Democracy Dilemmas in Jordan
Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World
Iranian Populism and Political Change in the Gulf
From the political perspective, the main consequence of the Persian Gulf War has been the restoration of the status quo ante. In Iraq and Kuwait, dissidents who had expected the military defeat of Saddam Hussein to usher in a new era of freedom and democracy have been sorely disillusioned. In the sheikhdoms of the Arabian Peninsula, hereditary rulers had feared the US military intervention might bring pressures for political reform, and citizens had hoped Washington might support at least modest democratization efforts. Both now realize that the West is interested in containing, not promoting, political change.
Syria’s Parliamentary Elections
On May 22 and 23, 1990, Syrian voters were called to the polls to elect a new parliament, the fifth People’s Council (Majlis al-Sha‘b) since Hafiz al-Asad came to power in 1970. The new Majlis would consist of a total of 250 instead of the 195 members in previous councils. The official media made clear that President Asad had “granted” these additional seats to encourage independents to stand as candidates. The Baath Party and its allies in the six-party National Progressive Front (al-Jabha al-Wataniyya al-Taqaddumiyya), which held some 160 seats in the outgoing council, would content itself with about that number in the new assembly; roughly a third of all seats would be reserved for independent, non-party candidates.
The Resilience of Algerian Populism
Human Rights and Elusive Democracy
The practice of human rights cannot wait until all political systems have become democratic. Human rights, in their vast range, can be protected under non-democratic regimes and violated under democratic ones. Still, human rights and democracy, though not interchangeable, can form the most humane relationship of all.
The Democracy Agenda in the Arab World
Letters
Said’s War on The Intellectuals
Edward Said’s interview with Barbara Harlow (MER 171) is an attempt to “dislodge” an array of opponents, ranging from “scholar-combatants” and “instant experts” to “native informants.” An important focus of the interview is the war’s repercussions on “the intellectual and cultural topography of the Arab world.” One such repercussion is the debate between Edward Said and Samir al-Khalil. This debate, in my view, is not about who has a more accurate reading of reality. It concerns what political consequences flow from each position and how we choose between them.
Graham-Brown, Images of Women
Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East, 1860-1950 (Quartet, 1988).
The invention of photography in 1839 coincided, Sarah Graham-Brown observes, with a vigorous phase of European global expansion. Egypt and Palestine were among early testing grounds for the camera, which rapidly made its appearance throughout the Middle East.
Dangerous Asset
Bush Locks Horns with Shamir
On January 21, six days into the US air war against Iraq, Israeli Finance Minister Yitzhak Modai took advantage of Washington’s praise for Israel’s “restraint” in the face of 11 Scud missile attacks to drop a bombshell of his own. Before the assembled Jerusalem press corps, he advised visiting Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger that Israel would require an additional $13 billion dollars from the US at the conclusion of the war, $3 billion as “compensation” for the bombing and $10 billion in loan guarantees for the anticipated immigration of Soviet Jews.
The Fall of BCCI
New Writing On Women, Politics and Social Change
Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the State (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991).
Seteney Shami, Lucine Taminian et al, Women in Arab Society: Work Patterns and Gender Relations in Egypt, Jordan and Sudan (Oxford: Berg, 1990).
Bouthaina Shaaban, Both Right and Left Handed: Arab Women Talk About Their Lives (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991).
Kitty Warnock, Land Before Honor: Palestinian Women in the Occupied Territories (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990).
Gender, Sexuality and the Iraq of Our Imagination
Writings on colonialism and post-colonial portrayals of the Third World are rife with constructions of the Other as feminine, or as subject, like women, to the passionate irrationality, weakness, cowardice, traditionalism and superstition that mark the feminine as subordinate in Western discourse. In the image of the Arabs, however, masculinity is foregrounded. The Western construction of Arab masculinity serves, like the ascription of femininity it displaces, to mark the subordination of the Other.
Recording “Real Life” in Wadi Zayna
Neither a village nor a suburb, Wadi Zayna is a collection of gray tenements straggling between two roads leading up from the coast road into the hills of Iqlim al-Kharoub, just north of Sidon. Palestinians displaced from camps in the south and Beirut during battles with the Shi‘i Amal movement (1985-1987) have gathered here. Some are old-time residents, people who bought apartments before the 1982 Israeli invasion, investing lifetime savings to have somewhere to retire to outside the camps. Others are muhajirin (war refugees) who rent, or stay with relatives, or “squat” in unfinished buildings.
Women and Work in Istanbul
The Egyptian Women’s Health Book Collective
The publication of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s famous and controversial book Our Bodies, Ourselves (1976) created wide repercussions and charted a way for women all over the world to gain personal control, through the possession of objective and necessary information, over their own bodies, health status and lives.
A group of interested Egyptian women started to meet in May 1985, with the idea of finding ways to spread the message of the book to Egyptian and Arab women. They agreed to form a collective to produce a similar book in Arabic.
Women and Public Participation in Yemen
Women, Islam and the State
Gender and Political Change
‘Aziza the Alexandrian is serving a life sentence in her women’s prison in Egypt for the murder of her mother’s husband. ‘Aziza, the main character in Salwa Bakr’s novel The Golden Chariot Won’t Ascend to the Heavens, assassinated this man who had seduced her as well as her mother, and then, following her mother’s death, took another woman as his wife. [1] She plans to flee the prison in a golden chariot destined for the heavens, but she does not plan to leave alone. Bakr’s novel presents the other women prisoners elected to accompany her, 12 life histories that have warranted them a place in ‘Aziza’s chariot.
