Showing papers in "International Journal of Middle East Studies in 2002"

Activism and Social Development in the Middle East

Abstract: This article is about social activism and its relationship to social development in the Middle East. It examines the myriad strategies that the region's urban grass-roots pursue to defend their rights and improve their lives in this neo-liberal age. Prior to the advent of the political–economic restructuring of the 1980s, most Middle Eastern countries were largely dominated by either nationalist-populist regimes (such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Turkey) or pro-Western rentier states (Iran, Arab Gulf states). Financed by oil or remittances, these largely authoritarian states pursued state-led development strategies, attaining remarkable (21% average annual) growth rates.1 Income from oil offered the rentier states the possibility of providing social services to many of their citizens, and the ideologically driven populist states dispensed significant benefits in education, health, employment, housing, and the like.2 For these post-colonial regimes, such provision of social welfare was necessary to build popularity among the peasants, workers, and middle strata at a time that these states were struggling against both the colonial powers and old internal ruling classes. The state acted as the moving force of economic and social development on behalf of the populace.

Post-colonialism compared: potentials and limitations in the middle east and central asia

Abstract: The term “post-colonial” is a relative newcomer to the jargon of Western social science. Although discussions about the effects of colonial and imperialist domination are by no means new, the various meanings attached to the prefix “post-” and different understandings of what characterizes the post-colonial continue to make this term a controversial one. Among the criticisms leveled against it, reviewed comprehensively by Hall (1996), are the dangers of careless homogenizing of experiences as disparate as those of white settler colonies, such as Australia and Canada; of the Latin American continent, whose independence battles were fought in the 19th century; and countries such as India, Nigeria, or Algeria that emerged from very different colonial encounters in the post-World War II era. He suggests, nevertheless, that “What the concept may help us to do is to describe or characterise the shift in global relations which marks the (necessarily uneven) transition from the age of Empires to the post-independence and post-decolonisation moment” (Hall 1996, 246). Rattansi (1997) proposes a distinction between “post-coloniality” to designate a set of historical epochs and “post-colonialism” or “post-colonialist studies” to refer to a particular form of intellectual inquiry that has as its central defining theme the mutually constitutive role played by colonizer and colonized in shaping the identities of both the dominant power and those at the receiving end of imperial and colonial projects. Within the field of post-colonial studies itself, Moore-Gilbert (1997) points to the divide between “post-colonial criticism,” which has much earlier antecedents in the writings of those involved in anti-colonial struggles, and “post-colonial theory,” which distinguishes itself from the former by the incoporation of methodological paradigms derived from contemporary European cultural theories into discussions of colonial systems of representation and cultural production. Whatever the various interpretations of the term or the various temporalities associated with it might be, Hall claims that the post-colonial “marks a critical interruption into that grand whole historiographical narrative which, in liberal historiography and Weberian historical sociology, as much as in the dominant traditions of Western Marxism, gave this global dimension a subordinate presence in a story that could essentially be told from its European parameters” (Hall 1996, 250). In what follows, I will attempt a brief discussion of some of the circumstances leading to the emergence of this concept and interrogate the extent to which it lends itself to a meaningful comparison of the modern trajectories of societies in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Din-u devlet all over again? the politics of military secularism and religious militarism in turkey following the 1980 coup

Abstract: Current discussions on the political developments in Turkey frequently frame the struggles between the military and religious parties as a war between secularism and Islam and draw out incommensurable differences between the two sides. Indeed, the military establishment, which casts itself as the guardian of the secular republic, succeeded in 1997 in having the Supreme Court ban the Welfare Party, the first openly religious party ever to form a government in the Turkish Republic. The generals justified this seemingly undemocratic move by claiming that that this party was trying to reinstate the sacred shari[ayin]a law.

The fragments imagine the nation: the case of iraq

Abstract: Iraq was formed as a modern state under a British Mandate in 1920. Its constituents were the Ottoman vilayets of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. As such, it was the product of two “colonial” administrations: first of the modernizing Ottoman state of the Tanzimat and the Young Turks' Constitution of 1908, then of the British Mandate.

