Showing papers in "Arab Studies Journal in 2015"

Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime

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 the impressive archival research, Sassoon uses memoirs, Saddam's novels and published speeches, and the Iraqi press. He also interviewed a number of Iraqi officials and military officers who served in the Ba'thist regime.From these sources Sassoon reconstructs how the Iraqi Ba'th Party sustained Saddam's rule and constituted, along with the state bureaucracy and military, one of the three key components of the regime. The party's membership represented a reserve labor force that could be called upon to augment the capacity of the bureaucracy, security forces, and military. We learn that the party was hierarchically organized, hyperregulated, and bureaucratized, but also that it was also capable of fostering initiative and competition among its units. It even devoted considerable attention to conducting elections for the leadership of some levels of the hierarchy. Sassoon traces the lives of party members to demonstrate how party activism was professionalized and constituted a full-time career for Ba'thists in the party's upper echelons. …

The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis

Abstract: 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 speculative or deferred-an aspect of what Demos, following political philosopher Giorgio Agamben, calls a "politics to come"-rather than as a contribution to activist initiatives in the present (156).The Migrant Image is most compelling when it relates formal and representational details of the artworks to the thorny histories and geopolitics of their associated confl ict zones. The book is cast as a study of a model of documentary-based art practices rather than an "exhaustive" survey of global contemporary art. It touches upon the Congo and South Africa in the work of Steve McQueen; the Sahara and North Africa in the work of Ursula Biemann; Palestine/Israel in the work of the Otolith Group, Ahlam Shibli, and Emily Jacir; and Beirut in the work of the Atlas Group, Lamia Joreige, Rabih Mroue, and Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. The artwork is presented in three major sections ("Departures") separated by shorter philosophical interludes ("Transits") on the broad themes/problems of the book: aesthetics and politics, neoliberalism, and globalization. …

Writing the Dismembered Nation: The Aesthetics of Horror in Iraqi Narratives of War

Abstract: Sinan Antoon's second novel, Wahdaha Shajarat al-Rumman (The Corpse Washer), begins with a repetitive nightmare-the narrator Jawad sees his former girlfriend lying naked on a marble bench beckoning him.1 He too is naked. As Jawad, a corpse washer by profession, approaches her, she urges him to wash her so they can be together. "Why would I wash you?" he asks. "You're still alive." This idyllic scene is interrupted by the following:I think I hear a car approaching. I turn around and see a Humvee driving at an insane speed, leaving a trail of flying dust. It suddenly swerves to the right and comes to a stop a few meters away from us. Its doors open. Masked men wearing khaki uniforms and carrying machine guns rush towards us. I try to shield Reem with my right hand, but one of the men has already reached me. He hits me in the face with the stock of his machine gun. I fall to the ground. He kicks me in the stomach. Another starts dragging me away from the washing bench. None of them says a word. I am screaming and cursing them, but I can't hear myself. Two men force me to get down on my knees and tie my wrists with a wire behind my back. One of them puts a knife to my neck; the other blindfolds me. I try to run away but they hold me tightly. I scream again, but cannot hear my screams. I hear only Reem's shrieks, the laughter and grunts of the men, the sound of the rain.I feel a sharp pain, then the cold blade of the knife penetrating my neck. Hot blood spills over my chest and back. My head falls to the ground and rolls like a ball on the sand. I hear footsteps. One of the men takes off my blindfold and shoves it into his pocket. He spits in my face and goes away. I see my body to the left of the bench, kneeling in a puddle of blood.2The narration of violent corporeal dismemberment in this, the first scene of the novel, is notable for its routineness and its casual enactment, but also because it establishes the centrality of a dismembering violence, here in the form of a decapitation, to the contemporary Iraqi experience. That this scene occurs in a repetitive dream sequence reveals its penetration into the recesses of the narrator's subconscious, establishing a metaphysical presence and suggesting that the effects of the violence the narrator has witnessed in daily life have been absorbed beyond the realm of the material. Literary recourse to the metaphysical, whether through the subconscious, nightmares, or the supernatural, are frequent stylistic conventions of post-2003 Iraqi literary production, narrating a terrain of unspeakable violence and its many afterlives. For Jawad, dreaming the violent spectacle allows him to witness his own decapitation-an out-of-body experience in which the mind is conscious of the self's corporeal dismemberment and simultaneously witnesses the spectacle as a voyeur. This self-witnessing of violence stages a relationship between embodied and disembodied violence, between the terror of violence inflicted on the physical self and the concurrent psychic processing of the event. The narrative function of this separation is to underscore the many afterlives of violence for those who see and experience it. For Jawad, a traditional corpse washer who prepares violently dismembered and mutilated corpses for burial, the subconscious acts as the playground where the residue of unspeakable violence witnessed elsewhere is manifested.Literary and artistic representations of the body's violent dismemberment and mutilation are a recurring feature of post-2003 Iraqi cultural production, from literature to the visual arts. These representations include portrayals of decapitations, dismembered limbs, tortured bodies, and charred remains of corpses. Visual artist Sadik Kwaish Alfraji's installation piece You Cannot Erase the Traces of War (2008), for example, positions a headless male torso in a series of repetitive photographic images. In each frame, a headless (perhaps decapitated?) torso is violated in different ways-burned, mutilated, slashed, and torn-and superimposed with iconic images of Iraq's ancient past. …

