State and Islam in Jordan: The Contested Islamic Modern

Palestine and Trans-Jordan emerged as modern states; this was in consequence of British war commitments to its allies during the First World War. Sir Mark Sykes, a senior Foreign Office official, together with George Picot, a French diplomat, set out in May 1917, to discuss matters with Sherif Hussein of Mecca, in order to co-ordinate the Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916,1 with the British commitments made previously to the Arabs.2 Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, instructed Sir Mark Sykes if possible to secure the addition of Palestine to the British area. Both the Prime Minister and Lord Curzon impressed on Sir Mark Sykes 'the importance of not prejudicing the Zionist movement and the possibility of its development under British auspices'. Sir Mark Sykes himself held the opinion 'that the Arabs probably realised that there was no prospect of their being allowed any control over Palestine'.' Therefore, Great Britain was free to dispose of Palestine as it wished. Thus, on 2 November 1917, by the 'Balfour Declaration', Great Britain committed itself to the establishment of the Jewish National Home in Palestine.4 Sir Mark Sykes drew up a political plan by which an Arab Kingdom would be established in areas 'A' and 'B' as had been designated in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, namely, the interior of Syria and the area east of the Jordan.5 The military organization of war against the Ottoman Empire determined that there be a division of the Hijaz theatre of war and the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (hereafter EEF) theatre of war. The line of separation ran from a point south of Akaba to a point south of Ma'an.6 Trans-Jordan and Syria were reserved as sub-theatres of war for the operations of the Arab Army headed by Prince Faisal, son of the Sherif Hussein of Mecca, subject to the supreme command of the Commander in Chief of the EEF. Palestine was designated the main theatre of war for the EEF. The organization of war drew up a sketch map separating Trans-Jordan from the Hijaz and Trans-Jordan from Palestine. At that time, the term 'Palestine' meant 'Palestine proper i.e. the area west of the Jordan-Dead Sea-Akaba line and south of the Lebanon, which forms the Sanjak of

A Translation and Critical Review of Yu Kil-Chun's On Neutrality In Kwan Hwang I. The Translation* In general there are two kinds ofneutrality practiced in international relations: simple neutrality, in time of war, and perpetual (or permanent) neutrality. Simple neutrality is the condition of a state which, in time of war, takes no part in the hostilities. In time of war between two states, the neighboring states can declare a neutral zone beyond which the belligerents cannot cross, and let the two belligerents settle the war between themselves, within their own territorial boundaries. If a neutral state cannot maintain its neutrality, due to its weakness, its neighboring states may offer joint defense for its neutrality. This practice of offering joint defense under extraordinary circumstances is sanctioned by customary international law. Perpetual (or permanent) neutrality, on the other hand, is the status of institutionalized neutrality for a small, weak state whose strategicgeopolitical location may become a security threat to its neighboring states, ifit is not able to maintain its own independence, due to rivalries among the greater powers. Thus, perpetual neutrality is a special international status which is usually brought about by international agreements or conventions between the state-to-be neutralized and a group of other states, in order to collectively protect and guarantee the independence of the neutral state (permanently), both in time ofwar and in time ofpeace. Ifthe neutrality of a state is violated, it is expected that the guarantor states would apply a collective sanction against the violator, in order to preserve the neutrality. At present Belgium and Bulgaria, in Europe, are examples of such neutrality, and several islands in the Black Sea region are designated as neutral zones. As a rule international law recognizes only a sovereign, independent state as eligible to acquire the neutral status. For example, I HWANG Belgium is such a country. However, Bulgaria has established a status of neutrality (autonomy) under the suzerainty of Turkey (the Ottoman Empire), to which it still sends tribute. Several islands in the Black Sea region, which are under the control of other states, also enjoy the status of neutrality. Such practice of informal neutrality is protected by international law. Today, geopolitically speaking, our country (Korea) is situated in the most strategic area in Asia, as Belgium is in Europe. Politically Korea is much like Bulgaria, under Turkey's suzerainty, as it sends tribute to China. But unlike Bulgaria, Korea has established numerous diplomatic and trade relations with other countries as an independent and equal state. However, our country is not similar to Belgium in that it is still under suzerain-vassal relationship with China. In any case, the international political status of our country is similar to that of Belgium and Bulgaria put together. While the perpetual neutrality of Belgium was established by the greater European powers to create a state of equilibrium in Europe as a policy of mutual security, the Bulgarian neutrality (autonomy) came into being as a result ofthe European policy to halt the southward expansionism of the Russian Empire. Viewed in this context, the neutrality of our country of Asia would also serve as a deterrent to the Russian southward movement, and as an instrument for guaranteeing the security ofall the great powers involved in Asia. Russia has vast territory and a large army; she never ceases to expand her domain by swallowing up small countries in Central Asia and enslaving their people on the pretext ofprotecting them. Although it is a well-known fact that, in general, the great powers have a penchant for dominating and absorbing the lesser powers, Russia is most notorious for its flagrant violations of the international code of behavior, for its barbarism, and for its never-ending pursuit of territorial expansion and Russification. Using the religious conflicts among the believers as a pretext, Russia went to war with Turkey and occupied Moldavia and Walachia, expanding its territory into the European sphere of influence. At this juncture the major European powers, namely Great Britain and France, together with other countries, offered joint assistance to Turkey, in order to stop the Russian aggression. Unable to resist the European pressure, and realizing the difficulties of fighting in...