After 1860: debating religion, reform, and nationalism in the ottoman empire

Abstract: The events of 1860 constitute a turning point in the modern history of Lebanon. In the space of a few weeks between the end of May and the middle of June, Maronite and Druze communities clashed in Mount Lebanon in a struggle to see which community would control, and define, a stretch of mountainous territory at the center of complicated Eastern Question politics.1 The Druzes carried the day. Every major Maronite town within reach of the Druzes was pillaged, its population either massacred or forced to flee. In July, Damascene Muslims rioted to protest deteriorating economic conditions, targeting and massacring several hundred of the city's Christian population. Although the reasons for the fighting in Mount Lebanon and the riot in Damascus were quite different, the Ottoman, local, and European reactions inevitably conflated both events.2 Following the restoration of order, the conflict of 1860 was the subject, effectively, of an Ottoman government mandate of silence—a desire to forget the events and proceed with administering the newly constituted Mutasarrifiyya of Mount Lebanon. At the same time, however, the sectarian violence prompted an outpouring of local memories that the Ottoman government could neither control nor suppress.

Nationalism and the colonial legacy in the middle east and central asia: introduction

Abstract: The study of nationalism has been reinvigorated by the debates on the subject carried out in the 1980s and 1990s. 1 Most authors on the subject can be divided into two camps; those who look at the material and objective conditions for the rise of nation-states as a social formation, and those who concentrate on how a national consciousness emerges. (In recent years, this division has ranged classical Marxists and modernization theorists on one side against postmodernists and subaltern theorists on the other). In considering this body of work, one can thus make a distinction similar to the one that E. P. Thompson famously elaborated (drawing on Marx) in labor history, differentiating between a class in itself and a class for itself, between a social class such as factory workers constituted by the objective facts of its material existence and a social grouping that is self-conscious about itself as a class so that it launches unions and labor parties. The former does not automatically or always result in the latter. We will discuss these theories in relationship to the Middle East and Central Asia and to the little theoretical work done on Middle Eastern nationalisms. Many authors speak as though “nationalism” is a unitary set of practices and beliefs that has a natural history, being born at a particular time and maturing into a long-term, fairly static phenomenon. Partha Chatterjee has shown, however, that the character of nationalism changes according to whether it is a metropolitan phenomenon or a colonial one. Implicit in his work, further, is that nationalism—or, at least, the making and conceiving of nationalism—continues in the post-colonial period, throwing up new forces and perspectives that challenge previous formulations of it. 2 Most writers on the subject worry about how the culture of nationalism tends to create a positive image of the nation as homogeneous while defining itself against a hated and despised Other or set of Others, within and without. 3 The debate over the peculiarities of the colonial legacy and its long-term impact on the colonized has constituted the central theme of post-colonial scholarship. Those involved in the two mainly disparate debates—on nationalism and on post-colonialism—need to address each other's concerns. To date, most discussions of the post-colonial condition have centered on South Asia, and it is our aim to open up this debate by considering the very different cases of the Middle East and Central Asia, the one having been subjected to capitalist colonialism, and the latter to czarist domination, followed by the Soviet experiment, with all the ambiguities it introduced in relations between metropole and periphery.

The reform movement and the debate on modernity and tradition in contemporary iran

Abstract: To appreciate the significance of the reform movement represented by the books selected for this survey, one needs the sharply contrasting background of Islamic thought in Iran from the mid-1960s to the end of 1980s, the period perceptively surveyed by Mehrzad Boroujerdi in Iranian Intellectuals and the West . Boroujerdi shows that the moral indignation against Westernization in Iran pre-dated the outburst of revolution in 1979 by a few decades, beginning as a series of nativistic protests that gradually cohered in the shape of an Islamic ideology. The mythical construction of the West was not exclusively or primarily a religious affair. It was, rather, a fairly general indigenous or nativistic response to Western cultural domination in which Islam played a varying and fluctuating role before the revolutionary crescendo of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The essence of this nativistic cultural response was what Boroujerdi analyzes as Occidentalism, or, borrowing a phrase from Edward Said's Syrian critic Sadiq al-עAzm, as “Orientalism in reverse.”

