Research & Commentary

This article was first published on Foreign Policy‘s South Asia Channel.

What Egyptians call the azmit al-iskan—the housing crisis—is exemplified by the 1986 movie, Karakon fi-l-Shari‘a, or Prison in the Street. The film depicts a typical middle class family that, evicted from its condemned home, must resort to living in a horse-drawn caravan because a regular apartment is unaffordable. The “prison” in the title is a reference to the father’s numerous altercations with the police, who deem his attempts to make a home quasi-legal—not illegal, but also not legal.

Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen is not surprising given Riyadh’s past policies and current perspectives on Gulf security. Yemen has always suffered from varying degrees of chaos and civil strife. Even in the best of times, large areas of the country lacked government control, and few if any in the region saw it as a functioning nation state. Whatever Gulf Arab leaders may have said publicly, most have viewed Yemen as a loose collection of autonomous or even independent regions, held together only by the lines drawn on a map.

Given the prominence of calligraphy in the traditional arts of both the Islamic world and China, it is only natural that Islamic calligraphy plays an important cultural role in Chinese Muslim communities. The art form’s survival over the centuries in China, even during prolonged periods of isolation from the rest of the Islamic world, reflects the strength of Chinese Muslims’ religious traditions, as well as the critical function of the written word within these traditions.

In this MEI Policy Paper, Thomas Juneau examines Iran’s role in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and the Arab-Israeli conflict to explain why Iran is not a “rising regional hegemon” but rather a “mid-sized regional power frustrated at not reaching its ambitions.”

In a significant New York Times op-ed on April 20, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif made a pitch for regional dialogue between Iran and its neighbors.

The following article was published in the April 2015 issue of the Journal of Democracy.

In the 1930s, several groups of Muslim students from China arrived to study at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. They were destined to play an important role in the history of modern Chinese Islam. These 35 Chinese Azharites, all but two from the Sinophone Hui community, helped China to establish lasting links with Egypt and other Muslim countries in the Middle East. They also left a considerable cultural legacy, including translations of crucial texts from both the Islamic and Chinese traditions.

As the urban historian Lewis Mumford pointed out, “When a city has reached the megapolitan stage, it is plainly on the downward path: it needs a terrific exertion of social force to overcome the inertia, to alter the direction of the movement, to resist the immanent processes of disintegration.”^[1]

Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria did not have a good winter. His forces lost a provincial capital, Idlib, and despite repeated efforts could not even seize northern and eastern suburbs adjoining Damascus. There were also failures in Aleppo and Dara‘a. He had to relieve heads of two of the regime’s four secret police services. The economic situation worsened.

April 23, 2015 – Marvin Weinbaum, director of the Center for Pakistan Studies at The Middle East Institute, explains Pakistan’s decision not to provide military aid for Saudi Arabia’s operation in Yemen, and how Prime Minister Sharif is working to repair relations with Riyadh.

“Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” – Martin Niemöller, German anti-Nazi theologian

Palestinians, beset by calamities at every turn, have all but ceased to think about their indeterminate prospects for independence and freedom. This dismal state of affairs suits Israel’s newly reelected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fine. His opposition to a sovereign Palestinian state, broadcast in word and deed, leaves little room for doubt.

The bar has been set so low that all concerned are searching for any shred of evidence that merely hints at better times for Palestinians, who have now lived under Israeli rule for almost a half century.

Read the full article on the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog.

An intense public debate is unfolding in Iran over the details of the ongoing nuclear negotiations. For a country that has been largely deprived of informed, open and critical discussions on the merits of this costly program, this is highly unusual. Even more striking, it is the hard-liners who are spearheading this dialogue in the run-up to the June 30 deadline for the final agreement.

Read the full article on CNN.

Relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia have always been thorny, but rarely has the state of affairs been as venomous as it is today.

Tehran and Riyadh each point to the other as the main reason for much of the turmoil in the Middle East. In its most recent incarnation, the Iranian-Saudi conflict by proxy has reached Yemen in a spiral that both sides portray as climatic.