This Blog is intended for use by students in the Islamic Middle East course at Northfield Mount Hermon School and guest students and teachers from other participating schools.
Tim Rutten’s review in the LA Times of Tony Judt’s new book (Reappraisal: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. Penguin, 2008) provides a summary of Judt’s views on Zionism and the State of Israel and some leading rebuttals to his thinking on these matters. Judt argued in a 2003 article in The New York Review of [...]
As hopes for a Palestinian state fade, critical shortages of humanitarian aid are appearing and despair is growing.
Story at the International Herald Tribune
IME course study guide on the Arab-Israeli conflict
Repeating a pattern seen in conflicts in other parts of the world, Iraqi insurgent groups have been recruiting children to plant or detonate bombs and to carry out other kinds of attacks.
Story from the BBC
More on the insurgency
Some Muslim scientists and clerics are calling for Mecca time to replace Greenwich Mean Time arguing that GMT is a relic from Britain’s colonial past and that Mecca is the true center of the earth.
Story at BBC
Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, both experts on the Arab-Israeli conflict note that the “Shelf Agreement,” a not-so-new peace plan, is, in the final year of the Bush presidency (during which no progress has been made), being dusted off and getting another go. The concept is that Israel’s P.M. Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud [...]
William Dalrymple notes the following bit of ecumenical wisdom from the lips of a Kashmiri Sufi named Deen Darvish, who lived in the nineteenth century:
The Hindu says, ‘I am superior’;
The Musulman says I.
Two halves of a grain of mung they are;
Which, then, is greater than the other?
don’t quarrel over who is superior;
And who is not;
The one [...]
After his meeting with HAMAS leader Khaled Meshaal, former President Jimmy Carter claimed he had gotten a promise that HAMAS would recognize Israel. Not so, said Meshaal later - only a ten year “truce.” The Arabic word for truce - hudna - should not be confused with peaceful intentions: throughout Muslim history it has referred only [...]
“Over the last 20 years, globalization has been gaining breadth and depth. More countries are making goods, communications technology has been leveling the playing field, capital has been free to move across the world – and the United States has benefited massively from these trends. Its economy has received hundreds of billions of dollars in [...]
(Read the full article.)
American forces began to establish a wall separating Sadr City from Baghdad. The Iraqi government hoped to see this wall build security by blocking the Mahdi Army.
Sadr City was originally called Saddam City during Saddam Hussein’s reign. In 2003, It was unofficially named after the Shiite cleric, Mohammed Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr. This [...]
“In a searing report, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, sharply criticized the administration for relying too heavily on Pakistan’s military to achieve American counterterrorism goals, while paying only token attention to economic development and improving governance.”
Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Lacks Pakistan Plan,” New York Times, April 18, 2008, A7.
BBC Middle East