Turkish conservative modernism: birth of a nationalist quest for cultural renewal

Abstract: The Turkish Republic was established in 1923 as an invention of the modernist– Westernist elites who sought a radical transformation of traditional Ottoman Islamic social, economic, and political structures after the three-year War of Independence (1919–22) against foreign occupation in Anatolia. The transformative modernist project of the Westernist elites took capitalism as the new economic basis of society; the nation-state and parliamentary democracy as its political structure; and secularization as its cultural process. Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu first used the term “Kemalism” on 28 June 1929 to refer to the new nation- and state-building ideology that defined the legitimate political vocabulary constituting the basic principles and values of the Turkish path to modernity.1 Then the term “Kemalism” was used in the mainstream histography of the Turkish Revolution to refer to a new political stand that interpreted the revolutionary practices that had taken place between 1923 and 1935 within the framework of the tradition of ideological positivism. It broadly implied a philosophical–political stand that was shaped by an adherence to the formal “six arrow” principles of the Turkish Revolution. Ali Kazancigil argued that Kemalist ideology was an amalgam of the ideas associated with laicism, nationalism, solidarist positivist political theory, and 19th-century scientism.2 The dominant trend in the histography of the Kemalist revolution saw it as a late-Enlightenment movement that had its roots in the secular-rationalist tradition of ideological positivism and characterized the politics of the era as a zero-sum game between secular-modernist Kemalists in action and religiously oriented anti-modernists in reaction. Yet both the progressive Kemalists and reactionary groups had heterogeneous structures and were composed of many groups formed around different philosophical–political understandings about the novelties brought about by the Turkish Revolution. This study, however, limits itself to the goal of illustrating the plurality of groups and approaches to the Turkish Revolution within the modernist–Kemalist ranks of which the neo-republican conservatives were an organic part. How alternative interpretations of the Turkish Revolution, including the neo-conservative one, became part of the Kemalist histography is an open-ended question that requires a comprehensive survey of the ideological and philosophical trends prevalent within the ranks of the modernist elites in the 1920s and 1930s.

Nationalism in afghanistan

Abstract: The theme of “Nationalism after Colonialism” as far as Afghanistan is concerned begs many questions: with the national or patriotic idea so weak and undeveloped, it arguably makes more sense to analyze rival ideas of the nation held by the country's different ethnic groups than some hypothetical all-embracing Afghan nationalism. When did the era of colonialism (neo-colonialism would be more apt) end—or, indeed, begin? Quite as much as foreign colonialism, was not internal colonialism by Pashtun tribal elites the major feature of development of nationalism in modern Afghanistan?

Power structure, agency, and family in a palestinian refugee camp

Abstract: This article seeks to explain the generation, spread, and reproduction of post-secondary education in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank since the inception of this process in the 1950s and into the 1990s, with a focus on the period of Israeli military occupation. It is based on the findings, qualitative and quantitative, of extended socio-anthropological field research that was carried out in Dheisheh camp in the years 1992–95. The conceptual framework that instructed the research methodology and the interpretation of the findings sought to combine a political-economy approach, which accords centrality to the determinants of the “system” of power relationships—in this case, primarily those of the military-occupation regime—with an analysis of “human agency” or praxis, particularly the reorganization of the division of labor in the refugee family household over the years and generations. Accordingly, the article explores and traces the inter-relationships among (1) “system-imposed” barriers and obstacles to the acquisition of education by Dheisheh refugees and to their education-related job mobility; (2) family-based patterns of organization that developed around the education and employment opportunities of second- and third-generation refugees in the face of impeding structural conditions; (3) the long-range consequences of the resultant “education and labor process” for the transformation of socio-economic relationships within the family and the community.

