Muslim religious soft power rivalry, a battle for the soul of Islam, just got hotter.
The rivalry’s latest battlefield is not Mecca, Medina, Cairo, Tehran, or Istanbul. It’s Hindu nationalist Delhi.
That is because, for the next year, India chairs the Group of 20 largest economies in the world.

The Biden administration excels in scoring its own goals, nowhere more so than in the Middle East.

Missed in the hype of Chinese President Xi Jinping's recent visit to Saudi Arabia is that no part of the world lends itself more than the Middle East to put into practice the administration's vision of a world in which the United States and China simultaneously cooperate and compete.

Pomp and circumstance are important.

So are multiple agreements to be signed during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Saudi Arabia this week, his first venture beyond East and Central Asia in three years.

The visit allows Gulf states, with Saudi Arabia in the lead, to further diversify their foreign relationships and hedge their bets as the world moves from a unipolar to a bipolar, if not multipolar, order.

In addition, Mr. Xi’s visit boosts the positioning of Mr. Bin Salman and his kingdom as undisputed leaders of the Muslim world.

If the Qatar World Cup proved anything, it’s that sports and politics are inseparable Siamese twins joined at the hip.

Hungary didn't qualify for the Qatar World Cup, but that hasn't stopped Prime Minister Victor Orban from exploiting the world's current focus on soccer to signal his Putinesque definition of central European borders as defined by civilization and ethnicity rather than internationally recognized frontiers.

Protest on the soccer pitch has proven to be a mixed blessing for World Cup host Qatar, exposing double standards in the Gulf state’s position as well as that of its critics.

Barely out of the starting blocks, the Qatar World Cup has already produced a fair share of upsets as well as politically and personally sensitive situations and incidents.

As Indonesia passed the chairmanship of the Group of 20 (G-20) to India earlier this month, major Muslim and Hindu organisations, some backed by their governments, are battling to define the role of religion in global politics and whether the world's significant faiths need reform to harness the power of their convictions.

Recent Saudi efforts to appease the Biden administration in the wake of the kingdom’s backing of last month’s OPEC+ oil production cut take on added significance in the wake of this week’s US midterm elections that have strengthened Joe Biden and weakened former President Donald J. Trump.

The Qatar World Cup kicks off a week from now. It is the most controversial World Cup in the history of global soccer body FIFA and has been enveloped in controversy from the moment Qatar won its hosting rights in December 2010.
A four-part documentary, FIFA Uncovered, that has just premiered on Netflix, documents much of this and links the Qatar controversy to the broader issue of the soccer body’s corrupt culture.
It features fresh interviews with several former officials, among them some of the allegedly most corrupt sports officials of our age, saying they did nothing wrong. Several of these officials speak extensively in public for the first time.
Miles Coleman, the producer and writer of the documentary, is here to discuss all of this.