Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Azzam Tamimi
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Muhammad Mahdi Akef, the Muslim Brotherhood’s own Mandela figure, is finally free
On 1 April 2008, I learned that the authorities in Egypt had ordered Alhiwar TV channel to be removed from Nilesat, the Egyptian-owned satellite, one of three through which Alhiwar was being transmitted to the Arab world. Just one day earlier, I had finished recording a set of six...
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In anticipation of the next cycle of Arab revolutions
I had just been appointed a senior lecturer at the UK-based Markfield Institute of Higher Education in the autumn of 2000 when the newly appointed director, Dr. Zaghlul Al-Najjar, summoned me to his office. He spent the first few days of his tenure in office acquainting himself with the...
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Aleppo dies for a cause
The people of Aleppo, like the majority of Syrians, rose against tyranny after they saw fellow Arabs in Tunisia and Egypt topple their own tormentors. Their revolution began peacefully and most Syrians wished for it to remain so. However, the local tyrant, with his regional and international backers, had other...
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Michael Flynn: A combustive cocktail of ignorance and arrogance
To dislike Islam and the Muslims, even to hate them, is one thing. To speak out of utter ignorance about them is something else. According to recently released video recordings, Michael Flynn, US president-elect Donald Trump’s appointee for the position of national security adviser, seems to think that Islam started less than...
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Will Ennahda’s transformation from the missionary to the political actually work?
The roots of Ennahda are found in Al-Jama’ah Al-Islamiyah (the Islamic Group), a small da’wah (missionary) and reform community made up of Tunisian individuals who in the late 1960s and early 1970s followed the methodology of the Indian-founded Tablighi Jamaat and used as a platform the government-sponsored Qur’anic Preservation...
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Tony Blair and George Bush created Islamic State
Thirteen years ago, Britain’s then prime minister Tony Blair relied on false evidence to justify taking the United Kingdom to war. For reasons perhaps better known to him than to anyone else, he chose to align himself with the neoconservative-led administration of the US president of the time, George...