Follow Us
From the Editors
Jadaliyya Launches DARS Page: Daily Acts of Resistance and Subversion
Tadween Publishing Blog is here! Check it out
Jadaliyya's first book is now available! Click here.
Want to find out about new books? Visit our expanding NEWTON page. Click here.
Interested in writing a Review for Jadaliyya? Visit our Call for Reviews here.
الآن . . . القسم العربي بحلة جديدة
Jadaliyya Launches Photography Page (click here!)
Call for Photos: Become a Contributing Photographer at Jadaliyya
Iran
Will Syria Cause a Divorce Between Iran and Turkey?
![[Image from Flickr/truthout.org]](/content_images/3/sm_4704400218_fc719729e2_z.jpg "[Image from Flickr/truthout.org]")
Turkey and Iran are two of the Middle East’s oldest and most powerful states, and both aspire to play a greater role in a new regional order. Major geopolitical developments in the Middle East—the rise of Kurdish nationalism, the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the expansion of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory, the Israeli-Hezbollah war of 2006, and Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2008-2009—have aligned Turkish and Iranian interests during the post-Cold War era. Nonetheless, as Ankara and Tehran seek to extend their respective influence throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, their interests and regional agendas have inevitably clashed, as ...
Keep Reading »O.I.L. Media Roundup (2 July)
![[A US Soldier observes an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) in Afghanistan. Image from Wikimedia Commons.]](/content_images/3/sm_Class1_uav.jpg "[A US Soldier observes an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) in Afghanistan. Image from Wikimedia Commons.]")
[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Occupation, Intervention, and Law and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the O.I.L. Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each biweekly roundup to OIL@jadaliyya.com by Monday night of every other week] News "Sudan Deports Egyptian Journalist and Detains Bloggers as Protests Continue”, Robert Mackey In response to mass demonstrations against Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir's recent round of austerity measures, Sudan has deported Salma El Wardany, an Egyptian journalist, and detained blogger Maha ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism
Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism. London and New York: Zed Books, 2012. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Hamid Dabashi (HD): As you well know, a massive set of revolutionary uprisings are sweeping across North Africa and Western Asia, from Morocco to Syria and from Bahrain to Yemen. This is all happening in the aftermath of an equally important uprising code-named the Green Movement in Iran. While the Arab uprisings were under way, the Eurozone crisis and civil unrest swept across Europe from Greece to Spain, and before that was completely registered the Occupy Wall Street movement started in the US. Like everyone else, I was ...
Keep Reading »Iran Will Require Assurances: An Interview with Hossein Mousavian
![[Nuclear symbol on outline on Iran. Image from Futureatlas.com]](/content_images/3/sm_asliinterviewmousavian.jpg "[Nuclear symbol on outline on Iran. Image from Futureatlas.com]")
Hossein Mousavian has served as visiting research scholar at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security from 2009 to the present. Prior to this position, he held numerous positions in the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including director-general of its West Europe department and ambassador to Germany from 1990 to 1997. Ambassador Mousavian was also head of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran during both terms of Mohammad Khatami’s presidency (1997-2005). In this capacity, he served as spokesman of the Iranian nuclear negotiations team from 2003 to 2005. When that team was replaced following the ...
Keep Reading »New Perspectives for the Anti-War Movement (New York City, 16 May 2012)
![[Logo of Havaar: Iranian Initiative Against War, Sanctions, and State Repression]](/content_images/3/sm_havaar.jpg "[Logo of Havaar: Iranian Initiative Against War, Sanctions, and State Repression]")
New Perspectives for the Anti-War Movement A Discussion with Havaar: Iranian Initiative Against War, Sanctions, and State Repression When: Wednesday, May 16 at 7 pm – 9 pm Where: The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Segal Theater, First Floor. Co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics Havaar (which means “cry of emergency”) is a coalition of Iranians, Iranian-Americans, and allies formed in response to the US government’s escalating attacks on Iran and to the Iranian government’s ongoing repression of grassroots movements. At a time when crippling sanctions and threats of war bear ...
Keep Reading »Roundtable on Iran Crisis, Part 1: War on Iran in 2012?
![[An U.S. Navy F/A 18 Hornet on duty over the Northern Arabian Sea. Image from U.S. Navy. Photo by Lieutenant Perry Solomon.]](/content_images/3/sm_iranarticle.jpg "[An U.S. Navy F/A 18 Hornet on duty over the Northern Arabian Sea. Image from U.S. Navy. Photo by Lieutenant Perry Solomon.]")
