Pub Date : 2017-04-01DOI: 10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim220070087
Jeffrey G. Karam
SPHERES OF INTERVENTION: US FOREIGN POLICY AND THE COLLAPSE OF LEBANON, 1967-1976 James R. Stocker Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016 (vii + 296 pages, notes, index, illustrations, maps) $45.00 (cloth)Reviewed by Jeffrey G. KaramIn Spheres of Intervention: US Foreign Policy and the Collapse of Lebanon, 1967-1976, James R. Stocker reconsiders the role of the United States in Lebanon's path to the civil war that erupted in 1975. Combining declassified documents from the US National Archives and various American presidential libraries, as well as some Arabic and French sources, Stocker advances two main arguments. The first is that "US policy toward Lebanon was subordinated to strategies toward the Cold War and the broader Middle East"; the second is that the "US played a role in the process of Lebanese state collapse" (4, 5). Both arguments are meant to convince the reader that rather than focus on one set of factors, a proper study of US involvement in Lebanon between 1967 and 1976 should incorporate the different domestic, regional, and international factors that shaped US policy at the time. Stocker considers Lebanon's slide into mayhem alongside other regional and international events, such as the October War of 1973, the detente between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the various disengagement agreements and disagreements between a number of Arab states and Israel during the 1970s, making his account of the underlying factors that ignited the Lebanese Civil War among the most comprehensive.Spheres of Intervention consists of an introduction, eight chapters, and an epilogue. In the introduction, Stocker discusses US interests in Lebanon and surveys existing literature on the causes of the civil war, which include the fragility of Lebanon's political system, foreign meddling in Lebanon's internal affairs, the effects of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and poor socioeconomic development. The first three chapters deal with important junctures between the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and the Jordanian Civil War of 1970, known as Black September. Chapters four and five focus on the heightened tension and subsequent skirmishes between Palestinian militants and the Lebanese government leading up to the October War of 1973, as well as the state of sociopolitical affairs in Lebanon before the outbreak of the civil war. The last three chapters examine the first two years of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-76) and the intense negotiations between various Arab states, the United States, and Israel to broker temporary peace between the warring factions. More specifically, chapters six and seven demonstrate that Lebanon became a battleground for regional contestation between Syria and Israel, as well as between Syria and different Arab states. The epilogue fast-forwards through Lebanon's civil war and ends with the United States calling on the Lebanese government to implement UN resolutions, particularly regarding the disarmament of Hizballah's armed
{"title":"Spheres of Intervention: Us Foreign Policy and the Collapse of Lebanon, 1967-1976","authors":"Jeffrey G. Karam","doi":"10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim220070087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim220070087","url":null,"abstract":"SPHERES OF INTERVENTION: US FOREIGN POLICY AND THE COLLAPSE OF LEBANON, 1967-1976 James R. Stocker Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016 (vii + 296 pages, notes, index, illustrations, maps) $45.00 (cloth)Reviewed by Jeffrey G. KaramIn Spheres of Intervention: US Foreign Policy and the Collapse of Lebanon, 1967-1976, James R. Stocker reconsiders the role of the United States in Lebanon's path to the civil war that erupted in 1975. Combining declassified documents from the US National Archives and various American presidential libraries, as well as some Arabic and French sources, Stocker advances two main arguments. The first is that \"US policy toward Lebanon was subordinated to strategies toward the Cold War and the broader Middle East\"; the second is that the \"US played a role in the process of Lebanese state collapse\" (4, 5). Both arguments are meant to convince the reader that rather than focus on one set of factors, a proper study of US involvement in Lebanon between 1967 and 1976 should incorporate the different domestic, regional, and international factors that shaped US policy at the time. Stocker considers Lebanon's slide into mayhem alongside other regional and international events, such as the October War of 1973, the detente between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the various disengagement agreements and disagreements between a number of Arab states and Israel during the 1970s, making his account of the underlying factors that ignited the Lebanese Civil War among the most comprehensive.Spheres of Intervention consists of an introduction, eight chapters, and an epilogue. In the introduction, Stocker discusses US interests in Lebanon and surveys existing literature on the causes of the civil war, which include the fragility of Lebanon's political system, foreign meddling in Lebanon's internal affairs, the effects of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and poor socioeconomic development. The first three chapters deal with important junctures between the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and the Jordanian Civil War of 1970, known as Black September. Chapters four and five focus on the heightened tension and subsequent skirmishes between Palestinian militants and the Lebanese government leading up to the October War of 1973, as well as the state of sociopolitical affairs in Lebanon before the outbreak of the civil war. The last three chapters examine the first two years of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-76) and the intense negotiations between various Arab states, the United States, and Israel to broker temporary peace between the warring factions. More specifically, chapters six and seven demonstrate that Lebanon became a battleground for regional contestation between Syria and Israel, as well as between Syria and different Arab states. The epilogue fast-forwards through Lebanon's civil war and ends with the United States calling on the Lebanese government to implement UN resolutions, particularly regarding the disarmament of Hizballah's armed","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127475969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
THE POLITICS OF SECTARIANISM IN POSTWAR LEBANON Bassel F. Salloukh, Rabie Barakat, Jinan S. Al-Habbal, Lara W. Khattab, and Shoghig Mikaelian London: Pluto Press, 2015 (viii+240 pages, notes, index, and charts) $30.00 (paper)Reviewed by Maya MikdashiThe Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon is a welcome and critical addition to the growing field of Lebanon studies. This edited volume offers us a detailed view into the ways that sectarianism operates in different arenas of Lebanese politics-contributing both new research and insight to the larger field. The authors-Bassel F. Salloukh, Rabie Barakat, Jinan S. Al-Habbal, Lara W. Khattab, and Shoghig Mikaelian-focus not only on state institutions and histories of political sectarianism, but also, in a Gramscian vein, on the manifestation of sectarian politics within Lebanon's civil society, political parties, political economy, and media industries.The book has a clear political purpose, stated in the preface: "The critical reflections we undertake here on the myriad operations of the sectarian system are meant to unmask its ensemble of practices in the hope of opening up possibilities to fight them and ultimately to transcend sectarianism altogether" (viii). While many academics view their work as inextricably bound to political conditions and commitments, this statement sets the authors apart from most in that they wear their politics on their sleeves. This is a book written to be in service of political action, and its tone is open