Sharq al-Adna: British Covert Radio and the Development of Arab Broadcasting

Sharq al-Adna or the Near East Arab Broadcasting Station was a covert, British radio station which broadcast in Arabic from 1941 to 1956, at first from Palestine before moving to Cyprus in 1948, where it posed as a commercial station but was in reality controlled by British Special Intelligence Services until it was commandeered by the military at the time of Suez. In the intervening fifteen years, its mainly Arab staff, loosely supervised by a small number of British personnel broadcast a mixture of music, drama, discussion, educational and religious material, together with a subtle British slant to its news output. Based on archival sources including the memoirs of some of those involved some material originally published in Arabic, this article assesses the station’s contribution to British propaganda efforts in the Middle East and to the development of Arab broadcasting

Communicating towards justice in ‘The Subaltern Voice’ (TSV)

We write with a voice of the marginalised in mind, as both marginalised women scholars writing from a critical perspective on human organisation and as privileged human beings with concern for those more dangerously excluded from The Master’s House. The voice we raise does not plead for assimilation into circumstances as they are. It calls for radical change. Our ideas originate in research with Māori women accountants employed in organisations expressing commitment to Māori involvement. From that research we learned that aspiring to bicultural ways of being in a context prematurely deemed post-colonial is fraught with risks of co-option and unintentional collusion. Accordingly we are committed to further exposing neo-colonialism and to experiment with The Subaltern Voice (TSV) as a heuristic for this work. Asking what might be said in TSV that is different from what can be said in more commonly heard voices calling for inclusion has brought us to new thoughts about our own engagement with ‘The Empire’. Not only as it continues to colonise Māori locally and indigenous peoples globally, but from the myriad of places we take our positions to speak, sometimes ‘from the margins’ and other times from within the relative comforts of The Master’s House