As the world awakens to the destruction of the ancient Mesopotamian cultural heritage and more killings of Christians by the Islamic State or ISIS, most people will just simply sigh…
Editorials
Terrorism and the Failure of Patriotism
Many people are asking what, exactly, is causing Muslims to be behind so many acts of terror and whether something could be done to change the situation for the better….
Murderous Fictions
The terrorist massacres in Paris on January 7th, and now the complaints about the portrayal of Islam’s prophet Mohammed on the surviving cover of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, are…
The Second Machine Age and Its Discontents
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and young cyber tycoon, wants the whole world wired and every human being to have access to the Internet. To bring Wi-Fi to people who…
A Brief History of British Tangier
In my book Freedom and Orthodoxy I make it clear that the classical world order was radically altered by Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the continent that would later bear the…
Jesus Was Not Christian
Not long after I reviewed Reza Aslan’s work on Jesus, I came across Geza Vermes’s excellent study, Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea (2013), that shows how Jesus’ iconoclastic but…
Post-Hassanian Morocco
I remember, vividly, how unsettled I was when I learned of the sudden death of Morocco’s King Hassan II on a hot July day in 1999. Like many people around…
Sultanic Democracy
The 4th of July is the only holiday that means something to me, not only because I am an American citizen, but also because I live in the modern world,…
Islam and the Enlightenment
As Iraq, Syria and other parts of the Arab and Muslim world are engulfed in flames, sectarian strife, social turmoil, and just plain misery, I keep wondering if these warring…
The Impossible Dreams of a Moroccan Prince
A few years ago, I wrote a review/commentary on The Road from Morocco, a thrilling account by Wafa Faith Hallam, a young, modern Moroccan woman who leads a truly quixotic…