Making Spaces for Communal Sovereignty: The Story of Beirut's Dalieh

Abstract: A few minutes into his talk at al-Madina Theater in February 2012, Beirut mayor Bilal Hamad outlined the reasons behind the decades of unwarranted closure of Hursh Beirut, the city's only large park.1 The mayor listed a wide array of "undesirable" activities he believed would dominate the park if it were open: picnicking, walking on the grass, smoking nargilahs, kissing, and engaging in political violence. A desirable public space, in Hamad's portrayal, would be an uninhabited park, sterile, devoid of surprises, and marked by a narrow de??nition of appropriate behavior. This control of public space in Beirut is not limited to its central park. Elsewhere in the city, municipal authorities lease city property to private institutions that de??ne and limit its use. Thus, the authorities offered a large municipal lot in Verdun to the religious center Dar al-Fatwa, which promptly hung a sign proclaiming "Private Property. Entry Not Allowed."A 2011 World Health Organization report on "Public Green Space" stipulates that the relative surface of open green areas in Beirut is one square meter per person, far below the recommended forty square meters per person.2 Where are Beirut's open spaces, then? Indeed, aerial photographs of the city reveal the dearth of such spaces. Aside from the main seafront Corniche where people converge from all quarters of the city, Beirut can claim almost only privatized spaces. These spaces are mostly concentrated in the Solidere area, the historic urban core of the city that private real estate development turned into a high-end commercial downtown in the postcivil war reconstruction process. One example of this transformation from public to private is Zaytuna Bay, a new marina that stands on the rubble of a historic ??shing port and is today one of Beirut's most expensive plots of real estate. Private security guards monitor the neighborhood, restricting certain practices, and clearly regulating who can enter its open spaces.Following a tradition that relies heavily on the privatization of zones earmarked for public use, Beirut has undergone diverse forms of controlling public space. During and after the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), the city witnessed the gradual disappearance of coastal lands accessible to the public, as the authorities' de facto privatization of its coastline became legal. Furthermore, throughout the past twenty years, the regulatory framework for building in Lebanon has enabled private actors to take charge of planning the city, paving the way for the private exploitation of the public domain, and effectively banning the public from access to the sea.3 Hence, a report published in 1997 indicates that private waterfront enterprises occupy eighty percent of the coastline between the bay of Jounieh and Beirut International Airport.4 (Figure 1)These conditions produce a city in which the usual provider of public space, namely the sovereign, is either disinterested in or openly at war with such spaces. Here I use the term "sovereign" in reference to the state, which acts as the ruler. In more general terms, Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat de??ne sovereignty as a "form of authority grounded in violence that is performed and designed to generate loyalty, fear, and legitimacy from the neighborhood to the summit of the state."5 Yet despite these conditions, or partly because of them, Beirut dwellers today lay claim to a limited number of open areas in the city. People use the spaces in different ways, allowing for an uncon??ned range of social activities to occur. It is social and communal agreements, rather than the state's laws and institutions, that organize and secure access to these remaining "leftover" spaces.The public's use of these "leftovers" offer lessons on how to shape and secure spaces as public, multicultural, and just, as well as politically and socially open. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, particularly his distinction between representational space (appropriated, lived space) and representations of space (planned, ordered space), I examine the case of Dalieh (Dalya) in the central Raouche (Rawsha) area. …

The Superlative City: Dubai and the Urban Condition in the Early Twenty-First Century

Abstract: THE SUPERLATIVE CITY: DUBAI AND THE URBAN CONDITION IN THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY edited by Ahmed Kanna Cambridge: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2013 (168 pages) $24.95 (paper)Like other coastal cities of the Arabian Peninsula in the last century, Dubai has been part and parcel of a regional network of human, capital, and commodity flows and exchange. Since the late nineteenth century, merchants and workers as well as goods and ideas have circulated between the port town and the rest of the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, across the Indian Ocean and South Asia. As Dubai became more central to the British Empire's trade routes, particularly as a link to India, economic life therein flourished. Families from Persia and the Indian subcontinent, among other places, increasingly settled in Dubai, further shaping everyday social, cultural, and economic life and spurring urban growth there. When Dubai joined the United Arab Emirates following independence from the United Kingdom in 1971, transnational influences manifested in the multiple languages and cosmopolitan identities of the emerging city's diverse inhabitants, as well as in its urban form and built environment.Journalistic, popular, and professional portrayals of Dubai altogether elide this transnational past. Instead, attributing Dubai's cosmopolitanism to its contemporary residents, they project a homogenous and fantastical space detached from the city's actual sociohistorical context, as The Superlative City: Dubai and the Urban Condition in the Early Twenty-First Century makes abundantly clear. The ten contributors to this edited volume-professionals and academics predominantly from the disciplines of architecture and urban planning but also from anthropology and visual studies-explain that such an imagined reality persists for several reasons. In the quest to construct a unified national identity following independence and the consolidation of the oil economy, Dubai's rulers attempted to either erase or "Arabize" multiethnic lived experiences, both cultural and material. Since the acceleration of the industrial and commercial diversification phases in the 1990s, the Al Maktum have also invested heavily in circulating a sanitized image of Dubai as a city with an unfettered, stable free market, rooted in the multiple, themed enclaves that have come to define the urban landscape. This image presents Dubai-which Boris Brorman Jensen here refers to as "the city of the image" (54)-as providing an ideal urban experience, thereby ignoring the attendant political, social, and economic inequalities. At the same time, the global media has been quick to reify the city's official, top-down selfimage, aligned as it is with the media's own neoliberal agenda (at least until the 2008 economic crash), as Ahmed Kanna, the volume's editor, points out in both the introduction and his contribution.In so doing, journalists, along with scholars and enthusiasts of "Brand Dubai," disregard the absolutism of the monarchy and its development corporations, as well as the political nature of both economic and urban planning practices, in favor of celebratory narratives of economic liberalization and neoliberal urbanization, as several of the book's contributors argue. As such, the violence and authoritarianism of the planning regime-which includes the rulers, state-owned development corporations, and technocratic elites- and its urban planning practices are repackaged as welcome, benevolent modernization practices that have elevated Dubai to its so-called exceptional status as a bastion of modernity in the Arab world. Such violence is also evident in the remaking of Dubai's material history, wherein "a new economy of origins as commodity" has emerged, one "in which history is marketed, [thus] rearranging the city to satisfy the growing market for entertainment" (Jensen, 56). Ignoring the spatial politics of development in Dubai makes it possible for space as a social product to mask the contradictions of its production, thereby reifying political and socioeconomic inequalities. …

