MER Article Letter (Fall 2011) Rochelle Davis’ “Culture as a Weapon” (MER 255) presents the wrong question, answered incorrectly. In her piece the US military appears both incapable of teaching service members to interact with civilians and unworthy of making such attempts. Davis concludes that military efforts at understanding c (Author not identified) • 1 min read
MER Article Editor's Picks (Fall 2011) Ahmed, Leila. A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence from the Middle East to America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). B’tselem. Dispossession and Exploitation: Israel’s Policy in the Jordan Valley and Northern Dead Sea (Jerusalem, May 2011). Dalacoura, Katerina. Islamist Terrorism (Author not identified) • 1 min read
MER Article Kuran, The Long Divergence Timur Kuran, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton, 2011). Readers looking at the title of Timur Kuran’s new book might be forgiven for thinking it had come from some pre-Orientalism time warp where it was still possible to make essentialist generalizations about Roger Owen • 4 min read
MER Article Media Wars and the Gulen Factor in the New Turkey Turkey’s experience in the twenty-first century is characterized, at least in part, by the efforts of a “conservative democratic” coalition against an eroding state class elite. Although led by the Justice and Development Party (AKP), this coalition is reliant upon the increased legitimacy of a new block of supportive Joshua D. Hendrick • 20 min read
MER Article The Grand (Hip-Hop) Chessboard In November 2006, the film The Making of a Kamikaze by Nouri Bouzid, a respected Tunisian director, was screened to great fanfare at the Carthage Film Festival. The film, a collaboration between the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Tunisian Ministries of Interior, Defense and Culture, examines the grievances Hisham Aïdi • 46 min read
MER Article Petrodollars at Work and in Play in the Post-September 11 Decade What does one do with a $1.3 trillion windfall? That was the cumulative value of current account surpluses that flushed into the Arab region from 2000 to 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund. The main source was hydrocarbon export revenues, thanks to the rise in demand for oil Karen Pfeifer • 21 min read
MER Article Bagram, Obama's Gitmo On President Barack Obama’s second day in office, one of the three executive orders he signed was a commitment to close the detention facility on the naval base at Guantánamo Bay as soon as possible but no later than one year thence. An inter-agency task force headed by White House counsel Greg Crai Lisa Hajjar • 28 min read
MER Article Lies, Damned Lies and Plagiarizing "Experts" The 9/11 Commission Report is the closest thing in print to an official narrative of the events that gave rise to the “war on terror.” In American political culture, the Commission embodied a trans-partisan act of knowledge creation, handing down a narrative meant to establish treasured national con Darryl Li • 3 min read
MER Article "Afghan Arabs," Real and Imagined During the holiday season of Ramadan 1425/October 2004, The Road to Kabul was one of the more popular television miniseries broadcast throughout the Arab world. The program traced recent Afghan history from one superpower invasion to another through a budding romance at Cambridge University between Tariq, a Palestinian pursuing Darryl Li • 13 min read
MER Article From the Editor (Fall 2011) In October 1970, a small group of anti-war activists gathered at a cabin in the deep woods of New Hampshire. Some were recently returned from Peace Corps billets in the Middle East. Others had worked in “peace church” offices in the region. The attendees were all young or youngish; they also had in The Editors • 2 min read