Islamic political thought over the past two centuries might best be studied around the theme of a new era in which all parts of the Muslim world responded to alien intrusion. Western hegemony reached different parts of the Muslim world at different times and differed in its intensity, but it was well under way by 1800. In the process the various Muslim polities (whether empires or states or lesser units) all faced a new reality that led in most cases to outright Western colonial rule, a development that reached a peak in the peace settlement following the First World War. Only Afghanistan, parts of Arabia, Iran and the Anatolian core of the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) escaped colonial rule but they experienced their own forms of persistent Western pressure. Thereafter came decolonisation, mainly achieved in the two decades following the Second World War. Even with formal independence, however, the perception, not lacking in some reality, of the Muslim political leadership and their populations has been that they are controlled by the alien other. As the timing and pattern of the Western intrusions differ so also did the circumstances within the diverse Muslim world make for different responses. The Ottoman Empire in 1800 had existed for roughly a half millennium, possessed a long-established government staffed by Muslims who ruled over a multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire with, however, a considerable Muslim majority.

France and the Partition Plan: 1947–1948

With the importance of the use of diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, Foreign Ministry gained an effective position in the state administration. This prominence had a direct impact on implementation of reforms at larger scale which was the general characteristics of the era. Therefore, Foreign Ministry stood out among the other institutions of the state due to some of its characteristics and bureaucrats from Foreign Ministry undertook important state duties. This article focuses on the reasons of Foreign Ministry playing a more active role than other institutions during Ottoman Empire’s era of modernization in the 19th century. As a result, the accuracy of the claim that the Foreign Ministry had a superior role in the 19th century Turkish public administration due to certain qualities it possesses; has been explained in details by using archive documents, the sources of the period and literature review.

The modern history of the Northern Africa (Egypt and the Maghreb) was marked with the progress in transformation of the local social and political institutions with at the same a vast expansion of the Ottoman Porte and later of the West European powers. The Arab Maghreb which firstly became an object of the European aggression from Spain and Portugal in the 15th — 16th CC. later joined the Ottoman Empire together with Egypt. Morocco, however, managed to save its formal independence until the very beginning of the 20th C.A.D. With the European expansion in the 19th C. the Northern Africa turned into a field of colonial experiments: from the direct military occupation to the assimilation politics of the French departments in Algeria, with a later introducing the protectorate regimes in Tunisia and Morocco and transforming Egypt into a zone of strategic communications between the Great Britain and its colonies in Arabia and India. The civilization interaction within the Northern Africa during the colonial epoch brought to light, both in Europe and Russia, a numerous academic historiography, defining main trends in studying modern history of Egypt and the Maghreb area — the most important crossroads of the historical contacts between the peoples and cultures of the Orient and the Occident.

