Without question, June is consistently our busiest month of the year at the Institute of Middle East Studies. As such, we wish to highlight a number of the projects that we have been working on as we seek to fulfill our institutional mandate: To bring about positive transformation in thinking and practice […]
by Elias Ghazal If you are familiar with the politics of the Middle East, you might be disturbed by the title of this blogpost. That’s because the Party of God is not some right wing pro-Christian party that serves a Christian cause in the Middle East. The Party of God […]
By Rose Khouri Western academia is filled with research on the effects of a colonialist, imperialistic Christianity and its intersection with modern identities. As my colleague Jesse Wheeler alluded to last week, from the native peoples of the modern day United States to the descendants of Africans taken from their […]
By Jesse Wheeler “The cool thing about Pew numbers is how versatile they are; bloggers can wear them with triumph, grief, & multiple shades of schadenfreude!” – Derek Rishmawy Early April, the Pew Research Center released an in-depth demographic study titled, “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050: […]
Persian or central Asian illustration showing Mohammed (on the right) preaching By Martin Accad Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Geert Wilders, and others, are inadvertently the spearheads of Islamism in the US and Europe! This may sound like a bit of a radical statement, but perhaps it really isn’t. The situation […]
Things are not always as they seem… A recent article in Spiegel sheds new and significant light on the inner workings of ISIS. The article is based on documentation discovered in the home of one of the Islamic State’s chief architects—Haji Bakr—a former Colonel in Saddam’s Air Defense Forces—after his […]
By Ashley al-Saliby How long has it been since anyone has really seen her? I can’t help but wonder her name and her story as I navigate the sidewalk parallel to the one she’s traveling, both of us with market bags in hand. I’m new here, and by “here” I […]
The Middle East Consultation 2015 – Discipleship Today: Identity and Belonging in the Middle East & North Africa, 15 – 19 June 2015, will focus on specific opportunities and challenges related to “identity” and “belonging” that face followers of Jesus within the MENA context. These challenges are particularly important given […]