Middle East File

Knox Thames is an international human rights lawyer, advocate, and author who has dedicated his career to promoting human rights, defending religious minorities, and combatting persecution. Over his 20 years of service in the U.S. government, Knox held several key positions advocating for freedom of religion or belief, including at the State Department and two different U.S. government foreign policy commissions. Knox has deep experience regarding South/Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and U.S. foreign policy relating to human rights. Serving in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, he has worked at the intersection of global affairs, religion, and human rights.

He is the author of Ending Persecution: Charting the Path to Global Religious Freedom (Notre Dame University Press, 2024).

The Middle East File podcast is a publication of the Religious Freedom Institute.

Samirah Majumdar is a research associate at the Pew Research Center, where she focuses on global restrictions on religion. She is an alumnus of Barnard College and Georgetown University and the author of multiple Pew Research Center reports, including the latest study: Globally, Government Restrictions on Religion Reached Peak Levels in 2021, While Social Hostilities Went Down.

The Middle East File podcast is a publication of the Religious Freedom Institute.

Lou Ann Sabatier is a consultant with decades of leadership experience in non-profit and corporate publishing, marketing and communications. She has worked with clients including World Vision/Save the Children, the International Monetary Fund, the OECD, the Federal Reserve Bank, National Geographic, the U.S. Marine Corps, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She also currently serves as Director of Communications for 21Wilberforce and in 2021 cofounded the FoRB Women's Alliance.

In this conversation, we discuss A Retrospective: 25th Anniversary of the International Religious Freedom Act. The retrospective looks back on the stories, people, successes, and challenges of the past 25 years, considering not only the legislation and policy, but the broader IRF movement in the United States and around the world.

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The Middle East File podcast is a publication of the Religious Freedom Institute's Middle East Action Team.

Fadi Hachem is a human rights lawyer and researcher specializing in Gender and Cultural Rights. He has worked as a consultant and advisor with a number of local and international organizations, including ALEF - Act for Human Rights, the International Commission for Missing Persons, ACTED, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, UNICEF, and Pax for Peace.

Fadi served as the editor and coordinator of this research report, as part of Search for Common Ground's project on FoRB Roundtables in Lebanon. The National Report on Freedom of Religion and Belief was produced by the National Working Group on FoRB in Lebanon and includes contributions from more than 18 organizations and individuals covering a wide range of topics.

The Middle East File podcast is a publication of the Religious Freedom Institute's Middle East Action Team. For more of their work, including recent articles, publications, and events, sign-up for the Middle East File email.

Farahnaz Ispahani is a Senior Fellow at the Religious Freedom Institute and joins to discuss her new book: Politics of Hate: Religious Majoritarianism in South Asia (Harper Collins, 2023). 

South Asia-home to almost 2 billion people representing every major and minor religious belief-has also witnessed religious extremism, often supported by the state apparatus.

In Politics of Hate, noted scholars-experts on the subject and the region discuss their research on the role of the media and political leaders in deploying hatred for political advantage, covering developments in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In an era of media incitement, orchestrated attacks on mosques, churches, and temples, and identity politics, this book serves as a timely study of the phenomenon of politically motivated religious and ethnic division. 

Farahnaz Ispahani has been a leading voice for women and religious minorities in Pakistan for the past twenty-five years, first as a journalist, then as a member of Pakistan's National Assembly, and most recently as a scholar based in the United States. As a Senior Fellow at the Religious Freedom Institute and advisor and consultant to numerous other initiatives, she works at the intersection of human rights, freedom of religion or belief, and the US policy world. She is on Twitter: @FIspahani

David H. Warren, lecturer in the Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies department at Washington University in St. Louis, joins to discuss a new report: Tolerance, Religious Freedom, and Authoritarianism (USCIRF, 2022). 

This report details how authoritarian states promote religious tolerance without necessarily ensuring freedom of religion or belief. It distinguishes between these two concepts and explains the origins of religious tolerance promotion as a tool of statecraft. The report then presents case studies of countries engaged in religious tolerance promotion, such as Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Qatar, Russia, and Uzbekistan.

David H. Warren is a scholar of contemporary Islam, politics, and media in the Middle East, with a particular focus on the understudied Arab Gulf states and Islamic soft power. His first book, Rivals in the Gulf: Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and the Qatar-UAE Contest Over the Arab Spring and the Gulf Crisis (Routledge 2021) investigated the political interventions of two of the most prominent figures among the Muslim scholarly-elite (the ulama) and their relationships with the Qatari and Emirati ruling families. The project included fieldwork in Doha and Abu Dhabi and qualitative analyses of media platforms ranging from satellite TV interviews, to YouTube sermons, to Twitter feeds.

The Middle East File podcast is a publication of the Religious Freedom Institute's Middle East Action Team. For more of their work, including recent articles, publications, and events, sign-up for the Middle East File email.

Geneive Abdo is a Fellow in the Middle East Program of the Wilson Center and joins to discuss a new report: Charting a Nationalist and Secular Iraqi State: The Road Ahead (EPIC / Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2022). 

Young people are changing Iraq. But what kind of state do they want? The report covers the results of a national survey conducted by EPIC of 1,062 eligible Iraqi voters ages 18 – 40 on their views toward religion and a secular state.

Geneive Abdo is a visiting fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington and a consultant at the World Bank. She was most recently a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center. Her current research focuses on the shifting political and religious alliances within Shia communities in the Middle East. She has worked at several Washington-based think tanks, including the Atlantic Council and the Stimson Center. She was a non-resident scholar at the Brookings Institution from 2013-17. She was also a lecturer at the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University from 2016-19.

Among her vast publications, including monographs and works in scholarly journals, Abdo is the author of four books on the Middle East, including The New Sectarianism: The Arab Uprisings and the Rebirth of the Shi’a-Sunni Divide (Oxford University Press, 2016). Her other books, also published by Oxford, include a groundbreaking study of the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt.

The Middle East File podcast is a publication of the Religious Freedom Institute's Middle East Action Team. For more of their work, including recent articles, publications, and events, sign-up for the Middle East File email.