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Saturday of Fire

Reporting

Palestinian Christians celebrate identity in Easter rituals

Posted on April 12, 2016 by Alex Shams

Palestinian worshipers across Holy Land mark ‘Saturday of Fire’, an Orthodox celebration and yearly revival of community pride

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About me

Alex Shams is an Iranian-American writer and a PhD student of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

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  • Looking A Tyrant In the Eye: Iran’s Long Struggle for Freedom and Justice
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  • Iran’s Protesters Are Caught Between State Repression and Foreign Intervention
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About

Born and raised in an Iranian-American family in Los Angeles, Alex Shams has long been fascinated by the stories that places can tell us. Growing up, he learned Persian and Spanish; in college, he learned Arabic and studied abroad at the American University of Cairo before moving to Beirut after graduation. After receiving his master’s in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard, he moved to Bethlehem, Palestine, where he was a journalist at Ma’an News Agency, the largest independent Palestinian news organization. He received his PhD. from the University of Chicago in Sociocultural Anthropology. His dissertation, entitled “Constructing Islamic Modernity: Power, Religion, and Masculinity in Post-Revolutionary Iran,” was based on three years of ethnographic research in Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan as well as archival research in the British Library and Ba’ath Party Archives.

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