Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Omar Ahmed
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Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj
Michael Christopher Low’s book Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj is a fascinating account of the Hajj pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest city of Makkah (“Mecca”) during the 19th century. It was a time when the semi-autonomous Sharifate in the Hijaz province was effectively at the crossroads...
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Pompeo’s attempts to link Iran to Al-Qaeda reveal the failure of ‘maximum pressure’
Last week, the outgoing US Secretary of State and former head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, announced a flurry of last-minute sanctions against rivals and foes China, Cuba and Iran. This was perceived widely as a desperate attempt to undermine the incoming Democrat Biden administration. He also designated Yemen’s...
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Profile: Kahlil Gibran (6 Jan 1883 – 10 April 1931)
Kahlil Gibran is regarded as the third-best-selling poet of all time after Lao Tzu and William Shakespeare, largely because of his book The Prophet. First published in 1923 it has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide and is among the most translated of all books. Despite these achievements,...
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Failure to realise Yemen’s political reality prolongs the conflict and crisis
Exiled Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi announced the formation of a new unity government on Friday, just over a year after the power-sharing agreement was signed with the separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) in the Saudi capital Riyadh. I wrote last November that the Saudi-brokered peace deal —...
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This year began and drew to a close with Iran being baited into war
The single main story of the year has without a doubt been the coronavirus pandemic which has thus far claimed over 1.5 million lives around the world amid encouraging news about vaccine development. However it is now easy to forget that before this story became a near permanent fixture...
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Bahrain is yet to normalise ties with its own people
If the US-backed, Saudi-led coalition’s war on Yemen was known as “the forgotten war”, the 2011 anti-government protests in Bahrain soon became “the forgotten uprising”. Forgotten in the sense that following the so-called Arab Spring, to which both events were linked, most of the world’s attention had shifted to...
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Remembering Taha Hussein: ‘The Dean of Arabic literature’
According to most accounts, Taha Hussein, one of Egypt’s most esteemed writers and intellectuals and a giant in modern Arabic literature, was born on 14 November, 1889, in the Upper Egyptian village of Izbet Al-Kilo in the Minya governorate. He had humble beginnings hailing from a large lower middle-class...
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The Humanity of Muhammad: A Christian View
Recent events in France have once again pushed the notion of a clash of civilisations between Islam and the West onto centre stage. Last month the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo republished caricatures of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him); this was followed by the gruesome murder of a French...
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With defiance and perseverance, Iran has once again demonstrated its independence
The 13-year arms embargo imposed on Iran by the UN Security Council expired on Sunday in accordance with Resolution 2231 of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the 2015 nuclear deal. This means that Iran is free to buy and sell conventional weapons, a diplomatic...
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Casting of Israel’s Gal Gadot as Cleopatra prompts debate on social media
Israeli actress Gal Gadot confirmed yesterday that she will be playing the role of Egyptian Queen Cleopatra...
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It’s a challenge to support Azerbaijan when its government is pro-Israel
The renewed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region has the propensity to draw in regional powers such as Iran, Russia and Turkey, and thus become a proxy war in the South Caucasus. The conflict is one that is already progressing towards outright war as fighting has...
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Biden to Trump: ‘Inshallah’ we'll see your tax returns
Although the Arabic phrase literally means “God willing” it is also popularly used in an informal way across the Middle East to denote something that is unlikely to happen....
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Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding
Whilst literature on Israel’s state violence against Palestinian children is nothing new, there are apparent limitations on the current discourse which tends not to extend beyond theories of childhood trauma in conflict zones; nor do they form part of a critique of the ideologies underpinning Israel as a settler-colonial...
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If Pakistan is unwilling to protect its Shia citizens, they may look to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards
The world’s largest population of Shia Muslims outside Iran is found in neighbouring Pakistan where they account for an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of the population. Although a sizeable minority in the country’s four provinces and major cities, they are the majority in the northernmost autonomous region...
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Baba, What Does My Name Mean? A Journey to Palestine
Most people would agree that it is important for parents to instil a sense of national and cultural identity in their children in order to preserve their heritage for future generations, especially for those from immigrant or refugee families. The Palestinian diaspora and others living in the western world...
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Hamas-Hezbollah talks and Iran-Turkey cooperation come at a crucial time
The recent meeting in Beirut between Hamas and Hezbollah leadership where the threats to the Palestinian cause and normalisation between Israel and Arab states were discussed is the latest sign that the two resistance movements have revived relations. The reconciliation between the Hamas and Hezbollah has been in the...
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Only Arab states aligned with Iran will oppose Zionism
The agreement between the United Arab Emirates and Israel to establish full diplomatic relations in exchange for the suspension (or from Israel’s point of view, merely the postponement) of the annexation of the occupied Palestinian West Bank follows nearly two decades of unofficial ties between the occupation state and...
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Political Thought in Contemporary Shi‘a Islam: Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din
When one thinks of contemporary political Shia Islam the Islamic Republic of Iran tends to spring to mind, a theocracy which those familiar with the subject know is based on the theory of Wilayat Al-Faqih or “guardianship of the jurist” as revived and expanded upon by Ayatollah Khomeini. Over...
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Turkey may have reclaimed the leadership of Sunni Islam from Saudi Arabia
The Hagia Sofia Grand Mosque was opened for public worship last Friday for the first time in 86 years following a top court’s ruling that the historic building, originally a church, had been converted into a museum illegally by the founder of modern Turkey’s secular state. I had expected...
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Abbasid-China contacts revolved around the Silk Road; so does Beijing’s anti-Uyghur clampdown
In the year 751 CE, the largely Arab-Persian army of the Abbasid Caliphate met the Chinese imperial forces of the Tang Dynasty on the banks of the River Talas near today’s Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan border in Central Asia. Initiated by a border dispute between client states, the conflict soon...
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Hagia Sophia will become a mosque again, it is both Turkey’s and an Islamic right
Turkey’s top administrative court, the Council of State is likely to announce today the restoration of the Hagia Sophia from a museum to a mosque reversing an 86-year-old decree by the Council of Ministers under the presidency of the republic’s secularist founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Once the largest and most...
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Israel’s ambitions in south Yemen increase risk of conflict with Houthis
Israel’s involvement in the Yemen war throughout its five year duration is an open secret. In 2015, when the Saudi Arabian Embassy in the capital Sanaa was seized by the Houthi forces in retaliation for the Saudi-led coalition’s aggression, a large cache of Israeli-made weapons and ammunition was discovered,...
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After Libya, will Turkey defeat the UAE in Yemen?
Turkey achieved a strategic success in breaking the year-long siege on the Libyan capital, Tripoli. With Turkish support, the internationally-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) pushed back the forces of renegade Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar and regained full control of the city two weeks ago. A campaign is currently...
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Was the ‘desecration of Caliph Umar II’s tomb’ fake news?
Sectarianism is a salient feature of contemporary warfare in the Middle East, especially in multi-religious societies. The ongoing conflict in Syria is no exception. The rapid online spread of information and misinformation has added to the problem, promoting propaganda and adding credence to competing narratives aimed at a global...