A Blog about Middle Eastern & North African Politics, Society and Culture
Youssef Rakha is the author of The Book of the Sultan’s Seal: Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars. Cairo where Rakha lives and works, is at the heart… Continue reading "An Interview with Youssef Rakha: Author of The Book of the Sultan’s Seal"
One of the most interesting books this summer may be a rather innocuous book by Anne Wolf, a leading Tunisia and North Africa specialist. In Political Islam in Tunisia: A… Continue reading "Political Islam in Tunisia: a History of Ennahda and the Tunisian Exception"
Sitting across Mahdi al-Harati in the hotel lobby it is difficult to see why anyone would want this quiet Libyan dead. His insulin rests on the low table alongside his… Continue reading "Mahdi al-Harati: A Libyan Garibaldi?"
In an important new book Durham University fellow Christopher M. Davidson, author of many books on the Gulf, sets out to explain why despite all the modernising forces that… Continue reading "A Crisis Waiting to Happen: Book Review of Christopher M. Davidson’s ‘After the Sheikhs’"
Mr. Fathi Warfali is one of Libya’s earliest and youngest political activists and hails from a pedigreed religious and scholarly family from Bani Walid. At sixteen he joined the nascent… Continue reading "Fathi Warfali: A Democrat who Sought Martyrdom in the Fields of Afghanistan."
Here begins a series of interviews and dialogues with al-Maqālāt who describes himself as “an independent media outlet”. He tweets under @Al_Maqal_Ps. The reader will find that the interviewees attitudes… Continue reading "The Human Nature of Jihadism- an interview with al-Maqālāt"
Out of all the places to meet Zuheir Salem, the number two man of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (SMB), a David Brent-style office in Alperton, north London, is probably the… Continue reading "The Syrian Brotherhood’s Man in London: An Interview with Zuheir Salem"
How do autocratic anomalies like the Gulf States weather the Arab Spring? Given that these states are the offspring of British imperialism it is remarkable that they are so stable.… Continue reading "Gulf States: The End is Nigh"
Review appeared in the New Statesman July 2012, reproduced with kind permission. Having lived in Syria for several years, I have always been sceptical about the coverage of the… Continue reading ""