The National Park: Reviving Eden in Iraq's Marshes

Abstract: An Argument for EdenIraqi exiles planned to restore Iraq's southern marshes as the country's first national park well before US-led coalition forces invaded and occupied the country. By 2007 George Packer, a New Yorker reporter, told me Iraq's marsh restoration had become "the success story of the war."1 Since 2003 global news agencies have published more than seventy-five stories on Iraq's marsh revival. Headlines read: "Iraq's Eden: Reviving the Legendary Marshes," "Marshes a Vengeful Hussein Drained Stir Again," "Iraq's Marshlands: Resurrecting Eden," "Iraqi-American Seeks to Restore 'Garden of Eden.'"2 Zaid Kubra, an Iraqi exile living in the United States, was the founder of Green Iraq, the NGO leading the initiative. I met Kubra for the first time in 2004 at a conference entitled "Mesopotamian Marshes"3 We sat across from each other in a cafe during a break in proceedings and I asked about his efforts. Kubra started working on the project he called "New Eden" in 1999, when he was part of the Iraqi opposition movement in exile. Kubra was charming, but direct. He told me he came up with the Eden connection for "purely political purposes" to market wetland conservation in Iraq to a skeptical Western public by highlighting the region as the site of the biblical garden. Kubra told me that his experiences running a company taught him the value of marketing; Eden had market value, the utopia was "sexy."In "post-war" reconstruction-era Iraq, Eden facilitated economic and political goals of the occupation. The environment has historically been an instrument of politics. The European quest for Eden in the fifteenth century facilitated colonial purchase over tropical islands of economic import.4 Nineteenth-century democracy building initiatives like the US national parks movement conserved nature for the republic by forcibly removing Native communities from indigenous lands.5 Contemporary biodiversity campaigns continue the imperial tradition by imposing international conservation policy unilaterally across the global south, enforcing new regimes of Western governance over non-aligned states.6 In nineteenth-century North Africa, French colonials cited the environment as a justification for colonial expansion that displaced indigenous communities. French officials argued that these communities ruined the "granary of Rome."7 Similarly, in early twentieth-century Iraq, Ottomans first referenced the draining of the marshes as crucial to the restoration of Eden, and with it the country's agricultural prosperity in the global market. British imperialists continued to champion the logic of draining as they encroached on Ottoman territory. In fact, it was British engineer Fred Haigh's 1951 wetland reclamation plans for Iraq's Irrigation Development Commission that served as the blueprint for Saddam Hussein's draining in the early 1990s.For the United States and coalition partners, creating the Iraqi nation anew involved remaking its national environment. National parks commonly index national ideals. They are one way for nations to project images of themselves to their citizens and the world.8 Building Iraq's environmental capacity became part of the UN- and the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority's national reconstruction plans, which created the Iraqi Ministry of Environment after Hussein's fall in April 2003. The US government sup- ported Green Iraq's marsh restoration as integral to the war effort by citing the marshes at key political moments. President George W. Bush cited Hussein's draining of the marshes as part of his rationale for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.9 When Iraq rewrote its constitution, the preamble remembered the marshes, equating post-Ba'th political participation with marsh memorialization.10 An Iraqi judge charged Hussein with seven crimes at his arraignment, including the draining of the marshes. Each of these acts validated the war as environmental redemption and made the deposed president a test case for the prosecution of world leaders on the basis of environmental crimes. …

Evicting Sovereignty: Lebanon's Housing Tenants from Citizens to Obstacles

Abstract: Sitting tenants under rent control in Lebanon between 1940 and 1992 constituted a political force that defended the right of low and middle-income social groups to affordable housing. By 2014, however, tenants' position with regard to state authority and private development had changed drastically. At the level of legislation, changes introduced to rent laws, building laws, and exceptions to zoning regulations had enabled a particular construction process to emerge. This process serves the economic elite and its interest to invest in real estate. New developers are an extension of Lebanon's political elite that devises economic and urban policies to continuously boost the country's real estate sector.1 They build alienating urban forms and create prohibitive housing markets. In addition, real estate companies' advertising represents these neighborhoods through images of luxurious new lifestyles and excludes the existing long-term residents. Moreover, speculation and an uncurbed property tax system are causing land prices to skyrocket.2 This process has transformed the value of land in Lebanon from a social one to what David Harvey terms a "pure financial asset."3This tendency has given rise to contradictions in the rent control system, which has in turn affected the lives of communities living in Beirut. Vast differences between rent values, tied to the minimum wage, and rapidly increasing land values have led landlords to imagine their buildings as "hidden treasures," ready to be dumped at a profit, as one landlord explained the decision to bulldoze the historic house he lives in. On another level, a substantial shiftin land ownership, as of 1992, from small landlords to large real estate companies has enabled market-led evictions. In 2014, "a mass eviction law," as the Committee to Defend Tenants' Rights described it, positioned old tenants as external to the market, thus justifying changes to rent law. In the past, landlords used court cases and/or private negotiations over a fee to evict tenants. However, the 2014 law redefined the conditions of eviction. This change caught tenants offguard, creating a growing sense of insecurity and a feeling of betrayal in the face of the state's violation of a seventy-three-year-old social contract. A close reading of the historical development of rent control in Lebanon reveals the conditions that led to tenants' loss of agency on multiple levels. Yet despite this loss, and even in the midst of a persistent and unprecedented media campaign as well as the lobbying of the newly-formed Syndicate of Owners, tenants and their representatives continue to challenge the legitimacy of the new law.This article analyzes the redefinition of the state-citizen relationship that the "market-driven" liberalization of rental contracts, which pave the way for the end of rent control, flagrantly embodies. Rent control was previously tied to addressing the wider social concern for an affordable housing policy. This affordable housing was poorly conceived and never fully materialized. Today elite forces are ransacking the social pact between citizens and the state, which older tenants strongly symbolize. In the process, the concept of a sovereign state is shifting from positing the state as a provider of basic rights to casting the state as an enabler of the market. A prevailing narrative of the "weak state" has legitimized this shiftin the Lebanese context. However, such a reconfiguration of sovereignty masks the workings of a strong state behind a new emerging sovereignty of eviction.Although in law rent control is still in effect, landowners and speculators are using extralegal measures and contradictory politics to remove tenants. The state's bureaucrats and governing institutions veer from leniency on landlord accountability to acting as enablers of the eviction process. Tenants face the threat of eviction long before its execution, with the process sometimes spanning a decade. Shifting owner negotiation strategies, swindling activities, intimidation, threats, and official notices together pressure residents to leave their homes. …

