Latest in Opinion Highlight
Latest in Opinion
Taking Christian-Muslim relations in the UK to the next level
By Reverend Dr. Richard Cheetham LONDON: In London, where I live, scarcely a day goes by without some media interest in relations between Muslims and Christians. Usually the coverage is negative and often implies that religion is a constant and inevitable source of conflict. The recent clashes between Muslims and Coptic Christians in Cairo which have …
Hubble bubble, budget trouble
By Philip Whitfield CAIRO: Have you heard the one doing the rounds? Three leading economists going hunting took a small plane into the wilderness. The pilot told them they could only bring one moose back because it was such a small plane. At the end of the trip they talked the pilot into letting them lug …
The sacred and the secular: Promoting Muslim democracy
By Asef Bayat The presence of religion in public space challenges our ideas about the roles of faith in our lives and politics. Over the last centuries, proponents of secularization have claimed that as societies modernize, the role of religion in public and private life diminishes. For them, modern rationality, science, and the ideal of representative …
On the API: The real issue is political leadership
By David Pollock Around half of Israelis, Palestinians, and some other key Arab publics, according to various opinion polls taken in the past decade, support something like the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, whose basic concept is peace and Arab recognition of Israel in exchange for Israel’s full withdrawal from the territories it captured in the …
When will China’s economy overtake America’s?
By Yang Yao BEIJING: Is China poised to surpass the United States to become the world’s largest economy? The International Monetary Fund recently predicted that the size of China’s economy would overtake that of the US in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) by 2016. But a recent co-authored study by Robert Feenstra, an economist at …
Pakistan’s road to China
By Shahid Javed Burki ISLAMABAD: Large events sometimes have unintended strategic consequences. This is turning out to be the case following the killing of Osama bin Laden in a compound in Abbottabad, a military-dominated town near Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. The fact that the world’s most wanted man lived for a half-dozen years in a large house …
AIDS at 30: No looking back
By Michel Sidibé We look back at the last 30 years of AIDS so that we can shape the future of the response. About 65 million people have been infected by HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) since it was first reported — and nearly 30 million people have lost their lives to it. Global reaction was slow …
Asia’s new growth model
By Michael Spence MILAN: Led by Asia, the share of the global economy held by emerging markets has risen steadily over recent decades. For the countries of Asia – especially its rising giants, China and India – sustainable growth is no longer part of a global challenge. Instead, it has become a national growth-strategy issue. This …
Editorial: What dialogue?
By Rania Al Malky CAIRO: Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces’ (SCAF) almost obsessive preoccupation with “communicating with the public” stands starkly in contradiction with its complete failure to do so, if the events of the past week are anything to go by. First I must state my position on the SCAF: While I have …
The Arab Spring and Europe’s turn
By Ana Palacio NEW HAVEN: Until now, and with few exceptions, the West has nurtured two distinct communities of foreign-policy specialists: the development community and the democratic community. More often than not, they have had little or no connection with one another: development specialists dealt comfortably with dictatorships and democracies alike, believing that prosperity can best …
American public opinion and the Middle East peace process
By John Zogby Zogby International has been polling American opinion on the Arab-Israel dispute and the path to peace since the early 1990s. This is the one foreign policy issue that engages Americans, and policymakers would be wise to listen to the public. The overall responses point to a fundamental sense of fairness and balance and …
Food for revolution
By Harold James PRINCETON: Summits are defined by their location. It is quaint that the 1933 World Economic Conference took place in the Geological Museum in London’s Kensington, at a time when international cooperation seemed as alien as a fossilized dinosaur. On these criteria, Deauville, in French Normandy, with the (slightly faded) elegance of a past …
Why credit cannot bridge the spending gap
By Tarek Elhousseiny As the Egyptian economy slowly starts getting back on track, there have been discussions in the business community, both here and abroad, about the country’s vast potential across all sectors. The economy is still expected to register a growth rate of 2 percent in 2011, according to the Ministry of Finance as reported …
The corporatist threat to the Arab Spring
By Edmund Phelps NEW YORK: The young protesters of the Jasmine Revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt, many of them university graduates, overthrew the old regime because it impeded or blocked them from careers that would offer engaging work and the chance for personal growth. The protesters did not demand more creature comforts or better infrastructure; they …
Religious pluralism and democracy on show in Egypt
By Asma Afsaruddin Religious pluralism is one of the few, truly, modern, expressions. The term refers to the acceptance of a multitude of religions existing in harmony despite internal doctrinal differences and variations in external rituals and practices. Although the term itself hails only from the 20th century, one might argue that the idea has been …
