During World War II, the British ambassador in Cairo, Lord Killearn, complained about the sudden influx of American experts into the country under the auspices of US Lend-Lease assistance. Inquiries into the exact size of railroad track gauge in the Egyptian countryside, he was convinced, were a thinly disguised effort to seize economic control of Egypt (from Great Britain) after the war. Egyptian nationalists launched similar attacks on American research and assistance projects in the 1950s, compelling Gamal Abdel Nasser, at an early point in his 18-year rule, to insist that Egyptians get over their “complexes” about foreign aid.
Heba Ra’uf ‘Izzat, 29, is a teaching assistant in the Political Science Department at Cairo University. Active in the Islamist movement, she is known for her academic research on women’s political role from the perspective of political Islam and its theory. She edits the women’s page in al-Sha‘b, a weekly opposition newspaper published by a coalition of the Muslim Brothers and the Labor Party.
With the return of Yasir Arafat and the installation of a Palestinian Authority (PA) in Gaza and Jericho, domestic political debates within the Occupied Territories are likely to focus less on the textual detail of the Israeli-PLO Declaration of Principles and more on the political nature of the nascent authority and strategies for the five-year interim period of self-rule.
Two figures who are bound to be significant voices in these debates are Marwan Barghouti, vice president of the Fatah Higher Council in the West Bank, and Ghazi Abu Jiyab who is politically identified with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in Gaza.
The early 1990s saw a period of renewed urban popular uprisings in Iran, unprecedented since the 1979 revolution. From August 1991 to August 1994, six major upheavals took place in Tehran, Shiraz, Arak, Mashhad, Ghazvin and Tabriz, and there were frequent minor clashes in many other urban centers. Most of these incidents involved urban squatters concerned with the destruction in their communities. This was the case in Tehran, Shiraz, Arak, Mashhad and Khorramabad.
Dear Dr. Saidi Sirjani:
For almost 20 years now, I have known and admired you and your writings. Whatever your detractors may say, Ali Akbar Saidi Sirjani cannot justly be accused of partisanship. I have known you as a fierce critic of Mohammad Reza Shah’s insufferable pretensions and intolerance of dissent, and later as an equally sharp thorn in the side of the Islamic government. May the nib of your pen never be blunted!
This issue looks at the economic and social crises that beset Iran more than 15 years after the Islamic Revolution. While the articles presented here share a critical perspective toward the present government, the authors allow us to see aspects of a society that both endures and challenges the inept, contradictory and impoverishing policies of the state. As was the case on the eve of the anti-Shah revolution, the most salient issues are corruption, legitimacy and competence.
Alternative Information Center. Guidelines for Palestinians Who Wish to Reside in the West Bank, Gaza Strip or East Jerusalem (Jerusalem, 1994).
Amirahmadi, Hooshang and Eric Hooglund, eds. US-Iran Relations: Areas of Tension and Mutual Interest (Washington, DC: Middle East Institute, 1994).
Barlow, Elizabeth. Evaluation of Secondary-Level Textbooks for Coverage of the Middle East and North Africa (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, 1994).
Danaher, Kevin. 50 Years Is Enough: The Case Against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (Boston: South End Press, 1994).
Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron, eds., Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender (Yale, 1991).
Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (Yale, 1992).
An eighteenth-century Ottoman woman left her urban household enshrouded in heavy veils. An Egyptian woman in the 1990s puts on her hijab before going out to work. To many Westerners, the veiled woman, repeated endlessly in popular and scholarly texts about the Middle East, is a signifier of Islamic patriarchy.
During April 1994, armed actions of the radical Islamist opposition in Egypt achieved a new level of lethal efficiency. One Gama‘a Islamiyya (Islamic Group) hit squad killed Maj. Gen. Ra’uf Khayrat, who was responsible for conducting undercover operations against them; another assassinated the chief of security of Asyout province, the Islamist stronghold in upper Egypt; a third shot at a train transporting tourists to the Pharaonic monuments of upper Egypt; and two or three ordinary policemen were shot each week.
Attacks on US policies are nothing new in Egypt. But as government representatives and NGOs prepare fore the September UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the loudest protests come from an unlikely corner: the Vatican. John Paul II has blessed a campaign (none dare call it a jihad) to tar the Cairo gathering, the latest of a series of UN meetings on global population issues, as a manifestation of pernicious US “cultural imperialism.”
Two of the most populous Arab countries, Egypt and Morocco, lie far apart in geography, in their histories and in the size of their populations. Egypt has 57 million inhabitants, more than twice as many as Morocco’s 25.5 million. [1] One thing they do share is a dramatic long-term rate of demographic growth. In the nine decades of this century, the populations of both countries have multiplied more than fivefold (from around 10 million in Egypt and less than 5 million in Morocco).
The Egyptian family is changing in significant ways, modified by the social and economic realities of everyday life which are in turn affected by changes in the local and international economy. Extended family living arrangements are declining in favor of nuclear families, which now account for 84 percent of all households.
The development of population policy in the Islamic Republic of Iran provides fertile ground for reexamining the widely held assumption that Islamist ideology is the antithesis of modernity and surely incompatible with any form of feminism. Recent strategies that the Islamic Republic has adopted to build a public consensus on the necessity of birth control and family planning indicate the flexibility and adaptability of that ideology in response to political and economic realities.
Miryam lives with her family in Manshiyat Nasir, originally a squatter settlement at the foot of Cairo’s Muqattam hills, now largely a brick-built community of small apartment buildings and box-like single family homes. Most now have piped-in water and electricity. Her family is one of the thousands of zabbalin (garbage collector) families comprising a large Christian minority among Manshiyat Nasir’s mostly Muslim residents. They live in a two-story, warehouse-like structure perhaps 25 feet high and about 20 feet square. Off to the side of the main living space, a narrow room has just enough space for a loom; a walled-in area behind the house is home to the family’s 18 pigs.
The question of population and development needs to be framed first and foremost as a question of equity. The articles in this issue address explicitly the matter of gender equity in families and societies, in ways that challenge the notion that Middle Eastern birth and fertility rates can be neatly attributed to Islam and Muslim cultures. Beyond this, we insist that the underlying theme is resource equity. As Philippe Fargues notes, the so-called demographic crisis in many Middle Eastern societies today is a social crisis, arising from the demand for more equitable access to jobs, schooling, housing and health care.
‘Abd al-Hadi, ‘Izzat, Usama Halabi and Salim Tamari, al-Mu’assasat al-wataniyya, al-intikhabat wa al-sulta (National Institutions, Elections and the Authority) (Ramallah: Muwatin, 1994).
Abu-Amr, Ziad. Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).
Ahmida, Ali Abdullatif. The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization and Resistance, 1830-1932 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994).
Akenson, Donald Harman. God’s People: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel and Ulster (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