Conflicting Narratives: War, Trauma, and Memory in Iraqi Culture

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 alKhakiyya: Min Awraq al-Jarima al-Thaqafiyya fial-'Iraq (Khaki: Documents of cultural crime in Iraq), both published in Cologne by al-Jamal in 2002 and 2005, respectively, and both of which are cited frequently throughout the book. They are scathing critiques of cultural production under the Iraqi Ba'th Party, and if at points they seem overly caustic in their criticism (an arguably justifiable excess, given the level of fear that existed during Ba'thist rule), they are nevertheless essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary Iraqi literature and cultural history. At the same time, much of the literary scholarship in Conflicting Narratives reflects more recent Englishlanguage studies of Iraqi fiction and poetry written by a younger generation of writers including Muhsin al-Ramli, Hassan Blasim, Sinan Antoon, and Inaam Kachachi. Much of this material deals with the consequences of the US-led invasion and subsequent wars and unrest since 2003.The first section of Conflicting Narratives, entitled "Cultural and Political Narratives," consists of three articles individually written by cultural critic Fatima Mohsen, literary scholar Leslie Tramontini, and historian Hala Fattah. …

Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive

Abstract: ALEXANDRIAN COSMOPOLITANISM: AN ARCHIVE Ha la Ha lim New York: Ford ham Universit y Press, 2013 (x v + 459 pages, bibliography, index, illustrations) $65.00 (clot h)Hala Halim's book is a provocative and erudite study of the modern European literary discourses that have constructed Alexandria as the exemplary site of what we might call cosmopolitan desire. Following Edward Said's critique of orientalism's endless discursive recycling of itself, Halim reads these Alexandria representations as an archive of a specialized Eurocentric discourse based in canonical texts characterized by "citation" and "selfreferentiality" (292). The book marshals a rich range of conceptual and historical discussions, and an array of critical and archival resources, to make a broad and illuminating argument about place and the politics of representation.Halim discusses the core of this canon-what she calls "the literary triumvirate" of Constantine Cavafy, E. M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell- in three separate chapters. Th rough close readings she traces the pattern and substance of the archive of literary, historical, and critical texts that produced and sustained "Alexandrianism" over the course of the century that witnessed the end of high colonialism and the emergence of a liberationist postcolonial order in Egypt.Halim's central contention is that Alexandrianism-as distinct from the literary texts it celebrates and canonizes-is a type of nostalgic neocolonial discourse that seeks to detach the city from its national and regional geography and histories and recuperate it. In one version, this revived narrative helps uphold the fantasy of a lost "golden age" of European hegemony, and in another version, it serves to valorize a properly postcolonial aesthetic of transnationalism and hybridity. Her claim is that both versions of this discourse are invested in a politics of representation built on a series of textual, historical, and geographical erasures. The book is in part an attempt to map the ghosts of these erasures in the work of, and in the critical scholarship on, the "triumvirate" and to trace the outlines of what a fully territorialized Alexandria might look like in the contemporary Egyptian imagination.The introduction lays out this claim by tracing the genealogy of the concept of cosmopolitanism, with its "imperial pedigree of universalism," and exploring the tension between postcolonial celebrations of cosmopolitanism's globalized, transnational subject (exile, refugee, and migrant) and its unspoken other (39). Taking her cue from a special issue of the journal Public Culture in which this other is named as nationalism-"an increasingly 'retrograde ideology' producing 'horrendous conflicts in recent history'"-Halim suggests that "not all lives are transnational" (7, 8). Lived post/colonial subject positions occupy a much broader and more nuanced range of relationships to territory (the traveler, the sojourner, the habitant, the indigene), she says. The possibility of radical agency is thus at least partly rooted in national and international (as opposed to "cosmopolitan" or "transnational") spaces, as witnessed in 2011 by the people in Tahrir Square in Cairo, which became a space of inter/national imaginations and solidarities (9). Here lies one of the most important and productive threads in the book's deconstruction of the archive of Alexandrianism: the implicit insistence on the importance of habitation (and the attendant notion of lived place) as the taking-off point for non-Eurocentric and egalitarian forms of conviviality, creativity, and action.Halim's nuanced readings of the Cavafy/Forster/Durrell triumvirate is intended as a critique of the role of specialist literary criticism, which "reiterates and orchestrates, with additional contributions of its own, the quasi-colonial historiographical narrative of Alexandria's cosmopolitanism" (43). She convincingly argues that this metacritical narrative is built on a kind of willful misreading of the canonical texts, a misreading that functions by "overlooking certain texts, occluding resistances in others, and disregarding genre expectations in given instances" (43). …

The Question of Judeo-Arabic

Abstract: While the ethnic/religious term "Arab-Jew" has at the very least been the object of heated debate and polemics, the linguistic/cultural term "Judeo- Arabic," paradoxically, has been widely accepted as a legitimate object of scholarly inquiry-especially within the realm of Jewish studies. Most languages, including the languages or dialects spoken by Jews, are palimpsestically complex and layered with various linguistic strata. Yet the case of Judeo-Arabic raises complex questions. This complexity is partially traceable to the persistence of the "Arab versus Jew" dichotomy, as well as to the corollary negation of the "Judeo-Muslim" hyphen, which had been crucial for the genealogy of Arabic written and spoken by Jews for millennia. Against the conceptual binary that mandates that "Jew" and "Arab" be antonyms, I argue that the linguistic/cultural question of "Judeo-Arabic" is inseparable from the ethnic/religious concept of the "Arab-Jew." My argument here is premised on my earlier critique of the taboos against joining the word "Jewishness" with the word "Arabness" (a taboo encapsulated in the very term "Arab-Jew") as well as against joining the word "Judeo" with the word "Muslim" (encapsulated in the "Judeo-Muslim"). That critique has been central to my scholarly work over the past three decades. Does the good/bad bifurcation between the terms "Arab-Jew" and "Judeo-Arabic" as objects of analysis reflect a different ideational status of the hyphen in the two terms (i.e., linking Jews to Arabs in the case of "the Arab-Jew" while delinking a Jewish language from Arabic in the case of "Judeo-Arabic")? Rather than take for granted "Judeo-Arabic" as a fixed natural language, I argue that the term-like "Arab-Jew"-requires a critical engagement. Both terms are equally entangled in the anxiety provoked by the idea of an Arab cultural genealogy for a Jewish identity.This essay does not concern itself with the extremely rich, indeed invaluable, scholarship in the related fields of "Judeo-Arabic" and "Jewish languages." Rather, it attempts to examine the implications of these terms, assumptions, and axioms for identity mapping. The essay interrogates the premises and conceptual frameworks associated with the rubric of "Judeo- Arabic language." If Jewish studies scholars have tended to conceive "Judeo- Arabic" within a ghettoizing approach to the history and culture of "the Jews," scholars within Arab studies have treated it with skepticism. Arab studies scholars ask, in effect, whether Judeo-Arabic even has any actual existence apart from its source language-Arabic. Rather than divide these two zones of inquiry, I hope to bring them into dialogue through addressing some of the specificities of Arabic written and spoken by Jews. In doing so, I cast doubt on the view of "Judeo-Arabic" as always-already belonging to the separate realm of "Jewish languages," which is itself arguably a newly invented and in some ways problematic category. At times, scholarly discussions within Jewish studies have acknowledged the difficulty that the "Jewish languages" rubric poses for linguistics scholars. Often, however, these projects have gone beyond invoking this category as a sociolinguistic classification to embracing "the uniquely Jewish" character of an increasingly expanding number of "Jewish languages of the Diaspora."1 Both the qualitative and quantitative procedures assume Jewish linguistic uniqueness, implicitly homologizing the idea of a unified national expression. This essay, in contrast, highlights multiple relations, addressing "Jewish languages" generally and "Judeo- Arabic" more specifically as linked not merely to other "Jewish languages," but also to any number of related languages and similar dialects within the various cultural geographies from which they emerged. I address the case of "Judeo-Arabic" simultaneously in relation to the notions of "Jewish languages" (safot yehudiyot in Hebrew) and of "Arabic dialects" (al-lahjat al-'arabiyya in Arabic). …

