Arab Spring

For those of us who have followed the struggle of Egypt’s Coptic Christians, particularly during the presidency of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al Sisi, there’s been both good news and bad news.

Although liberty movements swept the Middle East during the Arab Spring, an assessment of citizen’s rights and liberties in 2021 is disheartening. Little has changed.

Some in the West may hope that COVID-19 exposes the Chinese Communist Party’s lies and human rights violations while sparking mass protests. Meanwhile, the pandemic spreads in the West and complicates the geopolitical rivalry between the US and China.

May Aladdin remind international society, and especially Christians, about their responsibility in the fight for a more plural and diverse Middle East.

Observers expected Pompeo’s Cairo visit to defend President Trump’s drawdown in Syria. Instead, Pompeo systematically dismantled the failed Middle East policies of the Obama administration.

We need a return to a sober Christian Realism that appreciates our fallenness, the fallenness of the world, and our limits in shaping world events.

Real intolerance against Muslims exists, no question. But the term “Islamophobia” is too often deployed to inhibit rather than encourage dialogue about honest questions, concerns, or grievances.

In an excellent review of Shadi Hamid and Will McCants’ Rethinking Political Islam, Olivier Roy says there are generally two ways to think about Islamism: contextualist or essentialist.

While the Daesh genocide perpetrated against Christians, Yazidis, and other religious minorities is an extreme example of religious persecution, it sheds light on the perils religious minorities have been encountering more generally in the Middle East.