President Barak Obama’s triumphal proclamation of a US military victory in Iraq upon the December 2011 withdrawal of all US armed forces from that country made it possible for the unelected makers of American national security policy to focus attention on Iran, a nation high up on any list of US enemies since 1979. Indeed, from November 2011 until March 2012, the rhetoric of senior political leaders in both the United States and Israel about Iran’s alleged efforts to develop a nuclear weapon fueled a frightening depiction in the mainstream media of an Iran that posed an existential threat to Israel and to ‘vital’ US interests (i.e. oil) in the Persian Gulf region. ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran
Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Amy Motlagh (AM): Part of the study of literature is obsessive re-reading. In this case, I became preoccupied with what I felt was a narrow translation of a word in the English edition of Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (which is perhaps the only Persian novel to achieve the status of a work of “world literature”), giving rise to an interpretation of the novel that seemed to conceal some of the complexities of how this could be read in the Persian. Although the preoccupation with that particular word ...
Keep Reading »Love Bomb: How Deep Is Israel's Love for Iran?
If you follow the news in the Middle East, you have probably come across the online sensation known as the “Israel-Loves-Iran” campaign. The campaign, launched by Israeli graphic designer Ronny Edry and his wife Michal Tamir, emerges amidst rising tensions between Iran and the West over the country’s nuclear program, as well as months of sabre-rattling between the leaders of Israel, the United States, and Iran. What started out as a campaign to upload colourful posters with the slogan “Iranians, we will never bomb your country. We [heart] you” quickly turned into the second most-viewed video on YouTube in Israel, with around 740,000 views thus far. The irresistible ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Farzaneh Milani, Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement
Farzaneh Milani, Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Farzaneh Milani (FM): In a way, Words, not Swords is a rebuttal to my first book, Veils and Words. The central argument of Veils and Words revolved around Iranian women's literary output. I claimed that the veil had covered not only Iranian women's bodies, but also their literary voices. Women's self-expression, either bodily or verbal, I surmised, was covered by the material veil and its verbal counterpart—silence. I explored ways in which women poets and prose writers escaped the ...
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 »So What If Iran Has The Bomb?
![[Nuclear symbol. Image from WikkiCommons]](/content_images/3/sm_sugarzas.jpg "[Nuclear symbol. Image from WikkiCommons]")
Whether it is simply a product of political jockeying associated with the US presidential election season or a "real" concern of the institutional networks that constitute the US foreign policy establishment, there has been a marked increase in the rhetorical—and even the practical—mobilization around Iran's potential nuclear capabilities. Initially, such mobilizations centered on the question of whether and to what degree Iran would grant weapons inspectors access to its nuclear program. Lately, the discussion has shifted to a debate about which set of coercive measures can prevent Iran from acquiring weapon-grade nuclear technology. Importantly, this shift ...
Keep Reading »"A Separation" Buried Under the Dust of Politics
A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar winning film, gave Iranians a reason to come together and celebrate this moment, which could have potentially taken the focus away from war and nuclear program. The media on both sides, however, missed the moment. On Sunday, 26 February, Asghar Farhadi began his acceptance speech by greeting “the good people of my homeland” and saying: “Many Iranians all over the world are watching us and I imagine them to be very happy. They are happy not just because of an important award or a film or filmmaker, but because at the time when talk of war, intimidation and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country ...
Keep Reading »لماذا لا يستطيع الشهرودي أن يخلف السيستاني
كثرت التكهنات حول خطة ايرانية مزعومة تقضي بتولي المرجعية الدينية الشيعية في العراق رجل دين مقرب من طهران. وبغض النظر عما إذا كان أصحاب نظرية المؤامرة هذه على حق أم لا، يبدو أن الخطة التي يتحدثون عنها خطة غير متماسكة، فهي تتناقض مع التقاليد الدينية الراسخة في العراق منذ قرون. على مدى الأشهر التسعة الماضية، روجت الكثير من وسائل الإعلام تكهنات حول مؤامرة إيرانية مزعومة تقضي بإيصال واحد من كبار رجال الدين في العراق إلى مركز ديني مرموق. وتقضي هذه الخطة، بإرسال إيران رجل دين بارز إلى النجف، جنوب ...
Keep Reading »No Comment
Crowds cheer as a blow-up doll of Iranian President Ahmadinejad gets raped/sodomized with a nuke by a dungeon master Gay Pride San Francisco 2011
Keep Reading »Post-January 25 Iranian-Egyptian Relations: A New Dawn?
Iranian-Egyptian relations have been an often-overlooked aspect of Middle Eastern and international politics over the last thirty years, due in no small part to the almost complete lack of ties between the two states following Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979. Whilst these two great Middle Eastern powers have been linked over thousands of years of history, the last thirty years have been characterized by a distinct lack of inter-state relations, and considerable enmity and distrust. However, with ...