to multiple readerships both in the academy and outside of it. The readership is assumed, however, to have a background knowledge of the contemporary history of Lebanon and a shared will to rethink and resist sectarian politics in Lebanon. In service of this larger goal, the authors offer a detailed and insightful analysis into how state and nonstate institutions function together to buttress and reproduce the politics of sectarianism. They also offer an assessment of recent activist campaigns to fight and amend that system, including campaigns for civil marriage, electoral transparency, and LGBTQ rights.The authors do not elaborate a definition of sectarian politics or submit an argument about its origins or legacies. They instead concentrate on the operations of sectarianism. Put in another way, they do not ask what sectarian politics are but rather focus on and illustrate what sectarian politics do. Crucially and refreshingly, the authors treat political sectarianism-the system of power sharing that defines the Lebanese state-as one manifestation of sectarian politics more broadly, not its defining characteristic. This approach departs from influential work on Lebanon by Fawwaz Traboulsi, Kamal Salibi, and Theodor Hanf, among others, that has often concentrated on political sectarianism as the main manifestation of sectarian politics. In The Politics of Sectarianism, essays on the state and its institutions exist alongside chapters on associational life and Leb
战后黎巴嫩的宗派主义政治Bassel F. Salloukh, Rabie Barakat, Jinan S. Al-Habbal, Lara W. Khattab和Shoghig Mikaelian伦敦:Pluto出版社，2015(8 +240页，注释，索引和图表)$30.00(论文)由Maya mikdashireview战后黎巴嫩的宗派主义政治是对黎巴嫩研究领域的一个受欢迎和重要的补充。这本经过编辑的书为我们提供了宗派主义在黎巴嫩政治不同领域运作方式的详细视图，为更大的领域提供了新的研究和见解。作者——bassel F. Salloukh、Rabie Barakat、Jinan S. Al-Habbal、Lara W. Khattab和Shoghig mikaelian——不仅关注国家机构和政治宗派主义的历史，而且以葛兰西的风格，关注黎巴嫩公民社会、政党、政治经济和媒体行业中宗派主义政治的表现。这本书有一个明确的政治目的，在序言中说:“我们在这里对教派制度的无数运作进行批判性反思，旨在揭示其实践的整体，希望开辟与它们作斗争的可能性，并最终完全超越宗派主义”(viii)。尽管许多学者认为他们的工作与政治条件和承诺密不可分，但这一声明使作者与大多数人不同，因为他们把政治穿在袖子上。这是一本为政治行动服务的书，它的语气对学术界内外的多种读者都是开放的。然而，假定读者对黎巴嫩当代历史有一定的背景知识，并有共同的意愿来重新思考和抵制黎巴嫩的宗派政治。为了实现这一更大的目标，作者对国家和非国家机构如何共同支持和再现宗派主义政治进行了详细而深刻的分析。他们还对最近反对和修改这一制度的活动人士进行了评估，包括争取民事婚姻、选举透明度和LGBTQ权利的活动。作者没有详细说明宗派政治的定义，也没有提出关于其起源或遗产的论点。相反，他们专注于宗派主义的运作。换句话说，他们没有问宗派政治是什么，而是关注并说明宗派政治的作用。至关重要且令人耳目一新的是，作者将政治宗派主义——定义黎巴嫩国家的权力分享制度——视为更广泛的宗派政治的一种表现，而不是其决定性特征。这种方法不同于法瓦兹·特拉布尔西、卡迈勒·萨利比和西奥多·汉夫等人对黎巴嫩的有影响力的研究，他们经常把政治宗派主义作为宗派政治的主要表现形式。在《宗派主义的政治》一书中，有关国家及其制度的文章与有关社团生活和黎巴嫩大众媒体的章节并存。前三章主要解释了本书的范围，概述了黎巴嫩国家内部宗派政治的结构和官僚运作，并提供了内战后宗派政治和对宗派政治的抵制的历史。以下各章着重介绍黎巴嫩宗派政治的不同方面。最后，本书总结了真主党的历史，这是通过黎巴嫩和该地区的宗派政治波动折射出来的。《宗派主义的政治》的宏大范围令人鼓舞。书中最丰富的章节集中于1990年以来黎巴嫩的选举历史(第六章)，1990年以来武装部队的历史(第七章)，以及新自由主义宗派主义与社团生活和激进运动之间的交集(第五章)。法律、经济、官僚和选举研究的绝对数量、组织和呈现将对政治科学、军事和当代历史领域以及国家、内战、宗派主义和公民社会的研究大有裨益。…
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A HISTORY OF MODERN OMAN Jeremy Jones and Nicholas Ridout Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 (301 pages + maps, index) $94.99 (cloth)Jeremy Jones and Nicholas Ridout's book on modern Oman will be a reference for the history of Oman from the late eighteenth century to the present day. There are already a few histories of Oman, such as Patricia Risso's Oman and Muscat (Croom Helm, 1986) or Uzi Rabi's Emergence of States in a Tribal Society (Sussex University Press, 2006). Marc Valeri's book, Oman: Politics and Society in the Qaboos State (Oxford University Press, 2014) covers nation building and political legitimacy in the sultanate since 1970. A History of Modern Oman, however, writes a global history of the sultanate, placing its expansion as a thalassocracy and its emergence as a nation-state within a larger frame of the sultans' encounters and entanglements with colonial powers.The book's main argument is that unlike its neighbors the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, Oman has been able to undertake major changes to become part of the globalized world while keeping some of its nineteenth-century traditions. The sultans have supposedly invented an original mode of development that preserves Oman's political, social, and religious traditions. Hence Oman exemplifies the model of a state enjoying oil-reserve prosperity while preserving Ibadism, one of Islam's main branches, said to have been founded as early as the seventh century CE, and a centuryold cosmopolitan society. It is a classic argument, tackled here in two parts, covering first the long nineteenth century and then the twentieth century. The argument, however, is questionable. Oman's neighbors, like the emirates of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, have followed a similar political and social pattern as the one Jones and Ridout describe (see, for example, Christopher Davidson's Abu Dhabi: Oil and Beyond [Columbia University Press, 2009]). Nevertheless, the authors provide valuable details about Oman's political, social, and cultural modernity since the nineteenth century. Chapter two, for example, describes the development of a press and a dynamic intellectual sphere in Zanzibar and Oman, situating it within the larger frame of the global nahda movement. Chapters six and seven stand as a good resume of the modernizing reforms and measures Sultan Qaboos carried out in the 1970s, facilitated by the wealth coming from oil revenues and the help of British advisers, who served at economic consultants. The authors give a well-documented portrait of Omani society in the twentieth century as they tackle the social consequences of the oil boom as well as labor migration.The book's second central argument is that "key Sultans" made Oman a modern and federated nation-state that became an influential partner to the regional powers. The relevance of the "nation-state" in the context of Oman is questionable, and the book does not analyze the evidence of a "national sentiment." The concept is arguably
杰里米·琼斯和尼古拉斯·里多特的阿曼现代史剑桥:剑桥大学出版社，2015年(301页+地图，索引)94.99美元(布)杰里米·琼斯和尼古拉斯·里多特关于阿曼现代史的书将是阿曼从18世纪晚期到现在的历史参考。已经有一些关于阿曼的历史，如帕特里夏·里索的《阿曼和马斯喀特》(克鲁姆·赫尔姆，1986年)或乌兹·拉比的《部落社会中国家的出现》(苏塞克斯大学出版社，2006年)。马克·瓦莱里的著作《阿曼:卡布斯国的政治与社会》(牛津大学出版社，2014年)涵盖了1970年以来苏丹国的国家建设和政治合法性。然而，《现代阿曼史》写了一部苏丹国的全球历史，将其作为地中海联盟的扩张，以及作为一个民族国家的出现，置于苏丹与殖民大国的遭遇和纠缠的更大框架内。这本书的主要论点是，与邻国阿拉伯联合酋长国和沙特阿拉伯不同，阿曼能够在保持一些19世纪传统的同时，进行重大变革，成为全球化世界的一部分。据说苏丹们发明了一种原始的发展模式，保留了阿曼的政治、社会和宗教传统。因此，阿曼是一个享受石油储备繁荣的国家的典范，同时保留了伊斯兰教的主要分支之一，据说早在公元7世纪就建立了，是一个有百年历史的世界性社会。这是一个经典的论点，分为两个部分，首先涵盖了漫长的19世纪，然后是20世纪。然而，这种观点是值得怀疑的。阿曼的邻国，如阿联酋的迪拜和阿布扎比，遵循着琼斯和里多特描述的类似的政治和社会模式(例如，参见克里斯托弗·戴维森的《阿布扎比:石油与超越》[哥伦比亚大学出版社，2009年])。然而，作者提供了有关19世纪以来阿曼政治、社会和文化现代性的宝贵细节。例如，第二章描述了桑给巴尔和阿曼新闻界和动态知识领域的发展，将其置于全球复兴党运动的更大框架内。第六章和第七章很好地回顾了苏丹卡布斯在20世纪70年代实施的现代化改革和措施，这些改革和措施得益于石油收入带来的财富和担任经济顾问的英国顾问的帮助。作者在处理石油繁荣和劳动力迁移的社会后果时，为20世纪的阿曼社会提供了一幅有充分证据的肖像。本书的第二个中心论点是，“关键的苏丹”使阿曼成为一个现代的联邦民族国家，成为地区大国的一个有影响力的伙伴。在阿曼的背景下，“民族国家”的相关性是值得怀疑的，这本书没有分析“民族情绪”的证据。这个概念可以说是以欧洲为中心的，与阿曼深受伊斯兰教影响的长期政治传统不符。然而，这些条件并没有削弱本书对18世纪后期苏丹如何在阿曼建立一个联邦国家的有力叙述，尽管内部紧张局势和部落冲突。对于Jones和Ridout来说，said bin Sultan(1806-56年)，said III bin Taymur(1932-70年)和Sultan Qaboos(目前掌权)领导了所谓的民族团结与和解政策。这本书还展示了在石油繁荣的背景下，苏丹卡布斯如何改变了苏丹的形象:除了成为权威的最终来源之外，他还成为了一个服务的提供者和统一民族国家的守护者。《阿曼史》将舒拉作为理解阿曼政治制度的关键概念。正如作者所定义的那样，舒拉是“统治者、领袖或酋长在作出对他所领导的社会、部落或家庭重要的决定之前与其他人协商的做法”(198)。…
