despite having a thriving gay prostitution scene, Damascus…

“But if Nasser's gift to the Egyptians was their sense of pride, Mubarak's curse is to have created a cultural climate where the only…

— John R. Bradley

“However, since the Syrian regime is even less transparent than the NGOs, we have no way of knowing that, either.”

— John R. Bradley

“After the attack, it was again the image of the country, rather than the well-being of those who had been caught up in the…

— John R. Bradley

“Because Islam is so tightly bound up with Acehnese exceptionalism, it has since the introduction of Islamic law become the territory’s version of political…

— John R. Bradley

“After all, there is in more stable, developed countries like the United States and Britain a quantifiably more vicious culture of child abuse. A…

— John R. Bradley

“After that fateful day of July 23, 1952, the "Paris Along the Nile," as Cairo was lovingly renamed by the foreigners who flocked to…

— John R. Bradley

“Mansour earned the nickname "Al-Turbiny," from the air-conditioned express trains linking Cairo with Egypt's second city Alexandria, whose roofs were the favored location for…

— John R. Bradley

“The situation is complicated, though, in a country like Tunisia, where sudden and dramatic change in favor of Western-style democracy at this juncture does…

— John R. Bradley

“Nothing gives your average bored Sunni bigot surfing the web more instant gratification than zooming in on sigeh to condemn the Shia as debauched…

— John R. Bradley

“The Arab Spring has been a dismal failure. All indications are that what comes next will be significantly worse than what existed before, in…

— John R. Bradley

“An investigative report by the BBC in July 2007 found that thousands of young Egyptian men try to enter Europe illegally every year. Sometimes…

— John R. Bradley

“A secularist but not an atheist, he used the example of the Prophet, who according to tradition did not fast in Ramadan during wartime,…

— John R. Bradley

“Malaysia, then, offers an example of what happens when socalled moderate Islamists are appeased by the liberal elite. They provide cover for their more…

— John R. Bradley

“Saudi Arabia’s media and schools spew constant anti-Semitic venom, but the Al-Saud regime loathes Tehran much more than Tel Aviv. In Egypt, for all…

— John R. Bradley

“George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) that the sex instinct, more than any other, must be repressed if ruling elites are to maintain…

— John R. Bradley