M. Shahid Alam

Zionism is best described as an abnormal nationalism. This singular fact has engendered a history of deepening conflicts between Israel – leading an alliance of Western states – and the Islamicate more […]

It has never been easy offering a critique of capitalism or markets to my undergraduate students. Most have never heard an unkind word about these bedrock institutions, which they know to be the foundations of […]

“The Achilles’ heel of the Arab coalition is Lebanon. Muslim supremacy in this country is artificial and can easily be overthrown. A Christian State ought to be set up there, with its southern frontier on th […]

As the United States prepares to escalate its eight-year war against the Taliban, it might be useful to weigh its chances of success.Consider, first, the fate of three previous invasions of Afghanistan by two […]

Critics of Zionism and Israel — including a few Israelis — have charted an inverse exceptionalism, which describes an Israel that is aberrant, violates international norms with near impunity, engages in sys […]

In the slow evolution of US relations with Israel since 1948, as the latter mutated from a strategic liability to a strategic asset, Israel and its Jewish allies in the United States have always occupied the […]

At a time when Palestinian men, women and children, corralled in the ghetto of Gaza since 1948, are daily, hourly, relentlessly, being bombed from the air, land and sea, it is instructive to turn to some of the […]

“Laundry is the only thing that should be separated by color.” — Anonymous It is perhaps a bit late in the day, nearly two weeks after November 4, to be writing about Barack Obama’s electoral victory. […]

“There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?” “Jewish villages […]

“Anti-Semitism has grown and continues to grow, and so do I.” Theodore Herzl [1] As a self-defined movement for the national ‘liberation’ of European Jews, Zionism had an anomalous relationshi […]

On January 31, 2008, when the Winograd Commission submitted its final report on the Second Lebanese War of July 2006, this was a first in Israeli history: a report on why the Israeli military had failed in a […]

On December 27, a little more than two months after her return to Pakistan from years of exile, Benazir Bhutto was killed while leaving the grounds of Liaquat Bagh after addressing a rally of party faithfuls. […]

In January 2002, when President Bush named Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the first targets in his ‘global war against terror’ — the putative ‘axis of evil’—few noticed a curious omission. Pakis […]

In Pakistan today we encounter a paradox crying for an explanation; it is a paradox, moreover, whose exploration can bring some clarity to the predicament of the Islamicate today. In January 2002, when […]

In recent times, no nationalist project has been so completely mythologized by its partisans as Zionism. In the construction of nearly all aspects of its history, the official Zionist narrative is often at […]

“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today.” — Henry Ford, […]

No idea has played a more seminal role in the recent history of Jewish and Christian Zionism than the Jewish doctrine of divine election or chosenness.[1] Since this doctrine is the cornerstone of Zionism, […]

It is a fact little known in the West, outside the circle of historians of Islamicate societies, that Islamicate states often employed soldiers and bureaucrats who were ‘slaves’ of the king or emperor. Commo […]

One day Mulla Nasruddin went to his neighbor, known to be a mean fellow. “Sir,” he explained, “your ox has gored my cow and killed her after she refused his amorous advances.” His neighbors shot back, […]

It would appear from the fulsome praise heaped by mainstream reviewers on Bernard Lewis’s most recent and well-timed book, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford University Pr […]