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History
War of Position and War of Maneuver: Sexperts, Sex Pervs, and Sex Revolutionaries
![[Femen Protest in Paris, Image by Joseph Paris]](/content_images/3/sm_6890663584_26d7e017b8_c.jpg "[Femen Protest in Paris, Image by Joseph Paris]")
The recent issue of Foreign Policy on sex has instigated critical feedback from many who have rightly challenged racist and Orientalist representations of gender and sexuality in the Muslim and Arab worlds. Several critics have rightly pointed out that essentialist approaches to culture that rely on facile binaries of men/women, freedom/oppression, and West/East lack any meaningful analyses of geopolitics, economy, colonial and post-colonial formations, and historical nuances. Most of these responses, however, have focused on Mona El Tahawy’s article, which reproduces discourses of violent Arab masculinity and victimized femininity. Here, however, I want to ...
Keep Reading »The End(s) of Stability
![[Solidarity in Sana'a, Yemen on March 6. Photo by Sallam/Creative Commons]](/content_images/3/sm_SallamPhoto.jpg "[Solidarity in Sana'a, Yemen on March 6. Photo by Sallam/Creative Commons]")
In September 2010, Saudi Arabia marked the anniversary of the 1962 Republican Revolution in Yemen by funding lavish parties in the country’s capital. Large numbers of Yemenis thronged the Saudi Arabian embassy in Sana’a to collect the cash dispensed to commemorate this momentous occasion. Such a degree of profligateness in Saudi foreign policy is hardly new, but the pretence of solidarity demonstrated in their celebration of the Republican Revolution is particularly perplexing—even by Saudi standards of prevarication. On 26 September 1962, a small group of army officers in North Yemen ended the thousand-year-old Imamate overnight and established the Yemen Arab Republic ...
Keep Reading »"There Are Marxists in India?" Prabhat Patnaik on the Global Crisis
![[Prabhat Patnaik speaking at the CESP farwell party in JNU, New Delhi, 2006. Image by SubinDennis, via Wikimedia Commons.]](/content_images/3/sm_pp.jpg "[Prabhat Patnaik speaking at the CESP farwell party in JNU, New Delhi, 2006. Image by SubinDennis, via Wikimedia Commons.]")
After an engaging half-hour interview with India’s pre-eminent Marxist economist during a conference at New York University, I told a friend about my one-on-one time with Prabhat Patnaik. “There are Marxists in India?” came the bemused response. “I thought India was the heart of the new capitalism.” Indeed, we hear about India mostly as a rising economic power that is challenging the United States. While there certainly are no shortages of capitalists, there are still lots of Marxists in India, as well as communist parties that have won state elections. Patnaik represents the best thinking and practice of those left traditions—both the academic Marxism that provides a ...
Keep Reading »Pageantry, Military Myths, and Egypt's “Daddy Complex”
![[Members of the Egyptian press listen to President Anwar Sadat and military commanders as they explain the course of the October 1973 War. Mubarak is fourth from the right. Image courtesy of Zeinab Mohamed.]](/content_images/3/sm_1491200193_d2ee5de15d_b.jpg "[Members of the Egyptian press listen to President Anwar Sadat and military commanders as they explain the course of the October 1973 War. Mubarak is fourth from the right. Image courtesy of Zeinab Mohamed.]")
The Egyptian calendar is punctuated by various celebrations associated with military events. The Sixth of October had typically been the most flamboyant of those celebrations. Normally, the population does not actively participate in these festivities. On the streets, the Sixth of October feels like any other day; however, state TV has traditionally aired images of the army, nationalist songs, concerts organized by the ruling party to commemorate the day—and, most spectacularly, live transmission of the armed forces’ own performance in front of an audience of military generals and former President Hosni Mubarak himself. October 2011 witnessed a slightly toned down and ...
Keep Reading »The Art of Narrating the Egyptian Revolution: An Interview with Alaa Awad
![[Alaa Awad with Mona Abaza. Image from Video.]](/content_images/3/sm_AlaaAwad.jpg "[Alaa Awad with Mona Abaza. Image from Video.]")
The paintings on the walls of Mohamed Mahmud Street have generated a great deal of attention in the past months. In an interview with Mona Abaza, artist Alaa Awad takes us through the journey of creating the impressive murals he painted on the walls of Mohammed Mahmud and the area surrounding the former Greek Campus of the American University in Cairo (AUC). Awad’s art narrates the Egyptian revolution through reviving the centuries old pharaonic tradition of murals. The video was filmed by Rudolf Thome.
