MER Article Syria's Parliamentary Elections On May 22 and 23, 1990, Syrian voters were called to the polls to elect a new parliament, the fifth People’s Council (Majlis al-Sha‘b) since Hafiz al-Asad came to power in 1970. The new Majlis would consist of a total of 250 instead of the 195 members in previous councils. The official media made cl Volker Perthes • 12 min read
MER Article The Resilience of Algerian Populism Before October 1988, Algeria struck most observers as one of the most radical political regimes in the Third World yet one of the most stable, a strong “socialist” fortress firmly in the hands of the National Liberation Front (FLN). Comfortably backed by oil and gas exports, an expert technocratic elite Boutheina Cheriet • 17 min read
MER Article Human Rights and Elusive Democracy The practice of human rights cannot wait until all political systems have become democratic. Human rights, in their vast range, can be protected under non-democratic regimes and violated under democratic ones. Still, human rights and democracy, though not interchangeable, can form the most humane re Ahmed Abdalla • 8 min read
MER Article The Democracy Agenda in the Arab World Political liberalization, if not democracy, seems to be on Arab agendas. Algeria is about to conduct national elections that could alter the character of the regime there. Jordan’s monarchy must now take account of a parliament in which opposition forces have considerable sway, following the first elections in a The Editors • 10 min read
MER Article Letters SAID’S WAR ON THE INTELLECTUALS Edward Said’s interview with Barbara Harlow (MER 171) is an attempt to “dislodge” an array of opponents, ranging from “scholar-combatants” and “instant experts” to “native informants.” An important focus of the interview is the war’s repercussions on “the intellectua (Author not identified) • 18 min read
MER Article Graham-Brown, Images of Women Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East, 1860-1950 (Quartet, 1988). The invention of photography in 1839 coincided, Sarah Graham-Brown observes, with a vigorous phase of European global expansion. Egypt and Palestine were among early testing gro Maya Jaggi • 3 min read
MER Article Dangerous Asset Two major schools of interpretation seek to explain why the United States grants Israel an annual subsidy of nearly $4 billion and consistently supports Israeli militarism and expansionism. The domestic politics approach attributes the “special relationship” to the political and financial power of the Zionist lobby and Jewish influence in Joel Beinin • 4 min read
MER Article Bush Locks Horns with Shamir On January 21, six days into the US air war against Iraq, Israeli Finance Minister Yitzhak Modai took advantage of Washington’s praise for Israel’s “restraint” in the face of 11 Scud missile attacks to drop a bombshell of his own. Before the assembled Jerusalem press corps, he advised visiting Deput Jeffrey Blankfort • 5 min read
MER Article The Fall of BCCI Aga Hassan Abedi, the founder of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), talked a lot about starting an “ordinary” bank with an extraordinary mission. He never tired, and still does not, of expounding on his vision and ambitions, which became the bank’s credo and one that many (Author not identified) • 5 min read
MER Article New Writing On Women, Politics and Social Change Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the State (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991). Seteney Shami, Lucine Taminian et al, Women in Arab Society: Work Patterns and Gender Relations in Egypt, Jordan and Sudan (Oxford: Berg, 1990). Bouthaina Shaaban, Both Right and Left Handed: Arab Women Talk About The Sarah J Graham-Brown • 16 min read
MER Article Gender, Sexuality and the Iraq of Our Imagination Writings on colonialism and post-colonial portrayals of the Third World are rife with constructions of the Other as feminine, or as subject, like women, to the passionate irrationality, weakness, cowardice, traditionalism and superstition that mark the feminine as subordinate in Western discourse. I Anne Norton • 8 min read
MER Article Recording "Real Life" in Wadi Zayna Neither a village nor a suburb, Wadi Zayna is a collection of gray tenements straggling between two roads leading up from the coast road into the hills of Iqlim al-Kharoub, just north of Sidon. Palestinians displaced from camps in the south and Beirut during battles with the Shi‘i Amal movement (198 Rosemary Sayigh • 8 min read