Review: <i>Knowledge, Ideology, and Civilization: An Attempt at Understanding History (Arabic Edition)</i>, by Ali Jarbawi

Reviewed by: Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World by Gary Wilder Brett A. Berliner (bio) Wilder, Gary. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2015. Freedom, it turns out, was—and is—complex, especially for colonized peoples. Post World War II colonial activists, revolutionaries who actively struggled against the European imperial order and were instrumental in decolonization and the creation of independent, autonomous national states in Africa, have long been lionized. By contrast, these radicals and, later, intellectuals and historians have not always so judiciously considered the ideas of individuals who advocated for decolonization as something other than the establishment of independent national states. Perhaps these latter critics will be more judicious, now, after reading Gary Wilder’s Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World, a thoughtful and challenging work on the often maligned Negritude thinkers, poets, and politicians Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, both of whom presciently understood that decolonization with formal independence was no guarantee for “substantive freedom” (2). [End Page 229] Rather than retelling the often tortuous machinations of French decolonization and the resulting creation both of Departments in the Antilles and of new nations in Africa, Wilder explores the political forms that Césaire and Senghor imagined were possible after the War. Wilder’s task is ambitious: to “think with” Césaire and Senghor, both of whom imagined and favored decolonization as the creation of a democratic French federation; in addition, Wilder explores the temporality of the politics and poetics in Césaire’s and Senghor’s writing, and, finally, he wishes to do nothing less than “decolonize intellectual history” (11). Césaire, the poet, may be best known for his interwar masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to The Native Land. But Wilder is not interested in situating Césaire in the now well-known fertile, interwar diaspora in Paris that helped give rise to the poem and, with Senghor, Negritude. Rather, Wilder’s contribution is to map Césaire’s wartime writing in Martinique in the avant-garde, rather surrealist journal he published with Suzanne Césaire, his wife, and René Ménil, his friend. In a close, insightful reading of Césaire’s poetry in Tropiques, Wilder argues that Césaire wished to go beyond focusing on recovering a black identity for the projection onto the world of an Antillean model of humanity. Césaire’s concept of humanity, Wilder contends, is further developed in his essay on “Poetry and Knowledge,” written first for a conference he attended in Haiti in 1944, and reprinted in Tropiques in 1945. In this essay, Césaire articulates an elevated form of reason: “poetic knowledge,” where “all the pasts, all the futures . . . [are] summoned”; it is a way of knowing, Wilder interprets, “through which modern antinomies are not denied but transcended” (30). This liberating temporal thinking, which overcomes antinomies, is characteristically “untimely,” a concept central to Wilder’s argument. The untimely, he posits, is when “conventional distinctions between past, present and future no longer obtain . . . [and can] lead social actors . . . to act as if they inhabited an epoch that had already passed or had not yet arrived. . . . [which] can serve either transformative or conservative ends” (37). Analyzing Walter Benjamin’s discussion of time, to name just one among a constellation of thinkers discussed here, Wilder elaborates on the untimely, more simply, as a drawing on the past “not to recognize it . . . as ‘the way it really was’ but to grasp the revolutionary possibilities of the present,” which was one of Césaire’s major contributions (45). In other words, Wilder suggests, we should examine the historical references a social actor makes to understand their intentions. Senghor, too, Wilder argues, developed a poetic imagination that opened possibilities and was profoundly political, contrary to how many characterized the Negritude movement. Indeed, as late as 1976, when he was speaking in Martinique, Senghor defended Negritude as about more than being and living black and privileging cultural celebration: “politics,” Senghor asserted, “must be in the service of culture and not culture in the service of politics” (51). Wilder then returns to Senghor’s immediate postwar poetry...

