Aymen M. Khalifa is the editor-in-chief of the monthly magazine Civil Society, published by the Ibn Khaldoun Center for Development Studies in Cairo, Egypt.
How well-founded are Western concerns that the nascent parliaments of Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain will be captured by antidemocratic Islamists and lead to the ‘Talibanization’ of the Gulf?
Whether ethnic, sectarian, or some combination of the two, communalsim is one of the massive realities of Middle Eastern life and politics. It is usually seen as an obstacle to…
