Since 2011, the Kuwaiti telecom company Zain Group, one of the largest in the Middle East, has produced a series of popular ads broadcast annually during Ramadan. The ads are songs, usually featuring celebrities singing and dancing with children. Since 2015, the ads have become noticeably more political. In 2016, …

Abstract This essay, based on the author’s fieldwork on Palestinian music and oral history, examines the position of singer and Arab Idol winner Mohammed Assaf in relation to the contemporary Palestinian struggle and the wider play of power in the Arab world. The issues discussed gravitate towards three main themes: …

While a post-Brexit United Kingdom continues to struggle with xenophobia and anxieties about the Arab/Muslim diaspora, a new hero has emerged in the country’s most popular sport. He’s wildly talented, he’s from Egypt, and he’s Muslim. Known as “The Pharaoh”, “The Egyptian King”, and even the “Egyptian Messi”, 25-year-old Mohamed …

A few days before U.S. President Donald Trump declared that America would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a number of Arab heads  of state—including the leaders of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian Authority (not yet a state but one in the making since Oslo)—were  informed that Trump …

American diplomats responsible for public diplomacy working in the Middle East have always faced a number of challenges. Most arise from criticisms of U.S. policy; for example, the Arab-Israeli conflict, American intervention in Iraq, or the US posture toward the civil war in Syria. In today’s climate, such substantive criticisms …

On December 30, the UK's Security Minister Ben Wallace harshly criticized tech giants like Google, Facebook, and YouTube for not doing enough to combat "terrorism online". He called on them to remove online content that could lead to radicalization. "2018 is a time to deliver. We know they can do …

On Wednesday, November 15, 2017, the Adham Center and Arab Media & Society hosted a symposium on “Media and Crisis”. The event involved a panel discussion with Makram Mohammed Ahmed, head of the Supreme Council for Media Regulation, Dr. Abdel Monem Said, renowned writer and political analyst, and Zeid Al …

On November 21, 2016, the Middle East Centre of St Antony’s College, Oxford hosted the roundtable and launch of Public Culture and Islam in Modern Egypt: Media, Intellectuals and Society (London: I.B.Tauris, 2016) with myself and Morgan Clarke (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford) who is a social anthropologist …

I am writing a book that will be called Confronting Terrorism. It examines the evolution of terrorism that culminates, for now, in the Islamic State’s ability to hold and “govern” substantial amounts of territory. This requires me to immerse myself in both the literature of terrorism and to view, from a distance, the nasty realities of this topic. I do not pretend to be as intimately involved as are the people who must live under terrorism’s darkest shadows every day. But I think a lot about how terrorism’s presence changes our world...

The rise of the Islamic State group (which will be referred to as ISIS), from the perspective of those in the Middle East drawn to it, rather than Europe where the French scholar Olivier Roy has proposed the idea of the “Islamization of radicalism,” can be discussed within the framework of a number of deeper phenomena in Arab societies since the mid-twentieth century.