The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain signed the Abraham accords peace agreement to normalise relations with Israel last week in Washington. With this agreement, the two countries joined Egypt and Jordan, which signed peace treaties with Israel in 1979 and 1994 respectively. Mauritania also established diplomatic ties with Israel in 1999 but froze relations […]
The head of the Coptic Church in Egypt, Pope Tawadros II of Alexandria, has been leading a process of reform since he assumed the papacy in 2012. His reformist approach includes both internal measures related to religious rituals and an external one linked to rapprochement with the Catholic and Protestant churches. However, his reformist ideas […]
Early this year, US president Donald Trump announced his Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, the deal of century. According to the US plan, “the time has come to end the conflict, and unlock the vast human potential and economic opportunity that peace will bring to Israelis, Palestinians and the region as a whole.” This plan was advertised […]
The spread of Covid-19 to the MENA region has coincided with a heightened period of popular mobilisation for political change in a number of countries, namely Iraq, Lebanon and Algeria. In response to the initial impact of the virus, all types of popular gatherings were put to an end in an attempt to contain its […]
Protests in Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon and Iraq bring to mind images of the Arab Spring that shook the MENA region in 2011. Thousands of demonstrators in different Sudanese, Algerian, Lebanese and Iraqi cities have taken to the streets calling for political change and chanting the famous 2011 slogan “the people want the fall of the […]
Many Egyptian intellectuals celebrated the appointment of Ahmed Al-Tayeb as head of al-Azhar in March 2010. With his Sufi background and his career in education as a professor of philosophy who studied in France, Al-Tayeb was presented as a reformist scholar who could lead a renewal process in Egypt’s oldest religious institution. This image was […]
