Claire Sadar @KARepublic

The rise and fall of Turkish democracy under the ruling AKP government is one of the most debated cases amidst the larger global trend of democratic decline....

Professor Todd Green knows all too well the risks of being a professional Muslim ally. As he lays out in the introduction to his latest work on Islamophobia,...

The June 24 snap presidential and parliamentary elections in Turkey were the subject of much anticipation, hope, and excitement. Ultimately, the election came...

Fatma Neslishah Sultan, or Princess Neslishah Osmanoglu, was born on February 4, 1921, just as the Ottoman Empire was taking its last breath. She was...

There are seventy-three journalists currently in prison in Turkey, either serving out sentences or in pre-trial detention, according to the annual report of...

Independent international scholars, journalists, NGOs, and political institutions, as well as a many of their Turkish counterparts, are all but unanimous in...

U.S. President Donald Trump has rightly had his rhetoric and governing style compared to authoritarian leaders around the world, including Russian President...

At first glance, the phrase "foreign country" in the title of journalist Suzy Hansen's first book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a...

After Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke with Donald Trump on the phone on the morning of Friday, November 24, it was widely reported Trump had told...

In March of 2016, Reza Zarrab, an Iranian-Turkish businessman who had become extremely wealthy trading gold with Iran, in violation of international sanctions,...

The second edition of the Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Hatred of Muslims, first published in 2012, is not simply a re-release of the...

As a symptom of deteriorating democratic institutions and norms, the erosion of press freedoms is currently a serious, worldwide issue. Muftah has extensively...

When Turkish Journalist, Kadri Gursel, was finally released after nearly a year in prison, one of the first things he did was kiss his wife. The image of this...

Under Turkey's on-going state of emergency, which has been in place since the failed coup attempt last summer, arrests and detentions have become a daily...

Ayla Albayrak, a Turkish journalist who has reported for the Wall Street Journal from Istanbul since 2010, was sentenced to two years and one month in prison...

The leader of Turkey’s main opposition party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, walked more than 250 miles in the summer heat this past June to make a statement about the...

“I work to humanize my subjects so that the viewer can connect with them,” Karim Ben Khelifa, a photojournalist with fifteen years of conflict reporting...

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was in New York this past week for the United Nations General Assembly. He traveled without his bodyguards, many of...

Deputy co-Chair of Turkey’s Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, or HDP, Aysel Tugluk, has been imprisoned since December 2016, on allegations of being a...

Last week, nineteen Turks involved in the beating of protesters outside the Washington D.C. residence of the Turkish ambassador in May were indicted on...

Erik Love, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Dickinson College, poses crucial questions about the future of race and activism in America in his first...

Nineteen people, fifteen of whom are members of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s security detail, were indicted by a grand jury in Washington,...

To put it mildly, Turkey’s current political situation is bad. The almost complete erosion of democratic norms has been incredibly depressing to witness, and...

Though the backlash to the violence and death in Charlottesville has frightened some parts of the White Supremacist and White Nationalist movements in the...

At 3 am last Friday night, I sat exhausted and angry on a shuttle bus from LaGuardia Airport to Staten Island. My connecting flight had been canceled after six...

This is latest post in an ongoing series of articles that address some of the most prevalent misconceptions about Islam and Muslims in America. For more...

Purportedly objective, “etic” examinations of Islam routinely struggle to advance a compelling method of analyzing the faith and its adherents, without...

Journalist Ahmet Şık, a fierce and long-time critic of the Turkish government, appeared in court on Wednesday. He and 16 of his colleagues from one of the...

A magnitude 6.7 earthquake occurred off the coast of the Turkish resort town of Bodrum at about 1:30 am local time on Thursday, July 20. According to the U.S....

Comics scholar and graphic novel author A. David Lewis recently spoke with Muftah about Haawiyat, his comic book for Syrian refugee children. Lewis’s second...

Mohsen Dehnavi, an Iranian scientist who was traveling with his family to Boston to start a position as a visiting scholar at Children’s Hospital of Boston,...

Exactly a month after the Chair of Amnesty International Turkey, Taner Kılıç, was arrested and charged with “membership in a terrorist organization,”...

