Recent demands have been the most vocal and the most sustained in the history of Ethiopian Muslims. But if they have gone the least bit beyond the scope of religion, then, ironically, they have been overtly secularist.
In which the critic reverses a bit of advice he gave the writer on trusting people, maybe not including our neighbours, and ponders the latest mass TV audience.
The dispersal of the al-Qaida idea across many national territories takes some pressure off the "far enemy", the United States. But developments in Nigeria could represent a new danger for Washington and its allies.
Three hundred years ago, Britain signed a peace treaty that concluded a quarter of a century of warfare, cemented her place as a world power and secured the constitutional monarchy. That the UK doesn't commemorate this speaks volumes about its relationship to Europe.
This time around we have not seen the same wave of violent attacks on Muslims that gripped the US in the wake of 9/11. Nevertheless we should be vigilant.
Finally, we ask, "In what ways are we all 'Tillermen,' in what ways are we unaware?"
In a country where NGO’s have been severely crippled, press freedom is dying out, religious institutions are tightly controlled, and professional associations effectively co-opted - in short, where civil society is in grave danger of extinction - there has been one arena of visible democracy, that
If they are responsible for last Monday’s bombings, the Tsarnaev brothers are mass murderers. Whether they are terrorists is less clear.
After spending roughly one year in governing positions, the MB and Ennahda seem under pressure from frustrated publics who feel that a zero-change status quo is currently in situ. So who will the people turn to?
The opportunity for a peaceful settlement of Turkey's Kurdish question came as a surprise to many observers, announced as it was in the middle of a period of growing tension. But despite support by both parties, ambiguities that could undermine the whole process subsist.
The extraordinary bounce-back of the banks reveals the most disturbing, but least obvious, largely invisible, feature of the unfinished European crisis: the transformation of democratic taxation states into post-democratic banking states.
The failure to translate the momentum of the heady days of the January 2011 protests in Egypt into an effective revolutionary force is closely related to the organisational forms adopted by oppositional movements. This poses broader questions for social movements worldwide, argues Maha Abdelrahman
