The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer

  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. When Mohammed al-Jadaan told a gathering of the global political and business elite that Saudi Arabia would, in the future, attach conditions to its foreign aid, the finance minister was announcing the expansion of existing conditionality rather than a wholly new approach. Coined ‘Saudi First,’ the new conditionality ties aid to responsible economic policies and reforms, not just support for the kingdom’s geopolitics. For the longest time, Saudi Arabia granted aid with no overt strings. The aid was policed by privately demanding support for the kingdom’s policies, often using as a carrot and stick quotas for the haj, the yearly Muslim pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca allotted to countries across the globe. As a result, over the years, Saudi Arab...

  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...

  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,...