“The truth is the whole!” wrote Hegel. The reprint of V. N. Dadrian's article on the so-called Andonian “documents” steers clear of many pertinent facts related to Armenian-Turkish relations and falls short of Hegel's maxim. Dadrian reduces the topic to a one-sided indoctrination, limiting his references to selected narratives and omitting all evidence that contradicts mainstream Armenian views. His article bypasses the initial Armenian massacre of Muslim Anatolians, the Armenian-led revolt in the Ottoman province of Van, and Armenian shedding of blood in about a dozen wars or armed clashes. He attacks the Turks presented with the posture of a prosecuting attorney in tones so biased that today's social scientists would define them as racist.

Please open the PDF to view the article

Please open the PDF to view the article

Please open the PDF to view the article

This article argues that the Aden Protectorate constituted one of the westernmost parts of India in terms of its political–legal identity and its place in the cultural project of imperial India. Although the port of Aden was governed as part of the Bombay Presidency until 1937, the tribes of the Aden Protectorate were treated as independent native states similar to the princely states of India. Using the sultanate of Lahj as a case study, the article shows the extent to which the colonial state used the Indian model to elaborate a history of the sultanate as an independent political entity, a status that was then institutionalized in historical texts, ethnographic knowledge, and state rituals. The article concludes with an analysis of the protectorate's participation in the 1903 Coronation Durbar in Delhi as a means of demonstrating its place in the British imagination of a socially and politically fragmented India that extended beyond geographical South Asia.

Tracing the political trajectory of the Society of Islamic Coalition Association (SIC) since the Islamic Revolution, this paper explains the party's poor electoral performance and its increasingly apparent divergence from its assumed social base, the bazaar (bāzārī) community. The article argues that SIC organization and behavior are influenced by the experiences of the prerevolutionary era and state institutions of the Islamic republic. SIC's initial position of power was associated with its members' long-standing relations with the founders of the regime. However, this ultimately laid the foundation for its unwillingness and inability to develop an institutionalized party structure with a social base. As a consequence, bāzārīs have increasingly been alienated from the party leadership and unable to represent their group interests in institutional politics. The analytical narrative incorporates insights from institutionalist approaches to authoritarian politics and presents a view of Iranian political history that stresses contingency, fluidity, and pragmatism in political decision making by elites.

The growth of private welfare in Syria since the 1990s and a parallel détente between the Baʿth regime and the Islamic trend have allowed an Islamic movement called Jamaʿat Zayd to gain an impressive hold on Damascus's charitable sector. Through a detailed, fieldwork-based analysis of this process, this article argues that the movement's success as a private welfare provider is the product rather than the cause of its large religious following. We also propose an empirically nuanced contribution to the debate on the current transformations of Arab authoritarian systems, questioning the regime's ability to effectively co-opt the Zayd movement. Whereas the development of private welfare is politically risk free when authoritarian leaders control the financial and symbolic resources needed to maintain it, it can also strengthen independent-minded groups when, as in Zayd's case, its funding stems from a large popular base that limits the possibilities of instrumentalization by the regime.

This essay analyzes three problems with the landmark Arab Human Development Report 2005 on women as a means of reflecting on some consequences of the transnational currency of a particular “dialect” of women's rights. Given the current geopolitical context, it first asks how the report's attribution of “unique” shortcomings in the Arab world to cultural and religious factors might make it vulnerable to appropriation for dangerous arguments about “the clash of civilizations.” Second, it asks how the urban, middle-class, cosmopolitan perspective on women's lives, aspirations, and everyday conditions colors the report's analyses of education, employment, and the role of family, eliding critical aspects of political economy and ignoring alternative values. Finally, it considers how the report's reliance on the dominant secular, liberal political paradigms that this “dialect” of women's empowerment indexes—modernization, human development, and (neo)liberalism—both narrows its recommendations and limits its potential appeal, given the Islamic revival and economic problems in the Arab world.

