The rights of minorities and their relations with majority groups in power give rise to some of the most intractable struggles around the world. In the United States, for example, the affirmative action debate, a legacy of the civil rights struggle, pivots around the principle of “blindness” to collective differences in a society whose history is replete with racist and sexist discrimination. Advocates of affirmative action argue that it compensates for past wrongs against particular “kinds” of people — notably the female and/or black kinds. Opponents argue that it violates the equal protection principle by which rights should be accorded to individual “citizens” rather than groups.
Abdalla, Ahmad. Parliamentary Elections in Egypt: What Elections? What Parliament? And Which Egypt? Amsterdam Middle East Papers 1/3 (Amsterdam, 1995).
Adelson, Roger. London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power and War, 1902-1922 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
Appiah, Kwame Anthony and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Identities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Bennis, Phyllis. Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN (Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 1996).
Center for Human Rights Legal Aid. Mid-Year Report (Cairo, 1996).
Editors,
We were deeply saddened to learn of the death of Marion Farouk-Sluglett on March 1 in Salt Lake City. Marion had been diagnosed with cancer just a year earlier, but up until a few weeks before her death she continued to teach and write. In early December, she traveled to Washington for the MESA meeting, where she chaired a panel on poverty in Turkey. She told us then about a new work-in-progress relating to leading Islamist thinkers. Even in her time of grievous sickness she maintained the formidable affirmative spirit that had been her signature.
Diane Singerman, Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo (Princeton, 1995).
Boldly going where no one has gone before, the Clinton administration is busy renting out its broadcast studios to the Saudi king’s brother-in-law, whose new weekly call-in show, “Dialogue with the West,” airs inside the kingdom and in neighboring countries. The hour-long program is officially a joint venture of Voice of America (VOA), Worldnet and the London-based Middle East Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), owned by Walid al-Ibrahim, a relative of His Royal Highness, and part of the Al Sa’ud’s increasingly visible media empire.
In his January 1996 report on the UN operation in the Western Sahara, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali expressed the Security Council’s “frustration…at the absence of even a reasonably clear indication of when the [referendum] process might come to an end.” This was one of Boutros-Ghali’s most candid official statements about an operation that, by most accounts, has gone awry. With a mandate to organize and conduct a referendum asking Sahrawis to choose either independence or integration into Morocco, the most important issue now confronting the UN mission is whether the referendum process, which began in September 1991, has already been so compromised that it no longer offers a realistic means for resolving the conflict.
From June 4-14, tens of thousands of officials and experts from around the globe will gather in Istanbul for the Second UN Conference for Human Settlement (Habitat II), the last of the global UN summits. The non-official NGO gatherings should take the occasion to scrutinize how the attending states have addressed the right of their citizens to adequate shelter.
B’tselem. Incidents of Death and Injury Resulting from Exploding Munitions Remnants (Jerusalem, 1995).
Colonna, Fanny. Les versets d’invincibilite: Permanence et changements religieux dans l’Algerie contemporaine (Paris: Presse de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1995).
Darweish, Marwan and Andrew Rigby. Palestinians in Israel: Nationality and Citizenship (Trowbridge, Britain: Redwood Books, 1995).
Democracy and Workers’ Rights Center. Stop Exploiting Children (Ramallah, September 1995).
Doumani, Beshara. Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).
Michael Shalev, Labor and the Political Economy in Israel (Oxford, 1992).
Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (Oxford, 1992).
Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War (Clarendon Press, 1993).
Princeton University recently launched a massive fundraising campaign in its palatial Prospect House for maximum media exposure. But its public relations people are unhappy with reporters snooping around the Near Eastern studies division — a lumbering dinosaur of a department housed in nearby ivy-covered Jones Hall. The unwelcome attention involves a new member of the faculty, Heath Lowry, whose Ataturk chair in Turkish studies is paid for by the Turkish state. Lowry has a history of being beholden to Turkish governments and, as City University of New York psychologist Robert Jay Lifton charges, of doing their bidding.
Tal‘at Qasim got his start in al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya [1] (the Islamic Group) in the 1970s when it took control of many student organizations in the Egyptian universities. He led the student union in Minya, a hotbed of the Islamist movement, and later was a founding member of the majlis al-shura (governing council) of the organization at large. Sheikh ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman later became head of the majlis.
Women’s groups, like all voluntary associations in Kuwait, are controlled and funded by the state. They have elected boards, written constitutions and paid memberships. Law 24 of 1962 governing the activity of associations — partially amended in 1965 and still in force — gives the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor full control and power over voluntary associations. The Ministry has the power to refuse to license an association, to dissolve its elected board or to terminate an association if it determines the group not to be beneficial to society as a whole or not to be abiding by its constitution.
In the summer of 1993, True Path Party delegates — 99.8 percent of them males — selected Tansu Çiller as chairperson of their party and thus their candidate for prime minister. For the first time since 1934, when women gained the right to vote and to be elected to Parliament, a woman became prime minister of Turkey. If citizenship involves the rights and responsibilities of membership to a state, here was a woman who had fully exercised her right to head the government of her country.
