Although many Arab states view the Iranian expansion in the region with concern, their greater fear is a victory for the Syrian revolution

The rise of political Islam is closely linked to the birth of the modern state in Muslim societies and the exclusion of religion from the public space

The crisis within the Palestinian national leadership is the mirror image of the crisis within Fatah itself

Should the Brotherhood give up the struggle for democracy, Egypt would fall prey to the hegemony of a corrupt ruling class for decades to come

A truism that is valid for almost all revolutions – including the English, French, and the European revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century, the Iranian Revolution and east European revolutions after the Cold War – is that every revolution has an associated counterrevolution. A common thread through most modern revolutions is that they expressed the desire of the people in a nation to restrain the modern state either by demanding constitutional rights and democracy, confronting authoritarianism and the hegemony of the ruling elite, or by demanding a just social system that would be based on the redistribution of economic burdens and wealth. The success of a revolution, however, has never been guaranteed. In the past few decades, the countries that have experienced relatively easy transitions to democracy have been those that had been part of broader regional systems, or which had received support from regional bodies such as the European Union. Even such countries were not always spared counterrevolutionary retaliations.