Review of Middle East Studies最新文献

{"title":"Ibtisām ʻĀzim, trans. Sinan Antoon. The Book of Disappearance: A Novel. (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2019). Pp. 256. $19.95 paper. ISBN 9780815611110","authors":"Erin F Kelleher","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.12","url":null,"abstract":"The Book of Disappearance explores questions of memory for the Palestinian people and land. Collective traumatic memory is a major theme across both Palestinian literature and Israeli literature, and this work joins the ranks of a growing body of literature that considers these questions as central to understanding Palestinian identity. The book imagines a world where, following a sudden and mysterious event, the entire Palestinian people have disappeared from the world without a trace, and ceased to exist except in memories. The two major protagonists of this book are Ariel, an Israeli journalist living in Tel Aviv, and his neighbor Alaa, a Palestinian. After Alaa’s disappearance, Ariel finds a notebook in Alaa’s apartment containing letters written to his late grandmother. It is through these letters that we hear Alaa’s story. Meanwhile, Ariel’s chapters are mostly active narration. Along similar lines of indirect storytelling, the Palestinians are portrayed through place in this novel: the places they fail to be, and the memories of them that exist despite their absence. In the early hours after the disappearance of the Palestinians, a series of chapters are devoted to describing this absence by way of setting, pointing out how noticeable the disappearance of Palestinians is in terms of Israeli reliance on Palestinians as laborers especially, in empty farms, busses without drivers, and similar scenes. Throughout, buildings and architecture are used to consider memory, and its preservation and destruction. While Ariel ruminates on the new buildings in Tel Aviv and the new street names, Alaa considers the older architecture and the original Arabic names of the streets. Ariel is mildly sympathetic toward Palestinians, but ultimately takes an ambivalent view. Much of the progress of the novel shows Ariel’s overtaking of Alaa’s physical space. At the same time, a countrywide Israeli seizure of Palestinian places is also occurring. After the prime minister announces that Palestinians who do not return within 48 hours must forfeit their property to the state, Israelis begin claiming homes and preparing for a national holiday. On the micro level, Ariel is slowly moving his belongings into Alaa’s apartment and making himself comfortable there, ultimately claiming it as his own. Despite their supposed friendship prior to the disappearance, Ariel seems to have no issue with claiming Alaa’s physical space, nor with invading it to the point of feeling that he has a right to read Alaa’s private journal, which Ariel even decides later MESA R o M E S 54 2 2021","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rms.2021.12","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45054602","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":"RMS volume 54 issue 2 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.30","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.30","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rms.2021.30","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41250853","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":"Carl Brown (1928–2020)","authors":"N. Brown","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.15","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rms.2021.15","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42537616","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":"Ayfer Karakaya-Stump. The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics and Community. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Pp. 400. $110 cloth. ISBN 9781474432689.","authors":"Angela Andersen","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.19","url":null,"abstract":"Ayfer Karakaya-Stump has located, translated, and analyzed previously unpublished source materials from the private archives of Anatolian Alevi families to offer a reconceptualization of the formation of the Ottoman Kizilbash-Alevi milieu in The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics and Community. The book, part of the Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire series, embraces an historical framework to present the “central thesis that the basic doctrinal, devotional and organisational features of Kizilbashism/Alevism must be sought within Sufism broadly defined” (48). While the Safavid order in Iran and the Bektashi order in Ottoman lands are often discussed in relation to Alevi history and praxis, Alevi-held documents themselves reveal ties to Sufi and dervish circles that precede these imperially-affiliated orders. Based on findings from these sources, Karakaya-Stump presents a complex series of historical and political events and intra-Muslim exchanges, within which Kizilbash-Alevi identity solidified in response to confessional and persecutory pressures in the sixteenth century. Kizilbash-Alevi spiritual lineages (ocaks) emerged as a significant socio-religious network in the Islamic milieu of Ottoman Anatolia. Ocak families regularly sought to obtain verified genealogical documents to certify the seyyid authority of male lineage heads, which linked them to the genealogy of the family of the Prophet Muhammad and his son-in-law Ali. Certain scholarly paradigms and oversights long resulted in suggestions that Alevis lacked such documentary archives, but the Alevi cultural revival of the 1980s and 90s facilitated the publication of Alevi MESA R o M E S 54 2 2021","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rms.2021.19","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45953968","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":"Politics and the Limits of Pluralism in Mohamed Arkoun and Abdenour Bidar","authors":"M. Dobie","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.20","url":null,"abstract":"One of the striking features of the literary culture of the modern Maghreb is the profusion of works that undertake to identify the essential features of the region – exercises in definition that almost always emphasize plurality. Philosophers, social scientists, and literary writers have highlighted the Maghreb's multilingualism – the coexistence of different forms of Arabic, Tamazight, French, and Spanish – the varied and hybrid cultural legacies of conquest and