{"title":"A History of Modern Oman","authors":"G. Crouzet","doi":"10.5860/choice.194911","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.194911","url":null,"abstract":"A HISTORY OF MODERN OMAN Jeremy Jones and Nicholas Ridout Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 (301 pages + maps, index) $94.99 (cloth)Jeremy Jones and Nicholas Ridout's book on modern Oman will be a reference for the history of Oman from the late eighteenth century to the present day. There are already a few histories of Oman, such as Patricia Risso's Oman and Muscat (Croom Helm, 1986) or Uzi Rabi's Emergence of States in a Tribal Society (Sussex University Press, 2006). Marc Valeri's book, Oman: Politics and Society in the Qaboos State (Oxford University Press, 2014) covers nation building and political legitimacy in the sultanate since 1970. A History of Modern Oman, however, writes a global history of the sultanate, placing its expansion as a thalassocracy and its emergence as a nation-state within a larger frame of the sultans' encounters and entanglements with colonial powers.The book's main argument is that unlike its neighbors the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, Oman has been able to undertake major changes to become part of the globalized world while keeping some of its nineteenth-century traditions. The sultans have supposedly invented an original mode of development that preserves Oman's political, social, and religious traditions. Hence Oman exemplifies the model of a state enjoying oil-reserve prosperity while preserving Ibadism, one of Islam's main branches, said to have been founded as early as the seventh century CE, and a centuryold cosmopolitan society. It is a classic argument, tackled here in two parts, covering first the long nineteenth century and then the twentieth century. The argument, however, is questionable. Oman's neighbors, like the emirates of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, have followed a similar political and social pattern as the one Jones and Ridout describe (see, for example, Christopher Davidson's Abu Dhabi: Oil and Beyond [Columbia University Press, 2009]). Nevertheless, the authors provide valuable details about Oman's political, social, and cultural modernity since the nineteenth century. Chapter two, for example, describes the development of a press and a dynamic intellectual sphere in Zanzibar and Oman, situating it within the larger frame of the global nahda movement. Chapters six and seven stand as a good resume of the modernizing reforms and measures Sultan Qaboos carried out in the 1970s, facilitated by the wealth coming from oil revenues and the help of British advisers, who served at economic consultants. The authors give a well-documented portrait of Omani society in the twentieth century as they tackle the social consequences of the oil boom as well as labor migration.The book's second central argument is that \"key Sultans\" made Oman a modern and federated nation-state that became an influential partner to the regional powers. The relevance of the \"nation-state\" in the context of Oman is questionable, and the book does not analyze the evidence of a \"national sentiment.\" The concept is arguably","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127190028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
THE GLOBAL OFFENSIVE: THE UNITED STATES, THE PALESTINIAN LIBERATION ORGANIZATION, AND THE MAKING OF THE POST - COLD WAR ORDER Paul Thomas Chamberlin New York: Oxford University Press, 2012 (xi + 324 pages, bibliography, index, illustrations, maps) $36.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper)Reviewed by Sara AwartaniPaul Thomas Chamberlin's The Global Offensive tells the diplomatic story of the "increasingly international question of Palestine" (75). His work seeks to transcend parochial narratives of Palestinian history by illuminating the role of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the construction of the contemporary world order. In charting the PLO's formative years (1967-1975), Chamberlin's arguments are twofold: First, the PLO appropriated the language and military tactics of a variety of national liberation forces, placing the struggle for Palestinian self-determination within a framework of Third World movements. Second, in responding to the emergent "political fact" that the PLO was the legitimate voice of the Palestinian people, the United States enacted a three-pronged approach toward the Arab-Israeli conflict: bolstering military aid to regional allies; exploiting tensions between Soviet-Arab alliances; and isolating the PLO from diplomatic solutions to the problem of Palestine. While the book does a fine job of laying out the ways in which the United States tried to subvert the PLO's success at every turn, it ignores why Palestinians would make such critiques of colonial oppression in the first place.Chamberlin draws upon archival records of the US government to highlight how the PLO was an active participant in the international political arena, documenting the extent to which the United States reacted to-rather than solely shaped-the changing nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Nowhere is this dynamic better illustrated than in the context of the United Nations. According to Chamberlin, the United Nations was a forum in which formerly peripheral nations formed solidarities and viewed the United States in an increasingly critical light. As such, the United Nations provided an important platform for the PLO to garner international sympathy for Palestinian self-determination. Chamberlin suggests that Fatah mobilized the language of the UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights to demand international recognition of Palestinian dignity in the face of Israeli occupation. The PLO's acquisition of international support complicated US efforts at the United Nations throughout the period. Such was the case of Security Council debates on Israeli attacks against Syria and Lebanon in retaliation for PLO-led actions, such as the Munich murders in 1972. The United States issued the sole veto against a resolution condemning Israel, while the majority of nations, including those recently decolonized, interpreted Israeli retaliation as proof of "aggressive expansionist policies"-a charge substantiated by the reality of the 1967 occupation (1
{"title":"The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post - Cold War Order","authors":"Sara Awartani","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-5735","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-5735","url":null,"abstract":"THE GLOBAL OFFENSIVE: THE UNITED STATES, THE PALESTINIAN LIBERATION ORGANIZATION, AND THE MAKING OF THE POST - COLD WAR ORDER Paul Thomas Chamberlin New York: Oxford University Press, 2012 (xi + 324 pages, bibliography, index, illustrations, maps) $36.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper)Reviewed by Sara AwartaniPaul Thomas Chamberlin's The Global Offensive tells the diplomatic story of the \"increasingly international question of Palestine\" (75). His work seeks to transcend parochial narratives of Palestinian history by illuminating the role of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the construction of the contemporary world order. In charting the PLO's formative years (1967-1975), Chamberlin's arguments are twofold: First, the PLO appropriated the language and military tactics of a variety of national liberation forces, placing the struggle for Palestinian self-determination within a framework of Third World movements. Second, in responding to the emergent \"political fact\" that the PLO was the legitimate voice of the Palestinian people, the United States enacted a three-pronged approach toward the Arab-Israeli conflict: bolstering military aid to regional allies; exploiting tensions between Soviet-Arab alliances; and isolating the PLO from diplomatic solutions to the problem of Palestine. While the book does a fine job of laying out the ways in which the United States tried to subvert the PLO's success at every turn, it ignores why Palestinians would make such critiques of colonial oppression in the first place.Chamberlin draws upon archival records of the US government to highlight how the PLO was an active participant in the international political arena, documenting the extent to which the United States reacted to-rather than solely shaped-the changing nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Nowhere is this dynamic better illustrated than in the context of the United Nations. According to Chamberlin, the United Nations was a forum in which formerly peripheral nations formed solidarities and viewed the United States in an increasingly critical light. As such, the United Nations provided an important platform for the PLO to garner international sympathy for Palestinian self-determination. Chamberlin suggests that Fatah mobilized the language of the UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights to demand international recognition of Palestinian dignity in the face of Israeli occupation. The PLO's acquisition of international support complicated US efforts at the United Nations throughout the