American Friends Service Committee. When the Rain Returns: Toward Justice and Reconciliation in Palestine and Israel (Philadelphia: American Friends Service Committee, 2004).
Cohen, Stephen P. The Idea of Pakistan (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004).
Collins, John. Occupied by Memory: The Intifada Generation and the Palestinian State of Emergency (New York: New York University Press, 2004).
Eppel, Michael. Iraq from Monarchy to Tyranny (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004).
When primary school students in the major Berber-speaking regions of Morocco returned to class in September 2004, for the first time ever they were required to study Berber (Tamazight) language. The mandatory language classes in the Rif, the Middle Atlas, the High Atlas and the Sous Valley represent the first significant policy change implemented by the Royal Institute of the Amazigh [Berber] Culture, a government body established by King Mohammed VI on October 17, 2001, following through on a promise made in July of that year on the second anniversary of his ascension to the Moroccan throne.
On February 23, 2004, two days after the conservative victory in the elections for the Seventh Majles, for which the Guardian Council banned over 2,000 reformist candidates, including some 80 current deputies, the reformist-dominated Sixth Majles accepted the resignation of Fatemeh Haqiqatjoo.
The Iranian state, controlled de facto by the conservatives in the government, promotes the idea that Iran is the center of Shi‘ism. It bases its argument on the fact that Iran is a Shi‘i-run state, whereas Shi‘i Muslims in other parts of the world live in states that are dominated by Sunnis, and so Iran is free to pay near exclusive attention to Shi‘i concerns.
My work is visual. It’s immediate. My photographs show the process that is happening in Iran. —Abbas
Born in Iran in 1944, Abbas moved to Algeria with his family when he was eight years old. As a young school¬boy at the École de Garcons d’El-Biar, Abbas wrote a short story entitled “A Grand Voyage” about his family’s emigration, illustrating the tale with a pencil drawing of an Air France jet flying over jagged, snow-capped mountains. “A Grand Voyage” proved to be a prescient tale, foretelling his life as a traveler — an identity he prefers to that of an exile.
The conservative forces that took majority control of Iran’s parliament, or Majles, in the February 2004 elections were not swept into office by a mass movement. Conservative candidates had the help of the Council of Guardians, a body of 12 senior clerics [1] vested by the constitution of the Islamic Republic with the power to overturn acts of parliament, which blocked the candidacy of over 1,000 men and women associated with the reformist trend that held the majority in the Sixth Majles of 2001-2004. Thanks to this intervention, conservatives won the majority of seats, because many Iranians were left with no one for whom to vote.
After seven turbulent years in which a reformist movement transformed Iran’s political landscape as well as its international image, conservatives recaptured two thirds of the parliament in February 2004. “Victory” for the conservatives was achieved, in large part, by the intervention of the unelected Guardian Council, which succeeded in rejecting the candidacy of 2,400 reformist candidates. The “Tehran spring” — when Iranians and international observers hoped that reformists could bring about peaceful, democratic transformation of the Islamic Republic — has faded.
Even as the US military launched a long-rumored offensive in the Iraqi city of Falluja in early November 2004, the subject of anxious speculation in Washington was not Iraq, but Iran. President George W. Bush’s victory at the polls on November 2 returned to office the executive who located Iran upon an “axis of evil” in the 2002 State of the Union address and called the Islamic Republic a “totalitarian state” during his campaign for a second term in the White House. The neo-conservatives who were so influential in promoting the invasion of Iraq have long harbored the desire to foment “regime change” in Tehran as well as in Baghdad.
Have the Middle East and North Africa largely escaped the global AIDS epidemic? The available data seems to say so. UNAIDS reports that, at the close of 2003, there were 480,000 adults and children living with HIV/AIDS in the Arab world, Iran, Israel and Turkey. Compared to sub-Saharan Africa, where there are approximately 25 million cases of the disease, or South and Southeast Asia, where there are approximately 6.5 million, this number is tiny — about 1 percent of the world’s caseload.
With the death of Maxime Rodinson at the age of 89 on May 23, 2004, one of the last great figures disappeared in an exceptional lineage of Western scholars of Islam — including Régis Blachère, Claude Cahen and Jacques Berque, to mention only Rodinson’s fellow Frenchmen. Rodinson belonged to this group of writers who pioneered new approaches, reclaiming the field of Islamic studies and bringing it up to the level of other social sciences.
Achcar, Gilbert. Eastern Cauldron: Islam, Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq in a Marxist Mirror (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004).
Amin, Samir. The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004).
Bass, Warren. Support Any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the US-Israel Alliance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Clashes between the followers of a Zaydi Shi‘i religious figure and security forces left hundreds of people dead in a remote area in northern Yemen in the summer of 2004.
“Baghdad, if you ask your friends about it, has one re- markable peculiarity.” [1] So wrote Freya Stark in 1937 in her famed, and more than slightly Orientalist, collection of travel essays, Baghdad Sketches. Today, Baghdad has a number of peculiarities, though its most staggering is the pervasiveness of the memory of atrocities under Saddam Hussein’s 25-year rule.
The steady summertime creep of oil prices past $40 per barrel and over an unprecedented $45 surprised most oil analysts, including this one, who were expecting the price to drop after the US-led invasion of Iraq. But no one is likely to have been as stunned as the Bush administration policymakers, like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who glibly promised post-invasion prosperity for the country “floating on a sea of oil.”
In October 2004, representatives from the G-8 and 11 other countries will meet without fanfare or press coverage in a quiet room in the French Finance Ministry. It is unlikely that their lunchtime dessert will actually be a cake decorated with the stripes and green stars of the Iraqi flag, but they will certainly be intent on grabbing as large a slice as they can of the metaphorical cake in their minds. The outcome of their meeting will have tremendous significance for 26 million Iraqis.
In June 2003, L. Paul Bremer, head of the now dissolved Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), announced the broad outlines of the Bush administration’s plan to rebuild Iraq along strict free market principles. “The removal of Saddam Hussein,” Bremer helpfully explained, “offers Iraqis hope for a better economic future.
Sheikh Majid al-Azzawi was one proud Iraqi. His office, surrounded by sandbags, barbed wire and tall concrete walls, looked more like a military base than an administrative building. But even the pitch-black darkness that swirled in the corridors most of the day did not dampen al-Azzawi’s spirits. “We are very happy to be part of this council, even if we have simple equipment,” said the member of the Rusafa district council in central Baghdad. “It is the first time for all the members of the government, because it was impossible before.”
Within months after the fall of Saddam, the US military was engaged in a low-intensity guerrilla conflict throughout the predominantly Sunni Arab towns north and west of Baghdad. At first, the US dismissed the attacks as the work of Baathist “diehards” and “dead-enders,” a minor problem that would swiftly disappear thanks to US military might and the cooperation of an Iraqi public anxious to rebuild. Indeed, in its early stages the guerrilla campaign was little more than amateur harassment. But by the end of 2003 — partly because of the political failures of the Coalition Provisional Authority, but also because of US counterinsurgency tactics — the insurgency had escalated into a force capable of taking entire cities.
