Arab Studies Journal最新文献

{"title":"A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia","authors":"Mona Kareem","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-2258","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-2258","url":null,"abstract":"A MOST MASCULINE STATE: GENDER, POLITICS, AND RELIGION IN SAUDI ARABIA Madawi Al-Rasheed Cambridge: Ca mbridge University Press, 2013 (xii + 333 pages, works cited, index) $78.79 (cloth), $26.99 (paper)A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia will become an essential reference for discussions of what the author Madawi Al-Rasheed calls \"the globalized question of Saudi women\" (26). Saudi women are subject to economic marginalization and strict rules that regulate their everyday lives. While Western media focus on the ban on driving, this book explores the \"deep-rooted exclusion\" of women in the Saudi kingdom (1). Male guardians determine and control women's mobility, education, employment, and health just as the state makes their subordination possible at the legal, social, political, and economic levels.Al-Rasheed identifies her book as a project exploring \"the intercon- nection between gender, politics, and religion\" in an attempt to explain the continued exclusion of Saudi women from the public sphere (3). The ban on independent associations and organizations has also played a major role in denying Saudi women a chance to press collectively for social transforma- tion (2). The status quo is, however, changing with the expansion of com- munication technology that allows Saudi women to be present and active in the public sphere. Their voices are no longer unheard as they challenge ociety \"through daring voices, critical texts, and real mobilization\" (2).Acknowledging pioneering texts in the study of gender in Saudi Arabia, including work by Soraya Altorki, Saddeka Arebi, Eleanor Doumato, and Amelie Le Renard, and drawing upon the work of feminist scholars Deniz Kandiyoti, Suad Joseph, Mounira Charrad, and Sylvia Walby, Al-Rasheed looks to fill a gap in the growing literature by placing gender in Saudi Arabia in relation to the state and religious nationalism. She formulates the concept of \"religious nationalism\" in conversation with and against Joseph Massad's and Partha Chatterjee's theories of nationalism, which, she argues, \"fail to account for the imaging of Saudi Arabia\" (9). Unlike Jordan, for example, which was \"invented\" by forging a nationalism based on Bedouin culture, \"the Saudi nation articulated an identity by claiming to apply the Sharia in all aspects of life and submitting to a universal Islamic ethos\" (14). Citing the work of Beth Baron and Mervat Hatem, she also contrasts the case of the Saudi kingdom with that of Egypt, where anticolonial nationalism allowed women to benefit in certain legal aspects while \"projecting gender relations as a function of greater political projects\" (17). In the Saudi kingdom, religious nationalism involved breaking the military and political autonomy of the tribes, even as it drew upon the tribal ethos to keep \"women in a patriar- chal relationship under the authority of male relatives\" (5). By looking at both secular and religious nationalisms in the region and their ","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130509227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco","authors":"Dina A. Ramadanb","doi":"10.5860/choice.48-1267","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.48-1267","url":null,"abstract":"IMAGINED MUSEUMS: ART AND MODERNITY IN POSTCOLONIAL MOROCCO Katarzyna Pieprzak Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 (x xix + 177 pages, bibliography, index, i llustrations) $75.00 (cloth), $25.00 (paper)\"I am not interested in national museums of the Third World. Memory that is useless is useless to preserve,\" Ali Amahan, the former museum director of Morocco, declares in the opening pages of Katarzyna Pieprzak's study of Moroccan museums (xiii). In his definitive assertion, Amahan expresses a sentiment that echoes throughout the following pages, and beautifully sum- marizes some of the fundamental issues at the crux of this book. Imagined Museums explores the relationship between museums and the nation, and the place and \"usefulness\" of memory within these formulations, as well as the processes through which the designation of art, and subsequently value, is bestowed upon objects. Pieprzak demonstrates the ways in which museums, in their evolving forms, play a central role in a number of overlap- ping discourses of modernity in Morocco. Imagined Museums is therefore not only an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on modern and contemporary artistic practices and institutions in the region, but it is also a particularly timely one as museums (and their contents) in the contemporary Arab world continue to be sites of controversy and con- flict, from the looting of the National Museum of Iraq during the US-led invasion in 2003, to the ransacking of the Egyptian Museum and its use as a site for torture during the 2011 uprisings, to the ongoing campaign by Gulf Labor, a coalition of artists and activists, for workers' rights and the boycott of academic and cultural institutions building on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, including the Louvre and the Guggenheim.While based primarily on research conducted between 2000 and 2004 and focusing on Arabic and French postcolonial press, letters, and memoirs, Pieprzak's work also draws on sources from outside the traditional archive such as travel narratives, visitors' comments, and blogs. She reads this vast array of material through a number of disciplinary lenses including com- parative literature, museum studies, African studies, and anthropology. Demonstrating the exciting potential of interdisciplinary work, she weaves discussions of museums in Morocco into a larger conversation about the role of museums in the non-Western world, particularly in postcolonial contexts, and demonstrates how art is used \"to access the right to participate equally on local and world stages\" (xxi).Imagined Museums is divided into two somewhat separate but dia- logical sections. The first three chapters focus on a number of institutional manifestations of the museum in Morocco over the last century, beginning with its earliest incarnation, the Batha Museum, established in 1915 in a nineteenth-century palace in Fez by Prosper Ricard, the director of the Protectorate Fine Arts