The Piety of the Hadith Folk

Abstract: One of the most remarkable surveys of Islamic history and civilization remains Marshall G. S. Hodgson's The Venture of Islam , published posthumously in 1974. 1 For an introductory text, it has some bad faults—notably, a very dense style. Moreover, it has inevitably fallen out of date at many points. For example, one may admire Hodgson for coming up with his own critique of modernization theory in volume 3, but modernization theory has fallen so completely before other critiques that we hardly need Hodgson any longer. However, Hodgson has had some permanent effects on the way scholars approach Islamic history. For example, we may not have adopted many of his neologisms, but he certainly has made us self-conscious when we use the traditional terminology. The mere mention of “Jamaעi-Sunni,” “Islamicate,” “Arabist bias,” and other special terms immediately alerts us to the dangers of some customary approaches to Islamic history.

Intra-communal and inter-communal dimensions of conflict and peace in lebanon

Abstract: Recent contributions to the study of ethnic conflict, which attempt to explain why and under what circumstances members of ethnic groups, or communities,1 mobilize and engage in violence, include several works that are inspired by the “security dilemma”—a basic concept of the realist tradition of international theory.2 Barry Posen, for instance, argues that ethnic groups behave like sovereign states in the international system and are influenced by their proximity to other, similar groups in the same way that states are affected by their neighbors. Because security is the primary concern of these communities, each tries to enhance its security by strengthening its position. The actions the community takes, however, trigger the response of other groups, whose members intrinsically view it as offensive, regardless of its motives. A paradox thus emerges, as “what one does to enhance one's own security causes reactions that, in the end, can make one less secure.”3

Women in the limelight: some recent books on middle eastern women's history

Abstract: The study of women in the Middle East was almost dormant for the quarter-century after 1945. Since then, it has flowered, especially in the United States but also elsewhere, and it seems useful to take stock via a review of some of the main Englishlanguage scholarly books of the past decade that are of special interest to historians, including brief mention of some relevant works in the social sciences. To keep this to a reasonable length, this review concentrates on books relevant to women's history since 1800 on Iran, Egypt, greater Syria, Turkey, and North Africa, and omits journalistic and biographical books, and the important work done in literature and the arts, and also in the books primarily about other subjects. It also omits articles that were not published in books not primarily about Middle Eastern women, gender, or the family. It does not claim to include or analyze every significant book, as significance is partly a question of individual judgment and scholarly interests. The article is limited to books published since 1990. There have been several areas of concentration of recent books on Middle Eastern women's history: (1) books emphasizing the early period of Islam, including changes in certain ideas, laws, and practices from the time of Muhammad until the Abbasids, some of them carrying their issues down to modern times; (2) books on the role of women and the family in the Ottoman Empire, especially its Arab and Turkish provinces, and relatedly, books that include chapters on women in other Turkish or TurkoMongol-ruled areas, including Safavid Iran, and on Mamluk women; and (3) books on women in modern times. These make use of the greater documentation and participant observation available for this period, and include cultural, biographical, and socioeconomic books as well as works concentrating on women in politics and women's movements. I here limit myself to some of the important works about the modern period, having discussed some works in the other categories elsewhere.'

Aspects of the creed of imam ahmad ibn hanbal: a study of anthropomorphism in early islamic discourse

Abstract: Today, the religion of Islam is most distinctly characterized by the emphasis it places on the transcendence of God.1 God's otherness (mukhālafa), it is said, is presupposed in Islamic thinking from the Qurءan.2 A review of the history of dogmatic development in Islam reveals, however, that during the formative period—that is, the period to about 9503—divine transcendence was only one alternative among several models attempting to explain God's unity. Indeed, it coexisted alongside its antithesis, “assimilation” (tashbīh), or as we term it, anthropomorphism.4 Muslim and Western scholars agree that, although the anthropomorphist model certainly existed—the various heresiographies attest to it—it existed only on the margins of Islam, in the extravagant fancies of a few deviant doctors.5 Thus, anthropomorphist ideas were relevant only marginally, if at all, to Islam's attempt at theological self-definition. Such, at least, is the current scholarly consensus. But how accurate is this reading of Islam's theological history?

