Saturday, December 29, 2012 at 7:11 | Scott Lucas in EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran 
All such accomplishments of the ruling AKP have recently been overshadowed — not by the “hidden Islamist agenda” that the secularists feared, but a more mundane problem: lust for power, especially Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s personal lust for power.
Saturday, September 15, 2012 at 12:57 | Scott Lucas in Africa, EA Global, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran 
Peaceful protest in Istanbul over the US film "The Innocence of Muslims"
Opinion leaders throughout the Muslim world need to establish principles as to how to counter the insulting of Islam in civilized ways. They can, for example, focus on the Quranic verse that says that when they face people who mock Islam, Muslims should only “not sit with them”....In light of that verse, modern-day Muslims can counter Islamophobia not by violence or censorship, but with arguments and boycotts.
After all, no matter what we do, we Muslims cannot control what other people will say about Islam. We can only control the way we react to them.
Friday, March 23, 2012 at 8:42 | Scott Lucas in EA Iran, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran 
Turkish President Erdogan & Supreme LeaderThe Arab Spring has heightened the ideological tension between Ankara and Tehran, and Turkey's model seems to be winning. Last spring, Iran often claimed that the Arab revolutions were akin to the Iranian one decades before and would usher in similar governments. Yet in Tunisia and Egypt, for the first time, leading figures in mainstream Islamist parties have won elections by explicitly appealing to the "the Turkish model" rather than to an Iranian-style theocracy. What's more, in December 2011, the Palestinian movement Hamas salted the wound when a spokesman announced the organization's shift toward "a policy of nonviolent resistance", which reflected its decision to distance itself from Syria and Iran and to move closer to Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar.