In this article we present a threefold argument—chronological, geographical, and sociocultural—in order to demonstrate that interest in the woman question and the lively, and at times charged, debate that it stimulated began in Greater Syria in the early nahḍa (awakening) period and persisted throughout, drawing into its orbit leading intellectuals as well as members of the general public and permeating even peripheral areas of Greater Syria. The study is based on an analysis of Hadiqat al-Akhbar, Al-Jinan, Al-Muqtataf, Thamarat al-Funun, and Al-Hilal, whose articles, editorials, regular columns, op-ed items, and readers' letters provide a sense of the breadth, richness, coherence, and continuity of the debate and its accompanying “community of discourse.” We conclude with a consideration of the ramifications of the argument on future understandings of the nahḍa as a sociocultural phenomenon and on the study of the place of women in modern Arab societies.

Please open the PDF to view the article

During the British Mandate period Zionist health organizations and professional groups made an extensive effort to educate the Jewish public in health and hygiene. This article analyzes the Hebrew popular-scientific discourse of hygiene. It looks at the inculcation of hygienic models of conduct as part of a project of modernization and Westernization. As the analysis demonstrates, Zionist identity was constructed as modern and Western in opposition to the Orient and Oriental ways of life. At the same time, “Occidental” and “Oriental” were unstable and sometimes ambivalent categories in the hygienic discourse. Not only the value of the categories sometimes differ (as Jews were depicted both as European settlers and as natives of the Orient), but also East European Jews appeared both as objects and as subjects of a “civilizing mission.” As a consequence, the construction of difference between European Jews and Orientals was not always grounded in different practices attributed to each of these groups but sometimes in the different value attached to the same practices when performed by members of different groups.

This study give voices to three possibilities of becoming modern in the Turkish experience through a reading of the novels of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Oğuz Atay, and Orhan Pamuk. The analysis of the novels invites rethinking, with an eye to gender relations, the terms “modernity” and “modern existence” as well as Paul Gilroy's inversion of the relationship between center and margin. In this framework, I explore the Turkish experience through the themes of “constituting one's self across the East--West duality” and “temporality.” Tanpınar's novel represents a conservative, anti-individualistic response to modernity concerned with reproducing the “authentic whole” in the face of Westernization. Pamuk's novels take the opposite stance; here becoming modern coincides with full replication of Western individuality. The works of Atay, in contrast, display a “truly modern” possibility—a critical, creative, and open-ended process of self-creation that leads subjects toward individual and social autonomy, although it remains unrealized.

Please open the PDF to view the article

The article argues that to move beyond the standard nationalist narrative of Turkish history, scholars must employ new sources such as the provincial newspaper. Through a study of a religious nationalist provincial newspaper—Büyük Cihad (The Great Struggle)—from the early 1950s, it is possible to appreciate the extent and importance of a vibrant public debate concerning secularism and the place of Islam in Turkish society immediately after World War II. This debate has gone almost completely unnoticed, yet it constitutes an important foundation for understanding the present prominence of political Islam in Turkish society. Central to this debate is the person of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: ultimately it was criticism of Turkey's founding president rather than any real threat of “religious reaction” that prompted the government's decision to suppress religious publications in early 1953.

Although Dubai's economic development constitutes an important case, it has received hardly any academic coverage. This article explores the path taken by Dubai in its development, especially since 1990. Based on extensive fieldwork, I identify nine parameters that, through interaction, have contributed to the country's economic progress over the last two decades. I argue that the apparent developmental success of Dubai may be understood as the outcome of conscious policies conducted by a “late–late” developing state in order to “catch up” with the “developed world.” Even in a government-controlled and neopatrimonial economic environment, Dubai has created circumstances where the virtues of neoliberalism seem to coexist with state dirigism. Yet the country faces a challenge of sustainability. Certain of the Dubai's risks and vulnerabilities are unlikely to disappear in the short to medium term: the dependence on foreign workers, the asset bubbles in real estate, regional security problems, and issues related to political leadership.

Please open the PDF to view the article

Please open the PDF to view the article

Please open the PDF to view the article

This article analyzes the Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World. I argue that the Arab Human Development Report 2005 works within a United Nations development framework that strengthens states and elites in relation to their populations. This strategy reinforces the logic of national, transnational, and feminist governmentalities. Little attention is given to oppositional movements as sources of development. The authors of the report are often caught in the contradictions of using it to make radical critiques of undemocratic Arab state regimes and repressive Western state policies. International measures such as the human development index and the “global women's rights” discourse used by the United Nations Development Programme and other organizations selectively authorize subjectivities, freedoms, and transformations and help to normalize and constitute a range of inequalities among women.