The Woman on Westminster Bridge
A woman walks across a bridge. She is looking at her mobile. She seems to be in a hurry. Close to her, a person lies injured on the pavement. Several people attend to the injured person. The woman is wearing…
International Women’s Day: Celebrating the Pioneering Women of Arab Documentary
By Stefanie Van de Peer Negotiating Dissidence: The Pioneering Women of Arab Documentary is publishing this month, and it’s a significant time for a book of this nature, with today being International Women’s Day. Several of the films discussed in the book…
Contemporary Turkey in Conflict
By Tahir Abbas Turkey is a beguiling country. It straddles one of the most important geopolitical fault lines in the world. Since the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire and the founding of the republican era, however, the nation has undergone…
Muslims in Scotland: Demographic, social and cultural characteristics
By Stefano Bonino First published on the LSE Religion and the Public Sphere blog – read the original article Far removed from the cinematic and media depictions of Muslims as angry and threatening fundamentalists are the everyday experiences of many…
The Islamic Cult behind the Abortive Coup in Turkey
By Necati Polat Who are the Gülenists ostensibly behind the failed Turkey coup of last July, when, for the first time in Turkish history, soldiers led by a large cabal within the military did not hesitate to bomb the parliament and…
Understanding the Maghreb Before and After the Arab Spring
By J.N.C Hill The start of the Arab Spring has raised numerous searching questions about the study of the Maghreb. Scholars of the region are grappling with an intriguing and largely unacknowledged paradox: that the theory that arguably did most…
Islamic Thought in China
“There are Muslims in China? I didn’t know that.” Yes, indeed, there are—possibly as many as 25-30 million souls—and they constitute a fascinating segment of two vital world entities, “China” and “Islam.” Almost half of them speak Chinese as their…
Images of Islam
By Deanna Ferree Womack Images of Islam abound these days, and many of them are troubling. Those who speak loudly and most forcefully define Islam in the narrowest of terms, making one image – the militant extremist – into a…
Fitting Nowhere: Life as a Displaced Palestinian in England
Written by Ghada Karmi, this extract is one of a hundred featured in Being Palestinian: Personal Reflections on Palestinian Identity in the Diaspora, edited by Yasir Suleiman. Now available in paperback for £16.99. For most of my life, being Palestinian has been…