Middle East Journal, The

Azerbaijan's Foreign Policy and Challenges for Energy Security

This article examines Azerbaijan's foreign policy by demonstrating the interplay between the oil-led development process and early post-independence regional conflicts that enforced a Western orientation in the country's foreign policy. It is argued that geopolitics continue to prevail in the strategic goals of Azerbaijan. However, the new challenges in the emerging framework of energy security, which extends beyond the revitalized geopolitical rivalries and preeminent concern over securing e...

Border Guards of the 'Imagined' Watan: Arab Journalists and the New Arab Consciousness

Media plays a fundamental role in the formation of national identity, most famously detailed in Benedict Anderson's theory of the imagined community. In the Arab world, a media revolution is contributing to the emergence of a reawakened regional Arab consciousness. A comparison of data from the first major regional survey of Arab journalists and the results of various public opinion polls in the region indicate that Arab journalists stand on the borderlands of Arab identity, shaping an emergi...

Afghanistan-the Makings of Modern Afghanistan

In addition to copious annotations, the author provides a glossary of foreign terms, a bibliography of unpublished sources and contemporary published works, and concludes with a ten-page index. Because of its narrow focus and theoretical character, the work will be of interest primarily to the historian of early East India Company relations.

Arab-Israeli Conflict-Negotiating Under Fire: Preserving Peace Talks in the Face of Terror Attacks

[...] post-Oslo literature has tried to explain the reasons for its breakdown and the lessons that should be drawn for other peace negotiations worldwide. The book focuses on three major "acute security crisis" events during the Oslo years (1993-2000) which threatened to negatively alter the dynamics of the peace negotiations: the February 1994 Hebron massacre committed by Baruch Ggoldstein, an Israeli settler who killed 29 Ppalestinian worshipers in the Cave of the Ppatriarchs and wounded a...

Egypt-American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire

Sharkey's thesis moves beyond the assumptions of both a self-regarding American literature on missions and a defensive Egyptian and Arab nationalist polemic against Western missionaries. Sharkey, however, is unable to flesh out the Egyptian characters as empathetically as she does the Americans; the Coptic Church remains opaque as do Egyptian, Arab, and Muslim nationalists; and she hesitates to fully explore the racial dimensions of the staffing and salary policies at American missionary ins...

Iran-a History of Iran: Empire of the Mind

Using somewhat overwrought imagery, Axworthy posits Russia and Britain as fairytale "ugly sisters" thwarting Iran's attempts at modernization, such as its sporadic programs to build railroads and improve communications in the late 19th century. [...] despite the mention of the alcoholism of monarchs of that time, there is not enough assessment of the severe financial crises that Iran experienced following the reign of Shah Abbas I due to a variety of interconnected foreign and domestic facto...

Iran-Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran

Twice, this accomplished young journalist has spent lengthy periods in Tehran, writing for Time magazine, building a social life and, on her second time around, falling in love with and marrying another hyphenated Iranian and giving birth to a son. Ahmadinejad, after briefly trying to curry favor with women by announcing that they can attend mixed soccer games, retreats under pressure from conservative clerics and presides over a new crackdown on un-Islamic dress and satellite television.

Iran-Persian Dreams: Moscow and Tehran Since the Fall of the Shah

What he demonstrates in it is that while both governments have shared a common antipathy to American foreign policy, there also have been significant differences between Moscow and Tehran that prevented their relationship from developing into an alliance. While it is well known in the West that Iranians resent America and Britain for the role they played in the downfall of Pprime Minister Muhammad Mossadeq in 1953, Pparker shows that Iranian press commentary reveals the continuing salience o...

Iran-Iran's Intellectual Revolution

The absence of such analyses makes learned predictions about the future of each discourse - the task that the last chapter assumes - problematic. Since the book does not offer a theory to frame the interaction between discursive and non-discursive practices, its final predictions of the future ascendency of the secular-modernist (or even the religious reformist) discourse seem speculative.

