Modern Middle East Research Articles

Introduction: new trends in Gulf international relations and transnational politics

Abstract Arabian Peninsula politics are in a period of enormous transformation. In the context of a new generation of rulers seeking legitimacy through ambitious foreign policy regimes, shifting relations with Iran, the 2017–2021 Qatar crisis, and ongoing conflict in Yemen, this article introduces the July 2021 special section of International Affairs, which examines how the Arab states of the Gulf are adapting to these new realities. Questions addressed include: how have transnational identities been manipulated by states during regional disputes? How have oil and gas revenues been redirected to build up religious soft power and enhance state branding efforts? In an increasingly authoritarian world, how has transnational repression interacted with politicized diasporas to impact opposition mobilization? And, how do disputes over airspace help us understand the process of sovereignty-building in the modern Middle East? In pursuing these questions, the special section challenges the particularism still apparent in many analyses of the Gulf region, and seeks to bridge International Relations with fieldwork-based Gulf studies. The research presented in the section highlights new findings within contemporary research on the Gulf that will be of interest both to policy-makers and others seeking to understand the long-term sustainability and balance of power in this critical region.

Steve Tamari (ed.), Grounded Identities. Territory and Belonging in the Medieval and Early Modern Middle East and Mediterranean

Steve Tamari (ed.), Grounded Identities. Territory and Belonging in the Medieval and Early Modern Middle East and Mediterranean

The history of public health in the modern Middle East: The environmental–medical turn

AbstractThe field of Middle Eastern history began as an attempt to understand how Europeans came to dominate the region. As a result, when medicine and the environment were discussed, they were used to highlight European technological and scientific advances in these fields, and describe the processes through which Islamic medical and scientific concepts were replaced. The first wave of scholarship on the history of medicine in the region focused primarily on 19th‐century Egypt, where the state sponsored the development of a public health system to protect military readiness and combat epidemic diseases such as cholera and plague. This article highlights recent scholarship in the history of health, medicine, and the environment during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and illustrates how this lens (the “environmental‐medical turn”) provides new perspectives on the social and political history of the Middle East. I argue that the environmental‐medical turn provides a new avenue for locating illiterate members of society—the peasant and middle classes—in the archive; by exploring moments of crisis leading to protest and rebellion, and examining data revealing hardship and suffering, Middle Eastern historians can explore the complex roots of social and political events, and historians of medicine and the environment can include the region in transnational and comparative studies.

Egyptian-Israeli Relations during the Government of Mohamed Morsi (2012-2013)

The article highlights the details of the foreign policy of the Arab Republic of Egypt and its impact on the regional security of the state of Israel in between 2012-2013. After the Islamists came to power, they began to dominate expectations that the political force led by Mohamed Morsi would initiate an active anti-Israel policy, however, with active anti-Semitic rhetoric, the "Muslim brotherhood" was able to maintain peaceful relations with Israel. The purpose of this study was to characterize the relationship between M. Morsi's government and the state of Israel during the period 2012 to 2013while revealing the impact of various factors on the preservation of peace in the region, especially in the face of the conflict situation that intensified in neigh boring countries such as Libya and Syria. The main approaches to the study of the problem under consideration were analytical method and content analysis. It is concluded that the article can also contribute to the study of the history of the Middle East within the framework of Arab-Israeli relations against the deterioration of the political situation and the strengthening of religious radicalism in the region.

A Window to Urban Arabia

This set of images seeks to provide viewers with a window into Doha, Qatar, and into the urban heart of the modern Middle East that’s arisen on the Arabian Peninsula. Designed as an exhibit of phot...

Framing Sectarianism in the Middle East

AbstractThis paper argues that a long view perspective of contemporary sectarianism between Sunni and Shia Islam in the Middle East could be read on the background of earlier forms of sectarianism going back to the 19th and 20th century history of the region. Such an approach would disentangle sectarianism from primordial narratives as an intrinsic problem of Islam going back to the early schism of the 7th century and place it in social formations and social practices, and link it to the emergence of sectarianism during the Ottoman age of reforms. It would explicit arguments that link sectarianism with modernism, discussing how the emergence of modern, secular institutions that were based in early‐modern millet system led to sects and sectarianism. The outcome of this approach is conceptualization of sect and sectarianism, its categorization, and confronting it with other modern narratives of the history of the Middle East.

