A crowd of Harvard affiliates filled Ticknor lounge Monday to hear performances celebrating Middle Eastern people and cultures following President Donald Trump’s executive order that suspended immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Read the story in the Harvard Crimson.

The Trump administration’s executive order banning refugees and immigrants from seven majority Muslim nations from entering the United States for at least several months has stirred a hornet’s nest of concern internationally, including at Harvard. Among other actions, Harvard President Drew Faust unveiled a plan for Harvard to appoint a full-time Muslim chaplain, with a search committee to be chaired by Harvard Divinity School Professor and Committee on Middle East Studies faculty member Ousmane Kane. Read more in the Harvard Gazette.

CMES AM candidate Amir H. Mahdavi, who is also a researcher at Brandeis University's Crown Center for Middle East Studies, writes in the Washington Post that, with the recent death of Iran's former president and leading moderate Hashemi Rafsanjani, many are concerned that current President Hassan Rouhani will be overpowered by the conservative religious establishment and a controlling Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But Mahdavi says that Rouhani may in fact emerge stronger from Rafsanjani's death.

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at Harvard University today opened its first overseas office, in Tunisia, home to a tradition of learning and research that extends from Antiquity to the present. The office and the year-round programs run from the location are made possible by the support of Harvard College alumnus Hazem Ben-Gacem ’92.... Read more about Center for Middle Eastern Studies Opens Field Office in Tunisia

Khaled Fahmy, Shawwaf Visiting Professor of Modern Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, has been named one of 2016's top 100 Thought Leaders in the Arabic-speaking world by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute (GDI), an independent think-tank in economics, society, and consumption. Since 2012, GDI has analyzed social networks to identify influential voices in the digital world. This marks the first year that GDI has analyzed the Arabic-speaking internet as well as the English-, German-, Spanish- and Chinese-speaking internet.

Kirkland House resident Nancy Ko, a joint concentrator in history and Near Eastern languages and civilizations, was one of four Harvard students named as 2016 Rhodes Scholars. Ko participated in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies' inaugural Winter Session study excursion to Turkey in January 2016.