Their budgets don’t add up anymore. Algeria needs the price of Brent crude, an international benchmark for oil, to rise to $157 dollars a barrel. Oman needs it to hit $87. No Arab oil producer, save tiny Qatar, can balance its books at the current price, around $40 (see chart). So some are taking drastic steps. In May the Algerian government said it would slice spending in half. The new prime minister of Iraq, one of the world’s largest oil producers, wants to take an axe to government salaries. Oman is st

When Muhammad bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, visited New York earlier this year, the face of Ahmed Mater, the kingdom’s most celebrated artist, was beamed onto an enormous billboard in Times Square. In recent years, he has been feted at exhibitions in London, New York and Venice. He dominates the Saudi art scene so thoroughly that his peers struggle for attention. “He’s the only artist anyone writes about,” says one Saudi curator. In 2017 Mater was appointed as artistic director of the

I was paying my bill at the hotel when they came. There were seven of them, stiff and formal in plain-clothes. “Mr Pelham?” asked the shortest one and presented me with a hand-written document in Farsi. “It’s been signed by a judge,” he said. “It entitles us to detain you for 48 hours.” He paused to allow the information to register on my face. “It might be less,” he added. “We just need you to answer a few questions.” He gave me a choice. Either I could be questioned in the hotel or in their c

Every Friday lunchtime, Washington’s Church of the Epiphany near the White House turns into a mosque. Hundreds of Muslims prostrate themselves in the direction of Mecca on carpets spread on the ground (pictured). The congregation includes Homeland Security and fbi agents, State Department bureaucrats and a posse of lawyers from the Department of Justice. The imam is a Treasury official. His sermons steer clear of politics. America’s Muslims have come a long way since some of their ancestors arrived as slaves from West Africa in the 16th century. From the late 19th century to the 1920s a wave of well-off Arabs came to study and stayed on, entering the ranks of America’s middle class. In a nation of immigrants, Muslims found it easier to fit in than in Europe with its more settled population.

THE Al Sauds once again hold court in Diriya, their ancestral capital that was laid waste by the Ottoman empire and is being lovingly restored as a national tourist attraction. This is where the Al Sauds forged their alliance in the 18th century with a Muslim revivalist preacher, Muhammad Ibn Abdel-Wahhab—a pact that to this day fuses the modern Saudi state with the puritanism of Wahhabi Islam. And this is where Muhammad bin Salman (pictured), the 30-year-old deputy crown prince who is the power

It began two years ago with a few snips to a Damas bush. Before the week was out, Omar Slameh, who heads a provincial department of environmental management in eastern Yemen, had his 24 municipal gardeners clipping shrubs into pyramids, globes and hearts. Soon they were decorating ancient thoroughfares with six-foot-high teapots, incense burners and doves. By the year’s end they could produce entire Quranic verses in living greenery. Such feats of topiary would have dazzled any city. That they

Sunnis have been pushed out by the war. The new Syria is smaller, in ruins and more sectarian A NEW Syria is emerging from the rubble of war. In Homs, which Syrians once dubbed the “capital of the revolution” against President Bashar al-Assad, the Muslim quarter and commercial district still lie in ruins, but the Christian quarter is reviving. Churches have been lavishly restored; a large crucifix hangs over the main street. “Groom of Heaven”, proclaims a billboard featuring a photo of a Christ

Coverage of violence and Islam often go hand in hand. So it comes as a relief to be reminded that historically, culturally and intellectually, Islam is less a nihilistic creed than a global civilisation. A new book by Chase Robinson, which includes 30 pen-portraits of significant figures in Islamic history, is an elegant digest of the many colourful, creative and technologically innovative manifestations that the Prophet Muhammad inspired from his seventh-century oases in the Arabian peninsula.

It is perhaps a measure of how close Libya is to breaking apart that two years after ousting one dictator, many Libyans are craving another. Rapacious brigades of armed volunteers, who are based in Misrata and Benghazi in the east, and the creaking military inherited from the old regime, which is based in the capital city of Tripoli and the west, are hurtling toward a new civil war, and the country’s ineffectual authorities seem unable to stop them. Local militias have captured the oil fields an

Like many students of the Middle East, I am still haunted by Edward Said 41 years after he wrote “Orientalism”. The seminal book argued that Western academics, writers, artists and journalists had been agents of European soft power for over two centuries, constructing an image of the East that was exotic and therefore in need of taming. Orientalists’ art, literature, maps and artefacts reinforced the superior mindset of colonialists and whetted the appetite of Western governments to invade and p

His plans to turn the private sector into the driver of the kingdom’s post-oil economy are in disarray. He might court headline investment from Amazon and Apple, but moneyed Saudis who should be first on board prefer to squirrel their savings away. According to the International Monetary Fund, the Saudi economy dropped into recession more sharply than predicted in the last quarter. The gross domestic product dipped 0.7 percent in 2017, substantially down on pre-purge predictions of growth of 0.

“We’re ridding the world of polytheism, and spreading monotheism across the planet,” an ISIS preacher recently said in a video recording. Behind him one could see the ISIS faithful using sledgehammers, bulldozers, and explosives to destroy the eighth-century-BC citadel of the Assyrian king Sargon II at Khorsabad, ten miles northwest of Mosul in northern Iraq, and the colossal statues of human-headed winged bulls that had guarded it. Amir al-Jumaili, an antiquities professor at Mosul University,