colonialism, and the effects of the region's geographical proximity to other parts of Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. It would be hard to find a more ubiquitous theme of francophone Maghrebi literature than cultural diversity, and the subject is by no means absent from Arabic-language literature. This preoccupation with plurality can be seen as a response to a history of colonization and decolonization with particular ideological features. In their efforts to build “l'Algérie française,” the French colonial authorities suppressed Arabic as a language of culture and government. In response, anticolonial nationalists called for the replacement of French with Arabic. “Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, Algeria is my nation” – the catchphrase of Abdelhamid Ben Badis's Jam'iyat al-'Ulama [Association of Muslim Ulema], an Islamic reform movement of the 1930s and 1940s – later became a slogan of the nationalist movement, the Front de libération nationale (FLN) [National Liberation Front]. Since the 1980s, a similar call to restore Arabic and eliminate French has been issued by the Islamist opposition to the corrupt and undemocratic FLN government and at times by officials in that same government seeking to restore their legitimacy. In emphasizing linguistic and cultural diversity, writers and scholars have tried to tender an alternative to these recurrent efforts to delimit the region's identity.","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rms.2021.20","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49112409","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":"RMS volume 54 issue 2 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.29","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rms.2021.29","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44163695","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":"Reflections on Race and Ethnicity in North Africa Towards a Conceptual Critique of the Arab–Berber Divide","authors":"Mohamad Amer Meziane","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.24","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.24","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay argues that the usages of the divide between Berbers and Arabs by the Algerian government and Berber activists alike should be analyzed in light of the transformation of the Imazighen into a cultural minority by the nation-state. The nation-state's definition of the majority as Arab, as well as the very concept of a minority, has shaped both the status and the grammar of the Arab-Berber divide in ways that are irreducible to how this binary functioned under French colonialism. In order to understand the distinct modes by which these categories function in Algeria today, one needs to analyze how the language of the nation-state determines their grammar, namely how they are deployed within this political context. Hence, by focusing primarily on French colonial representations of race such as the Kabyle Myth and by asserting simplified colonial continuities, the literature fails to make sense of the political centrality of the nation-state in the construction of the Amazigh question.","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rms.2021.24","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45850059","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":"Theology and Philosophy of Pluralism","authors":"S. Diagne","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.23","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.23","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay is a reflection on the very notion of “pluralism” examined in a philosophical and theological approach. It evokes Quranic verses on pluralism and then examines the thoughts of different Muslim thinkers on the question, such as al-Farabi (d. 950), al-Ghazali (1058–1111) in the tenth and twelfth centuries, and Tierno Bokar Salif Tall (1875–1939), from Mali, in the twentieth.","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rms.2021.23","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43965138","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":"Jacob M. Landau (1924–2020)","authors":"Avigdor Levy","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.14","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rms.2021.14","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42391773","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 Refugee Camp as Site of Multiple Encounters and Realizations","authors":"Ayham Dalal","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.10","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Literature in Human Geography has given much attention to “encounters” and their impact on negotiating difference in everyday life. These studies, however, have focused solely on cities, while “other” spaces like refugee camps have received little attention to date. In this paper, I highlight the significance of “encounters” in camps by exposing three main types: the “refugee-refugee,” the “refugee-humanitarian,” and the “refugee-more-than-human” encounters. Using empirical examples from Zaatari camp in Jordan, I show that the “refugee-refugee” encounters cannot be fully understood without taking refugees’ culture, background, and urban identities into consideration. I also explain how the “refugee-humanitarian” encounters result in new types of behaviors and might harden the boundaries between both groups. And lastly, I demonstrate how the “refugee-more-than-human” encounters can inform us about refugees’ unique experiences with shelters, space, and materiality. Building on the examples given for each type, this article suggests that “encounters” have the ability to generate knowledge and learnings, which contributes to shaping the space of the camp by either enforcing boundaries between different groups and/or by allowing new and hybrid spatialities to emerge. This not only confirms that “encounters” are an important entry point in understanding the socio-spatial and material composition of refugee camps, but also that further studies in this regard are direly needed. It also suggests that architects and planners need to allow for the “new” to emerge as a result of these encounters and, therefore, to enable flexibility and adaptability within camps’ design and planning.","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rms.2021.10","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42805865","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}