MER Article Downveiling Veiling, particularly youth veiling, has captured the rapt attention of the Western media and scholarly community. Whether in France, Iran, Turkey or Egypt, veiling -- the adoption by women of Islamic dress (al-zayy al-islami) -- is often represented in highly ideological terms. Veiling has been explained as an assertion of Linda Herrera • 9 min read
MER Article Take Them Out of the Ballgame On January 2, 2001, newly elected parliamentary deputy and Muslim Brother Gamal Heshmat submitted an inquiry to Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni concerning the publication by the General Organization for Cultural Palaces (GOCP) of three novels containing what the MP described as "explicitly indecent material amounting to pornography." Samia Mehrez • 15 min read
MER Article The Joint Strike Fighter in the Middle East The Middle East dominates the world arms buying market, spending $82.5 billion on weapons from 1992-1999, virtually half the value of weapons bought worldwide during that period. [1] The United States, the region's largest arms supplier for decades, supplied 51 percent of that total, or $41 billion. Erik Floden, Luke Warren • 7 min read
MER Article An Uprising at a Crossroads More than eight months have passed, and over 500 lives have been lost, since the second intifada broke out in September 2000, but few, if any, of the uprising's original goals have been achieved. Instead, the iconic enemy of Palestinian nationalism, Ariel Sharon, was elected Israeli premier at Jamil Hilal, Rema Hammami • 15 min read
MER Article From the Editor (Summer 2001) This May's escalations in the long-since militarized confrontation in the Occupied Territories prompted the obligatory calls upon the US to intensify its diplomatic efforts. Secretary of State Colin Powell responded with the lackluster Mitchell Commission report and another attempt to broker a cease The Editors • 3 min read
MER Article Editor's Picks (Spring 2001) Ahmad, Eqbal. Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian (Boston: South End Press, 2000). Akash, Munir and Moore, Daniel, eds. Mahmoud Darwish: The Adam of Two Edens (Syracuse, NY: Jusoor/Syracuse University Press, 2000). Al-Ali, Nadje. Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: (Author not identified) • 1 min read
MER Article Economic Reform in Egypt Texts Reviewed Ray Bush, Economic Crisis and the Politics of Reform in Egypt (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). Nicholas S. Hopkins and Kirsten Westergaard, eds. Directions of Change in Rural Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1998). Marsha Pripstein Posusney, Labor and the State i Agnieszska Paczynska • 5 min read
MER Article "This Time I Choose When to Leave" Fatna El Bouih was born July 10, 1955, in Benahmed, a village in Settat province. In 1971, she received a boarder's scholarship to Casablanca's prestigious girls' high school, Lycée Chawqi, and became active in the national union of high school students (Syndicat National des Elèves). Arrested the f Susan Slyomovics • 4 min read
MER Article Sahrawi Demonstrations Within two months of the death of King Hassan II and the enthronement of his eldest son, King Mohammed VI in July 1999, a series of demonstrations erupted in the Western Sahara. This territory has been administered by the Kingdom of Morocco since 1976, though Morocco’s claim of sovereignty in the We John Damis • 9 min read
MER Article From Madrasa to Maison d'hote There’s a Moroccan expression similar to the English expression “the apple never falls far from the tree.” In Morocco, it’s phrased as a rhetorical question: “Where does wood come from? From the tree.” A year and a half after King Mohammed VI’s ascension to the throne, many Moroccans are wondering j Geoffrey D. Porter • 10 min read
MER Article Networks of Discontent in Northern Morocco What are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang is a group of men under the command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention. If this villainy wins so many recruits James Ketterer • 13 min read
MER Article Risking the Strait Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants. And the men of the towns and of the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves; and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man Gregory White • 12 min read
