Café La Vie, Ramallah. Chat, chink of glasses and beer bottles. Sweet apple smoke narghila and the tang of lemon and almond trees shading the café garden and the periphery of the adjacent refugee camp.

Most Muslims know, or should know, that Ibn Khaldun was one of the greatest of social theorists, who lived at a time in the fifteenth century when the Islamic civilisation was perceptibly in decline.

I have a confession to make. I did not want to write this article. Not on the Green Movement. Not on that elusive Iranian phenomenon that is as polarising a discussion topic now amongst Iranian communities as it was during its fiery inception.

What is there to say about Syria—on the human level—that hasn’t been said? The horror of the atrocities, the rising number of casualties, all of these can have a numbing effect.

Following the division of the country on 9 July 2011, the mood in the Sudanese capital Khartoum is one of dazed uncertainty.

Arab women play a crucial role in the revolutions sweeping the region, but most men are not supportive of them.

Anne Alexander reports from Tahrir Square.

One of the most gripping and revealing episodes of the popular Egyptian revolution that erupted on 25 January, 2011 was a scene in which a disoriented leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood explained to Al Jazeera news channel why he happened to be talking from a borrowed mobile phone outside a prison in the middle of the desert.

My plots against the Gaddafi regime have failed. But the people’s uprising is succeeding.