Getting Bashar al-Assad Very Wrong

Even in a scholarly discipline regularly upbraided for its ineptitude, Professor of Middle East History at Trinity University in San Antonio David W. Lesch stands out. Among the most rhapsodic boosters of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad since his ascension to power in 2000, Lesch has now written two books—one promoting the dictator as a Westernized peacemaker, one predicting his downfall—that have been withdrawn by their common publisher.

Studying the Middle East from Brazil: reflections on a different worldview

This paper describes and analyses the experiences of two Brazilian professors in teaching History and International Relations of the Middle East and the Arab World, both at undergraduate and graduate levels. Essentially, this paper is an exercise of comparison between the limits faced – but also the possibilities found – by the authors in the development of their activities as Latin American professors promoting the study of the Middle East and the Arab World in Brazil. Its main aim is to help scholars involved with these subject-matters to reflect on their pedagogical practices and on the knowledge they are promoting (or inhibiting) with their research proposals and teaching procedures. Anchored in the methodological techniques of participant observation and critical curriculum analysis, this paper reaches the conclusion that the socialisation of Brazilian scholars in the Anglo-Saxon literature on the Middle East when not mediated by a critical posture towards these parochial knowledges that pretend to be global, can make them more reproducers of the discourses produced in the North about the region than thinkers of the Global South capable of offering their educatees a space of knowledge production that is meaningful to them as Brazilian students.

Introduction: alcohol production and consumption in the modern Middle East

Introduction: alcohol production and consumption in the modern Middle East

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Arab Press Networks and Imperial Connectivities from Mediterranean Africa to France in the Late 19th Century

The press was an instrument of colonial governance. Yet newspapers and print also served to connect populations across borders and demonstrated how trans-imperial flows influenced empires. This article examines Arab print networks in North Africa and France. It argues that print networks assisted with processes of colonial expansion while also providing a forum for Muslim activists and Arab modernists to present their views to foreign audiences. This two-way channel illustrates how imperialism engendered new synergies that would influence political developments in both the French empire and the modern Middle East, suggesting that print networks were central to the entangled histories of empire in the modern period.

Деятельность епископа Порфирия (Успенского) на посту начальника Русской Духовной миссии в Иерусалиме (1847–1853 годы)

We analyze the missionary activity of the Bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church Porphyrius (Konstantin Aleksandrovich Uspensky) in the territory of Palestine, which was part of the Ottoman Empire in the period under study from 1847 to 1853. Porphyrius’s preliminary explora-tion of these lands to justify the expediency of establishing a Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in the region, and the patronage of this idea among the authorities of the Russian Empire, including the Chancellor Count Nesselrode and Emperor Nicholas I, are shown. We consider the educational and charitable activities of Bishop Porphyrius among the local Orthodox population, including the provision of financial assistance in the creation of public schools and a theological school for the training of clergy from the local Arab population. It is noted that along with missionary work, re-search activities were extremely important for the bishop. As an orientalist, Porphyrius described local church folklore, collected relics and copied manuscripts, and described his observations. It is noted that his colleagues also sought to reveal to the Russian society the history and culture of the Middle East; in particular, the seminarian Solovyov made sketches of the area. The relations of the bishop with the Russian and Austrian consuls are described.

Russian Sources of the Qur’anic Ethnography II. Alexander A. Adamov and His “Arabic Iraq”

The scholarly and documentary heritage, the museum collections associated with the name of Alexander A. Adamov (1870—1938), one of the leading Russian diplomats and practicing orientalists at the eve of the First World War, are undoubtedly an important source for studying the history of the Middle East at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of the rivalry of the great powers in the region. Today, however, the significance of Adamov's texts and collections takes on yet another dimension. It is Qur’anic ethnography, a new scientific field, based on the results of specialized studies of previous years, and it is closely related to the studies of the Qur’anic language and the language milieu of Arabia at the time of the Prophet, to the ethnographical field studies in Arabia and Qur’anic archaeology. Researchers of Arabia are very well familiar with the phenomenon of the long preservation of elements of traditional tangible culture and economic activities here. This phenomenon is mostly based on the specific natural and climatic conditions, which brought about a set of elements of tangible culture that have proved to be highly viable throughout many centuries. In this connection, we regard the itineraries and works of European travellers to Arabia in the second half of the 18th century — first third of the 20th century as a serious source for our research. Whereas the names and papers of the Western travellers are well known and have been often referred to in various research projects devoted to Arabia, similar Russian works are still waiting for their turn. The second article of the series is dedicated to the activities of a man who devoted a significant part of his life to the study of Iraq and the Gulf region, the areas that played a huge role in the complex and largely ambiguous processes that led to the emergence of Islam. Accurate historical and ethnographic observations of Adamov make it possible to obtain material that is important for the reconstruction of territorial units and types of settlements, types of clothing and dwellings, the specifics of water supply and irrigation methods, agriculture and horticulture, the role of different types of animals in economic circulation, and nutritional systems typical for Arabia in the time of the rise of Islam.

