Contemporary Issues in the Middle East

More than a decade after the birth of contemporary social movements in the Middle East and North Africa scholars are asking what these movements have achieved and how we should evaluate their lasting legacies. The quiet encroachments of MENA counterrevolutionary forces in the post-Arab Spring era have contributed to the revival of an outdated Orientalist discourse of Middle East exceptionalism, implying that the region's culture is exceptionally immune to democratic movements, values, and institutions. This volume, inspired by critical post-colonial/decolonial studies, and interdisciplinary perspectives of social movement theories, gender studies, Islamic studies, and critical race theory, challenges and demystifies the myth of "MENA Exceptionalism". Composted of three sections, the book first places MENA in the larger global context and sheds light on the impact of geopolitics on the current crises, showing how a postcolonial critique better explains the crisis of democratic social movements and the resilience of authoritarianism. The second section focuses on the unfinished projects of contemporary MENA social movements and their quest for freedom, social justice, and human dignity. Contributors examine specific cases of post-Islamist movements, the Arab youth, student, and other popular non-violent movements. In the final section, the book problematizes the exceptionalist idea of gender passivity and women's exclusion, which reduces the reality of gender injustice to some eternal and essentialized Muslim/MENA mindset. Contributors address this theory by placing gender as an independent category of thought and action, demonstrating the quest for gender justice movements in MENA, and providing contexts to the cases of gender injustice to challenge simplistic, ahistorical and culturalist assumptions.

During the decade that preceded Syria's 2011 uprising and descent into violence, the country was in the midst of another crisis: the mass arrival of Iraqi migrants and a flood of humanitarian aid to handle the refugee emergency. International aid organizations, the media, and diplomats alike praised the Syrian government for keeping open borders and providing a safe haven for Iraqis fleeing the violence in Baghdad and Iraq's southern provinces. Only a few analysts looked beneath the surface to understand how the apparent generosity toward refugees squared with the ruthless oppression that characterized the Syrian government. In this volume, Hoffmann offers a richly detailed analysis of this contradiction, shedding light on Syria's domestic and international politics shortly before the outbreak of war .Drawing on firsthand observations and interviews, Hoffmann provides a nuanced portrait of the conditions of daily life for Iraqis living in Syria. She finds that Syria's illiberal government does not differentiate between citizen and foreigner, while the liberal politics of international aid organizations do. Based on detailed ethnographic research, Iraqi Migrants in Syria draws a highly original comparison between the Syrian government's and aid organizations' approaches to Iraqi migration, throwing into question many widely held assumptions about freedom, and its absence, in authoritarian contexts.

Between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, Nayra Atiya gathered the oral histories of five Egyptian men: a fisherman, an attorney, a scholar, a business- man, and a production manager. Through personal interviews over the course of several years, Atiya intimately captured the everyday triumphs and struggles of these young men in a rapidly changing Egyptian society. These tender stories of childhood experiences in the rural countryside, of the rigors of schooling, and of the many challenges in navigating adulthood shed light on both the rich diversity of Egyptian society and the values and traditions that are shared by all Egyptians. The concept of shahaama-a code of honor that demands loyalty, generosity, and a readiness to help others-is threaded throughout the narratives, reflecting its deeply rooted presence in Egyptian culture. Moving beyond leaden stereotypes of the oppressive Middle Eastern male, these candid self-portraits reveal the complexity of male identity in contemporary Egyptian society, highlighting the men's desires for economically viable lives, the same desires that fuel the many Egyptians today working toward revolutionary change.