The Ayatollah and the witches
By Mehdi Khalaji WASHINGTON, DC: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has now made the mistake that all Iranian presidents make: he has challenged the authority of the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He is doomed to fail. The challenge posed by Ahmadinejad is such a predictable part of Iranian politics that it has come to be known as …
Getting it right about Islam and Muslim Americans
By John Esposito and Sheila Lalwani WASHINGTON DC: Muslim Americans deserve a break. There are as many as six to eight million Muslims living in the United States and contributing to the country as doctors, engineers, artists, actors and professionals, but for a decade many have found themselves and their religion wrongly equated with the …
Flying to the Marathon
By Ricardo Guerra Marathon running has significantly increased in popularity over the last three decades. Running enthusiasts from all corners of the globe submit themselves on a weekly basis to the most arduous bouts of training sessions in order to prepare for race day. Some are so serious about competing that they may even travel great …
The Arab Spring’s summersault
By Philip Whitfield CAIRO: Take stock. Egypt’s democratic dream hangs by a thread. Libya’s death throes and Syria’s killing fields are civil war nightmares. Yemen is a chimera, Bahrain has been bludgeoning and Tunisia is a memory. Scorching rays overwhelm the Arab Spring’s refreshing breezes. Which way should we look for the revolution’s resolution? Are we …
In defense of reason, not Israel
By Amr Yossef As Norman Finkelstein told his audience at the American University in Cairo that “the biggest threat to Israel is that Egyptians will enter the modern world, and reclaim their dignity,” he was indeed, as Sara Grebowski aptly observed earlier at a letter-to-the-editor sent to Daily News Egypt (May 18, 2011) preaching to the …
Do One Thing for Diversity and Inclusion
By Jorge Sampaio and Irina Bokova All cultures contribute to the enrichment of humankind. Human beings must respect one another in all their diversity of belief, culture and language. Differences within and between societies should be neither feared nor repressed but cherished as a precious asset of humanity. This is a core challenge of the 21st …
It’s not revolution fatigue, but…
By Rania Al Malky CAIRO: Watching the live transmission from Tahrir Square Friday morning as hundreds of Egyptians gathered to “realign the path of the revolution”, I’m heartened by the fact that they have drowned out voices calling for an open-ended sit-in dubbed “the second revolution of rage” in the past two weeks. Despite the emotional …
A Marshall Plan for the Arab world
ROME: US President Barack Obama’s major speech on the consequences of the Arab Spring is also a challenge for Europe. Only if the trans-Atlantic partnership proves effective, as it did to meet the demands of the Cold War and the end of Europe’s division, can the West contribute to realizing the hopes engendered by …
Lessons from South Asia for an Arab Spring
By Ali Gohar and Lisa Schirch ISLAMABAD: People power and the use of mass nonviolent action are not new to Muslims. Even before Gandhi, political and spiritual leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan — now more widely referred to as “Bacha Khan” — was drawing on Islamic and tribal teachings to train “nonviolent soldiers” in 1920s India (now …
Bombs away
By Gareth Evans LONDON: One of the most dispiriting features of today’s international debates is that the threat to humanity posed by the world’s 23,000 nuclear weapons — and by those who would build more of them, or be only too willing to use them — has been consigned to the margin of politics. US President …
Challenges and chances for Egypt’s Liberals
By Dr. Ronald Meinardus Liberalism in one of the four political mainstreams in Egypt. The others are nationalism, socialism and Islamism. As would be expected in a democratic system, to which this country is morphing, political parties mirror these ideological camps. In the liberal camp, the party with the big tradition is the Wafd, which played …
Libya and R2P
By Hany Besada Unlike other uprisings in neighboring countries, Libya descended into civil war earlier this year as forces, loyal to the President, Muammar Gaddafi, attacked civilians demonstrating against his regime. With his tanks, armed forces, naval vessels and artillery unleashing firepower on urban centers, the rebels appealed for international intervention to prevent a possible genocide …
A world of regions
NEW YORK: In almost every part of the world, long-festering problems can be solved through closer cooperation among neighboring countries. The European Union provides the best model for how neighbors that have long fought each other can come together for mutual benefit. Ironically, today’s decline in American global power may lead to more effective …
What are your credit losses? The changing regulations
By Donald MacDonald Having been a relatively stable or improving measure of company performance during the “good times,” the approaches used to measure impairment for credit losses are firmly in the spotlight, with major changes expected in the accounting standards. If our expectations are correct, reserves for credit losses will increase as we move to an …
Too many cooks spoil the brouhaha
By Philip Whitfield Elvis crooned: Wise men say only fools rush in …some things are meant to be. Are we to believe that villainy preordained Egypt’s crepuscule, a dark place? Or may we take heart that after the miscreants are culled the virtuous will open the windows to enlightenment? Optimists like me prefer the latter. But …