Middle East

Three Assumptions that Led to Kerry’s Failure in the Middle East

The conflict doesn’t need more architects.

  • Assaf Sharon

Norman Finkelstein: Teaching John Stuart Mill in Iran

A video of our conversation.

  • Danny Postel

The Conscience of Syria

An interview with activist and intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh.

  • Yassin al-Haj Saleh
  • Danny Postel
  • Nader Hashemi

What Killed Egyptian Democracy?

The promise of democracy lies in its potential to cultivate political virtue over time. But Egypt’s liberals, unnerved by the policies of the legitimate Muslim Brotherhood government, refused to wait.

  • Mohammad Fadel
with responses from
  • Ellis Goldberg
  • Micheline Ishay
  • Nathan J. Brown
  • Andrew F. March
  • Akbar Ganji
  • Anne Norton

From Democrats to Terrorists

The notion that elimination of the Muslim Brotherhood would produce a liberal democratic order was wishful thinking.

  • Mohammad Fadel

Illiberal Reform

Why Did Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood Fail?

  • Lisa Blaydes

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Ayatollah Khamenei and the Destruction of Israel

Including translations of Khamenei’s speeches from 1990 to the present.

  • Akbar Ganji

A Place for Muslim Women

The kinds of sacred spaces we worked for are not just possible; they exist. On the other side of the planet. Under occupation.

  • Haroon Moghul

The Sound of Terror

The phenomenology of a drone strike.

  • Nasser Hussain

Jordan’s Second-Class Citizens

Jordanian mothers with non-Jordanian husbands cannot pass along citizenship to their children. The results are devastating, but a growing campaign is committed to change.

  • Elizabeth Whitman

Defrosting the Cold War with Iran

What will it take to revive U.S.-Iran relations?

  • Akbar Ganji

Syria’s Red Line

The chemical weapons ban should have been made universal years ago.

  • Jeanne Guillemin

Bosnia and Syria: Intervention Then and Now

When state order collapses, every confessional or ethnic group asks one question: Who will protect us now?

  • Michael Ignatieff

Iran’s Olive Branch

What Rouhani’s presidential victory means for Iran-U.S. relations.

  • Akbar Ganji

Turkey’s Non-Crisis

The streets of Istanbul are alive with democratic politics—not dramatic upheaval.

  • Wajahat Ali
  • Haroon Moghul

Home for the Eid

Ramadan in Cairo and Istanbul

  • Ahmed Moor

The Salafi Question

Egypt’s Constitutional Moment

  • Amitai Etzioni

Purifying Kashmir

Saudi Arabia exports Salafism to the war-torn region

  • Tariq Mir

Islam in America

Video of an Ideas Matter event held at MIT on May 15, 2012

  • John R. Bowen
  • Feisal Abdul Rauf
  • Christopher Lydon

Never So Free

Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation portrays an Iranian divorce under sharia law with sensitivity and pathos.

  • Alan A. Stone

In Vain Have We Sanctioned

Harsher measures against Iran won’t work.

  • Akbar Ganji

Friends and Dictators

Cozying up to central Asia’s most brutal regimes.

  • Tara McKelvey

No Saudi Spring

The anatomy of a failed revolution.

  • Madawi Al-Rasheed

Blunt Instrument

Sanctions don’t promote democratic change.

  • Natasha Bahrami
  • Trita Parsi
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