The Lede

For thousands of years, most humans were nomads, living their lives on the move. They were raiders and traders, herder and hunters — and conquerors. From Genghis Khan to Osman I, nomads changed the course of history on countless occasions. And yet, says historian and travel writer Anthony Sattin, we still tend to underestimate their influence on history. “Our histories glorify people who build monuments,” he tells New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai. “We don’t tend to value tribes in the Amazon, for instance, who didn’t chop down their forests, who maintained an equilibrium and flourished without disturbing the ecological balance in their world.” Plenty of nomad cultures have been literate, but on the whole, most of the societies keeping substantial written records were sedentary societies. Traditionally confined by historians to anecdotes and afterthoughts, oral histories recently have been recognized as just as useful as written histories for reconstructing the past. “The stories are still being told, but the research hasn’t been done,” says Sattin. Those past biases come at a huge cost to our understanding of history, Sattin says: “I don’t think we can know who we’re going to become unless we know who we were, and half of our story is missing, because for most human history nomads have been half of our story, and yet they’re not in our books.” Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy

For two years, Ethiopia has been caught in the grip of a war between government forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), who control the country’s northernmost state. As the power struggle polarized the country along ethnic lines, the number of mass killings and other atrocities led one Ethiopian general to dub it a “very dirty war.” An agreement in March led to a truce, but after five months, fighting was reignited on Aug. 24. Yet hope for a lasting peace may not yet be lost. “Initially, the Tigrayans insisted that they were not going to be part of the peace process,” Dr. Adeoye Akinola tells New Lines Magazine's Kwangu Liwewe. But thanks to the diplomatic efforts of the African Union (AU), both the federal government and the TPLF have agreed to allow the international organization to mediate negotiations between the warring factions. As the United Nations convenes in New York, Ethiopians are watching closely in the hope that diplomacy can triumph. “We cannot hide from this,” says Tedla Asfaw. “We have to face it.” But with neighboring Eritrea, a government ally, launching a new offensive into Tigray, the conflict looks as if it may descend once more into total war. “Whether it’s the AU or the United Nations,” says analyst Chris Maroleng, “It’s quite clear that what is actually required is a reformation of not just the institutions, but the manner in which politics is carried out in Ethiopia.” Produced by Joshua Martin

Producer and screenwriter Hayat Aljowaily joins New Lines Magazine's Ola Salem and Anthony Elghossain to talk about cinema, identity and the making of Marvel’s “Moon Knight.” The Emmy-nominated show stars Oscar Isaac as the titular protagonist, a man with dissociative identity disorder who finds himself sharing a body with a mercenary battling Egyptian gods. “Portraying Egypt accurately was really at the core of what we were trying to achieve,” explains Aljowaily. With much of the action taking place in the country, the creators were determined to avoid the usual cliches. “That meant not going to shoot in Morocco and pretend that it’s Egypt, because then it’s not going to look like Egypt. And so we built Egypt.” The crew started with a vast empty set in Budapest and set to work. “And within two weeks, it was Cairo.” But perhaps the biggest responsibility of all was the portrayal of the protagonist’s love interest, Layla, the first female Arab superhero to appear on television. “It was a big responsibility to create Layla, because we knew how important it was to young Arab women — to Arab women, period.” “Having her was such a game changer,” adds Ola. “Just having someone with curly hair, that kind of resembles you, and you kind of can see yourself in, is such a big deal.”

Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, has died. For 70 years, the queen was a fixture in the national life of Britain and indeed the wider world. The world changed immeasurably in the decades since she came to the throne in 1952. The country when she first ruled was quite unlike the one she died in. She inherited not merely a country but an empire and presided over its dissolution. Although her death was expected, as the ritual of its declaration demonstrated, it still leaves the country in a deeply uncertain state — an uncertainty that extends to the 14 other countries in which she was the head of state as well as the wider Commonwealth. As the crown passes to her son, Charles III, New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai speaks to Lydia Wilson outside Buckingham Palace and talks to Amie Ferris Rotman and Kwangu Liwewe about what the passing of such a consequential figure may mean for the world. Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy

