A spectre is haunting Muslims—the spectre of fatwas. All the powers of old Islam have entered into a holy alliance: to issue more and more fatwas, each as ridiculous as the other, and thus drown the Islamic earth in a pestiferous flood of fatwas.
1.1 | The Arabs Are Alive
It is safe to say that Wikileaks will be with us for some time to come.
In the pursuit of a more viable future, Turkey has chosen to follow the modern path, but in her quest for a more authentic political existence she has also decided to adopt a secular constitution and a democratic way of life. A paradox or a contradiction in terms?
When it becomes a protest, poetry has a price.
The revolutions of the Arab Spring gave a new lease of life to an enormously popular poem by Palestinian-Israeli poet and activist Tawfiq Zayyad.
When crowds in Tunisia marched against the despotism of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, they chanted a short poem by the Tunisian poet Abu al-Qasim al-Shabi.
The poem became an instant classic despite being instantly banned. It rails against Arab dictatorship and backwardness, and calls for a new generation of Arabs to break their chains and overcome defeat.
A perspective on the Arab revolutions from the West.
One of the most gripping and revealing episodes of the popular Egyptian revolution that erupted on 25 January, 2011 was a scene in which a disoriented leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood explained to Al Jazeera news channel why he happened to be talking from a borrowed mobile phone outside a prison in the middle of the desert.
My plots against the Gaddafi regime have failed. But the people’s uprising is succeeding.