Phoenician Karl Sharro Explains Yemen

Here.

That big mess — quer pasticccaccio bruto — in Yemen, explained by the Phoenician Karl Sharro, who left his native Lebanon long ago for London where, in his far-from-the-madding-Muslim-crowd refuge, he can make sense of the confusion in Muslim lands by offering confusion worse and funnily confounded. And it’s all true.

I don’t know who is running The Atlantic now, but this article, following that by Graeme Wood on ISIS that came out recently and, to go back more than a decade, a brilliant summary by Toby Lester on Christoph Luxenberg, John Wansborough, and the revolution in the Western study of the origins of the Qur’an, have made it a magazine whose editors and writers, on Islam,  are prepared better than those at any other American magazine of similar scope.