In The News

Matein Khalid November 11, 2005
France has a long relationship with the Arab and Muslim worlds—a relationship that has often been marked by hostility and bloodshed. It would be a mistake, however, to see the current French rioting as an outgrowth of conflict between France and Islam. Matein Khalid writes that France's French-Arab minorities care about their own economic opportunity and social equality, rather than any...
Timothy Garton Ash November 10, 2005
With urban insurrection raging from Normandy in the north to Marseille in the south, it is now impossible for the French to dismiss the country’s enormous demographic faultlines with appeals to republican greatness and unity. The riots revealed that France, the European country with the largest proportion of men and women of immigrant descent, faces a tremendous social and cultural crisis. In a...
Barbara Supp November 9, 2005
Once the rarefied realm of connoisseurs, the wine industry now must bend to the forces of the market and not the tastes of the palate. Europe, the birthplace of wine, can no longer rely on its continental sophistication and experience to control the wine market. Experts estimate that 2005 will be the first year in which wine imports into Europe will outnumber wine exports. Fearing the loss of...
Asra Q. Nomani November 7, 2005
To conservative Muslims, Islamic feminism is an insult to Islam. To a growing group of moderates, however, it’s a return to fundamental Islamic theology, a reaffirmation of rights granted to women at the foundation of Islam but stripped by “manmade rules and tribal traditions masquerading as divine law”. Asra Q. Nomani, an American activist, was among twelve women to lead a conference on...
Niall Ferguson November 7, 2005
Both Britain and France have endured violence at the hands of their Muslim minorities in recent months: Britain in the July 7 London Underground attacks; France in the wave of nationwide rioting that has now gone on for more than a week. They need not endure such violence in the future. Their problem is not so much an excess of immigration as it is a lack of assimilation: the Muslim youths...
Barbara Demick November 2, 2005
The South Korean film industry is taking on Hollywood in a heated conflict over the number of foreign films that can be shown every year in South Korea. Filmmakers in South Korea are up in arms in response to what they consider inappropriate pressure to open the South Korean market to Hollywood productions. The issue centers on a government quota that requires South Korean films to be shown in...
Tom Heneghan (Reuters) November 2, 2005
The Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, wracked by days of clashes between Muslim immigrants and police, is far from unique. One of many such suburbs created by an influx of Arab and African immigrants in the 1960s and 1970s, the town suffers from the same social tensions simmering beneath the surface across France. France's Muslim immigrants live in low-income, high-crime slums from which...