Ruwayda: an historic urban settlement in north Qatar

SUMMARY: Ruwayda was first identified as an archaeological site in the 1970s and was excavated between 2009 and 2014. Despite a paucity of documentary evidence, this large settlement, which extends over an area of more than 90 hectares, contains a number of features indicative of an urban settlement including two mosques, a series of warehouses, a large multi-period fort, large courtyard houses interspersed with smaller, less substantial structures and a number of cemeteries. In addition to these buildings, there is also evidence for associated field systems and a walled garden.     

Tales from the old guards: Bithnah Fort, Fujairah, United Arab Emirates

This article examines the historical site of Bithnah fort, United Arab Emirates. Relevant historical sources were investigated, which highlighted the strategic importance of Bithnah's location in the Wadi Ham. A theoretical date was proposed for the site based on these historical references. The architectural features and material culture were combined with ethnographic information. This combination of sources allowed for a much clearer understanding of the fort's layout and interior use of space. It also provided a context for the village and agricultural space that surround the fortification of Bithnah.     

The War on Terror from the Perspective of Indonesia and Saudi Arabia

This article examines the perspective of two major Islamic nations—Saudi Arabia and Indonesia—toward the United States' War on terror and how this war shaped and influenced the behavior of the two Islamic governments toward domestic challenges and their partnership with the United States, as they have declared their support of the United States. Indeed the war against terror has developed several security concerns for both Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. However, each state has followed different methods to fight Islamic radical movements as well as a different framework of partnership with the United States on its war against terrorism.     

Location and Pricing Decisions of a MultiStore Monopoly in a Spatial Market

Abstract.  This article presents an analysis of location and pricing decisions of a monopolist about to open several stores in a compact geographical space. The number of stores is made endogenous by the introduction of fixed costs. A novel methodology is developed, by which the firm's location and price decisions are represented as continuous functions defined over the geographical space. This modeling artifact generates a negligible error but simplifies the solution considerably and allows the derivation of several intuitive results. Although the focus is on one‐dimensional markets, it is shown that the method can easily be adapted to two‐dimensional markets.     

Covering the Building of a Kingdom: The Saudi Arabian Authority in The London Times and The New York Times, 1901–1932

The orientalist literature subjected the Middle East in an exotic way — mostly as an “Arabian Nights” society ruled by traditional sultans and/or tribal chiefs — rather than modern governance structure's “bureaucracy.” The presumption within postcolonial scholarship has been that this perception influenced the policy landscape in the United States and Europe, especially the media depictions of the oriental leaders and leadership. The paper empirically tests this hypothesis through content analysis using Weber's categorization of leadership of two newspapers of record — The New York Times in the United States and The London Times in the United Kingdom — during the period of state building in Saudi Arabia (1901–1932). I find that rather than depicting the Saudi leadership as “backward,” these newspapers in particular, tend to overstate the development of the Saudi state during this period. As Weber is best known for his three types of authority, it benefits the discipline to see how the interpretive communities of Western journalists operationalized “authority” in terms of politics and religion of Saudi Arabia as this monarchy emerged.