Israel-Becoming Hebrew: The Creation of a Jewish National Culture in Ottoman Palestine

Zionists such as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, Menachem Ussishkin, Izhak Ben-Zvi, and many other men and women were expending their best energy on re-examining and reinterpreting every aspect of Jewish history and ritual: should Hanukkah be ignored because it marked the victory of religious fanaticism over the so-called enlightened proponents of Hellenism or was it rather to be celebrated as a class struggle, in Ben-Zvi's words, and the triumph of a peasant underclass? [...] this is a study of how res...

Israel-Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism

How is it that American Fundamentalists and Evangelicals, whose cultural history is steeped in anti-Semitic bigotry and whose theology predicts future persecution of Jews worse than Hitler's Holocaust, became allies of Jewish Zionism? Stephen Spector, a professor of English, surveys contemporary Evangelical rhetoric on Zionism, the future fate of Jews, and the current war with Islam as a kind of embedded academic journalist.

Israel-Israel's Occupation

According to Ggordon, during the occupation's first 20 years, Israel mainly used disciplinary and bio-power.

Jordan-Inter-Arab Alliances: Regime Security and Jordanian Foreign Policy

[...] there is the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty. Scholars of both international relations and of the region will benefit from reading the theoretical chapters; and the case chapters will give regional specialists additional grist for the mill as they grapple with the next episodes of shifting alignments in the Arab world.

Jordan-King Hussein of Jordan: A Political Life

While the notion that Husayn had dynastic aspirations for greater regional power, as Malik Mufti has argued, helps explain the assertiveness of many policy moves, referring to this notion as an "ideology" begs the question of whether this ideology had followers and how it compares to the rival nationalisms with which Husayn's subjects identified. [...] missing from Ashton's account is a survey of the domestic policies and astute performances that allowed Husayn to maintain a sympathetic foll...

Kurds-Kurdistan: Crafting of National Selves

Yet "paradoxically this [earlier Kurdish] autonomy is often also represented as a millstone around the neck of an emerging Kurdish nation-state" (p. 50). [...] in speaking of "this 'gap' between an event and its multitude of interpretations [that] is typical of historiography in general" (p. 48), "for many Kurdish nationalists, their imagining of Kurdistan resembles the Turkifying of the Ottomans by Turkish nationalists" (p. 63).

Libya-Libya: From Colony to Independence

In the subsequent chapter on the Italian colonial period, and even more so in the excellent chapters on the struggle for independence and the genesis of the United Kingdom of Libya, St John strongly focuses on the strategic considerations of international powers - the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, France and Russia - with respect to a country courted by both sides of the Cold War and initially hosting British and American military bases. [...] St John also focuses on Qadhafi's id...

Pakistan-Swat State (1915-1969): From Genesis to Merger

The Yusufzai Afghan Ppashtuns placed their mark on the region in the 16th century, and Afghanistan has long sustained its interest in the state, but it is only in modern times, with the pressure exerted by the British following their conquest of the Ppunjab and their occupation of Ppeshawar in the 19th century, that Swat found itself penetrated by a distant culture. [...] London's decision to draw a legal border between their South Asian colony and the Afghan monarchial state in 1893 brought...

Palestine and Palestinians-Mountain Against the Sea: Essays On Palestinian Society and Culture

The "Mountain" is the landed interior elites and the "Sea" is the emerging challenge of urban centers and the coastal cities, now competing with one another for pride of place in social, cultural, and economic leadership. The sensitive handling by the author of the variety of source material (memoirs, diaries, letters) and their contexts provides the reader with a treasure trove of new learning. The seven individual studies provide insights into daily life and in some cases the private thou...

Saudi Arabia-Religion and Politics in Saudi Arabia: Wahhabism and the State

In the final essay, "The Impact of the Wahhabi Vision," John Voll reconfirms the basic assumption stated in the early chapters: that Wahhabism is a conservative, intellectual Islamic reform movement and not a militant political platform in support of lethal, violent jihadist terrorism. In sum, although much of the content of the essays is well worth reading, as a whole they provide a relatively disjointed analysis of Wahhabism and the Saudi state and a relatively weak validation for the book...

