A couple of days ago, a dear friend of mine sent me a video recording of a speech by Abdelfattah Mourou, the Tunisian lawyer, politician, co-founder of Ennahdha (Islamist) Party and first vice president of the assembly of representatives. I find Mourou very interesting

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) who wrote that human life outside society would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”, had clearly never driven between Amman and Mafraq.

Muawiyah Ibn Abi Sufian, founder of the Umayyad Dynasty, is credited with many achievements, but he is least known for his greatest accomplishment: He shaped Arab government and political communication for centuries to follow.His description of himself being connected to the peop

In 1992, I was embarrassed to learn that the total number of books published in all Arab countries that year was equal to the number of books published in Britain in 1870.

In 1879, Gilbert and Sullivan achieved international success with their comic opera The Pirates of Penzance, in which major general Stanley introduces himself in a song that is still popular today.

In 1989, as I celebrated with my German friends the reunification of their country, we all ignored the cautionary note that German society may be divided by more than the Berlin Wall.

There is an apocryphal story about an exchange between the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and his contemporary US president Jimmy Carter. Finding himself in dire economic straits, Sadat telegrammed: “Situation desperate.

During the past few weeks, much was written about Prime Minister Omar Razzaz, especially his habit of turning up unexpectedly at places such as Al Bashir Hospital or the Abdali bus terminus, which prime ministers usually disregard completely, assuming they are aware that these pl

Last Friday, hundreds of thousands of Jordanian youth were glued to their computer screens to check their Tawjihi, Jordan’s school leaving exam, results.