Malise Ruthven

The Long Reach of the Satanic Verses

The violent controversy over Salman Rushdie’s novel can be traced back to the early days of Islam.

The Otherworldliness of Ibn Khaldun

God on Our Side

Physical Graffiti on the Border

What’s clear is that the “big beautiful wall” promised by Donald Trump is already a thing of the past, a technology superseded by new electronic barriers being built along the US-Mexico border. His prototype sections of wall should stand as material testaments to outdated, empty rhetoric.

The Islamic Road to the Modern World

Christopher de Bellaigue’s ‘The Islamic Enlightenment’ and Wael Abu-‘Uksa’s ‘Freedom in the Arab World’

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

The Caliphate: From Grand to Sordid

On Today’s Refugee Road

How to Understand ISIS

‘The New Arab Wars’ by Marc Lynch and ‘ISIS: A History’ by Fawaz Gerges

Inside Obedient Islamic Minds

Inside the Islamic State

Abdel Bari Atwan’s ‘Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate’

Lure of the Caliphate

Apocalyptic movements under a charismatic leader have always appealed to people who are at the margins or who are seeking some new source of meaning. Until we properly recognize this tradition we will have difficulty fulfilling Obama’s goal of destroying ISIS.

The Map ISIS Hates

The importance ISIS places on the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement about the Middle East may seem puzzling. But jihadist groups have long drawn on a fertile historical imagination, and on old grievances about the West in particular.

What Happened to the Arab Spring?

Hitler’s Miscalculation

As ruins, Germany’s Atlantic Wall defenses may evoke Romantic sensibilities as impressively as any Norman abbey or castle. They are essentially monuments to failure.

Terror: The Hidden Source

Akbar Ahmed’s ‘The Thistle and the Drone’

Warm Water Russians

Will Geography Decide Our Destiny?

Can Islam Be Criticized?

It may be ironic, but it is not entirely surprising that the YouTube clip of what appears to be a badly made film satirizing the Prophet Muhammad appeared, causing mayhem and destruction—coinciding with the death of US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens—in the same week of September that the novelist Salman Rushdie published Joseph Anton. The memoir recounts Rushdie’s life as a “celebrity victim” after Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for his death for offending Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses. Not to be outgunned by the late Ayatollah, the Pakistani railroad minister Ghulam Ahmad Bilour has now personally offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who murders the maker of Innocence of Muslims, the crude new film.

Waiting for the Apocalypse

In recent years, apocalyptic rhetoric has turned up in international politics among terrorists and hard-line governments such as Iran, but also their adversaries in Washington, Israel, and elsewhere including the current Republican candidate for president.