Towards the end of the decade long Iran–Iraq war, Saddam Hussein launched a deadly attack against the Kurds, known as the Anfal Campaign, killing more than a hundred thousand. One of the largest acts of genocide occurred on 18 March 1988 in the Kurdish city of Halabja. On that day, sweet-smelling poison gas was poured over the city, killing at least five thousand. Since 2001 Kurdish moviemakers have memorialized the tragedy of the Halabja massacre by producing cinematic dramas and narrative documentaries. These films are part of a discourse of authenticity and a politics of culture that permeate the Kurdish independence movement. This essay proposes that Halabja films can be divided into three stages: the era of consolidation, 2000 to 2009; the golden era, 2009 to early 2014; and the fall which followed the fall of Mosul to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Each era reveals new attitudes towards politics, society, and the massacre.

In the opening sequence of a 2008 documentary, Ni Sauvage, Ni Barbare (Neither Savage Nor Barbaric), co-produced by Québecois and Moroccan television, the director Roger Cantin introduces his subjects over images of art, ritual, and nature that alternate between northern Canada and northern Africa:

Muslim minorities in the West have become the improbable targets and tools of the discourses of some politicians in the search for votes, right-wing newspapers and tabloids seeking enlarged readerships, and Conservative activists advocating for their causes. These discourses have often taken bizarre twists, such as the surprisingly successful attempt during the 2007 Democratic primaries by a right-wing organization to depict (the Christian) candidate Obama as a Muslim who attended a “Madrasa” as a child. While the hoax was soon exposed by CNN, surprisingly many mainstream media outlets (e.g. Fox News) uncritically adopted the story and 12 to 18 percent of the American public continues to believe that President Obama is a Muslim.1 Some other recent curious political events that instrumentalize Muslims include vociferous attacks on elected female politicians who choose to wear a headscarf in Belgium, the use of racist language towards Muslim minorities by European candidates and politicians in several countries, and the framing of Muslims as a danger to welfare in Denmark or gay rights in the Netherlands.

During and after the January 2011 revolutionary protests, Egypt witnessed the surge and spread of graffi ti and street art activities. The story of graffi ti in Egypt is usually rendered as voices of dissent, modes of symbolic resistance, or expressive force of anger, solidarity, and commemoration. While it is true that the collapse of the state security services and the liberation of public space after the 2011 had fostered the growth of artistic revolutionary expressions, the story of artistic production implies more than politics of cultural representation. Rather, these artistic expressions are usually grounded in the formations, expansions, and contractions of social groups that keep on negotiating their identities, networks, capacities and limitations.

One of the most inspiring aspects of the Egyptian revolution was the outpouring of creative expression that accompanied the uprising’s social and political movements in the form of protest songs, poetry, slogans, chants, graffiti and installation art, street theatre, cartoons, among other forms of artistic inventiveness. Creative dissidence has always been an integral part of protest movements, as argued by Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon (2011):

Antoon evokes Abū al-Qāsim al-Shābī, whose poem “The Will to Live,” referenced in the epigraph, symbolized the battle cry of Tunisians in the anti-colonial struggles of the early 1900s. Refrains from the poem echoed in both Tunisia and Egypt during the Arab spring uprisings over one century later, thereby highlighting the intimate synergies between the creative imaginary and revolutionary action.

Some may ask why I have chosen this ominous-sounding title. For most of us, the MESA conference is a time for socializing, browsing among the latest books and hearing papers on recent research, generally in that order. It is certainly not a time for serious, introspective, potentially boring questions like this one. In the beautiful environment of this resort, it is even harder to focus on such unpleasant matters. In one of my last acts as President of MESA, however, I have decided to spoil the party, if only for a few minutes.

