{"title":"How a Middle Eastern Experience Helped Lead to the Formation of MERIP","authors":"M. Fischbach","doi":"10.1017/rms.2022.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2022.5","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract During the late 1960s, left-wing American activists faced challenges when trying to find out about what was happening in the Middle East and what their government was doing there. Yet overall, some activists still felt that by 1970 the American Left suffered from an overall dearth of solid information and regular, independent, critical analysis of the Middle East. As a result, the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) and its publication, MERIP Reports, were established in 1971 to fill that void. However, in many ways a major impetus for MERIP's formation was not just its founders’ hunger for better analysis of the region, but also the deep impressions made on them by a dramatic and influential trip several of them took to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan in August and early September 1970. Thus, while it is true that, since its inception, MERIP has shaped the study of the Middle East, it is also true that it was the Middle East that first shaped those who formed MERIP.","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"230 - 240"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43496505","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":"Arab Americans in Film: From Hollywood and Egyptian Stereotypes to Self-Representation","authors":"Viviane Saglier","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.7","url":null,"abstract":"What can film studies bring to the study of Arab culture, politics, and history? The past ten years have seen an increase in historical, theoretical, and methodological exchanges between Middle East studies and film and media studies. The sub-field of “Arab film studies” (Ginsberg and Lippard 2020, viii) has emerged as one possible intersection of these two fields of inquiry. This is illustrated by two recent book series, the Cinema and Media Cultures in the Middle East series at Peter Lang Publishing (edited by Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard) and the Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema series at Palgrave Macmillan (edited by Nezar Andary and Samirah Alkassim). Waleed Mahdi's <jats:italic>Arab Americans in Film</jats:italic> (2020) and Peter Limbrick's <jats:italic>Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi</jats:italic> (2020) consolidate these exchanges across ethnic studies, area studies, political sciences, (art) history, and film and media studies. While Mahdi primarily positions himself from within ethnic studies and Limbrick is first a film scholar, both have published in reference journals in film studies, Middle East studies, and cultural studies.","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":"60 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138511929","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 Reflection on the Importance of Philosophy and Ethics in the Gulf and in Saudi Arabia","authors":"Marzia A. Coltri","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.35","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.35","url":null,"abstract":"This essay offers a critical perspective on the future of the Arabian Gulf universities with respect to the humanities and philosophy. Although higher education institutions in Saudi Arabia and some other Gulf countries have begun offering some philosophy courses, there are too few degree programs for the humanities and philosophy. Most Gulf colleges still do not offer a bachelor's or master's degree in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHSS) based on the common assumption that the future is in STEM, and that degrees in engineering, science, technology, and medicine are more economically viable than their counterparts in the humanities. However, the latest results of the British Academy in its recent research report “Qualified for the Future: Quantifying demand for arts, humanities and social science skills” have shown that graduates in the humanities are more in demand in several areas of employment across the world. Key findings are that people who hold AHSS degrees have similar employability rates to those of STEM graduates. As a result, humanities and social sciences graduates work in a wide range of industries, including education, science and technology, public administration, national defense, financial services, and the media.","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"177 - 184"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42972153","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":"Revisiting Multilingualism in the Ottoman Empire","authors":"Sooyong Kim, O. Bashkin","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.43","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.43","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"130 - 145"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49058818","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":"Integrative Learning and Simulating Revolution and Protest in the Middle East","authors":"Brian Mello, Mark J. Stein","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.41","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.41","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay explores insights from our experiences teaching undergraduates a set of paired history and political science courses on protest and revolution in the Middle East. Working in groups, students developed simulations of key moments of revolution or protest explored during the courses. The simulation assignment was designed to engage students in an active learning setting and as a shared assignment across both courses. The most interesting result of this project, from the teaching perspective, was its unanticipated ability to expose students to the contingency and emotion that scholarship has recently emphasized as critical to understanding social movements, but which so often falls out of the study of history and political science analyses of protest and revolution. In this paper we explore the simulation assignment, how student groups designed the simulations with limited guidance from instructors, how students took on the assigned roles by engaging deeply with the histories of the events, and how the engagement in the simulations complicated the analyses that formed the bedrock of our course readings. In our analysis we draw on two iterations of the paired courses and use both student qualitative assessments of the course and student reflections on the simulations that were included in group papers.","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"110 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42164171","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":"ROSIE BSHEER. Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. Pp. 416. $30.00, paperback. ISBN 9781503612570.","authors":"Guy Burak","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.42","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.42","url":null,"abstract":"geographicalbased segregation by linking such projects to colonialism. Nonetheless, these models were viewed as beneficial by opposing camps who considered education reform as an opportunity for the production of ideal Iraqi women. Iraq’s educational development emerged from a colonial-linearity that aimed to yield specific subjects: its opposition evidently indicates that Iraqi women ‘believed they could better serve the nation’s interest by overthrowing the existing political order than by learning how to efficiently manage a household’ (105). The state of scholarship on Iraq is such that very few studies have consulted the country’s rich archives or conducted research within its borders. Of course, Pursley anticipated this otherwise minor critique by noting that the ‘very limited state of scholarship on Iraq means that many available sources remain unexamined and many of those that have been examined remain open to alternate readings’ (28). Familiar Future will interest scholars engaged with economic development projects, gender studies, postcolonial studies, national imaginaries, and the manufacturing of subjectivity. In a Koselleckian tradition, Pursley not only offers us a tantalizing critique of modernization and modernity, but also challenges us to rethink the boundaries between history, historiography and theory: an opportunity to reflect on the positioning of the history of Iraq within interdisciplinary theories.","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"189 - 191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41826405","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":"Studying Turkey through a Graphic Lens","authors":"A. Singer, Chris. Martin","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.46","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.46","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In Turkish Kaleidoscope, social anthropologist and novelist Jenny White has expanded her repertoire to the graphic novel format to create an account of the violence and political chaos that pervaded Turkey in the late 1970s.2 White builds here on her academic work and her own student experience at Hacettepe University in Ankara. Artist Ergün Gündüz has created visual interpretations of place, space, events, and emotions that bring the story to life. This review is a collaborative class exercise for “Turkey: From Atatürk to Erdoğan” at Brandeis University in the Spring 2021 semester. It reflects on the novel as a text for Turkish history; the format of the work; the aesthetic choices of artist and author; and the experience of encountering this work in the contemporary historical moment. The review incorporates student comments as direct quotations. It was co-authored by Chris Martin, a student in the course.","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"124 - 129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43934113","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":"Walter Armbrust. Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). Pp. 311. $27.95 cloth. ISBN 9780691162645 – Corrigendum","authors":"Darci Sprengel","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.39","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.39","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"197 - 197"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43615320","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":"Transformation from the Ottoman State to the Modern Republic of Turkey: The Renewal Party and Karakol","authors":"Evren Altinkaş","doi":"10.1017/rms.2021.48","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.48","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract After the end of WWI, the leaders of Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) established a political party, Renewal Party, and an underground organization, Karakol, in order to organize a resistance against the Allies and their presence in Ottoman territories. These institutions played an important role in the formation of national resistance in Anatolia before Mustafa Kemal's arrival in the region. The establishment of local resistance forces by former CUP members in Anatolia under the name of Renewal Party and the formation of a network in Istanbul to facilitate the smuggling of weapons, ammunition, former military officers, and Unionists to Anatolia were crucial for the formation of a national resistance movement to be organized under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal after May 1919. This article focuses on these two institutions and their role in Turkish National Struggle.","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"146 - 157"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46420487","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 55 issue 1 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rms.2022.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2022.9","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21066,"journal":{"name":"Review of Middle East Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"f1 - f5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44087180","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}