Politics, Economy, and Ideology in Iraqi Kurdistan since 2003: Enduring Trends and Novel Challenges

Abstract: Since the 2003 war, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq has followed a distinct trajectory, the roots of which lie in its emergence as a de facto autonomous entity in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War. This paper traces the development between 2003 and 2013 of the main political, economic, and ideological features that had emerged in the preceding decade; politically, these include a Leninist tradition of one-party rule and the attempt to dominate civil society; economically, the enduring dependence on oil production and the failure to rehabilitate the agricultural sector; and ideologically, the persistence of secular Kurdish nationalism, and the relative weakness of politicized forms of Islam. Finally, the recent emergence of new intra-Kurdish rivalries concerning the fate of the Syrian Kurds and the ISIS onslaught are briefly discussed.

Deconstructing Destruction: The Second Gulf War and the New Historiography of Twentieth-Century Iraq

Abstract: In this article, I reflect on the themes historians of twentieth-century Iraq have been writing about in the last decade in Europe and the United States.1 The rewriting of Iraqi history in the last ten years responded to and challenged the realities the US occupation and the ensuing civil war created. As Iraq weathered civil war, minoritization, and a shaky, if not violent, democratization, scholars labored to underscore Iraqi patriotism, the constructedness of sectarian policies, and the presence of popular bids for sovereignty. Their labor has failed to influence public policy or media coverage. And yet paradoxically, it was during the years when Iraq's archival resources were suffering destruction and a bitter sectarian struggle was tearing the state apart that scholars undertook the rewriting of Iraq's modern history.Deconstructing Saddam Hussein: Historiographical Shifts in the 1980s and 1990sPrior to 2003, scholars in Britain and the United States explored the history of modern Iraq. Peter Sluglett (when still in the United Kingdom), Charles Tripp, and Sami Zubaida produced seminal works. In the United States, scholars included Thabit Abdullah, Samira Haj, Hala Fattah (who later moved to Jordan), Phebe Marr, Dina Rizk Khoury, Sarah Shields, Reeva Simon, and especially Peter and Marion Sluglett.2 In the 1970s and 1980s, Hanna Batatu and Peter Sluglett made the major contributions to the establishment of the field of twentieth-century Iraqi history. Batatu's magnum opus, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and Its Communists, Ba'thists, and Free Officers, was the most influential study of modern Iraqi history. Based on unprecedented archival work, the book charted Iraq's modern social groups, showing how certain state-related processes, from the Tanzimat to postcolonial land reforms, shaped new relationships between groups whose access to capital was highly complicated by networks of kinship and socialization, which Batatu analyzed. His meticulous social histories, and his reference to hundreds of previously unseen state documents to reconstruct the politics of the communists and the nationalists in Iraq, created a text to which all historians of modern Iraq return.3 Peter Sluglett used social and economic parameters in order to analyze Iraqi history and to point to the constructed nature of sectarianism, both in his own works and in highly significant publications coauthored with Marion Farouk-Sluglett.4 His important work on the British mandate was one of the first to think of the mandate systems as part of the colonial system and to show its effects on Iraqi society and notions of sovereignty.5 Both Batatu and Sluglett saw class as the primary category for analysis. For both, the ways to understand Iraqi politics relied on questions of land ownership, access to the state's resources, and place of residence (city and countryside), as well as imperialism and the global politics of oil. Batatu was clear that he was a student of Marx and Weber.6 Despite these commonalities, Batatu and Sluglett were also very different in their approach. Peter and Marion Sluglett were extremely critical of the Ba'th, chronicling in detail its crimes and adopting a very negative approach to the pan-Arab nationalists of the 1930s and 1940s. Batatu, on the other hand, took a less critical approach toward the party. His magnum opus ended on a rather optimistic note as to Iraq's future. In 1979, at least, he believed that the regime was intent on using the oil boom to develop the state and combat neo-imperial politics.7A new direction in the field of Iraqi studies took shape in the years 1987-2000. The 1991 Gulf War was the impetus for a burgeoning interest in Iraqi history. Yet the sanctions regime that followed it, and the limitations on buying books from Iraq faced by US libraries, actually narrowed the scope of the study of modern Iraqi history in the years to come. …

