The question of population and development needs to be framed first and foremost as a question of equity. The articles in this issue address explicitly the matter of gender equity in families and societies, in ways that challenge the notion that Middle Eastern birth and fertility rates can be neatly attributed to Islam and Muslim cultures. Beyond this, we insist that the underlying theme is resource equity. As Philippe Fargues notes, the so-called demographic crisis in many Middle Eastern societies today is a social crisis, arising from the demand for more equitable access to jobs, schooling, housing and health care.
‘Abd al-Hadi, ‘Izzat, Usama Halabi and Salim Tamari, al-Mu’assasat al-wataniyya, al-intikhabat wa al-sulta (National Institutions, Elections and the Authority) (Ramallah: Muwatin, 1994).
Abu-Amr, Ziad. Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).
Ahmida, Ali Abdullatif. The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization and Resistance, 1830-1932 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994).
Akenson, Donald Harman. God’s People: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel and Ulster (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature Edited
by Salma Khadra Jayyusi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. 744 pages.
Dan Connell, Against All Odds: A Chronicle of the Eritrean Revolution (Red Sea, 1994).
Bassam Jarrar, a leading Islamist thinker in the Occupied Territories, is a teacher of Islamic studies at UNRWA’s Teacher Training Center in Ramallah in the West Bank and a member of the board of trustees of the Union of Islamic Scholars. He was among the 415 Palestinians expelled by Israel in December 1992 for alleged membership in the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas.
Since becoming president on January 30, 1994, Lamine Zeroual has taken significant steps that point toward “reconciliation” between the state and its Islamist opponents. Zeroual has moved to establish his authority, notably by appointing a new government and reshuffling the military command in the spring. His advent to the head of state represents the best prospect of a resolution of Algeria’s political crisis since it burst open in October 1988.
China makes the headlines, but US policies toward the top three recipients of US aid — Israel, Egypt and Turkey — are perhaps the most egregious examples of the failure of the Clinton administration to make good on its commitment to human rights. While the...
In the transition from exile to autonomy, Iraqi Kurdish parties have set up the first Kurdish-controlled television channels in the Middle East. Their broadcasts now reach more than half of the estimated 3 to 4 million people in “Free Kurdistan.” [1]
Saki Işikçi sits in a coffeeshop below a picture of the founder of the Turkish republic — Mustafa Kemal Atatürk — and ticks off the problems he faces as the deputy mayor of Cizre: bad roads, poor schools, not enough water, no jobs. The city’s monthly budget barely covers municipal salaries, and emigrants from outlying villages are straining social services.
Politics has always been a difficult and risky business for Kurdish nationalists in Turkey. The hegemony today of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), with its history of dogmatic Marxism-Leninism and its attachment to armed struggle, is very much a reflection of the refusal of successive Turkish nationalist regimes to accommodate Kurdish aspirations for cultural and political autonomy.
The stirrings of progressive Kurdish nationalist politics in Turkey date to the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Kurdish intellectuals in Istanbul and Ankara formed cultural clubs and organizations. The summer of 1967 saw mass student demonstrations in 19 Kurdish cities and towns, including 10,000 marchers in Silvan and 25,000 in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır.
Numbering over 22 million, the Kurds are one of the largest non-state nations in the world. Their homeland, Kurdistan, has been forcibly divided and lies mostly within the present-day borders of Turkey, Iraq and Iran, with smaller parts in Syria, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The greatest number of Kurds today still live in Kurdistan, though a large Kurdish diaspora has developed in this century, especially in the main cities of Turkey and Iran and more recently in Europe as well. Between 10 and 12 million Kurds live in Turkey, where they comprise about 20 percent of the population. Between 5 and 6 million live in Iran, accounting for close to 10 percent of the population. Kurds in Iraq number more than 4 million, and comprise about 23 percent of the population.
For many decades now, those states whose borders include and divide Kurdistan have alternatively tried to ignore, deny, manipulate and suppress widespread Kurdish demands for political rights. In this, the rulers have enjoyed the unstinting support of their great power patrons, the broad support of the majority communities, and often enough support as well among different Kurdish communities and social strata. These policies comprise a disastrous record that has exacted a horrible price in blood, treasure and democratic rights — of Arabs, Iranians and Turks as well as of Kurds themselves. These policies have failed miserably in their repressive goals, and yet they continue as the order of the day.
Association of Israeli-Palestinian Physicians for Human Rights. The Occupied Health Care System (Tel Aviv, 1992).
Augustin, Ebba, ed. Palestinian Women: Identity and Experience (London: Zed Books, 1993).
Bowen, Donna Lee and Evelyn Early, eds. Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993).
Chomsky, Noam. Enter a World That Is Truly Surreal: President Clinton’s Sudden Use of International Violence (Westfield, NJ: Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, 1993).
Gaff, Angela. An Illusion of Legality: A Legal Analysis of Israel’s Deportation of Palestinians on December 17, 1992 (Ramallah: Al-Haq, 1993).
I want to congratulate you on the excellent January issue that finally came my way. If there were prizes for excellence in magazine publishing, this issue would surely get first prize.
With a broken heart over what Edward Said called the “surrender,” I cannot help admiring your ability to knit together all the most important views of those who must live with these realities, devastating as they are.
Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World (W. W. Norton, 1993).
The absence of basic human rights and democratic freedoms in the Arab world for most of the post-colonial era, and the failure of the region’s inhabitants to successfully contest this deficit, has appropriately come to be known as a crisis of Arab political culture. That this crisis is not an abstraction but is excruciatingly real was amply demonstrated during the 1990-1991 Gulf crisis. It is this important theme that Kanan Makiya attempts to address.
Amatzia Baram, Culture, History and Ideology in the Formation of Baathist Iraq, 1968-1989 (Macmillan, 1991).
Samir al-Khalil, The Monument: Art, Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq (Andre Deutsch, 1991).
Robert Fernea and Wm. Roger Louis, eds. The Iraqi Revolution of 1958: The Old Social Classes Revisited (I. B. Tauris, 1991).
Oles Smolansky with Bettie M. Smolansky, The USSR and Iraq: The Soviet Quest for Influence (Duke, 1991).
Eberhard Kienle, Ba‘th vs. Ba‘th: The Conflict between Syria and Iraq, 1968-1989 (I. B. Tauris, 1990).
Aijaz Ahmad’s book In Theory helpfully reminds us of the continuing relevance of political-economic analysis. Current discussions on post-colonialism or postmodernism often privilege libidinal over political economies and thus overlook the global distribution of material privilege that goes some way toward determining why some voices will be heard more than others. To the extent that we forget the material dimensions of the conditions that make for academic-intellectual production, the reminder is timely and valuable.
During the Thatcher-Reagan-Bush era, just as critical intellectuals and left political activists had won a small place for the concepts of political economy and class analysis in academia, postmodernism and post-structuralism replaced Marxism as the favored mode of Anglo-American intellectual radicalism.
