Middle East Journal, The

Afghanistan-Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History

Afghanistan after all straddles three influential regions (the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, and Iran); has seen multiple invaders through the years; was caught in the "Great Game" of British India and Russia, the Cold War, and civil war in the 1990s; and has since then sanctioned terrorism and insurgency. Historically, successful models of governance in Afghanistan were those where the central authorities were satisfied with directly controlling the urban areas, while having a limited ...

Arab Gulf States-the Arab Gulf States: Beyond Oil and Islam

While not disputing the undeniably important role played by oil rents, Foley suggests that the telecommunications revolution and a series of other reThosealities of the "modern" era have created new forms of politics and governance and spawned in parallel a more enlightened leadership from the familial elites. Foley points to the political evolution in places like Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar as evidence of halting steps towards more representative governments in the region that bear no relati...

Arab-Israeli Conflict-Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948

Clan, village, and urban leaders were called upon to make life-changing decisions when faced with opportunities to sell lands to Zionists, to provide information to Shai (Hagana intelligence) operatives or to ally themselves with their Jewish neighbors when faced with security threats from nationalist or rebel fighters. Cohen, like other researchers before him (this reviewer included), makes it clear that many of the recorded expressions of Palestinians' friendliness towards the Zionists wer...

Chronology-Afghanistan/Algeria/Bahrain/Egypt/Iran/Iraq/Israel/Jordan/Kuwait/Lebanon/Libya/Mauritania/Morocco/Oman/Pakistan/Qatar/Saudi Arabia/Sudan/Syria/Tunisia/Turkey/United Arab Emirates/Yemen

Following an offensive, which included NATO air strikes, launched by Afghan and international forces over four days, 29 Taliban militants were confirmed dead in Baghlan province. [Al-Arabiya, 6/14] June 23: US President Barack Obama dismissed commander of multinational forces in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal after he made critical comments about senior administration officials that appeared in a profile in Rolling Stone magazine. Tribesmen in eastern Yemen blew up an oil pipeline t...

Chronology-Arab-Israeli Conflict

Palestinian President Mahmud 'Abbas urged US President Barack Obama to "impose" a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and rejected Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's suggestion of a Palestinian state with temporary borders, which Palestinian leaders feared would become permanent. According to the IDF, the two men attacked soldiers at a checkpoint. Naval commandos killed nine people, some of them Turks, during the raid, prompting Turkey to recall its ambassador to Israel and canc...

Chronology-Central Asia and the Caucasus

According to WHO spokeswoman Sona Bari, 128 cases of acute flaccid paralysis, often a key indicator of polio, were discovered across Tajikistan. Garegin joined Armenian Shi'a leader Shaykh ul-Islam Allahshukur Pashazade and Russian Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Kirill in issuing a joint declaration of support for the efforts of the Armenian and Azerbaijani governments toward ending the conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Government officials said that the law was intended...

Chronology-Palestinian Affairs

Palestinian President Mahmud 'Abbas banned goods made by Israeli residents of West Bank settlements, institutionalizing the grassroots campaign against such products.

Editor's Note

Rami Siklawi offers us a description of "The Dynamics of Palestinian Political Endurance in Lebanon," concentrating on developments before and during the civil war in that country.

Egypt-the Challenge of Political Islam: Non-Muslims and the Egyptian State

Political Islam has been subject to various theoretical insights and studied in numerous contexts. [...] the last few years, the role of religious minorities in the politics of the region was relatively underemphasized. [...] her analysis begins with a certain assumption that Islamists set the agenda for discourse in Egyptian politics and that other currents are either derivative or less likely to appeal to a wide audience.

Egypt-the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt's Succession Crisis: The Politics of Liberalisation and Reform in the Middle East

[...] the reader rarely glimpses the illuminating insights Zahid may have to share. [...] most surprising given the book's title, Zahid cites no interviews with government officials, ruling party elites, or Muslim Brotherhood members.

