Modern Middle East Research Articles

Gendered Struggles over the Medical Profession in the Modern Middle East and North Africa

AbstractHistorians of the professionalization of medicine in colonized regions, including the Middle East, have mostly focused on male practitioners, whereas histories of women in the medical professions are mostly centered in Western societies. The present issue examines histories of female medical practitioners by looking at case studies spanning the twentieth century from Algeria, Palestine, Israel, Iran, and Iraq. The introduction to this issue offers an overview of existing scholarship and charts sources and directions for future research and historical actors yet to be studied. The articles examine microlevel contact zones, in which women’s agency shaped and was shaped by colonial and postcolonial encounters, decolonization, and the formation of national professions. They reveal tensions within the medical sphere, between men and women, foreign and local, colonizer and colonized.

Teachers as State-Builders: Education and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Hilary Falb Kalisman (review)

Teachers as State-Builders: Education and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Hilary Falb Kalisman (review)

АНУШ-ТЕГИН КАК ЭПОНИМ ХОРЕЗМИЙСКОЙ ДИНАСТИИ В МУСУЛЬМАНСКИХ ИСТОЧНИКАХ

In this article, the author analyzes the formation in Muslim literature of the twelfth — thirteenth centuries of the eponym of the dynasty of Khorezm rulers, whose power in this region begins in 1097 and ends in the era of the Mongol invasion. We are discussing the Anushteginid dynasty and the father of the first Khorezmshah, Qutb ad-Din Muhammad, after whom this dynasty was named by researchers. According to medieval Muslim historians, Anush-tegin or Nush-tegin Garcha/Garja himself never ruled Khorezm, but his descendants not only managed to gain a foothold in these lands, but also created one of the most powerful Muslim states of the Middle East, which was destroyed only by the Mongol conquerors. Despite the close attention to the power of the Khorezmshahs in the research environment, which has been reflected in numerous special works, to this day we do not see in Russian and foreign literature a single study devoted to the ancestor of the Anushteginid dynasty, or rather, the analysis of the description of his biography in Muslim sources. Researchers, relying mainly on reports on this subject by the historian of the first half of the thirteenth century, Ibn al-Asir, broadcast his story about Anush-tegin, often not taking into account the nature and volume of information about this eponym as part of earlier sources. We will also attempt to understand what Muslim authors of the twelfth century write about Anush-tegin, how fully his biography is reflected in these texts in comparison with ‘al-Kamil fi-t-Tarikh’ by Ibn al-Asir, and what is the specificity of their description of the biography of the ancestor of the Khorezm rulers. In addition, we will try to consider what pre-Mongol texts Ibn al-Asir and subsequent historians could rely on in their reconstructions of the history of Anush-tegin’s life and work, as well as what contradictions in this case could arise between individual authors. We hope that this work will be useful to specialists in the history of the Middle East in the pre–Mongol period, as well as to researchers of Muslim historical literature of the twelfth-thirteenth centuries.

Tal Elmaliach. Hakibbutz Ha’artzi, Mapam, and the Demise of the Israeli Labor Movement. Translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2020

Nation-building projects in the twentieth century were often linked to socialism, and the Zionist movement was no exception. After all, if you are going to build a new nation, why not build it free of the ugly exploitation, inequalities, and class conflicts of modern capitalism? It is therefore a great historical irony that Israel, built and for decades led by a hegemonic socialist movement, now has the dubious honor to be ranked together with the United States among the most economically unequal of developed countries. How did this happen? This is the question that Tal Elmaliach, a historian at the University of Haifa, sets out to answer in his book Hakibbutz Ha’artzi, Mapam, and the Demise of the Israeli Labor Movement. Published as part of a series in the Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East, the book is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation and an earlier Hebrew-language monograph published in 2018, but it expands upon these works in major and important ways to highlight the significance of the research for an international audience. Although the book may appear at first glance to have a narrow scope, it speaks in fact to more general questions, which will surely make it of interest to nonspecialists in both history and the social sciences. Text in English

The Unsturdy Foundations of ‘Security for Oil’ Policies

Robert Vitalis’ latest book, Oilcraft, is a valuable addition to the new wave of critical studies on the history of oil and “energy policy” that have appeared in recent years. Tim Mitchell, Katayoun Shafiee, Touraj Atabaki, and Peyman Jafari, among others, have challenged some basic, long held notions about the role of oil in Middle East history and diplomatic relations. Oilcraft takes on the most fundamental guiding principles behind scholarship and policy-making: namely that the United States’ need to secure the free flow of cheap oil has driven some of its most unsavory foreign policy positions. This, he says, is a myth. Oilcraft is a follow-up to America’s Kingdom in which Vitalis traced the U.S. “special relationship” with Saudi Arabia as a cover for a neo-colonial relationship between a patron and client. Now he turns the focus back on American academics, think tanks, and policy circles to trace the origins of this pervasive myth about the need, or even the mere ability, to secure access to, and the affordability of, oil.

