Middle East Quarterly articles from January 2008

Middle East Quarterly archives from January 2008

Exposing the "flying imams".
January 1, 2008... On November 20, 2006, airline officials in Minneapolis removed six imams from U.S. Airways flight 300 to Phoenix after their behavior raised the suspicion of fellow travelers. (1) The imams decried the incident as racist and evidence of...

Did Edward Said really speak truth to power?
January 1, 2008... Edward Said's influence on academe looms even larger in death than during his life. On September 25, 2003, the day that he died, students and staff of Columbia University gathered in the garden outside Philosophy Hall, where the longtime...

The Middle East's tribal DNA.
January 1, 2008... Conflicts within the Middle East cannot be separated from its peoples' culture. Seventh-century Arab tribal culture influenced Islam and its adherents' attitudes toward non-Muslims. Today, the embodiment of Arab culture and tribalism within...

Where is Bashar al-Assad heading?(Essay)
January 1, 2008... On May 27, 2007, Syrians elected Bashar al-Assad to a second 7-year term as president in a referendum in which, according to results published two days later by the Ministry of Interior, Assad received the support of 97.62 percent of the...

Delhi: between Tehran and Washington.(Report)
January 1, 2008... As the U.S.-Iranian dispute escalates, both Washington and Tehran seek friends and allies. New Delhi is caught in the middle. While the U.S.-Indian partnership has grown closer in recent years, New Delhi's approach toward Iran's suspected...

Augmenting Israel's qualitative military edge.(Report)
January 1, 2008... Every president, since Lyndon Johnson has reiterated the U.S. commitment to maintain Israel s qualitative military edge (QME). The principle behind this commitment is simple: Israel is a bastion of liberal, representative government in the...

Contrasting secular and religious terrorism.(What Motivates Terror?)
January 1, 2008... Since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, there has been a steady rise in Islamist terrorism. Too many analysts underestimate the ideological basis of terrorism and argue instead that rational-strategic rather than ideological principles motivate...

The fallacy of grievance-based terrorism.(What Motivates Terror?)
January 1, 2008... The fundamental premise of much scholarly examination and public discourse is that grievances with U.S. policies in the Middle East motivate Islamist terrorism. Such assumptions, though, misunderstand the enemy and its nature. In reality, the...

How violent is Iraqi culture?(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2008... To the Editor: In reading the article "Culture in Post-Saddam Iraq" by Nimrod Raphaeli (MEQ, Summer 2007), I was saddened to see that the article was so selective in its survey of Iraqi ethnography. This prompts me to surmise that the...

Afghanistan and the Troubled Future of Unconventional Warfare.(Book review)
January 1, 2008... Afghanistan and the Troubled Future of Unconventional Warfare. By Hy S. Rothstein. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2006. 218 pp. $26.95. U.S. troops are losing Afghanistan because they are fighting a conventional war against an...

American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion.(Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America after 9/11)(Book review)
January 1, 2008... American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion. By Paul M. Barrett. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. 300 pp. $25 ($15, paper). Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America after 9/11. By Geneive Abdo. New York: Oxford...

Arabs.(Book review)
January 1, 2008... Arabs. By Mark Allen. London: Continuum, 2006. 145 pp. $29.95. Allen's book is a compilation of frivolous statements and untenable aims, with reasoning and assertions that expired in the nineteenth century. He states his objective is to...

Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews.(Book review)
January 1, 2008... Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews. By David Pryce-Jones. New York: Encounter Books, 2006. 171 pp. $23.95. Pryce-Jones has written a painful reminder for anyone still clinging to the notion that the West, defined by common history...

For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia.(Book review)
January 1, 2008... For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia. By Robert D. Crews. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. 480 pp. $29.95. Crews, an assistant professor of history at Stanford University, investigates relations...

In a Sea of Knowledge: British Arabists in the Twentieth Century.(Book review)
January 1, 2008... In a Sea of Knowledge: British Arabists in the Twentieth Century. By Leslie McLoughlin. Reading, U.K.: Ithaca Press, 2002. 288 pp. $49.50. McLoughlin, historian and professor of Arabic at the University of Exeter, defines "Arabist" as...

Iraqi Security Forces: A Strategy for Success.(Book review)
January 1, 2008... Iraqi Security Forces: A Strategy for Success. By Anthony H. Cordesman. Westport: Praeger Security International, 2006.410 pp. $49.95. Cordesman prolifically chronicles Middle Eastern military affairs, and Iraqi Security Forces is a...

Compare and contrast.
January 1, 2008... Michael Rubin, "A Comedy of Errors: American-Turkish Diplomacy and the Iraq War," Turkish Policy Quarterly; Spring 2005. ... Both the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Ankara fumbled American approach to Turkey in other ways. In...

Ireland and the Middle East: Trade, Society and Peace.(Book review)
January 1, 2008... Ireland and the Middle East: Trade, Society and Peace. Edited by Rory Miller. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007.206 pp. $75 ($32, paper). Links between Ireland and the Middle East may appear tenuous, but this impressive collection of...

The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims.(Book review)
January 1, 2008... The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims. Edited by Andrew G. Bostom. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2005. 759 pp. $29. Bostom, an associate professor of medicine at Rhode Island Hospital, has compiled a large...

New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England.(Book review)
January 1, 2008... New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England. By Matthew Dimmock. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2005.243 pp. $84.95. Dimmock, a lecturer in English at the University of Sussex, examines English...

Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the Struggle for Palestine, 1880-1948.(Book review)
January 1, 2008... Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the Struggle for Palestine, 1880-1948. By Mark LeVine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.457 pp. $65 ($29.95, paper). Unless there is strong evidence to the contrary, it is wise to...

The Prince: The Secret Story of the World's Most Intriguing Royal, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.(Book review)
January 1, 2008... The Prince: The Secret Story of the World's Most Intriguing Royal, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. By William Simpson. New York: Regan, 2006.480 pp. $32.50 ($17.95, paper). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia is...

Russia's Islamic Threat.(Book review)
January 1, 2008... Russia's Islamic Threat. By Gordon M. Hahn. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.349 pp. $35. Finally a work investigates the larger context hidden inside the Chechen conflict. Even before September 11, 2001, Russians often complained...

Saudi religious police attacked by girls.(members of Khobar's Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice)(Brief article)
January 1, 2008... Members of Khobar's Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice were the victims of an attack by two Saudi females, Asharq al-Awsat can reveal. According to the head of the commission in Khobar, two girls pepper-sprayed...

Saudi divorces wife for TV infidelity.(Brief article)
January 1, 2008... A Saudi man divorced his wife for watching a television programme [hosted] by a male [while] alone, an act he deemed immoral, the Al-Shams newspaper reported. The man, whom the paper did not identify, ended his marriage on the grounds his...

Erratum.(Correction notice)
January 1, 2008... Table 1, published in "Are Muslim Countries Less Democratic'?" by Frederic L. Pryor, Fall 2007 Middle East Quarterly, page 56, was incorrect. We apologize for the error and include the corrected table below.--The Editors Table 1: The...

Mahmoud Salehi.(Dissident Watch)
January 1, 2008... On April 9, 2007, Iranian security forces arrested Mahmoud Salehi, the former president of the Bakery Workers' Association in Saqez, a town in the Kurdistan province of northwestern Iran. They transferred him to prison in Sanandaj, the...