Georges CormArab Political Thought: Past and Present by Patricia M. Phillips-Batoma Atoma Batoma

BOOKS IN REVIEW Day. Almost all the characters, even a couple of bandits, surprisingly wear the same warm color against the gloomy social backdrop . The traditional Chinese doctrine of Confucianism is hardly mentioned in this book, but its characters behave in accordance , seemingly on instinct. The country gentlemen and stewards, young masters and hired hands, merchants and prostitutes , and all the other ordinary people struggling in the turbulent age of the late Qing Dynasty, they all shimmer unexpectedly with warmth and kindness, loyalty and humanity. From this novel, you might get the impression that Yu Hua seems to have reverted from his earlier years of being a cynical adult and turned into an innocent child, endeavoring in rebuilding a fairy land after a catastrophe, and trying to find a satisfying answer for all problems. He does want to reach a peaceful balance in this novel, like a serious reconciliation with his old sulky self. The novel starts with a quest, and it ends with emotional closure. A husband leaves his home in search of his wife; though he fails, providence brings their coffins together for a short moment on a beautiful sunny day. The key is that the reader knows. They know why she left and where she went and how she died. They know she loved him as he loved her, and she regretted every moment after leaving him, and she sent their daughter embroidered clothes, filled with a mother’s love. They know he died a hero, and she died thinking of him. They know everything . Different from Brothers and To Live, where readers are tortured with unsolved questions and unpacified grief, Wen Cheng indulges and feeds its readers with everything they want. Yu Hua endeavors to draw a perfect circle in this book. And sometimes , he even goes a little further on the path of perfecting it. The first part should end when Lin Xiangfu is killed, for usually the protagonist’s perspective is over after his death, and the writer of To Live would definitely leave it there. But today’s Yu Hua just cannot leave his death unrevenged. Of course, if he could, the second part added to patch up the tragedy would not be there either, and the whole story might make another realistic novel, instead of a romance. Gong Qiangwei China University of Mining & Technology Georges Corm Arab Political Thought: Past and Present Trans. Patricia M. Phillips-Batoma & Atoma Batoma. London. Hurst. 2020. 367 pages. AS EVENTS UNFOLD in the Arabicspeaking Middle East, whether related to the Arab-Israeli conflict, to the war in Syria, or to Trump’s so-called deal of the century more recently, we observers might be wondering what Arab intellectuals think, how they have been thinking for many decades now about politics in their respective countries and in the region. Apart from the occasional media appearance by English speakers like Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi, we likely lack historical perspective when it comes to Arab political thought. A recently published comprehensive overview by Lebanese economist Georges Corm goes a long way to fill this gap. This is not another work attempting to delve into the “Arab mind” but rather to track the evolution of Arab thought from the nineteenth century to the present. A professor of economics, political science , and contemporary history of the Middle East and North Africa, Corm has authored numerous works in French and Arabic but has little name recognition among readers in English, a reality that is somehow emblematic of one of his main points in Arab political thought: The major problem of secular or modernist thought was not its failure to conform to the realities of the Arab world. . . . Rather, its near total invisibility in academia and the media, both Western and Arab, is unquestionably what stifled it in favor of debates that were exclusively theologico-political, redundant, and circular. Whether they were portrayed positively or negatively, these debates continued to be the focus of what bordered on being a marketing campaign to promote the different Islamic movements and their leaders as if they constituted the main political and social force in the Arab world. This state of affairs led to a vicious selfperpetuating...