Keep Reading »Sanctions Against Iran: A Duplicitous "Alternative" to War
Media reports on Iran oscillate wildly between threats of imminent military action and hopeful reports of diplomatic progress. Amidst this confusing din, there is a constant truth: the United States has not ceased its economic bullying of Iran, nor has the threat of war receded. As Dennis B. Ross, the Obama Administration’s former Iran advisor, told the New York Times, “now you have a focus on the negotiations...It doesn't mean the threat of using force goes away, but it lies behind the diplomacy.” This ...
Keep Reading »Iranian Cyber-Struggles
From the Green Movement in Iran in 2009 through the Arab revolts that began in 2011, social media have held center stage in coverage of popular protest in the Middle East. Though the first flush of overwrought enthusiasm is long past, there is consensus that Facebook, Twitter and other Web 2.0 applications, particularly on handheld devices, have been an effective organizing tool against the slower-moving security apparatuses of authoritarian states. The new technology has also helped social movements to ...
Keep Reading »War of Position and War of Maneuver: Sexperts, Sex Pervs, and Sex Revolutionaries
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 ...
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 »Crossroads in Iranian Cinema: Interview with Hamid Naficy
Hamid Naficy of Northwestern University is a leading authority of Iranian cinema His most recent four-volume series, A Social History of Iranian Cinema. Covers the Iranian cinema from late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first cinema. Hamid Naficy has published extensively about theories of exile and displacement, exilic and diaspora cinema and media, and Iranian and Third World cinemas. His many publications include such well-known titles as An Accented Cinema, The Making of Exile Cultures, ...
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 »Covering Iran's Ninjas
On the evening of 29 March, a line in my twitter feed read, “You don’t want to mess with Iran’s lady ninjas.” Cara Park’s snarky comment had been retweeted by someone I follow in Cairo. I clicked her link to find she’s a deputy managing editor of Foreign Policy, blogging on the suspensions of Reuters’ accreditation in Iran over their reporting on women training in ninjutsu: In case it wasn’t obvious, you don’t want to offend a highly-trained cadre of Iranian ninjas. Anger these black-belted beauties ...
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 ...
Keep Reading »Queering the Qur’an? Sacred Ripping and the Holy Homonationalism
It may be hard to imagine that here, in the hot and humid Texas, being queer is “cool.” Believe it or not, Houston has a lesbian mayor and one of the first transgender judges in the nation. Hell, if it was not for the rest of Texas, gay marriage could possibly be legal in the land of Lawrence vs. Texas. But, the “feel-good” hegemonic queer culture in Houston is at best an epitome of American exceptionalism with an intense love for gay/queer normativity, or what Lisa Duggan has termed homonormativity. In ...
Keep Reading »Hot on Facebook
“So what are we seeing in Israel? A farce? A brief spasm over bread? Spoiled whingeing over the price of a flat for the children of the generals? An impossible chimera of joint struggle, the faint historical tracings of the Palestine Communist Party evanescently appearing in the Israeli imaginary?"click | email | tweet
.jpg){kind=small}
From Jadaliyya Reports
Top Jadaliyya Tags
Jadalicious / جدلشس
Noteworthy
Twitter Updates
Jadaliyya Features
.jpg)
Latest Entries
View All Entries »- Reports Roundup (May 25)
- يافا والموسيقى و"فوائد" النكبة
- O.I.L. Media Roundup (24 May)
- Islamists and Transitional Justice
- Maghreb Media Roundup (May 24)
- أوهام ليبرالية
- Tadween Roundup: News and Analysis from the Publishing/Academic World
- Syria Media Roundup (May 23)
- Asfari Institute Inaugural Conference: New Spaces of Civil Society Activism in the Arab World (Beirut, 23-24 May)
- Women's Rights in the Egyptian Constitution: (Neo)Liberalism's Family Values
- مسخ الذاكرة
- New Texts Out Now: Louise Cainkar, Global Arab World Migrations and Diasporas
- Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup (May 21)
- إعادة الحساب الدائمة: إساءة فهم سوريا بعد سنتين
- From al-Araqib to Susiya: Forced Displacement of Palestinians on Both Sides of the Green Line
- إعجام
- كارل ماركس واليسار في لبنان
- Picturing Algeria
- Egypt Media Roundup (May 20)
- Last Week on Jadaliyya (May 13-19)
Pages/Sections
Archive
©2010-2013 by the Arab Studies Institute. All Rights Reserved. info@jadaliyya.com
site by concepcion design