MER Article Marion Farouk-Sluglett We were deeply saddened to learn of the death of Marion Farouk-Sluglett on March 1 in Salt Lake City. Marion had been diagnosed with cancer just a year earlier, but up until a few weeks before her death she continued to teach and write. In early December, she traveled to Washington for the MESA meet Isam al-Khafaji, Joe Stork • 2 min read
MER Article Singerman, Avenues of Participation Diane Singerman, Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo (Princeton, 1995). Clarisa Bencomo • 5 min read
MER Article A New World Order, A New Marcel Khalife Marcel Khalife has always demanded a certain respect for his formal compositions when performing, interspersing his most popular songs featuring the phenomenal voice of Omayma al-Khalil with more symphonic, purely instrumental pieces. But during his last tour of the United States this insistence on his status as a composer was Robert Blecher, Elliott Colla • 7 min read
MER Article Column: America's Sawt Al Sa'ud Boldly going where no one has gone before, the Clinton administration is busy renting out its broadcast studios to the Saudi king’s brother-in-law, whose new weekly call-in show, “Dialogue with the West,” airs inside the kingdom and in neighboring countries. The hour-long program is officially a joi Al Miskin • 2 min read
MER Article UN Impasse in the Western Sahara In his January 1996 report on the UN operation in the Western Sahara, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali expressed the Security Council’s “frustration...at the absence of even a reasonably clear indication of when the [referendum] process might come to an end.” This was one of Boutros-Ghali’s m (Author not identified) • 10 min read
MER Article Closures, Cantons and the Palestinian Covenant On April 24, 1996 -- Israel’s forty-eighth Independence Day -- PLO leader Yasser Arafat made good on his 1993 pledge to the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to amend “those articles of the Palestine Covenant which deny Israel’s right to exist.” In a historic decision, 504 out Graham Usher • 12 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 The Crisis of the Turkish State In early June, some 30,000 high-level diplomats, state delegations, specialists and academics from around the globe will gather in Istanbul for the century’s last world summit, the Second UN Conference for Human Settlement, or Habitat II. As the delegates come out of their sessions in the “conference valley” Ertugrul Kurkcu • 14 min read
MER Article From the Editors (Summer 1996) From June 4-14, tens of thousands of officials and experts from around the globe will gather in Istanbul for the Second UN Conference for Human Settlement (Habitat II), the last of the global UN summits. The non-official NGO gatherings should take the occasion to scrutinize how the attending states (Author not identified) • 3 min read
MER Article Editor's Picks (Spring 1996) B’tselem. Incidents of Death and Injury Resulting from Exploding Munitions Remnants (Jerusalem, 1995). Colonna, Fanny. Les versets d’invincibilite: Permanence et changements religieux dans l’Algerie contemporaine (Paris: Presse de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1995). Darweish, Ma The Editors • 1 min read
MER Article The Limits of Revisionist Imagination Michael Shalev, Labor and the Political Economy in Israel (Oxford, 1992). Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (Oxford, 1992). Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War (Clarendon Press, Rebecca L. Stein • 6 min read
