MER Article Political Islam Under Attack in Sudan Through binoculars I can see clouds of reddish-brown dust billowing behind a Toyota pickup racing across the burnt savannah. A Dashka .50-caliber machine gun is mounted on its back. Crouched around me are a dozen guerrillas armed with AK-47s, hand grenades and light machine guns. The mood is casual, but Dan Connell • 9 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 Islamic Karim El-Gawhary • 7 min read
MER Article What Does the Gama'a Islamiyya Want? Tal‘at Qasim got his start in al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya [1] (the Islamic Group) in the 1970s when it took control of many student organizations in the Egyptian universities. He led the student union in Minya, a hotbed of the Islamist movement, and later was a founding member of the majlis al-shura (gov Hisham Mubarak • 18 min read
MER Article Women's Organizations in Kuwait Women’s groups, like all voluntary associations in Kuwait, are controlled and funded by the state. They have elected boards, written constitutions and paid memberships. Law 24 of 1962 governing the activity of associations -- partially amended in 1965 and still in force -- gives the Ministry of Soci Haya al-Mughni • 10 min read
MER Article On Gender and Citizenship in Turkey In the summer of 1993, True Path Party delegates -- 99.8 percent of them males -- selected Tansu Çiller as chairperson of their party and thus their candidate for prime minister. For the first time since 1934, when women gained the right to vote and to be elected to Parliament, a woman became prime Yesim Arat • 9 min read
MER Article Shari'a of Civil Code? Egypt's Parallel Legal Systems Egyptian courts have increasingly become a site of political struggle between Islamists and secularists. In a state that restricts political parties and open political debate, courts are now one of the main venues for political expression for groups such as the Muslim Brothers. In the last few years Karim El-Gawhary • 7 min read
MER Article The Most Obscure Dictatorship The camera avoids faces, except those of the plainclothes police. The black-and-white images are hazy, jumpy. They evoke the antiquated style of negatives that have escaped the censor and customs searches. “This could be any country,” says the commentator -- Chile under Gen. Pinochet, or Burma under Alain Gresh • 16 min read
Recent Books on Palestinian Society Marianne Heiberg and Geir Ovensen et al, Palestinian Society in Gaza, West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem: A Survey of Living Conditions (FAFO, 1993). Ziad Abu-Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad (Indiana, 1994). Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. M Ellen Fleischmann • 6 min read
God Power Donald Hannan Akenson, God’s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel and Ulster (Cornell, 1992). Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World (trans. Alan Braley) (Pennsylvania State, 1994). Hilton Obenzinger • 7 min read
Islamist Party Poised for National Power in Turkey In Turkey’s March 1994 local elections, the pro-Islamist Refah (Welfare) Party won 19 percent of all votes nationwide. This was almost equivalent to the roughly 20 percent each of the government party (True Path) and of the major opposition party (Motherland), and significantly higher than the 13 pe Haldun Gulalp • 8 min read
Report from a War Zone From the outside, they give a friendly impression, the villages around the small Egyptian city of Mallawi, four hours by train south of Cairo. The Nile waters flow serenely to the north. Only the chatter of the colorfully dressed women doing their laundry together on the riverbank breaks the silence Karim El-Gawhary • 7 min read
MER Article Algeria's Battle of Two Languages As the cancellation of Algeria’s electoral process reaches its third anniversary this January, the conditions for a political settlement between the Islamist groups and the army-backed government are becoming exceedingly complicated. Even if the “moderate” voices within both the established order an Abdeslam Maghraoui • 12 min read
