I met him before he was Anthony Shadid. In the summer of 1991, he was just a skinny kid from the University of Wisconsin with a black mustache and an easy smile. We were studying Arabic together in Cairo. He was a third-generation Lebanese-American who had learned Arabic from scratch …

Al Jazeera's new English-language service is not about to take the United States by storm, but it could have a major effect on Muslim communities around the globe. Its greatest impact, however, may be on Al Jazeera's Arabic broadcasts. As veterans of the American media environment know, US audiences are …

As news of kidnappings and beheadings flowed out of Iraq this summer, it was easy to assume that Iraq had fallen into a state of primordial chaos. The brutal forces of tribalism and barbarity appeared to be triumphing, and the modern appeared to be giving way to the medieval. Such …

This is a presentation prepared for the Arab Satellite Television Broadcasting conference in Cambridge, UK, in November 2002. It is presented in its preliminary form for the benefit of TBS readers, and not as finished research. It was impossible to read debates in the 1990s about political change around the …

[Editor�s note: This article is an excerpt from a policy paper entitled "New Media New Politics? From Satellite Television to the Internet in the Arab World" published by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998. If you would like to order a copy of the publication, see http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/pubs/pp.htm] Rise …

The Arab League's headquarters in Cairo lie just a few hundred meters away from the city's statue of Simon Bolivar. The two represent monuments to desires for regional autonomy and unity—desires that time has proved easier to conceptualize than to implement. Yet a half century after the founding of the …