Articles

The largest protest movement in Iraq’s history, Thawrat Tishreen of 2019, shouldn’t have achieved so little. The movement pursued...

Convince an enemy, convince him that he’s wrong Is to win a bloodless battle where victory is long A simple act of faith, in reason over...

Soheila Sokhanvari is a British-Iranian artist whose diverse practice delves into the complexities of identity, politics, and social...

Marzia Babakarkhail, a former family law judge in Afghanistan during the 1990s, has dedicated her career to justice. In the wake of the...

Ali Safavi is a member of Iran’s Parliament in Exile, National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), and President of Near East Policy Research (NEPR), a consulting and policy analysis firm in Washington, DC. A sociologist by career, Safavi studied and taught at UCLA, California State University Los Angeles and University of Michigan from 1972 until 1981. An activist during the anti-Shah student movement in the 1970s in the US, Safavi has been involved in Iranian affairs sinc

Nadia Murad is a Yazidi human rights activist. In 2014, she was abducted from her hometown in Iraq, Kocho, by the Islamic State, as part...

Boarding a crowded Delhi Metro train, I was crammed up with four college boys who seemed quite amused by my Tibetan face. As if the grins...

Soomaya Javadi is a Hazara human rights activist who fled Afghanistan with the help of the 30 Birds Foundation. Actively advocating...

Iqan Shahidi is a PhD candidate in Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. He completed his undergraduate studies in...

Does the law take its own course or is it made to take a certain course? Property cases are notorious for taking forever, but when the crime is murder, i.e., when the state is the prosecutor, and the facts of the case have been ascertained by the most reliable authorities, can justice elude the victim’s families for as long as two or three decades? Or is it made to do so? These questions arise from the way two cases—which should have been front page news but have simply disa

On 12 January 2022, there was an attempt to destroy, or at least damage, the statue of Prospero and Ariel installed outside the BBC’s...

Introduction No one knows about Amir Tataloo. Bahman Ghobadi’s film No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009) could be seen as a dynamic...

I became an atheist at the age of eight. After one of my Hebrew-school teachers devoted a 90-minute class to recounting her experiences...

Bury [music] so deep under the earth that no sound or echo of it may rise again. —Attributed to the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb[1]   Over...

I. The case of George Gavriel   A recent incident in Cyprus re-ignited the debate about the limits of artistic freedom. George Gavriel, a director and teacher of art of a secondary education public school, who is also an artist in his leisure time, posted on social media in September 2020 pictures of some of his latest paintings.[1] Some of them have a clear anti-Church theme, with one picture in particular showing a naked Jesus riding a motorcycle and wearing a scarf with th

Introduction   Canonical Penance in the early Church and the modern concept of prison, broadly construed, are both processes of...

In his seminal 1961 work The Destruction of the European Jews , Raul Hilberg proposed a thesis that sought to explain a perceived lack of...

Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, or press down its tongue with a cord? Can you put a rope in its nose, or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it make many supplications to you? Will it speak soft words to you? Will it make a covenant with you to be taken as your servant forever?[1]   *   The rich symbolic inner workings of Hobbes’ Leviathan  have been much commented on in the centuries since its publication, with most attention being given to its incomparable frontisp

The assumption we live in a secularized world is false. The world today … is as furiously religious as it ever was. —Peter Berger[1] Fig...

The family is often presented as an opponent to the state as the location of power, or as an alternative to state institutions. The 2004...

Fig 1. Returning (detail of SYNTERESE (Father Demosthenes Demosthenous 2020, mosaic)). Akropoli-Strovolos. Courtesy of Father Demosthenes...

Identity drives human agency. Who we consider ourselves and the groups we are part of determines the choices we make. This principle is...

Fig 1. Sacred and Profane Love (Titian 1514, oil on canvas). Wikimedia Commons. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tiziano_-_Amor_S...