Modern Middle East Research Articles

On the borders of the Turkish and Iranian nation-states: the story of Ferzende and Besra

ABSTRACTFollowing the First World War, empires were replaced with nation-states for good and the map of the Middle East was redrawn. Traced back to the final decades of the nineteenth century, Kurdish nationalism did not result in a nation-state in the modern Middle East. Therefore, the Kurds inhabiting the borderlands of the four nation-states of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria came to be perceived as ‘trouble’ by these nation-states. Through the use of a wide array of published and unpublished Kurdish, Turkish, Persian and French archival documents, memoirs and oral and written literary pieces, this article unearths the role of a Kurdish tribal chief by the name of Ferzende in Mount Ararat Revolt in the late 1920s and early 1930s against the Turkish and Iranian nation-states. An exceptional contribution of this study is its exploration of the petition submitted to the Iranian Parliament by Ferzende's wife Besra. This study thus is a fresh contribution to the study of social history of the Middle East from the margins.

Contesting antiquity in Egypt: archaeologies, museums, and the struggle for identities from World War I to Nasser

The sensational discovery in 1922 of Tutankhamun's tomb, close on the heels of Britain's declaration of Egyptian independence, accelerated the growth in Egypt of both Egyptology as a formal discipline and of 'pharaonism'-popular interest in ancient Egypt-as an inspiration in the struggle for full independence. Emphasizing the three decades from 1922 until Nasser's revolution in 1952, this compelling follow-up to Whose Pharaohs? looks at the ways in which Egypt developed its own archaeologies-Islamic, Coptic, and Greco-Roman, as well as the more dominant ancient Egyptian. Each of these four archaeologies had given birth to, and grown up around, a major antiquities museum in Egypt. Later, Cairo, Alexandria, and Ain Shams universities joined in shaping these fields. Contesting Antiquity in Egypt brings all four disciples, as well as the closely related history of tourism, together in a single engaging framework. Throughout this semi-colonial era, the British fought a prolonged rearguard action to retain control of the country while the French continued to dominate the Antiquities Service, as they had since 1858. Traditional accounts highlight the role of European and American archaeologists in discovering and interpreting Egypt's long past. Donald Reid redresses the balance by also paying close attention to the lives and careers of often-neglected Egyptian specialists. He draws attention not only to the contests between westerners and Egyptians over the control of antiquities, but also to passionate debates among Egyptians themselves over pharaonism in relation to Islam and Arabism during a critical period of nascent nationalism.Drawing on rich archival and published sources, extensive interviews, and material objects ranging from statues and murals to photographs and postage stamps, this comprehensive study by one of the leading scholars in the field will make fascinating reading for scholars and students of Middle East history, archaeology, politics, and museum and heritage studies, as well as for the interested lay reader.

Re-imagining the Empire of Japan through Japanese Schoolboy Uniforms

Japanese kimono and the Japanese schoolboy uniform continue to interact with, and interrogate, global fashions as contemporary designers continue to call on the tropes of ‘military chic’ (Tonchi) and Japanese-inspired clothing (Kawamura).

Conceptualizing an internal conflict: ISIS and international law

Abstract This article investigates the challenge for international society in understanding ISIS’s continuing presence in Iraq and which aspects of international law may be applied so as to allow ISIS to be better held responsible for its actions. Particular emphasis is placed on the nature of an internal conflict and the rules of international law that apply to such conflicts. There is also a wider analysis of the difficulty in contextualizing ISIS within the prevailing Westphalian framework of an international society predicated on independent sovereign states. As such, the article explores aspects of international relations and the history of the Middle East, as well as international law.

Guest Editors’ Introduction

Guest Editors’ Introduction

On the Simplest Reading of Bartol’s Alamut

Bartol’s Alamut as a valuable Slovenian literary work has been exposed to several interpretations for more than 70 years. The simplest or maybe the most credulous reading of this book is the one that considers it as a history book. This reading deems that the novel literally narrates the political and social events of Iran in the 11th century, the time that the Ismailis with Hasan Sabbah as the leader ruled over Alamut Castle. In this article the novel’s most important interpretations have been provided by discussing the deliberate critical essays through content analysis and historical criticism of the happenings. Then by using some important historical documents and relevant evidence, some events and persons of that time have been detected. The main aim of the article is to show that while Bartol incorporated a vast knowledge of the history of the Middle East as the core part of his novel, he also regarded his own nation and the miserable events of his own country. As a matter of fact he sent a harsh message through creating his own Hasan Sabbah, without any concern for the history.

Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North AfricaEdited by Alan Mikhail

<i>Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa</i>Edited by Alan Mikhail

En Route to Revolution: The Communists and the Free Officers—Honeymoon and Separation

Organized communism had already emerged in Egypt shortly after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Afterwards, it was characterized by internal splits and rivalries, which were followed by constant persecutions by the authorities. Nevertheless, revolutionary platforms presented by communists gradually seeped into government policy and thinking, noticeably after the July 1952 revolution. This study sheds new light on the causes for the formation of the complex relations between Egypt’s military regime and the communist movement. The intimate working relations and clandestine cooperation between the Free Officers and the largest communist organization, the Democratic Movement for National Liberation, proved to be constructive and, more importantly, successful, following the military takeover of 23 July. However, the Officers–Communists honeymoon was ephemeral and the ad-hoc alliance disintegrated shortly thereafter. Based on untapped exclusive first-hand sources drawn from a variety of archives, including Egyptian and Russian, this article provides a new narrative to the origins of one of the most studied subjects in the modern history of the Middle East—the Egyptian July 1952 revolution.

The Fragments Imagine the Nation? Minorities in the Modern Middle East and North Africa

Minorities in the Middle East1 have been a perennial object of scholarly attention.2 Minority politics have traditionally been considered as a problem: indeed, as one of the main reasons for the ‘u...

Who Heard What When: Learning from Radio Broadcasting Hours and Programs in Jerusalem

Incorporating descriptions and analyses of sound into Middle Eastern history offers a wealth of opportunity for enriching our understanding of the historical record. But sometimes we need to get back to the basics: the “five w's and one h” of sound studies, so to speak. In what follows I would like to run this simple exercise with radio in the Mandate-era Levant, in order to lay out the basic data and begin to reflect on how it might aid scholars in better understanding other aspects of life in this period. I will do this by first addressing some of these basic what, who, when, where, why, how questions, and then by examining one day's programming of the Palestine Broadcasting Service in 1937: the day immediately following the release of the Peel Commission Report. What can we learn from examining this day's programming?

Introduction

Over the past decade, historians have finally started listening to the past. Mark M. Smith, an American historian and a leader in this wave of sensory and sound history, has said that historians today are “listening to the past with an intensity, frequency, keenness, and acuity unprecedented in scope and magnitude.” However, scholars of the modern Middle East have yet to join this auditory revolution. Whether working in history, political science, anthropology, or gender studies, they are still largely producing soundproof, devocalized narratives.

The Lebanese Army: Saviour of the Republic?

The recent history of the Middle East is marked by military influence (both direct and indirect) over governance. Lebanon, however, has followed a different trajectory: although it was ruled by army commander General Fuad Shihab between 1958 and 1970, this represented a mediated solution to civil unrest. Here, Eduardo W Aboultaif analyses how the army has helped to preserve stability during periods of crisis, in the 1950s and 2000s, by remaining neutral towards those confessional groups struggling for power – the hallmark of what became known as Shihabism. When it failed to do so in 1975, Aboultaif argues, the armed forces fractured along religious faultlines and the country descended into a vicious, protracted conflict.

