Now Available! Arab Studies Journal Announces Spring 2024 Issue: Editors' Note and Table of Contents

Now Available! Arab Studies Journal Announces Spring 2024 Issue: Editors' Note and Table of Contents

Now Available! Arab Studies Journal Announces Spring 2024 Issue: Editors' Note and Table of Contents

By : ASJ Editors

[This is the Editor's Note and Table of Context for the Arab Studies Journal Spring 2024 issue, which is now available for purchase. Click here to subscribe to Arab Studies Journal.]

ARAB STUDIES JOURNAL

VOL. XXXII, NO. 1

Editors’ Note 


We are proud to publish this special issue as an intervention into the urgent and ongoing multidisciplinary conversation on questions of nature in the Middle East. Coordinated by guest editors Katharina Lange and Juliane Schumacher, the issue significantly expands this conversation’s regional and thematic focuses. Florian Zemmin introduces Islamic modernist conceptions of nature as an integral part of the history of global environmental thought. His article explores how Rashid Rida (1865–1935) and his intellectual circle constructed an environmental ethics within the normative matrix of the shari‘a. Thomas Kuehn calls our attention to the little-studied Province of Yemen as a critical site for the development of Ottoman environmental management. Military and technical struggles to dominate Yemeni nature were foundational to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Ottoman governance in the province, and ultimately made possible the post-Ottoman Yemeni state. Emily O’Dell further expands our geographic focus to the equally understudied context of Oman. Her article explores how modern Omani poets have employed natural imagery and evocations of landscape as a means to negotiate their experience of repression and exile. Finally, Katharina Lenner and Sylvie Janssens contribute a powerful interdisciplinary interrogation of the development of environmental conservation practices in Jordan. Their analysis reveals how local and international NGOs advanced competing and intersecting conceptions of conservation, and how Jordanian communities have negotiated, resisted, and/or profited from related interventions. Separate from this special issue, our reviews section features insightful perspectives on major recent works in Ottoman and post-Ottoman history. 

Underscoring the urgency of the kind of inquiry proposed by this special issue is the present grave escalation of warfare against the capacity of land to sustain human and nonhuman life. For nearly a year, Israeli artillery has rained thousands of white phosphorous munitions—among a barrage of others—into the Gaza Strip and South Lebanon, leaving excruciating chemical burns across human flesh and agricultural fields. After burning down tree groves and planted crops, these munitions’ residues have seeped into water supplies and pervaded the air, poisoning people, plants, and animals. The long-term effects of these munitions remain unknown, a degree of terrible uncertainty recalling that which surrounded the United States’ 1991 use of depleted uranium munitions against Iraqi forces and civilians. White phosphorous bombardments constitute an escalation of what the multidisciplinary research group Forensic Architecture term “herbicidal warfare” against Gaza, which the Israeli military has prosecuted since 2014. Bulldozers have razed fields and orchards, bombs have shattered greenhouses, and soldiers have demolished and obstructed supplies of food and water. Each of these are implements in an Israeli military strategy of ecocide, which seeks to destroy the natural, social, and technological infrastructure that sustains life in Gaza. These cataclysmic attacks on people and nature are part of Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and annihilationist policy vis-à-vis Lebanon’s southern border region. They demand from us focused analysis of the environment not as an object for boutique politics, but as the central terrain of struggle for the future.

Table of Contents


EDITORS’ NOTE
 

ARTICLES

SPECIAL SECTION: ENGAGEMENTS WITH NATURE IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA SINCE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

"Section Introduction: Appropriations, Representations, Productions: Engagements with “Nature” in the Middle East and North Africa Since the Ninteenth Century"
Katharina Lange and Juliane Schumacher 

"What is Islamic About Islamic Conceptions of Nature?: Rashid Rida’s Formative Contributions in the First Volumes of Al-Manar"
Florian Zemmin

"Managing the Hazards of Yemen’s Nature: Military Violence, Governance, and the Environment in Ottoman Southwest Arabia, 1872–1914"
Thomas Kuehn

"Nature Imagery in Modern Omani Poetry: Alternative Eco-Productions of Sociality, Individuality, and Immateriality"
Emily Jane O’Dell 

“'Conserve Not Protect'?: Competing Environmental Imaginaries in Jordan’s Conservation Thinking and Practice"
Katharina Lenner and Sylvie Janssens

REVIEWS

Dangerous Gifts: Imperialism, Security, and Civil Wars in the Levant, 1798–1864
By Ozan Ozavci
Reviewed by Zoe Griffith

