“... Je vous salue, ruines solitaires, tombeaux saints, murs silencieux!’ In 1782, Constantin-François Chassebeuf, alias Volney, travelled through Egypt and Syria. Everywhere he was struck by the contrast between the region’s present misery and the architectural evidence of its former wealth and grandeur. It was while meditating in the ghost city of Palmyra that he was inspired by the spirit of the place to write Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791), a treatise in which reflections on the moral causes of the downfall of ancient Oriental despotisms led on to a declaration of faith in progress and the principles of the French Revolution ...”

“... illustration on the cover of the New Republic of 7 August: a lurid depiction of Hizbullah’s Hassan Nasrallah in the style of Der Stürmer crossed with more than a touch of the ‘Dirty Jap’ cartoons of World War Two? How else is one to account for the convoluted, sophistic defence by Leon Wieseltier in the same ...”

“... South Lebanon have ancient family and scholarly ties. The leader of Lebanon’s Hizbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, was born in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf. The mother of Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, is from the South Lebanese town of Binti Jbeil. Hizbollah drove ...”

“... it at all) and the findings have prompted him to alter the agency explanation that the torture of Hassan Ghul produced the lead that opened the trail to Bin Laden. The emerging​ line among the members of the ‘deep state’ seems to be this. A misguided love of our country and a justified panic caused many persons ...”

“... of Tehran. Among the 17 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard killed was Brigadier General Hassan Moghaddam, the architect of the country’s missile programme. Tehran said the explosion was an accident, but it came just days after the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran had tested the fitting of a ...”

“... Shia. The Baath came to be dominated by its military wing, headed by a general from Tikrit, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, and, later, his relation, an assassin who headed the security apparatus, Saddam Hussein. Today, the Americans call the area around Ramadi and north of Baghdad ‘the Sunni triangle’. ‘Iraq is now the most ...”

“... he had accompanied Uthman on another trip to Iraq. Back in Ustaz Luay’s house, they had met Ali Hassan Majid, known to the Kurds and others as ‘Ali Chemical’, for the enthusiasm with which he carried out Saddam’s orders to use poison gas in the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988. Five thousand people were killed. Ali ...”

“... a similar role and women participated in large numbers. Al-Afghani also wrote to Ayatollah Mirza Hassan Shirazi in Najaf, giving the greatly influential but apolitical Shiite cleric an early lesson in the ‘structural adjustments’ that Western financiers would come to enforce in poor countries: ‘What shall cause thee ...”

“... increasingly angry at American interference in their societies in the interest of what Hassan Nasrallah has termed the ‘Western project’. One indication of what voters now want can be gauged from Nasrallah’s speeches. ‘In our region,’ he said in Beirut in March, ‘we witness the serious threat ...”

“... a single candidate from the alliance in each constituency. Mélenchon and the LFI activist Rima Hassan – who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp near Aleppo and has just won a seat in the European Parliament – are fierce defenders of the Palestinian cause, but Mélenchon is a problematic advocate for Palestine. To ...”

“... first half is also an excellent primer on the long prehistory of Pomo. We are reminded that Ihab Hassan made a preliminary canvass of Post-Modernist literature as early as 1971, but later came to deplore a touch of fraudulence in the sell: Post-Modernism, he wrote, looking back, ‘has become a kind of eclectic ...”

“... the Arabs have felt since the 1967 defeat. Erdogan and Hizbullah’s secretary general, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, are folk heroes in Egypt. The Islamism of today is very different from the Islamism of the 1980s and 1990s, when radical jihadis rose up against secular-nationalist regimes in Syria, Algeria and Egypt, turning ...”

“... for his own needs. ‘Rebellious sons’​ are still available for exploitation today. Mos’ab Hassan Yousef, son of a Hamas leader in the West Bank, collaborated with Israeli intelligence from 1997 to 2007. His story made it into bookshops (Son of Hamas) and cinemas (The Green Prince). Human rights organisations in the ...”

“... in an Israeli airstrike. But on the whole Hizbullah’s reaction to the war has been modest. Hassan Nasrallah didn’t speak publicly about Gaza until 3 November, and even then said very little. Iran, too, has been relatively restrained, its response mostly confined to symbolic proxy attacks on US military outposts in ...”

“... tree. She liked to imagine that one day she would live in a house like that with her husband, Hassan, and their two daughters. Hassan used to work at the mosque. Later on, when he was spending more time away, Rania would send him loving messages ...”