Amid the turbulence of the 2011 Arab uprisings, the revolutionary uprising that played out in Cairo's Tahrir Square created high expectations before dashing the hopes of its participants. The upheaval led to a sequence of events in Egypt that scarcely anyone could have predicted, and precious few have understood: five years on, the status of Egypt's unfinished revolution remains shrouded in confusion. Power shifted hands rapidly, first from protesters to the army leadership, then to the po...

A powerful and sophisticated underground business delivers thousands of refugees a day all along the Mediterranean coasts of Europe. The new breed of criminals that controls it has risen out of the political chaos of post-9/11 Western foreign policy and the fiasco of the Arab Spring. These merchants of men are intertwined with jihadist armed organizations such as al Qaeda in the Maghreb. They have prospered smuggling cocaine from West Africa and kidnapping Westerners. More recently, the de...

In this searing memoir, the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize tells her story of courage and defiance in the face of an Iranian government out to destroy her, her family, and her mission: to bring justice to the people and the country she loves.“Shirin Ebadi is quite simply the most vital voice for freedom and human rights in Iran.”—Reza Aslan, #1 New York Times bestselling author of No god but God and Zealot

Galal Amin once again turns his attention to the shaping of Egyptian society and the Egyptian state in the half-century and more that has elapsed since the Nasserite revolution, this time focusing on the era of President Mubarak. He looks at corruption, poverty, the plight of the middle class, and of course, the economy, and directs his penetrating gaze toward the Mubarak regime's uneasy relationship with the relatively free press it encouraged, the vexing issue of presidential succession,...

Revolutions are difficult to understand, let alone predict. Egypt’s revolt last year was no exception. The military’s abandonment of Mubarak confused many observers, who had always assumed that the leader and the generals stood or fell together. But as the violence of the transitional period discredited the armed forces, academics fell back in relief on the same age-old assumptions about officers who rule from behind the scenes and change the figures on stage to preserve the status quo.

David Harris-Gershon and his wife, Jamie, moved to Jerusalem full of hope. Then, mere days after Israel thwarted historic cease-fire negotiations among the Palestinians, a bomb ripped open Hebrew University’s cafeteria. Jamie’s body was sliced with shrapnel; the friends sitting next to her were killed.When a doctor handed David some of the shrapnel removed from Jamie’s body, he could not accept that this piece of metal changed everything. But it had. The bombing sent David on a psy...

Will Saudi Arabia join the democratic wave in the Middle East? The uprisings and revolutions of the twenty-first century have not yet affected the stability of the House of Saud, which remains secretive, highly repressive and propped up by the West.The Islamic Utopia uses a range of sources including first-hand reporting and recently released WikiLeaks documents to examine Saudi Arabia in the decade after the 9/11 attacks, when King Abdullah’s 'reform' agenda took centre stage in p...

What happened to the promise of Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring?On January 25, 2011, the world was watching Cairo. Egyptians of every stripe came together in Tahrir Square to protest Hosni Mubarak's three decades of brutal rule. After many hopeful, turbulent years, however, Egypt seems to be back where it began, with another strongman, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in power. How did this happen?In Circling the Square, Wendell Steavenson uses literary reportage ...

The world is facing the worst humanitarian crisis since the Second World War. Over 300,000 are dead in Syria, and one and half million are either injured or disabled. Four and a half million people are trying to flee the country. And Syria is just one of a growing number of failed or failing states in the Middle East and North Africa. How should developed nations respond to human suffering on this mass scale? Do the prosperous societies of the West, including Canada and the U.S., have a mo...

To access the maps mentioned in this book, Click Here.Despite the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains a country in dire need of strong international support. Only with an understanding of the conditions in both urban and rural areas will the international community be able to offer aid and remain committed to long-term development.This fascinating and clearly written book mines a rich and unique array of data, which was collected in rural areas of Afghanistan by an exp...

In his latest exploration of the Egyptian malaise, Galal Amin first looks at the events of the months preceding the Revolution of 25 January 2011, pointing out the most important factors behind popular discontent. He then follows the ups and downs (mainly the downs) of the Revolution: the causes of rising hopes and expectations, mingled with successive disappointments, sometimes verging on despair, not least in the case of the presidential elections, when the Egyptian people were invited t...

No chapter in Egypt's contemporary history has been more turbulent and unpredictable than the past three years. In a very short period of time, the Arab world's most populous country has seen a transition from rule by an iron-fisted dictatorship to a populist uprising to military omnipotence to Islamist electoral victory to constitutional turmoil to societal polarization. Egypt's iconic revolution has been neither victorious nor defeated. Egypt in Flux is a collection of essays on...