Heralding a new period of creativity, In the Wake of the Poetic explores the aesthetics and politics of Palestinian cultural expression in the last two decades. As it increasingly gains a significant presence on the international scene, much of Palestinian art owes a debt to Mahmoud Darwish, one of the finest contemporary poets, and to Palestinian writers of his generation. Rahman maps the immense influence of Darwish's poetry on a new generation of performance artists, visual artists, spoken-word poets, and musicians. Through an examination of selected works by key artists-such as Suheir Hammad, Ghassan Zaqtan, Elia Suleiman, Mona Hatoum, Sharif Waked, and others-Rahman articulates an aesthetic founded on loss, dispersion, dispossession, and transformation. It interrupts dominant regimes, constituting acts of dissension and intervention. It reinscribes belonging and is oriented toward solidarity and future. This innovative wave of experimentation transforms our understanding of the national through the diasporic and the transnational, and offers a profound meditation on identity.

In one of the few anthropological works focusing on a contemporary Middle Eastern city, Colonial Jerusalem explores a vibrant urban center at the core of the decades-long Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This book shows how colonialism, far from being simply a fixture of the past as is often suggested, remains a crucial component of Palestinian and Israeli realities today. Abowd deftly illuminates everyday life under Israel's long military occupation as it is defined by processes and conditions of "apartness" and separation as Palestinians are increasingly regulated and controlled. Abowd examines how both national communities are progressively divided by walls, checkpoints, and separate road networks in one of the most segregated cities in the world. Drawing upon recent theories on racial politics, colonialism, and urban spatial dynamics, Colonial Jerusalem analyzes the politics of myth, history, and memory across an urban landscape integral to the national cosmologies of both Palestinians and Israelis and meaningful to all communities.

The simple act of inscription, both minute and epic, can be a powerful tool to bear witness and give voice to those, who are oppressed, silenced, and forgotten. In the eras of Hafiz al-Asad and his son Bashar, Syrian political dissidents have written, extensively about their experiences of detention, both while in prison and afterwards. This body of writing, largely untranslated into English, is essential to understanding the oppositional political culture among dissidents since the 1970s, a culture that laid the foundation for the 2011 Syrian Revolution. The emergence of prison literature as a specific genre helped articulate opposition to authoritarian states, including the Asad regime. However, the significance of Syrian prison literature goes beyond a form of witnessing, expressing creative opposition, and illuminating the larger cultural and historical backstory of the Syrian uprising. Prison literature, in all its diversity, challenges the narrative structures and conventional language of human rights. In doing so, prison literature has played an essential role in generating the "experimental shift" in Arabic literature since the 1960s. Taleghani's groundbreaking work explores prison writing's critical role in resistance movements in Syria, the evolution of Arabic literature, and the development of a global human rights.

Over the last three decades, Hezbollah has developed from a small radical organization into a major player in the Lebanese, regional, and even international political arenas. Its influence in military issues is well known, but its role in shaping cultural and political activities has not received enough attention. Kanaaneh sheds new light on the organization's successful evolution as a counterhegemonic force in the region's resistance movement, known as "Muqawama." Founded on the idea that Islam is a resisting religion, whose real heroes are the poor populations who have finally decided to take action, Hezbollah has, shifted its focus to advocate for social justice issues and to attract ordinary activists to its cause. From the mid-1990s on, Hezbollah has built alliances that allow it to pursue soft power in Lebanon, fighting against both the dominant Shi'ite elites and the Maronite-Sunni, as well as Israeli and US influence in the region. Kanaaneh argues that this perpetual resistance-military, as well as cultural and political is, fundamental to Hezbollah's continued success.

During the postwar period of 1948-56, over 400,000 Jews from the Middle East and Asia immigrated to the newly established state of Israel. By the end of the 1950s, Mizrahim, also known as Oriental Jewry, represented the ethnic majority of the Israeli Jewish population. Despite their large numbers, Mizrahim were considered outsiders because of their non-European origins. Viewed as foreigners who came from culturally backward and distant lands, they suffered decades of socioeconomic, political, and educational injustices. In this pioneering work, Roby traces the Mizrahi population's struggle for equality and civil rights in Israel. Although the daily "bread and work" demonstrations are considered the first political expression of the Mizrahim, Roby demonstrates the myriad ways in which they agitated for change. Drawing upon a wealth of archival sources, many only recently declassified, Roby details the activities of the highly ideological and politicized young Israel. Police reports, court transcripts, and protester accounts document a diverse range of resistance tactics, including sit-ins, tent protests, and hunger strikes. Roby shows how the Mizrahi intellectuals and activists in the 1960s began to take note of the American civil rights movement, gaining inspiration from its development and drawing parallels between their experience and that of other marginalized ethnic groups. The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion shines a light on a largely forgotten part of Israeli social history, one that profoundly shaped the way Jews from African and Asian countries engaged with the newly founded state of Israel.

