Middle East Research and Information Project: Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971
Abdel-Latif, Omayma. In the Shadow of the Brothers: The Women of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 2008).
Al-Ali, Nadje and Nicola Pratt. What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009).
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. 2003-2007 Report on Hate Crimes and Discrimination Against Arab Americans (Washington, DC, December 2008).
I recently visited a small Turkish village that seemed in many ways similar to the 1950s Iraqi village Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, known to her friends as B.J., described in her now classic ethnography, Guests of the Sheikh, from the muddy lanes to the daily lives of its men and women. Having just learned of B.J.’s death on December 2, 2008 at age 81, I thought a lot about her while I was there, about how we are all part of a chain of experience that links one generation to the next and about how my own experience of fieldwork — and how I try to live my life, teach, and mentor my students — is still inspired by her example. A few days after I returned to Istanbul, I went to an exhibit of Orientalist paintings and came face to face with a life-size portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the wife of the British consul to the Ottoman Empire who in 1716-1718 lived in Istanbul, learned Turkish and wrote about her experiences visiting the Ottoman harems with enormous sensitivity and ethnographic detail, the first foreign woman to do so. B.J. was a link in that line of compassionate, humanistic observers of the Near East going back to Lady Montague and forward to the rich and dense circle of fellow travelers forged among the many women that B.J. mentored.
“Simplicity has disappeared,” laments Minoo Shahbazi, energetic at 50, and animated in the cheap manteau and black scarf she wears beneath her chador. Look at her 16-year old son, she says: “He likes to wear famous brand-name clothes. Obviously, I do not agree. He is very different from me.”
It is characteristic of modern social revolutions to seek moral improvement of the population, as well as redress of the injustices of the ancien regime. In 1794, Paris echoed with calls to “righteousness”; in 1917, the Bolsheviks denounced the bourgeois decadence of the czarist era. For Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and other clerical leaders, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was not only a seizure of political power, but also the moment of revival of Islamic morality, which had been systematically weakened by the secular Pahlavi regime. The clerics set out to build in Iran “a spotless society.” [1]
Baluchistan, a region long associated with instability and armed conflict, straddles the borders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan is home to the largest number of Baluch, at 5 million, and the largest province of Baluchistan, at 43 percent of the country’s land mass. In Iran, the Baluch, who are mainly Sunni Muslims, share the province of Sistan and Baluchistan with ethnically different Persians and Sistanis, who are mainly Shi‘i Muslims. There are Shi‘i Baluch, as well, living in Makran, as the southernmost part of the province is known, especially in a region called Bazman. The province comprises 11.5 percent of Iranian land and has around 2.5 million inhabitants, around 4 percent of the national population.
Since the 2005 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the burning economic issue in Iran has been the privatization of public assets and, more recently, the elimination of subsidies for a vast array of goods and services. Leading figures, including the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have called the privatization program “an economic revolution.” [1] But it is not only the economy that private ownership is supposed to rescue. There seems to be a consensus across the political and ideological spectrum that public ownership of economic assets is the cause of a host of social and political ills, from authoritarianism to corruption and nepotism.
The poet Esmail Khoi once remarked to Ardeshir Mohassess that many of his drawings focused on oppression, depicting both the oppressor and the oppressed as ugly and animal-like. “You seem to suggest,” Khoi observed, “that those who suffer from oppression are no less cruel that their oppressors.” Ardeshir responded, “Perhaps I see both as equally responsible.” [1] Throughout an artistic career that spanned nearly five decades, Mohassess’ evocative line drawings depicted the heavy burden of the contest for power on the lives of Iranians. Above all, Ardeshir saw himself as a reporter, and his body of work forms an archive of twentieth-century Iran.
I want to begin with a story. Like the best of stories, it is true.
The story of Iran’s “reformist moment” of 1997-2005 can be told through the story of the Iranian press in this period. Previously, the Islamic Republic had severely restricted freedom of the press, issuing permits only to newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets that mimicked the hard line of state-owned media. With the second appointment of Mohammad Khatami as minister of culture and Islamic guidance in 1989, the restrictions loosened and the number of newspapers published in Iran rose to about 550 in 1992-1994. These new publications included bestselling Hamshahri, the first newspaper printed in color, and the independent Salam.
Obituaries for the Islamic Republic of Iran appeared even before it was born. In the hectic months of 1979 — before the Islamic Republic had been officially declared — many Iranians as well as foreigners, academics as well as journalists, participants as well as observers, conservatives as well as revolutionaries, confidently predicted its imminent demise. Taking every street protest, every labor strike, every provincial clash as the harbinger of its inevitable downfall, they gave the new regime a few months — at best, a few short years.
It was early afternoon, a bright, crisp Friday in mid-January on the hilltop that lies between Route 34 and the Gaza border, maybe half a mile from Sderot. At the base of the hill lounged journalists and TV crews in foldout chairs, taking advantage of a midday lull in the bombardment. Pop music sounded from one of their dish-mounted vans. No one seemed to take much notice of the locals who came and went overhead — couples, amateur videographers, a man in a wheelchair, taking up positions under an overhanging copse of pine trees.
Tehran, February 9, 1979. The Shah was gone. Iran was governed, if governed is the word, by Shahpour Bakhtiar, a former minister in the cabinet of Mohammad Mossadeq, the nationalist premier whose CIA-engineered overthrow had restored the monarchy 26 years earlier. The country was roiled by massive demonstrations and armed clashes between security forces and revolutionaries of many stripes, secular and devout, Marxist and Islamist. Eight days earlier, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had alighted at Tehran’s airport and, following a jubilant popular welcome, announced the formation of a new revolutionary government. The Iranian military was collapsing, as soldiers relinquished their rifles and numerous commanders declared their neutrality in the civil strife.
On the day after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, the wanted man addressed a pre-planned rally of thousands in front of the presidential palace in Khartoum. Bashir was defiant, denouncing the warrant as “neo-colonialism,” and praising his supporters in Martyrs’ Square as “grandsons of the mujahideen,” a reference to the participants in the Mahdiyya uprising against Anglo-Egyptian rule in 1885. The atmosphere was almost one of jubilation; one might have mistaken the crowds for soccer fans celebrating a win.
Beating their chests and wearing black, a procession of young men and women filed toward the gates of Tehran’s Amir Kabir Polytechnic University on February 23. The mourners — drawn primarily from the ranks of the Basij militia and unaffiliated hardline Islamist vigilantes — were carrying the remains of five unknown soldiers, martyred during the 1980-88 war with Iraq, to campus, where they intended to rebury them. Inside the gates, a gathering of angry students had assembled to protest what they saw as a blatant show of state force, and when the procession crossed onto campus, a confrontation ensued. Students claimed the fight pitted 1,500 protesters against a smaller group of mourners, most of whom were armed with clubs, knives and martial arts weapons.
Under a tent in Benghazi on August 30, 2008, Silvio Berlusconi bowed symbolically before the son of ‘Umar al-Mukhtar, hero of the Libyan resistance to Italian colonial rule. “It is my duty to express to you, in the name of the Italian people, our regret and apologies for the deep wounds that we have caused you,” said the Italian premier. [1] Eastern Libya was the site of the bulk of the armed resistance to the Italian occupation, which lasted from 1911 to 1943. More than 100,000 Libyans are believed to have died in the counterinsurgency campaign, many in desert prison camps and in southern Italian penal colonies.