Introduction

Introduction Gülhan Balsoy (bio) This special issue of the Journal of Women’s History on Ottoman and post-Ottoman women’s and gender history is a selection of articles from a conference on “Feminist Paradigms and Cultural Encounters: Women’s Experiences in Eastern Mediterranean History in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” The conference met in Istanbul in June 2013 and included historians of women and gender from Turkey, the United States, Europe, and the wider Middle East. The original call for papers noted that “changing feminist paradigms” refers to a shift from a Turkish-oriented historiography of women’s experiences to an emphasis on diversity in both the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. Scholarship has come a long way in producing “women’s histories,” but feminist critiques of national historiography and challenges to the conventional periodization of the Ottoman-Turkish historical narrative are tasks yet to be undertaken. Tackling this challenging project requires reconsideration and reformulation of many key terms and concepts first introduced by feminist scholars in North America; it was one of the key aims of the conference. In addition, this conference sought to rethink the interaction between “feminist activism and scholarship” with the purpose of bringing new perspectives to women’s and gender history in the Middle East and around the world. Now, with this publication, it is rewarding to see that many of the expectations were not only met but also surpassed. The articles in this issue uncover the experiences of women in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world and analyze some of the main themes of scholarly controversy through the perspective of gender. They touch upon a variety of themes from women’s activism and feminist organizations to crime, sexuality, slavery, and citizenship. With its wide array of topics, the collection promises to contribute both to the scholarship in women’s and gender history—regardless of national frameworks—and to the field of Ottoman and post-Ottoman history—with renewed emphasis on gender. One of the most important contributions of this collection is the challenge posed to the Eurocentric and nationalist assumptions that remain pervasive to date. Several studies in this issue, through the research on the encounters between the feminists from Europe and North America and those from Ottoman lands, decenter Europe from the history of women’s struggles and show that these encounters add to the complexity of women’s activism globally. The articles here unearth the experiences of feminist figures not well researched by the historiography in such periods as the [End Page 10] early twentieth century and the 1950s, assumed to be irrelevant for feminist history by the scholars of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman past. Analyzing the historical patterns of women’s activism enables our authors to question the links and legacies between the Ottoman and post-Ottoman worlds, a central preoccupation in the wider field. This theme challenges the validity of the existing chronologies of nationalist historiography by searching the continuities and ruptures in the imperial and nationalist contexts and reworking the intricacies of gender, state building, and ethnicity. Through the use of gender, the articles here pose a profound challenge to the nationalist interpretations of Ottoman and Turkish history. They moreover offer ways to reconsider women’s “agency” in the realms of crime, sexuality, and urban life. Finally, besides these significant conceptual contributions, several articles gender the fundamental question of freedom and slavery, the nationalist project, and the legal system, all of which are innovative topics in the historiography of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world. They also make this scholarship compelling to readers of women’s and gender history outside the Ottoman framework. The issue opens with three articles reexamining women’s activism and challenging the nationalist assumptions and boundaries that typically frame scholarly work on feminist struggle in eastern Mediterranean women’s and gender history. The first two address transnational women’s activism, while the third refines the debate further by adding a comparative dimension to the encounters between different ethnoreligious groups within the Ottoman imperial context. The first article by Nicole A.N.M. van Os, “They can breathe freely now,” explores the early twentieth-century interactions between two of the...

The Fall of Empires and the Formation of the Modern Middle East

The collapse or weakening of six empires over a 53-year period furnished the precondition for the rise of what we offhandedly call the modern Middle East. But if we mean “modern” as a concept of political sociology rather than a shorthand way of saying recent or contemporary, we must conclude that a “modern” Middle East is still straining to be born. We see that through an integrated analysis that explains not how the post-Ottoman Middle East arose, but why it took the shape it did.

From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt: Religion, Identity and Politics after the Arab Conquest by Maged S. A. Mikhail