Keep Reading »The Myth of Egypt's Liberal Constitution
![[King Fouad I of Egypt, accompanied by Prime Minister Muhammad Mahmoud Pasha and several ministers. Image by Riad Shehata. From Wikimedia Commons.]](/content_images/3/sm_1024px-ModernEgypt,_Fouad_I,_DHP13402-1-21_01.jpg "[King Fouad I of Egypt, accompanied by Prime Minister Muhammad Mahmoud Pasha and several ministers. Image by Riad Shehata. From Wikimedia Commons.]")
In the years leading up to January 2011, Egypt’s past often appeared as an admonishment to the present. While their invocations of history assumed many forms, critics of the Mubarak regime became particularly enthralled with the so-called “liberal era” that followed the revolution of 1919. Secularist liberals saw the interwar decades as a golden age of political freedom, religious tolerance and cultural efflorescence. Political conservatives reinvented the Egyptian monarchy as a model of strong leadership not marred by the moral decrepitude and corruption of Mubarak’s presidency. And even some Islamist groups recognized these years as their own moment of emergence before ...
Keep Reading »The Day Hafez al-Assad Died
![[Father and Sons. Image by amerune/Flickr]](/content_images/3/sm_assads.jpg "[Father and Sons. Image by amerune/Flickr]")
The day Hazfez al Assad died, I was having lunch with a friend. We were eating pasta at a family owned Italian restaurant in Ras Beirut when the news was announced. With everyone else, we stared at the small television. The owner kept changing the channel, and each time the news was confirmed. I don't remember if we finished lunch. But I do remember that when we went outside the streets seemed deserted. Beirut is not a quiet city, but that day it seemed as if sound had retreated from picture. My father called and demanded that I come home. Less than five minutes later my friend received the same call from her mother. No one knew what would happen next. The questions, I ...
Keep Reading »Epic or Farce: Preliminary Assessment of Iran's Parliamentary Elections (Part One)
![[Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and ‘Ali Khamenei. Photos by Sinaf, via Creative Commons.]](/content_images/3/sm_iran_2012_new.jpg "[Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and ‘Ali Khamenei. Photos by Sinaf, via Creative Commons.]")
The 2nd of March marked Iran’s first nationwide elections since the widely disputed presidential race in June 2009 and its turbulent aftermath. They also hastened the decline of a “president” who owed his second term in office to a “miraculous hand,” a “hand” that, on 2 March, sought to curb Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s influence over the country’s affairs. The embattled head of the executive of branch, whose protégés have dominated Iranian politics for the past seven years, is slowly but surely coming to terms with the realities of Iran’s power structure, namely the will of the Supreme Leader ‘Ali Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards. Prior to the election, and for the ...
Keep Reading »Migration: The Arabian Gulf story
![[Migrant laborers in Dubai. Image by Ross Domoney/Demotix]](/content_images/3/sm_migrantsdubai.jpg "[Migrant laborers in Dubai. Image by Ross Domoney/Demotix]")
When I arrived in the Gulf fourteen years ago, my perception of this region was the same as that of millions of other migrants, that this is a place where we can easily earn enough to achieve financial freedom. But over the years, a different gulf has been haunting my thoughts: that between expectations and reality. In other words, the fact that many who come looking for gold are having to satisfy themselves with coal. There are around twenty million migrant workers in the Gulf and many millions had walked its sand-swept streets since the oil boom in the 1970s. A vast majority of them are single workers—Asians, Africans, Arabs—and despite the gaping diversities in the ...
Keep Reading »How Not to Study Gender in the Middle East
![[Changes in traditional Sudanese dress. Image by Khaled Albaih]](/content_images/3/sm_large.jpg "[Changes in traditional Sudanese dress. Image by Khaled Albaih]")
One: Gender is not the study of what is evident, it is an analysis of how what is evident came to be. Two: Before resolving to write about gender, sexuality, or any other practice or aspect of subjectivity in the Middle East, one must first define what exactly the object of study is. Be specific. What country, region, and time period forms the background picture of your study? Furthermore, the terms “Middle East,” “the Islamic World” and the “Arab world” do not refer to the same place, peoples, or histories, but the linkages between them are crucial. Moreover, the “state” is a relatively new phenomenon in the Middle East. In order to study gendered political economy in ...
