Middle Eastern Studies articles from April 1997

Middle Eastern Studies archives from April 1997

Sir Frederic Goldsmid and the containment of Persia, 1863-73.
April 1, 1997... The maintenance of Persia as a buffer state was one of Britain's basic objectives in the Middle East during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (1) The hope was that an independent Persia would keep Russia comfortably away from the frontiers...

Seyyed Jamal Vaez and the Aljamal newspaper in Iran.
April 1, 1997... It is usually the intellectuals who first become aware of or develop novel ideas and hence acquire a desire for social change. In order to transmit their new perceptions and desire for change to the masses, they develop a sense of mission to...

The formulation of the Baghdad Pact. (1955 Turkish-Iraqi Pact of Mutual Co-Operation)
April 1, 1997... The formulation of the 1955 Turkish-Iraqi Pact of Mutual Co-operation, which metamorphosed soon afterwards into the short-lived five-power Baghdad Pact, is nowadays usually seen as the direct result of the initiative taken by the United States...

Myth in the desert, or not the Great Arab Revolt.
April 1, 1997... There is probably no more potent a myth in the annals of the modern Middle East than the so-called 'Great Arab Revolt' of the First World War. In Arab historiography, parroted by generations of unquestioning Western students, the revolt signifies...

Rural indebtedness and agricultural credit supplies in Palestine in the 1930s.
April 1, 1997... When the debts reach a certain figure, the fellah takes his bundle of bedclothes, along with his cooking pan and watercan, and if he is very fortunate, his small water jug and his shoes, and having loaded the whole onto his one...

The absorptive capacity of Palestine, 1882-1948.
April 1, 1997... The quandary of how one measures a country's absorptive capacity has captured the scholarly attention of behavioural science researchers and dates back to the days of Thomas Malthus. (1) Researchers who pursued the issue during the first half of...

Bridging myth and reality: the absorption of She'erit Hapletah in Eretz Yisrael, 1945-48.
April 1, 1997... From the end of the Second World War in May 1945 until the founding of the State of Israel in May 1948, some 70,000 immigrants--mainly Holocaust survivors--set sail for the shores of Palestine. (1) Two-and-a-half thousand of the illegal...

Quo vadis? Palestinian authority building dilemmas since 1993.
April 1, 1997... The signing of the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (DOP) and the Letters of Mutual Recognition exchanged between Israel and the PLO in September 1993 marked a new era in the history of the Middle East. The PLO...

Iraq: The Search for National Identity.
April 1, 1997... The contemporary phenomenon of political ethnicity, shattering apparently stable, well-integrated and cohesive polities into their individual component parts, has rendered the question of national identity rather problematic. For the peoples of...

Shi'ite Islam: Polity, Ideology and Creed.
April 1, 1997... Shi'ite Islam: Polity, Ideology and Creed by Yann Richard, trans. Antonia Nevill. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Pp.xiii + 241, glossary, bibliography, index. This study, a slightly altered version of the original French edition (L'islam chi'ite,...

A Journey to Persia: Jean Chardin's Portrait of a Seventeenth-Century Empire.
April 1, 1997... A Journey to Persia: Jean Chardin's Portrait of a Seventeenth-century Empire translated and edited by Ronald W. Ferrier. London: I.B. Tauris, 1996. Pp.xiv + 193. 25.00 [pounds sterling]. Jean Chardin was a Huguenot merchant who spent several...

British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688-1914.
April 1, 1997... British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688-1914 by P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins. London: Longman, 1993. Pp.xv + 504. 38 [pounds sterling] (hardback); 16.99 [pounds sterling] (paperback). Among the most striking aspects of Cain and...

British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914-1990.
April 1, 1997... British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914-1990 by P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins. London: Longman, 1993. Pp.xiv + 337. 30 [pounds sterling] (hardback); 11.99 [pounds sterling] (paperback). Among the most striking aspects of Cain and...

My Enemy's Enemy: Lebanon in the Early Zionist Imagination.
April 1, 1997... My Enemy's Enemy: Lebanon in the early Zionist imagination by Laura Zitrain Eizenberg. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994. Pp.219, index. $29 (hardback). This is a book about pre-state Zionist policy towards Lebanon and the Maronites...

Quest for Conception: Gender Infertility and Egyptian Medical Traditions.
April 1, 1997... Quest for Conception: Gender Infertility and Egyptian Medical Traditions by Marcia Inborn. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Pp.xxvii + 441, index (paperback). The struggle of poor urban Egyptian women against their...

Dictionary of Iraqi Judeo-Arabic Dialect.
April 1, 1997... Dictionary of Iraqi Judeo-Arabic Dialect by G. Yona-Swery and R. Rajwan, Jerusalem, Association for Jewish Academics from Iraq, 1995, pp.xvi + 348, no bibliography, 5 indexes. Since H. Blanc's 'discovery' of the Judeo-Arabic dialect in 1964,...

On the Margins: The Arab Population in the Israeli Economy.
April 1, 1997... On the Margins: The Arab Population in the Israeli Economy by Aziz Haidar. London: Hurst & Company, 1995, Pp.192, bibliography, index. 32.50 [pounds sterling] (hardback). In this comprehensive study which is based on widely collected...

The Arabs in Israel.
April 1, 1997... The Arabs in Israel by Ori Stendel. Brighton and Oregon: Sussex Academic Press, 1996. Pp.viii + 296. Whatever their legal rights, minorities always remain distinctive, which is only too true for the Israeli Arabs. Struggling for...

Children in the Muslim Middle East.
April 1, 1997... Children in the Muslim Middle East edited by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Pp.xvi + 477, photographs, tables, map. US$55.00 (hardback); US$22.95 (paperback). In this masterful collection of prose, poetry and...