CAIRO, Egypt — Father Metyas Mankarios ministers to garbage men and runs a newspaper for Coptic Christians from an office crammed with brittle archives above vegetable sellers and fishmongers barking out prices along the muddy roads of a Cairo neighborhood. Few have it easy here. From dawn until deep into the night, there is the clatter of making a living, …

© Islamic Finance Today The recent outing of two of the backbones of the recent Islamic Finance phenomena in the Mid East (organised Tawarruq and some types of Sukuk) as possibly Haraam has thrown the cat amongst the pigeons. Now, all of sudden – well meaning Islamic bankers and their customers are finding themselves stuck in the middle. Are they …

In 1987, US President Ronald Reagan pointing at the Berlin Wall during a visit to West Germany, bluntly said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Two years after this famous Reagan remark, the wall that divided Germany for 28 years collapsed, leading to the reunification of Germany. In 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev helplessly watched the Soviet Union disintegrate into 15 independent …

DOHA: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will join Qatar’s Prime Minister H E Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem bin Jabor Al Thani to address the seventh edition of US-Islamic World Forum opening here today. The three-day event, being jointly hosted by the US think- tank Brookings Institution and Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, …

“I did not want to ‘trade in’ my culture. I wanted access to new meanings.” – How an American writer born of a Jewish father and a Christian mother found spiritual fulfillment in Islam. After twenty-five years a writer in America, I wanted something to soften my cynicism. I was searching for new terms by which to see. The way …

  It might be a bad dream, but it feels real enough. The mantle of warfare slips seamlessly from one president to another, from one party to another, from one decade to another, from one generation to another. The impetus of national aggression transcends race, creed, socio-economic status, age and geography. Our collective sin is the bald lie that we …