Nadia Midani was born in Damascus in 1955. She studied sociology in Paris, and gained her doctoral degree with a dissertation on “Tribal and Village Structures in Metropolitan Arab Cities.” She works as a journalist in Paris and Damascus. The Syrian regime tolerated her, and because of her powerful tribe, as she ironically says, she was never arrested. Read More Over the last  forty years, relations of hers from the Midani tribe have been leading generals and ministers. However, Nadia, the black sheep of the family, was never allowed to publish in the state newspaper. For years she was on the editorial staff of the Arabic edition of the French monthly magazine Le Monde diplomatique in Beirut.