Exploring and Photographing the Empty Quarter

Four hundred feet in the air, George Steinmetz continues to photograph Shibam, unaware of the effect his sudden appearance has down below; perched in the seat of his custom-built paraglider, aptly described as a "flying lawn chair," Steinmetz focuses on capturing this region of the Wadi Hadramaut from just the right angle, light, and velocity. Two aerial shots of Shibam transform the rectangular rooftops of these narrow, tapering towers into an irregular mosaic of beige and white tiles that ...

Iran-After Khomeini: Iran Under His Successors

Ultimately, the competition among political institutions may have generated less centrifugal force than the massive social changes that Iran has undergone since Khomeini's death, which Arjomand discusses briefly, such as the mushrooming of the educational system, the increasing assertiveness of the Iranian women's movement, and the urbanization that has switched the country from two-thirds rural to two-thirds urban in a single generation. [...] far, these social transformations have had litt...

Iran-Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty/Democracy in Modern Iran: Islam, Culture, and Political Change

In the first instance, the authors identify both the heavy-handed developmentalist ideology of Reza Shah and his son, forever placing "order and progress" before any decentralization of power, and also the impact of Left thought on the Islamic and secular opposition to the Pahlavi monarchy, as sidetracking the intellectual milieu of two generations of Iranians away from democratic principles. [...] my favorite, the language, dress, and mannerisms of the IRI elite (including the current presi...

Iraq-the Kurdish Quasi-State: Development and Dependency in Post-Gulf War Iraq

"Whereas the Iraqi economy benefited from the dynamic changes that pushed development ... , allowing it to acquire foreign capital and penetrate world markets with petroleum resources, the Kurdistan Region remained disconnected from world markets and politics" (p. 28). The author contends that "even with the commitment to capacity building after 2003, donor organizations, international law, and regional politics continued to emphasize the territorial integrity of Iraq, and not the self-suffi...

Israel-the Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa

1Reportedly, senior defense officials from South Africa and Israel met in late March-early April 1975, during which time the Israelis offered to sell nuclear warheads to the Apartheid regime; while the South Africans refused the deal due in part to high costs, Israeli officials tried to prevent South Africa from declassifying the archive, one which included a security and secrecy agreement signed by then-Israeli Defense Minister and current President Shimon Peres and his South African counter...

Jordan-Hussein and Abdullah: Inside the Jordanian Royal Family

According to Habib, King Hussein had previously offered the crown to his brother on the condition that he appoint King Hussein's son, Prince Hamza (then 19) as the new crown prince. According to Habib, Hassan flatly refused stating, "When I am king, I will appoint my crown prince."

Law-Genocide in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire, Iraq, and Sudan

[...] the first quarter of the book addresses the development of the law of armed conflict, theoretical approaches to genocide, the history of colonialism and its genocidal effects in North and South America, Asia, Africa, Oceana, and even Ireland, and a short history of the early Arab and Turkish conquests in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. [...] the book seeks to present a comprehensive study of genocide that deals in particular, but not exclusive, detail with the three regions in its t...

Lebanon-War and Memory in Lebanon

[...] the book does not mention that some Lebanese factions invited these external forces (both state and non-state) to intervene in the conflict, leading to its "internationalization," and that the claim regarding a "war of others" in Lebanon is, hence, an attempt to silence this role. [...] contrary to the book's claim (p. 57), the Lebanese Parliament was actually quite active during the war: its members met and elected five (!) presidents, debated and approved important laws, and ratified...

Modern History and Politics-Citizenship in the Arab World: Kin, Religion and Nation-State

Gianluca Parolin, an assistant professor of Comparative Law at the American University in Cairo, analyzes in extensive detail three levels of interpretations of membership in Arab societies - the kin group which originated in pre-Islamic Arabia and flourishes as a basic framework of society today, the religious community [al-umma al-islamiyya] which seeks to override kin loyalties with holis- tic communal identity under Islam, and the more recent sense of the nation-state (al-jinsiyya) which ...

