Middle East Quarterly articles from March 2004

Middle East Quarterly archives from March 2004

Arafat's grand strategy.
March 22, 2004... For Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leadership, the Oslo process has always been a strategic means not to a two-state solution--Israel and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza--but to the substitution of a...

After Arafat.
March 22, 2004... When Yasir Arafat became seriously ill in late 2003, Palestinians were near panic for several days. Officials did not know how to handle the crisis. Ahmad Dudin, former Fatah leader in the Hebron region, summed up the dilemma in this way: "The...

Iraq for the Iraqis: how and when.
March 22, 2004... Are Iraqis ready to take on the responsibilities of sovereignty? Regardless of the government that assumes sovereign authority on June 30, it will remain fragile and weak at first, and heavily reliant on the United States. Indeed, the U.S....

Museum madness in Baghdad.
March 22, 2004... The looting of the Iraq Museum (Baghdad) is the most severe single blow to cultural heritage in modern history, comparable to the sack of Constantinople, the burning of the library at Alexandria, the Vandal and Mogul invasions, and the ravages...

How to tame Tehran.
March 22, 2004... Over the past year, Iran has become a major cause of concern in Washington. The Islamic Republic has been discovered to possess a robust nuclear program, of a scope well beyond previous estimates. It has also made substantial breakthroughs in...

Stealth Islamist: Khaled Abou El Fadl.
March 22, 2004... Which Muslims in the West support Islamism; which do not? Those who have Al-Qaeda connections or deal in terrorism are relatively easy to classify, once they are found out. The state has ways to investigate and punish illegal activities. In...

Islamism's campus club: the Muslim Students' Association.
March 22, 2004... The northern Virginia-based Muslim Students' Association (MSA) might easily be taken for a benign student religious group. It promotes itself as a benevolent, non-political entity devoted to the simple virtue of celebrating Islam and providing...

Sponsoring terrorism: U.S. Department of State.
March 22, 2004... Editors' Preface: In April 2004, the U.S. Department of State issued its annual Patterns of Global Terrorism, covering the year 2003. The annual report is simultaneously a political and an analytical document. Its basic purpose is to justify...

The Chatham House Version, yet again.
March 22, 2004... Editors 'preface: In 1970, Elie Kedourie published a collection of his essays under the title The Chatham House Version and Other Middle Eastern Studies. The volume took its Name from a new essay prepared especially for the collection, in which...

Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years after Oslo.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years after Oslo. By David Grossman. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003. 192 pp. $22. Grossman's new book brings to mind a 1930s British appeaser who had lauded the Munich accord and who published...

Escape from Slavery: the True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity--and My Journey to Freedom in America.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity--and My Journey to Freedom in America. By Francis Bok with Edward Tivnan. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003. 284 pp. $24.94. The year 2004 is the United Nations'...

Fire, Snow & Honey: Voices from Kurdistan.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Fire, Snow & Honey: Voices from Kurdistan. Edited by Gina Lennox. Sydney, Australia: Halstead Press, 2004. 678 pp. US $50. After Arabs, Turks, and Persians, Kurds are the fourth largest ethnic group of the Middle East. As events such as the...

Israel and Palestine Out of the Ashes: the Search for Jewish Identity in the Twenty-First Century.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Israel and Palestine Out of the Ashes: The Search for Jewish Identity in the Twenty-First Century. By Marc H. Ellis. London: Pluto Press, 2002.208 pp. 14.99 [pounds sterling]/$ 22.50, paper. Out of the Ashes purports to be a theological...

Jordan in Transition: From Hussein to Abdullah.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Jordan in Transition: From Hussein to Abdullah. By Curtis R. Ryan. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002. 159 pp. $49.95. With the signing of a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, King Hussein of Jordan signaled a readiness to move towards...

Lebanon's Second Republic: Prospects for the Twenty-first Century.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Lebanon's Second Republic: Prospects for the Twenty-first Century. Edited by Karl C. Ellis. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. 236 pp. $59.95. Lebanon ended the twentieth century as the world's only satellite state, with an...

The New Geopolitics of Eurasia and Turkey's Position.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... The New Geopolitics of Eurasia and Turkey's Position. By Bulent Aras. London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002. 110 pp. $24.50. The geopolitics of the Eurasian region and Turkish policy are important subjects, and this book would have made a...

Political Leaders and Democracy in Turkey.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Political Leaders and Democracy in Turkey. Edited by Metin Heper and Sabri Sayari. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002. 259 pp. $75. Heper and Sayari, two leading scholars of Turkey, offer a high-quality and ambitious study that presents...

Politics, Parties, and Elections in Turkey.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Politics, Parties, and Elections in Turkey. Edited by Sabri Sayari and Yilmaz Esmer. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2002. 237 pp. $55. Even though Turkey is the only secular, Muslim democratic country that has held free and fair...

Revolutionary Sudan: Hasan al-Turabi and the Islamist State, 1989-2000.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Revolutionary Sudan: Hasan al-Turabi and the Islamist State, 1989-2000. By J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins. Leiden: Brill, 2003. 300 pp. $96. This multifaceted scholarly analysis of Sudan's domestic and foreign politics during...

The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... The Rout Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars. By Douglas H. Johnson. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003. 234 pp. $54.95 ($24.95, paper). Johnson, a historian at Oxford University, deals with the subject of Sudan's tragic...

Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill. By Jessica Stern. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. 368 pp. $27.95. What explains religious violence? Harvard's Stern attempts to offer a reply by weaving a compelling narrative that...

Tricolor and Crescent: France and the Islamic World.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Tricolor and Crescent: France and the Islamic World. By William E. Watson. Westport: Praeger Press, 2003. 295 pp. $49.95. Watson surveys the sustained relationship between France and Islam, presenting a chronological historical narrative...

Turkish Islam and the Secular State: the Gulen Movement.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Turkish Islam and the Secular State: The Gulen Movement. Edited by M. Hakan Yavuz and John L. Esposito. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003. 280 pp. $17.47, paper. The Islamist political movement led by Fethullah Gulen in Turkey and...

War and Peace in Sudan: a Tale of Two Countries.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... War and Peace in Sudan: A Tale of Two Countries. By Mansour Khalid. London: Kegan Paul International (KPI), 2003. 536 pp. 85 [pounds sterling]. Khalid's career was abruptly cut off on July 29, 1978, when the barrister and senior figure in...

Spanish withdrawal.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2004... A statue in a Spanish cathedral showing St. James slicing the heads off Moorish invaders is to be removed to avoid causing offense to Muslims. Cathedral authorities in the pilgrim city of Santiago de Compostela, on Spain's northwest coast,...

Instant Arabic.(Last Word)
March 22, 2004... The American University in Cairo has an outstanding reputation, and it's expensive. The summer intensive Arabic program costs $2,900 for seven weeks of classes. Housing in the dorm was $1,200 because I didn't want to share a room. Air fare from...