My sojourn in Tunisia inevitably ended up focussing to some degree on the question of the Islamist Ennahda (al-Nahda) party and the future of secularism in Tunisia. It’s a sign of how advanced the secular agenda is in Tunisia that the term is […]
I was in Tunisia for two weeks and had a chance to compare how things are moving there to the situation in Egypt. I like Tunisia and I like the Tunisian dialect, which is getting more comprehensible to me on each trip! […]
Nationalism when it evolved in Europe in the 19th century postulated an ideal of nation states for specific ethnicities. Germany was for the Germans, France was for the French, etc. Realities were more complex. Histories were distorted to promote ethnic unity and create narratives whose inevitable […]
March 2009 Driving from Tel Aviv to Haifa, you could be forgiven for not realizing you are driving close to the old Green Line that marked the border of the mountainous West Bank with Israel until 1967 when Israel seized the occupied […]
In a room overlooking the waters of the Gulf in Manama, the leader of Bahrain’s largest opposition party ponders a troubling question: Did he throw away a chance for the first real democracy in the Gulf Arab region? Over two months after […]
The Big Speech was rather a non-event from the perspective of most people in the region, I reckon. Obama and his administration were behind the curve when the uprisings broke out. The uprisings were troubling for them because 1. (like the Iranian Revolution in 1979) […]
This piece in the New Left Review tries to make sense of the Arab uprisings but falls into the trap of believing that there is no “anti-imperial” element to the movements. Perry Anderson writes: Notable has been one further absence in the upheaval. […]
Britain’s Foreign Minister Hague thinks the “Arab Spring”, as he just had to call it, is going to be the event of the early 21st century, “greater than either 9/11 or the global financial crisis in 2008” and he compared it to the […]
What is striking about Osama Bin Laden’s extrajudicial execution – let’s be precise – is how insignificant the man’s movement had become in much of the region. The threat to Arab regimes has moved on from the violent revolt of al-Qa’ida to the peaceful civil […]
Abdelbari Atwan, the editor of al-Quds al-Arabi, says the Egyptian Prime Minister Essam Sharaf was looking for investments not direct aid handouts during his Gulf tour last week. But while he was received in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar, the door was […]