Ahmed Gatnash is co-founder and Executive Director of Kawaakibi Foundation. He is author of The Middle East Crisis Factory (Hurst, 2021).
The Arab Tyrant Manual - a news & analysis platform - launches on 12 February 2019. If you were on Twitter during the Arab Spring, you probably know how this started. The #ArabTyrantManual hashtag first appeared in March 2011, as our founder, Iyad El-Baghdadi, was watching Arab dictators react to... read more
Coming soon: Islam & Liberty - an online platform featuring articles, podcast, videos, and more. You may have noticed that I describe myself as an “Islamic libertarian” in my bio. I do that for two reasons: Because it’s accurate, and because I derive some kinda pleasure from watching people... read more
On 2nd October, our friend Jamal Khashoggi, a leading Saudi journalist and Washington Post contributor, went into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to get some routine paperwork done. He has not been seen since, and all signs point towards an assassination carried out inside the consulate on the orders of... read more
We’ve been very busy at Kawaakibi Foundation over the last few weeks, here’s a quick update on our ongoing projects. Firstly, we launched Iyad El-Baghdadi’s Ramadan blog series [https://islamandliberty.com/category/ramadanblog/] on Islam & Liberty. It’s available in both English [https://islamandliberty.com/category/... read more
We’ve had a chronic capacity problem at the Kawaakibi Foundation (and the writing team that preceded the foundation). Since late 2013, we’ve accumulated a large corpus of original content — including strategic reports, articles, and several half-finished manuscripts — that was never surfaced. Throughout 2014 and 2015, I was struggling... read more
The Arab world has been caught for decades between the horns of an oppressive dilemma: time and again, we have been forced to either support the ruling autocrats in return for safety and stability, or to side with violent Islamist radicals in order to throw off the tyrants’ yoke and... read more