According to the Qur'an, God created two parallel species, man and the jinn, the former from clay and the latter from fire. Beliefs regarding the jinn are deeply integrated into Muslim culture and religion, and have a constant presence in legends, myths, poetry, and literature. In Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn, Amira El-Zein explores the integral role these mythological figures play, revealing that the concept of jinn is fundamental to understanding Muslim culture and tradition. Examining closely a wide range of sources, from the fields of law, theology, and folklore, El-Zein clearly places the status of the jinn in the metaphysical and cosmological economy of Islam. The author also illuminates the Islamic concept of the jinn by comparing it to other similar concepts in different religions and mythologies. She probes the complex relationships between the jinn and humans, as well as the jinn and animals, providing critical insights into the function of the jinn in the process of poetic and cultural creation. The author's access to Arabic sources and her ability to contextualize them make this a compelling and thorough account, enriching our knowledge of Islamic religion and tradition.

Described by historians as a "total war," World War I was the first conflict that required a comprehensive mobilization of all members of society, regardless of profession, age, or gender. Just as women became heads of households and joined the workforce in unprecedented numbers, children also became actively engaged in the war effort. Adding a new dimension to the historiography of World War I, Maksudyan explores the variegated experiences and involvement of Ottoman children and youth in the war. Rather than simply passive victims, children became essential participants as soldiers, wage earners, farmers, and artisans. They also contributed to the propaganda and mobilization effort as symbolic heroes and orphans of martyrs. Rebelling against their orphanage directors or trade masters, marching and singing proudly with their scouting companies, making long-distance journeys to receive vocational training or simply to find their families, they acquired new identities and discovered new forms of agency. Maksudyan focuses on four different groups of children: thousands of orphans in state orphanages (Darüleytam), apprentice boys who were sent to Germany, children and youth in urban centers who reproduced rivaling nationalist ideologies, and Armenian children who survived the genocide. With each group, the author sheds light on how the war dramatically impacted their lives and, in turn, how these self-empowered children, sometimes described as "precocious adults," actively shaped history.

In the last few decades, the media, academics, and the general public have put considerable focus on Muslim culture and politics around the world. Specifically, the rising population of young Muslims has generated concerns about religious radicalism, Islamism, and conflicts in multicultural societies. However, few studies have been devoted to how a new generation of Muslims is reshaping society in positive ways. In Political Muslims, Abbas and Hamid provide a new perspective on Muslim youth, presenting them as agents of creative social change and as active participants in cultural and community organizations where resistance leads to negotiated change. In a series of case studies that cross the globe, contributors capture the experiences of being young and Muslim in ten countries-the United States, Canada, Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, and Indonesia. They examine urban youth from various socioeconomic backgrounds, addressing issues that range from hybrid identities and student activism to the strategic use of music and social media. With diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches, Political Muslims gives readers a nuanced and authentic understanding of the everyday social, economic, and political realities of young people.