Hidden public expenditures and the economy in iran

Abstract: Fiscal accounts are meant to show how much and where the government spends public funds or commits a country's resources to future payments. Information from government accounts is essential for evaluating government policies and programs in terms of their contribution to addressing social and economic needs and their impact on macro-economic performance. But there is a common problem in published fiscal data that must be addressed before they can be put to use: governments typically have some expenditures and debts that are not reflected in their official accounts. The extent of concealment varies across countries and activities, and the users of fiscal information need to be sensitive to the causes and consequences of such variation. Middle Eastern countries have their own share of hidden spending and liability, and some—such as Iran, Turkey, Morocco, Syria, and the Persian Gulf countries—stand out among nations in the scope and size of fiscal activities that they keep off their budgets. In this paper, we examine the case of Iran, where huge public funds are appropriated and redistributed outside the formal budget. The case is instructive because it shows the wide range and size of hidden government expenditures and commitments that affect the public. It also displays the dire consequences that lack of proper government accounting and reporting can bring to a country.

From patriotism to matriotism: a tropological study of Iranian nationalism, 1870-1909.

Abstract: “Nationalism in the Middle East, as has often been noted, is a gift of the West.”1 While concurring with G. E. Von Grunebaum's 1962 observation, Bernard Lewis added that “[t]he ever-fertile continent of Europe had, however, more than one example to offer to its neophytes and disciples.”2 Distinguishing Western European “patriotism” from German “nationalism,” Lewis observed: “Patriotism, most of us agree, is right and good—the love and loyalty that all of us owe to our country. Nationalism, on the other hand, is something rather alien and therefore rather suspect.”3 He keenly discerned that “the first stirrings of the new loyalty in the Middle East took the form of patriotism, not nationalism.”4 But in its later phases, the “new loyalty” took the shape of a nationalism characterized as “romantic, subjective, often illiberal and chauvinistic, contemptuous of legal loyalties, and neglectful of personal freedom.”5 Although these arguments are heavily rhetorical and ideological, Lewis was correct in identifying two distinct modalities of nationalist imagination. But these modalities had more to do with the tropes of nationalism than with an assumed European pedagogy. 6 An exploration of the competing tropes of national imagination allows for the decoupling of nationalism from a political etiology that constitutes Europe as the original home of modernity.7 While recognizing the mimetic or “modular” types of nationalism, 8 a tropological approach allows for the exploration of the inventive vernacular contents of nationalist imagination. Such an approach, according to Hayden White, “centers attention on the turns in a discourse: turns from one level of generalization to another, from one phase of a sequence to another, from a description to an analysis or the reverse, from a figure to a ground or from an event to its context, from the conventions of one genre to those of another within a single discourse, and so on.”9 In a tropological study of nationalism, the focus of inquiry shifts from a schizochronic historiography attending to the belated delivery of “a gift of the West” to the Rest to a decolonized and post-nationalist historiography that explores the contingent and novel deployments of territory, history, language, ethnicity, religion, and culture in the making of a serially continuous and homogeneous polity endowed with competing identities and characteristics.

Workers, Peasants, and Peddlers: A Study of Labor Stratification in the Post-Revolutionary Iran

Abstract: In the post-revolutionary decades, the Iranian economy has undergone significant transitions. This paper is a study of the changes in the pattern of occupational and labor stratification in the Iranian economy in these years. This is a sufficiently long time, permitting the identification of decisive structural shifts in the Iranian economy and its labor force. For the purpose of this study, we propose two periods in the post-revolutionary years. The first period comprises the years of fervent search for a populist Islamic utopia, which began with the 1979 revolution and came to an end by 1986, when the burden of the war with Iraq and the glut in the world oil market made the populist project practically defunct. The death of Ayatollah Khomeini in June 1989 marked the beginning of the second period, one that is characterized by a move toward “economic restructuring” a la the International Monetary Fund–World Bank, aiming for a general liberalization of economic activities, including foreign-exchange realignment, decontrolling of prices, reduction of subsidies, and privatization of nationalized enterprises.

