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The results of elections to the Muslim Brotherhood's 16-member Guidance Bureau in Egypt are being interpreted as a victory for the conservative camp amid a growing rift with reformist elements.
The wing now dominating the movement is more focused on the religious aspects and is not in… Read more
Yemen's parliament yesterday urged the government "to enhance the accuracy of its targets and avoid any error" when carrying out operations against "terrorists, insurgents and outlaw elements", the official news agency says.
The defence minister and the deputy prime minister responsible for… Read more
Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri sat face-to-face at a state banquet on Saturday with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad – whose regime has been widely suspected of assassinating his father.
Hariri's bridge-building visit to Damascus seems to have cautious support from a range of… Read more
Supporters of the niqab (face veil) have won the latest round in their long-running battle with the Egyptian authorities.
Yesterday, the Administrative Court annulled a decree by the education minister that banned students wearing the niqab from entering… Read more
Algeria is planning to introduce a centralised system for filtering (i.e. censoring) the internet. It is also proposing stiff penalties for anyone who circumvents the government's filtering, according to the Magharebia news website.
Algeria is one of the few Arab countries (… Read more
Last Thursday the Yemeni government congratulated itself on a
series of raids which reportedly killed 34 al-Qaida terrorists and led to the arrests of 17 more. The raids were said to have foiled a series of suicide attacks.
President Obama even phoned President Salih and … Read more
An Egyptian member of parliament has filed a lawsuit against a female journalist over a newspaper article headed “My four husbands and I”.
Writing in the independent daily, al-Masri al-Youm (here, in Arabic), Nadine al-Bedair asked why Muslim men are allowed to have more than one wife,… Read more
Decision-making in authoritarian regimes can be a lot more complicated than it looks. The idea that dictators simply dictate is often wide of the mark: they may not care much about public opinion but they do have to juggle with conflicting demands inside their own power base, and sometimes they can… Read more
The problem of Arabic literature is a lack of readers rather than writers, Rasheed el-Enany, professor of modern Arabic literature at Exeter university, says in an interview with the Egyptian newspaper, al-Masri al-Youm.
Fiction is flourishing, often in unexpected places like Iraq and Saudi Arabia… Read more
Last week Sheikh Ahmed al-Ghamdi, head of the religious police in Mecca, gave an extraordinary interview to the Saudi newspaper, Okaz. In fact, it was so extraordinary that I decided not to write about it at the time, imagining the sheikh’s remarks must have been misquoted or at least taken out of… Read more
ARAB ART ONLINE: Susan Hefuna: Al Sabr Gamil (Patience is Beautiful) 2007. Ink stained on wood 140 x 170 cm. More information | Click to enlarge