The historical study of Muslim-minority communities in regions commonly associated with “the West” is a field in its infancy. It was not until the 1980s that the enormously diverse groups who adhere to Islam in Western Europe, the United States, and Canada came to be categorized primarily by their religion rather than by their varying races, ethnicities, nationalities, class, or status as immigrants or colonials. This new categorization resulted largely from the recognition of a religious resurgence in public life that was punctuated by the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the “Rushdie Affair.” It was also informed by histories of modernity and experiences of European imperialism that pitted a “modern West” against a “Muslim Orient.” Consequently, as Yasemin Soysal (2001: 165) and many others have noted, “at issue” in the study of Western Muslims has been “the compatibility of Islam—its organizational culture and practice—with European categories of democratic participation and citizenship.” Not even the study of African American Muslims escaped this binary opposition between Islamic identity and democratic citizenship; early studies of the rise of Islam among African Americans generally explained the separatist tendencies of African American Muslim nationalist organizations, such as the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam, in terms of their appropriation of an Islamic identity. Whether writing about immigrant or indigenous Muslims, scholars have been preoccupied with determining whether Muslims pose an anti-democratic, anti-modern threat to Western societies or if they are yet another addition to the religious, cultural, and political diversity of Western nation-states.

The online public sphere, and the ways in which its digital media platforms influence discourse, is a crucial but understudied area of research in the six Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf. Through a case study of the ongoing Gulf diplomatic crisis, which began in June 2017, this essay draws on the disciplines of political science, communication, and digital media studies to analyze qualitative examples of digital discourse: the role of women, territorial boundaries, and the FIFA World Cup 2022. Linking these flash points to historical struggles between the countries, this essay suggests that the politicization of the online public sphere in the region does not represent a fundamental change in the diplomacy of the region but rather a new battleground for old regional rivalries.

Evliya Çelebi (d. after 1685), in his Seyahatname, Book of Travels, completed circa 1683, records a host of languages and dialects spoken within the Ottoman Empire at the time and provides practical word lists in transcription, especially for those less familiar to his Turkophone audience, such as Hungarian in the western borderlands and varieties of Kurdish in the eastern regions. Evliya also remarks of places where he met bilingual speakers. For instance, about the city of Ohrid in the central province of Rumelia, he informs us that, though its people mainly speak Greek or Bulgarian, they could converse in “elegant Turkish,” some in a “very urbane and witty” manner typical of Ottoman literati. Yet curiously, about the capital of Istanbul, his hometown, Evliya says nothing specific about any interaction, besides that he had learned “fluent Greek and Latin” from a Christian goldsmith, to be able to read certain chronicles, and in exchange instructed Persian to the craftsman.

The goals of the Middle East history survey course are to introduce students to the major events in the history of the Middle East and to show the diversity of Middle Eastern civilization. In this paper, I discuss how instructors can use the Internet to enrich their teaching of the Middle East history survey course for students known as “digital natives.”

Despite the physical proximity of the birthplace of Subaltern Studies, South Asia, to the Middle East and despite the convergent, colliding histories of these two regions, scholars of the Middle East attend very little to the Subaltern Studies project or to the work of Subaltern Studies groups. Although certain stances of Fanon and Said, with their focus on cultural strategies of domination and resistance, have a currency in Middle Eastern studies, no literary theorist, folklorist, anthropologist, political scientist or historian in the field of Middle Eastern Studies, so far as I am aware, explicitly draws upon Subaltern Studies with any consistency as an organizing principle for his or her studies. It is the Latin Americanists (and to a lesser degree Africanists) who have been most eager to build on South Asian Subaltern Studies to respond to Latin American (or subsanaran African) circumstances. Perhaps it is time to take a closer look at what Subaltern Studies might contribute to Middle Eastern studies if we were to make a sustained effort to apply and critique that body of literature.

