Yassamine Mather n the aftermath of every Islamist terror attacks in America, Europe or the UK, such as the stabbing of Tory MP David Amess, we hear the…
Ramzy Baroud When the news circulated that Morocco’s leading political group, the Development and Justice Party (PJD), has been trounced in the latest elections, held in September, official…
Peyman Jafari “We are melting away,” lamented the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, on December 26 1978 in a phone tap of a conversation with his advisor and former…
Farnaz Fassihi Candidates in Iran’s presidential elections have always been strictly vetted, and those deemed insufficiently loyal to the Islamic Revolution were disqualified. Within those limits, contenders held…
Abdullah Al-Arian Last month, Tunisia’s parliamentary speaker and head of the Ennahda Party, Rached Ghannouchi, came under fire for comments he made following a meeting with the French ambassador. Following a recent string…
Patrick Cockburn Alend Shoresh is a Kurdish farmer and teacher from north-east Syria who was conscripted into fighting Islamic State in 2018: he joined the Syrian Democratic Forces…
Abdullah Al-Arian Last month, Tunisia’s parliamentary speaker and head of the Ennahda Party, Rached Ghannouchi, came under fire for comments he made following a meeting with the French ambassador. Warning…
Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Ammar Maleki, Tilburg Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution was a defining event that changed how we think about the relationship between religion and modernity. Ayatollah Khomeini’s…
Juan Cole This spring, the novel coronavirus pandemic has raised the issue of the relationship between the blindest kind of religious faith and rational skepticism — this time…
Yassamine Mather Professor Fariborz Raisdana, who died on March 16 in a Tehran hospital, was a leftwing economist, political activist and author, who lived and worked in Iran….
Daliah Lina “You stand with the terrorist troops. You are a jihadist.” This just covers a part of the public smearing I had to face the last couple…
Eight and a half years ago when the war on Syria began, Turkey played the most important role. Weapons were smuggled from Libya through Turkey to be delivered…
Robert Fisk Those tens of thousands of largely young protesters demanding a non-sectarian Lebanon were joyful, filled with happiness, determined that this time they would change the wretched…
Jonathan Cook There is something profoundly deceitful in the way the Democratic Party and the corporate media are framing Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria….
Paul Khalifeh. The New Hezbollah has emerged. In the past, the Lebanese Shia party proclaimed its allegiance to Iran through resistance to the state of Israel, and by…
Kourosh Ziabari. Iran is a country in which many aspects of public life: governance, education, foreign relations and even people’s lifestyles are peculiarly determined by ideology. The authorities…
As the Sudanese uprising enters its most critical conjuncture, with negotiations between the military council and the Forces for the Declaration of Freedom and Change collapsing, and the…
Adrian Searle. Whitechapel Gallery, London: The Beatles play a presidential funeral while Nimrud’s Palace is rebuilt with sardine cans in this angry, thought-provoking journey though time. Michael Rakowitz’s…
Robyn Creswell. In March, 2011, when civil protests broke out in cities and towns across Syria, the country’s most famous poet, Adonis—who is in his eighties and has…
Mehdi Farji. Located 125 kilometers south of Tehran, Qom is a holy city known for its many seminaries and the thousands of clerics and seminarians who live and…
Robert Fisk. After all the headlines about the supposed defeat of Isis, anyone who doesn’t believe a word of it may seem a bit of a spoilsport. But whenever…
Omar Sabbour. In September 2018, when the Assad regime was preparing to launch its (now on-hold) offensive against rebel-held Idlib in northern Syria, a rather surprising report emerged in the…
Concluding part of dialogue: Political Islamism, women and democracy Ardeshir Mehrdad: As you have probably observed, amongst the authors dealing with feminist-Islamism some place their emphasis on the…
This is the second part of a three-part conversation carried out with the Syrian academic Aziz Al-Azmeh. Here Professor Al-Azmeh addresses the various forms that political islams take…
This is the first part of a three-part conversation carried out with the Syrian academic Aziz Al-Azmeh. Here Aziz Al-Azmeh addresses the relation of contemporary political islams and…
Esen Uslu. Almost two years ago, when the military challenged his rule by attempting a coup and were beaten back, president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan famously said: “It was…
Domunique Vidal. As the extreme right continues its rise across Europe, Israel’s prime minister has decided to get closer. This decision, in the name of the fight against…
Nadia Murad. The slave market opened at night. We could hear the commotion downstairs where militants were registering and organising, and when the first man entered the room,…
Romy Roynard. The young Yazidi woman, the victim of horrific crimes, has spoken out worldwide in her campaign to end sexual assault as a weapon of war. Nadia…
Interview with Ardeshir Mehrdad. Mehdi Kia: In the first part of the interview[1]http://www.middleast4change.org/squeezing-iran-part-1-trumps-project-in-the-middle-east/we talked of the evolving line-ups in the Middle East in the backdrop of recent massive…
Middle East 4 Change