period. Such was the case of Security Council debates on Israeli attacks against Syria and Lebanon in retaliation for PLO-led actions, such as the Munich murders in 1972. The United States issued the sole veto against a resolution condemning Israel, while the majority of nations, including those recently decolonized, interpreted Israeli retaliation as proof of \"aggressive expansionist policies\"-a charge substantiated by the reality of the 1967 occupation (1","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116143817","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AN INCURABLE PAST: NASSER'S EGYPT THEN AND NOW Meriam Belli Gainesv il le: University Press of Florida, 2013 (xii + 296 pages, bibliography, index, figures, tables) $74.95 (cloth)In stark contrast to colleagues who work on the rule of Muhammad 'Ali Pasha and his successors, historians who focus on the Nasser period in Egyptian history are hobbled by the absence of substantial and accessible government archives. Indeed, while the past twenty years have witnessed a veritable renaissance of inquiry into, and interpretation of, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-due in no small part to a careful excavation of documents at the Egyptian National Archives, or Dar al-Watha'iq-pathbreaking analyses of the Nasser years have remained far fewer in number.This is not to say, however, that critical exploration of the 1950s and 1960s is impracticable. What historians of these years lack in terms of government archives, they can make up for in abundance through the use of the voluminous popular culture materials dating to this period.This task is, in part, what Meriam Belli sets before herself in her book, An Incurable Past: Nasser's Egypt Then and Now. But only in part, for this book is no conventional history of the Nasser years. Indeed, one could well be forgiven for thinking, on examining the work, that it is not history at all, but ethnography. Without question, the book draws inspiration as much from anthropology as from history, for its central concern is not solely the past, but the work that the past performs in the present. Given how frequently Nasser and the years of his rule are invoked in discussions of Egyptian politics-not least since the 2011 revolution-Belli seeks to grasp how and why these invocations are used.Drawing upon Bakhtin, Belli frames the study in terms of "historical utterances" dating to the 1950s and 1960s. In shunning references to memory or commemoration, she seeks to emphasize "the wide sphere of 'human communications and activity' that takes history for object" (9). Likewise privileged in Belli's notion of historical utterances are the ways in which history is appropriated and articulated in everyday life-the vernacular as opposed to elite, government, or media appropriations and articulations. As a result, this project ultimately entails an exploration not simply of the Nasser years themselves, but of the traces of those years that have consistently emerged in Egyptians' lives since that time.What this project demands in terms of sources is both the popular culture materials mentioned above and detailed interviews with a wide range of Egyptians reflecting upon how interpretations of these materials have changed over time. In order to focus the study, Belli has selected three experiences of the Nasser period that have taken on varied connotations through the years: the experience of the Nasserist educational system, the experience of the effigy-burning festival haraq al-limby in Port Said, and the experience of the ap
不可避免的过去:纳赛尔的埃及过去和现在梅里亚姆·贝利·盖恩斯维尔:佛罗里达大学出版社，2013年(12 + 296页，参考书目、索引、数字、表格)74.95美元(布)与研究穆罕默德·阿里帕夏及其继任者统治的同事形成鲜明对比的是，专注于埃及历史上纳赛尔时期的历史学家由于缺乏大量可访问的政府档案而步履艰难。事实上，虽然过去20年见证了对19世纪和20世纪早期的研究和解释的真正复兴——这在很大程度上要归功于对埃及国家档案馆(Dar al-Watha'iq)文件的仔细挖掘——但对纳赛尔时代的开创性分析仍然少得多。然而，这并不是说，对20世纪50年代和60年代的批判性探索是不可行的。这些年来的历史学家在政府档案方面所缺乏的，他们可以通过使用可追溯到这一时期的大量流行文化材料来丰富地弥补。梅里亚姆·贝利(Meriam Belli)在她的书《无法挽回的过去:纳赛尔的埃及过去与现在》(An Incurable Past: Nasser’s Egypt Then and Now)中提出了这个任务。但这只是一部分，因为这本书不是纳赛尔时代的传统历史。事实上，如果有人在审视这部作品时认为它根本不是历史，而是民族志，那是可以原谅的。毫无疑问，这本书从人类学和历史中汲取了同样多的灵感，因为它的中心关注的不仅仅是过去，而是过去在现在所做的工作。考虑到在埃及政治讨论中频繁地引用纳赛尔及其统治时期——尤其是自2011年革命以来——贝利试图把握这些引用是如何以及为什么被使用的。Belli以巴赫金为蓝本，从20世纪50年代和60年代的“历史话语”角度来构建这项研究。在避免提及记忆或纪念时，她试图强调“以历史为对象的‘人类交流和活动’的广泛领域”(9)。同样，在贝利的历史话语概念中，历史在日常生活中被挪用和表达的方式享有特权——与精英、政府或媒体的挪用和表达相对立的是白话。因此，这个项目最终不仅需要探索纳赛尔时代本身，还需要探索自那以后埃及人生活中不断出现的那些年代的痕迹。这个项目所需要的资料来源包括上面提到的流行文化材料，以及对广泛的埃及人的详细采访，以反映对这些材料的解释是如何随着时间的推移而变化的。为了集中研究，Belli选择了纳赛尔时期的三个经历，这些经历随着时间的推移具有不同的内涵:纳赛尔主义教育制度的经历，塞得港焚烧雕像节haraq al-limby的经历，以及在宰敦圣母显形的经历。在她对纳赛尔式教育的阐述中，贝利关注的是揭露一个普遍的假设，即1952年的革命开创了一个免费普及教育的时代。为了达到这一目的，她采取了两种主要手段:首先，说明事实上，免费和普及教育的理念的起源并不在纳赛尔时期，而是在之前的自由主义时期;第二，揭露埃及共和国时期出现的教育体系的种种失败，尤其是在培养埃及人的公民精神方面。通过对自1952年革命以来国家规定的教科书的仔细审查，贝利描绘了历届领导人如何掩盖其前任的成就，通常是通过简单的遗漏。这种随意的教科书开发方法导致公民教育充其量是不连贯的。从纳塞主义教育的广泛经验出发，贝利开始了对哈拉克·阿尔-林比(haraq al-limby)的引人入胜的案例研究，在苏伊士运河区的城市，节日期间焚烧雕像一度很常见。…
{"title":"An Incurable Past: Nasser's Egypt Then and Now","authors":"Paul Sedra","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-1052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-1052","url":null,"abstract":"AN INCURABLE PAST: NASSER'S EGYPT THEN AND NOW Meriam Belli Gainesv il le: University Press of Florida, 2013 (xii + 296 pages, bibliography, index, figures, tables) $74.95 (cloth)In stark contrast to colleagues who work on the rule of Muhammad 'Ali Pasha and his successors, historians who focus on the Nasser period in Egyptian history are hobbled by the absence of substantial and accessible government archives. Indeed, while the past twenty years have witnessed a veritable renaissance of inquiry into, and interpretation of, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-due in no small part to a careful excavation of documents at the Egyptian National Archives, or Dar al-Watha'iq-pathbreaking analyses of the Nasser years have remained far fewer in number.This is not to say, however, that critical exploration of the 1950s and 1960s is impracticable. What historians of these years lack in terms of government archives, they can make up for in abundance through the use of the voluminous popular culture materials dating to this period.This task is, in part, what Meriam Belli sets before herself in her book, An Incurable Past: Nasser's Egypt Then and Now. But only in part, for this book is no conventional history of the Nasser years. Indeed, one could well be forgiven for thinking, on examining the work, that it is not history at all, but ethnography. Without question, the book draws inspiration as much from anthropology as from history, for its central concern is not solely the past, but the work that the past performs in the present. Given how frequently Nasser and the years of his rule are invoked in discussions of Egyptian politics-not least since the 2011 revolution-Belli seeks to grasp how and why these invocations are used.Drawing upon Bakhtin, Belli frames the study in terms of \"historical utterances\" dating to the 1950s and 1960s. In shunning references to memory or commemoration, she seeks to emphasize \"the wide sphere of 'human communications and activity' that takes history for object\" (9). Likewise privileged in Belli's notion of historical utterances are the ways in which history is appropriated and articulated in everyday life-the vernacular as opposed to elite, government, or media appropriations and articulations. As a result, this project ultimately entails an exploration not simply of the Nasser years themselves, but of the traces of those years that have consistently emerged in Egyptians' lives since that time.What this project demands in terms of sources is both the popular culture materials mentioned above and detailed interviews with a wide range of Egyptians reflecting upon how interpretations of these materials have changed over time. In order to focus the study, Belli has selected three experiences of the Nasser period that have taken on varied connotations through the years: the experience of the Nasserist educational system, the experience of the effigy-burning festival haraq al-limby in Port Said, and the experience of the ap","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"202 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115011457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