The third Arab-Israeli war, June 5–10, 1967, has been variously described as the first major conventional war between a modern state and a not-yet-modern society, as an instance of Western imperial aggression by proxy, or as a tragic ritual of the ineluctable Middle Eastern war game. Some analysts see it is as a prelude to a Vietnam-style people's war of liberation or even a nuclear war, those more optimistic as an end to all war in the Middle East. The third Arab-Israeli war is thus likely to be studied with interest by historians, strategists, military sociologists, political scientists, and even by armaments sellers.

The formation and development of the concept of “citizenship” as one of the most important tools for state and national construction is largely due to the historical and ethno-cultural context. As a consequence of the developing centrifugal tendencies in the Ottoman Empire, reforms were undertaken in various spheres of society, including those concerning the introduction of a new community — the national state — instead of the old millet system. The ongoing processes of formation of national-state identity in the Middle East region make it relevant to consider it from various methodological and substantive positions. The article attempts to consider the features of the terminology reflecting the concept of “citizenship” in the Ottoman Empire and its Arab provinces in the historical and linguistic aspect. The European tradition is characterized by the opposition of the concepts of nationality and citizenship, due to the diversity of their emergence, the Arab tradition does not have a direct analogy with the concepts of the nation and the national state.

Reviewed by: Xenocracy: State, Class, and Colonialism in the Ionian Islands, 1815–1864 by Sakis Gekas Evdoxios Doxiadis (bio) Sakis Gekas. Xenocracy: State, Class, and Colonialism in the Ionian Islands, 1815–1864. New York: Berghahn. 2017. Pp. xii + 368. Cloth $130. Sakis Gekas's Xenocracy is a significant contribution to the literature about British colonial rule in the Ionian Islands. The book makes an important contribution by focusing on the colonial administration through the Foucauldian lens of governmentality and by examining the emergence of a commercial, professional, and administrative bourgeoisie. The work is thoroughly researched, especially with regard to the records of the British colonial administration, and its economic focus makes it a unique and interesting companion to earlier works, such as Thomas Gallant's Experiencing Dominion (2002). The first chapter, "The First Greek State and the Origins of Colonial Governmentality," introduces the main themes, discussing the transformation of the Ionian islands from Venetian possessions to a British-controlled but nominally autonomous state. For the author, this transitional period (1797–1814) [End Page 215] was crucial in the development of Ionian governmentality regarding new approaches to governance. The second chapter, "Building the Colonial State," examines the foundation of British rule on the Ionian Islands. Colonial administration combined individual liberalism, meaning that individuals enjoyed certain constitutional rights and freedoms, with autocracy, since the powers of the British commissioners often trumped any constitutional liberties. Gekas situates Ionian governance within the British colonial system and compares it with other British-held territories, such as Malta, Quebec, and Mauritius. This comparative approach, which pervades the book, is one of its strongest points. Gekas's description of British ideas regarding the Ionian islanders is not necessarily new, since Gallant and others have also commented extensively on it, but the references to the British experience of governance in other parts of the globe give the discussion an important nuance for understanding British concerns and policies. Gekas contextualizes the discussion by referring to the reception of British Ionian rule in British society and Parliament, an often ignored facet of the complexities of British rule. The second chapter also discusses local resistance to British policies and taxation. Though brief, his discussion on British responses to the violence on the islands and the attempts to disarm the population is pertinent and tied to the revolutionary upheavals of the 1820s in Italy and Greece. Gekas draws an interesting parallel between the policies of the British administration and those of the Bavarian Regency in Greece (75), a comparison that he returns to at different times in his discussion. Chapter 3, "Laws, Colonialism, and State Formation," delves deeper into the idea of governmentality, examining how concepts of sovereignty and government applied to a supposedly independent state that was ruled by foreign officials. An interesting assertion regarding legal and economic reforms is that they should not be seen as "the product of colonial rule but a process of modernization" that drew much from local legal expertise developed under French rule and subsequent British colonialism (81). The chapter devotes significant space to the examination of the legal system with special focus on the police and criminal justice system. The reform of the criminal code as a process of "civilizing" (91) is discussed extensively and successfully augments earlier works on violence and criminal justice (Gallant 2002). Chapter 4, "Colonial Knowledge and the Making of Ionian Governmentality," discusses the emergence of a modern bureaucratic state under colonial paternalism. The chapter contains a fascinating discussion on the question of citizenship and nationality, tying it to questions of surveillance, immigration, and refugees. The arrival of Christian refugees from the Ottoman Empire even prior to the Greek War of Independence forced the authorities to address [End Page 216] the question of citizenship and the legal status of refugees, such as those from Parga. The same question pertained to immigrants from the adjacent Ottoman territories as well as those from places like Malta. The authorities' response to the problem of regulating mobility was to issue passports to those arriving on or departing from the islands (including seasonal migrants, Ionian merchants, Italian citizens), thus enhancing the government's ability to surveille and control the population. The next chapter, "A True and...

