Middle East Research and Information Project: Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971
“In the last decade,” wrote Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the November 2011 Foreign Policy, “our foreign policy has transitioned from dealing with the post-Cold War peace dividend to demanding commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. As those wars wind down, we will need to accelerate efforts to pivot to new global realities” — namely, the growing strategic importance of Asia and the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
Bahrain Centre for Human Rights. Post-BICI Report (Manama, March 2012).
Brown, Nathan. When Victory Is Not an Option: Islamist Movements in Arab Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
Caridi, Paola. Hamas: From Resistance to Government (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012).
Davis, Diana K. and Edmund Burke III, eds., Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012).
Elver, Hilal. The Headscarf Controversy: Secularism and Freedom of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Adam Hanieh, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
It is argued that the celebrated Arab protest movements have changed the path of visual arts in the region. Headlines predict that art inspired by the uprisings will be freer and more critical. Artists have partaken in the displays of mass dissent, demonstrating in the streets and protesting further through their work. Inflated claims notwithstanding, and despite unfulfilled hopes, the protests have indeed directed welcome attention to art scenes in Arab cities. Change, many still hope, is finally possible.
A clip circulating on YouTube begins with two sets of feet stepping on a portrait of Syrian President Bashar al-Asad, defaced with a blood-red X and tossed on the ground. It soon becomes apparent that “dirty Asad” lies inside a ring of protesters, who circle the head shot stomping rhythmically — on the downbeat, in repeated or alternating steps that rock backward and forward, left and right — to a rollicking tune in the background. The video is captioned, “The Sweetest and Finest of Syrian Dabka.” [1]
A familiar song accompanied the massive protests that began on February 20, 2011 in Morocco.
The song, “Fine Ghadi Biya Khouya” (Where Are You Taking Me, Brother?), was first released in 1973 by Nass el Ghiwane, the venerable folk-pop group that continues to dominate Moroccan popular music — its aesthetics and social conscience. It resurfaced in a 2003 cover by the band Hoba Hoba Spirit. And it was broadcast again in the background of the 2011 demonstrations that had much in common with the uprisings across the Arab world, but which in Morocco never became a revolt.
The website of Morocco’s National Tourist Office, a government organization, advertises the North African country as a land of cultural festivals and moussems (traditional fairs honoring a saint). According to the Ministry of Information, about 150 such festivals take place each year. The Ministry of Tourism describes these gatherings as occasions for Moroccans to celebrate the diverse cultural identities of the country as expressed in all artistic fields.
At the beginning of 2012, as Egyptians and Syrians marked the second year of their revolts, protesters also took to the streets of Hadiboh, the tumbledown capital of Yemen’s Socotra archipelago (pop. approx. 50,000). Like demonstrators elsewhere, the Socotrans were calling for both local administrative change and national political reform. While the Socotran protests, occurring since March 2011, were small, they were no less significant than the more spectacular rallies in the epicenters of Arab revolution. Indeed, the spread of revolution to Socotra, the largest and most populated of the archipelago’s four islands, shows the extent to which the events of 2011 have resonated even at the very margins of the Arab world.
Many of the slogans of the Egyptian revolution have been poetry, and as compositions with rhyme, meter and purpose, they resonate with very old conceptions of lyrical form. But slogans are not literary texts whose meanings can be reduced to a purely semantic level. Most often, they are part of a performance — embodied actions taking place in particular situations. This fact opens up avenues for thinking about literary aesthetics and political practice, and it shows the relevance of cultural analysis for the study of revolution.
The Arab uprisings have brought major challenges, as well as unprecedented opportunities, to the culture industries. According to a flurry of celebratory news articles from the spring of 2011 onward, protest art is proliferating in the region, from graffiti in Egypt to hip-hop in Morocco to massive photographic displays and political cartoons gone viral in Tunisia. These articles then adopt a predictably ominous tone to express the concern that resurgent Islamist forces represent a danger to arts and culture writ large.
Abbas, Rauf and El-Dessouky, Assem. The Large Landowning Class and the Peasantry in Egypt, 1837-1952 (ed. Peter Gran) (trans. Amer Mohsen and Mona Zikry) (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012).
Achy, Lahcen. Tunisia’s Economic Challenges (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 2011).
Anderson, Betty. The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2011).
Bonnefoy, Laurent. Salafism in Yemen: Transnationalism and Religious Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
Clark, Peter. Istanbul: A Cultural History (Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 2012).
We are reeling from the loss of Anthony Shadid, an extraordinary reporter, gifted writer and good friend to many of our staffers, editors and regular contributors. Anthony served on our editorial committee from 2000-2002.
Shir Hever, The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation (Pluto, 2010).
There is a latter-day tendency to see the 44-year Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories as the organic outward growth of the Zionist idea — as though the aspiration to hold the entirety of the land, embedded in Labor Zionist doctrine, was in fact a certainty, simply waiting for time to catch up. With the occupation deepened since the 1993 Oslo accord, and the remainder of the Palestinian populace crowded into a scattering of bantustans in the West Bank and one big one in Gaza, one can understand the diffusion of this way of thinking. It appears that the Zionist drive to dominion has neared completion.
On July 9, 2011, tens of thousands of South Sudanese gathered in the capital city of Juba at the mausoleum of rebel leader John Garang to celebrate the creation of their new state. Six months earlier, these jubilant crowds had voted in a referendum for independence from northern Sudan; more than 98 percent cast their ballots in favor of secession.
In the spring of 2011, amidst vociferous debates over the prospect of a third term in office for the “Islam-friendly” Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey, a group of devout women launched an initiative called “No Headscarves, No Vote.” The activists demanded that all Turkish political parties include women wearing headscarves on their electoral lists. No fewer than 60 percent of Turkish women cover their heads in public, and the activists believed it was time these women had a place in formal politics. At the time, in fact, 50 of Parliament’s 550 members were women, and 30 of the women represented the AKP, but none of them wore a headscarf.
In his classic study, The Arab Cold War, Malcolm Kerr charted the machinations of inter-Arab politics during an era dominated by Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser. In another renowned work, The Struggle for Syria, Patrick Seale documented the links between Syria’s tumultuous domestic politics and the broader contest for supremacy in the region, stemming from factors ranging from inter-Arab conflicts to the global cold war. [1] Today, amid the chaos in Syria and the transformations in the region, these texts, both originally published in 1965, seem all too contemporary. Once again, regional politics shows many signs of an Arab cold war and, once again, that broader conflict is manifesting itself in a struggle for Syria.
Nearly one year into the Syrian uprising, with more than 7,500 Syrians dead, the protracted conflict is not very well understood or reported despite a deluge of writings. Most track fast-moving events without pausing for sober analysis of Syrian politics and society. Early on, the dominant argument was that the regime would quickly collapse; later, it has been that the regime is durable. The long view rarely appears. When it does, alas, it most commonly adduces timeless cultural factors, chiefly sectarianism, to explain the apparent stalemate.
On October 23, 2011, for the first time since independence in 1956, Tunisians were called to the polls in free and transparent elections. They were to choose 217 members of a Constituent Assembly that for a year would play a double role: drafting a new constitution and governing the country.