Historical and Philosophical Arabic Studies in Russia at the Turn of the Century (the 2nd Half of the XX - Early XXI Centuries)

The article presents an overview of the most significant results in Russian academic research in philosophy of the Arabic Middle East in the second half of the XX century-the beginning of XXI century. The author consistently examines the contribution of various schools and their main representatives to the field of Arabic studies, in particular, the academic research works dedicated to the Middle East philosophy and history written by the scientists from the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Saint Petersburg State University and RUDN University. The article attempts to show the conceptual findings and results of this academic research on Arabic Islamic philosophy of the Middle Ages considering the problems of understanding and interpreting Arab and Muslim culture, which was held by a number of leading experts during the second half of the XX century, up to the early XXI century. It is equally important to understand the role and place of the historical and philosophical Arabic studies in the dialogue between different philosophical cultures - in the context of striving for responses to the challenges of the modern time. The author of the article proves the idea that overcoming false cultural, philosophical and ideological stereotypes in the unprecedented global interaction of East and West in the late XX and early XXI centuries will significantly expand academic mobility and internationalization in the fields of education and science, open new perspectives for international cooperation in various fields and promote mutual enrichment of cultures.

Educating Palestine: Teaching and Learning History under the Mandate

Educating Palestine: Teaching and Learning History under the Mandate

Jihadi Audiovisuality and Its Entanglements: Meanings, Aesthetics, Appropriations

Jihadi Audiovisuality and Its Entanglements: Meanings, Aesthetics, Appropriations

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History

The Origins of the Syrian Conflicts

The Origins of the Syrian Conflicts

Agapius of Manbiǧ, Qusṭā ibn Lūqā and the Graeco-Roman Past

Abstract This article looks at the routes by which knowledge of the Greco-Roman past was transmitted from late antiquity by Christian communities living under Muslim rule. The process involved translation from Greek to Syriac and from Greek and Syriac to Arabic. Once in Arabic, the lingua franca of the Abbasid Middle East, this historical material could be used by Muslim scholars to work into their histories of the pre-Islamic Middle East. This article also shows that historical texts could easily cross interconfessional lines and that their transmission, although handled very differently to scientific texts, was still part of the broader transfer of late antique culture to the Islamic Empire that is commonly referred to as the Graeco-Arabic translation movement.

