page by page, he did continue, and he wrote a honest-to-God, hands-down, undeniable and instant classic. This is a book about war, and terrible loss, and a troubled region, and his own tattered family history, yes, but it’s written with the kind of levity and candor and lyricism we associate with, say, Junot Diaz — and that makes the book, improbably, both a compulsive read and one you don’t want to end. I have no idea how Shadid pulled all this off while talking about the history of modern Lebanon, how he balanced ribald humor and great warmth with the sorrow woven into a story like this, but anyway, we should all be grateful that he did.” — Dave Eggers, author of Zeitoun and What Is the What

“I was captivated, instantly”: Dave Cullen

admin — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 06:38:39 +0000

“I was captivated, instantly, by Anthony Shadid’s lushly evocative prose. Crumbling Ottoman outposts, doomed pashas, and roving bandits feel immediate, familiar, and relevant. Lose yourself in these pages, where empires linger, grandparents wander, and a battered Lebanon beckons us home. Savor it all. If Márquez had explored nonfiction, Macondo would feel as real as Marjayoun.” – Dave Cullen, author of Columbine

Reviews for House of Stone

Anthony — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:59:51 +0000

Reviews for House of Stone have been posted, including the below quote from David Finkel, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good Soldiers

“Anthony Shadid has written a beautiful and timeless book about a broken place and a breaking man. House of Stone is poignant, aching, and at times laugh-out-loud funny. It is a story of history and healing, and Shadid’s writing is so lyrical it’s like hearing a song.”

Across Divide in Iraq, a Sunni Courts Shiites

Anthony — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 02:33:40 +0000

RAMADI, Iraq — In the unforgiving badlands of western Iraq’s Anbar Province, once a cradle of the insurgency and now a muddled landscape of corruption, simmering strife and spirited electoral campaigning, no one seems ready to pardon Hamid al-Hais.

Mr. Hais is a sheik, a title that conveys his tribal pedigree. But that title is too facile in describing one of the more complicated figures in Iraq today. He is also a veteran of the American-backed war against insurgents, a Sunni Muslim politician, and now, in his most recent incarnation, an unlikely confederate of the Iraqi National Alliance, the Shiite Muslim standard-bearer in elections in March for a new Parliament.

A bid for national unity, Mr. Hais calls his foray across Iraq’s entrenched sectarian divide. Many of his neighbors do not see it that way. A traitor to his sect, a stooge of neighboring Iran’s Shiite government, and a rank opportunist, they say.

In Assad’s Syria, There Is No Imagination

Anthony — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:49:01 +0000

The House of Assad evokes an imperial sense of power, or at least its trappings, with iconography that one scholar described as infused with “laudatory slogans and sempiternal images.”

But my first impression of Rami Makhlouf, President Bashar al-Assad’s cousin and one-time confidante, was of his unassuming quality. Here was a tycoon, a figure as rich as he was loathed, who eschewed formalities and ceremony. I had seen it before, in men like Saad Hariri, a former prime minister in Lebanon, lavished with so much privilege and so much wealth that pretensions become unnecessary. Even his most brazen threats seemed more pleading than menacing, as if I should understand the logic behind them. Don’t the Israelis know that they will suffer if we do; don’t the Europeans; don’t the Americans realize that we are the bulwark before forces that they can’t imagine — Islamists, chaos, wars roiling an already combustible region?

Read the full article at PBS