Middle East Research and Information Project: Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971
It was a small but brave demonstration. On October 23, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, 20 people marched down a major street during lunch hour, carrying an Israeli and a Palestinian flag. Sponsored by a local coalition of Jews, Palestinians and peace activists, the group distributed leaflets and postcards along the route, urging people to write Congress to promote US recognition of the PLO and mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO.
Nadav Safran will step down as director of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) this summer, following a three-month investigation into his acceptance of over $150,000 from the Central Intelligence Agency. Michael Spence, dean of faculty for arts and sciences, accepted Safran’s resignation “with sadness and deep reservation.” Spence proclaimed that Safran’s “erudition and objectivity as a scholar have not been questioned,” and told reporters that Safran was under no obligation to resign as CMES director. Safran will retain his tenured post as Murray Albertson Professor of Middle East Studies in the Department of Government.
November 21, 1985, was a remarkable day. FBI agents arrested a civilian terrorism analyst working for the US Navy, Jonathan Jay Pollard, outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, where he had gone seeking political asylum. Six days later, Pollard was arraigned in federal district court on several counts of espionage against the United States as a paid agent for the government of Israel.
Shaikh-ul-Islam Pashazada Allahshukur Hummatoglu is chairman of the Board of Management of Caucasian Muslims. Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux interviewed him in Baku in July 1984.
How are Soviet Muslims organized?
There are four separate Islamic religious bodies in the Soviet Union. Three of these are for Sunnis. Here in the Transcaucasian region, comprising Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia, Shi‘i Muslims are the majority. Their leader is the shaikh-ul-Islam, the position I now hold.
Are you appointed by the state?
Baku, the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan, lying on the west coast of the Caspian, embodies many suggestive contrasts with other areas of the Soviet Union and with the neighboring countries of Iran and Turkey. On the esplanade running along the seashore, restaurants sell kebabs, local pancakes (kutab) and Azerbaijani sweets; there are the colored lights, smells and sounds of outdoor eating places further south. The mustachioed young men, the gestures of greeting, the pace of the crowd suggest other Middle Eastern cities. In the icheri sheher, the inner city, glass-paned balconies lean over the first floors of the houses, as they do in Turkey. Three centuries of Persian rule have also left their mark on the literature and art of this region.
The relationship of women’s emancipation to liberation parties or movements raises a number of questions. The basic one is whether or not women are making their own revolution in their own name or being handed it by “another revolution.” [1]
During the early stages of national political formation in the Middle East, when crises prevail and mass mobilization is a major organizing strategy, political movements often recruit women and the domestic sector into the political arena. Continuous crises, from which the domestic sector is not immune, compel women to participate. This was the case in the pre-1982 Palestinian community in Lebanon.
Masses of Iranian women, many of them “traditional,” relatively uneducated and from the lower classes, were politically quite active in the Iranian revolution. Many observers assume this to be without precedent. There is, however, a tradition of political participation and struggle in community politics by women, as the case of the village of Aliabad illustrates. Women’s activities, roles and characteristics in local politics were similar to those they exhibited in the Iranian revolution. These village women were not radically departing from their usual behavior by supporting the revolution and joining marches in the nearby city of Shiraz.
The study of women and politics has usually focused on the participation of women in the formal political arena — that is, in politics as practiced by political parties, by people holding political office or, at most, by political opposition movements. In the Middle East context in particular, the modern history of women in politics has been limited, by and large, to study of the role women played in the various nationalist movements in the region.
How are Middle East women political and how do they participate in states, movements, revolts and revolutions? Few activities of ordinary people are inherently political. How something comes to be seen as political at times and non-political at other times, and who gets to define it as such, are basic questions. Neither women nor men are political or apolitical in the abstract. How their activities come to carry a political charge must be understood in the context of their particular histories and cultures.
We mark MERIP’s 15 years of publication by introducing a few changes in the magazine. MERIP Middle East Report is the same magazine, but now has a title that identifies its focus for potential new readers unfamiliar with our acronym. We are confident that this new name and fresh look will help broaden our audience and magnify the impact of our work.
The "Lebanon primer" in your June issue was quite good. It is difficult to see what more you could have gotten into it. I have only a couple of remarks, which certainly are not a criticism, as I myself don’t see how you could have worked these nuances in within the short space at your disposal.
Alan Hart, Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker? (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1984).
From the West Bank to Armageddon A 45-minute slide-tape program produced by Sara Freedman and Ted German for Boston Mobilization for Survival. Available from Survival Education Fund.
Organizing around Middle East issues has never been easy in the United States. A number of obvious political problems have caused many people on the left to shy away from open support for the struggles of the people of the region and clear-cut opposition to US policy. But activists anxious to reach potentially sympathetic people in the peace and anti-intervention movements have also suffered from a lack of resources to help clarify the complex struggles in the region and explain the character and costs of US involvement there.
Meron Benvenisti, Israeli Censorship of Arab Publications: A Survey (New York: Fund for Free Expression, 1984).
Uriel Dann, Studies in the History of Transjordan, 1920-1949 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984).
Paul A. Jureidini and R. D. McLaurin, Jordan: The Impact of Social Change on the Role of the Tribes (New York: Praeger, The Washington Papers 108, 1984).
Clinton Bailey, Jordan’s Palestinian Challenge, 1948-1983 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984).
Emile Habiby, Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist (New York: Vantage Press, 1982).
Sarah Graham-Brown, Education, Repression and Liberation: Palestinians (London: World University Service, 1984).
“Whenever I hear the word culture,” said an occupying officer during the Spanish conquest of South America, “I pull out my gun.” Foreign invaders are often quick on the trigger, and quick to assert their “superior” culture. Indigenous culture, after all, is a rallying point for popular resistance. What the invaders cannot suppress outright, they try to ignore, belittle, distort and dehumanize.
Moshe Ma’oz, Palestinian Leadership on the West Bank: The Changing Role of the Mayors Under Jordan and Israel (London: Frank Cass, 1984).
Moshe Ma’oz is a current favorite in Israel and the US to guest lecture on the subject of Palestinian politics, and the Israeli media regularly defers to him as a respected Arabist. His assessment of West Bank political leadership gets more than its fair share of attention. What a shame.
The smiling young actor posed on the cover of Cinematographe magazine this summer is Tunisian-born ‘Abd el-Kechich, star of ‘Abd el-Krim Bahloul’s 1984 film, Thé a la Menthe (Mint Tea). Jeune Cinema, meanwhile, is featuring Egyptian director Youssef Chahine, whose personalized retelling of the French invasion of Egypt, Adieu Bonaparte, premiered at Cannes in May and is now playing in the Latin Quarter. A few blocks away, another theater is showing Mehdi Charef’s Le Thé au Harem d’Archimede (The Tea in Archimedes’ Harem), which, like Thé a la Menthe, deals with the life of an Algerian immigrant in Paris.
