The current vigorous growth of the television industry in the Arab world has its origin in three factors. Their mixture of technological and political elements symbolises, as if in a distorting mirror, the struggles of a people who are negotiating a difficult historical inheritance while painfully attempting to enter the world of globalisation on their own terms.

The current vigorous growth of the television industry in the Arab world has its origin in three factors. Their mixture of technological and political elements symbolises, as if in a distorting mirror, the struggles of a people who are negotiating a difficult historical inheritance while painfully attempting to enter the world of globalisation on their own terms.

The solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute will not come overnight, but a crucial pre-condition is an understanding in Israel of the need to have a stable partner not an enemy across its fine boundaries. Stand back from the passions of the Gaza withdrawal and look for a moment at the Israeli-Palestinian dispute from an unfamiliar viewpoint: the concept of the healthy nation-state.

Europe's left-wingers are supporting us Lebanese against Israel and its war crimes. Thanks, that's great: the Lebanese need all the backing they can get in facing the overwhelming technological savagery unleashed on their land and airspace, scorching the earth and not distinguishing civilians from soldiers, babies from adults.

The ultra-left ideology of Maoism that inspired China’s cultural revolution of the 1960s was known for its analytical focus on “the principal contradiction”. Only when this contradiction had been solved, said the Great Helmsman, could secondary contradictions be addressed.

It is understandable that Muslims should feel angry and offended because of the caricatures published in the Danish press, and subsequently in other European newspapers. When a community's prophet is targeted, there is a natural feeling that the community itself has been singled out. And given that one of the pictures associated the Arab prophet with terrorism, by putting a bomb on his head, the sense that all Muslims have been stigmatised becomes comprehensible.

It is understandable that Muslims should feel angry and offended because of the caricatures published in the Danish press, and subsequently in other European newspapers. When a community's prophet is targeted, there is a natural feeling that the community itself has been singled out. And given that one of the pictures associated the Arab prophet with terrorism, by putting a bomb on his head, the sense that all Muslims have been stigmatised becomes comprehensible.

Whether recent or remote, the past is always more than a mere background to events. This is as true of Iranian politics as it is of anything else. Thus, whenever Arab-Iranian relations undergo some development or other, there are always scholars reminding us of the Safavid dynasty established in 16th-century Iran. At that time, the Safavids embraced Shi'ism, not from religious zeal but because they wanted to distinguish themselves within the Islamic world from the Sunni Arabs.

Whether recent or remote, the past is always more than a mere background to events. This is as true of Iranian politics as it is of anything else. Thus, whenever Arab-Iranian relations undergo some development or other, there are always scholars reminding us of the Safavid dynasty established in 16th-century Iran. At that time, the Safavids embraced Shi'ism, not from religious zeal but because they wanted to distinguish themselves within the Islamic world from the Sunni Arabs.

European countries are all worrying about their Muslim populations, but there is one reality they have failed to grasp: that they have played a part in creating the problem, in the form of “Muslim communities”, in the first place. The immigrants and their descendants who fall under this designation may have arrived as Pakistanis, Turks, Moroccans, Algerians, or Iraqis; it was only after they settled in the west that they were transformed into “Muslim communities”. Such communities are, to a certain extent, a “virtual reality” that exists above all in the minds of western politicians, “experts” and journalists – and, of course, in the minds of their supposed and self-appointed “spokesmen”.

European countries are all worrying about their Muslim populations, but there is one reality they have failed to grasp: that they have played a part in creating the problem, in the form of “Muslim communities”, in the first place. The immigrants and their descendants who fall under this designation may have arrived as Pakistanis, Turks, Moroccans, Algerians, or Iraqis; it was only after they settled in the west that they were transformed into “Muslim communities”. Such communities are, to a certain extent, a “virtual reality” that exists above all in the minds of western politicians, “experts” and journalists – and, of course, in the minds of their supposed and self-appointed “spokesmen”.

Fifty years ago this month, October 1956, saw the outbreak of what in English is known as the Suez crisis, and which in Egypt and throughout the Arab world is referred to as the "tripartite aggression."

The war in Lebanon of July-August 2006 raised and continues to raise many questions. The attempt to answer them raises two almost irreconcilable forms of logic, each with its own ideological roots and outlook.

The war in Lebanon of July-August 2006 raised and continues to raise many questions. The attempt to answer them raises two almost irreconcilable forms of logic, each with its own ideological roots and outlook.

In so many parts of the Islamic world today, worsening tensions between Sunni and Shi'a have shown us graphically just how atomised those societies have become. As communities have grown ever more alienated from one another, so the meaning of the "other" in Arab and Islamic culture has expanded, as the Tunisian writer and Saleh Bechir put it.