Visitors to the West Bank and Gaza get a very immediate, sensory grasp of the significance of stones. In the West Bank, the main cities and towns and many larger villages lie along the ridge of hills and plateaus running north to south and forming a sort of geological spine between the Mediterranean coastal plains and the Jordan rift valley. It is a land made of equal measure of stone and soil. The inhabitants and their ancestors have used the stone to hold the soil to the hillsides in order to provide rooting ground for their olive and fruit trees. The hill country of the West Bank is a subtly sculptured landscape of terraces that testify to uncounted generations of unobtrusive settlement, rows of rough stones piled patiently and mended every several seasons.
In June, the seventh month of the uprising, two of us — Joe Stork and Jim Paul — traveled to the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, along with photographer Rick Reinhard. We saw firsthand the extent to which this unfolding political event has transformed, and continues to transform, a balance of forces which less than a year ago had seemed so static, so immovable.
I would appreciate your publishing in Middle East Report the information that Zed Books has agreed to withdraw from circulation and pulp all remaining copies of Bantustan Gaza by Richard Locke and Anthony Stewart. This action has been taken at my request on the grounds that substantial portions of the book were plagiarized from my two-part monograph The Gaza Strip: Heading Toward a Dead End. Zed Books has also agreed to pay the cost that I incurred by engaging a solicitor.
Ann M. Lesch
Villanova, PA
The defeat of the Arab states in the June 1967 war was more than a military setback. It was also a blow against the radical nationalist project and its modern and secular cultural orientation which bonded the Arab world and the West even as it provided a framework for resistance to Western economic, political and cultural domination. Since 1967, only the Palestinian national movement has continued to advance the flag of radical nationalism. Elsewhere, a romantic Islamism, brandishing the slogan of cultural “authenticity,” has posed the most consistent challenge to continuing Western domination of the Middle East.
Doris Lessing, The Wind Blows Away Our Words (London: Picador and NY: Random House, 1987).
The travel book that touches on the political is a tricky genre. At its best it enables the author, freed from the constraints of formal narrative and factual analysis, to present a special insight into a society in turmoil and into his or her encounter with the protagonists. The anecdotal and the experiential can provide a unique access. The contrasting accounts of China in the 1930s by Edgar Snow and Peter Fleming are classics of this kind: more recent examples might be Graham Greene, Paul Theroux, Ryszard Kapuscinski, James Fenton at his more considered, the Naipauls at their less dyspeptic.
Asef Bayat, Workers and Revolution in Iran: A Third World Experience of Workers’ Control (London: Zed Press, 1987.)
The participation of workers in the anti-shah struggle, the rise of factory councils in 1979 and 1980, and their battles with the new Islamic state over workers’ control and other aspects of industrial relations has sparked interest in the structure and consciousness of the Iranian laboring classes.
The particular strength of this book is the extensive fieldwork which Bayat undertook in 1980 and 1981, prior to the regime’s crackdown on the left and liberals. The material he collected includes interviews with workers and council activists, and observation of factory conditions.
William Dorman and Mansour Farhang, The US Press and Iran: Foreign Policy and the Journalism of Deference (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).
Bruno Etienne, L’islamisme radical (Paris: Hachette, 1987.)
Gilles Kepel, Les banlieues de l’islam: naissance d’une religion en France (Paris: Seuil, 1987.)
BIRTH (Al-Maulid)
Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhoub (1921-1982)
Hand on the Prophet, God
Help and support me with him
who speaks for the people
on Judgment Day —
with him who drinks pure water
from al-Kauthar, Paradise river.
On the square’s other side
clear light spreads
a rainbow of hope and joy,
a spring flowing through
the darkness of night,
dance driving souls here
slowly one moment,
another faster than breath!
Turkish sociologist Ismail Beşikçi, the country’s foremost authority on Kurds, was born in Çorum in 1939. He recounts meeting Kurds for the first time as a student at Ankara University’s Faculty of Political Science. Later he spent time in Turkey’s eastern provinces as a student and during his military service. Out of these extended stays came his doctoral dissertation on the region’s social structure. Published as a book in 1968, it remains the best study of its kind. His publications eventually cost him his post at Atatürk University in Erzurum.