PILGRIMAGE AND PERFORMANCE: UZBEK WOMEN AND THE IMAGINING OF UZBEKISTAN IN THE 1920s

Abstract: In August 1924, Anabibi Safaeva set off from her home city of Khiva, which was then the capital of the Xorezm People's Republic, to study in Tashkent, which was the administrative center of the Turkistan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Safaeva traveled with some 160 students in a convoy of three boats down the Amu River toward the Aral Sea. However, misfortune befell Safaeva: her boat was attacked by basmachi s, a bandit or rebel gang. 1 The basmachi s killed all twenty-two of the men in Safaeva's group and carried off the women as captives. By the time that Safaeva was rescued, more than two months later, there was no longer a Xorezm People's Republic or a Turkistan Republic; instead, Safaeva's Khivan home was now in Uzbekistan, and Tashkent, the goal of her academic pilgrimage, had become the capital of Uzbekistan.

ABU AL-THANA[hamza ] AL-ALUSI: AN ALIM, OTTOMAN MUFTI, AND EXEGETE OF THE QUR[hamza ]AN

Abstract: Abu al-Thanaء Shihab al-Din al-Alusi (1802–54) was one of the most prominent ulama of mid-19th century Baghdad. In an era in which the Ottoman drive for modernization and centralization was changing the fabric of society and undermining the power and influence of the ulama class in large parts of the sultanate, al-Alusi was emerging as a powerful local alim, in terms of both his status as a scholar and his influence as a public figure. By the time of his death, the Alusis were becoming firmly established as a recognized ulama family, members of which would continue to play important roles in the intellectual and political life of Iraq and the Arab Mashriq. The grand Alusi, as Abu al-Thanaء al-Alusi was known, however, was, and still is, a controversial Muslim scholar whose intellectual genealogy and leanings seem to be difficult to categorize and too contradictory to pin down. Nothing illustrates the problematic of defining al-Alusi's intellectual and theological attitudes better, perhaps, than the way in which his two sons diverged. Whereas Nuעman Khayr al-Din al-Alusi (1836–99) became one of the most influential Salafi ulama in the late 19th century, his brother, Abdullah, was known as an alim with strong Sufi tendencies. Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi (1857–1924), the son of Abdullah, however, emerged as a highly regarded member of the growing Salafi circles of the major Arab urban centers in the beginning of the 20th century.

Historiography of post-soviet kyrgyzstan

Abstract: The first written information about the Kyrgyz is found in ancient Chinese chronicles. However, no Kyrgyz historian who wrote a history of the nation can be identified before the end of the 19th century. Of course, there were many relaters of genealogical legends and stories based mainly on folk heritage. This paucity of indigenous historiography is the reason that Kyrgyz history has been written mainly from external sources in various languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Iranian, Greek, Turkic, Mongolian, and Russian. Kyrgyz historians made their first attempts at publishing histories at the beginning of the 20th century under the influence of the reformist movement known as Jadidism. Some Kyrgyz intellectuals brought out works in Kazan, Ufa, and Orenburg. For example, books by Osmonaaly Sydyk uulu were published in Ufa in 1913 and 1915.

