MER Article Editor's Picks (Summer 2001) Amin, Galal. Whatever Happened to the Egyptians? Changes in Egyptian Society from 1950 to the Present (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000). Brumberg, Daniel. Reinventing Khomeini: The Struggle for Reform in Iran (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). B’Tselem, Illusions of Rest The Editors • 1 min read
MER Article In the Shadow of Kurdish The arrest of Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the militant Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), at the beginning of 1999 and the almost instantaneous wave of protest across Europe, in Australia and later within Turkey briefly increased the prominence of the Kurdish struggle for autonomy in Turkey. As one o Joan Smith/Kocamahhul • 11 min read
MER Article Challenging the Embargo What impresses one is the will to ignore and reduce the Arabs that still exists in many departments of Western culture, and the unacceptable defeatism among some Arabs that a resurgent religion and indiscriminate hostility are the only answers. — Edward Said (1990) Hosam Aboul-Ela • 9 min read
MER Article Arab "World Music" in the US “World music,” defined as “a marketing term describing the products of musical cross-fertilization between the north -- the US and Western Europe -- and south,” [1] attracts a growing audience in the US. Since the mid-1980s, this term has come to incorporate just about any music of non-European origin Ted Swedenburg • 13 min read
MER Article Nature Has No Culture In April 2000, Abbas Kiarostami received the Akira Kurosawa Lifetime Achievement Award at the San Francisco Film Festival. While in the United States, Kiarostami visited New York City, where the Andrea Rosen Gallery mounted the first US exhibition of Kiarostami’s photographs. The photographs, which Anthony Shadid, Shiva Balaghi • 6 min read
MER Article Iranian Cinema Following the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the inauguration of the Islamic Republic, many predicted that new restrictions would kill off Iran's cinema. But Iranian film has survived, undergoing remarkable transformations in parallel with the wider changes in Iranian culture and society. Today, Ira Ziba Mir-Hosseini • 9 min read
MER Article How "Berber" Matters in the Middle of Nowhere In the High Atlas valley of the Agoundis, less than 100 kilometers from Marrakesh’s international airport, the lives of Berber-speaking farmers move in what seems a timeless rhythm. Men manipulate intricate stone canals, drawing water to steeply terraced plots of barley. Women in bangles and bright scarves lash David Crawford • 14 min read
MER Article Downveiling Veiling, particularly youth veiling, has captured the rapt attention of the Western media and scholarly community. Whether in France, Iran, Turkey or Egypt, veiling -- the adoption by women of Islamic dress (al-zayy al-islami) -- is often represented in highly ideological terms. Veiling has been explained as an assertion of Linda Herrera • 9 min read
MER Article Take Them Out of the Ballgame On January 2, 2001, newly elected parliamentary deputy and Muslim Brother Gamal Heshmat submitted an inquiry to Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni concerning the publication by the General Organization for Cultural Palaces (GOCP) of three novels containing what the MP described as "explicitly indecent material amounting to pornography." Samia Mehrez • 15 min read
