In your long and impenetrable prison, dearest Sammour, you might be wondering: how is it that I was not able to help you all this time? You must have thought that I could help, and here we are: three years and seven months have passed and you are still a hostage; you don’t know anything about me, and I don’t know anything about you. I…

In Arabic, we differentiate between taghyeer (تغيير) and taghayur (تغيّر). Both words mean change. But taghyeer connotes planned action, executed unilaterally by a powerful elite, with a pre-known end result; whereas taghayur implies an open- ended, multitudinous process that could be influenced by organized social agents. Taghyeer is engineered according to a pre-determined ideal, already complete before its application, while it is this ideal which…