Metaphors of commerce: trans-valuing tribalism in yemeni audiocassette poetry

Abstract: Over the course of more than three decades, efforts to integrate theories of political economy with verbal culture have produced some of the most generative inquiries into the social meaning of discursive form. Beginning in the 1960s, sociolinguists developed what became known as the “ethnography of speaking,”1 with the aim of considering verbal skills and performance as aspects of a socioeconomic system whose resources are apportioned according to a hierarchical division of labor. Critical of the more formalist and universalist language paradigms of Leonard Bloomfield and Noam Chomsky, these theorists argued that speaking is a socially and culturally constructed activity that is meaningful precisely in its relationship to specific systems of material organization. By the 1970s, sociologists were extending these insights to broader political theory by proposing that linguistic competence be considered a form of “capital” that is distributed in “linguistic markets.”2 Through pioneering interdisciplinary efforts, inquiries into the competences of individual speakers gradually yielded to analyses of situated calculations that individuals make in exchange—calculations of quantities and kinds of return, of symbolic and economic capital, of alternative representations. Meaning was becoming as much a matter of value and power as it was an expression of relationships between, as Ferdinand de Saussure once proposed, a “sound pattern” and a “concept.”3 Indeed, in recent work in linguistic and cultural anthropology, studies of meaning have been linked even more intentionally to political economy by scholars who locate signs within social and material contexts. Words are things that circulate as signs through social, symbolic, and economic trajectories4 and are refracted through linguistic markets that are multiple and shifting.5 Building on earlier social anthropology, these studies suggest that, even within one tightly knit social community, exchange becomes meaningful only at the intersection of multiple systems of value.

The armenian question and the wartime fate of the armenians as documented by the officials of the ottoman empire's world war i allies: germany and austria–hungary

Abstract: The wartime fate of the Ottoman Empire's Armenian minority continues to be controversial. The debate in the main revolves around the causes and nature of that fate. Some historians have alleged that what is involved is centrally organized mass murder—or, to use contemporary terminology, genocide. This school of thought maintains that the Ottoman authorities were waiting for a suitable opportunity to undertake the wholesale liquidation of the empire's Armenian population, and the outbreak of World War I provided that opportunity. The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, or Unionists), who controlled the Ottoman government, they argue further, did in fact undertake this liquidation under cover of the war.1 Others, however, dispute these assertions, especially that of genocidal intent. This group maintains that Armenian acts of disloyalty, subversion, and insurrection in wartime forced the central government to order, for purposes of relocation, the deportation of large sections of the Armenian population. According to this argument, apart from those who were killed in “intercommunal” clashes—that is, a “civil war”—the bulk of the Armenian losses resulted from the severe hardships associated with poorly administered measures of deportations, including exhaustion, sickness, starvation, and epidemics. In other words, this school of thought holds that the Ottoman Empire, in the throes of an existential war, had no choice but to protect itself by resorting to drastic methods; therefore, the tragic fate of the Armenians must be understood in the context of the dire conditions of World War I.2 These views are encapsulated in the formula that the noted Middle East historian Bernard Lewis has used—namely, the desperate conditions of “an embattled empire.”3

The colonial system of power in turkistan

Abstract: The history of Turkistan in the second half of the 19th and the early 20th century has repeatedly attracted the attention of social scientists. It is widely recognized that the tendency of most Soviet authors was to consider this history under the rubric of “the progressive consequences of annexation to Russia,” at a time when the main historiographical trend was to investigate the history of revolutions, movements of the working class and peasants, riots among the people, and national-liberation movements. Under the same rubric, during a rather long period until the end of the 1980s, many problems of local Turkistan society were written about. As a result of this approach, some questions remained unasked—questions that challenged the officially mandated proposition that “despite tsarist colonialism, the annexation of non-Russian peoples to Russia was a progressive reality.” In particular, one of these questions has to do with the history of the state that governed the territory of Turkistan in the colonial and post-colonial periods.

HISTORY TEXTBOOKS AS REFLECTIONS OF THE POLITICAL SELF: TURKEY (1930s AND 1990s) AND UZBEKISTAN (1990s)

Abstract: Variations in the formulation of the past as an official political enterprise give significant clues to the genres of nationalism. The “state past” reveals preferences for different historical periods and different subdisciplines of history, as well as for alternative regional and international alliances.