Introduction

Histories of gender in the modern Middle East and North Africa have flourished in the last three decades, fueled in part by JMEWS. Yet much of this work is circumscribed by the nation-state, which remains the primary framing for discussions of women’s activism and gender-based reform. Existing scholarship includes glimpses of women collaborating across national, regional, cultural, and linguistic boundaries but rarely foregrounds these transnational connections or emphasizes how formative transnational spaces and conversations were in shaping gender norms. This roundtable brings together the work of gender historians whose research collectively ranges from Morocco to Afghanistan, and traces a variety of connections across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Its five short essays highlight modes of movement, organizing, and exchange across borders, focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We demonstrate the many ways in which women in the Middle East and North Africa collaborated with one another and with women in other world regions in the name of national independence, women’s rights, and economic justice, often shaping gender norms in the process. But should all modes of cross-border collaboration be described as “transnational”?One area of debate that the roundtable addresses is whether “transnationalism” is the best analytic mode for studying women’s activism across local and international borders. While thinking entirely beyond the national has its own historiographical value (Ludden 2003), transnationalism as a methodological approach begins with the nation, then demands that scholars think above and below it in ways that have the potential to challenge its solidity and salience as a category of analysis. Pursuing a transnational approach, we acknowledge the nation as a salient political unit while refusing to be confined within it, whether in linguistic, spatial, or ideological terms. Another key concept running through these essays is “transnational feminism,” which foregrounds feminist cross-border collaborations in the name of disrupting systems of power (Mohanty 2013). During the colonial era, many feminists in the Middle East and North Africa engaged in transnational organizing in opposition to colonialism. More recently, transnational feminist organizing in the Middle East and North Africa has been anticapitalist, prodemocracy, and has often sought to end US military occupation in the region.This roundtable also touches on questions of what counts as “transnational” activism and the scales on which it operates. Our essays reveal how micro and macro transnational feminist organizing contributed to reshaping gender norms in the wider Middle East. Marya Hannun’s work reconstructs a web of feminist organizing that connected Afghan women with women from Cairo to Bombay. Nova Robinson’s piece reveals how Syrian women collaborated with US and Swiss feminists to try to secure representation from the “East” on the League of Nations’ Committee of Experts on the Legal Status of Women. Anny Gaul’s research demonstrates that multiple generations of Moroccan women activists engaged with ideas and movements circulating through the Middle East and beyond as they advocated for liberation. Focusing on these models of exchange and activism encourages new spatial frameworks for understanding women’s organizing. Lucia Carminati’s essay addresses such frameworks by asking how the inherent transnational nature of certain spaces, like the Suez Canal, impacts gendered subjectivities and histories in unique ways. Finally, Gülşah Torunoğlu’s essay addresses the promises and limitations of transnationalism as a method of analysis, and discusses “relational comparison” as an alternative analytic lens through which to scrutinize the interconnected feminist networks in the Middle East prior to the 1920s.In addition to highlighting the circuits and exchanges of people and ideas, this collection of essays in conversation with one another demonstrates how a transnational approach can push gender history in the Middle East and North Africa in exciting new directions. Questions that animate this roundtable include: In what ways did feminisms in the Middle East and North Africa transcend the nation and even the region during the interwar period, a time when the nation-state emerged as the default vehicle through which patriarchy was wielded and contested? What were the geographic limits of these connections? How does the fact that women of a certain class around the world had more in common with one another than they did with those who shared their national frames shape our writing of women’s history? How do these divisions endure in the present debates around global feminist movements? Our essays do not definitively answer these questions. However, we suggest that a denationalized analysis of feminism can give us a clearer picture of women’s movements and subjectivities in the early twentieth century, within and beyond national contexts. We hope that our collective exploration about the potential benefits and challenges of transnational analysis sparks further debate and inquiry.

Comparative and Integrative History in Ottoman and Turkish Women’s and Gender Studies

Comparative and Integrative History in Ottoman and Turkish Women’s and Gender Studies

Qatari genomes provide insight into Middle Eastern history

Qatari genomes provide insight into Middle Eastern history

The 43rd Annual Session of St Petersburg Arabists

On April 19–21th, 2021, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (Saint-Petersburg) hosted the 43rd Annual Session of St Petersburg Arabists in tribute to professor O. G. Bolshakov (1929 – 2020). The conference was held for two days under the chairmanship of Associate Professor S. A. Frantsuzov and included morning and afternoon sessions, which covered interesting reports by Arab scholars from St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kazan in person and online. Arabic messages were accompanied by scholarly discussions on various topics on the history of the Middle East and cultural linguistics. More than 35 speakers from different countries including Canada and Switzerland took part in the conference and were able not only to meet their colleagues, but also to take advantage of a spare day between the sessions and to visit unique sights St. Petersburg has to offer. MGIMO University was represented at the scientific conference by N. G. Antonova, lecturer of the Department of Middle East Languages, with a report on the topic The History of Arabisms in the Spanish Language devoted to the analysis of words borrowings, their introduction into the Spanish language, main groups and levels at which the linguistic process took place. A. O. Bolshakov and F. A. Asadullin delivered their reports about a prominent historian and Arabist O. G. Bolshakov who dedicated his life to the study of the history of Caliphate and Islam. Researchers in the field of linguistic cultural studies spoke about Moscow Arabs, development of the theory of jihad, and various aspects of the Arabic language. A lot of speakers touched upon the topic of religion, including pre-islamic beliefs, and the Quran, its translations and editions kept in the museum collections. The representatives of Saint Petersburg State University gave reports on a wide range of linguistic, historic and ethnographic issues. A. A. Mokrushina made an interactive presentation on the special aspects of commercials in Arab countries. Participation in the session of St. Petersburg Arabists served as a valuable opportunity to make a presentation of one’s current research to colleagues-Arabists, to carry out professional and scientific communication, to hold scientific discussions and to gain a deeper understanding of the history and culture of the Arabic language.

