The Hoover Institution Press today released The Challenge of Dawa: Political Islam as Ideology and Movement and How to Counter It by Hoover research fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In this free downloadable report, Hirsi Ali argues that the American public urgently needs to be educated about both the ideology of political Islam, dawa, and the organizational infrastructure that Islamists use to inspire, indoctrinate, recruit, finance, and mobilize those Muslims whom they hope to win over to the extremist cause.

Dear Mr. Brin: Fifty years ago this week, when I was a 21-year-old college senior, I was in the Soviet Union, sent by the government of Israel to smuggle in Jewish religious items and smuggle out names of Jews who wanted to escape the Soviet Union and could then be issued a formal invitation to Israel.

A look at the 2019 Summer Policy Boot Camp.

His reading list focuses on how liberty is won, lost, and neglected. By Jonathan Rauch.

For years, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri criticized Iran’s supreme leader and argued that the country was not the Islamic democracy it claimed to be, but his words seemed to fall on deaf ears. . . .

Abbas Milani, a research fellow and codirector of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution and the Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, compares the upheaval in Egypt to the Iranian revolution of 31 years ago rather than to Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution that toppled Ben Ali less than 31 days ago. Milani explains that Iran and Egypt are very similar and that what happens in both places has shaped what happens in the Middle East for a hundred years. Milani notes that Egypt is the most important center of Sunni learning and that Iran is the most important center of Shia learning. The two countries, he says, have been very much in competition with each other for hegemony over the Islamic world.

Maybe democracy never had a chance in the Iranian presidential elections, but the people of Iran still do. By Abbas Milani.

Saudi Arabia has probably done more than any other actor to repress the hopes and demands of the early Arab Spring protests. It sent troops to neighbouring Bahrain in March 2011 to quell an uprising, gave asylum to Tunisia's ousted dictator Bin Ali, underwrote the coup in Egypt in 2013, and generally propped up the old regimes and monarchies across the region.