By using the records of Islamic legal institutions to do Jewish history, we gain insight into how Jews lived their…
Crossing legal and religious borders in Morocco
North Africa
The end of postcolonialism
The London-based publisher Zed Books recently released Hamid Dabashi's The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (distributed in the U.S. by Macmillan).
The season of revolution
The online journal Interface: A Forum for and about Social Movements dedicates much of its most recent issue to the "Arab Spring."
Debating the Muslim Brotherhood
A few days ago, the Al-Jazeera program Empire assembled a high-profile panel to discuss the future prospects of the Muslim Brotherhood…
Have the jihadis lost the moral high ground to the rebels?
It has been a season of earthquakes, and the political ones in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Middle…
Asecular revolution
Why have I chosen the term “asecular,” and not, say, “non-secular” or “post-secular,” to describe the power manifested by these…
Missed signals
At Muftah, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd reflects on how American observers may have overlooked the potential for political uprising, and eventual revolution,…
Religion and the emerging transnational Arab public
In the SSRC's Transformations of the Public Sphere essay forum, Seyla Benhabib considers the recent and ongoing uprisings in the…
An historic expression of synergy and resistance
In The Nation, Saba Mahmood weighs in on the factors that facilitated the historic events recently witnessed in Egypt, and the tasks that lie ahead…