MER Article From the Editors (Fall 1996) This, our two-hundredth issue of Middle East Report, addresses the sensitive topic of minorities in the Middle East. The articles examine the relations of power that create and preserve or challenge and displace the politics of difference in a variety of contexts. National, ethnic, religious and sectarian differences make The Editors • 2 min read
MER Article Editor's Picks (Summer 1996) Abdalla, Ahmad. Parliamentary Elections in Egypt: What Elections? What Parliament? And Which Egypt? Amsterdam Middle East Papers 1/3 (Amsterdam, 1995). Adelson, Roger. London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power and War, 1902-1922 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). Appiah, The Editors • 2 min read
MER Article Marion Farouk-Sluglett We were deeply saddened to learn of the death of Marion Farouk-Sluglett on March 1 in Salt Lake City. Marion had been diagnosed with cancer just a year earlier, but up until a few weeks before her death she continued to teach and write. In early December, she traveled to Washington for the MESA meet Isam al-Khafaji, Joe Stork • 2 min read
MER Article Singerman, Avenues of Participation Diane Singerman, Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo (Princeton, 1995). Clarisa Bencomo • 5 min read
MER Article A New World Order, A New Marcel Khalife Marcel Khalife has always demanded a certain respect for his formal compositions when performing, interspersing his most popular songs featuring the phenomenal voice of Omayma al-Khalil with more symphonic, purely instrumental pieces. But during his last tour of the United States this insistence on his status as a composer Robert Blecher, Elliott Colla • 7 min read
MER Article Column: America's Sawt Al Sa'ud Boldly going where no one has gone before, the Clinton administration is busy renting out its broadcast studios to the Saudi king’s brother-in-law, whose new weekly call-in show, “Dialogue with the West,” airs inside the kingdom and in neighboring countries. The hour-long program is officially a joi Al Miskin • 2 min read
MER Article UN Impasse in the Western Sahara In his January 1996 report on the UN operation in the Western Sahara, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali expressed the Security Council’s “frustration...at the absence of even a reasonably clear indication of when the [referendum] process might come to an end.” This was one of Boutros-Ghali’s m (Author not identified) • 10 min read
MER Article Closures, Cantons and the Palestinian Covenant On April 24, 1996 -- Israel’s forty-eighth Independence Day -- PLO leader Yasser Arafat made good on his 1993 pledge to the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to amend “those articles of the Palestine Covenant which deny Israel’s right to exist.” In a historic decision, 504 out of Graham Usher • 12 min read
MER Article "We Are a Civil Party with an Islamic Identity" It came as a surprise to many when, in January 1996, a group of young Egyptian Islamists, mainly from the cadres of the outlawed but still active Muslim Brothers, announced the formation of a new Islamist party in Egypt. Al-Wasat, the founders claim, is a civil party with an Karim El-Gawhary • 7 min read
MER Article The Crisis of the Turkish State In early June, some 30,000 high-level diplomats, state delegations, specialists and academics from around the globe will gather in Istanbul for the century’s last world summit, the Second UN Conference for Human Settlement, or Habitat II. As the delegates come out of their sessions in the “conference Ertugrul Kurkcu • 14 min read
