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“You have to say it: the rosary keeps you from falling any lower.” Raoul* – a language-loving retiree, an overqualified Lebanese-Canadian family man living under the constant threat of unemployment – says it matter-of-factly, without going into detail. In May, the month the Church dedicates to the Virgin Mary, stories of help received through the rosary are countless. For Fahed F., a native of Kesrouan, his marriage would have remained childless without the rosary and visits to the Marian shrine of Béchouate, in the Bekaa Valley. “Start praying!” the businessman suddenly hears inwardly just after handing his car keys to a worker he had sent on an errand. When the man returns – after discreetly repeating Hail Mary’s near the construction site where his laborers were working – he learns that his car had skidded on the rain-slick Metn highway and might have plunged into a ravine had a large bush not providentially stopped its course.

The first draft of the memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran that was leaked to the press and media on Saturday evening sparked widespread outrage on Sunday. Many Republican senators, including several heavyweight members of Congress, as well as analysts, commentators, and influential circles warned against the serious geopolitical consequences of this proposal. Some did not hesitate to denounce on social media what they unanimously called a 'capitulation of the United States to the Islamic Republic of Iran'. Did this outcry and these warnings coming from all sides online push President Trump to apply serious brakes to the approval process for the memorandum, or did the White House chief realize that certain clauses were indeed unacceptable and detrimental to the credibility of the United States as a superpower?

The cry of the nonagenarian Stéphane Hessel in his pamphlet Indignez-vous! had awakened millions of young people to a form of liberation, after reading in that slim volume: “You have the right to anger, to refusal, to opposition.” But that cry was certainly not enough. It was at most an impulse that drove them into the streets to confront the social, political and cultural conflicts of their time. Things have genuinely changed since then, and one of the greatest victories of the dominant forces has been the discrediting of the words “activist” or “dissident”, labels sometimes deployed to attack young people who had managed to achieve substantive progress.

Lebanon is witnessing today a farce that has turned, in reality, into a tragedy. At the heart of this farce lies the insistence of a Lebanese faction organically linked to the "Islamic Republic" of Iran on presenting negotiation with Israel as "humiliation," while the real humiliation consists in doing everything possible to entrench Israeli occupation and serve it. All that the legitimate authority in Lebanon — represented by President of the Republic Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam — has sought to convey is that the "humiliation" of negotiations is in fact an act of honour and patriotism, whereas the "humiliation" of occupation is nothing more than a service rendered to Israel and to its enterprise of occupation.

American President Donald Trump stated a few days ago that the Iranian regime has been "pulling the wool over our eyes (the United States and the Western world) for 47 years." One could reasonably add that in the current context, it is essentially public opinion in several Levantine countries that is being misled, particularly given the flood of information on Saturday about the imminence of a "memorandum of understanding" between Washington and Tehran, from which it appears, at least judging by the leaks to the media, that President Trump seems to have essentially given in to Iran's main conditions.

This series of articles offers a wide-ranging overview — both thematic and chronological — of the various relationships between music and the space of the City across the ages. The first in the series, divided into three parts, examines the origins of the bond between music and 'the' political — both as concept and as practice. It is in eighteenth-century Europe that the debate on music and freedom steps briefly outside its relationship with the sacred to resume an explicitly philosophical form, as it had in the time of ancient Greece. And the credit belongs essentially to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. History has certainly retained him as one of the pillars of Enlightenment political philosophy, but his dual condition as composer and musicologist remains largely overshadowed by his philosophical legacy.