THE ORPHAN SCANDAL: CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES AND THE RISE OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD Beth Baron Stanford, CA: Stanford Universit y Press, 2014 (x xi + 245 pages, maps, photographs, index) $85.00 (clot h), $24.95 (paper)In 1933 the case of a teenage girl beaten at the Swedish Salam Mission in Port Said, Egypt, brought the issue of state neglect of orphans, who had been "saved" or "served" by missionaries in increasing numbers since the nineteenth century, into the spotlight. What had happened to fifteen-year-old Turkiyya Hasan? The young woman claimed she had received the beating for not accepting Christianity, while the missionaries claimed that Turkiyya willfully misbehaved in order to provoke a disturbance and create a media firestorm. The location and context of Hasan's story are also significant. Although Egypt had technically received its independence from Britain in 1922, the British continued to exercise control in matters concerning minority communities, as well as communications and defense. At the heart of Britain's strategic interest in defense lay the Suez Canal-hence the importance of Port Said. It was in this area where foreigners, generally, and the British in particular, struggled for the hearts, minds, and bodies of Egyptians with competing brands of "muscular Christianity."Taking the case of Turkiyya Hasan as its starting point, Beth Baron's Orphan Scandal investigates how Egyptians responded to this "muscular Christianity" and, in particular, how Christian missionary practices influenced the development of the nascent Muslim Brotherhood. It also charts the relationship between Christian missionaries and the establishment of the welfare state in Egypt. At the time of the Hasan affair, the Egyptian government, for its part, did not speak with one voice, and the British continued to interfere on multiple levels. The authoritarian king sought to benefit from government sponsorship of new institutions and donations for new Muslim institutions, and Egyptian government officials attempted to navigate the waters between multiple aggrieved parties. Ultimately, Baron argues, the Turkiyya Hasan affair allowed King Fu'ad to buttress his Islamic credentials, force Britain to the negotiating table, and put the wheels in motion that would create the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (1936), which in turn would spawn the Ministry of Social Affairs in 1939. Baron contends that the "ministry grew in part out of calls generated during and after the orphan scandal for the expansion of state welfare services for the young and vulnerable" (190). Eventually, it would pave the way for the welfare state created in the wake of the 1952 revolution.In The Orphan Scandal we see the Muslim Brotherhood in its early years, defining its course. Previous works on the Brotherhood, such as the groundbreaking research of Richard Mitchell, Brynjar Lia, and Gudrun Kramer, focused on Hasan al-Banna and the dynamic of the larger organization. Baron examines the connections between e
孤儿丑闻:基督教传教士和穆斯林兄弟会的崛起贝丝·巴伦斯坦福，加州:斯坦福大学出版社，2014年(x xi + 245页，地图，照片，指数)$85.00(血球)，$24.95(纸)1933年，在埃及塞得港的瑞典萨拉姆传教会，一名少女被殴打的案件，使国家忽视孤儿的问题，自19世纪以来，越来越多的孤儿被传教士“拯救”或“服务”，成为人们关注的焦点。15岁的土耳其亚·哈桑发生了什么事?这名年轻女子声称她因为不接受基督教而遭到殴打，而传教士则声称Turkiyya故意行为不端，以挑起骚乱并制造媒体风暴。哈桑故事发生的地点和背景也很重要。虽然埃及在1922年从技术上脱离英国获得独立，但英国继续在少数民族社区、通讯和国防事务上行使控制。苏伊士运河是英国国防战略利益的核心，因此塞得港具有重要意义。正是在这个地区，外国人，尤其是英国人，为了争夺埃及人的心灵、思想和身体，与各种“肌肉基督教”相竞争。贝丝·巴伦的《孤儿丑闻》一书以土耳其亚·哈桑的案例为出发点，调查了埃及人对这种“强势基督教”的反应，尤其是基督教传教士的做法如何影响新生的穆斯林兄弟会的发展。它还描绘了基督教传教士与埃及福利国家建立之间的关系。在哈桑事件发生时，埃及政府并没有发出一个声音，而英国则继续在多个层面进行干预。这位专制的国王试图从政府对新机构的赞助和对新穆斯林机构的捐赠中获益，而埃及政府官员则试图在多个受害方之间斡旋。巴伦认为，最终，土耳其哈桑事件让国王福阿德巩固了他的伊斯兰信仰，迫使英国坐上谈判桌，并推动了1936年《英埃条约》的签订，这反过来又催生了1939年的社会事务部。巴伦认为，“在孤儿丑闻期间和之后，人们呼吁扩大对年轻人和弱势群体的国家福利服务，这在一定程度上推动了该部的发展”(190)。最终，它为1952年革命后建立的福利国家铺平了道路。在《孤儿丑闻》中，我们看到了穆斯林兄弟会早年的发展历程。之前关于兄弟会的研究，比如理查德·米切尔、布林贾尔·利亚和古德伦·克莱默的开创性研究，都集中在哈桑·班纳和更大组织的动态上。巴伦考察了运河区和上埃及的传教任务与新兴组织中的普通成员之间的联系。这本书的一个主要论点是，穆斯林兄弟会及其成员在两个方面受到福音派新教的深刻影响。第一个似乎很明显，也更容易证明:一种“用他们自己的武器与他们战斗”的基本感觉(117)。在打击传教士的过程中，兄弟会观察了他们的组织策略，并利用同样的策略来获得信徒，并向他们传授正确的、纯洁的伊斯兰教。巴伦指出，在这种情况下，兄弟会是如何意识到萨拉姆使命的，因此能够迅速回应Turkiyya Hasan的情况，创造媒体闪电战，并向国王提交请愿书。．..
{"title":"The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood","authors":"Mona L. Russell","doi":"10.5860/choice.186515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.186515","url":null,"abstract":"THE ORPHAN SCANDAL: CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES AND THE RISE OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD Beth Baron Stanford, CA: Stanford Universit y Press, 2014 (x xi + 245 pages, maps, photographs, index) $85.00 (clot h), $24.95 (paper)In 1933 the case of a teenage girl beaten at the Swedish Salam Mission in Port Said, Egypt, brought the issue of state neglect of orphans, who had been \"saved\" or \"served\" by missionaries in increasing numbers since the nineteenth century, into the spotlight. What had happened to fifteen-year-old Turkiyya Hasan? The young woman claimed she had received the beating for not accepting Christianity, while the missionaries claimed that Turkiyya willfully misbehaved in order to provoke a disturbance and create a media firestorm. The location and context of Hasan's story are also significant. Although Egypt had technically received its independence from Britain in 1922, the British continued to exercise control in matters concerning minority communities, as well as communications and defense. At the heart of Britain's strategic interest in defense lay the Suez Canal-hence the importance of Port Said. It was in this area where foreigners, generally, and the British in particular, struggled for the hearts, minds, and bodies of Egyptians with competing brands of \"muscular Christianity.\"Taking the case of Turkiyya Hasan as its starting point, Beth Baron's Orphan Scandal investigates how Egyptians responded to this \"muscular Christianity\" and, in particular, how Christian missionary practices influenced the development of the nascent Muslim Brotherhood. It also charts the relationship between Christian missionaries and the establishment of the welfare state in Egypt. At the time of the Hasan affair, the Egyptian government, for its part, did not speak with one voice, and the British continued to interfere on multiple levels. The authoritarian king sought to benefit from government sponsorship of new institutions and donations for new Muslim institutions, and Egyptian government officials attempted to navigate the waters between multiple aggrieved parties. Ultimately, Baron argues, the Turkiyya Hasan affair allowed King Fu'ad to buttress his Islamic credentials, force Britain to the negotiating table, and put the wheels in motion that would create the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (1936), which in turn would spawn the Ministry of Social Affairs in 1939. Baron contends that the \"ministry grew in part out of calls generated during and after the orphan scandal for the expansion of state welfare services for the young and vulnerable\" (190). Eventually, it would pave the way for the welfare state created in the wake of the 1952 revolution.In The Orphan Scandal we see the Muslim Brotherhood in its early years, defining its course. Previous works on the Brotherhood, such as the groundbreaking research of Richard Mitchell, Brynjar Lia, and Gudrun Kramer, focused on Hasan al-Banna and the dynamic of the larger organization. Baron examines the connections between e","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133632864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-10-01DOI: 10.1525/9780520957220-003
Michael Christopher Low
