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Humantrustees.org aims to foster understanding and cooperation between Muslims and Christians so as to empower them to live up to their God-given calling as “trustees of the earth.” This Christian initiative seeks to accomplish this goal through scholarship, teaching, news commentary, and networking between scholars, members of both communities, and with anyone else who is passionate about peace and human flourishing.
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06 May 2020

Algeria: The Hirak Phenomenon

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“‘We, the people’: one year ago, mass anti-government protests erupted in Africa's largest country. At times more than a million people have taken to the streets. The weekly protests finally led to the resignation of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who had been the leader of Algeria for 20 years. Yet the demonstrations continued unabated. Many see in successor Abdelmadjid Tebboune a continuation of the old elites”
This concludes a trilogy of blog posts on the 2019 global street protests. In the first one, I focused particularly on Sudan, where women had been in the forefront. Then I moved to Algeria, where a year of bi-weekly protests produced spectacular results, at least on the surface: toppling a president, imprisoning many of his cronies for corruption, postponing a…
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16 April 2020

Algeria: The Postcolonial Straightjacket

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“‘Go!’ Protestors demand that remaining Bouteflika officials step down in Algiers this July,” Farouk Batiche · Anadolu · Getty
As a follow-up to my last post, “The Rise of Global Protests,” I begin a more in-depth look at the phenomenal street demonstrations that lasted just over a year in Algeria before they were halted by the coronavirus. Perhaps this OpEd in the Washington Post (Feb. 2, 2020) by M. Tahir Kalavuz and Sharan Grewal is the best summary to…
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22 March 2020

The Rise of Global Protests

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“Earlier this week, an iconic photo [taken by local photographer Lana Haroun] of a woman named Alaa Salah, a 22-year-old engineering and architecture student, addressing protesters from atop a car went viral.” From a Vox article, “The Women who helped bring down Sudan’s president.”
First, a very belated wish: a peaceful and prosperous 2020 year to all! By “prosperous” I don’t only mean freedom from financial woes. I mean a deep sense of flourishing and thriving in your soul. You can find any number of signs around you pointing to this year as a harbinger of stress and grief -- and above all, being…
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05 October 2019

Turkey: Secularism, Nationalism, and Democracy (2)

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Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, c. 1016 (1881-1938)
In the first installment of this post I showed how the extreme secularism imposed on his nation by Kemal Attatürk, borrowed from the French ideology of laïcité, could not hold forever. The world dramatically became more religious starting in the 1970s (see my blog post on this) and social science scholars began to describe a wave of “fundamentalism” sweeping over…
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