William Barnes

Washington’s relationship with Cairo has been icy since President Mohammed Morsi’s ouster in July 2013. Since then, Pundits and scholars have floated a...

“We need a religious revolution,” declared President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi at the Ministry of Awqaf’s celebration of Prophet Muhammad's birthday on...

Steven Cook recently wrote an article comparing the current political regimes in Egypt and Turkey for his blog. A part of that article is excerpted...

Rights activist have tracked the Egyptian government’s crackdown on gay men with increasing alarm. In August, eight men were charged with...

In recent days, the Egyptian government has demonstrated a new level of intolerance for dissent. On December 8, customs officials refused to allow...

Founding Director of Human Rights Watch's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program, Scott Long has long reported on the Egyptian...

Why did Islamists reemerge in Egypt and in other Arab countries during the 1970s? Scholars typically point to the 1967 Arab-Israeli War as being an historical...

Human Rights Watch recently issued a statement condemning the October 27 decree by President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi of Egypt to place all 'public and vital...

Much focus has been paid recently to the colonial borders of the Middle East. Many pundits, politicians, and others loosely versed in the region’s recent...

According to Wikithawra, an open source database for the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its aftermath, over 40,000 Egyptians have been detained since July 3,...

On Friday, October 31, TV personality Bill Maher criticized a petition by students at the University of California, Berkeley urging the school to dis-invite...

Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-American writer, recently wrote an article for the New York Times about three billboards in Cairo and the story of "dissent and...

Over the last few weeks, the Egyptian state has censored and distorted private media on multiple occasions. Earlier this month, the Egyptian intelligence...

Egyptian director Samir Nasr recently announced that he would begin filming his adaptation of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel, Sharaf. Perhaps the recent box office...

On October 3, Gallup released its findings from a recent poll. The report is excerpted below.   After a tumultuous year of political turmoil, violence,...

President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi addressed the UN for the first time on September 25, proclaiming his intention to build a new Egypt that “ensures the...

Former Ambassador Robert Ford testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last Thursday, September 18. A career foreign service officer, Ford spent...

To mark President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s plan to add an additional lane to the Suez Canal, Egyptian officials released a series of commemorative stamps with...

“The junction of the Mediterranean and Red Seas will, when the canal is completed, bring Southern Europe to the very door of India, and being entirely a...

Last week, I blogged about Joshua Landis’s argument that 1930s and 1940s Eastern Europe provides the best historical analogy for the Middle East today....

The unprecedented degree of violence, instability, and change in the Middle East has spurred a number of experts to consider larger processes at play within...

The one-year anniversary of the Rabaa and Nahda square massacres in Egypt were marked by the release of a long-anticipated report by Human Rights Watch (HRW)...

The number of foreign fighters who have flooded into Syria throughout the past three years now exceeds the total number of jihadists who fought invading Soviet...

Scott Long earned his PhD from Harvard University. Thereafter he relocated to Eastern Europe where he taught English and began working in the field of human...

The violence in Israel and Palestine as well as the sweeping gains made by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have claimed the lion’s share of...

Brazil’s devastating loss to Germany left soccer fans around the world incredulous. Germans were ecstatic, and they wasted little time expressing their joy...

“Do not be amazed at anything you see,” says Sir Malcolm Murray (played by Timothy Dalton) to Ethan Chandler (played by Josh Hartnett). Accompanied by...

Last week, we wrote about “Kofta Gate,” the Egyptian army’s claim about developing two devices that respectively detect and eradicate AIDS and hepatitis...

Since the January 2011 uprising, Egypt has weathered a number of absurdities, including rumors about a spy stork, an Israeli spy shark, and subliminal...

“Considerable research has shown that often Islamists will ‘moderate’ their ideology and behavior the more they directly participate in their political...

Since February 2011, the Egyptian state has struggled to contain one of the most significant accomplishments of the January 25 revolution: a willingness to...

"It's obvious that people are annoyed with us because we're talking about a certain person. Our words were out of place…I swear to God, we love him…We...

“This film isn’t about the revolution,” said Egyptian director Ahmed Abdallah after a viewing of his latest film, Rags and Tatters. “It’s about the...

Dr. Brian K. Barber earned his PhD in Family Studies at Brigham Young University. He is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Youth and...

After a nearly three month long hiatus, Bassem Youssef’s television series, El-Bernameg, returned Friday night. In the preceding weeks, many speculated...