MER Article Editor's Picks (Spring 2007) B’Tselem. Act of Vengeance: Israel’s Bombing of the Gaza Power Plant and Its Effects (Jerusalem, September 2006). B’Tselem. Barred from Contact: Violation of the Right to Visit Palestinians Held in Israeli Prisons (Jerusalem,September2006). Eyal, Gil. The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in (Author not identified) • 1 min read
MER Article Thinner Than Air Rachel Bronson, Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) Robert Vitalis • 6 min read
MER Article Comrades and Brothers Emad Mubarak is a busy man. Director of the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, and a lawyer with the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, the leftist Mubarak cannot hold a meeting without being interrupted by the ring of his cell phone. The calls these days come from student members of the Mus Hossam El-Hamalawy • 12 min read
MER Article The Battle Over Family Law in Bahrain On November 9, 2005, over 100,000 protesters—approximately one seventh of the Kingdom of Bahrain’s population—flooded the streets of the capital, Manama. Most of the protesters were Shi‘a demonstrating their resistance to the government’s campaign to implement a codified family law, announced a mont Sandy Russell Jones • 21 min read
MER Article Saudi Arabia's Not So New Anti-Shi`ism Enmity for the Shi‘a in Saudi Arabia, never entirely absent, has become increasingly strident in 2006 and early 2007. The empowerment of the Iraqi Shi‘a and the bloody escalation of Sunni-Shi‘i violence in Iraq have intensified sectarian animosity around the Middle East, but in Saudi Arabia the host Toby Jones • 9 min read
MER Article Basra, the Reluctant Seat of "Shiastan" On December 24, 2005, an Iraqi writing under the signature “Hammad” published a remarkable message on a website devoted to southern Iraqi affairs: Reidar Visser • 19 min read
MER Article The Lebanese Impasse On November 11, 2006, the six Shi‘i ministers in the Lebanese government, affiliates of Hizballah and the Amal movement, left the cabinet in protest of their colleagues’ rejection of their demand for a government of “national unity.” Such a government would give the Shi‘i parties and their Christian Fawwaz Traboulsi, Elias Khoury • 8 min read
MER Article Louder Than Bombs Political posters and banners are not new in Beirut. Activists have long hung portraits of party leaders or hastily spray-painted party symbols to claim territory, mark special events or simply insist on being recognized. At certain city intersections, these images are nearly always layered thickly, Lara Deeb • 4 min read
MER Article Deconstructing Hizballah and Its Suburb During the Israeli war against Hizballah in the summer of 2006, the innocuous Arabic word dahiya, meaning simply “suburb,” achieved an unprecedented notoriety. For several days, Israeli warplanes pounded one particular dahiya, the southern suburb of Beirut, whose neighborhood of Harat Hurayk contain Mona Harb • 14 min read
MER Article Signs of a New Arab Cold War During and after the 34 days of intense fighting between Hizballah and Israel in July and August 2006, observers advanced competing interpretations of the varied reactions in the Middle East. One popular narrative pointed to an emerging Sunni-Shi‘i divide in what one might label a “post-Arab” Middle Andre Bank, Morten Valbjorn • 15 min read
MER Article The Muslim World Is Not Flat This 1995 CIA map, often used in the media and in classrooms, reminds us that today Shi‘i Muslims are concentrated in only a few nation-states—Iran, Iraq, the Arab Gulf states, Azerbaijan and Lebanon in the Middle East, and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India in South Asia. There are also numerous ‘Alaw Arang Keshavarzian • 2 min read
MER Article From the Editor (Spring 2007) Twin specters hang over the Middle East of the American imagination -- the perceived rise in the geopolitical power of the region’s Shi‘i Muslims and the dark shadow cast by the sectarian reprisals that increasingly propel the Iraqi civil war. In the United States, pundits and Democratic presidential The Editors • 15 min read
