This article analyzes two important genres of Arab music that are heard in Syria in the course of the performance of the wasla, or suite of songs: the muwashshahât and the popular songs known as al-qudûd al-halabiyya. Many consider the muwashshahât (sing, muwashshah) to be the epitome of Arab music. Poetically, melodically, and vocally, the muwashshahât constitute a veritable treasure-house of Arabic culture and civilization. The qudûd (sing, qadd) are sung in both standard and colloquial Arabic, but because of their simpler melodic rhythmic structure are generally considered to be simplified versions of muwashshahât; therefore in this article I treat them as a sub-set of the muwashshahât.

To deal with the growing migrant crisis in North Africa, several states have considered granting amnesty to foreign displaced persons (both economic migrants and potential refugees) who have entered their territories clandestinely. Morocco has taken the lead in this policy approach, launching two successful amnesty campaigns in 2014 and 2017 that regularized the status of approximately 40,000 displaced persons in total. While policymakers in many North African states increasingly see this policy as a viable solution, it is less understood how ordinary citizens view such regularization policies. Hence, this article inquires: under what conditions do ordinary native citizens support regularizing clandestine migrants and refugees? Further, what factors correlate with either higher or lower levels of public support for (or opposition to) regularization campaigns? Drawing on an original representative public opinion poll from Morocco's Casablanca-Settat region completed in 2017, this article finds that more than 59 percent of native citizens of Morocco support these regularization campaigns. Particularly, Moroccans who were wealthier, female, and ethnic minorities (black Moroccans) endorsed regularization more strongly. By contrast, Moroccans opposed regularization when they had concerns about whether displaced persons hurt the economy, undermine cultural traditions, and reduce stability.

International law, government policy, and a range of academic disciplines all demonstrate different approaches to the task of defining who is a refugee. Yet how do refugees define themselves? When, how, and why do they come to identify with this term, or not? This essay offers reflections on these questions based on interviews with hundreds of displaced Syrians in the Middle East and Europe from 2012 to 2018. Syrian experiences illustrate how individuals’ self-understandings as refugees evolve over time as a contingent process not necessarily coterminous with actual physical displacement. I trace how these self-understandings are generated as shifts in three indicative relationships: displaced persons’ relationships to their expectations of return to their homeland; their relationships to their pre-flight lives; and their relationships to the word “refugee” itself. This focus on the bottom-up, organic development of a new subjectivity suggests how one's self-definition as a refugee might be less a quality or state that exists synonymously with forced migration than it is an identity that comes into existence gradually over time. That is, it is the product of a process of “becoming” more than “being.”

One problem faced by many Western historians of the Middle East and North Africa is a relative ignorance of what is being produced by the local scholars themselves. In the case of the Maghreb, for example, without regular visits to the area, an American researcher may have to wait several years to learn about the publication of a new book or a local research project relevant to his own interests. This observation is certainly true for Tunisia, where a small, active group of historians at the University of Tunis has been examining aspects of Tunisia's political and social evolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but whose works, with few exceptions, are not well known to scholars in America.

From time to time in recent years, the complaint has been voiced that “women’s studies” have gone far enough: panels on women at professional meetings are de rigeur. though the subject matter is becoming somewhat tedious; articles and books on women are proliferating, though they seem to be increasingly repetitive; and furthermore, it is argued, there is nothing intrinsically interesting or problematic about women per se. As for investigators whose interest focus on women in the Middle East, they have been called opportunistic, capitalizing on the feminist movement in the United States, and have been accused of imposing feminist concerns and sensibilities on Middle Eastern societies.

Current debates about the status of middle east studies are informed by an assumption that separates ‘area studies’ from ‘global studies,’ and ‘area specialization’ from disciplinary or theoretical orientation. Arguing against such separation, I propose that a resort to comparative perspectives may help bridge the divide. To this end, I discuss imperatives and modalities of thinking comparatively in the context of the Middle East, and their implications for bringing other areas into comparative inquiries. Focusing on illustrations from Middle East social studies, I attempt to think through my own, albeit limited, experience of comparative research within the Middle East region.

As a colleague of mine has recently written, a term that was slanderous a mere decade ago—empire—has now become a cliché in discussing the United States. Indeed,

In 1957 and 1958, Lebanese Armenian political parties, through the medium of their newspapers, rearranged the Armenian neighborhoods of Bourj Hamoud and Corniche al-Nahr as Armenian territories, separate from, and often in opposition to, the Lebanese state. These Armenian parties, in vying with one another for authority over this territory, fashioned Armenian enemies of one another. The internal Armenian enemy of the Armenian nation was constructed from within the national space of Lebanon. The power struggle within the Armenian community in Lebanon challenges the placement of Armenians in the historiography of Lebanon, which considers them as refugees and therefore non-Lebanese or temporary residents of Lebanon as well as passive, impossible political actors.

This introductory essay sets the stage for this special issue, which explores how online media has changed the Arabian Gulf region's politics, economies, and social norms.2 It provides an overview of the most important themes, arguments, and findings tackled in the four essays in this issue, as well as the intersections, overlaps, and divergences emerging from, and between, them. In doing so, it explains how the similarities and differences, as well as the most significant underlying themes, emerging from these four essays further our understanding of the online public sphere in the Gulf region as a space for contestation, creativity, and change. This introductory essay identifies three important, and overlapping, themes found in this special issue: techno-euphoria, cyberwars, and the public sphere. It concludes by proposing possible next steps and future research on the important, yet understudied, links between the online public sphere and the sociopolitical environment of the Gulf.

This essay discusses the music of the Maronite Church, a Christian church based in Lebanon. It provides an overview of the chants used in religious services and examines their transmission and performance practice. The Maronites have always faced challenges to maintain their identity and preserve their heritage while adapting to their cultural milieu. Their religious music reflects the dichotomy between safeguarding tradition and accepting contemporary trends. Since the late nineteenth century, Maronites looking for better opportunities and political freedom have increasingly immigrated to the New World, where they face new challenges to preserving their religious identity while assimilating to the culture of their new homeland. Therefore, this essay reaches beyond the traditional geographic boundaries of the Maronite Church in Lebanon to examine issues in the transmission of Maronite music in the diaspora.

This study examines attributes associated with U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Omar's unique intersectionality of identities as a Black, immigrant, Muslim woman presents a rich case study for an examination of attribute agenda setting. A sample of Tweets, all Wall Street Journal articles referencing the congresswoman, and Google searches were obtained for the hashtags (“IlhanOmar,” “GoBack,” and “WelcomeHome.”) from May 2019 to January 2020. The Tweets and articles were then coded for a variety of dimensions. Analysis of the frequencies of words associated with the coding and the hashtags showed that the majority of the messages were negative despite the hashtag for which they were collected. A cross-correlation time series analysis showed that articles and editorials published by the Wall Street Journal predicted spikes in Google searches and Twitter messages. This article pinpoints underlying sociological phenomena about the representations of gender, race, religion, and immigration status to show the arguments that link attributes of Ilhan Omar together on Twitter.

The SSRC’s Joint Near and Middle East Committee has been organizing a series of workshops on the State in its Middle Eastern context. Its aim is to continue the discussions initiated at the Conference on State and Society which it organized at Aix-en-Provence in March 1988. The first workshop was held at Büyükada, Istanbul, in September 1989 under the general title of “State Creation and Transformation” and the second at Hanover, New Hampshire, in March 1990 under the title “Vocabularies of the State.” A third and last workshop will be held in Oxford in December 1990, after which it is hoped to publish most of the papers in book form.