Conflicts Forum

By Ibrahim El Houdaiby, Conflicts Forum, February 25, 2008
Those who believe that the ongoing crackdowns on the Muslim Brotherhood by the Egyptian regime will cause a major setback for the country’s largest and most powerful civil opposition group are definitely mistaken. Brotherhood members are an integral living part of the Egyptian society who can never […]

Alastair Crooke interviewed by Christian Porth, Daily Star, February 2, 2008
“If thought corrupts language,” the English author George Orwell wrote in his famous 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” “language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.” Alastair Crooke, […]

A Conflicts Forum Monograph, by Azzam Tamimi, November, 2007
The Hamas election victory in January of 2006 sent shockwaves through the Arab world — and through Islamists with varying convictions. The debate among Islamists over whether Hamas should have participated in the elections has been intense. But Hamas’s willingness to maintain its principled non-acceptance of the […]

A Conflicts Forum Monograph, by Khalid Amayreh, November, 2007
Palestine’s Islamic Resistance Movement — Hamas — won a surprising electoral victory in the January 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections. Almost immediately, Hamas leaders, movement activists, and Islamist academics began to debate the future course of the movement. Under what conditions would Hamas recognize Israel? What was its […]

By Sukant Chandan, Conflicts Forum, October 15, 2007
The Hamas election victory in January 2006 has led to an increased interest in the Islamic Resistance Movement. Hitherto little had been understood of Hamas’ history, political and social strategy and tactics. Rather rumors and cheap prejudice against Hamas have been rampant across the political spectrum in the […]

From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islamism by Adnan Musallam - a review by Alastair Crooke, Journal of Islamic Studies (Vol 18, Number 3), Oxford University Press, September, 2007
On the face of it an unlikely figure—here was a middle-class intellectual Egyptian from a traditional village background of waning family fortunes; […]