Islam and Democracy in the Middle East


Book Description

A comprehensive assessment of the origins and staying power of Middle East autocracies, as well as a sober account of the struggles of state reformers and opposition forces to promote civil liberties, competitive elections and a pluralistic vision of Islam. Drawing on the insights of some 25 leading Western and Middle Eastern scholars, the book highlights the dualistic and often contradictory nature of political liberalization. Yemen suggest, political liberalization - as managed by the state - not only opens new spaces for debate and criticism, but is also used as a deliberate tactic to avoid genuine democratization. In several chapters on Iran, the authors analyze the benefits and costs of limited reform. There, the electoral successes of President Mohammad Khatami and his reformist allies inspired a new generation but have not as yet undermined the clerical establishment's power. By contrast, in Turkey a party with Islamist roots is moving a discredited system beyond decades of conflict and paralysis, following a stunning election victory in 2002. force for change. While acknowledging the enduring attraction of radical Islam throughout the Arab world, the concluding chapters carefully assess the recent efforts of Muslim civil society activists and intellectuals to promote a liberal Islamic alternative. Their struggles to affirm the compatibility of Islam and pluralistic democracy face daunting challenges, not least of which is the persistent efforts of many Arab rulers to limit the influence of all advocates of democracy, secular or religious.




Lebanon’s Jewish Community


Book Description

This book mines the early history of modern Lebanon, focusing on the country’s Jewish community and examining inter-Lebanese relations. It gives voice to personal testimonies, family archives, private papers, recollections of expatriate and resident Lebanese Jewish communities, as well as rarely tapped archival sources. With unique access to the Jewish communities in Lebanon and the Greater Middle East, the author presents both history and memory of Lebanon’s Jews, considering what, how, and why they choose to remember their Lebanese lives. The work retells the history of Lebanon by placing Lebanese Jews into the country’s narrative from the 1920s to 1970s, including an examination of the role they played in the construction of Lebanon’s multi-sectarian system.




A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa


Book Description

This book offers the first critical engagement with the political economy of the Middle East and North Africa. Challenging conventional wisdom on the origins and contemporary dynamics of capitalism in the region, these cutting-edge essays demonstrate how critical political economy can illuminate both historical and contemporary dynamics of the region and contribute to wider political economy debates from the vantage point of the Middle East. Leading scholars, representing several disciplines, contribute both thematic and country-specific analyses. Their writings critically examine major issues in political economy—notably, the mutual constitution of states, markets, and classes; the co-constitution of class, race, gender, and other forms of identity; varying modes of capital accumulation and the legal, political, and cultural forms of their regulation; relations among local, national, and global forms of capital, class, and culture; technopolitics; the role of war in the constitution of states and classes; and practices and cultures of domination and resistance. Visit politicaleconomyproject.org for additional media and learning resources.




From Resilience to Revolution


Book Description

Based on comparative historical analyses of Iran, Jordan, and Kuwait, Sean L. Yom examines the foreign interventions, coalitional choices, and state outcomes that made the political regimes of the modern Middle East. A key text for foreign policy scholars, From Resilience to Revolution shows how outside interference can corrupt the most basic choices of governance: who to reward, who to punish, who to compensate, and who to manipulate. As colonial rule dissolved in the 1930s and 1950s, Middle Eastern autocrats constructed new political states to solidify their reigns, with varying results. Why did equally ambitious authoritarians meet such unequal fates? Yom ties the durability of Middle Eastern regimes to their geopolitical origins. At the dawn of the postcolonial era, many autocratic states had little support from their people and struggled to overcome widespread opposition. When foreign powers intervened to bolster these regimes, they unwittingly sabotaged the prospects for long-term stability by discouraging leaders from reaching out to their people and bargaining for mass support—early coalitional decisions that created repressive institutions and planted the seeds for future unrest. Only when they were secluded from larger geopolitical machinations did Middle Eastern regimes come to grips with their weaknesses and build broader coalitions.




The Only House Left Standing


Book Description

[[ The unfolding events in the run up to the Iraq war had given Tom Hurndall, a 21-year-old British photojournalist, an increased curiosity and desire to journey to the Middle East. In February 2003, initially as an observer alongside the Human Shields, he left with a passion to make a difference, to record and photograph the truth for himself. [[ We follow his journey first from Baghdad, then to Amman and the Al-Rweished refugee camp in Jordan, and finally on to the town of Rafah in Gaza close to the Egyptian border, where US peaceworker Rachel Corrie had been killed just weeks previously. [[ On April 11th, unarmed and wearing an internationally recognizable orange peacekeeper jacket, he was severely wounded while carrying Palestinian children to safety. He died nine months later in a London hospital. [[ The book follows Tom's life and thoughts in the final weeks leading up to the shooting. Motivated by a sense of injustice and striving to remain objective we are drawn into his increasingly serious photographs and words, through extracts from his diary, emails and poems. [[ It is realised through collaboration with the Hurndall family on the sixth anniversary of the fateful day, no of that fateful day recent Channel 4 film-documentary 'The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall'.




Promoting Democracy, Reinforcing Authoritarianism


Book Description

A detailed examination of the role of US and European 'democracy promoters' in Jordan based on a diverse range of original source material.




Is There a Middle East?


Book Description

This book offers diverse debates on the possible manifestations and meanings of the term "Middle East."




The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies


Book Description

Over the past few decades, humanistic inquiry has been problematized and invigorated by the emergence of what is referred to as the digital humanities. Across multiple disciplines, from history to literature, religious studies to philosophy, archaeology to music, scholars are tapping the extraordinary power of digital technologies to preserve, curate, analyze, visualize, and reconstruct their research objects. The study of the Middle East and the broader Islamic world has been no less impacted by this new paradigm. Scholars are making daily use of digital tools and repositories including private and state-sponsored archives of textual sources, digitized manuscript collections, densitometrical imaging, visualization and modeling software, and various forms of data mining and analysis. This collection of essays explores the state of the art in digital scholarship pertaining to Islamic & Middle Eastern studies, addressing areas such as digitization, visualization, text mining, databases, mapping, and e-publication. It is of relevance to any researcher interested in the opportunities and challenges engendered by this changing scholarly ecosystem.




Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East


Book Description

A revised and updated edition of a popular and widely used text




Networks of Privilege in the Middle East: The Politics of Economic Reform Revisited


Book Description

This volume explores the role of informal networks in the politics of Middle Eastern economic reform. The editor's introduction demonstrates how network-based models overcome limitations in existing approaches to the politics of economic reform. The following chapters show how business-state networks in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan have affected privatization programs and the reform of fiscal policies. They help us understand patterns and variation in the organization and outcome of economic reform programs, including the opportunities that economic reforms offered for reorganizing networks of economic privilege across the Middle East.