Rounded Analysis On Contested Issues; Spotlighting Blind Spots; Politics, Religion, Travel, Books
Former Oxford professor Avi Shlaim’s book Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew uncovers what he calls ‘undeniable proof' of Zionist involvement in the attacks that forced Iraqi Jews to emigrate to Israel after over 2,500 years of presence in Babylon
Millions of devotees march through Iraq to reach the holy city of Karbala to mark the end of the 40-day mourning period of Prophet Muhammad's grandson Hussain, making Arbaeen the world's biggest annual pilgrimage
Karbala symbolises for Muslims the foundational Islamic values—egalitarianism, justice, and equity— the Prophet’s Muhammad favourite grandson, Imam Hussain, laid down his life there in the seventh century resisting Umayyad ruler Yazid violating these ideals
Israel's dispossession of Palestinians has blighted Jewish-Muslim ties, but the seven-decade conflict is a blip if seen from the perspective of centuries of cordial ties dating back to the rise of Islam By Sameer Arshad Khatlani In September 2020, an imam at Islam's holiest shrine—Mecca’s Grand Mosque—spoke about Prophet Muhammed’s kindness to a Jewish neighbour. … Continue reading Medina Charter To Nakba: Highs, Lows in Jewish-Muslim Ties
Successes against ISIS would have been impossible without national unity when the bloody civil war deepened Shia-Sunni fissures
In 2016, Iraq was reaping the bitter fruits of the adventurism of another westerner Paul Bremer, who fell back upon the colonial divide-and-rule policy to counter a broad-based challenge to the American occupation and prepared the ground for ISIS to tap into resentment over the Sunni purge
Britain and France secretly hammered out the Sykes-Picot accord in 1916 to arbitrarily redraw borders by marking straight lines with a rude chinagraph pencil and a ruler on the Middle East's map as their shared spoils of the First World War without letting the region's people have a say in it
Scholar Abdallah bin Mahfudh ibn Bayyah crafted the legal framework that inspired the declaration connecting early Islamic sources and the Prophet Muhammad's Charter of Medina with international human rights law for a model of equal, contractual citizenship as an Islamic principle
Arabs began acquiring Sanskrit texts before they sourced nearly all of the Graeco-Roman philosophical and scientific works to usher in the Islamic Golden Age from the eighth-century onwards
The incendiary comments of India's ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders about the Prophet Muhammad mark a new low in their anti-Muslim rhetoric but essentially echo medieval crusade chroniclers' distortions
