Islamic fundamentalism

Only an Apocalypse Can Save Us Now

By Mark Lilla,

Not long after setting out on his first adventures, Don Quixote is invited to share a frugal meal with a group of goatherds. A little meat stew, plenty of wine.…

A Special Relationship

By Andrew Cockburn,

One morning early in 1988, Ed McWilliams, a foreign-service officer posted to the American Embassy in Kabul, heard the thump of a massive explosion from somewhere on the other side…

The Ultimate Terrorist Factory

By Scott Sayare,

In 1995, Kamel Daoudi, a twenty-one-year-old engineering student from the suburbs of Paris, moved out of his parents’ apartment. He had fought with his father, an Algerian immigrant obsessed with…

Modest Proposals

By Asma Ghribi,

From a list of rules the Islamic State has imposed within territories it has claimed since 2013. Translated from the Arabic by Asma Ghribi. Read More

The Joke

By Justin Smith,

By Justin E. H. Smith, from “The Fundamentals of Gelastics,” a work in progress. Smith’s latest book, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference (Princeton), will be published in June. In…

Guns and Poses

By Sarah A. Topol,

From the air, Ubari looked exactly like the pitiful Saharan frontier town it is. Squat, unpainted cement buildings jutted from the southern reaches of the Libyan desert like a child’s…

The Pious Spy

By Mujib Mashal,

It is sunrise on a Saturday morning in spring, and the peaks of the Hindu Kush are gleaming from a recent hailstorm. A bearded man in an Afghan National Army…

How Timbuktu Saved Its Books

By Tristan McConnell, on February 4, 2013

Behind the rescue of Mali’s historic manuscripts Read More

This is not an Islamic revolution

By Olivier Roy, Translated by Jonathan Derbyshire

Tough Luqman

From an October 27 federal criminal complaint against Luqman Ameen Abdullah and ten other alleged members of Ummah, a radical Islamic separatist group based in Detroit. On October 28, after…

The War We Can’t Win

By Andrew J. Bacevich,

By Andrew J. Bacevich, in the August 15 issue of Commonweal. Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University and the author, most recently, of The Limits of…

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