Middle Eastern Minorities and Diasporas: Moshe Mo'az and Gabriel Sheffer,eds.

Book reviewed in this article: Muslim Minorities in the West: Visible and Invisible: Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Jane I. Smith, eds.     

Imperial Dreams Prefigured: America and its Middle Eastern Urge

Book reviewed:
McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East.     

Things and the Slow Neolithic: the Middle Eastern Transformation

This paper argues that the search for an overarching explanation for the adoption of farming and settled life in the Middle East can be enhanced by a consideration of the dependencies between humans and human-made things from the Late Glacial Maximum onwards. Often not considered in discussions of the origins of agriculture is the long process of human tooth size reduction that started in the Upper Palaeolithic and can reasonably be related to the increased use of grinding stones that created softer and more nutrient-rich plant foods. A consideration of the use of groundstone tools through the Epipalaeolithic and into the Neolithic shows that they were entangled with hearths, ovens, houses and settlements, exchange relations and notions of ownership. The practicalities of processing plants drew humans into pathways that led to intensification, population increase, sedentism and domestication. Much the same can be said for other human-made things such as sickles, storage bins, domestic animal dung and refuse. The dialectical tensions between human-thing dependence and dependency generated the movement towards Neolithicization. Human-thing dependence (involving human dependence on things, thing dependence on humans and thing dependence on other things) afforded opportunities towards which humans (always already in a given state of entanglement) were drawn in order to solve problems. But this dependence also involved dependency, limitation and constraint, leading for example to increases in labour. In order to provide that labour or in other ways to deal with the demands of things and their entanglements with other humans and things, humans made further use of the affordances of things. There was thus a generative spiral leading to sedentism and domestication.     

Kuwait: Elections and Issues of Democratization in a Middle Eastern State

In 1992, elections were held in Kuwait to vote for the four-year assembly. The elections were essentially a compromise formula between two systems and political cultures in Kuwait: traditional hereditary rule and representative and modern forms. The successful conclusion of the election campaign, one of the most intensive in the history of Kuwait, may be the first step in the direction of much-needed political reform that may tilt the country more and more toward a true parliamentary system. The elections resulted in a victory for the opposition forces and their supporters, who together won thirty-five seats. For the first time in the history of Kuwait, government ministers can vote in parliament against a government-backed policy, should they feel the need to do so. Kuwait, as far as conditions allow today, is progressively shifting toward a parliamentary system. But, despite Kuwait's political steps forward, many questions and immense dangers still surround the democratic process.     

Private Body and Social Order: Problems of Sex among Pre-Modern Middle Eastern Jews

This article centres on a case that was brought to the Jewish court in Egypt around the middle of the seventeenth century. The protagonist was a man who was diagnosed with melancholy. The proposed cure, coitus, led the arbiter, Rabbi Mordechai Halevi, to discuss the ethical dilemma concerning its realisation, because the man's wife lived in Istanbul. The article contains two inter-related parts. The first analyses the legal case as a meeting of complementary interests. The second discusses the aetiology and the prevalence of two parallel diseases that were mentioned in the case: sperm-retention melancholy and suffocation of the womb. The article examines the social functions of these diseases, against the background of cultural perceptions of sexuality and gender in the Jewish communities of the pre-modern Middle East, thus shedding new light on patients as historical agents.     

Martin Amis,neo-Orientalism,and hubris

This article puts forward a reading of Martin Amis’s 2008 book The Second Plane with an emphasis on its cultural politics. It reconsiders Amis’s book from a distance of almost a decade in light of recent global developments, including the rise of ISIS in the Middle East, the resurgence of acute Islamophobia in Europe and the US, and Tony Blair’s public acknowledgement of the shortcomings of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. With these factors in mind, the essay argues that it is possible to detect in Amis’s book early warning signs of how the West’s relationship with both Islamism and Islam would develop in the period following its publication. Drawing on William Connolly’s work on tragedy and Edward Said’s work on Orientalism, the essay argues that The Second Plane ought to be read as advancing a hubristic ‘neo-Orientalist’ cultural and political agenda which today threatens to lock much of the world into an ongoing cycle of recrimination and revenge. Against this, a case is made for an appreciation of the complex circumstances which give rise to suicide terrorism and for a sense of history largely absent from Amis’s writing on the subject.     

The Eisenhower Doctrine in its American and Middle Eastern Contexts

Book reviewed:
Salim Yaqub. Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine in the Middle East . Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiii + 377 pp. Illus., maps, notes, bibliography, index. $59.95 (cloth), $22.50 (paper).