MER Article Women and Work in Istanbul On the Asian side of the Istanbul lies a district which I will call Yenitepe. [1] At its center it is a teeming municipality of small shops and low-rise working-class apartments, but at its edge Yenitepe’s streets branch into a haphazard network of dirt roads threading together houses in Jenny White • 16 min read
MER Article The Egyptian Women's Health Book Collective The publication of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s famous and controversial book Our Bodies, Ourselves (1976) created wide repercussions and charted a way for women all over the world to gain personal control, through the possession of objective and necessary information, over their own Nadia Farah • 5 min read
MER Article Women and Public Participation in Yemen Although still old-fashioned when compared with their Levantine or North African sisters, constrained by patriarchal social structures, and limited in their earning capacities, Yemeni women play at least a token role in contemporary political and economic life. They may well be the most “liberated,” though not the most privileged, women Sheila Carapico • 3 min read
MER Article Women, Islam and the State Most commentary on gender and politics in the Middle East assigns a central place to Islam, but there is little agreement about the analytic weight it carries in accounting for the subordination of women or the role it plays in relation to women’s rights. [1] Using the Qur’an, Deniz Kandiyoti • 14 min read
MER Article Gender and Political Change ‘Aziza the Alexandrian is serving a life sentence in her women’s prison in Egypt for the murder of her mother’s husband. ‘Aziza, the main character in Salwa Bakr’s novel The Golden Chariot Won’t Ascend to the Heavens, assassinated this man who had seduced her as well as her mother, and then, followi Barbara Harlow, Julie Peteet • 10 min read
MER Article From the Editors When MERIP came together in 1971, it was with a purpose to integrate the Middle East into the progressive political agenda in the United States. Toward this end we began this magazine to provide information and analysis about the material conditions of Middle Eastern societies and to examine US poli The Editors • 2 min read
MER Article Ehrenfeld, Narcoterrorism Rachel Ehrenfeld, Narcoterrorism (Basic Books, 1990). Ever since the Reagan administration elevated “narco-terrorism” to the status of a national security threat, ideologists of left and right have staked out predictable positions. [1] Foes of Cuba, Nicaragua and other leftist regimes or movements Jonathan Marshall • 6 min read
MER Article Feminism or Ventriloquism Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds., Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (Indiana, 1990). Introduced by the editors as “the first collection of Arab women’s feminist writing,” Opening the Gates is both an important and problematic anthology. Following the basic format of two prev Zjaleh Hajibashi • 7 min read
MER Article Egypt from Outside and Inside In May the group of 17 states known as the Paris Club decided to forgive (in stages) half of Egypt’s $20.2 billion government-to-government debt. Earlier, the US had agreed to write off $7.1 billion of Egypt’s military debt, and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar canceled $6 bi Joel Beinin • 4 min read
MER Article Al Miskin Tikkun editor Michael Lerner’s noisome whining and waffling over whether or not to support US military action against Iraq lasted just about as long as the Gulf crisis itself. But at least Lerner never went all the way and fully endorsed Operation Thyroid Storm. The same cannot be said of a number o Al Miskin • 4 min read
MER Article An Interview with Francis Deng Francis Deng is a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School. He served as Sudan’s ambassador to Canada from 1980-1983, to the United States from 1974-1976 and to Scandanavian countries from 1972-1974. He Khalid Mustafa Medani • 9 min read
