The Lede

The Yellow Wind of Damascus — with Benan Grams and Rasha Elass

The city of Damascus is one of the oldest in the world. Syria’s ancient capital has been continuously inhabited for perhaps 12,000 years and seen countless plagues, viruses and epidemics sweep through its streets. But, says Dr. Benan Grams, a social historian of disease and medicine at the University of New Orleans, the cholera epidemics of the 19th and early 20th centuries stand out among the worst. 
 
“The disease is endemic to the Ganges Valley in India, but it did not have its international journey until the involvement of British imperial forces that took the disease from India to the Persian Gulf,” Grams tells New Lines magazine’s Rasha Elass. “And from there, the disease came to Syria, but did not reach Damascus until 1848.”
 
When it did hit, though, it hit hard. 
 
“It was a shock for everybody, not because of the novelty of epidemics but because of the horrific symptoms,” Grams says. Signs of infection came on suddenly, leaving the afflicted vomiting and unable to control their bowels. Many would be dead within hours. At the height of the epidemic, hundreds were dying over a single day.
 
“By 1902, we learned what causes the disease, and we learned how it is transmitted,” Grams says. Advances in epidemiology had revealed the pathogen behind the devastation —Vibrio cholerae, a bacterium that spread through contaminated water. Yet that same year, the city was struck by its worst epidemic yet. 
 
“Despite all measures and all precautions, people were still dying from cholera,” Grams explains. The situation became so severe that Ottoman officials feared V. cholerae would become endemic to the city’s water supply. 
 
By the time it ended, the outbreak had lasted for more than a year, several times the length of previous epidemics, leaving the city traumatized and its economy crippled by containment measures. Ottoman officials had found themselves caught in an endless cycle, cordoning off the city again and again as the outbreak flared and waned. Every few months, Grams explains, things would seem to die down, no new cases would be reported, and the administration would ease restrictions. 
 
“And then someone died or another case was reported. And then all the measures that were eased were reinstated again. And the misery started all over again,” she says.
 
“Researching cholera during the COVID pandemic,” she adds, “it was quite fascinating to see the similarities.”
 
Produced by Joshua Martin

Identity, Liberalism and the New Left — with Yascha Mounk and Faisal Al Yafai

Yascha Mounk thinks the left is making a big mistake.
 
“Over the last decades a genuinely new political tradition has started to coalesce in universities around the world,” the political scientist and commentator tells New Lines magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai, ”and then come to have significant influence on our culture and politics.”
 
Uncomfortable with the direction this new generation of progressives has taken, Mounk sought to understand them. His new book, “The Identity Trap,” presents a history of how these new ideas became mainstream.
 
“I think the problem is not that they go too far,” he says. Mounk is uncomfortable with the position that many of his fellow critics have taken toward what they would call “wokeness” and he calls the “identity synthesis.” “How can you go too far in fighting against racism?” 
 
In Mounk’s view, the problem is not how far, but which way. “I think the problem really is that they take us in the wrong direction,” he says. 
 
For Mounk, a proud believer in the liberal tradition, that wrong direction is the emphasis on identity and difference rather than more traditional universal values. It is not that he thinks identity is not important, he says. “The problem comes when we start to have a conception of politics which reduces people to those categories.”
 
Mounk believes that these ways of thinking have led activists to abandon their commitment to liberal values like free speech and equality before the law.  “Who's going to be sitting on the speech facilitation committee of some tech company? It's not the most marginalized in society. It's not the weakest in society. It's people who virtually by definition hold quite a lot of power,” he explains.
 
At a time where the far right is on the march, he concedes that a more confrontational and uncompromising approach might be compelling. But he fears that it may be misguided in the long run.
 
“Trump's election in the United States in 2016 made it so hard to criticize some of those ideas because you were immediately accused of somehow running interference for Trump,” he says. “But I think the deep influence that these ideas now have on many institutions in the United States and beyond leaves an opening to people like Trump to come back into power.”

