“The Prophet Mohammed described the ummah, or the community, as a body where, if one part is hurt, the pain is felt throughout. For us today, the ummah is humanity.
The part of humanity now known as the Middle East is here represented by two hands whose arteries and veins run deep across the landscape: from the Nile to the Jordan River to the Tigris and the Euphrates.
The Middle East continues to suffer the effects of the crude pencil lines of the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, in which the landscape and its various people were divided into ‘A’ and ‘B.’ Whether the region’s people resist or submit to the dominance inherent in Sykes-Picot, it is an agreement whose scars stand even now, between them and self-fulfillment, between them and peace.
And as the…
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Foreign Policy (Digital) - 1 Issue, January - February 2015