GLOBAL MUSLIMS IN THE AGE OF STEAM AND PRINT edited by James L . Gelvin and Nile Green Berkeley: University of Ca lifornia Press, 2014 (xiv + 285, index, illustrations, maps) $75.00 (clot h), $34.95 (paper)In his 1981 classic, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, Daniel Headrick wrote: "Among the many important events of the nineteenth century, two were of momentous consequence for the entire world. One was the progress and power of industrial technology and the other was the domination and exploitation of Africa and much of Asia by Europeans" (3). But, as the editors of Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print, James Gelvin and Nile Green, caution, "focusing on these technologies also highlights the fundamental problem of ascribing agency solely to one part of the globe" (3). Thus, instead of telling a "simple story of imperial hegemony and technological determinism," this edited volume attempts to weave a more complicated narrative, documenting how Muslim communities worldwide quickly took up the "tools of empire" and put them to use in ways that their inventors and disseminators had never envisioned (2-3). Highlighting the global Muslim community's exposure to new technologies, the authors in the volume do more than simply reframe a familiar story from a non-Western perspective. Instead, they open up new space to rethink the meaning and timing of globalization itself.Gelvin and Green take aim at the question of how to periodize globalization. Acknowledging that we live in a globalized world, but dissatisfied with the notion that the current era of globalization dates from the end of the Cold War or the invention of the microchip, they argue that this most recent incarnation of globalization "was made possible and in many ways defined by earlier globalizing events" (1). For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, steam and print quickened the pace of human contact and represented the sinews and tentacles of "the twin systems most identified with the modern period: the world system of nation-states and the modern world economic system" (4). By concentrating on this bundle of technologies, Gelvin and Green distinguish between "the more nebulous periods of 'modernity/early modernity' on the one hand and unqualified 'globalization' on the other" (1). In contrast to political or military framings of the long nineteenth century, they propose a period from roughly 1850 to 1930 defined by "the global diff usion of enabling technologies" (2).The collapsing of time and space facilitated the movement of migrants, pilgrims, commodities, and diseases with unprecedented speed and breadth. In the process, steamship and rail travel rearranged the physical and conceptual geography of the Islamic world. The massive increase in the numbers of Muslims making the hajj to Mecca, particularly from South and Southeast Asia, helped to kindle the emergence and spread of new religious and religiopolitical movemen
{"title":"Introduction: Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print","authors":"Michael Christopher Low","doi":"10.1525/9780520957220-003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520957220-003","url":null,"abstract":"GLOBAL MUSLIMS IN THE AGE OF STEAM AND PRINT edited by James L . Gelvin and Nile Green Berkeley: University of Ca lifornia Press, 2014 (xiv + 285, index, illustrations, maps) $75.00 (clot h), $34.95 (paper)In his 1981 classic, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, Daniel Headrick wrote: \"Among the many important events of the nineteenth century, two were of momentous consequence for the entire world. One was the progress and power of industrial technology and the other was the domination and exploitation of Africa and much of Asia by Europeans\" (3). But, as the editors of Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print, James Gelvin and Nile Green, caution, \"focusing on these technologies also highlights the fundamental problem of ascribing agency solely to one part of the globe\" (3). Thus, instead of telling a \"simple story of imperial hegemony and technological determinism,\" this edited volume attempts to weave a more complicated narrative, documenting how Muslim communities worldwide quickly took up the \"tools of empire\" and put them to use in ways that their inventors and disseminators had never envisioned (2-3). Highlighting the global Muslim community's exposure to new technologies, the authors in the volume do more than simply reframe a familiar story from a non-Western perspective. Instead, they open up new space to rethink the meaning and timing of globalization itself.Gelvin and Green take aim at the question of how to periodize globalization. Acknowledging that we live in a globalized world, but dissatisfied with the notion that the current era of globalization dates from the end of the Cold War or the invention of the microchip, they argue that this most recent incarnation of globalization \"was made possible and in many ways defined by earlier globalizing events\" (1). For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, steam and print quickened the pace of human contact and represented the sinews and tentacles of \"the twin systems most identified with the modern period: the world system of nation-states and the modern world economic system\" (4). By concentrating on this bundle of technologies, Gelvin and Green distinguish between \"the more nebulous periods of 'modernity/early modernity' on the one hand and unqualified 'globalization' on the other\" (1). In contrast to political or military framings of the long nineteenth century, they propose a period from roughly 1850 to 1930 defined by \"the global diff usion of enabling technologies\" (2).The collapsing of time and space facilitated the movement of migrants, pilgrims, commodities, and diseases with unprecedented speed and breadth. In the process, steamship and rail travel rearranged the physical and conceptual geography of the Islamic world. The massive increase in the numbers of Muslims making the hajj to Mecca, particularly from South and Southeast Asia, helped to kindle the emergence and spread of new religious and religiopolitical movemen","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131396571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SADDAM HUSSEIN'S BA'TH PARTY: INSIDE AN AUTHORITARIAN REGIME Joseph Sassoon New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012 (xxi + 314 pages, bibliography, index, i llustrations, and map) $29.99 (paper)Despite the attention that Iraq has commanded in the news media and among policymakers since 1990, the country's history, politics, culture, and economy have remained remarkably understudied. This situation is beginning to change, and Joseph Sassoon's Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party represents a major contribution to recent scholarship. Sassoon poses the question of how Saddam Hussein was able to maintain power through two disastrous wars, crippling economic sanctions, and the prolonged and assiduous efforts of the United States to bring him down. Sassoon's book answers this question with the assertion that the Ba'th Party was critical to maintaining the compliance, complicity, cooperation, and support of a significant segment of Iraq's population until the American-led invasion of 2003.Perceptive surveys of Iraq's history such as those by Charles Tripp (A History of Iraq, Cambridge, 2007) and Phebe Marr (The Modern History of Iraq, Westview, 2012) acknowledge that Saddam's regime successfully entangled and implicated many Iraqis in an elaborate system of patronage and surveillance. Sassoon places the Ba'th Party at the center of this enter- prise, looking inside the party to reveal its machinery and its relationship to other institutions of the state. By examining how the regime rewarded its loyalists, he adds a dimension largely absent from Kanan Makiya's The Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (University of California, 1998), which focuses on the regime's repressive capacity. Sassoon's book explores the party's role in cultural production and thereby complements Eric Davis's Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (University of California, 2005), which explores the regime's endeavor to maintain itself through crafting a hegemonic worldview to impart to its citizens.Sassoon bases his account on extensive use of Iraqi archival sources, among them textual records of the Iraqi government and audiotapes of meetings between Saddam and his close associates, which the United States seized during its occupation. The documents are now archived at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. A second major collection of archival sources that Sassoon exploited is the Ba'th Party Regional Command documents, also taken to the United States in the wake of the invasion. This collection amounts to some six million pages, which have been digitized and made available to researchers at the Hoover Institute on Stanford University campus. Sassoon also draws upon the records of the Iraqi secret police that were seized by Kurds during the March 1991 uprising in the north of the country. These documents include about 2.4 million pages that are archived in digital form at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In addition to