Art, Music and Freedom in Iran — with Malu Halasa, Nahid Siamdoust and Danny Postel

Iran was set ablaze last year after Mahsa Amini was taken into custody and beaten to death by the country’s morality police in Tehran for wearing “improper hijab.” The killing of the 22-year-old struck a deep chord among Iranians, inspiring protests in more than 100 cities throughout the country, marking the largest uprising Iran had seen since the 1979 revolution. Government reprisals were severe, with hundreds if not thousands of protesters arrested and tortured and several of them executed.
“The volume of art and creative responses that we've seen to this uprising is really unprecedented,”says Nahid Siamdoust, author of “Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran” and host of the podcast “Woman, Life, Freedom.” “Even in comparison to 1979, I think this is unprecedented.”
“In a sense, the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ revolution is a revolution that's formed by culture, by art, by music, by poetry,” Malu Halasa, literary editor of The Markaz Review, tells New Lines magazine’s Danny Postel. It’s that art that is the subject of her new book, an edited anthology titled “Woman, Life, Freedom: Voices and Art from the Women's Protests in Iran,” which was released this month.
Unlike previous, more reformist protest movements in Iran, the Mahsa Amini protests became genuinely revolutionary. That revolutionary feeling was channeled into a great range of art forms, but especially music and hip-hop in particular. “Hip-hop in the West has lost its power. We haven't really had conscious rap for quite a long time,” Halasa says. But in Iran, she adds, “even before the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement, hip-hop was very powerful. It was critical of the status quo. It wasn't just party music.” 
Artists can pay a high price for speaking out against the regime. For his blistering lyrics in support of the movement, a 32-year-old rapper from Esfahan named Toomaj Salehi was arrested and eventually sentenced to six years in prison after being held in solitary confinement for 252 days. He is one of many artists who have become figureheads of the wider movement, his songs played at protests while demonstrators wield placards with his name and face. 
It’s no accident that musicians have become such integral and iconic parts of the movement, Siamdoust says.

Behind the Abaya Ban — with Rim-Sarah Alouane, Rasha Al Aqeedi and Erin Clare Brown

The abaya is a loose, flowing robe worn by women across the Middle East, Northern Africa and South Asia. Though it is favored by many observant Muslims for its modesty, it is not considered religiously mandated attire and has no special spiritual significance. Nevertheless, French Education Minister Gabriel Attal announced at the end of August that the abaya would be banned from public schools on the basis that they violated France’s longstanding principle of “laicite.”
“Laicite is a form of secularism,” explains French legal scholar Rim-Sarah Alouane. But it’s a very specific form, one that took a very different path to its equivalents elsewhere. “In the U.S., the idea is to protect people's beliefs against abuses of the state,” she tells Rasha Al Aqeedi and Erin Clare Brown. “In France, it's the other way around.”
This unique form of secularism has its origins in the education system. “Schools were considered the place where we create the future citizen. So, we needed to protect pupils from any influence, and especially the influence of the Catholic Church,” Alouane explains. 
That secular principle would go on to become one of the cornerstones of public life in the French Republic. The Law of 1905 established the separation of church and state and guaranteed individual freedom of worship while also instituting a policy of religious neutrality for government employees, forbidding them from any public display of faith. 
“However, religious neutrality did not apply to the individuals,” Alouane adds. “Individuals were free to express their religiosity as long as public order is not disturbed.”
“The problem is not laicite itself because in France, laicite is supposed to guarantee freedom of religion and freedom of conscience,” Alouane says. “The problem is what we have done with it.”
But fanned by the flames of anti-immigrant animus, Alouane says the past few decades have seen the emergence of an increasingly illiberal and uncompromising conception of secularism. 
“We call it the new laicite,” she says. “This has been used as a reason to restrict religious visibility, especially targeted at Muslims. And right now, the victims are literally kids. I mean, can you imagine being so young and facing that?”
And so, as France’s youth returned to school last week, many Muslim girls had to choose between the clothes they feel comfortable in and their access to schooling. According to the education ministry, 67 girls were sent home in a single day for refusing to remove their abayas. 
“France is losing its own children, I would say,” Alouane laments. “These girls will come back to school dressed differently or they will go to private schools. Is it what we want? Girls to go to religious school instead of going to the school of the republic, where everybody should be treated equally?”
Produced by Joshua Martin

Somaliland’s Secession Struggle — with James Barnett and Joshua Martin

“Somalia has been in one form of civil war or another for about 30 years,” James Barnett tells New Lines magazine’s Joshua Martin on the first episode of The Lede’s fourth season. “You have this dynamic where the government in Mogadishu doesn't have much direct power or presence in most of the rest of the country.”
 
