As the Muslim world welcomes Ramadan 2011, set to start early next week, we wait with baited breath to see if the world will witness a time of peace and thanksgiving in the Middle East or an escalation in the unrest, and even violence, that has been characteristic of the last 6 months. Traditionally, this Holy Month is marked by charity and blessings (maybe even excess) among family and friends. It is the time of the year when Muslim cities are aglow. Markets are awash with shoppers, families and friends ...

How has Egypt 'changed' since the conditions were ripe for a revolution nearly 60 years ago? The First Ouster: of that first unwanted Pharoah, King Farouk. Egypt's monarchy, by the time of this revolution, had started to stand for corruption scandals and decadent living, with a growing gap between the rich landowners (including the King) and the general masses. Led by Gamal Abdel Nasser the second President of Egypt from 1956, along with Muhammad Naguib, the first president, this Revolution of July 1952 overthrew the monarchy of Egypt and Sudan ...

Arab entertainment in and out of the Arab world. See what the stars are up to, from their latest releases to their sizzling summer concerts in Europe and at home.

These are the poster children and heroes of the Arab revolutions. Some are just that- children, kids who have been raised as human faces of an otherwise anonymous maelstrom of anonymous popular demonstrations. Without these citizen faces, the revolutions would be marked mostly by the faces of much reviled leaders. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, Hosni Mubarak, Ali Abdullah Salif, Bashar al-Assad. Find out which faces stayed with you or haunted you. Some dead, some alive and continuing their daring feats of activism, the poster kids - boys, girls, women, men- of ...

The ghosts of Hama have come back to haunt the Assad regime. Today we find Hama once again a flash point for Syrian repression. Thirty years after its residents were massacred in one of the worst atrocities committed by an Arab regime against its own people, we look back at patterns between father and son, to glean what has changed since Hama's first 'incident' in 1982 from which a whole city has not really had closure nor healed. This time the population of Hamam who finally entered into the slow-starting ...

For a while it seemed afloat but only momentarily before this fleet floundered, most notably at the port of Greece. Here it underwent what was considered a form of sabotage akin to that afflicted by Israel last time round (see our photo-gallery flotilla review) but this time in the form of Greece's over-zealous and probably illegal paperwork and security check facade- saving Israel the trouble of later intercepting this fleet of activists or as it termed them 'provocateurs' which may have resulted in more than just a beareaucratic injury to ...

Check out our panel of Lebanon's best "babe" of 2011.

It's official, South Sudan is now a new country. The African region can celebrate this new arrival and new leader, Salva Kiirat, at a time of departures and collapse in the Mid-East.

Souad Muhammad Kamal Hosni Al Baba was born on the 26th of January, 1942 in Ataba, Cairo, Egypt, the 10th sister of 17 siblings. Hosni was one of the most influential and adored actresses in the Middle East and consequently, was given the name the "Cinderella" of the Egyptian and Arab cinema. At the end of the 1950s, she reached her stardom and became one of the most legendary actresses in the Arab world. Suad has taken the leading parts in more than 83 films in the period from 1959 ...

The Salafis are a very broad, amorphous grouping of Muslims who believe that the only way to salvation is to follow, strictly and fully, the way of life of the earliest Muslims (whom they revere as the "Salaf us Saleh", or "Righteous Predecessors", the 'Puritans' of the Muslim collective, if you like). Although they would like to present themselves to other Muslims as belonging to a timeless tradition, Salafism in fact can be traced to around the time of the collapse of the Crusader states, when a Damascene Islamist preacher ...