One of the huge mistakes made by numerous people from all backgrounds is to believe that current Middle East and North Africa societies can become democratic. My 50 years of acquaintance with this region's history, politics and cultures brought me (...)
Over the past four years, a great deal of both scholarly work, as well as media analysis, of the Muslim Brotherhood has been produced, focussing in particular on its year in power in Egypt.
What is striking is how partisan and politicised much of (...)
There continues to be confusion about the events of 30 June 2013, when millions of Egyptians spilled onto the squares and streets of Egyptian cities demanding the removal of President Mohamed Morsi.
Media commentary has tended to focus on matters of (...)
Russia for me has always been a magical name. As a young Egyptian bookworm, I read hundreds of the masterpieces of European literature (Russian, French, Italian, German, British, Spanish) all in beautiful classical Arabic in extremely cheap — yet (...)
It was exactly a century ago that World War I began. When it ended four years later, the countries that had emerged victorious from the war set out to redraw the map of the Middle East, designating the borders of the countries of the region and (...)
The movements that were hailed as the harbingers of an “Arab Spring” revealed the reality of societies whose inhabitants' minds and spirits had been crushed under the weight of a number of factors that had permeated their lives for many years. One (...)
I have been studying the Arab mind-set for the last four decades from several perspectives. For a start, I myself am a product of this Arabic-speaking region and was able to study the phenomenon from the perspective of an “insider” as it were, as (...)
The sociology of the Arabian Peninsula tribes is the key to understanding the Arab character and mentality. In order to trace the historical features of that character and mentality, we must try to imagine the way of life in the inland wastes of the (...)
Islam has played an important role in the making of the history and culture of the Arabic-speaking peoples. While the “Muslim mind” has known periods of prosperity (according to the norms of the Middle Ages), until the 12th century AD, it has also (...)
While the Muslim Brotherhood claims to have renounced violence, can we be sure that the peaceful trend in the movement will always outweigh its fanatical other, asks Tarek Heggy
In Part III of his book, In the Aftermath of the Egyptian Revolution of (...)
Outside of day-to-day decisions, there are fundamental questions to ask of the character of the political forces at the helm in Egypt today, writes Tarek Heggy
A measure of a society's ranking on the scale of human civilisation and progress is the (...)
The hard truth is that the clash between the value systems of political Islam and modernity is so total as to make them incompatible, writes Tarek Heggy
"Bear witness for us, O pen/ That we shall not sleep/ That we shall not dither between 'yes' and (...)
For the last four decades, I have been on a journey of discovery, travelling along the highways and side streets of three cultural/political/historical worlds. First, the world of western culture, its history, philosophies, literature, achievements (...)
A description of what happened: There is a point at which a popular uprising, indeed, any popular movement, must be described as a revolution and that is when it succeeds in rallying huge numbers under its banner and when it produces effects and (...)
Fundamental change in the Arab region depends on reaching out to institutions of religious education and reforming them, not ignoring them, writes Tarek Heggi*
Islam has played an important role in the making of the history and culture of the (...)
THERE can be no doubt that the khula'a law, which allows a woman to unilaterally repudiate a marriage, represents an important step forward.
But while we applaud its enactment, we must be aware that it will remain vulnerable unless legal and (...)
I CAN see no way of stabilising the erratic needle on the compass of our Egyptian identity than through the medium of education.
However, we are faced here with a massive and extremely complicated challenge. It would be all too easy to stuff (...)
ON August 13, 1947, the Muslim Indian who went to bed resolved to remain in India woke up on August 14, 1947 still an Indian.
But Muslim Indians who chose to leave India and join the new entity, Pakistan, slept as Indians and woke up the next (...)
ACCORDING to the statistics of the Soviet state itself, the Soviet people did not enjoy 10 per cent of the comforts enjoyed by the French people. While the statistics mentioned before speak for themselves, two observations are in order here.
First, (...)
IT is a fact that the dictatorship of the proletariat in Soviet Russia has not realised the dream of giving everyone "according to his need". Even the progress achieved by the former Soviet Union, in comparison with the conditions, which obtained in (...)
WESTERN Europe has not forgotten the lessons learnt from the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, from Soviet exploitation of the economies of Eastern Europe and from Tito's experience with the Soviets when he aspired to a degree of (...)
WHAT does dictatorship of the proletariat really mean?
According to Marxists, it is a dictatorship exercised by the majority in the interest of the majority and against all the classes and groups opposed to those interests.
If that is so, why is (...)
ONE of the issues most closely associated with the transition to socialism is “the dictatorship of the proletariat". In Marxist theory, the transition to socialism is meant to come about through the eruption of the struggle between the bourgeoisie (...)
IN 1964, the Japanese Communist Party declared it was severing all ties with the Soviet Communist Party.
Three years later, the Central Committee agreed in the course of its annual meeting to delete from the Party's charter the provision ruling that (...)
BROADLY speaking, all the elements in Marx's philosophy which are derived from Hegel are unscientific, in the sense that there is no reason whatever to suppose them true.
(Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, George Allen and Unwin, (...)