Al-Quds and the Muslim world
In Part I last week I mentioned the undiplomatic and mischievous action by President Trump in relocating the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, an action against UN resolutions…
Egypt’s economic policy
The Egyptian government appears to be on the verge of further devaluing the pound. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi met the governor of the country’s central bank, Tarek Amer, last week…
Lack of law and order
In the very recent past we first heard of the abduction of Barrister Owais Shah, son of Sindh High Court Chief Justice Justice Sajjad Ali Shah, followed by the shocking…
Trump’s reckless peace plan
Holding good on his campaign promises in the very first week of his presidency, Donald Trump has issued a clutch of executive orders involving controversial issues, including building of the…
Bitter Options
It takes a visit to the British Museum in London to make sense of contemporary Pakistani politics. Only there, in that shrine to unending civilisation, in those honey-combed galleries honouring…
The new gold rush
Gold has a history that goes back thousands of years. Nobody knows when it was first discovered or how, but what we do know is that the human race has…
Trump, the toy soldier
Toy soldiers (miniature figurines representing real soldiers) have a long history. They have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, and have since appeared in many cultures and eras. During the…
The Arab winter as ‘morbid symptom’
The title of Gilbert Achcar’s latest book ‘Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising’ (2016) is derived from Gramsci’s ‘Prison Notebooks’: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the…
Our coup-lovers
In background conversations, senior military officials say there is consensus in the army that the democratic dispensation should continue. Senior political representatives also say, joyfully of course, that recent tensions…
Choosing among people
Well, of course, it’s the poor guys who are getting the chop – courtesy of an annual €3 billion to the Turks and an easy visa for anyone from Izmir…