The most frequently asked questions regarding the phenomenon of American universities in the Arabian Gulf are: how good are they and how likely are they to endure? Already one of the first to enter the arena (George Mason University in 2005) was forced to close its Ras al-Khaimah campus in October of 2009 “after reaching an impasse with our partner over budget and control issues” (http://eagle.gmu.edu/newsrooms/740). GMU’s former students were directed to its American campus and seven other institutions within the UAE with whom GMU had teach-out agreements. One of these seven institutions has now closed as well: on 6 July 2010 Michigan State University (MSU) announced it was closing its undergraduate programs in Dubai. Its former students were offered a special package to attend the MSU campus in Lansing. As reported in the Lansing State Journal, the reason given was that the Dubai campus had “failed to attract sufficient numbers of students and was no longer financially sustainable.” It had just eighty-five students. However, MSU still had to pay between $1.3–1.7 million in “wind-down costs” (http://lansingstatejournal.com/article/20100706/NEWS01/307060031/MSU-to-close-programs-at-Dubai-campus).

In 1993 I taught an NEH summer seminar for high-school teachers on the Arabic novel in translation. As I went through the listing of translated novels that are available in the 1990s and also made a choice from translations of other genres as back-up materials, I became newly aware of the wealth of material that we now have available. To be sure, it is not of the size and variety that is available for many other literary traditions, but there are now sufficient published novels and anthologies of poetry, drama and short-stories to devote entire courses or at least significant segments of them to individual genres and themes. I could not help thinking back to the start of my teaching career in 1968.

The contributions by Bishara, Deeb and Harb, Silverstein, and Winegar explore the ways non-state actors confront nationalist state projects. If these projects are not always foregrounded, the modernist nationalist state is nevertheless always in the background in each case, inviting an examination and critique of the “political commodifications of culture.” Here, I take a different approach to the culture concept in struggles between modernizing states and their subjects. Particularly suggestive in Winegar’s piece on Egypt and Deeb and Harb’s on Lebanon is the ethico-cultural dimension of thaqafa, its injunction to the would-be muthaqqaf to self-regulate, to refine the sensibilities, and so on. As the authors point out, there is an arguably Eurocentric and statist bias when thaqafa is deployed in this way. Part of this aspect of thaqafa is an implicit condescension toward “folk” (i.e., non-state) traditions, which are represented as retrogressive.

Mamduh Adwan (1941-2005) was right eighteen years ago. The people whose lives Hafiz al-Assad had poisoned and whose souls he had wounded would pursue his son for blood. Decades of living with walls that are—not have—ears have produced rage and a demand for vengeance and justice: “From now on we shall begin our great duty: This tyranny shall never recur.” These lines call for revolution. It is not enough to cut off the hand of the jailor. The jail must be destroyed.

As protestors filled Tahrir Square in Cairo in January 2011, Western diplomats, academics, and political pundits were searching for the best political analogy for the promise—and problems—for the Arab Uprising. Whereas neoconservative skeptics fretted that Egypt and Tunisia might go the way of post-revolutionary Iran, Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright praised Indonesia's democratization as the ideal model for the Arab Spring. During her 2009 visit to Indonesia, Clinton proclaimed: “if you want to know whether Islam, democracy, modernity, and women's rights can coexist, go to Indonesia.” Certainly Indonesia of May 1998 is not Egypt of January 2011, yet some comparisons are instructive. Still reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997, middle class Indonesians were fed up with corruption, cronyism, and a military that operated with impunity.

When it was founded in 2001, the current ruling party in Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (JDP), unequivocally declared its commitment to democracy and secularism (JDP 2014). Nevertheless, the party's implementation of reforms aimed at strengthening Turkey's democracy after coming to power in 2002 surprised many observers because the JDP's top leaders had been known Islamists. The speed and dedication with which the government introduced and implemented laws aimed at “European-style normalization” even impressed the EU, leading to the historic decision of 17 December 2004 to open negotiations with Turkey for full membership (Kirişҫi 2004). Such commitment seemed to be a rarity and therefore did not escape the attention of scholars either. It led to the publication of several academic works, four of which are the subject of this review essay.