Douglas Garrison

Patricia Crone, the eminent Danish-American historian of early Islam, died peacefully on July 11 following a long battle with cancer. This memoir by her...

Diplomats from six countries reached a historic deal today, announcing a comprehensive agreement to reduce Iran’s nuclear capabilities. The deal comes in the...

While the world waited in vain for the end of negotiations on the Iranian nuclear issue, a less publicized but no less important peace agreement gained major...

Over the last weekend, while those of us in the United States celebrated the 239th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain – and...

Every once in a while the world reminds me of the inherent goodness and decency of human kind. It seems to happen less frequently these days, but when it does,...

In a recent interview given with El-Khabar, former Deputy Chairman of the National Transitional Council and current member of the Libyan Political Dialogue...

The story had all the makings of an international political thriller: a head of state indicted on war crimes and genocide charges, a summit meeting in a...

The Turkish general elections held last Sunday, June 7, dealt a major blow to the long-ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its founding patriarch,...

Religion, and Islam in particular, appear to be mainstays in discussions about politics in the Middle East. But while readers may be quite familiar with...

Rami Galal, a contributor to Al-Monitor and an investigative reporter for the Rosa El-Youssef website, documents divergent interpretations among various...

Everybody saw this coming. They may not have wanted to admit it, but the truth was staring them in the face throughout the trial: deposed Egyptian president...

Among the rallying cries during the Arab Uprisings of 2010-2011, calls for freedom (hurriya), dignity (karama), and social justice (adala ijtima‘iyya)...

Talal Asad, the preeminent anthropologist of religion and Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, shares his...

On April 15, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published two scathing reports documenting the current state of politics and society in Egypt....

When was the last time there was good news out of Libya? It seems like a very, very long time ago. For the last three years, the international community has...

In a display of solidarity with the Armenian people and their Apostolic Church, Pope Francis used a special mass at St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City on...

The April 2 agreement reached by Iran, the United States, and rest of the P5+1 members regarding Iran’s nuclear program is nothing short of historic. A year...

As part of its ongoing research initiatives, the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) has published its latest series of research briefs. The...

It has been a busy two weeks of politicking on Capitol Hill.  The issue? Iran. More specifically, the Obama administration’s diplomatic attempts to resolve...

There is no shortage of books covering the Arab uprisings. Indeed, a cottage industry devoted to the topic seems to exist among academic and trade publishers...

Douglas H. Garrison, MA Josef Korbel School of International Studies University of Denver Denver, CO 80208 March 10, 2015 Dear Senators, We need to...

Since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, one of the most pressing issues facing Egyptian society concerns the status and protection of...

As high-level negotiators from Iran, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, and Germany meet in Geneva for another round of nuclear talks, it is...

There is a religious war going on, but it is cold, not hot, and takes place in boardrooms at the highest levels of government, not in the cities and towns of...

Tunisia appears to be moving toward political and civil freedoms, says Washington D.C.-based think tank Freedom House. The announcement on February 2 that the...

Since the ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS) declared a new caliphate in June of last year, much ink and column space has been devoted to seeking out the root causes...

Largely lost amid the media din stirred by events in Paris earlier this month,President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi delivered a speech to Egypt’s Ministry of Awqaf...

I did not want to write this piece. It seemed like piling on an already-towering heap of media analysis steadily buckling under the weight of its own hot air....

Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi was sworn into office on December 31 to much fanfare. His inauguration caps a process that began with parliamentary...

In the article below, Omar Ould Dedde O. Hammady and Michael Meyer-Resende, both constitutional lawyers and, respectively, the Libya country director and the...

Conversations with friends and family over the holidays recently turned to the escalating levels of violence and atrocity ravaging the Middle East. The...

First they came for the Muslim Brothers, then the human rights and democracy activists, then the domestic academic dissidents. Now, the reinvigorated...

The language of “jihadi” religious violence follows many of the same contours of revolutionary political radicalism. Like the leaders of fascist and ethnic...

On Saturday, November 29, a Cairo appellate judge officially dropped all murder and corruption charges against ousted president Hosni Mubarak, thus ending...

There is a well-established trend among Western scholars of religion, public commentators on religion, and leaders within religious communities regarding the...

By Hamza Mahfoud, translated by Abdellah Laaraj On the heels of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights’ (AMDH) decision to sue Interior Minister...

“You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the...

I used to live on a small Caribbean island, where I was a SCUBA instructor. I also played collegiate and club rugby. On our small island, I had two...

A specter is haunting North Africa—the specter of terrorism. More specifically, terrorism instigated or inspired by the self-proclaimed ‘Islamic State’...

In five days, Tunisians will go to the polls in the first parliamentary elections since the new constitution was adopted in January. Next month they will...