Editor's Note: Throughout the week, Ruchir Sharma will be posting thought-provoking questions with answers and explanations on CNN.com/GPS.  Be sure to check out his excellent new book Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles.

By Ruchir Sharma - Special to CNN

Question: There are 15 members in the club of trillion-dollar economies. What are the next two countries that will join the club?

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Editor's Note: Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a GPS contributor. You can find all his blog posts here. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Soner Cagaptay.

By Soner Cagaptay - Special to CNN

Could Turkey really go to war against Syria?  If it were to do so, Ankara would need to find a way to deal with the increasingly sectarian nature of the conflict in Syria and its potential ramifications inside Turkey.

The regime of Bashar al-Assad has enjoyed overwhelming support among Syria’s minority Alawite population. The country’s Sunni majority, on the other hand, is leading the anti-Assad rebellion.  Turkey’s push-back against al-Assad has drawn attention to a possible risk for Ankara: A sectarian Sunni-versus-Alawite conflict in Syria could potentially spill over into neighboring Turkey, causing tensions between Turkey’s Alevis and the government in Ankara.

This is especially surprising since the Alevis are not Alawite.  Despite semantically similar names - -both Alawites and Alevis derive their names from their reverence for Ali, a close relative of the Muslim prophet Mohammed - Alevis and Alawites represent different strains of Islam.  Alevis are not Alawites, just as Protestants are not protestors.

Furthermore, the Alawites are Arabs and the Alevis are Turks.  Even Alevi populations among the Kurds and Balkan Muslims pray in Turkish, testifying to the essentially Turkish nature of Alevism.  FULL POST

By Fareed Zakaria, CNN

Egypt is in the news these days because of the nomination of two new candidates for president - one from the Muslim Brotherhood, Khairat al-Shater, and the other from the more radical Salafi movement, Hazem Salah Abu Ismail.

Many Egypt watchers are understandably concerned. There have been attacks on Christians, Western aid workers and women. So where is Egypt headed? Is democracy in Egypt being captured by highly illiberal forces? Can tolerance and pluralism win out?

We should continue to monitor the situation very closely, but as of right now, we should not panic.  Al-Shater and Abu Ismail both insist that they are fully committed to democracy and to the rights of minorities.

Yes, they have very reactionary social views, but such views are allowed within democratic systems. There are plenty of parties in the West with arguably reactionary or illiberal views. Nevertheless, these parties run and, in some places, win elections. For example, ultra-right-wing, nationalist parties have won elections in countries across northern Europe. FULL POST

By Fareed Zakaria, CNN

As Egypt's election campaign gathers pace, we are seeing the rise of candidates from Islamic parties, one more radical than the next. Across the Arab world, the promise of a new birth of freedom has been followed by a much messier reality.

It raises the question in many people's minds: Why does it seem that democracy has such a hard time taking root in the Arab world?

As it happens, a Harvard economics professor, Eric Chaney, recently presented a rigorous paper that helps unravel that knot. Chaney asks why there is a "democracy deficit" in the Arab world and systematically tests various hypotheses against the data. He notes that such majority-Muslim nations as Turkey, Indonesia, Albania, Bangladesh and Malaysia have functioning democratic systems, so the mere presence of Islam or Islamic culture cannot be to blame. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a GPS contributor. You can find all his blog posts here. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Soner Cagaptay.

By Soner Cagaptay - Special to CNN

A new argument against intervention in Syria is that since the opposition consists of radical Islamist elements, the United States and other countries should shy away from supporting the rebellion against the Bashar al-Assad regime for fear that they might empower Islamists.

I recently visited Turkey, stopping in cities near the Syrian border such as Antakya and Gaziantep. During this trip, I talked to people who are in daily contact with Syrians, including professors at Zirve University in Gaziantep, an international school that has Syrian students, and American journalists who had just returned from Syria. I did not find any evidence that Islamists run the uprising, yet I left Turkey thinking that delayed intervention against the al-Assad regime could surely lead to building Islamist resentment towards al-Assad to the point of empowering radicals in Syria. FULL POST

Editor's Note: The following is an edited transcript of Ed Husain's remarks in the video below. Ed Husain is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Author of "The Islamist," he can be followed on Twitter via @Ed_Husain.

The protests sweeping Afghanistan in relation to the allegations of copies of the Quran being burned by NATO forces are protests that thus far have been contained within Afghanistan.  But unless this risk is managed, there is a real chance that these could spread beyond Afghanistan.

Now, the background to this is simple. The Bagram Air Base thought that in its detainee libraries there were excessive collections of what they called "extremist material." In an attempt to clear out that library they also included other literature and, as it happened, among this collection there were copies of the Quran. Those were burnt alongside other literature and copies of the burning were then somehow disseminated on the Afghan media and on the Internet.

Soon afterwards, the Taliban and others got involved in this whole incident and made it part of a wider narrative that America is here to humiliate Afghanis, Islam, and Muslims. They said that this incident was not just a standalone incident but last month American soldiers had urinated on the dead bodies of Taliban soldiers, that Americans earlier in February had killed eight Afghan soldiers, which was by all reports an accident but that was played out as part of a greater American conspiracy to humiliate Muslims, Afghanistan, and Islam. FULL POST

As 2011 was coming to a close, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a remarkable speech to his parliament. Assessing the Arab Spring barely a year after it had begun, Netanyahu announced triumphantly that it had failed, that events had confirmed his extreme suspicion about the pro-democracy movements in the region. The Arab Spring was moving the Middle East "not forward, but backward."

Netanyahu seems to endorse the Syrian regime's approach to political protest. During the uprising in Egypt, he wanted the U.S. to stubbornly cling to Hosni Mubarak–who had cooperated with Israel on mutual security issues–as millions of Egyptians gathered in public squares across the country to demand democracy. But leaving that aside, the evidence for Netanyahu's pessimism now is that parties advocating an Islamic approach to politics have won pluralities in Egypt's first post-Mubarak elections. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Barak Barfi is a research fellow at the New America Foundation.

By Barak Barfi - Special to CNN

Egyptians go to the polls this week for the country’s final round of voting, but the results are a foregone conclusion.  Islamists, who captured around 71% of the ballots cast in the first two phases of voting, have secured a majority in parliament.

The results have perplexed Western liberals, who are baffled at why voters have chosen parties advocating restricted freedoms.  But the Islamists' adherence to religious values only partially explains their allure.  The key to the Islamists’ success lies equally in their effective grass-roots campaigning, which gives voice to peoples' wide-spread grievances.   FULL POST

Editor's Note: Omar Ashour is Director of Middle East Graduate Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter (UK), and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center. For more from Ashour, visit Project Syndicate or follow it on Facebook and Twitter.

By Omar Ashour, Project Syndicate

“We want democracy, but one constrained by God’s laws. Ruling without God’s laws is infidelity,” Yasser Burhami, the second leading figure in the Salafi Call Society (SCS) and its most charismatic leader, recently said. The unexpected rise of the Salafis in Egypt’s parliamentary election has fueled concern that the most populous Sunni Arab country could be on its way to becoming a fundamentalist theocracy akin to Shia Iran.

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