Superpower Dominance: The Yum Kippur Case

The Yum Kippur War, or as the Egyptians call it The October War, is one of the most important wars in the history of the Middle East between the coalition of Egypt and Syria versus Israel. It occurred at a time when the two superpowers then, the Americans and the Soviet Union, were in engaging in what was called the Cold War. For that every Superpower used to support a certain party of conflict to assure the balance of global dominance isn't affected. This paper reviews American foreign policy during the war in 1973. It concentrates on how the American institutions and foreign policy activists acted and influenced the outcome of the war. The paper finally conducts a counter analysis on what could have happened if the Americans didn’t support the Israelis in the war.

The genomic history of the Middle East

SummaryThe Middle East region is important to understand human evolution and migrations but is underrepresented in genomic studies. Here, we generated 137 high-coverage physically phased genome sequences from eight Middle Eastern populations using linked-read sequencing. We found no genetic traces of early expansions out-of-Africa in present-day populations but found Arabians have elevated Basal Eurasian ancestry that dilutes their Neanderthal ancestry. Population sizes within the region started diverging 15–20 kya, when Levantines expanded while Arabians maintained smaller populations that derived ancestry from local hunter-gatherers. Arabians suffered a population bottleneck around the aridification of Arabia 6 kya, while Levantines had a distinct bottleneck overlapping the 4.2 kya aridification event. We found an association between movement and admixture of populations in the region and the spread of Semitic languages. Finally, we identify variants that show evidence of selection, including polygenic selection. Our results provide detailed insights into the genomic and selective histories of the Middle East.

Tribes and Tribalism in the Modern Middle East: Introduction

This roundtable is the product of a conference on tribalism in the Modern Middle East held at the University of Maryland in College Park in early May 2019. In two days of scholarly exchange, the participants addressed questions on the reality of tribal life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and its impact on politics and society. Most of the specialists who participated in the conference are also contributors in this forum. To keep the discussion concise, the case studies focus on the Arab East – Syria, Jordan, and Iraq – as well as Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Building on the findings and reflections shared in College Park, the contributors responded to the following prompt as a point of departure for their essays: For cultural, intellectual, political, and arguably even most social historians, tribes remain an enigma. As an ideal-type, the tribe seems to be all that the modern state is not: it defies positive law, rational administrative structures, equal citizenship based on individual rights and duties, and, still, in some cases, sovereignty based on fixed territorial boundaries. As a non-state, the tribe seems to be, on the other hand, the most enduring socio-political structure of human history. It is a kind of substrate, or a hetero-stratum of social organization at least in Middle Eastern societies. Its position as such seems even more pronounced in today's period of state disintegration and instability. What is the place of tribes in modern society, how do they relate to the modern state? How can what is seemingly an atavism of pre-modern times still have currency in today's world?The responses share the perception that tribes are not the antithesis of the modern state or of progress in the region. Researchers and politicians alike should take them into account in their analyses of modernization processes. They offer meaningful identities and forms of organization across the region and enjoy influence and power.

Situating Tribes in History: Lessons from the Archives and the Social Sciences

The tribe presents a problem for the historian of the modern Middle East, particularly one interested in personalities, subtleties of culture and society, and other such “useless” things. By and large, tribes did not leave their own written records. The tribal author is a phenomenon of the present or the recent past. There are few twentieth century tribal figures comparable to the urban personalities to whose writings and influence we owe our understanding of the social, intellectual, and political history of the modern Middle East. There is next a larger problem of record keeping to contend with: the almost complete inaccessibility of official records on the postcolonial Middle East. It is no wonder that political scientists and anthropologists are among the best regarded custodians of the region's twentieth century history; they know how to make creative and often eloquent use of drastically limited tools. For many decades, suspicious governments have inhibited historians from carrying out the duties of their vocation. This is one reason why the many rich and original new monographs on Saddam Hussein's Iraq are so important. If tribes are on the margins of the records, and the records themselves are off limits, then one might imagine why modern Middle Eastern tribes are so poorly conceived in the scholarly imagination.

Unconventional monetary theories in modern Middle Eastern economic schools amended october 2019

Abstract. In this study, we classify the unconventional monetary views found in the modern Middle East economic literature into five main categories. These five categories include 1) Full reserve-like approach to the banking system, 2) Commodity/Asset-backed monetary systems or Currency board-like frameworks, 3) Interest-free approach to the banking system, 4) Bank-free approach to the banking industry, and finally 5) Public money or monetary guidance approach to the monetary system. Additionally, we identify a collection of ideas as hybrids or combinations, some of which are in their developmental stage and are receiving significant attention and support. Our review of these approaches summarizes their theoretical foundations, historical and current advocates, and relevant policy recommendations. Keywords. Monetary economics, Unconventional theories, Middle Eastern schools. JEL. F21, F68, O53, K23 .