Several months ago, I expressed (here and here) several important concerns related to Syria's sizeable Christian minority, particularly regarding its uniquely vulnerable position between the brutal tactics of a failing, unscrupulous regime and a fractured, unpredictable myriad of opposition forces. At least some of those concerns...

In a February post, I discussed the precarious situation of Syria's religious minorities in light of that country's now year-old uprising. I argued that 1) decisive humanitarian intervention would best position the U.S. and its allies to assist the opposition against the increasingly brutal regime, 2) gain the...

Pope Shenouda III, who presided over Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Church since his ascension to the patriarchal throne of St. Mark in 1971, died on...

While the foreign policy community has finally begun to delve into the Syrian crisis with full attention, it has become immediately clear just how far the world is from a consensus on responding to the Assad regime's bloody repression of dissent (which has claimed up to 7,000 lives...

The U.S. Department of State announced on January 5 that Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood had given reassures on its commitment to respecting the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Within the space of a day, a Brotherhood (MB) spokesman fired back with a denial: the organization, he explained, had made...

The violence in and around Cairo's Tahrir Square that began on December 16th between military police and an increasingly belligerent core of protestors, has been particularly ugly. In fact, the circumstances surrounding this violence represent clear evidence that the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has...

As the biggest socio-political crisis facing Egypt since February continues to unfold in Cairo's Tahrir Square and elsewhere in the country, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is again demonstrating its political agility in using such moments to its advantage.

The MB and other Islamists initiated calls for...

In a recent article, George Washington University's Nathan Brown -- a specialist on Arab constitutions who has advised Congress on regional issues -- starkly argues that American advice for constitutional committees in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere will be mostly bad and irrelevant. Brown explains that Arab...

The overwhelming majority of the Arab world is Muslim, and so it would seem to reason that the two words on everyone's lips in that region since January -- revolution and democracy -- should hinge on the participatory, popular will of that population. However, a crucial test of the potential...