Géza Pálffy. <i>Hungary between Two Empires 1526–1711</i>.

This paper challenges ‘the myth’ of the demise of Arab nationalism after the Arab–Israeli War in 1967 that appears in the scholarship of international relations of the Middle East (IRME). I argue instead that Arab nationalism plays a constitutive role in ideologically linking the issue of Bahrain’s post-colonial state sovereignty and foreign policy on alignment, showing its political salience after 1967 in what I call ‘the Juffair dilemma’: the Al Khalifa regime’s dilemma in aligning with the US after Bahrain’s formal independence. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s ‘national-popular collective will’ to re-conceptualise Arab nationalism, the paper further argues that the impact of Arab nationalism on Bahrain’s alignment was revealed through a political struggle between the Al Khalifa regime and the Bahraini New Arab Left, corresponding to wider regional and international anti-imperialist movements in the context of the Cold War. This struggle manifested Arab nationalism as a non-collective will, in which ideological disconnections existed between ‘the people’ and the regime, in Bahrain. It then created the context where the issue of alignment was related to the contestation of sovereignty and the Palestinian question, which was the source of the Al Khalifa regime’s dilemma in making alignment with the US.

Once the Fascist dictatorship completed its national political consolidation at the end of 1929, it directed more and more of its attention towards setting out an explicit Fascist foreign policy in...

The ethnic and political development of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a multinational monarchy at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century was determined by several groups of contradictions. First, the internal contradictions between the state and ethnic and social communities. Secondly, the interests of the peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose national movements sought national selfdetermination and its political and legal formalization in the form of national statehood, did not coincide completely or permanently with each other. Thirdly, by the constant contradictions between two full-fledged peoples, three peoples ‘in formation, and the rest — non-full-fledged nations. The Poles, Czechs, and Croats, although they were not equal in their political and legal status to the Austrian Germans and Hungarians (Magyars), had their own state law, which made their position ambivalent. Fourthly, the cross-border political influence of neighbouring states on the internal political development of those regions of the Empire, certain peoples of which were in ethnic kinship with the population of adjacent national and multinational states which conflicted with the desire of the dynasty and the central authorities of Cisleithania and Transleithania to limit the problem of strategic minorities exclusively to the imperial space. Three multinational Empires — Austria- Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire — failed to complete the modernization process and to provide their peoples with new legal forms of national selfdetermination within the existing borders. In 1919 — 1920 in Versailles (as well as in Neuill-sur-Seine, in the Saint-Germain Palace, in the Grand Trianon Palace and in Sevres), the victorious powers (the Great Britain, France, the US, and Italy) decided the fate of the countries of Central (Central and Southeastern) Europe.