In Lebanon, the question of who possesses weapons is never merely a security issue. It is also a question of who governs, who protects the country, and who has the authority to decide between war and peace. This is why the approaching end of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, commonly known as UNIFIL, is generating an unusually sensitive debate. The issue is...
Religious communities rarely survive major political ruptures unchanged. They endure by carrying an old moral world into new institutions. The Süleymancılar are among the clearest examples of this process in modern Turkey. They emerged from the Naqshbandi tradition, but they cannot be understood simply as another Sufi order gathered around a sheik and a lodge. Their distinctive achievement was to make religious education the...