Business Politics in the Middle East

Abstract: BUSINESS POLITICS IN THE MIDDLE EAST edited by Steffen Hertog, Giacomo Luciani, Marc Valeri London: Hurst, 2013 (377 pages, bibliography, index, illustrations) $40.00 (paper)Forty years of neoliberal economic transformations have given rise to a new breed of Middle Eastern capitalist. With governments across the region abandoning state-led development and embracing free-market reforms since the 1970s, new business elites have emerged as part of modified social coalitions that underpin political authority. Some of these new capitalists represent old money previously sidelined by statist development strategies, but most are newcomers who have relied on political connections to achieve entrepreneurial success. Showcasing works by both established and younger scholars that use Arabic and Farsi sources and extensive field research, Business Politics in the Middle East adds to a growing literature on the role of business elites in the restructuring of state-society relations in the Middle East-or what some have called "authoritarian upgrading"- during the 1990s and 2000s. The editors of this volume are less interested in the role of business elites in authoritarian survival than in the details of state-business relations: how businesses elites' increased capacities shape negotiation strategies with regimes, how changing state-business relations affect economic policy-making, and how the social roots of business elites affect their relations with governments (1). Highly sensitive to local context, the contributors move between providing rich microsociological insights and placing state-business relations in a wider historical narrative.The chapters by senior academics contribute to long-standing debates about state-business relations in the region, especially the influence of business elites on policy-making and their role-or lack thereof-in democratization. Hertog's introduction (chapter one) summarizes the literature on state-business relations in the Middle East. He argues that Arab business elites remained aloof from the 2011 uprisings because authoritarian states had successfully co-opted private-sector activity. Hertog anticipates little scope for fundamental change although he sees encouraging signs in the growth of small and medium enterprises, start-ups, and independent business organizations. Marc Valeri (chapter two) compares the influence of business elites in Oman and Bahrain. Oman stands out in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) for having a government administration in which business elites occupy prominent positions-a result of Sultan Qabus's unwillingness or inability to rely on his own family to run the state. In Bahrain, on the other hand, business elites have been too weak to keep the ruling Al Khalifa family out of business. This inability has led to contrasting dynamics in the realm of labor market reform: the Omani government has been unable to impose restrictions on employing expatriate workers because business elites in powerful positions could block reforms, while struggles over economic policy in Bahrain take place within the ruling family.Almezaini (chapter three) provides a historical overview of statebusiness relations in the United Arab Emirates. He describes how leading business families and Emirati rulers have built connections with each other, but he avoids making a broader argument that would contribute to the debate on state-business relations. Hodson (chapter five) examines various macroeconomic indicators to gauge the independence of the private sector from the state in the GCC. He finds that dependence is still high but that the rising private share in capital investment bodes well for the autonomy of the private sector. The numbers are convincing, but Hodson's quantitative approach is only a starting point; a fuller analysis of the prospects for an independent bourgeoisie would require an investigation of business elites' attitudes toward the state and their complex relationships with state officials. …

Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939

Abstract: OTTOMAN REFUGEES, 1878-1939 Isa Blumi London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013 (xiv + 154 pages, notes, bibliography, index, maps) $130.00 (cloth)In Ottoman Refugees, Isa Blumi examines the period of late Ottoman dissolution and the transition to the empire's numerous successor states through the filter of the refugees and migrants passing through, into, and out of the Ottoman domains. In doing so, he presents a credible alternative to persistent narratives in late Ottoman and nationalist historiographies crafted on the "entrenched stereotypes" of ethnonational and sectarian difference (143).Central to Blumi's objective is the recasting of the refugee populations that flowed into and out of the Ottoman lands and surrounding regions in the decades under review. He distances the refugees in his analysis from the "political vulnerability and dependency" with which they are normally associated (49). Instead, he focuses on their role as self-interested agents whose actions forced otherwise more powerful central governments and financial interests to adapt to their presence in different ways. These migrant communities and their diverse motivations and experiences are key to his larger project of detaching the history of modernity from all-encompassing narratives based on "relics from an era where racism, politics, and 'science' intersected at violent junctions of modern history" (151). In demonstrating an alternative approach to the study of this important period, he highlights how the common factors of refugees, centralizing states, and agents of "Euro-American finance capitalism" intersected in different times and places to produce unique configurations of post-Ottoman power structures (26).These themes act as connective threads for chapters that otherwise tackle various aspects of unique refugee/migrant experiences. The first chapter provides a baseline for what follows through an analysis of the last half-century of Ottoman rule with a heavy emphasis on political economy, weaving the author's themes of international finance and refugees/migrants into the history of the late empire's structural changes. The remaining chapters explore in a comparative manner the different contexts in which refugee and migrant populations interacted with the Ottoman state and various outside economic and political actors. The chapters radiate in their focus from the imperial center into the larger world: from programs to resettle migrants entering the Ottoman domains from the Balkans, Caucasus, and Persian Gulf; to Ottoman and former Ottoman populations in an "Ottoman proximate" world on the empire's Romanian, Bulgarian, and Egyptian peripheries; and finishing with two chapters on Ottoman subjects further afield in territories from East Africa to Southeast Asia and Latin America. These latter chapters in particular offer some intriguing alternatives to historical literature on the Ottomans in the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century, which is too often reduced to a focus on Hamidian-era pan-Islamic policies. Among others, the section focusing on how Ottoman migrants interacted with labor and finance networks in the Philippines and the South China Sea offers a fresh take on how Ottoman historians can examine the region outside of state-centric policies and Islamic solidarity (101-10).The study is informed by Blumi's expansive archival work in, among other places, Turkey, Albania, Austria, Italy, Zanzibar, Singapore, and the Philippines. The geographical breadth of the archival work and the substantial bibliography of consulted sources enabled the tracing of Ottoman migrants' experiences within divergent global contexts. The increasing flows of people into and out of the Ottoman domains in this period meant that Ottoman migrants' stories could as easily have begun or ended in Singapore or Buenos Aires as Kosovo, Yemen, or eastern Anatolia. In this respect, Blumi's broad framework captures some of the dynamic eccentricities of these migrants' histories that could be obscured by an overly narrow geographical focus. …

The Gendering of Spaces and Institutions of Islamic Sovereignty in Contemporary Sudan

