Human Trustees

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…

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…

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…

I begin here a two-part blog post on Turkey. What has captured the headlines is the Trump administration love affair with Saudi Arabia (apparently uninterrupted by the grisly murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggji) and its support of its proxy war against Iran in Yemen, now in its fifth year. But it is not just the Kingdom of Saudi…