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Stepping back from the abyss: A conversation with Indian Muslim thinker A. Faizur Rahman

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  By James M. Dorsey Hindu Muslim relations are in a rout. Fear and prejudice have been weaponized. Hindu nationalists fuel intercommunal strife by emphasizing an imaginary demographic threat. Muslims believe themselves to be in a situation similar to that of Jews in Germany in the 1930s that led to genocide. India's far right Hindu nationalist movement, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS, the ideological cradle of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his cohorts, speaks of a 1,000-year war. While professing an interest in dialogue, the RSS is widely viewed as a catalyst of anti-Muslim violence and discrimination in India. The movement speaks to individual Indian Muslim leaders, but those conversations are mostly private, and the Indian Muslim community has been unable to develop a leadership that can channel a dialogue that could produce results. Stepping into the breach is Indonesia's Nama, arguably the world's most moderate Muslim civil society movement in the worl
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To engage or not engage. Hindus and Muslims suss each other out

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  By James M. Dorsey To watch a video version of this story on YouTube please click  here. A podcast version is available on Soundcloud,   Itunes ,  Spotify ,  Spreaker , and   Podbean. Moderate Muslims and militant Hindu nationalists are strange bedfellows at the best of times, particularly when they come together to reshape Hindu-Muslim relations in troubled India. Yet, that is what Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama and India’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) seek to achieve. Nahdlatul Ulama, arguably the world's most moderate Muslim civil society group in the world's largest Muslim-majority state and democracy, is everything the RSS, a notorious Hindu nationalist movement widely viewed as the catalyst of anti-Muslim violence and discrimination in India, is not. What makes the endeavour even more remarkable is that the two groups have strikingly different visions of what Hindu-Muslim reconciliation should entail. For Nahdlatul Ulama, engagement with the RSS is par
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Neither Saudi Arabia nor market concerns dent Dubai’s real estate market

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  By James M. Dorsey To watch a video version of this story on YouTube please click  here. A podcast version is available on Soundcloud,   Itunes ,  Spotify ,  Spreaker , and   Podbean. If real estate is anything to go by, Dubai is snubbing its nose at Saudi efforts to replace it as the Middle East's go-to business and expatriate hub. Saudi Arabia’s insistence that corporations doing government-related business in the country, many of which have their regional base in Dubai, move their offices to the kingdom by 2024 has yet to dampen the appetite for Emirati real estate. Last week, the kingdom eased its rules by exempting companies that are sole bidders on a government contract and enterprises with annual foreign operations worth less than one million Saudi riyals ($266,000). Similarly, big-ticket Saudi projects have so far failed to dent the Dubai real estate market. Prominent among those projects is Neom, a US$500 billion futuristic, 25,000 square kilometre dese
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