خلق الحوار. التأثير على السياسة.
Generating Dialogue. Impacting Policy.
With a fragile democratic transition process and a continuous low-intensity yet bloody conflict against terrorist groups, Tunisia is still taking stock of the effects and repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic on the country.
Fikra Forum
On July 6, 2020, Iraq’s most prolific security commentator Husham al-Hashemi was assassinated in Zayouna, a social melting pot neighborhood of east Baghdad. Iraq’s protesters, journalists, and security agencies knew Husham well, as did nearly all the governments of the international Coalition. Everyone, from every angle, must lend their voice and their efforts to finding and prosecuting Husham’s killers, and those who killed protesters and journalists, before they kill more Iraqis.
Fikra Forum
Results of a rare Jordanian public opinion poll, conducted by a leading regional commercial firm in June, show widespread popular concern about current discussion of Israeli annexation in the West Bank, in the context of the Trump “Peace Plan.”
With the potential of Israel moving forward with annexation looming, the question of its likely impact on recent steps of normalization with Gulf countries is becoming increasingly relevant.
Fikra Forum
In my most recent Fikra Forum piece, In Defense of Islamic Religious Reform, I address the need for religious reform in the modern age. In Hassan Mneimneh’s response to my piece, Islamic Religious Reform Is an Institutional Need First, he concludes that the very notion of religious reform is flawed, as it cannot achieve anything beyond a compromise between the values of Islam and the demands of the times. In reality, however, I am not calling for a kind of religious reform that simply compromises between those values and demands.
Fikra Forum
Even after the fall of of the Islamic State’s (ISIS) territorial control last March, the al-Hawl refugee camp of northern Syria remains the group’s beating heart.