The result, explains Barnett, who traveled there in June to report for New Lines, is that large swaths of the country are actually controlled by local independent and autonomous governments that don’t always dance to the beat of Mogadishu’s drum. “Even though there's a veneer of statehood or state authority, a lot of it is essentially clan politics — elders or clan leaders that are building up their own institutions,” he says. Perhaps the most successful has been the Republic of Somaliland, which declared independence in 1991, though it has not achieved U.N. recognition.
 
With its own legal system, legislature and national anthem, Somaliland has often been hailed as a success story for its multi-party democracy and relatively stable administration. Yet in the border city of Las Anod, captured from the autonomous government of neighboring Puntland in 2007, the Somaliland independence movement now faces an independence movement of its own: the SSC, a militia group formed by the Dhulbahante clan and its allies.  
 
Barnett spoke to dozens of SSC fighters determined to establish their own autonomous state in what they consider to be their ancestral lands. 
 
“Their main goal right now is to break away these lands from Somaliland,” Barnett says. “Then they want to become a federal member state, similar to the status that Puntland has.”
 
Since the fighting started at the beginning of the year, the two sides were at a stalemate. But on Aug. 25, “the entire battlefield situation changed really overnight.” A shock SSC offensive drove the Somaliland Armed Forces out of Las Anod. “SSC activists are declaring August 25 victory day,” Barnett says. “Even some of them were surprised that it had happened so quickly.”
 
The consequences may spread far beyond the borders of Somaliland or the SSC’s nascent Dhulbahante state. 

Listen Again: The Age of Conspiracy Theories — with Gabriel Gatehouse and Faisal Al Yafai

Known best by his alias “the QAnon Shaman,” the shirtless man depicted in photos with a horned fur hat and an American flag painted on his face became one of the most iconic images from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S.Capitol. His real name is Jake Angeli, and he believed in the conspiracy theory known as QAnon — that the U.S. government was controlled by a global child-trafficking Satanist cabal and that Donald Trump was fighting a secret war to defeat them. 
Gabriel Gatehouse, an award-winning foreign correspondent with the BBC, recognized the man in the photos. He had met him just months before, while covering the 2020 election. Dismissing the man as nothing more than a fringe weirdo, he had passed up the chance to interview him. That same man was now the face of the Capitol riot. 
“It bothered me, because I realized that I had not given his story,” Gatehouse tells New Lines magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai.  “That was the question I hadn’t asked myself: There must be a reason why he believes this. It’s not true. But it means something. What is it telling us about the world that we live in?”
That was the question Gatehouse set out to find answers to on “The Coming Storm,” a  podcast series he made with the BBC. 
“We reach for conspiracy theories when the world doesn’t make sense to us,” he says. Distrust in traditional media and government institutions — not entirely unwarranted — has led many to reject what they say entirely, Gatehouse explains. “And they feel like the internet has put this powerful tool in their hands, to connect with people and uncover the hidden truth. And I think they genuinely believe it.”
QAnon itself may burn out or at least change into something new. But Gatehouse suspects it may not matter all that much. Something else will just take its place. 
“QAnon was like the match that lit the fire,” he says. “And the fire is now raging, and it is going to keep on burning, I think, until something quite fundamental changes.”
Produced by Joshua Martin. This episode originally aired March 3, 2023.

India’s Star Crossed Lovers — with Mansi Choksi and Surbhi Gupta

“I have a line in my book where I say marriage is the only intended outcome of growing up in India,” Mansi Choksi tells New Lines magazine’s Surbhi Gupta. “Like, that's how it feels for a lot of us.”
 