Administration. Unde","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126771250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza","authors":"L. Hajjar","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-4688","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-4688","url":null,"abstract":"THE LEAST OF ALL POSSIBLE EVILS: HUMANITARIAN VIOLENCE FROM ARENDT TO GAZA by Eyal Weizman New York: Verso, 2011 (218 pages, index, illustrations) $26.95 (cloth)In that historical moment after the September 11 terrorist attacks, American politicians and pundits launched a debate about whether torture should be employed to combat terror. Those who endorsed the use of torture, and even some conflicted torture opponents, affirmed the consensus view that torture is unequivocally bad. But, they opined, if torture was necessary to elicit vital information to keep Americans safe, it would be a justiflable lesser evil in the service of national security. Nowadays, drone strikes have supplanted torture as the popular lesser evil.Eyal Weizman begins The Least of All Possible Evils with a history of lesser-evil thinking. \"The principle of the lesser evil,\" he explains,is often presented as a dilemma between two or more bad choices in situations where available options are, or seem to be, limited. ... Both aspects of the principle are understood as taking place within a closed system in which those posing the dilemma, the options available for choice, the factors to be calculated and the very parameters of calculation are unchallenged. Each calculation is taken anew, as if the previous accumulation of events has not taken place, and the future implications are out of bounds. (6)Weizman's work is a profound and empirically rich engagement with developments in contemporary \"humanitarianism,\" which, he argues, has evolved into various technocratic collusions among those who work to aid the vulnerable and those who mete out state violence in the name of security. He names this lesser-evil collusion \"the humanitarian present.\"Weizman dates the start of the humanitarian present to the 1980s, specifically the \"humanitarian crisis\" in Ethiopia and the role Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) played there. The \"crisis\" was not the devastating famine in East Africa. It was rather the ways in which Mengistu Haile Mariam's regime co-opted MSF's relief work to seize and relocate starving people who came from rebel-controlled regions to the food distribution centers, ultimately leading to thousands of deaths.Weizman traces the contemporary history of humanitarianism to French left-radical politics in the late 1960s and the influence of Hannah Arendt's work on totalitarianism. Anti-totalitarianism supplanted revolutionary leftism, and activism shifted from proletariats and capitalists to the \"passive quasi-religious dialectics of victims and perpetrators\" (37). This elevation of victims as the focus of humanitarian concern and action congealed as a politics of compassion and a practice oriented to the humanitarian culture of emergency. The humanitarian ethic, in the words of Bernard-Henri Levy, was the utilitarian objective to \"make the world a little more livable for the greatest number of people\" (38). The nexus of compassion and practice found its infrastructure in humanitar","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131133257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran","authors":"B. Mostofi","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-6537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-6537","url":null,"abstract":"A SINGLE ROLL OF THE DICE: OBAMA'S DIPLOMACY WITH IRAN by Trita Parsi New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012 (ix + 240 pages, notes, index) $27.50 (cloth), $17.00 (paper)With the election of Barack Hussein Obama to the White House in 2008, expectations ran high for a major shi in US-Iranian relations from the stando of the Bush era to a new period of diplomacy. Trita Parsi's A Single Roll of the Dice details what became of those expectations for a foreign policy reboot. Relying primarily on interviews with negotiators and diplomats- from the United States, the European Union, and Iran, as well as Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Brazil, and Turkey-and secondarily on news media coverage and leaked classied documents, Parsi oers an exhaustive account of the Obama administration's Iran policy that reads at times like an investigative journalist's thriller, a la All The President's Men.Parsi heralds Obama's arrival to the scene as wiping the slate clean: he contests the dominant Western media narrative that the United States and Iran are headed inevitably toward military confrontation. Such fatalism, he argues, is a false premise if the political will for a diplomatic solution truly exists. In contrast to the supercial coverage in the US mainstream media, Parsi delivers a substantive play-by-play account of the Obama administration's policy toward Iran that begins with the possibilities for a peaceful resolution to the current crisis. His analysis of events during the rst two years of Obama's presidency asks whether the potential for real diplomacy between these two states existed. He discusses the circumstances that led to diplomatic failure and provides a framework for what he believes is necessary for meaningful diplomacy to occur.Unlike others writing on US-Iranian relations, and specically the nuclear issue, Parsi does not undertake a serious discussion of Iran's nuclear history, its cooperation or lack thereof with the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA), or its compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Nor does he spend much time weighing the likely consequences of war- or continued sanctions-for Iran's nuclear program. Instead, he focuses his research on policy decisions. It could be argued that in choosing this approach Parsi presents a dangerous framework, whereby the facts have little to no relevance to policy-making. Yet with this framing Parsi is able to show how the substance of the issues falls prey to the politics of each state, thus placing negotiations in constant peril.The book begins with the negotiations that started in the fall of 2009. Parsi describes the US political climate in which Obama's policy was formed, introduces the political actors (both domestic and international), and plumbs the three-decade-long abyss that has dened US-Iranian rela- tions. He concludes that Obama's push toward diplomacy was sincere and suitable for the political moment in which he came to oce, when it was obvious that Bush-e","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124696148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel","authors":"Ryvka