The nuzhih plot and iranian politics

Abstract: On the night of 9–10 July 1980, several hundred active-duty and retired Iranian paratroopers made their way to the Nuzhih air-force base near the city of Hamadan to initiate a coup d'état against Iran's fledgling Islamic regime. The Iranian government had learned of the plot, and many of the paratroopers were arrested as they arrived at the base. Several hundred additional participants in the plot were arrested in the following days. Those arrested were soon put on trial, and many were executed. Fearing that other military personnel were linked to the plot or sympathized with it, the government carried out an extensive purge of the armed forces in the following months. Hundreds of other participants in the plot were never apprehended, however, and many continued to plot against the Islamic regime, though they never again posed a serious threat to it.

Nation-state formation: features of social stratification in the late soviet era

Abstract: The story of the collapse of the USSR and of the newly independent states that have risen on its ruins is still shrouded in mystery, because the actual cause of the rapid breakdown of the strong power is not quite comprehensible. Statements to the effect that the underlying cause was an inefficient economy do not seem convincing, as even during the so-called stagnation period, the annual gross national product (GNP) growth rate had been 2–3 percent, which looks satisfactory, especially taking into account the overall production slump experienced by all of the republics after 1991.

N IKOLAI T ODOROV , Society, the City and Industry in the Balkans, 15th–19th Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1998).

Abstract: This collection of essays, the latest in a long list of collected works put together by Variorum's Studies in East–Central Europe, 1500–1900, is supposed to give the reader a broad range of Nikolai Todorov's lifetime work. Todorov's contribution to the field is not in doubt, although this collection hardly does justice to that contribution. The fourteen separate articles often overlap in theme, and on one occasion they almost reproduce the same article, as they span a period that reaches back to Todorov's early career in Bulgaria (1964–92). The essays somewhat misplace Todorov's importance to the field, as most of the language appropriated has become outdated with the collapse of the Bulgarian institutions that funded Todorov's research until 1989. I would like to think Todorov can survive the fall of historical materialism.

Household formation in 19th-century central anatolia: the case study of a turkish-speaking orthodox christian community

Abstract: This article explores household formation among the Greek Orthodox population of a mixed village of Cappadocia inhabited by Muslims, as well. The village, Cukur, was located on the right bank of the river Kizilirmak, 49 kilometers north–northwest of Kayseri. 1 I aim to show that complex forms of household formation were the main type of social organization and were especially durable over time, with a high average household membership. I attempt to clarify whether the predominance of extended households—which, as other studies have shown, is not that common in the Asian portion of the Ottoman Empire—was related to the Christian character of this section of the Cukur population, or whether the agricultural basis of the village economy played a more important role.

FOROUGH JAHANBAKHSH, Islam, Democracy and Religious Modernism in Iran (1953–2000) from Bazargan to Soroush (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001).

Abstract: This work is a critically informative study of religious modernism in Iran from 1953 to 2000 in the context of Islam versus democracy. It examines the thoughts and works of seven religious intellectuals who either shaped or influenced the religious-political developments of contemporary Iran. According to Jahanbakhsh, although Iranians have failed in understanding the meaning of democracy, the yearning for democracy was the most enticing goal in both the 1906 and 1979 Iranian revolutions.

CAROLE HILLENBRAND, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999). Pp. 704. $125.00 cloth.

Abstract: This book is a comprehensive survey of the history of the Crusades—comprehensive, that is, from the standpoint of the sources left by the Crusaders' enemies. The author sets out to reconstruct for a Western audience what the available Muslim sources (for the most part, in Arabic) tell us about the Crusading phenomenon: how the Muslims viewed and responded to the challenge presented to them by the European Christian holy warriors who suddenly appeared on the Near Eastern scene at the end of the 11th century. In this respect it is not unlike Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, although compared to the earlier volume the present book is simultaneously less narrative and more exhaustive, even encyclopedic.