Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Muhammad Hussein
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Amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza, are we witnessing the fall of Zionism?
Around 50 years before the creation of the state of Israel, British explorer and diplomat Richard F. Burton wrote in his book The Jew, the Gypsy, and El-Islam about the concept of a Jewish state in the holy land, which was being proposed by the emerging Zionist movement at...
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Out of Time: The Collected Stories of Samira Azzam
It takes a certain level of skill to encapsulate the plight of an oppressed people, the nostalgia of distant and forgotten days, and the inexplicable heartbreak of generational trauma in short stories – there is simply barely enough space to attain that sort of depth – but those in...
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The Arab World’s democratic transition has kicked off in Sarajevo
It is ironic that a conference on democracy in the Arab world could not be held in the capital of any Arab country, and was instead held in the capital of a politically-unstable Balkan state that itself remains vulnerable to separatist and ethnic intrigues. According to the Arab Council,...
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The Turks are winning the new Great Game at the Caspian
One region where events seem to have been developing at breakneck speed over the past few years is that of Nagorno-Karabakh, the former Armenian-dominated breakaway republic which – despite being internationally-recognised as Azerbaijani territory – had been ruled by Armenian militants with support from Yerevan over the past three...
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IMEC will fail to rival China Silk Road by neglecting key developing nations
In this era of grand projects and geopolitical interconnectedness, it was no surprise, this month, when a memorandum of understanding was announced on the sidelines of the G20 summit in New Delhi that numerous nations will work to establish a vast ship and rail corridor, stretching from India across...
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Remembering the Zionists’ assassination of UN Palestine mediator Count Bernadotte
Bernadotte was most notably known for securing the release of thousands of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps during World War II...
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The Libya people have spoken, and ties with Israel are forced back into the shadows
As protests erupted throughout the Libyan capital, Tripoli, and other cities in the country in response to the Foreign Minister’s secret meeting with her Israeli counterpart last week, it served as a stark reminder of the rampant disconnect between the country’s political leaderships and the general population, along with...
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The scramble for the Global South: Foreign domination or self-sufficiency?
The year 2023 has, so far, proven to be an eventful year for the “Global South”, the loose collective of nations with developing, less developed or under-developed economies, which has served more as an abstract idea than a unitary reality until now. When the military coup in Niger took...
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Putting Saudi’s Vision 2030 over human rights may be a very sinister part of the plan
When it was confirmed by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change last week that it had continued its £9 million partnership with Saudi Arabia even after the 2018 assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, there was little surprise expressed by either the media...
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Is the West turning against Kosovo to appease the Serbs?
In a globalised world where a largely stable international order of nation states with agreed-upon boundaries is in place, borders contested by rival nations are few and far between. Those who grow up in the Western world in particular are generally unaware of such places, or at least ignorant...
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Riots in France do not mean an alien takeover of Europe
It was entirely predictable that when riots erupted in France after 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk was killed by a police officer they would provide another opportunity for the far-right in France and beyond to blame immigration and foreigners. Claims surfaced online and in the socio-political sphere that the rioters were...
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Has the Wagner mutiny ended Russia’s dream of hegemony in the global south?
Tensions which had long been brewing reached a climax on 24 June when the leader of the infamous Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, announced a march on Moscow against the Russian army and government, which he finally blamed for the invasion of Ukraine. The “mutiny” was essentially the culmination...
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Remembering the 1989 coup in Sudan
Many see the 1989 coup as instrumental in leading Sudan to many of the crises it is currently undergoing, and the country seems far from the civilian and democratic rule its people have long hoped for....
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In the Taliban’s war on drugs, the West chooses condemnation instead of assistance
Governments and regimes throughout the world have been no strangers to using narcotics as a major revenue source. More recently, during this era of sanctions, that practice has been an effective tactic to circumvent such measures. Entities and figures in isolated states such as Venezuela and Iran represent key...
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Unlike their media, Western nations recognise the necessity of Erdogan’s Turkiye
The month of May has seen a replay of the past decade of both Turkish politics and the Western nations’ dealings with it: the old rivalry between Turkiye’s secularist body politic and its ‘Islamist’-inspired ruling party, the exaggeration of both by Western media, and the significant ultranationalist base underlying...
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Reconciliation with Assad is a strategic mistake and backward step for the Arab world
Syria’s return to the Arab League this month was momentous, not because it came as a complete surprise – it did not – nor because it changes much on the ground – it does not – but simply because it shows the unfortunate reality that Arab governments have not...
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Are Saudi Arabia and the UAE leading the way to a new order in the Middle East?
The foreign ministers of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and other Arab states agreed last month in Jeddah that the Arab world must play a leading role in efforts to broker an end to Syria’s ongoing conflict. This not only highlighted the attempts to rely less on foreign hegemons for...
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Remembering the Russia-Turkiye war in 1877 and the Ottoman loss of the Balkan
On 24 April 1877, a Russian-Ottoman war began ...
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Are we witnessing the end of Pakistan’s military Establishment?
In the West, the existence of a “deep state” remains a contentious issue. Many activists and political outcasts have referred to it, even targeted it, while mainstream media outlets have rushed to condemn the concept as a conspiracy theory. Even so, many in Britain, for example, still refer to...
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Can Gulf States really save Europe from its incoming property grab?
Much has been made of the West’s decades-long energy suicide, especially amid its acceleration over the past few years. The introduction of policies to drive forward a green revolution and transition away from fossil fuels – while fuelled largely with good intention – has had the effect of threatening...
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Will Israel betray the Pax Americana by striking Iran without permission?
The days of war between the Arab world and Israel are long gone. Even enmity toward the occupation state has largely faded away, leaving in its trail the infamous Abraham Accords, despite the “normalisation” deals being generally accepted only by Arab or Muslim-majority nations which were never actually at...
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Is Saudi Arabia preparing for the collapse of the petrodollar and US dollar dominance?
One of the most illusory phenomena in our current existence is the money we use for buying, selling and hoarding on a daily basis. It is, to put it simply, in the air, backed up by nothing and reliant on nothing, yet at the same time highly delicate and...
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Between a dictator and a failed UN, post-earthquake Syria resembles its revolution: isolated and abandoned
There are few tragedies in the world for which the responsibility can be deflected away from politics and human fault. This week’s earthquake in Turkiye and Syria was one of those, and has resulted in a flurry of devastation – over 20,000 deaths so far, destroyed homes, huge infrastructure...
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The world is heading towards CBDCs: the inevitable future of finance or new form of dystopian control?
It is the unfortunate – or fortunate, depending on one’s propensity to autocracy – nature of every decentralised system in this modern age to become centralised under the scope of governmental regulation or private sector control. That has been true for taxation, data, health and safety legislation, construction permission...