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 […]

The majority of speculation on the future of ISIS sees it as a central organisation that has been masterminding global jihad. We tend to forget that jihadism and terrorism predate ISIS by 20 years. There are in fact three “theatres of operations” where ISIS has been the dominant factor since 2014, corresponding to three different […]