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.
Iraq is in the grip of internal political plotting and power plays that, in the words of one reporter, “seem closer to Shakespearean drama than to nascent democracy.”
More:
“The real struggle is for the country’s identity: how much the government will be controlled from Baghdad and how much from the provinces, who will hold power and [...]
Turkey has a new elite class of observant Muslim business people who have helped transform the country’s social, religious, political, and economic life. This class helped bring an Islamist political party to power in a fiercely secular country, and, it is largely responsible for making Turkey the seventh largest economy in Europe (if, indeed, Turkey should be [...]
For West Bank Palestinians, economic life is improving (Bethlehem’s Christmas tourist industry is booming this year; Nablus, a city with an especially troubled recent history, is also faring better). However, in Gaza, under the rule of HAMAS, everyday life for Palestinians grows worse and worse. All Palestinians agree that only a political solution with Israel [...]
The New York Times, in the latest contribution to its “Generation Faithful” series, profiles college students in Jordan, who see Islamist politics as a vehicle for rebelling against what they perceive to be dead-end, oppressive political, social, and economic lives.
Michael Slackman, “Jordanian Students Rebel, Embracing Conservative Islam,” New York Times, Dec. 24, 2008
Photographs from this year’s Hajj (”Pilgrimage”) to Mecca and Eid al-Adha (”The Feast of the Sacrifice”), which concludes the pilgrimage season.
At Boston.com
Two recent articles in the Jan-Feb 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs merit our attention (both via the NMH Virtual Desktop):
Richard N. Haass and Martin Indyk, “Beyond Iraq: A New U.S. Strategy for the Middle East,” Foreign Affairs, Jan-Feb 2009, vol. 88, no. 1, pp. 41ff.
Walter Russell Mead, “Change They Can Believe In: To Make [...]
Kenan Malik notes that the same liberals who spoke up in defense of Salman Rushdie’s right to speak his mind through The Satanic Verses are now putting on the brakes:
Kenan Malik, “Twenty Years On: Internalizing the Fatwa,” Spiked Review of Books, Dec. 12, 2008
See also” Lorraine Adams, “Thinly Veiled” (review of Sherry Jones, The Jewel [...]
The Economist website (Dec. 13) is reporting that plans to enlarge the Haram Mosque of Mecca (where the Kaaba is located), so that it can accommodate the ever growing numbers of pilgrims each year, are running into trouble because one of the British architects being consulted is not a Muslim, and, Muslims are not permitted [...]
Follow the journey of BBC correspondent Aleem Maqbool as he walks from Nazareth to Bethlehem retracing the footsteps of Mary and Joseph with a donkey named Cynthia.
See Maqbool’s diary at BBC.
“An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society [...]
BBC Middle East