Read a Jan. 29, 2013, article from The Atlantic that compares sports fans to members of a religious congregation.

Read a July 31, 2012, article from The Wall Street Journal about the struggles Muslim women face while competing in the Olympics.

Tamara Cofman Wittes is a senior foreign policy fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. She is director of the institution’s Middle East Democracy and Development Project.

Shibley Telhami is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and an expert on politics in the Persian Gulf and in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. He is also the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland in College Park.

Read a Feb. 6, 2013, story published by BigThink.com that compares religion and the spectacle of sports.

Jean-Francois Seznec is a visiting associate professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He is an expert on democratization in the Persian Gulf region..

Read a Jan. 13, 2013, story published by Slate about a survey released by the Public Religion Research Institute that found 27 percent of Americans think that a higher power plays some role in deciding who will win sporting events.

Itamar Rabinovich is a visiting fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He is a former president of Tel Aviv University and an expert on politics in the Arab world.

Vali R. Nasr is director of the Roundtable Series on Global Islamic Politics at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is also an adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies. He is dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Relations at Johns Hopkins University and is an expert on Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, political Islam and […]