Since October 2021, Iraq’s politics have been deadlocked in a showdown between two of its most powerful political factions. The rivalry between the Coordination Framework, a pro-Iranian Shiite bloc, and the supporters of populist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has left the country’s Parliament paralyzed since last October’s elections, unable to form a government or elect a new president. But after Sadr announced his withdrawal from politics at the end of August, the rivalry turned deadly as protesters from his movement marched into the heavily fortified Green Zone and paramilitaries battled each other in the heart of Baghdad. Only after Sadr called for the violence to end and for his supporters to withdraw did the fighting die down. New Lines Magazine's Rasha Al Aqeedi joins host Faisal Al Yafai to talk about what this latest escalation may mean for Iraq’s future. Produced by Joshua Martin

In May 1948, at the onset of the Arab-Israeli War, Egyptian soldiers crossed into Palestine at Rafah as military leaders promised a swift victory. Yet despite their defeat by the year’s end, this war would give way to military rule less than four years later. “A military loss was not what Egyptians expected,” historian Chloe Bordewich tells New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson in The Lede. Egyptian media carried images and footage of successful operations, helping to reinforce pronouncements of imminent victory. But victory never materialized. In the face of official obfuscation, alternative explanations for why the war had been lost began to circulate among the public and in the press. One rumor in particular began to take on a life of its own — “that Egypt had lost the war in Palestine because political leaders had procured, profited from and knowingly supplied their own troops with dysfunctional weapons.” The rumor tapped into something that resonated deeply with the Egyptian public. As time went on, it migrated from page to screen and into popular memory. The government’s reputation never recovered, and in 1952, a group of mid-ranking officers overthrew the king. Produced by Christin El-Kholy

Tunisia was the cradle of the Arab Spring, and had been hailed as its biggest success story. But President Kais Saied’s new constitution, narrowly approved in a controversial referendum last July, has changed that. “Kais Saied has unchecked power,” Mohamed-Dhia Hammami tells New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson in The Lede. “Even under Ben Ali, we used to have some sort of balances and checks. There are some people who even compare his power to the North Korean leader’s.” Saied ran for president as a political outsider in 2019, vowing to tackle ‘moral and financial corruption’. The country’s continuing economic crisis left many Tunisians disenchanted with the status quo, and Saied’s populist platform won him the election. Even as he suspended parliament and began ruling by decree in 2021, he continued to attract support. But, Hammami says, his latest move may have been a step too far. “Saied is having serious problems consolidating his power.” Produced by Joshua Martin

One year after the fall of Kabul, this special anniversary episode of The Lede looks back on the momentous events of Aug. 15, 2021, and explores how Afghanistan has fared in the aftermath. New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai talks to Afghanistan correspondent Fazelminallah Qazizai, who was in Kabul the day it fell, about what the first year of Taliban rule has looked like from the ground. He also speaks to human rights specialist Nazila Jamshidi about how the millions of Afghans in the diaspora have been affected. Finally, Rasha Elass catches up with Chris Sands, the magazine’s South Asia editor, about ISIS’s plan to weaken the Taliban and plunge Afghanistan back into war. Produced by Joshua Martin

What if you woke up one morning to discover everything you knew about the world was wrong? That all the truths you’d been taught to take for granted were actually lies? For author and political philosopher Lea Ypi, that’s not a hypothetical question. In her recent memoir “Free: Coming of Age at the End of History,” she tells the story of growing up in communist Albania only for the regime to collapse during her teenage years. “It really was like being taught a new language,” she tells New Lines Magazine's Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede. “Almost overnight, you’re told that all of these names that you had for things are now different—you have different names and different categories and different ways of making sense of the world.” They talk about how to see the gap between ideology and reality, where people look for certainty in uncertain times and what it actually means to be free. Produced by Joshua Martin & Christin El Kholy

Selma Dabbagh is a British-Palestinian writer and the editor of the 2021 anthology “We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers.” Through poetry and short stories, novel excerpts and letters, the collection pulls from more than 1,000 years of Arab women’s writing — from pre-Islamic poetry to contemporary fiction. “There seemed to be something so modern and pithy and frank and refreshing about their voices,” Dabbagh tells New Lines Magazine's Lydia Wilson in the first episode of the magazine’s new podcast, “The Lede.” “My interest was really in looking at how these voices had changed over time.” They talk about the difficulty of writing about love and intimacy, Orientalism and the male gaze, as well as why Arab women writers are expected to be “political.” Produced by Joshua Martin & Christin El Kholy