Protests over the death in custody of Mahsa Amini have gone global. But in Iran there is a unique version, known as ‘amameh parani’, targeting a garment sacred to Shi’a clerics.
The recent parliamentary election in Iraqi may have been the most transformative of the post-Saddam era, a pollster from Baghdad and an American academic explain.
After overrunning Mosul in June 2014, Islamic State (IS) hastily and brutally occupied soft targets in poorly protected areas of ethnic minorities – the villages of Kurds, Christians, and Yezidis on the…
There are two reasons why we should ignore the growing calls in the United States, Canada and Australia for Western “boots on ground” – meaning ground troops – to fight and destroy the Islamic State (IS…
Islam, like Judaism, is a religion of law. The usual Arabic word for Islamic law is sharia (pronounced shar-ee-ah), originally the track leading to a waterhole in the desert. For Muslims, the morally good…
After the death of Osama Bin Laden in May 2011, the global jihadist movement seemed to have become fragmented and considerably weakened. This happened for various reasons. First, the coincidence of the…
This week Twitter began suspending accounts related to ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham). This follows an ISIS fighter reportedly posting the photo of the head of a decapitated Iraqi police major…
The Sunni rebels in Iraq have made further gains, taking control of important border crossings with Syria and Jordan, the Rutba truck-stop on the main road from Baghdad to the Jordan border and two towns…
The capture of most of Mosul, Iraq’s second city, by Islamist paramilitaries has caused shock across the Middle East and in western capitals, especially Washington, but follows a pattern developing over…
Senior Research Fellow, Muslim Philanthropy Initiative at IUPUI and Journalist-fellow, Religion and Civic Culture Center, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences