MER Article War in the City Nothing stays new for long in the torpor of Beirut, where everything is worn out by so much violence. If the word “ruin” suggests a comparison with the remains of ancient Tyre or Pompeii, it shouldn’t be used to describe Beirut, not even the blasted remains of the central city. The age and monumenta Ahmad Beydoun • 11 min read
MER Article "Everyone Misunderstood the Depth of the Movement Identifying with Aoun" Mansour Raad is the pen name of an Arab journalist who recently left Beirut and has followed the Lebanese war closely. Joe Stork spoke with him in Europe in late November 1989. Who is Gen. Aoun and what does his “war of liberation” represent? Joe Stork • 11 min read
MER Article Confessional Lines Gen. Michel Aoun’s “war of liberation,” and the Syrian army’s obliging response, has left another thousand killed, thousands more injured, a third of the population transformed into refugees and the worst destruction and damage the country has suffered since 1975. Aoun tried to “convince” his Muslim Fawwaz Traboulsi • 6 min read
MER Article The Militia Phenomenon Even after 15 years, the Lebanese conflict has never taken the form of mass communal violence, of ethnic riots and massacres. There are no cases where the population of one neighborhood raided another, looting and killing. Exactly the reverse: Groups have found shelter from the fighting among other Salim Nasr • 1 min read
MER Article Lebanon's War Most of the already very large literature on the Lebanese conflict has focused on the etiology of Lebanon’s civil strife: its roots, causes, origins, antecedents and facilitating factors; its inherent or contingent characteristics. And, as one might expect, many conflicting readings and interpretati Salim Nasr • 13 min read
MER Article From the Editors The government of Israel fiercely maintains its rejectionist stance toward any political accommodation with the Palestine Liberation Organization. This is not merely a diplomatic posture, but undergirds the ideological structure of its policies of dispossession and occupation. Ha’aretz reported last The Editors • 2 min read
MER Article Editor's Bookshelf Dipesh Chakrabarty’s well-documented, theoretically informed, innovative history of the jute mill workers of Bengal, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), poses this central question: “Can…third-world countries like India…build democratic, Joel Beinin • 4 min read
MER Article Bennoune, The Making of Contemporary Algeria Mahfoud Bennoune, The Making of Contemporary Algeria, 1830-1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.) Mahfoud Bennoune has written a rich and highly informative book on the political economy of Algeria, both under colonial rule and since independence. The Making of Modern Algeria is a thou Rachid Tlemcani • 4 min read
MER Article Sharabi, Neopatriarchy Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Values in Arab Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.) Peter Gran • 3 min read
MER Article Mediations Intifada Chic We’re not really sure what this tells us about the present state of the Israeli Jewish psyche, almost two years into the intifada, but here are some of the designer T-shirts being sold these days in Jerusalem: Al Miskin • 3 min read
MER Article Khartoum Diary July 25 The predawn landing, with the swollen Nile below and a touch of freshness in the air, feels reassuring after two years away from Sudan. But at the airport exit a nervous officer holds back the passengers: security is tight since the inqilab, he mutters, using the Arabic word for “overthrow” Ann Lesch • 8 min read
MER Article Sudan's Killing Fields In 1988 Sudan reaped its best harvest in at least a decade, yet as many as half a million Sudanese may have died of starvation. Most were victims of the civil war raging in the southern provinces, and anarchy in the west. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled the war zones, seeking refuge in cam Jay O'Brien • 12 min read
