MER Article Letter (July/August 1988) I would appreciate your publishing in Middle East Report the information that Zed Books has agreed to withdraw from circulation and pulp all remaining copies of Bantustan Gaza by Richard Locke and Anthony Stewart. This action has been taken at my request on the grounds that substantial portions of t (Author not identified) • 1 min read
MER Article Editor's Bookshelf (July/August 1988) The defeat of the Arab states in the June 1967 war was more than a military setback. It was also a blow against the radical nationalist project and its modern and secular cultural orientation which bonded the Arab world and the West even as it provided a framework for resistance to Western economic, Joel Beinin • 5 min read
MER Article Lessing, The Wind Blows Away Our Words Doris Lessing, The Wind Blows Away Our Words (London: Picador and NY: Random House, 1987). The travel book that touches on the political is a tricky genre. At its best it enables the author, freed from the constraints of formal narrative and factual analysis, to present a special insight into a Fred Halliday • 2 min read
MER Article Bayat, Workers and Revolution in Iran Asef Bayat, Workers and Revolution in Iran: A Third World Experience of Workers’ Control (London: Zed Press, 1987.) The participation of workers in the anti-shah struggle, the rise of factory councils in 1979 and 1980, and their battles with the new Islamic state over workers’ control and other Val Moghadam • 1 min read
MER Article Dorman and Farhang, The US Press and Iran William Dorman and Mansour Farhang, The US Press and Iran: Foreign Policy and the Journalism of Deference (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). Ervand Abrahamian • 4 min read
MER Article Apprehensions of Islam Bruno Etienne, L’islamisme radical (Paris: Hachette, 1987.) Gilles Kepel, Les banlieues de l’islam: naissance d’une religion en France (Paris: Seuil, 1987.) Michael Gilsenan • 14 min read
MER Article Birth (Al-Maulid) BIRTH (AL-MAULID) Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhoub (1921-1982) Hand on the Prophet, God Help and support me with him who speaks for the people on Judgment Day -- with him who drinks pure water from al-Kauthar, Paradise river. On the square’s other side clear light spreads a rainbow of hope and jo Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhoub • 2 min read
MER Article Document: Ismail Besikci on State Ideology and the Kurds Turkish sociologist Ismail Beşikçi, the country’s foremost authority on Kurds, was born in Çorum in 1939. He recounts meeting Kurds for the first time as a student at Ankara University’s Faculty of Political Science. Later he spent time in Turkey’s eastern provinces as a student and during his milit (Author not identified) • 3 min read
MER Article Democracy and the Kurds The Kurdish issue has become a daily staple of the Turkish press. At first focused on PKK atrocities, coverage now allows many people to get a clearer view of the conditions facing the country’s Kurdish citizens. Articles and interviews with tribal leaders, pro-government militia, local party leader Ömer Karasapan • 2 min read
MER Article Between Guerrilla Warfare and Political Murder The most spectacular development of the past several years in Turkey’s Kurdish provinces has been the resumption, in the late summer of 1984, of guerrilla activity. The attacks consist mainly of hit-and-run actions against military personnel and against Kurdish civilians considered “traitors” or “co Martin Van Bruinessen • 18 min read
MER Article What Happened in Soviet Armenia? Early in 1988, the southern Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan witnessed large-scale political demonstrations and ethnic clashes. Renewed demonstrations and street confrontations in mid-May led to the dismissal of the Communist Party chiefs in both republics. Joe Stork spoke to Ronald Grigor Joe Stork • 9 min read
MER Article Egypt: A New Secularism? Arab political and social thought in the 1960s was dominated by secular conceptions, including Arab nationalism, Arab socialism and Marxism. Even after the 1967 war, when the attraction of these ideologies began to wane, the immediate “self-criticism after the defeat” (to cite the title of Sadiq al- Alexander Flores • 12 min read
