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Anthropologists were hardly pleased to see their discipline portrayed as a hotbed of “bad political groupthink,” or to read that “scientific neutrality” is, at best, an illusion and, at worst, a political dictate. They reacted angrily to the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences , commissioned by Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis and prepared by a group of ten scholars. Recently released, the report presents anthropology as an example of a discipline experiencing a widespread decline in scientific standards, accompanied by a corrosive intellectual climate in which reasonable disagreement on politically controversial subjects is suppressed and punished.

There is an idea that is becoming almost axiomatic in Lebanese political life today. Whenever the discussion turns to restoring the state, the future of Hezbollah, or rebuilding the national balance, the debate sooner or later comes back to the same question: how do we build an independent Shiite political dynamic? It is difficult to challenge this question. It seems logical, even self-evident. Any national project naturally needs an independent Shiite presence, and the monopoly of any single force over the representation of an entire community must come to an end. But the most dangerous ideas are not those that appear to be wrong. They are those that seem so self-evident that we stop questioning them.

We are a long way from the (falsely) optimistic statements made by senior Pakistani officials and even American leaders, who regularly spoke of “positive contacts” in the Iranian negotiations and, often, of an imminent agreement between the two protagonists in the Iranian conflict. President Donald Trump has, to be sure, put the airstrikes against Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) positions, infrastructure and warehouses on “pause.” But the same cannot be said of the mullahs’ regime, which is clearly taking advantage of this lull to catch its breath, reorganize its forces and replenish its offensive arsenal, as far as possible, while shifting the “front” and military operations onto the territory of a third party: Yemen.

Some people spend their lives accepting their lot, while others take their destiny into their own hands. This is all the more difficult for a woman living in a man’s world. And yet… some women chose to fight, succeeding in breaking the taboos of their time. Whether they wielded a brush, a pen, scientific instruments, or their voices, they made their mark on their century with a boldness that at times bordered on scandal. From Artemisia Gentileschi, defying Italian society and the courts five centuries ago, to George Sand, who traded the corset for the freedom to write; from Camille Claudel, the deeply wounded artist, to the rigor and genius of Marie Curie, and the universal voice of Oum Kalthoum… these women succeeded in overcoming social prejudice.

A fire smoldering beneath the ashes… At this stage, that appears to be the perception that the radical Iranian camp is seeking to cultivate on multiple fronts. On the military operations front, first… The Yemeni Houthi militia, one of the mullah regime's main proxies in the region, continued on Tuesday, August 11, its campaign of destabilization in the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb area, launching three ballistic missiles at a Yemeni commercial vessel crossing the strait. The Houthi attack was particularly deadly, resulting in four crew members killed — three Pakistanis and one Indonesian — and four others wounded.

In April 2026, Wissam Saadé delivered four lectures at the University of Bologna at the invitation of Professor Giovanni Giorgini. The first lecture, entitled The Prophet and the Philosopher: The Hierarchy of Knowledge between Avicenna’s Falsafa and al-Kirmānī’s Isma ʿ ili Neoplatonism , is presented here in its revised and expanded essay form, published as a ten-part series. The series explores the intellectual landscape of Islamic Neoplatonism through a comparative reading of Avicenna and al-Kirmānī. Although both thinkers share a broadly Neoplatonic horizon, shaped by an emanationist metaphysics, a hierarchy of being, and a synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic thought, they develop distinct philosophical projects: Avicenna within the tradition of Peripatetic falsafa, and al-Kirmānī within Ismaʿili theology. Despite these different intellectual settings, their systems remain in continuous dialogue on the nature of knowledge, the relationship between reason and revelation, and the ascent of the soul. Their respective projects also embody contrasting approaches to the political, illuminating different ways of understanding the place of philosophy in relation to authority, law, and the ordering of the community. This article is the third installment of that ten-part series.