Turkey signals sweeping regional ambitions
A nationalist Turkish television station with close ties to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has dug up a 12-year-old map that projects Turkey’s sphere of...
Saudi schoolbooks: What does it take to recontextualize Islam?
Two decades of snail pace revisions of Saudi schoolbooks aimed at removing supremacist references to Jews, Christians, and Shiites suggest a willingness to delete...
Muslim scholar: Human rights policy needs to focus on religious scholars, not just activists
A prominent Muslim scholar has warned that the West’s failure to include the incarceration in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Muslim world of...
Saudi moderation has its limits
Two recent reports documenting significant Saudi progress in countering ingrained religious anti-Jewish, anti-Christian and anti-Shiite supremacism as well as anti-Western and other xenophobic attitudes...
Separating the wheat from the chaff: Saudi moderation put to the test
Saudi Arabia’s combustible mix of religion, nationalism, and tradition as well as contradictions in the kingdom’s projection of itself as a driver of moderate...
Concentration Camp Guides, the Far Right, and Islam: Europe Frays at the Edges
Religion scholar Esra Ozyurek has a knack for identifying trends that ring warning bells about where Europe is heading.
She points to German Muslims, widely...
Islamophobia: A fungible prop for Muslim religious soft power
Think the Muslim world is united in opposing Islamophobia? Think twice.
Rising anti-Muslim sentiment in countries like China, Myanmar, and India as well as the...
Iranians move into front line of the Middle East’s quest for religious change
A recent online survey by scholars at two Dutch universities of Iranian attitudes towards religion has revealed a stunning rejection of state-imposed adherence to...
When is usury usury? Turkish fatwa casts doubt on Erdogan’s religious soft power drive
Turkey’s state-controlled top religious authority has conditionally endorsed usury in a ruling that is likely to fuel debate about concepts of Islamic finance and...
Middle East futures: Decade(s) of defiance and dissent
If the 2010s were a decade of defiance and dissent, the 2020s promise to make mass anti-government protests a fixture of the greater Middle...