MER Article Editor's Picks (Summer 2015) Amiry, Suad. Golda Slept Here (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Bowering, Gerhard, ed. Islamic Political Thought: An Introduction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). Cuno, Kenneth. Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology and Law in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Egypt (Syracuse, N The Editors • 2 min read
MER Article Migrant Workers and the US Military in the Middle East Over the past 15 years, the United States has waged two major land wars in the greater Middle East with hundreds of thousands of ground troops. Shadowing these armies and rivaling them in size has been a labor force of private contractors. The security company once called Blackwater has played an ou Darryl Li • 14 min read
MER Article Status-less in Cyber City When refugees from the Syrian war first began to stream into Jordan, the Jordanian Ministry of Interior registered the newcomers and placed them in the care of families, under the kafala system, mainly in the capital of Amman. The kafala or guardianship system has roots in Bedouin customs, but in mo Maisam Alahmed • 6 min read
MER Article Send My Regards to Your Mother I. I sometimes refer to my college years in Saudi Arabia as “doing time.” But early in those years I did some time that almost did me in—and my mother, too. I had spent high school in Bahrain as a boarder. My father pressured me to attend university near our house in Dhahran, where he worked as a Zein El-Amine • 25 min read
MER Article The Moroccan Prison in Literature and Architecture In seventeenth-century Morocco, the scholar Abu ‘Ali al-Hasan Ibn Mas‘ud al-Yusi admonished the reigning Sultan Mawlay Isma‘il in writing. His much quoted letter, the “short epistle” or al-risala al-sughra, instructed the ruler to avoid injustice and oppression. Mawlay Isma‘il was second in line as Susan Slyomovics • 14 min read
MER Article Breaking the Silence of Tadmor Military Prison In 2001, following a general amnesty for several hundred political prisoners, the Syrian government reportedly closed its most infamous detention center—the Tadmor military prison. Human rights organizations, both local and international, had made Tadmor the subject of intense scrutiny from the 1980 R. Shareah Taleghani • 12 min read
MER Article Resistance Museum in Abu Dis In the shadow of the Israeli separation wall, and on the bucolic campus of al-Quds University in Abu Dis, a suburb of East Jerusalem, sits a museum dedicated to Palestinian prisoners of Israel. The Abu Jihad Museum for the Prisoners’ Movement is named after the Palestinian political prisoner and mar Alex Lubin • 3 min read