Keep Reading »Iran and the US Anti-War Movement
[This article is based on a talk given at the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Conference on 24 March 2012 in Stamford, Connecticut. It was part of a workshop called, “Solidarity Not Intervention,” organized by Raha Iranian Feminist Collective. Just before this workshop, the conference overwhelmingly voted down a resolution put forward by Raha and Havaar: Iranian Initiative Against War, Sanctions, and State Repression that read: “We oppose war and sanctions against the Iranian people and stand ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Mohammad Salama and Rachel Friedman, Locating the Secular in Sayyid Qutb
Mohammad Salama and Rachel Friedman, “Locating the Secular in Sayyid Qutb.” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XX No. 1 (Spring 2012). Jadaliyya (J): What led you to write this article? Mohammad Salama and Rachel Friedman (MS and RF): The post-revolutionary political scene in Egypt, with at least fourteen Islamist parties vying for power, is a timely historical moment to take a close look at the dynamics of religious authority versus the so-called secular. As the Egyptian people succeeded in overthrowing ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Gilbert Achcar, Eichmann in Cairo: The Eichmann Affair in Nasser's Egypt
Gilbert Achcar, “Eichmann in Cairo: The Eichmann Affair in Nasser's Egypt.” Arab Studies Journal Vol. XX No. 1 (Spring 2012). Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article? Gilbert Achcar (GA): The story of this article resembles that of my book The Arabs and the Holocaust, of which it can be seen as a sequel. In both cases, the initial impulse of writing was not the evolution of my ongoing research, but a fortuitous circumstance. The prelude to the book was a request made to me a few years ago to ...
Keep Reading »Outside Looking In
City of Mirages: Baghdad 1952-1982. The Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY, 22 February – 5 May 2012. City of Mirages: Baghdad 1952-1982 is an exhibit of design work produced by world-famous architects and firms for the booming Iraqi capital during the mid-twentieth century. Beginning from the year that the Iraq Development Board was established to channel seventy percent of state oil revenues into modernizing schemes for national development, the exhibit traces a thirty-year ...
Keep Reading »Khalil al-Wazir: Paving the Way of Armed Struggle
It took Israeli intelligence over two decades and many assassination attempts before they managed to hunt down the PLO’s military mastermind Khalil al-Wazir. On the 24th anniversary of his death, Al-Akhbar recounts his story. When Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) began his endeavor in the early 1950s, Israeli intelligence had no idea he existed. At the time, he was the twentysomething leader of the Palestinian al-Haq Brigade in Gaza. His family had been displaced from Ramleh in 1948. Back then, ...
Keep Reading »Syria Media Roundup (April 11th)
[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Syria and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Syria Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to syria@jadaliyya.comby Monday night of every week] On Foreign Intervention “Putting Syria into Some Perspective” William Blum’s insightful comments on the power of “The Holy Triumvirate: The United States, NATO, and the ...
Keep Reading »Epic or Farce: Preliminary Assessment of Iran's Parliamentary Elections (Part Two)
[Read Part One here.] "Epic" Turnout After the 2 March polls closed, Khamenei said that the turnout had been “one of the highest” throughout the history of the Islamic Revolution. “These elections were a firm and clear answer” to the naysayers, he argued. Yet even without a thorough inspection of the results, it is quite difficult not to question claims about “one of the highest” turnouts in the past thirty-three years. Official figures suggested a sixty-four percent turnout, higher than the ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Nelly Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600-1800)
Nelly Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600-1800). Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book, and what particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address? Nelly Hanna (NH): The book is part of a large body of literature that deals with the artisans and guilds of the Ottoman Empire. Scholars have written about artisans in Istanbul, Bursa, Aleppo, and Jerusalem (including Suraiya Faroqhi, Abdul Karim Rafeq, Haim ...
Keep Reading »The Problem of Privilege
“To believe in a democratic Jewish state today is to be caught between the jaws of a pincer,” writes Peter Beinart in his widely circulated and hotly debated op-ed. Indeed -- but it was ever thus. Today the pincer is not, as Beinart would have it, the incongruity of the “democratic Israel” inside the Green Line and the “undemocratic Israel” outside it. It is the discrepancy between the notions that Israel -- whether a Greater Israel encompassing West Bank settlements or the pre-1967 Israel for ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Shahla Talebi, Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran
Shahla Talebi, Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011. Winner of the 2011 Outstanding Academic Title Award, sponsored by Choice, and Honorable Mention in the Biography & Autobiography category in the 2011 PROSE Awards Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Shahla Talebi (ST): I knew since leaving Iran in late 1993 that I wanted to find a way to make whatever sense possible of my experience of imprisonment, and the ...
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