Barnard","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-3435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-3435","url":null,"abstract":"THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS: A HISTORY OF THE PALESTINIANS IN ISRAEL Ilan Pappee New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011 (320 pages, illustrations, bibliography, index, appendix, map) $30.00 (cloth)Reviewed by Ryvka BarnardAnyone preparing a reading list or syllabus on Palestinian history will note the silence in the English-language literature about the years directly following the nakba. There is an overwhelming amount of historical writing about 1948, after which there is a gap until accounts of the 1960s, when Palestinians resurface in the historiography with the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Even then, much of what is available focuses on Palestinian organizing and politics outside of historic Palestine, or only in the territories newly occupied by Israel in 1967, with very little about Palestinians inside Israel. Ilan Pappe's The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel addresses this gap in a comprehensive and engaging way. While several sociological and political science texts cover the same time period, Pappe's new work is notable as the first narrative social history of this particular segment of Palestinians.Pappe uses 1947 as a starting point to present a chronological history from the perspective of those Palestinians who remained and those few who returned and managed to stay in Israel after the nakba. The first two chapters look at the first decade and a half of the state of Israel, during which Palestinians remaining inside lived under Israeli military rule. The second two chapters address the official lifting of military rule (what Pappe calls \"military rule by other means\") and the years leading up to the first intifada in 1987 (94). The last three chapters plus the epilogue cover more recent years and focus largely on the histories and developments of Palestinian political parties in Israel, most notably al-Tajammu' (National Democratic Assembly), the party of the now-exiled Azmi Bishara, as well as a handful of NGOs including Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which works to document and challenge the discriminatory laws afflicting Palestinians in Israel.Activists and scholars of Palestinian history commonly recall several important events as defining moments very much tied to this particular population: the nakba, the Kafr Qasim massacre in 1956, the Land Day demonstrations in 1976, and the protests in 2000 at the beginning of the second intifada, during which Israeli forces killed thirteen Palestinians. Certainly these events also punctuate the timeline of Pappe's book, but his invaluable addition is an in-depth account of the context for these events, so we see them as points in a long and rich history, rather than as singular aberrations, desperate and occasional outbursts in response to an overwhelming Israeli oppression. At the same time, Pappe certainly does not downplay the ways in which Palestinians in Israel have been targeted, manipulated","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"1246 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123507938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria","authors":"B. Brower","doi":"10.5860/choice.48-3434","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.48-3434","url":null,"abstract":"APOSTLES OF MODERNITY: SAINT-SIMONIANS AND THE CIVILIZING MISSION IN ALGERIA Osama W. Abi-Mershed Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010 (xii + 328 pages, bibliography, index, tables, figures, maps) $60.00 (cloth, e-book)Into the more than one thousand pages of notes and quotations that make up The Arcades Project, German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin inserted the following comment: \"All social antinomies dissolve in the fairyland which le progres projects for the near future\" (578). This reflection came in a section of this prewar study of the capitalist origins of modernity that Benjamin devoted to French utopian writer Henri de Saint-Simon and his nineteenth-century followers. In these political theorists, engineers, bankers, and soldiers, Benjamin located the origins of a fatal crisis of modernity: the contradictions of industrial society diverted from their revolutionary path by fantasies of social conciliation, material wealth, and technological advancement (\"le progres\"). As Benjamin anticipated, these fantasies ended ultimately in violence, violence that claimed his life in 1940.Benjamin did not present much of the Saint-Simonians' work in the Middle East in The Arcades Project, but he should have. They served as something akin to foot soldiers of empire in places like Egypt and Algeria, where the Saint-Simonian \"fairyland\" was enacted and transformed by the social conflicts of colonialism. Osama W. Abi-Mershed's history of this fairyland in nineteenth-century Algeria is thus a much anticipated and necessary addition to scholarship. In this cogently argued and welldocumented account the reader gets-for the first time in English-a detailed view of the Saint-Simonian impact on colonial policy. A skillful and nuanced reading of the sources uncovers the projects by which the political and social subjugation of Algerians was wrought through a story of cultural enrichment, combined interest, and moral and material progress. Empires typically rely on such ideological configurations to legitimate their rule. But the particular way that the Saint-Simonians did this work in Algeria is worth special attention. As Benjamin's interest in them signals, the Saint-Simonians were key, if too often overlooked, architects of modernity.The Saint-Simonians in Algeria were a loose and often deeply divided group that drew inspiration from the writings of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). Having lived through the turmoil of the French Revolution, Saint-Simon developed an eclectic constellation of reform ideas that emphasized social harmony and material abundance as tools for fighting poverty and social tensions. For Marx and Engels, these ideas earned him inclusion in the trinity of nineteenth-century utopian socialists, along with Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. But with his veneration of productivity and efficiency, Saint-Simon distinguished his thinking and made himself a favorite among engineers, bankers, and the tec","PeriodicalId":184252,"journal":{"name":"Arab Studies Journal","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127183235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}