In Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, Saba Mahmood has produced a valuable account both of how the…
A thought-provoking study
Egypt
Egypt’s uncertain future
Since the resignation of former president Hosni Mubarak in 2011, Egypt has experienced significant turmoil, from temporary rule by the…
Islamism beyond the Muslim Brotherhood
A few weeks after the ouster of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, the New York Times ran this headline:…
Is democracy the question?
Perhaps the most pertinent question to be asked of Egypt’s revolutionary/counter-revolutionary process in the past three years is this: how…
Beyond duality, for plurality
Carl Becker was right in his assessment of great events: they have an ability to create a new normal language…
The politics of divine intervention
What role do divine interventions play in Egypt’s current political climate? Is Abdel Fattah el-Sisi a Sufi? Is the Muslim…
Electoral legitimacy, not religious legitimacy
The ouster of Mohamed Morsi involved a dispute over legitimacy—what gave the Egyptian president the right to remain in power?…
This is not Mubarak-lite: The new face of authoritarianism
Since the removal of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected leader, much of the discourse on the interim government’s handling…
Egypt and the elusiveness of shar’iyyah
Political legitimacy in the Arab world has often been derived from Islam. Both sharia (Islamic law) and shar’iyyah (legal, legality…
Searching for the church of Islam
Amid the conflict currently underway in Egypt—between state authorities led by the military-backed government and the Muslim Brotherhood and their…