MER Article Media Matters in Pakistan Imran Aslam, a senior Pakistani journalist, is president of Geo TV Network, where he oversees content for Geo News, Geo Entertainment, Aag (a youth channel) and Geo Super (sports). In 1983, he became the editor of The Star, an evening newspaper that blazed a trail in investigative journalism during the Kamran Asdar Ali • 11 min read
MER Article Pakistan’s Collateral Damage from the Wars in Afghanistan In late November 2008, international media attention was riveted by a series of highly orchestrated attacks across India’s financial capital, Mumbai, which left at least 173 people dead and hundreds more injured. The only attacker taken alive by Indian security forces disclosed his membership in Lashkar-e-Tayaba, the militant wing Humeira Iqtidar • 9 min read
MER Article The Afghan Triangle The Pakistani army’s operation in the Swat Valley in northwest Pakistan is the most sustained in five years of selective counterinsurgency against the local Taliban. The toll already is immense: 1.9 million internally displaced, including tens of thousands housed in tents on parched plains; 15,000 s Graham Usher • 13 min read
MER Article American Torture Starting with the publication of the Abu Ghraib photos in April 2004, [1] there has been a steady cascade of revelations about the Bush administration’s brutal and dehumanizing interrogation and detention policies. These days, the last refuge for die-hard deniers is the euphemization that “enhanced interrogation” is not “torture. Lisa Hajjar • 15 min read
MER Article Dubai Glitzy Dubai, long considered the new Monte Carlo or the Las Vegas of the Middle East, has suffered one of the worst crash landings of this global recession. Dubai might be considered a bellwether of the global credit crunch. Until recently touted as a beacon of progress in an otherwise Christopher M. Davidson • 11 min read
MER Article The Many Cyprus Problems The poet T. S. Eliot called April the cruelest month, the month of change, the month when memory collides with desire. In Cyprus, April has become not only the month of cyclical changes, but the month of decisive ones. In April 2003, the checkpoints dividing the island since the 1974 Rebecca Bryant • 15 min read
MER Article From the Editors (Summer 2009) At least 60 people were killed in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan on June 23 by a US drone attack. The dead were among those attending a funeral for a suspected Taliban commander who, along with six other people, had been killed by a drone earlier that day. Since The Editors • 5 min read
MER Article Editor's Picks (Spring 2009) Abdel-Latif, Omayma. In the Shadow of the Brothers: The Women of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 2008). Al-Ali, Nadje and Nicola Pratt. What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (Berkeley, CA: University of Califor The Editors • 2 min read
MER Article Elizabeth Warnock Fernea I recently visited a small Turkish village that seemed in many ways similar to the 1950s Iraqi village Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, known to her friends as B.J., described in her now classic ethnography, Guests of the Sheikh, from the muddy lanes to the daily lives of its men and women. Having just lea Jenny White • 3 min read
MER Article Activism Under the Radar Few would disagree that the 1979 Iranian revolution, despite the massive participation of women, rapidly became a catastrophe for women’s legal status and social position. Under the Shah, Iran had a mildly forward-looking family law limiting men’s rights to polygamy and unilateral divorce, and, at least theoretically, basing Homa Hoodfar • 14 min read
MER Article Foot Soldiers of the Islamic Republic’s “Culture of Modesty” “Simplicity has disappeared,” laments Minoo Shahbazi, energetic at 50, and animated in the cheap manteau and black scarf she wears beneath her chador. Look at her 16-year old son, she says: “He likes to wear famous brand-name clothes. Obviously, I do not agree. He is very different from me.” Fatemeh Sadeghi • 16 min read
MER Article The Islamic Republic's Failed Quest for the Spotless City It is characteristic of modern social revolutions to seek moral improvement of the population, as well as redress of the injustices of the ancien regime. In 1794, Paris echoed with calls to “righteousness”; in 1917, the Bolsheviks denounced the bourgeois decadence of the czarist era. For Ayatollah R Azam Khatam • 14 min read