Any mention of the Holocaust is almost always met with the refrain “never again.” But as the paired exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston,...

Today marks the 109th day since elementary school teacher, Semih Özakça, and professor of literature, Nuriye Gülmen, have gone without food. They have...

Ankara, Turkey’s capital, lies about 250 miles southeast of Istanbul - a one hour flight, five hour drive, or a twenty-three day walk. The distance between...

After more than one month in detention without charge, French photojournalist Mathias Depardon was finally released and deported by Turkish authorities on the...

May 28 marked four years since a small group of demonstrators gathered in a park in Taksim Square, Istanbul, to stop its destruction. Their efforts sparked the...

David Lewis is a specialist in religion and graphic novels, two things that, at first glance, may appear to have very little to do with one another. Lewis’...

Letters from Baghdad, a new documentary about the life of British adventurer, Orientalist, and political officer Gertrude Bell, from Verve Pictures, begins...

The first protest on Tuesday, May 16, was peaceful and well organized, according to Kurdish Ph.D. student Mahir Ayhan, who spoke to Muftah about the event....

Heraa Hashmi, a sophomore majoring in molecular biology at the University of Colorado, is best known for a tweet that went viral last fall. Unlike most...

Barış Yazgı, a twenty-two-year old Kurdish Turk, died on April 24th. The tragic story behind his death has since made the rounds on Turkish-language...

According to the Turkish government, the referendum to amend Turkey’s constitution and restructure the government under a powerful, central executive passed...

Today, Turks will vote on a referendum proposing eighteen amendments to Turkey’s constitution. These amendments, if passed, will give President Recep Tayyip...

Inspired by similar projects created for other contemporary social justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock protests, a group of...

In Turkey, real life is stranger than any April Fool’s Day prank. Turkish food manufacturer, Ulker, is omnipresent in the country. A cross between...

When I saw Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School listed among the latest round of Jewish institutions to receive bomb threats, I immediately texted my friend...

On Thursday, March 23, authorities apprehended the person responsible for the bulk of bomb threats that have plagued the American Jewish community in recent...

Muftah has extensively covered the ongoing deterioration of press freedom in Turkey. As journalists have been imprisoned and newspapers co-opted by the...

Turkish writer Kaya Genc opens his latest work of non-fiction, Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey, with the stark and horrifying scenes...

As part of our ongoing coverage of the Turkish media, Muftah spoke with Turkish journalist Ilhan Tanir. Tanir is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and...

For decades, scholars of Turkey and Egypt have discussed and debated how the so-called “deep state” has steered politics in these countries. Now, in the...

The number of journalists in prison around the world is at an all time high, and Turkey has the infamous distinction of imprisoning more journalists than any...

Home-grown terrorism is a serious problem in America, but major media outlets often fail to give the issue the time and attention it deserves; typically, they...

The Smithsonian’s Freer Sackler gallery has long been one of the best, and most under-appreciated, museums on the National Mall in Washington D.C. With most...

Almost two years ago exactly, I wrote that power and profit, not Islam, were becoming the new state religion of Turkey thanks to the efforts of then Prime...

If you read this magazine regularly, then you are certainly know incidents of anti-Muslim violence are becoming increasingly common. Thanks to the executive...

Thursday, January 19, marked the 10 year anniversary of the the assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. Dink was a truly inspiring figure who...

President-elect Donald Trump’s behavior both during his campaign and after his election has spawned a slew of articles comparing him to European...

In a sadly predictably turn of events, Turkish journalist Ahmet Şık was taken into custody by Turkish police on December 29 and formally arrested on December...

This is part of an open-ended series that will address some of the prevalent misconceptions about Islam and Muslims in America. Read about the motivation...

The assassination of Russia's ambassador to Turkey on Monday, December 19, was shocking in its brazenness. In light of often tense relations between the two...

On Sunday, December 11, 2,600 Bostonians packed the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC) in support of the “Out of Many, One” initiative...

In this interview, Muftah speaks with Sarah Kendzior, an expert on the authoritarian states of post-Soviet Central Asia, about President-elect Donald Trump....