Culture and Society-Charity in Islamic Societies

[...] as Singer argues, the difference between the concepts can be rather blurred: "in reality, all these words describe dynamic relationships that create, signal or reaffirm gradients of power" (p. 22). Since giving is also an investment in status and power, charity both indicates and forms social status.

Modern History and Politics-Beaches, Ruins, Resorts: The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World

Reviewed by Matthew Gray There is a paucity of research on tourism in the Middle East, all the more so on the political economy of tourism, despite the salience of the sector to several of the region's economies - Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, and increasingly Dubai in the UAE, among others - and the important political and social controversies that commonly attach to the growth of Western tourism to non-Western states. Waleed Hazbun's new book is a welcome addition to the literature, and contribu...

Modern History and Politics-Jewish Property Claims Against Arab Countries

A significant public campaign was launched in 2002 by a new lobby group, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC, the creation of major American Jewish organizations), to bring attention to the "forgotten exodus" of Jews from Arab countries with the aim of supporting Israeli diplomacy by playing the Jewish "refugee" card against demands for repatriation.

Recent Publications

Conceived shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, this study - the product of a series of international conferences in which the contributors participated - seeks to provide analysis and strategy for the reconstruction and development of post-conflict Afghanistan. Cochran outlines educational development in Egypt from the beginning of writing in 4000 BC to the modes of three traditions of religious education, the periods of Mamluk, Ottoman, and British occupation, and the ...

Chronology: Arab-Israeli Conflict

Ppalestinian Authority Ppresident Mahmud 'Abbas placed full-page advertisements for the 2002 Arab peace plan in four Hebrew-language Israeli newspapers in an attempt to communicate to Israeli citizens Fatah's position regarding an Arab-Israeli peace deal. According to Israeli government sources, 39 truckloads of supplies and 20 of animal feed were permitted to enter during this respite. Hundreds of Jewish settlers took part in escalating riots in response to rumors that the Israeli authorit...

Chronology: Central Asia and the Caucasus

Uzbekistan raised its rates for natural gas shipments to Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan by nearly $100 per 1,000 cubic meters, bringing the total to $240 per cubic meter and prompting worries of an energy crisis in the two neighboring countries. [Reuters, 1/9] Jan. 13: A new law restricting religious activity was enacted in Kyrgyzstan, instituting a ban on proselytizing, barring children from religious organizations, and raising the threshold for registering a religious organization from ten peop...

Chronology: Petroleum Affairs

Chronology: Palestinian Affairs

An aid boat from Cyprus carrying 27 activists from the Free Ggaza group and half a ton of medical supplies arrived at the port in City, defying the Israeli blockade that had been in effect since Hamas took control of the area in June 2007. The Israeli Navy intercepted a boat carrying international activists, including former US Congresswoman and Ggreen Pparty presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, and four tons of aid for Ppalestinians in the Ggaza Strip.

Chronology: Regional Affairs

In March, Saudi Arabia restored full diplomatic ties with Qatar, five years after cutting them in response to negative coverage of the 2002 Hajj pilgrimage by Qatari government-funded broadcaster Al-Jazeera, and in protest of Qatar's increased relations with Israel and support for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Pprosecutors from the US Department of Justice and US District Court in New York alleged that from 1995 to 2007, Lloyd's Dubai office falsified transfer statements so that illegal m...

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

US-led coalition forces killed 14 Afghans who they claimed were militants, despite the Khost provincial governor's assertion that the men were security guards watching a road construction crew. According to court reports, Lloyd was speaking with Salam outside of Kandahar on November 4, 2009, when he ignited a pitcher of fuel and doused her with it, inflicting second and third-degree burns over 60% of her body. [YT, 10/28] Nov. 3: A US military tribunal at Gguantanamo Bay, Cuba, found 'Ali H...

Editor's Note

Among the offerings in this spring issue of the Journal are: an assessment of the possible role of Arab journalists in a new "Arab Awakening;" a case study of a major jihadist group in Algeria and its evolution; an examination of the geopolitics of Azerbaijan's foreign policy since independence; a history of the Shari'a Court system in Israel; and a look at the Ford Foundation's experiences in 1950s Iran; as well as an examination of new books on democracy promotion and reform. An intriguing...