Abstract: On 30 June 1989, a group of officers in the Sudanese armed forces took power through a military coup. This event marked the overthrow of a democratic regime established in 1985 after a popular uprising called the April intifada. Between 1989 and 2001, the new military regime embarked on a "civilization project," placing rigidly enforced restrictions on all aspects of public life in the name of the Islamization of society. These restrictions aimed to centralize state authority. The process was thoroughly gendered, as the new regime defined standards of appropriate public behavior restricting women's movements and actions in particular, and branding women's rights organizations as anti-Islamic. Despite these restrictions, a vibrant Sudanese women's movement emerged.This article traces the restrictive nature of Sudan's Islamist regime and the response of the country's women's movements. It begins with a discussion of how the contemporary political Islamist movement aimed to reformulate society and enforce a new notion of sovereignty grounded in a project of inqaz or "salvation," and then how the military regime implemented these changes from 1989 to 2001. It goes on to describe the regime's gendered regulations, in particular a set of legislation called the "public order law." The article ends with a discussion of Sudanese feminist organizations' strategies to confront the regime, working within and around the law to expose the gendered sovereignty of the state and embody alternative forms of rule and authority.Islamization and the Reformulation of SocietyContemporary Islamist thought, which envisions the dismantling of the liberal nation-state, inspires the intellectual origins of the Sudanese Islamist movement. The movement, following its professed leader Hasan al-Turabi, believes that "society is the first institution in Islam, not the state."1 Al-Turabi explains:The perfect Islamic society is one that limits the functions of authority to those things that can only be done through authority and expands the functions of society in every possible way, because this means that the majority of life is managed by society with purely religious ends untarnished by context or worldly causes.2Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir implemented this vision through what he called the salvation state, which he described in an interview with Qatari al-Rayah as:Al-inqaz is a purposeful Islamic state and draws its legitimacy from realizing God's words on earth. The Salvation state is an example of a fundamentalist state inspired by principles in a civilized way and returns everything that is luminous to Islam. Its determination is based on the argument of religion, and thus he who accepts it accepts religion and he who refutes it fights God and His Messenger.3Abdel Wahab Afandi, formerly a press consultant for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and currently a researcher and lecturer in Britain, describes this political project in more palliative terms. For him, "the concept of the modern state is strange and distant from Islam, its values and customs."4 Afandi posits that there is a political Islamic vision of the state that is quite distinct from the modern concept of the state, given the latter's alleged multiple sources of authority. He goes on to explain the ruling style of the Islamic regime in Khartoum and its distribution of authority, especially the roles of the police and other security apparatuses. During a time of austerity in Sudan, it was only the security sector that was able to expand structurally, organize politically, and recruit clients. In addition, the security establishment was the only sector to have complete freedom of movement. In other words, the security establishment was the only state element capable of facilitating communication channels between all the active centers of the Islamic regime. Therefore, the security apparatus remains the major player, not only at the level of safeguarding the ruling regime but also at the level of political coordination. …

Enough Already Alternatives to Orientalist Feminism: Do Muslim Women Need Saving?/your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism

Abstract: ENOUGH ALREADY ALTERNATIVES TO ORIENTALIST FEMINISM DO MUSLIM WOMEN NEED SAVING? Lila Abu-Lughod Cambridge, MA: Har vard University Press, 2013 (278 pages, bibliography, ack nowledgments, index) $35.00 (cloth)YOUR FATWA DOES NOT APPLY HERE: UNTOLD STORIES FROM THE FIGHT AGAINST MUSLIM FUNDAMENTALISM Karima Bennoune New York: W. W. Nor ton & Co., 2013 (372 pages, ack nowledgments, index) $27.95 (paper)As a university professor, I am alarmed at the beginning of every semester when I learn that most of my students do not know the difference between the categories "Arab," "Middle Eastern," and "Muslim," and perceive "Arab- Middle Eastern-Muslim" women to be the most oppressed women of the world. Their understandings are shaped by decades of Islamophobic media coverage in the United States that presents Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim women as a homogenous mass, faceless and nameless, and covered from head to toe in long black garb. Islamophobia is, of course, an extension of what Edward Said, in 1978, called orientalism, a European fabrication of "the East" that is shaped by European imperialist attitudes and assumes that Eastern or oriental people can be defined in terms of cultural or religious essences that are invulnerable to historical change. Orientalist thought has constructed visions of Arab and Muslim societies as either completely decadent, immoral, and permissive, or as strict and oppressive to women. One of the problems with contemporary Islamophobia is that it pits those perceived to belong to the category of the "oppressed Muslim woman" against those presumed to be " liberated Euro-American women." This conceit reinforces the binary notion of Muslim inferiority-savagery as opposed to Euro-American superiority-civility. Islamophobia was consolidated in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when diverse sectors of American society relied on arguments about "Muslim women's oppression" to justify military violence and war.The Arab region and Muslim-majority countries have witnessed immense shifts and turns in the years after the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001. Once the Arab spring revolutions of 2011 began, for instance, nearly every week brought about complex transitions, successes, and failures in women's struggles: strikes and rallies, the formation of feminist coalitions, active participation in the writing of new constitutions, and massive campaigns against sexual harassment. Yet in US public discourse little has changed. It is as if there have been no shifts in context or leadership; it is almost as if the revolutions-where millions of women from every sector of society took to the streets to overthrow longstanding dictators-did not happen. The primary question public audiences in the West continue to ask remains unchanged: "What about the oppression of Muslim women?"Islamophobic thought underlies this question and blames an abstract concept of "Islam" for women's oppression, ignoring the impact of structural factors such as corruption, patriarchy, economic violence, militarism, and war. It also ignores the stark realities of violence against women (Muslim and non-Muslim) in the United States. For feminists from Muslim-majority countries who live in the global north and are genuinely concerned with gender justice, Islamophobia has made it difficult to discuss, write, or teach about gender struggles without having to first deconstruct Islamophobic thought. Indeed, especially in the United States it is an urgent problem that any discussion about Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim women's struggles is necessarily trapped within either Islamophobic thought or reactions to it. Two books by Arab-American feminist academics provide very different and important solutions to this problem: Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, by Columbia University anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, and Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here, by Karima Bennoune, professor of international law at the University of California, Davis. …

The Origins of Kuwaiti Nationalism: Rashid Rida's Influence on Kuwaiti National Identity