A Sestina in 1979

POETRY Firoozeh KashaniSabet is a novelist and a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Pennsylvania. Her creative work follows the treacherous path of politics by intruding into people’s personal lives and private spaces. Through her poems and stories, she explores some of the themes of her academic research, including alienation, prejudice, power, love, and violence. A Note on “A Sestina in 1979” by Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Islamic Republic placed restrictions on public musical performances and the pursuit of professional musical interests. Although traditional Persian music regained some of its status and popularity, the state maintained a complicated, and often negative, relationship with Western music, especially in public settings. This poem recognizes the beauty and burden of creating “boundless music” of all genres and in all social settings. A Sestina in 1979 by Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet for Lida Berberian I remember when I couldn’t read music; The pile of unfamiliar books lay listless; my hands glided across every open note, reaching out to the piano, an overture to harmonize the random sounds into one melody. I was six . . . She led me through six measures, my fingers following hers. “Music,” she hummed, “is what we’ll create.” One by one we approached my listless drills. I felt the grand piano long enough to caress every note. Her music, my only language. The note, my first alphabet. Six seasons later, we bought a new piano. The rioters outside listened to our music, the estranged waltzes. My fingers, no longer listless, had learned to crescendo from one measure to the next, perfecting one suite after another. The note from the committee arrived on a listless afternoon, as the Shah’s requiem dimmed. I had six weeks to perform a lifetime of music. My teacher stood beside the piano choosing the études, correcting my pianofortes . The voices blending into one, a deafening cry for freedom. The music fading – the stilted chord, every pedaled note. We practiced together for six days, the metronome ticking away the listless hours. Nothing seemed listless on stage, the grand piano awaiting my turn. Six pages delivered, the judges following my one remaining bar of music. Gunshots crackling with each note, a revolution unfolding as the music cruelly echoed. No listless repetitions, one last time touching the piano, harmonizing every note – Six breathless measures, a coda for boundless music. WORLDLIT.ORG 15 EBONY AND IVORY / PHOTO BY BLONDINRIKARD FRÖBERG / FLICKR ...

Egypt in the Early 20th Century in the Light of Newspaper Essays of Tadeusz Smoleński

This paper brings to light the reports and analyses written by Tadeusz Smoleński, a forgotten source on the political history of the Middle East and particularly Egypt, in the first decade of the 20th century. Tadeusz Smoleński (1884–1909), the first Polish Egyptologist, was also a regular correspondent of the Lviv daily newspaper Słowo Polskie [‘The Polish Word’]. In his reports, he outlines a panoramic view of Egypt’s extraordinarily complex political situa­tion, determined by tensions between the European powers, i.e., the rivalry between Britain and France, and between Russia and Germany. Another fac­tor whose growing importance was noted by the Polish observer, is the rise of nationalist and Islamist movements in both Egypt and the Arab world as a whole. This takes place alongside the chronic political instability of the Otto­man Empire. While acknowledging all of the beneficial aspects of British rule (especially under the consulship of Sir Evelyn Baring), Smoleński does not hide his sympathies for Mus????t????afà Kāmil Bāšā, leader of the Egyptian national­ists. In his analysis, Smoleński also hints at some analogies between the situa­tion of the Egyptians and the Poles in their ambitions to set up an independ­ent nation-state.

A Printer’s Odd Plea to Reform Legal Pluralism in Khedival Egypt

Abstract In 1871, an Italian-Jewish printer published a peculiar Arabic treatise from Cairo. It promoted strengthening legal pluralism in Khedival Egypt by realigning laws there to accord with those of the Ottoman Empire and European states. Composed by the printer’s legal team, the treatise questioned how justice could be obtained if the extraterritorial privileges of European subjects and protégés were not guaranteed. The printer had been motivated by his own plight: a test of the Egyptian merchant courts left him mired in a catch-22, whereby he could either accept an imperfect verdict, or demand extralegal measures. Choosing the latter option, the treatise embodied his desperate bid to promote his cause. Its importance stems from its very existence. It gave form to the printer’s tricky predicament by grasping at different genres of legal writing; it made his personal story relevant to all by entering it into the public domain; and it audaciously called for strengthening Roman law in Egypt. While the document’s actual influence cannot be ascertained, it anticipated wider historical developments regarding the practice and conception of print and law in the modern Middle East.