The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier
By Chris Gratien
Reviewed by Atar David

Losing Istanbul: Arab-Ottoman Imperialists and the End of Empire
By Mostafa Minawi
Reviewed by Edhem Eldem

Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire
By Nora Elizabeth Barakat
Reviewed by Lâle Can


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Education in the Time of Virality

Widespread access to the internet has facilitated means of acquiring news and information at rates unseen in earlier eras. As individuals, we have the ability to post and spread political information, social commentary, and other thoughts at will. This has caused an information overload for users of social networking sites. In a fight for views, reposts, and clicks, creators, both corporate and not, have been forced to develop new tactics to inform their audiences. This response to a new mode of information consumption also forces a reconsideration of how we understand knowledge production. Much of the information put forth into the world is absorbed passively, such as through characters’ storylines in books, films, and television - and this information accumulates over a lifetime. What, then, happens when knowledge is actively consumed (as is done when reading, watching, or listening to news stories), but the manner through which the information is presented still conforms to the brevity generally associated with more passive knowledge intake?

Pew Research estimates that over 70% of Americans use their phone to read the news. This is nearly a 25% increase since 2013. The constant barrage of advertisements in online articles does not make consuming news easy to do on a phone, thereby forcing media outlets and their competitors to change and adopt new tactics. Applications such as Flipboard have tried to mitigate these frustrations by simply providing the full article without the ads on their own platform, but many people still turn to sources like The Skimm. In attempting to distill a day’s worth of news coverage on domestic affairs, foreign affairs, pop culture, and sports into a few quips, undeniably both texture and nuance are lost. To compete with these services, CNN, the New York Times, and other mainstream news sources are doing the same and producing articles that give the, “Top 5 News Moments to Start Your Day,” or a, “Daily Brief.” Of course, looking at the language differences between the New York Times daily summary versus The Skimm’s, one can tell which is a more comprehensive news source. Even so, slashing the word count still takes a toll on clearly informing the public. The question then becomes, after quickly skimming through these summaries, are people doing more readings to cover what was lost? Or has “the brief” become the new standard for knowledge production and awareness?

It is more than likely that a significant portion of The Skimm’s subscribers do go on to read the full article linked in the email, but the growing popularity of similarly quick and fast news sources has had an impact on how much information viewers and readers actually understand. Between 2011 and 2014, The Skimm was founded, along with AJ+, Now This, Upworthy, and BuzzFeed News’ more serious journalism section. Undeniably, all of these sources produce and publish very important information, and make this information accessible to a larger audience. However, their production and marketing strategies hinge upon condensing very nuanced topics into videos that are, on average, only seven minutes long, as well as optimizing their materials for social media audiences. Now, it is ridiculous to expect highly textured and complicated issues to be thoroughly represented in these videos or posts. Even research based texts do not touch upon all of the complexities of a topic. The problems arise when looking at how viewers perceive themselves and their level of knowledge after actively searching out the products of, for example, AJ+ and Buzzfeed, for information. Carefully refining their materials to fit the shortened attention span of people scrolling through Facebook, social media news organizations have found their niche audience. Their products provide a simple way to deliver information to those who want gather knowledge on the “hot topics of today,” but do not what to do the leg work to be truly informed. These videos are spread throughout Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms in a manner that says, “Watch this, and you will know what is going on in the world.”

Understanding how information is being pushed out into the world is almost as important as the content of the information. None of these outlets claim to provide comprehensive knowledge, but in being popular sites for information, the question becomes: do they have a responsibility to encourage their viewers to continue to inform themselves about these issues? Having a well-informed society is phenomenal, but if in informing society we are also forever altering how we consume knowledge to favor brevity over nuance, what consequences could come with this change? We must ensure that the consumption of these videos does not become a license for people to see themselves as truly informed and thus appropriate for them to take the microphones at protests and speak over those who have a solid and textured understanding of the issues. Information content is incredibly important, as is spreading knowledge, and AJ+, Now This, and the like have become important role models in showing how issues should be accessible to everyone and not clouted in jargon. But we must simultaneously consider the unintended side effects that these styles of videos have on knowledge production. Ultimately, it is a mutual effort. Just as producers must be watchful of their content and method of dissemination, we as consumers must be mindful of how we digest and understand the news we take in.


[This article was published originally Tadween`s Al-Diwan blog by Diwan`s editor, Mekarem Eljamal.]