Shia Muslims Population

According to Pew Research Institute, A comprehensive demographic study of more than 200 countries finds that there are 1.6 billion Muslims of all ages living in the world today, representing 23% of…

Commentary: Inside Trump’s Middle East mess

President Donald Trump’s attempt to bring peace and stability to the Middle East has backfired spectacularly. He has put a major U.S. ally, Qatar, in a serious geopolitical crisis and damaged the efforts of his own cabinet to calm regional tensions.

حمد بن عيسى: ملك الفتنة والدم!

يُمعن حكام البحرين وملكهم حمد عيسى، بإلحاق الظلم بالشيخ عيسى قاسم، وهو الزعيم الأكبر في البلاد والذي حكمت عليه محكمة في المنامة غيابياً يوم الأحد الماضي، بالسجن مدة سنة مع وقف التنفيذ بعد إدانته “بجمع الأموال بالمخالفة لأحكام القانون… وغسل الأموال”، وبدفع غرامة قدرها مئة ألف دينار بحريني (نحو 265 ألف دولار) و”مصادرة الأموال المتحفظ عليها”.

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Two conferences spotlight Muslim world’s struggle to counter militancy

Two conferences this week spotlight the Muslim world’s struggle to come to grips with extremism and militancy. The conferences, the Arab-Islamic-American summit in Riyadh and a gathering in East Java of youth leaders of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the world’s largest Muslim movement, laid bare the difficulty of reforming cultures in the battle against extremism, called into question the commitment of Muslim states to combat radicalism and political violence, and put on display US President Donald J.

Experimenting in Mapping Online Anti-Shia Sectarianism on Twitter in the Middle East

Wouldn’t it be interesting to see if sectarianism itself was more dominant in one place than an other, at least online? Are some countries/cities more sectarian than others? Is sectarianism a localised phenomenon, despite what we might see in the news? If we knew this, we could then highlight where to prioritize tackling it.

The Shi’a Revival

Four years after Lebanon’s Hezbollah first appeared in Syria, and following the military victory in Aleppo last December, there is great change in Syria’s Shi’a Twelver community. The community makes up no more than 1-2 percent of the total Syrian population, a few hundred thousand people at most, but has been largely militarized since 2012.

البحرين… لا خيار سوى السلمية

See also: al-Akhbar report from al Wefaq
Hezbollah Condemnation
ADHRB Newsletter 191

In the Arab world, sectarianism is real, sects are not

Winter, S.: A History of the ‘Alawis: From Medieval Aleppo to the Turkish Republic. (eBook, Paperback and Hardcover)

A Shia act of piety or forbidden trend? The debate on self-inflicted wounds on Ashoura