Category: Dr. Ahmad’s blog

President Biden has received a great deal of criticism for including Saudi Arabia in his planned trip to the Middle East later this week. Today’s Washington Post features his answer in the form of an op-ed called “Why I’m Going to Saudi Arabia.” The first paragraph asserts that his purpose is to “advance important American…

[On May 23, 2022, Radwan Masmoudi moderated a Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy panel discussion of what the United States can do to restore democracy in Tunisia. This is my summary of highlights of the program, not a transcript. Use of the first person is for convenience only. For a video of…

Transcending the Israel Lobby at Home & Abroad  [These are my notes from the 2022 conference on “The Israeli Lobby and American Foreign Policy” held at the National Press Club in Washington DC on March 4. These notes summarize my impression of highlights of the presentations and are not an attempted transcription  The use of…

[In her book “The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom,” Sahar Aziz applies critical race theory to ask how it is that a country that privileges religious freedom has an open rabid Islamophobia. This is my summary of her ideas presented at an online book forum organized by the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center…

[On January 13, 2022, Jonathan Kuttab moderated a Nonviolence International discussion of what comes next in Israel/Palestine now that the two-state solution is dead. Discussants were Jeff Halper, author of Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State, and Noura Erakat. author of Justice for Some: Law and the…

[On January 6, 2022, the Council on Foreign Relations held an on-the-record discussion of the relationship between religion and populism, and how this relationship is affecting the politics of Europe and the United States, featuring Jocelyne Cesari, chair of religion and politics at the University of Birmingham, and Tobias Cremer, junior research fellow in religion…

Among the remarkable Muslims who passed away in 2021 were three who, in different ways, supported the Minaret of Freedom Institute. Dr. Mahmoud Ayoub, one of the most outstanding scholars of his time, was knowledgeable in both Islamic jurisprudence and in Sufism.  We were honored to work with him on a number of occasions and…

[These are my notes from the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy program on “Tunisia’s Democracy Under Threat: What is at Stake for the MENA region?” held on October 26, 2021, moderated by Khalil Jahshan (Executive Director of the Arab Center in Washington DC). These notes summarize my impression of selected highlights of…

It seems everyone is asking some version of the question “What happened in Afghanistan?” Of course, what happened is exactly what many predicted from the moment the invasion of that country was announced almost twenty years ago.  While not everyone can be expected to understand the reasons why America’s defeat was a foregone conclusion, everyone,…

The original HAMAS charter, written in 1987 by a single person and adopted in the crush of the first intifada in 1988 without critical scrutiny, has been an embarrassment to HAMAS to the extent that it is still cited by Zionist propagandists years after its replacement in 2017.  The new and official HAMAS charter is…