*Screenings of Kedi in North America begin 2/17/2017. Check the schedule here to find one near you. For both Turkey and the United States, 2016 has been a...

In the weeks since U.S. presidential election, many, very smart people have been giving out stellar recommendations on what to read in order to understand and...

Fake news in the form of propaganda, rumor, and outright slander pre-dates the Internet by millennia. But, as we learned the hard way during the recent U.S....

America's president-elect seems to revel in teasing his opponents by dangling his racist, homophobic, and misogynistic advisers and cabinet appointments in...

To the black, brown, Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, immigrant, indigenous, refugee, queer, and every other minority-American: Since so many of you have been forced...

Turkey’s political roller coaster just took a deep dive. Since the aborted July 15 coup attempt, there have been numerous instances in which the ruling...

Turkish soap operas are a world-wide phenomenon, but none more so than drama about the life of the Ottoman Empire’s most famous sultan, known in the west as...

On September 30, Turkish journalist Ahmet Şık spoke to a packed seminar room at Harvard University as part of the Weatherhead Center for International...

In this interview, Bilge Yesil, assistant professor of Media Culture at the City University of New York and author of the new book, Media in New Turkey, speaks...

In Media in New Turkey, Assistant Professor of Media Culture at the City University of New York Bilge Yesil, takes on and undermines the common myth that,...

Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, the head of one of Turkey’s largest media conglomerates, Dogan Media, which includes CNN Turk and the newspaper Hurriyet, resigned this...

Claire Sadar (CS): Thank you for agreeing to speak with me. Trump’s Hair (TH): It is my pleasure. CS: Why have you decided to break your silence now? TH:...

Equal parts political allegory, situational comedy, and psychological thriller, with a dash of magical realism thrown in for good measure, the 2015 Turkish...

It is no exaggeration that the events of September 11, 2001 deeply affected the lives of all Americans. Outside of active military personnel, no group in the...

Mehmet Aytac, a Turk of Kurdish descent and father of two, was one of scores of laborers employed in the construction of Istanbul’s massive new airport,...

Politicians love to talk about Muslim women, discussing their thoughts, needs and wants, but rarely ask Muslim women themselves to weigh in (see the current...

Five weeks ago, I wrote about the surge in anti-Muslim violence in the United States. Unfortunately, the situation has only deteriorated since then. Violence...

Since April of this year, the facade of the nearly 150-year Old South Church building on Copley Square in Boston has been attracting attention for more than...

Last fall, U.S. President Obama pledged to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees within the year. In the months following the announcement, however, it appeared that...

If only for a brief moment, the recent coup attempt in Turkey united a very divided Turkish society against the putschists. Supporters and critics of the...

Freedom of the press, though never stellar in Turkey, has declined rapidly in recent years. Muftah has previously discussed a number of the remaining...

On Friday around 10pm local time, rumors started to circulate on Twitter about unusual military maneuvers in Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, and Ankara,...

America has had a spectacularly terrible few weeks. While the death of two black men at the hands of police and five police officers at the hands of a...

On Tuesday, June 28, three terrorists arrived by taxi at Istanbul’s busy Ataturk International Airport. Before detonating their suicide vests, they...

As Muftah reported last week, the annual Istanbul Trans Pride and LGBTQ+ Pride parades were officially banned by the Governor of Istanbul, allegedly because of...

The Fall of the Turkish Model: How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism by Cihan Tugal, Verso Press, 2016. In The Fall of the Turkish Model,...

On Friday, the Istanbul governor’s office issued a statement on its website about the annual Trans Pride and LGBTQ+ Pride parades. These parades were...

Point of View (POV) is a long-running series on PBS showcasing documentaries made by independent filmmakers. For a limited time, POV has made available for...

Does your Muslim neighbor make you nervous? Is your Muslim colleague giving you the chills? Then talk to your doctor about the latest breakthrough in anti-hate...

Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World by Shadi Hamid, available from St. Martin’s Press June 7, 2016 The violence and...

Netflix's recent acquisition, Look Who’s Back (original title: Er ist wieder da), is a German film based on a novel by the same name by Timur Vermes, a...