Reviewed by: From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt: Religion, Identity and Politics after the Arab Conquest by Maged S. A. Mikhail Lev Weitz From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt: Religion, Identity and Politics after the Arab Conquest. By Maged S. A. Mikhail. [Library of Middle East History, vol. 45.] (London: I. B. Tauris; distrib. Palgrave. 2014. Pp. xiii, 429. $100.00. ISBN 978-1-848-85938-8.) Maged Mikhail’s From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt examines the transformations in Egyptian society, religion, and politics occasioned by the Arab-Muslim conquests of the seventh century. It is an ambitious undertaking. In twelve chapters spanning the seventh to the tenth centuries, the book seeks to examine an extensive range of historiographically significant subjects. These include relations between the conquerors and indigenous Christian elites; religious conversion; linguistic change; Muslim rulers’ reforms to the Byzantine administrative system; law and justice in the cities and countryside; the settlement and evolution of Egypt’s Muslim population; relations with the churches of Nubia, Ethiopia, and Syria; the reconstitution of ecclesiastical authority under Muslim rule; and the practical and discursive construction of Coptic, Melkite, and local Muslim religious identities. In many respects, the book succeeds in accomplishing its ambitious goals. Its greatest strength is its full use of the exceptionally wide range of textual sources Egypt has to offer—narrative texts in both Coptic and Arabic, as well as Greek, Arabic, and Coptic documentary papyri—in the service of its broad historical vision. The source material and historiographical debates related to Egypt are extensive enough that the subject of any of the book’s chapters could be a monograph of its own. Mikhail’s signal contribution is to bring such a diverse array of material together to offer both compelling and coherent syntheses of his chosen topics and a number of new arguments of his own. Chapter 9’s discussion of the Coptic Church’s relations with Nubia and Ethiopia is noteworthy; Mikhail ably makes the case that those relations fundamentally structured the Coptic hierarchy’s political position vis-à-vis the Muslim rulers back in Egypt. Although other provinces of the early Islamic caliphate have received treatments comparable in their breadth (Michael Morony’s seminal Iraq after the Muslim Conquest [Princeton, 1984] comes to mind), Egypt was surely in need of one. Mikhail has made an important contribution in this regard. From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt will be most readily accessible to specialists in late antiquity and early Islam. On the whole, its chapters tend to dive straight into historiographical debates; students or nonspecialists might want to read a more general history before engaging with Mikhail’s arguments. Certain limitations arise in the book’s approach to the formation of communal religious identities. Mikhail frequently and laudably objects to primordialist narratives of Egyptian history (although which contemporary scholars actually hold such views is not always clear), and tends to emphasize the constructedness of religious identities. Despite this framework, however, the book uses the terms Coptic and Melkite interchangeably with anti-Chalcedonian and pro-Chalcedonian throughout. This becomes problematic at times. For example, Mikhail justly argues that Coptic religious elites began to portray Byzantine rule as exclusively persecutory only in the [End Page 379] ninth century and that doing so was an effort to define the Church’s place in both the Egyptian past and the Islamic order (p. 36). It would have been useful, however, to consider whether indigenizing discourses like this played some role in producing the very idea of Coptic Christianity as a discrete religious tradition and in transforming anti-Chalcedonian Egyptians into Copts as an ethno-religious category. In this respect, the book’s terminological conventions sometimes obscure the cultural transformations it otherwise documents so well. These limitations are not an indictment of the book’s overall quality. It is a very impressive success to provide both broad syntheses and detailed examinations of a topic so vital to the history of the Middle East and Christianity. From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt is a welcome contribution to the historiography of the early Islamic world, Coptic Christianity, and late-antique and medieval Egypt. Lev Weitz The Catholic University of America Copyright © 2016 The Catholic University of America Press

Review of 'kThe Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923'

Review of 'kThe Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923'

Storage Biologically Active Substances by Convection Drying Food and Medicinal Plants

The paper presents the overview and experimental results, and recommendations for drying herbs with quality preservation of biologically active substances and their application in the food and pharmaceutical industries. Dehydration of products are widely used since ancient times, the earliest known drying of 12,000 BC inhabitants of the modern Middle East and Asian regions. With the aid of drying suppressed the growth of bacteria, yeasts and mold by removing water. A properly chosen drying method allows you to save the dried final product active biological substances with maximum preservation. This study is an overall view of the conveyor of the dryer, which proposes to carry out drying of forest products.

Diminished Sovereignty and the Impossibility of “Civil War” in the Modern Middle East

Diminished Sovereignty and the Impossibility of “Civil War” in the Modern Middle East

Hugh Wilford: America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East

Hugh Wilford: America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East. 1. vydání. New York: Basic Books, 2013, 342 stran, ISBN 978-0-465-01965-6.

Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion: Two Thousand Years of Christian Missions in the Middle East [Review

Compared to their counterparts in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, Christian missionaries in the modern Middle East affected relatively few formal conversions. Nevertheless, in the past 15 years, scholars have begin to appreciate how missionaries in the Middle East exerted far-reaching cultural, political, and economic influences on the region, through schools, hospitals, and other institutions. Scholars have also begin to appreciate how missionaries variously strengthened, mediated, and deflected forms of European and American imperialism, while forging long-distance connections between the Middle East and their home countries.