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Le Monde Diplomatique, June 2026 Excerpts “The Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood’s capacity to mobilise support has prompted the regime to outlaw it. “We only read the Quran and talk about religion, never politics.’ The weekly meetings remain legal as long as participants avoid claiming that ‘Islam is the solution’ to the crises facing the country,”  the 50-something mother explained. “  This was one of the first slogans of the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin), founded in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna in 1928. Saying it now would constitute a crime in Jordan.” “The Jordanian branch of the Brotherhood was dissolved in 2020, although it was able to continue some of its social activities. But on 23 April 2025, after the arrest of 16 people accused of planning an attack on Jordanian soil, it was banned outright and its assets confiscated, within less than ten days and without any form of trial. “The ban was officially imposed to protect the kingdom’s security. But Assem al-Omari, ...

The world is stranger than we can imagine, and surprises are inevitable in science. Thus, we found, for example, that pesticides increase pests, antibiotics can create pathogens, agricultural development creates hunger, and flood control leads to flooding. But some of these surprises could have been avoided if the problems had been posed big enough to accommodate solutions in the context of the whole. —  —T. Awerbach, A. Kiszewski and R. Levins, “Surprise, Nonlinearity and Complex Behavior in Health Impacts of Global Environmental Change: Concepts and  Methods,” 2002

“An important aspect of Lewis’s approach was his comparison of slavery in the Islamic world with the Atlantic slave trade. By claiming that the Muslim history of slavery was worse, Lewis deflected scrutiny from the transatlantic trade. Similar arguments are now made by the European far right. The French journalist and politician Éric Zemmour has claimed that the issue of historical slavery is ‘banal’, since ‘all civilisations’ practised it. Why should Europeans be the only ones to feel guilty? The idea that Muslims did it first and did it worse has been used more broadly to contextualise European colonialism. “ This is not to diminish the use of slavery in the Muslim world . As the historian Ehud Toledano has shown, there has long been a tendency within Islamic society to minimise its violence. According to this view, a ‘softer’ form of slavery prevailed in the Muslim world, one that was domestic, almost familial. These arguments can be traced back to 19 th -century Islamic defenders o...

“Under the old system, there were separate ‘pots’ for research and teaching – some money for research; some money for each student you had to teach. Under the new system , there is no pot for research (at least for the arts and humanities): the money must come out of student fees. This transforms the operations of the university – and much for the worse. While in the old system, there was no particular incentive to increase your student numbers (and, in fact, an incentive for the government to limit them), under the new one, there is an incentive and even necessity to attract as many as possible. So whereas in the past universities could concentrate on teaching and research, now they spend a huge amount of their time and resources on a perpetual scramble for students. This competition has only grown more cut-throat since the cap on student numbers was lifted, which meant that more prestigious universities could hoover up more, leaving others to fight over the shrinking remainder. “Mean...

An opinion article on the FT

Part 1 What is behind Christianity banning polygamy before some Muslim states? The primary reason Christianity banned polygamy long before Muslim states is not actually rooted in the Bible, but rather in  the pre-existing pagan laws of ancient Greece and Rome, where Christianity first developed.  [1, 2]  When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it absorbed the strict Greco-Roman legal tradition of  socially imposed monogamy . In contrast, Islam originated in the Arabian Peninsula, a region where polygamy was a deeply rooted tribal tradition that the Quran chose to regulate and restrict rather than entirely eliminate. [1, 3, 4, 5, 6] 1. The Greco-Roman Cultural Legacy (The Main Driver) Centuries before Jesus was born, ancient Greece and Rome had already outlawed polygamy. [3]  The Roman Law:  To Romans, marrying multiple wives was viewed as a "barbarian" practice. A Roman citizen could legally have only  one wife at a time . T...