Iran: The Middle East’s Joker

... known that Islam does not approve of card games. It is believed card games lead to gambling and create terrible addictions that distract people from spiritual growth and improvement. However, the complex, confusing, and often dramatic events in the Middle East inevitably evoke associations with it being a card game, where the stakes are high and the deck is intricately shuffled. Andrey Kortunov: Russia in the MENA Region amid the Ukrainian Crisis Following this somewhat arbitrary analogy, the role ...