RIP Shammi Kapoor, Bollywood star of the 1960s. You danced, you sang, you romanced, you made movies fun. And although you didn’t know it, you saved my life.
Long before Indian song-and-dance movies became cool in the West, they were huge in the Middle East. In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Bollywood stars like Raj Kapoor (Shammi’s older …
As we wait for the Salafi leader Kamal Habib at the Cairo Journalists’ Union, a sudden panic comes over me. I’ve just noticed that my translator, Shahira Amin, an Egyptian journalist, is wearing a sleeveless top and that her hair is uncovered. In my experience, Salafis, adherents of a very strict school of Islam, take a dim view of such …
Everybody wants a piece of Turkey. On my sweep through Egypt and Tunisia, virtually everyone I met invoked the nation that bestrides the Bosphorus as one they’d like their own country to emulate. The Turks had just had a general election, and Arabs had watched it unfold on Al Jazeera and other TV channels. The vote was clean, mostly …
Most Western observers see the Muslim Brotherhood as a homogenous group of hard-line Islamists, dedicated to overthrowing the secular Egyptian state and imposing a severe interpretation of Shari’a law on its people. In reality, the Islamist group has long been something of a “big tent,” gathering within it representatives of …
Essam Erian throws his hands up in mock surrender. “I cannot answer this question,” he says, smiling broadly. “This is a question for me to ask, for you to answer.”
The question: What does the Muslim Brotherhood have to do to stop being portrayed as the bogeyman? The Egyptian Islamist movement has been trying very hard to shake …
After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, many Western commentators were surprised by the ease with which Iraq’s religious movements adapted to multiparty democracy. The Shi’ite groups, in particular, were quick to organize into political parties, set up grass-roots organizations across the country and form practical coalitions ahead of …
With the Obama administration’s feeble attempts having failed, the task of brokering a peaceful end to Yemen’s civil war has fallen to Saudi Arabia. Wires are reporting that Riyadh has got the warring sides—President Ali Abdallah Saleh and the Ahmar clan—to agree a truce after days of bloodshed.
Reuters is reporting that Saleh …
After several interruptions, I’ve finally finished the best book to land on my desk this year: “It Happened On The Way To War,” by Rye Barcott, a former Marine who has devoted his life to bringing development to one of the world’s worst slums. The book (published by Bloomsbury) chronicles the creation of Carolina for Kibera (CFK), a …
War photographers are the bravest people I know. In many years of covering conflict, from Kashmir to Palestine to Iraq, I’ve had the honor to befriend and work with some of the finest, and bravest, of the breed. Few were in the league of Chris Hondros. I am heart-broken by the news that he and Tim Hetherington, another photographer, have …
News that Moussa Koussa, Libya’s foreign minister, has ditched the dictator and fled to London will boost the morale of the rebels and please NATO. A big-name defection may be exactly what it will take to shake Muammar Gaddafi’s resolve to fight till the bitter end. And they don’t come much bigger than Koussa, a former intelligence chief …
Over dinner in Sana’a late last year, a European diplomat told me that President Ali Abdallah Saleh’s 32-year-old regime was unlikely to be toppled anytime soon. He offered four key reasons: “The army are with him and the tribes are with him—which means the people will never rise against him. And of course, the U.S. is with …
Those who see the Bahraini uprising in the context of a larger contest for Middle Eastern supremacy between Iran and Saudi Arabia with desultory U.S. involvement are missing the potentially crucial role played by a fourth player: Iraq.
A little background, first. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi holy city of Najaf has …
Natural disasters set off a wave of charitable giving from all over the world: but just as inevitably, they bring out all manner of fraudsters looking to cash in on global sympathy.
How do you tell if the charity soliciting your dollars for Japan is on the level? The FBI has a timely press release with useful ways to avoid dodgy …