Modern History and Politics-Khatami and Gorbachev: Politics of Change in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Ussr

Some might argue that instead of resembling Gorbachev, Khatami is far more similar to Imre Nagy of Hungary in 1956 or Alexander Dubcek of Czechoslovakia in 1968 - both prime ministers (i.e., heads of republican institutions) who lost control of reform efforts aimed at and opposed by communist party chieftains (i.e., heads of revolutionary institutions) both in their own countries and the USSR. Khatami certainly did not have as goals the elections of a hard-line president as his successor, th...

Modern History and Politics-the Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914

In the past decade a number of important studies on intellectual life in the late Ottoman Empire have appeared.1This work by Ilham Khuri-Makdisi adds to that ongoing review of the parameters of modernity as understood by people living in the Ottoman Empire, or the former Ottoman Empire in the case of Egypt which provides the focus of much of this work. [...] scholars have concentrated on two dominant intellectual paradigms that were circulating in the empire: nationalism and the Salafiyya, o...

Modern History and Politics-Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons From the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War

Index to p. 238. $27.95. Since the 9/11 attacks, there have been a plethora of studies and official reports dedicated to the topic of intelligence reform.

Pre-20th Century History-a Social History of Ottoman Istanbul

[...] the authors often collapse events from very disparate periods into general statements; although they carefully word these passages, less knowledgeable readers may receive the impression that Istanbul remained unchanged from 1453 to circa 1800. [...] including a greater number of secondary sources in the footnotes and bibliography would have been useful for readers wishing to use this book as springboard for further research.

Recent Publications

Written in an accessible question-and-answer format, Ending the US War in Afghanistan addresses the human and economic costs of the war, the history of US-Taliban relations, the military and diplomatic roles of NATO and the UN, and, perhaps most importantly, policy choices which would prevent future Afghanistan-style quagmires. Arguing that Iran's hostility with the United States remains the major causal factor for its proliferation activities, Khan explains that states' decisions to acquire...

Saudi Arabia-Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism Since 1979

[...] when dissidents were tortured, this further radicalized survivors as the actions and reactions swirled into a pattern. [...] one of the main reasons why QAP and Saudi jihadists failed was probably due to their minuscule numbers (around 1,000), which is hardly sufficient to mobilize and lead Arabia.

Saudi Arabia-Oil and the State in Saudi Arabia

The corruption centers on "rent-seeking," which refers to income derived from exports of government-owned natural resources such as oil. [...] the focus of government domestic economic policy is how to trickle down oil revenues to its citizens, while the focus of the citizens is how to obtain as much financially as possible from the nation's natural recourses.

The Ayatollah's Praetorians: The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the 2009 Election Crisis

One of the central questions of the 2009 Iranian Presidential Election crisis has been the role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). This article argues that what we are witnessing goes beyond the institution of the IRGC to the unmasking of a new faction in Iranian politics, which has been overtly (through elections) and covertly (through penetration of state institutions and the economy) transforming power in the Islamic Republic of Iran since at least 2003.

The Druze in Israel: Questions of Identity, Citizenship, and Patriotism

The Druze of Israel constitute a very unique community within the pluralistic, though Jewish-dominated, social map of the country. Their religious heritage and ethnic integrity set them apart, even while they have participated in the political and military domains in close affiliation with the Jewish population. Through research and analysis, a picture emerges of Druze solidarity with the Zionist ethos, as they simultaneously distance themselves from the Arab and Islamic themes resonant among...

The Dynamics of Palestinian Political Endurance in Lebanon

This article addresses the issue of the Palestinian presence in Lebanon, examining the position of the Palestinians before, during, and after the last Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), and assessing their future prospects in the country. The lessons and the aspects from this period are assessed with the goal of analyzing what is happening today. The wider significance of the Palestinian refugee situation within Lebanon is also given consideration.

The Rise of Iran: How Durable, How Dangerous?

Iran is viewed by many as a rising power that poses an increasing threat to regional and even global security. This view is wrong for three reasons. Iran's hard and soft power is exaggerated by most accounts; it is too limited to allow the Iranians to dominate the Persian Gulf let alone the Middle East, and its brand of Shi'ism has very limited appeal outside of Iran. Second, growing internal political and economic instability will seriously limit Iran's bid for regional dominance. Third, the...