political Islam

The Salafist democratic trend

by News Sources 07.23.2012

Aaron Y. Zelin looks at the emerging democratic trend among Salafists, most recently expressed by Sheikh Salman al-Awdah in Saudi Arabia. “Important questions remain about Salafi groups’ shift to democracy. Is it pragmatic or a true ideological commitment to democratic principles?” But who, one might ask, sets the benchmark for such a commitment? A Democratic [...]

Read the full article →

Why Islamists will just keep winning

by News Sources 02.29.2012

Rami G Khouri writes: A persistent question we have heard during each Arab uprising across the Arab world in the past year has been, “What happens after the regime falls? Who takes over power?” This is usually asked with a tone of foreboding, with concern that bad or unknown political forces will assume power. Most [...]

Read the full article →

Forging ties with democratic Egyptian government is like reaching out to the Soviet Union?

by Paul Woodward 01.04.2012

The New York Times reports: With the Muslim Brotherhood pulling within reach of an outright majority in Egypt’s new Parliament, the Obama administration has begun to reverse decades of mistrust and hostility as it seeks to forge closer ties with an organization once viewed as irreconcilably opposed to United States interests. The administration’s overtures — [...]

Read the full article →

Hamas responds to the Arab Spring

by News Sources 12.22.2011

The Washington Post reports: Buoyed by the success of Islamist movements in countries swept by the Arab Spring, Hamas, the militant Islamist group that rules the Gaza Strip, is showing signs of pragmatism as its sense of isolation fades. The organization is jockeying to reposition itself amid shifting terrain in the Arab world. It is [...]

Read the full article →

The success of Egypt’s Islamists marks a trend throughout the region

by News Sources 12.13.2011

The Economist looks at the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists represented by the Nour party, whose combined successes in the first round of Egypt’s parliamentary elections give an overall majority to the Islamists. Surrounded by well-wishers at his home on a narrow dirt street in the village of Nazla, Wagih al-Shimi insists his Nour party [...]

Read the full article →

Democracy and Islam in the Arab elections

by News Sources 12.06.2011

Jack A. Goldstone writes: No doubt the most difficult task in the months ahead for Western leaders responding to changes in the Arab world will be to stick to their guns on democracy — that is, to accord elected governments and their leaders all the respect due to democratically chosen heads of state. This is [...]

Read the full article →

Inside Story – Is political Islam replacing Arab dictators?

by News Sources 12.01.2011
Read the full article →

Do the Middle East’s revolutions have a unifying ideology?

by News Sources 12.01.2011

Marc Lynch writes: “Why does every nation on Earth move to change their conditions except for us? Why do we always submit to the batons of the rulers and their repression? How long will Arabs wait for foreign saviors?” That is how the inflammatory Al Jazeera talk-show host Faisal al-Qassem opened his program in December [...]

Read the full article →

The rise of the Islamists

by Paul Woodward 12.01.2011

Mohamed Awad, director of the Alexandria and Mediterranean Research Center, describes to Patrick Martin from Toronto’s Globe and Mail, a scenario that many in Egypt’s liberal secular elite must now dread: “My fear,” said Dr. Awad, whose office is surrounded by models of Alexandria’s prospective future waterfront, “is that the more extreme Islamists, the Salafists, [...]

Read the full article →

Can Islamism and feminism mix?

by News Sources 10.26.2011

Monica Marks writes: In May, Tunisia passed an extremely progressive parity law, resembling France’s, which required all political parties to make women at least half of their candidates. As a long-repressed party, Ennahda enjoyed more credibility than other groups. It also had a greater number of female candidates to run than any other party, and [...]

Read the full article →

Can the West stop worrying and learn to love the Islamists?

by News Sources 10.25.2011

Tony Karon writes: Tunisia’s election and Libya’s celebration of the overthrow of Col. Muammar Gaddafi won’t have made for a happy weekend among those fevered heads in Washington who believe the West is locked in an existential struggle with political Islam: If anything, the Islamist tones of the Libyan celebrations, coupled with the Islamist victory [...]

Read the full article →

Erdoğan tell Arabs his secularism remarks mistranslated

by News Sources 09.18.2011

Today’s Zaman reports: Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has reiterated his response to Arabs who were discontent with the prime minister’s call to build a secular state, saying that his words were mistranslated and that secularism does not mean being against the religion. Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party), which was successful [...]

Read the full article →

Islamists emerge in force in new Libya

by News Sources 09.14.2011

The Washington Post reports: In the fight against Gaddafi’s forces, the Islamist militants played an important role among the rebels’ rag-tag forces because of their experience in battles abroad. With a place in the new Libya, most have said that their days as militants are over. The largest of the organizations, the Libyan Islamic Fighting [...]