{"title":"Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime","authors":"Weldon C. Matthews","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-1116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-1116","url":null,"abstract":"SADDAM HUSSEIN'S BA'TH PARTY: INSIDE AN AUTHORITARIAN REGIME Joseph Sassoon New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012 (xxi + 314 pages, bibliography, index, i llustrations, and map) $29.99 (paper)Despite the attention that Iraq has commanded in the news media and among policymakers since 1990, the country's history, politics, culture, and economy have remained remarkably understudied. This situation is beginning to change, and Joseph Sassoon's Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party represents a major contribution to recent scholarship. Sassoon poses the question of how Saddam Hussein was able to maintain power through two disastrous wars, crippling economic sanctions, and the prolonged and assiduous efforts of the United States to bring him down. Sassoon's book answers this question with the assertion that the Ba'th Party was critical to maintaining the compliance, complicity, cooperation, and support of a significant segment of Iraq's population until the American-led invasion of 2003.Perceptive surveys of Iraq's history such as those by Charles Tripp (A History of Iraq, Cambridge, 2007) and Phebe Marr (The Modern History of Iraq, Westview, 2012) acknowledge that Saddam's regime successfully entangled and implicated many Iraqis in an elaborate system of patronage and surveillance. Sassoon places the Ba'th Party at the center of this enter- prise, looking inside the party to reveal its machinery and its relationship to other institutions of the state. By examining how the regime rewarded its loyalists, he adds a dimension largely absent from Kanan Makiya's The Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (University of California, 1998), which focuses on the regime's repressive capacity. Sassoon's book explores the party's role in cultural production and thereby complements Eric Davis's Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (University of California, 2005), which explores the regime's endeavor to maintain itself through crafting a hegemonic worldview to impart to its citizens.Sassoon bases his account on extensive use of Iraqi archival sources, among them textual records of the Iraqi government and audiotapes of meetings between Saddam and his close associates, which the United States seized during its occupation. The documents are now archived at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. A second major collection of archival sources that Sassoon exploited is the Ba'th Party Regional Command documents, also taken to the United States in the wake of the invasion. This collection amounts to some six million pages, which have been digitized and made available to researchers at the Hoover Institute on Stanford University campus. Sassoon also draws upon the records of the Iraqi secret police that were seized by Kurds during the March 1991 uprising in the north of the country. These documents include about 2.4 million pages that are archived in digital form at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In addition to","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124958076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
THE MIGRANT IMAGE: THE ART AND POLITICS OF DOCUMENTARY DURING GLOBAL CRISIS T. J. Demos Durham, NC: Duke Universit y Press, 2013 (xiii + 250 pages, acknowledgments, notes, index, bibliography) $26.95 (paper)In The Migrant Image, T. J. Demos explores how selected contemporary artists represent migrants both sympathetically and as potential figures of resistance. Framing contemporary artworks dealing with the theme of migration within the twenty-first century context of "crisis globalization," Demos engages with a growing and interdisciplinary body of scholarship on neoliberalism and uneven development. The book's main intervention, however, is within the subfield of global contemporary art history, where it will serve as a ver y useful text for students, researchers, critics, and curators concerned with the relationship between art and politics in the post-September 11 era.Demos claims that conventional mass media and documentary images of migrants-a category that includes refugees, exploited laborers, nomads, and exiles-reinforce stereotypes of victimhood and criminality, and thus entrench political positions within conflict zones. By contrast, artists working with documentary material in unconventional ways, he argues, offer nuanced and even redemptive representations of these figures, thereby "uprooting" them from binary and polemical discourses on victimhood and criminality. The extent to which these latter artistic representations "intervene in the cultural politics of globalization," as he says they do, is less clear (xv).The artwork Demos considers is displayed in international exhibitions or biennials for limited audiences. Following curator Okwui Enwezor, Demos argues that the work contributes in these contexts to the formation of a "diasporic public sphere" (18). For Demos it is within this sphere that the figure of the refugee is redeemed and put forward as "the paradigm of a new (global and post-national) historical consciousness" (4). There is a leap here from the diverse political and economic circumstances of migration to representations of the migrant's postnational consciousness in artworks. Demos argues that in setting up a forum for reflexive "cross-cultural interactions" the biennial can forge a "community of sense" among its participants (18). Nevertheless, a gap remains between the artistic community formed by such participants and the diverse political community of migrants whose figures circulate in their work. Demos grants that the artwork, when viewed at international art fairs and in private galleries, might well function as a humanitarian alibi for corporate interests, but he does not examine this problem in detail. For Demos the question of the art market is secondary since the work extends beyond its context of production and display to "constitute a site of potential subjective transformation with ultimately immeasurable political implications" (248). The artwork's political power is described throughout the book as
《移民形象:全球危机期间纪录片的艺术与政治》T. J. Demos达勒姆，北卡罗来纳州:杜克大学出版社，2013年(13 + 250页，致谢、注释、索引、参考书目)26.95美元(纸本)在《移民形象》中，T. J. Demos探讨了当代艺术家如何以同情和潜在的抵抗人物来表现移民。在二十一世纪的“危机全球化”背景下，以移民为主题的当代艺术作品为框架，Demos参与了新自由主义和不平衡发展的跨学科学术研究。然而，这本书的主要介入是在全球当代艺术史的子领域，它将成为学生、研究人员、评论家和策展人关注后9 / 11时代艺术与政治关系的非常有用的文本。Demos声称，传统的大众媒体和关于移民(包括难民、被剥削的劳工、游牧民和流亡者)的纪录片形象强化了受害者和犯罪的刻板印象，从而巩固了冲突地区的政治立场。他认为，相比之下，艺术家以非传统的方式处理文献材料，为这些人物提供了微妙甚至是救赎的表现，从而将他们从关于受害者和犯罪的二元性和论战性话语中“连根拔起”。这些后一种艺术表现形式在多大程度上“干预了全球化的文化政治”，正如他所说的那样，就不太清楚了(xv)。Demos认为艺术作品是在国际展览或双年展上为有限的观众展出的。继策展人Okwui Enwezor之后，Demos认为，在这些背景下，这些作品有助于形成一个“散居的公共领域”(18)。对于Demos来说，正是在这个范围内，难民的形象得到了救赎，并被提出为“一种新的(全球和后民族)历史意识的范式”(4)。这里有一个飞跃，从移民的各种政治和经济环境到艺术作品中移民后民族意识的表现。Demos认为，通过为反思性的“跨文化互动”建立一个论坛，双年展可以在参与者之间建立一个“意识共同体”(18)。然而，由这些参与者组成的艺术社区与在他们的作品中流通的移民的多样化政治社区之间仍然存在差距。德莫斯承认，当这些艺术品在国际艺术博览会和私人画廊展出时，很可能会成为企业利益的人道主义托词，但他没有详细研究这个问题。对于Demos来说，艺术市场的问题是次要的，因为作品超越了其生产和展示的背景，“构成了一个潜在的主观转变的场所，最终具有不可估量的政治含义”(248)。在整本书中，艺术作品的政治力量被描述为推测性的或延迟的——这是Demos追随政治哲学家Giorgio Agamben所说的“未来的政治”的一个方面——而不是对当前激进主义倡议的贡献(156)。当《移民形象》将艺术作品的形式和代表性细节与相关冲突地区的棘手历史和地缘政治联系起来时，它是最引人注目的。这本书是对基于纪录片的艺术实践模式的研究，而不是对全球当代艺术的“详尽”调查。史蒂夫·麦奎因(Steve McQueen)的作品触及了刚果和南非;厄休拉·比曼作品中的撒哈拉和北非;巴勒斯坦/以色列在Otolith小组、Ahlam Shibli和Emily Jacir的工作中;以及贝鲁特的阿特拉斯集团、拉米亚·乔雷吉、拉比·姆鲁、乔安娜·哈吉托马斯和哈利勒·乔雷吉的工作。艺术作品分为三个主要部分(“出发”)，由较短的哲学插曲(“过境”)分开，涉及本书的广泛主题/问题:美学与政治，新自由主义和全球化。…
