Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he is an expert in the Foreign Policy research program and the Center for Middle East Policy. He is also an assistant research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary. Hamid is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and co-founder and editor of Wisdom of Crowds, which includes a newsletter and podcast. The author of several books, including Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World and Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East, his latest is The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea. Hamid was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine in 2019.
Previously
We don’t always know how to express it, but many of us feel it: There’s something wrong with America today. The mood is tense. More Americans say they won’t have children beca...
Across the globe, free and fair elections have given rise to autocratic regimes. Have we underestimated the fragility of democracy and overestimated its value? (Book signing w...
From 9/11 to the Iraq War, from the American bond with Israel to its alliances with friendly Arab autocrats, the U.S. relationship with the Middle East is complex, to say the...
Despite some frontline successes and territorial reclamations, the destruction of organizational assets, and the death of thousands of militants, the Islamic State’s ideology...
Is Islam, in fact, "exceptional" in how it relates to politics? Shadi Hamid argues for a new understanding of how Islam and Islamism shape politics by examining different mode...