Read the full article →

Britain’s arrest of Sheikh Raed Salah

by News Sources 07.05.2011

Jonathan Cook writes: He is an Islamic “preacher of hate” whose views reflect “virulent anti-Semitism” and who has funded Hamas terror operations, according to much of the British media. The furore last week over Sheikh Raed Salah, described by the Daily Mail newspaper as a “vile militant extremist”, goaded the British government into ordering his [...]

Read the full article →

The post-Islamist revolutions

by News Sources 04.28.2011

Asef Bayat writes: How should we make sense of the revolts that have engulfed the Arab world? Some observers see them as postmodern revolutions, diffused and leaderless, with no fixed ideology. Others view them as the next wave of democratic and liberal revolutions. Most commonly, they are described as youth revolutions, since young people played [...]

Read the full article →

The West’s fear of equality

by News Sources 03.20.2011

Haroon Siddiqui, at the Toronto Star, spoke to the long-exiled recently-returned Tunisian Islamist leader, Rashid Gannoushi, who said: “Islam is not a threat to the West. The popular revolutions sweeping the Middle East are not against the West but, in fact, influenced by the concept of freedom, egalitarianism, justice, rule of law. The West should [...]

Read the full article →

Gaddafi cruelly resists, but this Arab democratic revolution is far from over

by News Sources 02.21.2011

In agreement with Gilles Kepel who has dubbed events unfolding across the Middle East as the “Arab democratic revolution,” David Hirst writes: [S]ome now say, this emergence of democracy as an ideal and politically mobilising force amounts to nothing less than a “third way” in modern Arab history. The first was nationalism, nourished by the [...]

Read the full article →

The Muslim Brotherhood bogeyman

by Paul Woodward 02.06.2011

Nicholas Kristof writes: Maybe my judgment is skewed because pro-Mubarak thugs tried to hunt down journalists, leading some of us to be stabbed, beaten and arrested — and forcing me to abandon hotel rooms and sneak with heart racing around mobs carrying clubs with nails embedded in them. The place I felt safest was Tahrir [...]

Read the full article →

The demand for dignity surpasses all others

by Paul Woodward 01.23.2011

There are those who want to portray the emerging trend of self-immolation across the Middle East as the expression of suicidal desperation. For instance, Adam Lankford, attempts to explain away the death of Mohamed Bouazizi — the man who triggered the Tunisian revolution — suggesting that: By setting himself on fire near a government building [...]

Read the full article →

Islamists and the democratization of the Middle East

by News Sources 01.21.2011

Olivier Roy notes that there was no visible Islamist dimension to the uprising in Tunisia. Instead, the protesters were calling for freedom, democracy and multi-party elections. Put more simply, they just wanted to get rid of the kleptocratic ruling family. At the end, when the real “Islamist” leaders returned from exile in the West (yes [...]

Read the full article →

Tunisia’s Islamist democrats

by News Sources 01.21.2011

The New York Times reports: Ali Larayedh was imprisoned and tortured for 14 years for his role as a leader of the outlawed Islamist movement here, then hounded for the past six years by the omnipresent Tunisian secret police. But six days after the ouster of this country’s dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Mr. Larayedh [...]

Read the full article →

Tunisia: “The Islamists want democracy”

by News Sources 01.19.2011

The Guardian reports: Tunisia’s interim president, Foued Mebazaa, yesterday vowed “a complete break with the past” to calm fears that the revolution was being hijacked by the presence of the dictatorship’s ruling party in the interim government. In his first televised speech, Mebazaa promised a “revolution of dignity and freedom” following the ousting of Tunisia’s [...]

Read the full article →

Dahieh: flashpoint of the colonial and anti-colonial struggle

by News Sources 11.03.2010

Rami G Khouri writes: Who would have thought that a gynecologist’s office in the Hizbullah-dominated southern Beirut suburb of Dahieh would be the symbolic place where the colonial and anti-colonial struggles of the past century would reach their confrontational peak and bring to a head this long-simmering war? Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s call Thursday night [...]

Read the full article →

It’s obvious, go talk to the Islamists

by Paul Woodward 07.04.2010

Rami G Khouri writes: This nagging issue just will not go away: How do local or foreign governments best deal with leading Islamist groups in the Middle East and South Asia? Do you engage, negotiate with, ignore, or actively fight politically and militarily against Hizbullah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban and other such groups [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries