During and after the 34 days of intense fighting between Hizballah and Israel in July and August 2006, observers advanced competing interpretations of the varied reactions in the Middle East. One popular narrative pointed to an emerging Sunni-Shi‘i divide in what one might label a “post-Arab” Middle East. According to Vali Nasr, author of the much discussed volume The Shia Revival, the Lebanon war marked a spillover of sectarian tensions manifest in Iraq, confirming his prophecy that cleavages within Islam will define the region’s major conflicts in the future.
This 1995 CIA map, often used in the media and in classrooms, reminds us that today Shi‘i Muslims are concentrated in only a few nation-states—Iran, Iraq, the Arab Gulf states, Azerbaijan and Lebanon in the Middle East, and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India in South Asia. There are also numerous ‘Alawis in Syria, Alevis in Turkey and Zaydi Shi‘a in Yemen. The vast majority of Muslims in the world, approximately 90 percent, are Sunni.
Adib-Moghaddam, Arshin. The International Politics of the Persian Gulf: A Cultural Geneaology (London: Routledge, 2006).
Ansari, Ali M. Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Conflict in the Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
Golan-Agnon, Daphna. Next Year in Jerusalem (New York: New Press, 2006).
Hirschkind, Charles. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
In the summer of 2006, two border incidents were invoked by Israel, with strong US diplomatic support and material assistance, to justify a prolonged military offensive in Gaza and a crushing “shock and awe” assault on Lebanon. The main international response, effectively orchestrated by Washington, was built around the bland assertion that Israel has the “right to defend itself.”
In June 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unexpectedly won the presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran, after an intense campaign in which he exerted great effort to present himself as the defender of the poor and the working class. These classes, badly hurt by neo-liberal economic policies in the period following the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq war, had staged a number of organized and noisy protests in the years preceding Ahmadinejad’s campaign, and they responded in significant numbers to his appeal for votes. The first year and a half of Ahmadinejad’s presidency, however, has seen an erosion of the social contract between working Iranians and the state of a magnitude that may be decisive for the future of democracy in Iran.
In evaluating women’s position in the contemporary Islamic Republic of Iran, it is important to look at the social, as opposed to the legal, aspects of citizenship. In the decades following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iranian society has become resolutely more modern, despite the public face of elderly tradition presented by its clerical political elite. This modernization enhanced trends that were already evident before the revolution. In 1978–1979, for the first time more Iranians lived in cities than in the countryside, and nearly half the population could read and write. The number of births per family rose in the early years of the revolution, but by 1986 the fertility rate peaked, and then began a dramatic decline.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) underwent its most recent five-year review in May 2005. There were numerous proposals on the table for strengthening the global non-proliferation regime. None were adopted. Perhaps even more puzzlingly, in an age when the White House repeatedly invokes the specter of suitcase-size nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists, the United States did not send a high-level delegate.
The first round of the 2005 Iranian presidential election was rich in lessons regarding the country’s political life, in general, and regarding the political comportment of diverse sectors of the population, in particular. Contrary to what is often said, electoral fraud alone does not explain — or only partially explains — the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His incontestable win over one of the most eminent members of the clergy, former President Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, had deeper causes that require an analysis borrowing from various social sciences.
The August 31 UN Security Council deadline for Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program passed with the Islamic Republic, not unexpectedly, refusing to acquiesce. In the summer of 2005, the newly inaugurated President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reversed his predecessor Mohammad Khatami’s voluntary suspension of enrichment, claiming that Iran had received nothing substantial in exchange for the unilateral confidence-building measure. Iran’s official position since August 2005 has been to seek unconditional negotiations with the West, presumably not just over its nuclear program, but over a wide-ranging security and economic package as well. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon, openly supported by the United States, hardened the Iranian regime’s attitude into truculence.
In Ramadans past, teams of men drawn from neighborhoods across Baghdad faced off in nighttime matches of mihaibis (the ring game), an amusing pastime dating back to the Ottoman Empire. A ring, small enough to conceal in the palm of the hand, and unlike any other on the men’s fingers, was given to one team, whose leader chose a player to hold it in his clenched fist. The team with the ring then lined up, each man with clenched fists held out and turned downward.
Alagha, Joseph. The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology: Religious Ideology, Political Ideology and Political Program (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006).
Cook, Jonathan. Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (London: Pluto Press, 2006).
Deeb, Lara. An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Hashim, Ahmed S. Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
Cynthia Nelson (1933–2006), professor of anthropology at the American University in Cairo and founding director of its Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies, passed away on Valentine’s Day after a long, severe illness. She was in Sacramento with family.
Youssef Darwish (1910–2006) was born to a Karaite Jewish family of modest means in the Cairo neighborhood of ‘Abbasiyya. His father was illiterate, but made sure that his children received a first-rate education. In France to study commerce and then law, Darwish met the Communist Party of France in the heyday of Stalinism. Returning to Egypt in 1934, Darwish was instrumental in a succession of Egyptian communist groups.
MERIP notes with deep sadness the passing of Ahmed Abdalla Rozza on June 6, 2006, at age 56. A former Egyptian student leader, Abdalla was an independent scholar and activist who wrote frequently on Egyptian politics and sociology, authoring several articles for this magazine in the 1990s. He was a tireless advocate for Egypt’s lower classes, a widely respected analyst and a good friend to many progressive scholars of Egypt in the US, Europe and Japan.
Misty Gerner, an editor of this magazine and an inspiration to so many of us, died in the tranquility of her home in Vinland, Kansas on June 19, 2006 after a lengthy struggle with cancer. Misty was a scholar, activist and peacemaker, exemplifying always both reason and passion. She “let her life speak,” to paraphrase a fellow Quaker, living her values each day in what can only be described as a coherent, internally consistent life.
Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (trans. Chaya Galai) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
In photography books, Palestine is a schizophrenic place. In certain books it is primarily funerals, masked militants with guns and crumbling buildings, while other
