Intellectuals and Culture in the Time of Monsters: A Conversation with Yassin al-Haj Saleh
Thursday, February 20, 2025 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1W15 Cafe at Bard College Berlin (Waldstrasse 15, 13156)
What can and should intellectuals do in times of fundamental transformation, when “monsters” rule and fall, when genocide is rampant but dictatorships surprisingly collapse? We will discuss this question with speaker Yassin al-Haj Saleh.
He will have returned from Syria where he currently spends time to celebrate the liberation from the Assad regime with the Syrian people, to visit the former sites of his political struggle after an 11-year absence, and to support the transformation with all its risks and uncertainties. Recent events in Syria will certainly figure prominently in the conversation; it will also address the issue of Israel's role in the region, and the part the EU can still play in Syria's democratic development.
The conversation will be conducted by BCB’s alum and staff member Hesham Moadami and BCB senior student Ahmad Mustafa. The event will be followed by a reception.
Yassin al-Haj Saleh (born 1961) is the most acclaimed Syrian political writer and dissident of our time. In his youth, he spent 16 years, from 1980 to 1996, in the prisons of the Syrian dictatorship under Hafez al Assad. After Bashar al Assad took over, he became a journalist and author. From 2011 he accompanied, analyzed and explained the sources of the “Arab Spring” in Arabic as well as Western media, and became a central figure in the democratic, human rights-oriented resistance in Syria. Yassin al-Haj Saleh fled to Turkey in 2013 and came to Germany in 2017. Since then, he has written several books: about Syria and the failure of the revolution, about jail and torture, violence and genocide, absence and disappearance, and politics of culture. He now also writes about the Israeli question and the dynamics of Palestinian and Arab (mis)representation in Germany.
Hesham Moadami, who graduated from BCB in 2021, is currently the Civic Engagement and OSUN Coordination Officer at BCB. He worked as an open-source investigator for the NGO Mnemonic and on the “WhoWasInCommand” Project with Columbia Law School's Security Force Monitor. As a law student in Damascus he participated in the Revolution as a citizen journalist. After fleeing to Jordan he worked for the Shaam Relief Foundation supporting other refugees.
Ahmad Mustafa is a senior student in the HAST program at Bard College Berlin. He is writing his thesis on the Syrian diaspora activities in Germany vis-à-vis the German passport procurement requirement and the Syrian embassy, and he has been documenting the changes since December 8. Inside Syria, he was active in the revolutionary movement, coordinating protests at Aleppo University and working as a citizen journalist with the Assembly of Free Raqqa’s Youth. After ISIS took control of Raqqa, he fled to Turkey, where he began working on refugee support projects before eventually moving to Germany.
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