Abstract: The late nineteenth century featured an Arab renaissance or nahda, emanating mainly from Cairo and the major urban centers of Greater Syria. In this nahda, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-97) and his student/associate, Muhammad 'Abduh (1849-1905), are regarded as the founders of "Islamic modernism." This movement attempted to adapt traditional Islamic concepts and make them applicable to the modern world.1 Within this framework, maslaha (welfare) turns into utility, shura (consultation) into parliamentary democracy, and ijma' (consensus) into public opinion.2 Al-Afghani and 'Abduh pushed for reform through their influential journal al-..Urwa al- Wuthqa (The Firmest Bond). As a reformist movement, Salafism called for return to the rightful practices of Islam epitomized by al-salaf al-salih (the pious predecessors), referring to the early Muslims who either lived during the time of the prophet or during the idealized incipient Islamic period.3 Among the primary concerns of the Salafimovement was the concept of ijtihad-legal interpretation and decisions based on critical thinking independent of the traditional legal schools of thought (madhahib). Ijtihad is against taqlid (blind imitation), which Salafis referred to as a disease. This emulation, they argued, was also the principle underlying legal school bias (ta'assub madhhabi).4 At a time when terms such as "rational" and "modernity" were being wielded against religion, 'Abduh's "Islamic modernism" stressed that:The true Islam of the ancestors [al-salaf al-salih] had bestowed rationality on mankind and created the essentials of modernity, which the West had borrowed. While Europe moved forward on the basis of these borrowings, the Muslims fell into error and corrupted and abandoned the true Islam. The cure for the present humiliation and abasement of the Muslims was to return to the true Islam of their ancestors.5Muslims, Salafis contended, had deviated from the "true Islam" and consequently suffered from stagnation (jumud).6 'Abduh therefore condemned emulation, which he saw as obstructing the voluntarism necessary for revival, and encouraged the exercise of reason in "worldly affairs."7 It is important to differentiate here the modern-day Salafimovement derived from the teachings of Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab associated with Saudi Arabia; thus in the context of this article, the term Salafiwill refer to classical Salafism, the reform movement based on the teachings of al-Afghani and 'Abduh.The most prominent disciple of al-Afghani and 'Abduh was Sheikh Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935).8 Born in Ottoman Syria, Rida moved to Cairo after al-Afghani's death to collaborate with 'Abduh in launching the most influential Islamic reform journal/magazine of the early twentieth century, al-Manar (The Lighthouse), which appeared from 1898 until Rida's death in 1935.9 Although there is considerable research on Rida's political and religious influence during his time,10 there is less information regarding his influence on the Arabian Peninsula. This article traces the extent to which his ideas penetrated Kuwait and contributed to shaping a Kuwaiti national identity. It illustrates how Rashid Rida's ideas deeply resonated with some of Kuwait's leading intellectuals and influential figures who in turn shaped Kuwait's "high culture," as defined by Ernest Gellner, a state-supported drive to cultural homogeneity through "standardized, literacy and education-based systems of communication."11 Chief with regard to this determination of a national and cultural identity was a drive toward civic activism. Rida was a keen advocate of this dynamism, which was commonly associated with European success and believed to be a feature that Muslims had lost, hence bringing about their subordinate position. Positive effort for Rida was the essence of Islam and the most general meaning of jihad, which he claimed to be a binding duty for all Muslims.12 Societal participation in institution building with an emphasis on education was a recurring theme in Rida's fight against the "disease" of jumud. …

Roundtable: Perspectives on Researching Iraq Today

Abstract: IntroductionMona Damluji is Associate Dean and Director of The Markaz: Resource Center for Engagement with Peoples and Cultures of the Muslim World at Stanford UniversityUniversities around the world were prime sites for the expression of popular opposition to the US invasion of Iraq. During the year prior to March 2003, students and scholars organized protests, teach-ins, and panels to voice the outcry against the hasty plans of the Bush regime to "liberate" the Iraqis. From its inception, Operation Iraqi Freedom suffered from a lack of historical and humanistic perspective.1 As distant witnesses to the violence and injustices televised nightly, many researchers living outside of Iraq hoped that Saddam Hussein's fall would at least open up critical new avenues for research. During the thirteen years of brutal UN sanctions that preceded the war on Iraq, substantial ethnographic work, cultural studies, and historical research were exceedingly difficult if not impossible due to lack of access to people, places, archives, and information inside the country. Scholarship on Iraq in this period relied chiefly on British colonial archives and top-down political analysis.Moreover, in April 2003, arsonists, thieves, saboteurs, and military operatives devastated national collections of archives, objects, and buildings in Baghdad. Unidentified regime loyalists and profiteers torched and looted the Iraqi National Library and Archive (INLA), despite its proximity to the Ministry of Defense.2 A fragile collection of original documents from the Ottoman and monarchy periods was flooded and destroyed in unverified circumstances. Much of the documentation of Iraq's Jewish community in the basement of the Iraqi Security Services building was badly damaged before the US Army confiscated and transferred it to Washington, DC. Baghdad's National Museum of Modern Art was severely vandalized and stripped of furniture and fixtures, as thieves walked away with thousands of original works of Iraqi art. Under the auspices of the Iraq Memory Foundation, Kanan Makiya assumed custody of extensive archives in the Ba'th Party Regional Command Headquarters and transferred them to the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. Additionally, the US military took about 100 million pages of documents from Iraq during the invasion. The Pentagon and CIA insist on keeping these papers classified.3Reporting in the days after the invasion of Baghdad reveals that US military forces left sites of cultural significance vulnerable and unprotected despite pleas for help by local staff and onlookers. Environmental hazards caused by the bombings, rampant looting, and vandalism left the INLA, the Iraqi Museum and other government buildings in near ruins. As a result, the INLA lost one quarter of its library holdings and sixty percent of its archival collections, including rare books, photographs, and maps.4 Myriads of artifacts and sites spanning ten thousand years of archaeological and architectural history have been irretrievably lost, damaged, or even destroyed, while large quantities of looted modern artwork have disappeared from Iraq altogether.5The loss of these historical sources, as well as the devastating toll of decades of dictatorship, sanctions, occupation, and war, has influenced critical studies of Iraq. Mass displacement and loss of life resulting from unprecedented levels of violence since 2006 have dispersed communities irreversibly and divided social worlds according to newly politicized sectarian and ethnic identities. Thus, a greater understanding of Iraq cannot rely on historical work alone. An investment in producing ethnographic and culturally oriented research, and building constructive alliances with Iraqi scholars and institutions, is urgently needed.6 Yet the volatility and intensity of identity-based violence has severely hindered the possibility of conducting fieldwork. Devastating attacks on Iraqi universities and faculty pose significant security risks to scholars researching in Iraq and organizing conferences in Baghdad and throughout the country. …