The Kurdish issue has become a daily staple of the Turkish press. At first focused on PKK atrocities, coverage now allows many people to get a clearer view of the conditions facing the country’s Kurdish citizens. Articles and interviews with tribal leaders, pro-government militia, local party leaders and state officials provide an understanding often at odds with official myths. For liberal and left-leaning journalists, this new opening has come as a welcome release from years of indirect reporting on the subject. Mehmet Ali Birand forcefully stated in July 1987 that the time for cryptic references was over. Columnist Mümtaz Soysal, also the country’s foremost constitutional scholar, discussed the futility of continuing the ban on the Kurdish language.
The most spectacular development of the past several years in Turkey’s Kurdish provinces has been the resumption, in the late summer of 1984, of guerrilla activity. The attacks consist mainly of hit-and-run actions against military personnel and against Kurdish civilians considered “traitors” or “collaborators.”
Early in 1988, the southern Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan witnessed large-scale political demonstrations and ethnic clashes. Renewed demonstrations and street confrontations in mid-May led to the dismissal of the Communist Party chiefs in both republics. Joe Stork spoke to Ronald Grigor Suny, who teaches Soviet and Armenian history at the University of Michigan, about the background to these clashes. Suny is the author of Armenia in the Twentieth Century (Scholars Press, 1983) and The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1972).
What exactly happened early this year in Karabagh, when clashes erupted between Soviet Armenians and Azerbaijanis?
Arab political and social thought in the 1960s was dominated by secular conceptions, including Arab nationalism, Arab socialism and Marxism. Even after the 1967 war, when the attraction of these ideologies began to wane, the immediate “self-criticism after the defeat” (to cite the title of Sadiq al-Azm’s famous book) maintained a militantly secular and revolutionary stance. [1] The emerging Palestinian resistance movement put forward slogans of armed struggle and people’s war.
Rachid al-Ghannouchi: "Deficiencies in the Islamic movement"
Although the Islamist movement has realized great accomplishments in its attempts to liberate the Islamic community from the legacy of decay and the remnants of destructive Western invasions, it is still far from realizing its ultimate goal — the establishment of the shar‘a of God on Earth…
Shaikh Hamid al-Nayfar is a leading figure in Tunisia’s Islamist movement. Francois Burgat, who interviewed him in Tunis in 1985, works at the Centre de Recherches et d'Etudes sur les Societes Mediterraneennes (CRESM) in Aix-en-Provence, France.
What is the meaning of the name of your magazine, 15/21?
The basis of our project is to ask how one can be simultaneously a Muslim and live in this era — how to be a Muslim today. Fifteen stands for the fifteenth century of the hegira, the beginning of the Islamic community. Twenty-one signifies the fact that we are living now on the edge of the twenty-first century, with all the problems that poses for the world community.
Late last September, in the sweltering, heavily guarded State Security Court in Tunis, all eyes were fixed on Shaikh Rachid al-Ghannouchi as he concluded his impassioned defense:
If God wishes me to become the martyr of the mosques, then let it be so. But I tell you that my death will not be in vain, and that from my blood, Islamic flowers will grow.
The Hearth of Intellectuals, a small organization comprising some 150 conservative journalists, academics and other intellectuals, has functioned as a sort of fountainhead for a new legitimizing ideology for the Turkish Republic. Gencay Şaylan refers to them as the “Turkish Opus Dei” in his 1988 book, Islam and Politics. Indeed, the Hearth resembles this Spanish Catholic institution in its goals of providing the intellectual and moral foundations for an authoritarian political system.
Tarikats are religious orders established to “search for divine truth.” They have been part of Turkish cultural and social life for centuries. The groups discussed here are Sunni. Turkey’s Shi‘a do have their own religious orders, but as a result of the persecution they suffered during Ottoman rule and later at the hands of rightwing forces in the 1970s, they support secular principles and are generally non-political.
The Rabita affair underlines the extent to which the post-1980 regime in Turkey has turned to Islam as a bulwark against the left. “Rabita” — the Saudi-based Rabit’at al-Alam al-Islami (World Islamic League) — advocates the establishment of a pan-Islamic federation based on the shari‘a. One would have expected it to be among the last allies sought by Turkey’s Atatürkist generals, since it promotes a political system anathema to the military and funds publications which denounce Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his secular policies.
