The next Badaro Talks lecture ”Animating Memories of South Lebanon: Pakistani fedayeen in the PLO, 1971–1982” will be given by Sabah Haider, a cultural and visual anthropologist based between Paris and Beirut. The event is organized by the Finnish Institute in the Middle East (FIME) and the Anthropology Society in Lebanon (ASIL).
When: Tuesday 28th of January at 6pm.
Where: The FIME premises at 30 Badaro Street, Chaoui Building, 5th floor meeting room.
You can also attend online via Zoom.
We kindly request you to RSVP at the latest on Monday 27th of January through this link, or send an email to us at institute@fime.fi. Let us know if you’re attending in person or online.
Abstract
My discovery of the existence and little-known history of Pakistanis as fedayeen in the Palestinian armed struggle in Lebanon was serendipitous. In June 2011, while in Baalbek, Lebanon, I encountered an elderly man of Sindhi peasant origins who revealed that he had been a fedayi in one of the Palestinian factions under the PLO. To my surprise, he insisted that he was not unique—asserting that thousands of volunteer fighters from Pakistan had joined Fatah and other PLO factions. This claim raised a provocative question: if there were so many, why is this history absent from the narratives we know? Over the next seven years, I embarked on a research journey to untangle this hidden past. My inquiry took me to Pakistan, where I spent months in archives, embassies, and homes across the country, collecting vivid testimonies, artifacts, and evidence that revealed irrefutable connections to the geographies and communities of South Lebanon. Armed with this archive of material, I returned to South Lebanon, where I pieced together this history through villages, homes, cemeteries, and families, and in this process, uncovered a history profoundly intertwined with the Palestinian armed struggle and the broader dynamics of the Lebanese Civil War. This talk will present this overlooked history, challenging conventional understandings of participation and lived experiences during the PLO period in Lebanon. It will also explore how the villages and villagers of South Lebanon were enmeshed in international and transnational solidarities, reframing their role within this historical context.
Bio
Based between Paris and Beirut, Sabah Haider is cultural and visual anthropologist. Her research and creative practice is at the intersections of photography, film and text, and regularly explores themes of identity, visibility/invisibility, transnational cultures and how geographies and structures are imagined and experienced. In parallel, for the past decade she has been working as a human centered design researcher at companies including Google, Bolt, and JP Morgan. She earned her Ph.D. from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada in 2023, and MA in Film Studies (2009) from the University College London. She is author of the chapter “Palestine through the prism of Pakistani cinema: imagining sameness and solidarity through Zerqa (1969)” in Transnational solidarity: Anticolonialism in the global sixties (University of Manchester Press, 2022). She is currently teaching courses in design research at the American University of Beirut, while also preparing an upcoming exhibition at Dar El Nimer representing an archive of PFLP photos from Beirut 1982, discovered in Helsinki. www.sabahhaider.com
