Beyond the Ultra-Nationalist State The current debate on the compatibility of Arab-Muslim culture with Enlightenment ideals of rationality, democracy and tolerance is curiously devoid of historical reference. In the Arab world, the debates on democracy and progress regained momentum during the late 1970s, when the Islamist movements Isam al-Khafaji • 14 min read
MER Article A New Post-Cold War System? There was a short period, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the shape of the emerging post-Cold war system seemed quite clear. The disintegration of the Eastern Bloc would be complemented by further economic and political integration of Western Europe according to the Maastricht Trea Roger Owen • 11 min read
MER Article The New Orientalism and the Democracy Debate The “collapse of communism” in 1989 and the victory over Iraq in 1991 sparked a wave of triumphal declarations by Western pundits and analysts who believed that all “viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism” had now been exhausted and discredited. Some then tried to sketch a foreign policy Yahya Sadowski • 31 min read
MER Article Politics and Media in the Arab World Hisham Milhem is the Washington correspondent of the Beirut daily al-Safir. Born in Lebanon, Milhem has lived and worked in Washington since 1976. Joe Stork and Sally Ethelston spoke with him in Washington in September 1992. What are the salient features of the power structure of the Arab media? Wh Sally Ethelston, Joe Stork • 10 min read
MER Article Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Faber and Faber, 1991). This is a rich and profoundly satisfying book, the high-water mark of Albert Hourani’s long and influential career as a writer and teacher. Hourani’s gifts as a teacher, and the care and affection he has devoted to his students, Peter Sluglett • 5 min read
MER Article Layoun and Boullata Mary Layoun, Travels of a Genre: The Modern Novel and Ideology (Princeton, 1990). Issa Boullata, Trends and Issues in Contemporary Arab Thought (SUNY, 1990). Saree Makdisi • 4 min read
MER Article Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World Democracy has become a catchword of Middle Eastern politics, replacing in some ways the concern with Arab socialism of the 1950s and 1960s. Can a combination of political and economic liberalism, of multi-party democracy and a market economy, help Arab governments enhance their efficiency and acquire legitimacy? Will it reduce Gudrun Kramer • 12 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 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 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
MER Article "The Regime Has Simply Barricaded Itself in Khartoum" Bona Malwal was elected to the Sudanese parliament in 1968. He was minister for culture and information from 1972 to 1978 and minister of finance and economic planning for the south from 1980 to 1981. His English-language newspaper, the Sudan Times, was banned when the current regime seized power in Joe Stork • 9 min read
MER Article Harvest of War It takes two to make a war, and there were indeed two protagonists in making this war. On the one hand, there was the United States, which wanted the war for a number of reasons, primarily global: to consecrate its world hegemony, to liquidate any sequels to bipolarism, to marginalize Europe and Jap Fawwaz Traboulsi • 7 min read