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CONFLICTING NARRATIVES: WAR, TRAUMA, AND MEMORY IN IRAQI CULTURE edited by Stephan Milich, Friederike Pannewick, and Leslie Tramontini Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2012 (x v iii + 268 pages) $99.00 (clot h)Looking at Iraq from our current vantage point it is easy to forget the rich cultural history contained within the borders of a country that has been plagued by warfare for over thirty years, with each catastrophic event seemingly overshadowing the previous one. Iraq has had no shortage of writers and intellectuals. In the latter half of the twentieth century some of the Arab world's most important poets emerged from the country; names like Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Nazik al-Mala'ika, and 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati- among many others-need no introduction for anyone with the slightest familiarity with modern Arabic poetry. Their stories are well known, and their contribution to the shape of modern Arabic literature is undeniable. Yet far less has been written, particularly in English, about the writers and cultural figures from the final quarter of the last century until the present day. What happened to Iraqi cultural production during the terrifying years of Ba'thist rule, under the sanctions of the 1990s, or following the 2003 US invasion and occupation? What has been the role of the Iraqi intellectual since then, and how has Iraqi culture responded to the memories and traumas of recent, violent pasts? Moreover, who, for that matter, can speak in the name of Iraq at a time when the country is more fragmented than ever before and an increasing number of writers live abroad?In response to these questions, in December 2008 a conference entitled "Cultural Voices of a Fragmented Nation: War, Trauma and Remembrance in Contemporary Iraq" took place at the Phillips-Universitat in Marburg, Germany. Much of Conflicting Narratives: War, Trauma, and Memory in Iraqi Culture grew from this conference. The edited volume consists of four sections: "Cultural and Political Narratives"; "Poetics of Trauma"; "The Dialectics of Home and Exile"; and "Shahadat: Essays on the Poetic Semantics of the 'Iraqi Place.'" The final section contains five additional essays translated from the 2009 collection of articles edited by Basran novelist and short story writer Lu'ay Hamza 'Abbas entitled al-Makan al-'Iraqi: Jadal al-Kitaba wa-lTajriba (The Iraqi place: Debating writing and experience). While the goals of the book are ambitious, it does an admirable job of introducing readers to contemporary debates about Iraqi literary production.The book's essays reflect important recent trends in scholarship on Iraqi culture, originating in scholarly works written primarily in Arabic by Iraqi intellectuals who critically treat Iraqi cultural production, especially literature, inside and outside the country from approximately 1979 until the present day. The most notable of these studies are Salam 'Abbud's Thaqafat al-'Unf fi al-'Iraq (The culture of violence in Iraq) and 'Abbas Khidr's al
Stephan Milich, Friederike Pannewick和Leslie Tramontini Wiesbaden编辑的伊拉克文化中的战争，创伤和记忆:Reichert Verlag, 2012 (x v iii + 268页)$99.00 (clot h)从我们当前的有利位置来看伊拉克，很容易忘记包含在一个国家边界内的丰富的文化历史，这个国家已经被战争困扰了30多年，每一个灾难性事件似乎都掩盖了前一个。伊拉克并不缺少作家和知识分子。在20世纪后半叶，阿拉伯世界一些最重要的诗人从这个国家涌现出来;像Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Nazik al-Mala'ika和Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati这样的名字，对于任何对现代阿拉伯诗歌稍有了解的人来说都不需要介绍。他们的故事众所周知，他们对现代阿拉伯文学的贡献是不可否认的。然而，关于从上世纪最后25年至今的作家和文化人物的著作，尤其是英文著作，却少得多。在复兴党统治的恐怖年代，在20世纪90年代的制裁下，或者在2003年美国入侵和占领之后，伊拉克的文化生产发生了什么变化?从那时起，伊拉克知识分子扮演了什么角色?伊拉克文化如何回应最近暴力过去的记忆和创伤?此外，在这个国家比以往任何时候都更加分裂，越来越多的作家生活在国外的时候，谁能以伊拉克的名义说话?为了回答这些问题，2008年12月在德国马尔堡的菲利普斯大学举行了一场题为“支离破碎的国家的文化之声:当代伊拉克的战争、创伤和记忆”的会议。《冲突的叙述:伊拉克文化中的战争、创伤和记忆》一书就是从这次会议中产生的。编辑后的卷由四个部分组成:“文化和政治叙事”;《创伤诗学》;《家与流亡的辩证法》;《沙哈达特:“伊拉克地”的诗歌语义学论文集》。最后一部分收录了另外五篇文章，这些文章摘自巴斯兰小说家和短篇小说作家鲁阿伊·哈姆扎·阿巴斯2009年编辑的文集《伊拉克的地方:辩论写作和经验》。虽然这本书的目标雄心勃勃，但它在向读者介绍有关伊拉克文学创作的当代辩论方面做了令人钦佩的工作。这本书的文章反映了伊拉克文化学术研究的重要最新趋势，这些趋势主要是由伊拉克知识分子用阿拉伯语撰写的学术著作，这些知识分子从大约1979年至今，在国内外批判地对待伊拉克的文化生产，特别是文学。这些研究中最值得注意的是萨拉姆·阿布巴德的《伊拉克的暴力文化》和阿巴斯·希德尔的《伊拉克的文化犯罪》，这两本书分别于2002年和2005年在科隆由al- jamal出版，并在全书中被频繁引用。他们对伊拉克复兴党统治下的文化生产进行了严厉的批评，如果他们的批评在某些方面显得过于尖刻(考虑到复兴党统治期间存在的恐惧程度，可以说是合理的过度)，他们仍然是任何对当代伊拉克文学和文化史感兴趣的人的必读读物。与此同时，《冲突叙事》中的许多文学研究反映了最近对年轻一代作家(包括穆赫辛·拉姆利、哈桑·布拉西姆、希南·安东和伊纳姆·卡查奇)所写的伊拉克小说和诗歌的英语研究。这些材料大多涉及美国领导的入侵以及2003年以来的战争和动乱的后果。《冲突叙事》的第一部分题为“文化与政治叙事”，由文化评论家法蒂玛·莫森、文学学者莱斯利·特拉蒙蒂尼和历史学家哈拉·法塔赫分别撰写的三篇文章组成。…
{"title":"Conflicting Narratives: War, Trauma and Memory in Iraqi Culture","authors":"Amirbahador Moosavi","doi":"10.29091/9783752000993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.29091/9783752000993","url":null,"abstract":"CONFLICTING NARRATIVES: WAR, TRAUMA, AND MEMORY IN IRAQI CULTURE edited by Stephan Milich, Friederike Pannewick, and Leslie Tramontini Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2012 (x v iii + 268 pages) $99.00 (clot h)Looking at Iraq from our current vantage point it is easy to forget the rich cultural history contained within the borders of a country that has been plagued by warfare for over thirty years, with each catastrophic event seemingly overshadowing the previous one. Iraq has had no shortage of writers and intellectuals. In the latter half of the twentieth century some of the Arab world's most important poets emerged from the country; names like Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Nazik al-Mala'ika, and 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati- among many others-need no introduction for anyone with the slightest familiarity with modern Arabic poetry. Their stories are well known, and their contribution to the shape of modern Arabic literature is undeniable. Yet far less has been written, particularly in English, about the writers and cultural figures from the final quarter of the last century until the present day. What happened to Iraqi cultural production during the terrifying years of Ba'thist rule, under the sanctions of the 1990s, or following the 2003 US invasion and occupation? What has been the role of the Iraqi intellectual since then, and how has Iraqi culture responded to the memories and traumas of recent, violent pasts? Moreover, who, for that matter, can speak in the name of Iraq at a time when the country is more fragmented than ever before and an increasing number of writers live abroad?In response to these questions, in December 2008 a conference entitled \"Cultural Voices of a Fragmented Nation: War, Trauma and Remembrance in Contemporary Iraq\" took place at the Phillips-Universitat in Marburg, Germany. Much of Conflicting Narratives: War, Trauma, and Memory in Iraqi Culture grew from this conference. The edited volume consists of four sections: \"Cultural and Political Narratives\"; \"Poetics of Trauma\"; \"The Dialectics of Home and Exile\"; and \"Shahadat: Essays on the Poetic Semantics of the 'Iraqi Place.'\" The final section contains five additional essays translated from the 2009 collection of articles edited by Basran novelist and short story writer Lu'ay Hamza 'Abbas entitled al-Makan al-'Iraqi: Jadal al-Kitaba wa-lTajriba (The Iraqi place: Debating writing and experience). While the goals of the book are ambitious, it does an admirable job of introducing readers to contemporary debates about Iraqi literary production.The book's essays reflect important recent trends in scholarship on Iraqi culture, originating in scholarly works written primarily in Arabic by Iraqi intellectuals who critically treat Iraqi cultural production, especially literature, inside and outside the country from approximately 1979 until the present day. The most notable of these studies are Salam 'Abbud's Thaqafat al-'Unf fi al-'Iraq (The culture of violence in Iraq) and 'Abbas Khidr's al","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123521264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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