Choksi, author of the “The Newlyweds” and co-host of the latest season of NPR’s “Rough Translation” podcast, has spent many years untangling the fraught politics of marriage in the country. “On a family level, it's almost as if it's seen as a marker of success. Finding the right match for your son or daughter is like your ultimate duty towards your child,” she says. “And disobeying your parents' choice for marriage? Possibly the ultimate disrespect that you can have towards your parents.”
 
But in a nation where over 90% of marriages are arranged and seldom cross lines of class, caste and confession, a new generation of young people are questioning the traditional boundaries. “And love marriage is one of those fault lines,” says Choksi.
 
It’s not a choice that’s taken lightly, however. The consequences for couples who take it can be severe, especially when they come from different religious or caste backgrounds. “The stakes are really varied, right?” Choksi says. “Like the stakes can be as little as disappointing your parents to honor killing.” 
 
It should be no surprise, then, that marriage often features prominently in national politics. In July, the chief minister of Gujarat announced that he was considering a law which would require parental approval for love marriages. Hindu nationalist politicians promote conspiracy theories about ‘love jihad’ — “this idea that Muslims are are taking away Hindu women as part of a concerted effort to convert them to Islam and eventually outnumber the Hindu population,” Choksi explains. Meanwhile, despite the objections of Narendra Modi’s government, the Supreme Court is considering the extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples. 
 
“There's these conversations happening across the country,” says Choksi, “ I think that young people in India are just trying to figure themselves out. Like anywhere else in the world, I guess.
Produced by Joshua Martin

The Sound of Struggle in Zimbabwe — with Thomas Mapfumo and Kwangu Liwewe

Thomas Mapfumo has been making music for more than 60 years. A popular and influential Zimbabwean protest musician, Mapfumo is known as the “Lion of Zimbabwe” and has been a persistent opponent of dictatorship since the days of white-minority rule. Days before Zimbabwe’s second election since the fall of longtime dictator Robert Mugabe, Mapfumo remains cynical about the prospects for political progress.
 
“These guys are used to rigging the election,” he tells New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe. “There's no change in Zimbabwe until these guys are removed from power.”
 
At the beginning of his career, Mapfumo mostly played covers of popular American songs by artists like Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones. But soon his music began to take on a much more political — and unapologetically African — shape. “I started thinking, if these people don't want us to play their music, don't we have our own music, our own cultural music?”
 
He began to experiment by blending conventional rock and blues with the sounds of traditional Shona music, creating something new and vibrant and uniquely Zimbabwean.
 
“We were just playing guitars, imitating the mbira sound,” he says. “But eventually we thought it was right if we could bring the mbira itself, actually mix it up with the guitars, and that came out very well.”
 
That might be an understatement. With his new innovative style, which he dubbed “Chimurenga” — meaning “liberation” in the Shona language — Mapfumo became the voice of a generation of Zimbabweans crying out for change.
 
It was in 1980 that that change seemed to have finally arrived. Ian Smith’s white minority Rhodesian regime had collapsed, and Mugabe’s revolutionary movement took control of the government. But Mugabe’s autocratic leadership and personal corruption quickly left Mapfumo disillusioned.
 
“Mugabe was not the kind of person that I thought he was,” he reflects. “He was an oppressor and he wasn't there for the people.”
 
Mapfumo’s music began to take aim at the post-independence government. With the release of his 1989 hit “Corruption,” the regime decided to act. His songs were banned from the radio, and Mapfumo was forced into exile in the United States in the late ’90s, where he has lived ever since.
 
Mugabe remained in power for two more decades, until he was finally overthrown by his former ally Emmerson Mnangagwa following widespread protests in 2017. But while many Zimbabweans celebrated the dictator’s fall, Mapfumo was under no illusions that the ouster of the man at the top would change the nature of the regime. 
 
“There was no new dawn in Zimbabwe,” he says. “The situation was still the same.”
Produced by Joshua Martin

The American Money Driving Official Homophobia in Africa — with Lydia Namubiru and Kwangu Liwewe

On May 26, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023 into law. The legislation imposed even steeper sanctions on LGBTQ Ugandans than previous laws had, outlawing the promotion of homosexuality and punishing same-sex activity with life imprisonment and even the death penalty in so-called “aggravated” cases.The law had plenty of backing within the Ugandan establishment, with only two members of Parliament dissenting. But it also had powerful backing from abroad.
 