ANTHONY GORMAN and SOSSIE KASBARIAN, Eds., Diasporas of the Modern Middle East: Contextualizing Community (2015)

ANTHONY GORMAN and SOSSIE KASBARIAN, Eds., Diasporas of the Modern Middle East: Contextualizing Community (2015)

Review of Lorenzo Kamel, The Middle East: From Empire to Sealed Identities

While the scholarly literature is replete with works claiming a comprehensive analysis of modern Middle East history, few authors have actually built their investigation on identity-related perspectives. Indeed, the book, The Middle East: From Empire to Sealed Identities, proved faithful to its title, providing a clear historical view of the processes that turned the fluid and multifaceted distinctiveness, which characterised the peoples of this region under the late Ottoman Empire, into sealed-off identities...

The End of Middle East History and Other Conjectures (By Richard W. Bulliet)

Reviewed by: The End of Middle East History and Other Conjectures by Richard W. Bulliet Bruce B. Lawrence (bio) The End of Middle East History and Other Conjectures Richard W. Bulliet Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. 132 Pages. This slim volume is a collection of 12 essays, spanning two decades (1998–2017), from the prominent social and economic historian of Middle Eastern/ global history, Richard W. Bulliet (Columbia University, NY). It is a mixture of professional rivalry, methodological advocacy, and sheer, unbridled imagination. As a genre, it would fall between biography and manifesto, its labeling, like its content, challenged by the broad gambits of information, analysis and, yes, conjecture [see the subtitle] that fill its pages, defying rigorous, or even minimally accurate, summary. The series in which it appears, the Mizan Series, projects a "digital initiative to encourage informed public discourse and interdisciplinary scholarship on the history, culture, and religion of Muslim societies and civilizations." Its advisory board includes Bulliet, and several other distinguished academics, both Muslim and non-Muslim. Excluded from the above statement of purpose is the term Middle East, yet it is the topic of the very first, mind bending essay: "The End of Middle East History." Like several other essays, it is framed as a retrospect, in Bulliet's case on a long, distinguished career of teaching Middle East history at Columbia University. But instead of looking back from 2013, when the lecture was delivered, Bulliet projects the terminus ad quem for his inquiry as 2009, i.e., the end of the 21st century. He makes a prediction that the [End Page 98] historian Marshall Hodgson had already presaged in 1968, 45 years earlier, to wit, that the Middle East was not the cultural center of the Muslim world, nor its demographic core1 but rather, as Bulliet declares, a moniker "constructed in response to the vagaries of western imperialism" (p. 15). In its place will be the dispersion of geographical identity for countries now lumped together as "the Middle East." By the dawn of the 22nd century, "North Africa and Turkey went with Europe. Iran went with Asia. The eastern Arab world revolved around a new axis running from Jerusalem to Dubai. And the world's Muslims found ways of leading religiously fulfilling lives wherever they happened to live" (p. 15). Apart from this prognosis, at once compelling and unverifiable, there is more than a touch of irony in the appearance of this book in a series dedicated to scholarship on Muslim "civilizations." The very term civilization comes under intense scrutiny in three of the most arresting, and also counter-intuitive, chapters. The most general critique of civilizational labor becomes the subject of the longest essay, nearly 30 pages, titled "Isthmus Civilizations and 'Sapient Paradox.'" It amounts to an expansive review of the book by Nicholas Wade (2006) which discusses the archeaologist Colin Renfrew's argument about the "Sapient Paradox." Exploring alternate paths of human development, Bulliet argues against viewing "the rise of civilization as a continuous and everexpanding phenomenon from the fourth millennium BCE onward" (p. 113). Instead, Bulliet urges reexamination of the legacy of foragers and their use of both the environment and animals without presupposing that innovation and creativity belonged only to those who developed urban environments. It is a similar contrarian argument that informs "The History of the Muslim South: The Hajj and the Recentering of Islamic Civilization" (2008), where he assesses the annual Muslim pilgrimage or hajj as a better index of Muslim collective awareness and communal identity than loyalty to the Caliphate over time. Earlier in the initial essay on "The End of Middle East History," he had also devalued the caliphate: during the twentieth century it ceased to be "the territorial focus of a worldwide Muslim community;" instead "in the twenty-first century, the Muslim community finally became as global in thought and authority as it long had been in faith" (p. 15). But the sharpest and most personal critique of civilizational history with a teleological, cultural bent, occurs in a further chapter titled "Critiquing Orientalism: Marshall Hodgson and Edward Said" (2017). This chapter in a further instance of irony is the published version of a background...