Prominent Muslim Brotherhood leader Abdel Moneim Abouel Fotouh has announced that he will run for president, defying the group’s previous decision not to field a candidate.  Abouel Fotouh has said that he will run as an independent in the December election.  Disagreements between Abouel Fotouh and other Brotherhood leaders led to his exclusion from the Guidance Bureau, however he still commands a strong following from the younger Brotherhood members.  Abouel ...

On Friday, the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) held their 12th Annual Conference under the theme “Tunisia’s and Egypt’s Revolutions and Transitions to Democracy.” CSID President Radwan Masmoudi opened the conference by giving special attention to discerning real and fake stability and development in Egypt and Tunisia. The first panel, chaired by George Washington University Visiting Scholar and Program Committee Chair for the event, Radwan Ziadeh, was ...

In an op-ed in Al-Ahram, Ibrahim El-Houdaiby discusses the emergence and role of the  two public spheres fostered by the Mubarak's regime: the religious and secular-liberal spheres.  He notes that these spheres, which had minimal diversity and relatively exclusive, had little influence on the regime's policies.  Rather, Mubarak chose which sphere's rhetoric to employ to justify his policies.  El-Houdaiby also discusses how these regimes changed over time and calls on members ...

As part of a Jadaliyya Roundtable, editors of the blog asked analysts Steven Heydemann, Fred Lawson, David Lesch and Patrick Seale to respond to a series of questions on the current situation in Syria.  In part two of the roundtable, contributors were asked to respond to the following question:  "What do you consider to be missing or exaggerated in the discussion/writings/policy on the Syrian uprisings?" In response, Heydemann states that the current debate in Washington ...

POMED's Senior Research Associate Daphne McCurdy was interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on Bashar al-Assad's recent speech addressing protests in Syria.  McCurdy said the Assad's speech was an attempt to pacify the unrest by stoking fear of Iraq or Lebanon-style sectarian strife in the ethnically and religiously diverse nation.  She explained that there may be internal divisions within the regime on how to respond to the protests as security forces ...

On Monday, a Turkish court charged five journalists of being involved in an alleged plot to overthrow Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government.  The journalists were remanded into custody and joined two additional journalists who were also charged with involvement in the same plot on Sunday.  The seven journalists' houses were raided by police a week ago. The arrests come amidst a protracted investigation by the Turkish government of the ultra-nationalist group Ergenekon, which the ...

On Sunday, hundreds of people rallied in Beirut to protest the country's complicated power-sharing confessional system which divides political power amongst the country's 18 different religious sects.  The protesters called for a civil-secular state that guarantees religious diversity and social justice.  Many, including some of the protesters at the rally, blame the current political system as the root cause of corruption and violence in Lebanon.  One counter demonstrator however questioned the abandonment ...

On Friday, the Wilson Center hosted an event, entitled, “Egypt and the Middle: A Turkish Model of Democracy,” discussing the growth of democracy in Egypt and the role other democratic models could play in the process. John Sitilides, Chairman of the Board of Advisors for the Wilson Center Southeast Europe Project moderated and introduced the speakers: Steven A. Cook, the Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at ...

In an Atlantic article titled "When Islamism is Liberal-Democratic", Max Fisher notes that the recent passing of a constitutional referendum in Turkey is being described in some quarters as a turn away from the country's secular past. He asserts that it is actually a move towards liberal democracy: "Islamic rule and liberal democracy, far from mutually exclusive in the Middle East, can go hand-in-hand." He goes on to describe Middle ...

On Monday, September 13th, POMED hosted an event entitled “Is Turkey Becoming Less Democratic?” The event was moderated by Bill Schneider, Distinguished Senior Fellow and Resident Scholar at Third Way and the Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University. The discussion featured three panelists: Gonul Tol, Executive Director of the Center for Turkish Studies at the Middle East ...

Days ahead of the Turkish constitutional referendum, Steven Kinzer suggests the vote will be a critical test of both AKP's (Justice and Development Party) and the military’s power: “If the referendum passes, it will be taken as a sign that Turks are fed up with the military's involvement in politics.” Should the referendum pass on Sunday, Kinzer writes, it will likely empower AKP to draft a new constitution in the ...

Writing at Comment is Free, Brian Whitaker discusses the Quilliam Foundation's claim that "violent and nonviolent Islamists broadly share the same ideology and disagree only on tactics." According to the Quilliam Strategic Briefing Paper, "Preventing Terrorism: where next for Britain?, "Although some Islamist groups have accepted aspects of democracy, political pluralism and the concept of universal human rights, few -- if any -- Islamist groups have accepted all of these ...

Ray Takeyh, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes in the The Washington Post that Iran's mullah's owe the Iranian people an apology for squashing "another democratic movement in the summer of 2009," as they did in 1953 with the fall of Premier Mohammad Mossadegh. In Takeyh's view, it was not the instigation of the CIA plot against Mossadegh that played a decisive role in rejecting democratization in ...

The International Press Institute (IPI) has declared Akbar Ganji-- Iranian journalist and dissident --a World Press Freedom Hero, in "recognition of his decades of work defending freedom of speech and equal rights for all, in the face of continued harassment and imprisonment." Ganji spent six years in the infamous Evin prison in Tehran, much of that time in solitary confinement, while continuing to write. Addressing prospects for democracy in ...

Turkey will hold a national referendum on September 12 "on a wide-ranging set of changes to the constitution." Advocating for the amendments, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) argues that the "reforms will enhance democracy in Turkey and boost its case for accession to the European Union." The Republican People’s Party (CHP) however, opposes the reforms, saying that "they violate the independent nature of Turkey’s military and judiciary." The package ...

Majid Mohammadi argues at Gozaar that the Green Movement in Iran has "reshaped the Iranian political factions" inside and outside of the country. Noting two different tendencies both inside and outside of Iran, Mohammadi writes, "One section of the movement pursues its goals within the framework of the existing regime and its constitution, while the other does not believe the regime is capable of reform and aims to ...

Writing in the National Review, Barbara Lerner argues that the current ruling political party in Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP, is indeed Islamist and that "a 'moderate Islamist party' is a Western fantasy, a contradiction in terms, concocted by people who are blind to the fundamental differences between Islam and Christianity."Assessing Turkish foreign policy under the AKP, Lerner argues that Turks "are now just part of ...

Kuwaiti Minister of Education Moudhi Humoud recently decided to "tone down the incendiary religious content of the nation's school curriculum," an action with serious political and religious repercussions in Kuwait. The secular minister, who has been criticized for not wearing the headscarf, discussed two questions in a "controversial draft of a ninth- grade final exam": the issue of the companions of the prophet Muhammad and "appropriate behavior at a cemetery." ...

Hooshang Asadi provides insight on the political and historical transformations of Iran as divided along liberal and fundamentalist lines, arguing that the Constitutional Revolution in 1906 and its collapse occurred precisely because of the popular Islamic shari'a legal system. Despite efforts to integrate the two into a formal constitution, "The self-contradictory nature of this constitution would later give birth to the Islamic Revolution of 1979." According to Asadi, since ...

In order to combat Western influence and political opposition, Iranian authorities have ordered to send 1,000 clerics into Tehran schools, according to Mohammad Boniadi, deputy director of Tehran’s education department. According to a piece in The Washington Post, these same measures were taken right after the 1979 revolution, when morality police were placed in schools to "promote the government ideology." Seeking to enhance the government's influence on the Internet, Fars ...