As an Iranian Muslim woman and a granddaughter of a well-known ayatollah, Shahla Haeri was accepted into the communities where she conducted her fieldwork on mut'a, temporary marriage. Mut'a is legally sanctioned among the Twelver Shi'ites who live predominantly in Iran. Drawing on rich interviews that would have been denied a Western anthropologist, the author describes the concept of a temporary-marriage contract, in which a man and an unmarried woman (virgin, widow, or divorcee) decide how long they want to stay married to each other (from one hour to ninety-nine years) and how much money is to be given to the temporary wife. Since the Iranian revolution of 1979, the regime has conduction an intensive campaign to revitalize this form of marriage, and Shi'i ulama (religious scholars) support it as positive, self-affirming, and cognizant of human needs. Challenged by secularly educated urban Iranian women, and men and by the West, the ulama have been called upon to address themselves to the implications of this custom for modern Iranian society, to respond to the changes that mut'a is legally equivalent to hire or lease, that it is abusive of women, and that it is in fact legalized prostitution. Law if Desire thus makes available previously untapped and undocumented data about an institution in which sexuality, morality, religious rules, secular laws, and cultural practices converge. This important work will be of interest to cultural anthropologist, religious scholars, scholars of the Middle East, and lawyers as well as to those interested in the role of women in Islamic society.

Situated in the fields of contemporary literary and cultural studies, the ten essays collected in Generations of Dissent shed light on the artistic creativity, cultural production, intellectual movements, and acts of political dissidence across the Middle East and North Africa. Born of the contributors' research on dissidence and state co-option in a variety of artistic and creative fields, the volume's core themes reflect the notion that the recent Arab uprisings did not appear in a cultural, political, or historical vacuum. Rather than focus on how protestors "finally" broke the walls of fear created by authoritarian regimes in the region, these essays show that the uprisings were rooted in multiple generations and various acts of resistance decades prior to 2010—11. Firat and Taleghani's volume maps the complicated trajectories of artistic and creative dissent across time and space, showing how artists have challenged institutions and governments over the past six decades.

The eighteen essays in this volume cover a wide range of material and reevaluate women's studies and Middle Eastern studies, Muslim women and the Shari'a courts, the Ottoman household, Dhimmi communities, children and family law, morality, and violence.

While the occupation of Iraq and its aftermath has received media and political attention, we know very little about the everyday lives of Iraqis. Iraqi men, women, and children are not merely passive victims of violence, vulnerable recipients of repressive regimes, or bystanders of their country's destruction. In the face of danger and trauma, Iraqis continue to cope, preparing food, sending their children to school, socializing, telling jokes, and dreaming of a better future. Within the realm of imagination and creative expression, the editors find that many Iraqi artists have not only survived but have also sought healing. In We Are Iraqis, Al-Ali and Al-Najjar showcase written and visual contributions by Iraqi artists, writers, poets, filmmakers, photographers, and activists. Contributors explore the way Iraqis retain, subvert, and produce art and activism as ways of coping with despair and resisting chaos and destruction. The first anthology of its kind, We Are Iraqis brings into focus the multitude of ethnicities, religions, and experiences that are all part of Iraq.

When they initiated a war on drugs in 1979, Iran developed a reputation as having some of the world's harshest drug penalties and as an opponent of efforts to reform global drug policy. As mass incarceration failed to stem the growth of drug use, Iran shifted its policies in 1990 to introduce treatment regimens that focus on rehabilitation. While most Muslim countries and some Western states still do not espouse welfare-oriented measures, Iran has established several harm-reduction centers nationwide through the welfare system for those who use substances. In doing so, Iran moved from labeling drug users as criminals to patients. In Life on Drugs in Iran, Anaraki moves beyond these labels to explore the lived experience of those who use and have used illicit substances and the challenges they face as a result of the state's shifting policies. Gaining remarkable access to a community that has largely been ignored by researchers, Anaraki chronicles the lives of current and former substance users in prisons, treatment centers, and NGOs. In each setting, individuals are criminalized, medicalized, and marginalized as the system attempts to "normalize" them without addressing the root cause of the problem. Drawing upon first-hand accounts, Anaraki's groundbreaking study takes an essential step in humanizing people with substance abuse issues in Iran.

