(Part of a European Council on Foreign Relations report, ‘The Gulf and Sectarianism’, published November 2013) Sectarianism has long underpinned Saudi Arabia’s domestic and foreign policy, and it has proved to be a particularly effective tool in the government’s management of the Arab […]
Hazem Kandil, a political sociologist at the University of Cambridge, outlined in a lecture in Oxford last week his view of the movement as a politically naïve cult acting on an innovative understanding (discordant within the Islamic tradition) of religious determinism – the idea that God […]
(From the latest issue of Turkish Review, Volume 3 Issue 5: http://www.turkishreview.org/newsDetail_getNewsById.action?newsId=223386) When Hosni Mubarak handed over power to his military peers in Egypt two years ago in the face of over two weeks of determined protests, the shock and fear in […]
One of the key themes the coup regime has developed in Egypt against its Islamist opponents is a rehashed version of the chauvinistic nationalism of the Mubarak regime. This involved an ‘Egypt First-ism’ vis-a-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict that gave a veneer of respectability for security paranioa […]
If there is any lesson to be drawn from the movement of uprisings unleashed in December 2010 it is that nothing is predictable. The Brotherhood is in a bad way, but neither it nor “political Islam” are spent forces (whether it’s in analysts’ and academics’ […]
Watch: Graffiti At Rabaa: Commentary on Cairo Islamist protest graffiti : http://camra.tv/l/mmvnsph Tweet
Watch: Rabaa, the Day After : Scene of Cairo Islamist protest after police attack: http://camra.tv/l/l668mer Tweet
Rabaa, the day after a massacre. The devastation at the site of the six-week long Brotherhood sit-in at the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in Cairo’s Nasr City was all the more jarring given the carnival that was going on there earlier the week. […]
The rehabilitation of Egypt’s police apparatus continues. The interior ministry and its numerous security and intelligence agencies were the backbone of Mubarak’s corrupt police state. But they suffered a severe blow during the uprising against Mubarak two years ago, and the story […]
The Rabaa al-Adawiya protest in Cairo was pretty festive this week, despite a government threat on Monday to clear it and the smaller one at Nahda square near Cairo University. Nobody there believed that the security forces – who were authorized by […]