Basheer Nafi | 02 June 2016 | TR
Fears over political Islam’s general current shouldn't shake the pillars of a political movement with such a long history of struggle and sacrifice A number of leaders and cadres from the Tunisian Ennahda movement came [...]
Basheer Nafi | 25 December 2015
The British review on the Muslim Brotherhood is another stratum in a long history of misunderstanding of the movement
Basheer Nafi | 24 November 2015
The fate of Egypt and Syria shows the need to revisit the rapprochement between Islamist and nationalist currents that has been lost since 2011
Basheer Nafi | 12 November 2015
Understanding the relationship between Islamism and Arab nationalism has always been problematic. The separation between Islamists and Arab nationalists, and political conflict between them is a relatively late development in modern Arab history. From the early 1950s, a series of military coups brought young Arab nationalist military officers to power in many Arab countries, including Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Algeria. Arab nationalism, expressed in exclusive, radical and even socialist discourse, became the official ideology of these Arab states. The military background of the ruling forces, their fragile base of legitimacy, and the sweeping programs of modernization and centralization they pursued, turned most of their republican, nationalist countries into authoritarian states. One of the major results of this development was the eruption of a series of confrontations between Arab nationalist regimes and Islamic political forces, in which questions of power, identity and legitimacy were intertwined.
David Hearst | 10 November 2015
When the Saudi ambassador in Washington announced the launching of airstrikes and a military intervention in Yemen on Wednesday night, the kingdom surprised everyone - not least Iran.Conventional wisdom was that Riyadh had dithered and left it too late. The Houthis and elements of the army loyal to the ousted autocrat Ali Abdullah Saleh and his son Ahmed had advanced on the southern city of Aden with such speed that its fall, and that of President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, was considered only a matter of time.
David Hearst | 10 November 2015
John Allen, the retired marine general charged by US President Barack Obama to coordinate the campaign against the Islamic State (IS) group, is a man confident of his facts. Fresh from Turkey, which had just agreed to enter the air campaign against the militants, he told the Aspen Security Forum that IS are losing.