Three devastating epidemics swept Egypt in the 1940's killing more people than all the wars Egypt has fought in the twentieth century. Egypt's Other Wars vividly reconstructs the nation's struggle against malaria, relapsing fever, and cholera and explores the unique combination of forces that put public health at the top of the national political agenda. Egypt in the 1940's as in the throes of a nationalist upheaval. Nationalists of all political ideologies attributed the sever epidemics that the country was experiencing to Egypt's status as an underdeveloped and colonized nation. The epidemics were therefore viewed for the first time as not only a public health crisis but also a political problem that called for a political solution.

Arabic is unconditionally the national language of Palestinians, but for many it is no longer their mother-tongue. More than a century after the early waves of immigration to the Americas, and more than seven decades after the Nakba of 48, generations of Palestinians have grown up in a variety of different contexts within Israel-Palestine and the world at large. This ongoing scattered state has led to the proliferation of Palestinian culture as it is simultaneously growing in multiple directions, depending on geographical, political, and lingual contextualization. The Palestinian story no longer exists exclusively in Arabic. A new generation of Palestinian and Palestinian-descended writers and artists from both Latin and North America, Scandinavia, and Europe at large, as well as Israel-Palestine are bringing stories of their heritage and the Palestinian nation into a variety of languages such Spanish, Italian, English, Danish, and Hebrew-among so many other languages. “Being There, Being Here” is the product of an eight-year long journey in which Maurice Ebileeni explores how the Palestinian homeland is being imagined in multiple languages from a variety of positions both locally and globally. The book poses unsettling questions about this current situation and also looks to the future to speculate about how a Palestinian nation might still house the notion of home for an increasingly diverse Palestinian population.

The Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, devastated Palestinian lives and shattered Palestinian society, culture, and economy. It also nipped in the bud a nascent grassroots, binational alliance between Arab and Jewish citrus growers. This significant and unprecedented partnership was virtually erased from the collective memory of both Israelis and Palestinians when the Nakba decimated villages and populations in a matter of months. In The Lost Orchard, Kabha and Karlinsky tell the story of the Palestinian citrus industry from its inception until 1950, tracing the shifting relationship between Palestinian Arabs and Zionist Jews. Using rich archival and primary sources, as well as on a variety of theoretical approaches, Kabha and Karlinsky portray the industry's social fabric and stratification, detail its economic history, and analyze the conditions that enabled the formation of the unique binational organization that managed the country's industry from late 1940 until April 1948.

“War Remains” traces the poetics of ruination and resistance in select contemporary Lebanese wartime literature, cultural production, and sites of memory. Drawing upon work from southern Lebanon and Beirut, Khayyat examines how war remains are employed as a resistant trope in the intellectual spaces of war's aftermath. She focuses on "Southern Counterpublics," a collective of poets, novelists, activists, artists, and ordinary citizens and their war-inspired creative productions that speak to the ruins' capacity to be reframed, recycled, and recontested. Khayyat argues that the ruins of war can be thought of as a generative milieu for resistant thought and action. An ambitious and provocative work, War Remains ventures to the so-called margins to archive the texture and substance rendered invisible when studies of memory rely solely on data furnished by official narratives and military accounts of war.

The emergence of Turkish nationalism prior to World War I opened the way for various ethnic, religious, and cultural stereotypes to link the notion of the "Other" to the concept of national identity. The founding elite took up a massive project of social engineering that now required the amplification of Turkishness as an essential concept of the new nation-state. The construction of Others served as a backdrop to the articulation of Turkishness—and for Turkey in many ways, the Arab in his keffiyeh and traditional garb constituted the ultimate Other. In this nuanced and richly detailed study, Ilkim Büke Okyar brings the everyday production of nationalist discourse into the mainstream political and historical narrative of modern Turkey. Okyar shifts the focus of inquiry from the abstract discourses of elite intellectuals to the visual rhetoric of popular culture, where Arabs as the non-national Others hold a front seat. Drawing upon previously neglected colloquial Turkish sources, Okyar challenges the notion that ethnoreligious stereotypes of Arabs are limited to the Western conception of the Other. She shows how the emergence of the printing press and the subsequent explosion of news media contributed to formulating the Arab as the binary opposite of the Turk. The book shows how the cartoon press became one of the most significant platforms in the construction, maintenance, and mobilization of Turkish nationalism through the perceived image of the Arab that was haunted forever by ethnic and religious origins.

