It’s not every day that Barack Obama and Ban Ki-moon agree with the head of the Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami or an America-bashing Pakistani politician. But Tuesday’s Taliban attack on 14-year-old activist Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan’s Swat Valley attracted universal condemnation cutting across countries and cultures. Read Here – WSJ Opinion
Some months after the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein, I sat at lunch with the aging Hosni Mubarak. He was then 76 years old and hard of hearing but soon to “run” for the presidency for a fifth time in 2005. The four times previous, there had been no election at […]
Moroccans, it is said, revere the monarchy as an almost divine institution, and they expect the current Alaoui king, Mohammed VI, to be an active, engaged monarch, to lead the country and serve as the arbiter among its diverse interests, classes, tribes, and regions. The king, in turn, wants to rule, but not dominate, I […]
In 2006 Egyptian human rights activist Wael Abbas posted a video online of police sodomizing a bus driver with a stick, leading to the rare prosecution of two officers. Later, Abbas’s YouTube account was suddenly suspended because he had violated YouTube‘s guidelines banning “graphic or gratuitous violence.” YouTube restored the account after human rights groups informed its parent company Google that Abbas’s posts were a […]
The recent violence over an anti-Islam film is part of a wider clash with the idea of the modern republic. Read Here – The Hindu
Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi has won grudging respect from detractors in his first 100 days by sending the army back to barracks faster than anyone expected and raising Egypt’s international profile in several newsmaking visits abroad. Yet his political fortunes and those of the Muslim Brotherhood which propelled him to power may well depend on his […]
Qatar is spending massively to modernize its capital ahead of the 2022 World Cup, leading conservative Qataris to worry about how this will affect the Islamic nature of the Gulf state. Trucks can be seen speeding around Doha‘s business district, carrying building materials for the $150 billion makeover that will give the city a new […]
The most important facts about Iran go unstated because they are so obvious. Any glance at a map would tell us what they are. And these facts explain how regime change or evolution in Tehran — when, not if, it comes — will dramatically alter geopolitics from the Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent and beyond. […]
Islamists of various political shades are now in power in a growing number of Arab states. They are a new reality that everyone will have to deal with, and therefore seek to understand. The challenge is that most of these parties have been in opposition for decades under long-established military presidencies, and during these years […]
MINUTES after last week’s violent attacks on America’s missions in the Middle East, the country’s embassy in Cairo was already on Twitter. It tweeted an emergency number for American citizens. It criticised Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood for supporting the protests on their Arabic feed. And it thanked fellow tweeters for their condolences on the murder of […]
looking beyond borders 