A Forum on Islamic and Middle Eastern Politics
KELLY HAMMOND, 05 APRIL 2021 China’s Uyghurs have rightly been the center of news coverage recently. In China, the ongoing efforts to suppress Islam and Uyghur culture have led to the terrible and illegal incarceration of over one million Uyghurs and forced labor conditions. Recently governments in Canada, the United States and the EU have […]
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SEAN YOM, 15 MARCH 2021 During President Biden’s first month in office, the US raised the possibility that relations with Saudi Arabia would need “recalibration,” given its harrowing record of recent human rights violations. This move signaled a familiar scene that plays out in Washington whenever a non-democratic American ally commits egregious human rights abuses. […]
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TURAN KAYAOĞLU, 6 APRIL 2020 On February 27, in the New York Times, Mustafa Akyol wrote that, “the justification of many terrible deeds in the name of Islam today, from terrorism to tyranny, from patriarchy to bigotry” is a cause of Islamophobia. He argues that the solution is “right there in the Quran”: Muslims should […]
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AHMET T. KURU, 4 NOVEMBER 2019 “Are Arabs Turning Their Backs on Religion?” was the title of BBC’s 2019 coverage of a survey conducted in 11 countries with 25,000 interviewees. In 2018, BBC had reported the decline of religiosity in Turkey, too: “The Young Turks Rejecting Islam.” Other sources also documented declining Islamic religiosity in […]
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NADER HASHEMI, 9 SEPTEMBER 2019 What do Iranian human rights activists want from the international community, the West in particular? What guidelines should be followed that can better support their heroic efforts? As someone who has written on the topic and spent considerable time studying the topic, reading their statements, and interviewing some prominent voices, […]
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WENDY PEARLMAN, 2 SEPTEMBER 2019 The war in Syria can seem bewilderingly complex. Over more than eight years, a dozen states supported hundreds of rival groups that competed on the ground in a kaleidoscope of shifting alliances and rivalries. A web of sectarian tensions, economic interests, ideological clashes, and geopolitical jockeying overlay a fundamentally political […]
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Interview with MOHAMMAD H. KHALIL, 26 AUGUST 2019 Mohammad Hassan Khalil recently wrote a well-received book, Jihad, Radicalism, and the New Atheism. Having invited Dr. Khalil to Omaha to give a talk about his book and seen the great interest in my community about it, I wanted to have an extended interview with him about the […]
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RAMAZAN KILINÇ, 7 MAY 2019 On May 6, Turkey’s Higher Electoral Council canceled the mayoral elections in Istanbul and ordered the rerun of the race on June 23. This decision wiped away the humiliating defeat of the governing Justice and Development Party in Istanbul. Turkey had already been in the path to authoritarianism under the presidency […]
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RAMAZAN KILINÇ, 14 FEBRUARY 2019 In January 2019, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had a Middle East tour with the goal of forming an alliance that could contain Iran in the region. He vowed to “expel every last Iranian boot” from Syria and decrease Iran’s role in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. For observers of […]
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RAMAZAN KILINÇ 18 JANUARY 2019 Last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Egypt and gave a speech at American University in Cairo. Secretary Pompeo criticized President Obama’s foreign policy in the region by referring to his famous speech, “A New Beginning,” given in Cairo after he became the president in 2009. He blamed Obama of retreating American presence […]
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