From Open Democracy: Secular activists and politicians in Egypt and officials in Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – each for their own reasons – have watched with alarm as the Gulf state, Qatar, and its pan-Arab […]
The news on Sunday that the deputy Saudi defence minister Prince Khaled bin Sultan had been removed from his post comes after a series of position changes among senior Saudi princes that have sped up in recent months as King Abdullah closes […]
In a seminal work published in 1970, writer Alvin Toffler managed to capture the sense of a world of such immense change at the physical, economic, political and social level that all were afflicted in one way or another by what he […]
It has become rather fashionable in some circles to predict the imminent demise of Qatar’s alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Brotherhood calques around the Arab world. I don’t see it happening, and here’s why: Tweet
Mixing East and West has become such a cliche that first mention of it is enough to shut down interest in any given context. EastWest-ism is still doing well in the art world, though. One of celebrated Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri’s works, […]
Ahd Kamel’s Sanctity was a real surprise at the Gulf Film Festival. Saudi cinema has taken off in recent years despite a multitude of obtacles – an informal ban on public cinema houses and state funding of cinema, and frequent interference from […]
Many Egyptian social media activists and analysts opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood have taken a sharp line against Western analysts who appeared to be bigging up the Brotherhood during the latter period of the Mubarak years. You thought the Brotherhood were a […]
The destruction of a synagogue in Damascus is the latest manifestation of a fundamental, and troubling, shift going on in the Middle East. The Jobar Synagogue, thought to be 2,000 years old, was looted and burned to the ground. Both the government […]
When Patricia Crone and Michael Cook’s Hagarism was first published in 1977 it was immediately controversial. Hagarism argued that the problems with the historical material of Islamic tradition were so severe that it was worthwhile looking at what source material there is […]
Hong Kong is impressive in so many ways. Urban living is taken up an extra notch and the result seems so advanced compared to ‘Old Europe’, as former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once put it – overhead walkways and escalators that […]