East Asia’s relationship with the Middle East today is based mainly on economics and is devoid of grand political projects of solidarity and intellectual dialogue. Countries such as China, Japan and Korea present the Middle East with a model of neoliberal economic development. At the same time, the redemptive transformation of East Asia from a Western-dominated region to a globally powerful one offers a trajectory of development diverging from the Middle East, which struggles with political turbulence, regime crises and regional wars both cold and hot.
“Will China dominate the twenty-first century?” So asks the title of a short book by Jonathan Fenby, a British journalist who was editor of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post during the period when that bustling entrepôt was being transferred from British control to the sovereignty of the People’s Republic.
Abu Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
Amar, Paul and Vijay Prashad, eds. Dispatches from the Arab Spring (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Atia, Mona. Building a House in Heaven: Pious Neoliberalism and Islamic Charity in Egypt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Carapico, Sheila. Political Aid and Arab Activism: Democracy Promotion, Justice and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Cooke, Miriam. Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014).
Maxime Rodinson (1915-2004) was a pioneering scholar of Islam and the Middle East, as well as a prominent Marxian public intellectual. A product of classical Orientalist training, he was professor of Old Ethiopic and South Arabian languages at the Sorbonne. His scholarly sensibility was historical-materialist, a perspective he brought to his famous biography of the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad (1961), as well as later publications including Islam and Capitalism (English edition, 1973), Marxism and the Muslim World (English, 1979) and Cult, Ghetto and State: The Persistence of the Jewish Question (1983). Rodinson was a contributing editor of Middle East Report from 1988 to 2000.
On a Friday afternoon in September 2013, dozens of Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces looked exasperated as they tried to move Palestinian youth away from the wall near Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem. Attempting to corral hundreds of children, the PA troops pushed them down the hill toward Aida refugee camp and implored them to stop throwing stones at the Israeli military positions above.
Scan the headlines for news about Israeli settlers, and you are likely to be overwhelmed by stories of a radical and violent religious nationalism: extremists marching on the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, guarded by Israeli soldiers, to pray atop the Temple Mount; West Bank colonists torching olive trees and cars, or making midnight jaunts into Palestinian villages armed to the teeth, to put a “price tag” on both Israeli state slowdowns of the settlement project and Palestinian attacks on Israeli targets. But lately tales have emerged of a kinder, gentler settler as well. Take this Associated Press dispatch:
The Republic of South Sudan is undergoing its most devastating round of violence since declaring its independence in July 2011. The fighting broke out in mid-December 2013, some five months after President Salva Kiir fired his vice president, Riek Machar, along with the entire cabinet. At a December 15 meeting of the ruling party, Kiir alleged that Machar had been planning a coup. Machar denied it. Kiir is Dinka and Machar is Nuer, respectively the country’s two largest ethnic communities at 40 and 20 percent of the population. The dispute between the two men quickly took on a decidedly ethnic character as Dinkas in the presidential guard tried to disarm their Nuer colleagues leading to fighting between Dinka and Nuer civilians in the capital city of Juba.
Only a few dictators are blessed with a security apparatus powerful enough to suppress any and all challenges to their rule. The wretched remainder have to turn to Machiavelli’s Il Principe — a handy companion for political realists — for answers to the question of how to forestall their otherwise inevitable overthrow. But does Machiavelli’s masterpiece supply the foils for the new perils that insubordinate youths pose to the Arabian emir of the early twenty-first century?
In 2011 Yemenis shared a vision of revolutionary change with protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria demanding the downfall of cruel, corrupt presidential regimes. Today, like many of their cousins, the peaceful youth (shabab silmiyya) of Yemen face a counter-revolutionary maelstrom from within and without. If Gulf sultans were anxious about insurrection in North Africa, they were even more fearful of subaltern uprisings in their own neighborhood.
There are few obvious reasons to visit Basatin, a poor district off the Ring Road at the southern edge of Cairo. Getting there requires a driver willing to bob and weave through a succession of potholed lanes barely wide enough to accommodate pedestrians and the tiny shops that spill into the street. The problems of Basatin are the problems of Egypt: grinding poverty, overcrowding and the slow deterioration of state services. The neighborhood has learned to fend for itself, and non-residents are regarded with suspicion. I stick out more than most. One man watches me curiously for a while, and wanders over to ask if I am Syrian.
On August 14, 2013, supporters of deposed President Muhammad Mursi were massacred at two protest camps in Cairo and Giza. In the subsequent four months, the Muslim Brothers have regrouped to launch a wave of popular protest the likes of which has not been seen in Egypt since the January 25 revolution. Under the banner of the National Alliance to Support Legitimacy, the Brothers have mounted over 1,800 actions in 26 of Egypt’s 27 governorates to call for Mursi’s restoration to office and justice for his dead supporters. These protests have continued in spite of an ongoing crackdown that has claimed the lives of hundreds more and seen thousands of Brothers and pro-Mursi supporters detained.
In August 2013, as the United States was preparing to attack Syria over the use of chemical weapons, a chant echoed through ‘Alawi areas of Homs: “Strike, strike, buddy, we want to loot Tel Aviv” (idrab idrab ya habib, bidna n’affish Tall Abib). The couplet draws on a familiar position in Baathist discourse — resistance to the American-Zionist project for the region — but the means of resistance it espouses departs from the standard of national sacrifice in favor of something far more local. The term for looting, ‘afsh, is slang that comes from a word for furniture.
On January 25, 2011, thousands of Egyptians angered by police brutality, among other state abuses, took over Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo, setting off the exuberant upheaval that unseated a dictator of 30 years’ standing and inspired democrats the world over. Spellbound observers (including us) predicted that January 25 would never again be known in Egypt as Police Day.
Christopher Hitchens’ article “Uncorking the Genie: The Cyprus Question and Turkey’s Military Rule” (MERIP Reports 122) must be commended for approaching the complex issue of Cyprus from the vantage point of regional politics, rather than the more usual and not very enlightening arguments involving US imperialism or ethnic-religious differences. However, although his analysis is interesting and his paradigm plausible, the fact is that they quite simply do not apply. By looking at Turkish politics entirely through the prism of Cyprus, he has set up a model that appears to be supported more by aesthetics than hard facts.
Albrecht, Holger. Raging Against the Machine: Political Opposition Under Authoritarianism in Egypt (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013).
Al-Rasheed, Madawi. A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics and Religions in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Antoon, Sinan. The Corpse Washer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
Bayat, Asef, ed. Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Bröning, Michael. Political Parties in Palestine: Leadership and Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
MERIP mourns Graham Usher, our long-time correspondent and contributing editor. Below are his obituary and two remembrances from our editors.
In her article, “A Makeover: Baghdad, the 2013 Arab Capital of Culture” (MER 266), Nada Shabout gives a description of arts and culture initiatives being developed in three Iraqi “zones.” There are a few discrepancies regarding the non-profit Sada (Echo) for contemporary Iraqi art. First, the organization is described as being based in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. Sada has never been based in Erbil nor have we done specific work in this city. There is no connection between Iraqi Kurdistan and Sada as an organization, other than Sada’s broader mission to work in the Iraqi arts sphere as a whole.
When Sheikh Muhammad ‘Ali Hasan ‘Awad learned that nine kidnapped “Africans” — eight Eritreans and one Ethiopian — were being beaten, raped and starved in a compound in Sheikh Zuwayd, a Sinai village near the Israeli border, he wasted little time. Firing AK-47s in the air, the sheikh and his Bedouin posse burst in to free the victims and threaten their three torturers with death if they did not immediately tell all. The captors’ accounts — and the raid itself — were recorded in high-definition video with an iPad.
On June 1, the day after the brutal police attack to disperse the occupation of Gezi Park, thousands more protesters descended upon Taksim Square in central Istanbul. By the end of the week, demonstrators filled the plaza completely, with those in the park itself behind barricades should the police mount another raid. The atmosphere reminded many of a carnival, with people sharing food and dancing to music as they chanted slogans in the shade of the towering trees. It was an anxious occasion all the same — two protester tents were designated as infirmaries. Everyone wore masks or scarves around their necks to ward off tear gas and many carried first aid items for the volunteer health personnel.
Generation Y has figured large in the global pattern of protest beginning at the tail end of the 2000s. In marches against the fraudulent presidential election in Iran, against austerity in southern Europe, against autocracy in places from Morocco to Bahrain, and against greed and corruption in the United States, people born between 1980 and the late 1990s, aged 15-30, have been a driving force. Generation Y, also known as the millennials or the We Generation, is more than 2 billion people, roughly a third of the world’s total population.