In recent weeks, much ink has been spilled about Turkey and the illiberal turn it has taken under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan's authoritarianism...

Though it has a history stretching back decades in Muslim-majority countries, like Egypt, Indonesia and Turkey, modern Muslim fashion culture was not...

Bursa is hardly the kind of place that tops the list of targets for terrorist groups. But, on Wednesday, April 27, Bursa officially became the latest victim...

Over the past month or so I have been publishing a series of posts on independent media in Turkey, including both Turkish and English language sources. After I...

This past Friday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel shocked many foreign and domestic observers when she announced that her government would allow the...

A few weeks ago, I published a post on independent journalism in Turkey in the wake of the government take over of the Zaman media group. After it was...

This week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan became the latest victim of the Streisand Effect. The Streisand Effect is an attempt to cover up or censor...

Though Turkey is well known for its crazy and sometimes unpredictable politics, it rarely features in buzz-worthy headlines in the U.S. media. Over the last...

The past two weeks have been particularly terrible for humanity. From the bombings in Ankara, Istanbul, Brussels, and Baghdad, to the EU's inhumane refugee...

Last week, I wrote about the small, but vibrant, network of Turkish independent media. I want to thank everyone who responded to the article with the names of...

The Turkish government’s recent takeover of the Zaman media group, one of the most popular Turkish news sources both at home and abroad, made headlines...

Lewis, Reina. 2015. Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures. Duke University Press; Durham, NC. Muslim fashion is an emerging, hot topic in...

Are you a business mogul who has been sued one too many times for employment discrimination? A think tank that is regularly called out for your all-male...

Dear Fellow Turkey Watchers Who Are Male, This is a friendly reminder (or, perhaps, wake up call) that my experience and interpretive lens on the country,...

Mustang, France’s entry for this year's Oscar awards, is a compelling and affecting coming of age parable set in contemporary Turkey. The film straddles the...

Women and Gender in Islam by Leila Ahmed attempts an ambitious project, namely, to address the major social, political, legal, judicial, and religious...

Outside of a small circle of Turkey watchers, and perhaps some scholars of contemporary Islam, few Americans have heard of Pennsylvania resident Fethullah...

While religion and politics are inextricably interwoven in any society, in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), they interact in particularly rich and...

What We Know At about 10am local time on the morning of January 12, a suicide bomber killed ten tourists, nine Germans and one Peruvian, and injured fifteen...

On Friday, January 8, my co-editor here at Muftah, Sarah Moawad, published a wonderfully comprehensive and detailed article making a case for why 2015 was the...

This is part of an open-ended series that will address some of the prevalent misconceptions about Islam and Muslims in America. Read about the motivation...

This is part of an open-ended series that will address some of the prevalent misconceptions about Islam and Muslims in America. Read about the motivation...

This is part of an open-ended series that will address some of the prevalent misconceptions about Islam and Muslims in America. Read about the motivation...

There is no end in sight to the disturbing trend of anti-Muslim rhetoric that has been dominating this presidential election cycle in the United States. While...

The Internet exploded this week after news broke about a court case involving President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the book and movie series, The Lord of the...

‘Tis the season for explainers on how to talk to your conservative family members about controversial political topics. Perhaps you had heated political...

The past week has been terrible the world over. For Syrian refugees, who are one of the most vulnerable populations on earth right now, the events that have...

The Gezi protests, which took place throughout Turkey during the summer of 2013, marked an important turning point in how the ruling Justice and Development...

Last Sunday in snap elections in Turkey, the Justice and Development party, or AKP, regained its majority in parliament and ability to form a single-party...

Today, November 1, for the second time in five months, Turks are going to the polls to elect a new parliament. The result of the previous election in June...

Gertrude Bell was a multi-talented British archaeologist, mountaineer, spy, political administrator, and polymath who left an indelible mark on the modern...

In the wake of the October 10 double bombing in Ankara, apocalyptic predictions about Turkey’s future have rapidly multiplied. While some of these...

What happened last Saturday, October 10, in Turkey? Two suicide bombers struck a peace rally taking place outside of the main train station in Turkey’s...

Turkey’s current government is notorious for pursuing economic development that pays little attention to costs to the environment, human life, and the...

