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.
Ian Buruma, in a review of recent books on American foreign policy, explores the current “grand thesis”: that America’s era of global dominance is over. He injects a welcome note of caution into the debate and concludes that the causes of democracy and security in the world would be much better advanced were the United States [...]
The visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the United States this week has spurred mixed reactions in America’s Muslim community. Muslims cite the pontiffs remarks about their religion in the fall of 2006 and his baptism this past Easter of a high profile Muslim as evidence that he has at times offended Muslim sensibilities. Some Muslims accuse [...]
Michael L. Ross, Associate Professor of Political Science at UCLA, notes the following correlation between oil and human conflict:
“The world is far more peaceful than it was 15 years ago. There were 17 major civil wars - with ‘major’ meaning the kind that kill more than a thousand people a year - going on at [...]
Graham Fuller, author of a recent book on Turkey (The New Turkish Republic: Turkey as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World, U.S. Institute of Peace, 2007) summarizes the challenges of Turkish-American relations and Turkey’s role in the Middle East regionally in a piece from the LA Times:
“Our Fraying Alliance With Turkey,” Los Angeles Times, [...]
A recent (February, 2008) publication from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace suggests the United States adopt a more accommodating, less confrontational and less ideological approach to the Middle East. A summary of the publication at the Carnegie website and a link to a .pdf file of the entire text are at the Supplemental Resources [...]
A new poll carried out by the University of Maryland and Zogby International shows eight out of ten Arabs finding fault with U.S. policies. The poll also indicated widespread sympathy among Arabs for Lebanon’s Hizbullah and its leader Hasan Nasrallah, who, along with Syria’s President Asad and (non-Arab) Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, was among the most popular leaders [...]
Foreign tourism is hitting new highs in Syria, a country with relative political and economic stability in the region.
Story from the BBC
Israel has never had a constitution in its sixty year history. A committee is hard at work trying to draft one. Some think that the first thing that has to change is Israel’s system of proportional representation, which assures that elected officials are responsible to their parties, not to the voters. Israeli society is so fractured that [...]
Israeli analyst Zev Chafets writes that, in the face of American failure to stop Iran from building up its nuclear capability, Israel can take care of itself. He alludes to the 1981 Israeli attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak (destroying it), and to Israel’s “own arsenal” in making the case that Israel has the capacity to [...]
Syrian writer Khaled Khalilfa’s latest novel, In Praise of Hatred, is being translated into English. The novel is based on events that took place in Syria in 1982: a clash between Muslim fundamentalists on the one hand and state Baathist “fundamentalists,” as Khalifa calls them, on the other. Khalifa watched a “culture of elimination” evolve on both sides of the conflict.
Journalist [...]
BBC Middle East