When asked about “political control of a population,” Michel Foucault responded, “[P]ower had to gain access to the bodies of individual, to their acts, attitudes, and modes of everyday behavior . . .I believe that the political significance of the problem of sex is due to the fact that sex is located at the point of intersection of the discipline of the body and the control of the population.” This insight is often reflected in the relationship between literature that deals with the body and the discipline imposed on it by various institutions (whether religious or social) in the form of censorship. One good example of that “ethical” exercise of power versus dramatic literature emerged when Sameh Mahran, a professor at the Cairo Academy of Arts, wrote Al-Marakbi (The Boatman), a play in two acts with an epilogue.

Since 1974, U.N. peacekeepers on the divided Mediterranean island of Cyprus have patrolled a buffer zone that divides the Greek-leaning, government-controlled south from the northern third, the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). The economy of Northern Cyprus resembles that of other small islands with negligible industrial production that rely on the service sector to generate income. What makes Northern Cyprus unique, however, is that the rest of the world does not acknowledge it as a separate political entity. This limits economic functions because the “country” cannot trade freely and depends on Turkey, the only nation to formally recognize Northern Cyprus.

Challenges to academic freedom have been much in the news of late, with coverage and interest extending well beyond college newspapers and the publications of our profession.

In the United States, there is no question that members of the Middle East studies community have been disproportionately targeted. A number of our colleagues have been victims of ugly smear campaigns regarding their scholarship; several tenure cases have triggered vicious, high-profile “extramural” attacks against junior faculty; and, in a handful of cases, our colleagues have been barred from giving talks or participating in educational events, owing to their political positions on Middle East-related issues. Others from outside this community who have also ventured to engage key regional issues in critical ways have had their invitations to give presentations in policy or academic forums rescinded.

Recent calls to boycott Israel, including its academic institutions, have stimulated heated debate over the relationship between boycotts and academic freedom. Academic boycotts admittedly raise complex issues, as they typically trammel academic freedom to some degree. Nonetheless, I do not favor a blanket refusal to engage in them. Although applying a negative presumption, we should consider academic boycotts on a case-by-case basis.

As a member of the British academic community—an international relations professor who is deeply involved in Middle Eastern studies—I find it distressing that some of the most dismal aspects of the American academic environment are coming our way. Nowhere is this trend more pronounced than on the question of Israel. That country is, of course, no stranger to controversy, but the attack on the right of academics to criticize Israel is a relatively recent and a highly disturbing phenomenon.

Studies of Middle Eastern urbanism have traditionally been guided by a limited repertoire of tropes, many of which emphasize antiquity, confinement, and religiosity. Notions of the old city, the walled city, the casbah, the native quarter, and the medina, sometimes subsumed in the quintessential “Islamic city,” have all been part of Western scholarship's long-standing fascination with the region. Etched in emblematic “holy cities” like Jerusalem, Mecca, or Najaf, Middle Eastern urban space is heavily associated with the “sacred,” complete with mystical visions and assumptions of violent eschatologies and redemption.

Until recently, the topic of charitable organizations seemed to have fallen in disgrace. Social scientists have given little attention to this sector of associational life. Instead, a great deal has been written on the issues of democratization through pressure groups or on the transformation of social movements into professional organizations while assessing the overall impact of development promoted by donors. Yet three signs point to the need for a better understanding of charitable organizations. First, new research studying Islamic activism through the lens of social-movement literature has offered innovative results. Second, studies on the impact of aid during the second intifada have revealed that charitable organizations as well as Islamic organizations offered a significant amount of emergency support, sometimes competing with professional nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Finally, the fact that Hamas, also known for running a vast network of charitable organizations, achieved such a significant political success in the 2005 municipal and 2006 legislative elections should invite social scientists to consider whether and how political momentum can also be obtained through activism in the charitable sector.

Held since 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest is an annual event traditionally dedicated to the eternal themes of love, peace, and harmony. Yet Israelis asked to pick a song for the 2007 contest in Helsinki paid little heed to these themes. Instead, they settled for “Push the Button,” a controversial number by an Israeli punk group called Teapacks; the song is generally understood as a description of life under the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran with its “crazy rulers.” Meanwhile, an Israeli fashion house (Dan Cassidy) commissioned a series of photos at a construction site in southern Tel Aviv that showed a topless model lying in a pit. The project was designed as a warning against the “holocaust” that would follow Iran's possible nuclear attack on Israel; the pit, as the project's creative director explained, represented “the mass grave of complacent Tel Aviv residents.”

From the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, the forces unleashed by the age of European imperialism and its rapid encroachment on dār al-Islām increasingly brought the hajj under the scrutiny and regulation of non-Muslim powers. The driving force behind these dramatic changes in administration of the hajj was the expansion of the British Empire. As Britain's power in the Indian subcontinent grew, so too did its maritime supremacy throughout the Indian Ocean basin. Looking to secure its access to India, ward off its European competitors, and expand its commercial interests in southwestern Arabia, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Aden, Britain's role in the region was intensified by the transit opportunities that emerged with the development of regular steamship routes between the Mediterranean and India from the 1830s to the 1860s and the eventual opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. With the exponential growth of maritime traffic that accompanied these technological advances came a similarly dramatic rise in the oceangoing pilgrim traffic from and through British India. Owing to this expansion in the number of seaborne pilgrims, the hajj soon came to be recognized as the primary conduit for the globalization of epidemic diseases, such as cholera and plague.

On 4 August 2005 the Lebanese English-language paper the Daily Star reported that Lebanon's ancient inscriptions at Nahr al-Kalb had been accepted into the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO’s) collection of “worldwide rare documents” through its Memory of the World Programme. UNESCO established the Memory of the World Programme in 1992, after realizing that its World Heritage Programme, which seeks to protect historic landscapes and architectural landmarks, did not safeguard a category of less visible, yet equally important, documents of the past: texts. The Memory of the World Programme made the preservation of “documentary heritage [which] reflects the diversity of languages, peoples and cultures” its goal, hoping that its work would help prevent “collective amnesia.” An eight-member Lebanese national committee made up of cultural and political elites affiliated with Lebanon's Ministry of Culture and Lebanese University, the country's largest public university, submitted a unanimous proposal to UNESCO's International Advisory Committee (IAC) to include Nahr al-Kalb in its collection of “documentary heritage.” The IAC reviewed and accepted the proposal in June 2005, placing the inscriptions along the river of Nahr al-Kalb in the company of 156 other universally memorable texts from around the world.