“U.S. evangelicals have been active here for nearly four decades,” journalist Lydia Namubiru tells New Lines magazine’s Danny Postel. “Uganda itself has a very active evangelical movement as a result. They've been doing the work of winning souls, as they say, to their cause for over 40 years.”
 
The movement infrastructure built up over those years is extensive, and U.S. Christian right groups like The Family (also known as the Fellowship Foundation) have come to enjoy close ties with influential lawmakers and politicians as well as building a robust indigenous Evangelical movement. Hardline Christian groups from the United States have spent more than $50 million in Africa over the past decade. Namubiru spent months as part of a team of journalists following the “dark money” flowing not only into Africa but also Europe, Asia and Latin America in the effort to promote far-right causes. The bulk of their spending was actually in Europe, she adds, but Africa may be where it has had its greatest effect. 
 
“Culturally, Africa still remains quite invested in Christian conservatism. I do think there's some sense that this is the last frontier for conservative Christianity. They fight for it as the last bit of territory that they hold.”
 
And in countries like Uganda, where the state is relatively weak and minority protections minimal, the political situation provides them the opportunity to consolidate their power. 
 
“I think part of the appeal to Africa is that the states are very overwhelmed; they're very young and still overwhelmed by bread-and-butter issues," Namubiru says. Without a strong state to protect minority rights, she points out, it’s relatively easy for these groups to find a foothold. Uganda, she says, “wasn't really building, you know, state power, state processes, democratic processes, checks and balances, until the mid-1980s.”
 
Still, she cautions against seeing it as a uniquely African problem. 
 
“Anti-LGBTQ, ultraconservative politics targeting women's rights in this particular global moment has real popular appeal, not just in Africa, but in countries like Hungary, Italy.”
 
Instead, it is better understood as a particular regional manifestation of a worldwide phenomenon: “The backlash is global. It's not just in Uganda.”
 
Produced by Joshua Martin

Ukraine’s Cluster Bomb Dilemma — with Sera Koulabdara, Romeo Kokriatski and Danny Postel

In July, U.S. President Joe Biden made the controversial decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine. Though neither the United States, Ukraine nor Russia is party to the 2008 convention outlawing them, it has been ratified by hundreds of other nations because of how dangerous the weapons remain long after the fighting stops.
 
“If they fail to detonate on impact, they'll lay there dormant,” Sera Koulabdara tells New Lines magazine’s Danny Postel. “They have no self destruct mechanism, so they'll be there until it's triggered by an animal walking by or a child finding it and picking it up.”
 
Koulabdara is the CEO of Legacies of War, an international advocacy and educational organization working to address the long-term consequences of Cold War-era conflicts in Southeast Asia and grew up in Laos. Many of the millions of cluster bombs the United States dropped on the country in the 1960s and ’70s did not explode, and both clean-up efforts and loss of life continue to this day, decades after the war’s end. 
 
“Globally, 97% of casualties of cluster munitions are civilians,” Koulabdara says. “And in the case where the age is known, 60% are children.” 
 
Their presence leaves Laotians, she says, with the anxiety that their lives are always at risk, forever knowing that an unexploded bomb could kill them in the fields where they farm or the roads they take to school. “That is not the future that I want to see in any country.”
 
But, says Romeo Kokriatski, a journalist and managing editor of the New Voice of Ukraine, Kyiv can’t afford to be picky.
“These aren't weapons that Ukraine wants or that we would have chosen, but we were not given the things that we asked for,” he says. “We simply took them because they were offered to us.”
 
Kokriatski says that he is well aware of the dreadful consequences of cluster bombs but that Ukraine is already condemned to the long, arduous task of their clean-up — Russia has been using them since the invasion began. 
 
“Every extra day that this war stretches on is just an unimaginable tragedy. I simply can't imagine anything that would override that overwhelming priority to defeat the Russians as quickly as possible.”
 
Produced by Joshua Martin