Confronting the past has become a byword for democratization. How societies and governments commemorate their violent pasts is often appraised as a litmus test of their democratization claims. Regardless of how critical such appraisals may be, they tend to share a fundamental assumption: commemoration, as a symbol of democratization, is ontologically distinct from violence. The pitfalls of this assumption have been nowhere more evident than in Turkey whose mainstream image on the world stage has rapidly descended from a regional beacon of democracy to a hotbed of violence within the space of a few recent years. In “Victims of Commemoration”, Eray Çayli draws upon extensive fieldwork he conducted in the prelude to the mid-2010s when Turkey's global image fell from grace. This ethnography-the first of its kind-explores both activist and official commemorations at sites of state-endorsed violence in Turkey that have become the subject of campaigns for memorial museums. Reversing the methodological trajectory of existing accounts, Çayli works from the politics of urban and architectural space to grasp ethnic, religious, and ideological marginalization. “Victims of Commemoration” reveals that, whether campaigns for memorial museums bear fruit or not, architecture helps communities concentrate their political work against systemic problems. Sites significant to Kurdish, Alevi, and revolutionary-leftist struggles for memory and justice prompt activists to file petitions and lawsuits, organize protests, and build new political communities. In doing so, activists not only uphold the legacy of victims but also reject the identity of a passive victimhood being imposed on them. They challenge not only the ways specific violent pasts and their victims are represented, but also the structural violence which underpins deep-seated approaches to nationhood, publicness and truth, and which itself is a source of victimhood. “Victims of Commemoration” complicates our tendency to presume that violence ends where commemoration begins and that architecture's role in both is reducible to a question of symbolism.

With an estimated population of 35 million, Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without an independent state of their own. Kurds constitute about 20 percent of Turkey, the largest Kurdish population in the region. The history of the Kurds in Turkey is marked by state violence against them and decades of conflict between the Turkish military and Kurdish fighters. Although the continuous struggle of the Kurdish people is well known, and the political actors involved in the conflict have received much attention, an increasing wave of scholarship is being written from the vantage point of the Kurds themselves. Alemdaroglu and Göçek's volume develops a fresh approach by moving away from top-down Turkish nationalist macroanalyses to a microanalysis of how Kurds and Kurdistan as historical and ethnic categories were constructed from the bottom up. Contributors look beyond the politics of state actors to examine how Kurdish workers, women, youth, and political prisoners experience and resist marginalization, exclusion, and violence. Kurds in Dark Times opens an essential window into the lives of Kurds by generating meaningful insights into the formal and informal ways of negotiating their power and place in Turkey; and therefore, it provides crucial perspectives for any endeavor to create peace and reconciliation in the country.

What accounts for the regression of Turkey's stature from a "model" country to one riddled with state crisis and conflict? Unable to adapt to the challenges of the era and failing to respond to ethnic and multicultural political demands for reform, the Turkish state has resisted change and stuck to its ideological roots stemming from the 1930s. In Turkey's State Crisis, Aras delves into the historical, political, and geopolitical background of the country's decline. In an effort to delineate the origin of the crisis, Aras investigates several perspectives: the political elites' attempt to change the administrative system to create a performance-oriented one, the bureaucracy's response, concerns, and resistance to change, the state's conflict resolution capacity, and the transformation of foreign/security policy. Providing a comprehensive portrait of the Turkish state's turmoil, Aras creates a blueprint for the ways in which much-needed reforms can break vicious cycles of political polarization, rising authoritarianism, and weak state institutions.