During his recent visit to the United States, Pope Francis spoke at length about the need to protect religious freedom. Though an official (while sometimes...

The renewed conflict between the Turkish government and the Kurdish guerrilla group, the PKK, is tragic, preventable, and questionable in terms of timing. But...

I was a twenty-seven year-old American graduate student, he was a middle-aged working class Turk. We barely shared a common language, let alone common...

Thirty-five years ago tomorrow, September 12th, 1980 at approximately 4am the Turkish military announced the last full military coup that would take place in...

I had a different post for today. A fun, light-hearted, end-of-the-summer post. But after following the news coming out of Turkey the last few days, I can’t...

The June 7, 2015 parliamentary elections in Turkey were hailed as historic. A Kurdish party, the HDP, was elected to parliament for the first time in history....

This week, ISIS released a video in which a native Turkish speaker (later identified as Fatih Acipayam of Bursa) encouraged Turks to rise up in revolt against...

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has built a career around the intellectually and morally bankrupt notion that Islam is inherently violent and oppressive. Her newest...

Burman, Thomas E. Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. The recent discovery of what...

Before leaving on a scheduled overseas tour this week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fulfilled the predictions of many analysts, following renewed...

On the morning of Monday, July 20, a bomb carried by a supporter of the Islamic State ripped through a crowd in Turkey, breaking the tense,  years-long...

After almost two and a half years of peace, Turkey has reignited its decades-long war with the insurgent Kurdistan Worker’s Party or PKK. After the PKK took...

A new phone app developed by Vodafone Turkey made headlines this past week. Called the Easy Rescue app, it is designed to allow a woman (or a man, for that...

This past Monday, Muftah published an excellent essay by Nick Danforth arguing that Turkey’s democratic tradition is often under-estimated and...

Over the past several weeks, Americans of all stripes have been scanning the news each day for the U.S. Supreme Court's latest rulings, which are typically...

1913: Seeds of Conflict opens quite dramatically, with the discovery of a previously lost film, footage from 1913 of newly created Jewish communities in...

Thursday marked the first day of the holy month of Ramadan, a time when Muslims fast from sun up to sun down every day. The fast breaking meal is called an...

Turkey’s ruling party for the past twelve years, the Justice and Development Party or AKP, suffered an embarrassing defeat in last Sunday’s election,...

Today Turks vote for a new government and, ultimately, the shape and health of their democracy. For a primer on the major issues and parties, take a look at...

This Sunday, June 7, Turkey will go to the polls to elect a new parliament. Without exaggeration, this election is being called one of the most important in...

The international media has recently been paying attention to the issue of LGBTQ rights in Turkey for reasons both positive and negative. On the negative side,...

With the Turkish general elections less than a month away, campaigning by the major parties has reached a fever pitch.  The election will undoubtedly be one...

For the first time in four years, Turkey will elect a new parliament on June 7. Turks and Turkey watchers everywhere are already debating the potential...

On Friday, the independent Turkish news website Diken reported that, after hounding from the pro-government press, the Zorlu Performing Arts Center in Istanbul...

Friday was May Day, also known as International Worker’s Day or Labor Day, and a public holiday in Turkey. The day holds special significance for Turkey’s...

Friday, April 24, marked the 100th anniversary of the roundup and extermination of Armenian communities in the Ottoman Empire. This week, major U.S. cities...

Last week, Pope Francis referred to the World War I massacres of Armenian citizens in the Ottoman Empire as “genocide.” In most countries, such terminology...

The story of three British teenage girls who left what were by all accounts comfortable and promising lives and joined the Islamic State (IS) has become a...

Armed gunmen take a state prosecutor hostage. After almost eight hours of negotiations, the standoff ends in a hail of gunfire leaving both hostage-takers and...

For Americans used to dealing with a very unpopular legislature that takes itself very seriously, the raucousness of parliamentary democracy in most other...

The Turkish general elections will be held on June 7, 2015 and speculation about the results is already well underway. Turks and analysts alike are...

The scholar Shadi Hamid was recently in Turkey and where he happened to be invited to visit the new Presidential palace. He tweeted this about the...