She Came from Kasaba

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 582-585
Author(s):  
Leslie Hakim-Dowek
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Modal Approach ◽  
History Of

As in Marianne Hirsch’s (2008) notion of ‘devoir de memoire’, this poem-piece, from a new series, uses the role of creation and imagination to strive to ‘re-activate and re-embody’ distant family/historical transcultural spaces and memories within the perspective of a dispersed history of a Middle-Eastern minority, the Sephardi/Jewish community. There is little awareness that Sephardi/Jewish communities were an integral part of the Middle East and North Africa for many centuries before they were driven out of their homes in the second half of the twentieth century. Using a multi-modal approach combining photography and poetry, this photo-poem series has for focus my female lineage. This piece evokes in particular the memory of my grandmother, encapsulating many points in history where persecution and displacement occurred across many social, political and linguistic borders.

Situating Tribes in History: Lessons from the Archives and the Social Sciences

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-476
Author(s):  
Nadav Samin
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Official Records

The tribe presents a problem for the historian of the modern Middle East, particularly one interested in personalities, subtleties of culture and society, and other such “useless” things. By and large, tribes did not leave their own written records. The tribal author is a phenomenon of the present or the recent past. There are few twentieth century tribal figures comparable to the urban personalities to whose writings and influence we owe our understanding of the social, intellectual, and political history of the modern Middle East. There is next a larger problem of record keeping to contend with: the almost complete inaccessibility of official records on the postcolonial Middle East. It is no wonder that political scientists and anthropologists are among the best regarded custodians of the region's twentieth century history; they know how to make creative and often eloquent use of drastically limited tools. For many decades, suspicious governments have inhibited historians from carrying out the duties of their vocation. This is one reason why the many rich and original new monographs on Saddam Hussein's Iraq are so important. If tribes are on the margins of the records, and the records themselves are off limits, then one might imagine why modern Middle Eastern tribes are so poorly conceived in the scholarly imagination.

The Middle Eastern Shift and Provincializing Zionism

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 577-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orit Bashkin
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Greek Orthodox ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of ◽  
Middle East Studies

Scholars working on Jewish communities in the Middle East are in the midst of an important historiographical moment, in which the major categories, historical narratives, and key assumptions within the field are undergoing radical changes. A cluster of books and articles written by scholars trained in history, anthropology, and area studies departments, and published in Middle East studies rather than Jewish studies book series and journals, suggests that the study of Middle Eastern Jewish communities in the American academy is undergoing a change which might be termed “the Middle Eastern turn.” For such scholars, the history of Jews in Muslim lands, as modern subjects and citizens, is typified by a multiplicity of categories related to their identities—Ottoman, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Arab-Jewish, and local-patriotic—which they explore by looking at the political organizations and social and cultural institutions that enabled the integration of modern Jews into new imperial and national frameworks. This new scholarly wave is transnational, as it illustrates the importance of Jewish networks and Jewish languages in the Middle East, and likewise seeks to draw comparisons between Jews and other transregional and religious minorities, such as Armenians and Greek Orthodox Christians. It is interdisciplinary, as it attempts to incorporate the insights of sociologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars. Finally, it is postcolonial, in its critiques of national elites, national narratives, and nationalist histories. These new accounts uncover how processes which affected the entire Middle East, like Ottoman and Egyptian reform politics and the rise of nation-states, shaped modern Jewish lives.

The Middle East in World History

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Obert Voll
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
World History ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Other World ◽  
Specific Label ◽  
Broad Region

This article describes the role of the Middle East in world history. The Middle East is both a strategic concept and a geo-cultural region. As a concept and a specific label of identification, it is a product of analysts writing about twentieth-century world affairs. However, as a region, its peoples and cultures are associated with the history of humanity from ancient times. This regional name itself shapes a way of understanding the history of the broad region of Southwestern Asia and Northern Africa. Both of the terms in the name — ‘Middle’ and ‘East’ — identify the region in relationship to other world regions and reflect the importance of the region's involvement in broader global historical processes. Along with examining the history of the region, the discussion also notes how the concepts of the historical units involved in that history have changed in the presentations of the history of the Middle East.

scholarly journals Cross-species hybridization and the origin of North African date palms

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (5) ◽  
pp. 1651-1658 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan M. Flowers ◽  
Khaled M. Hazzouri ◽  
Muriel Gros-Balthazard ◽  
Ziyi Mo ◽  
Konstantina Koutroumpa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Date Palm ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Introgressive Hybridization ◽  
Nucleotide Polymorphisms ◽  
North African ◽  
Mixed Ancestry ◽  
History Of

Date palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.) is a major fruit crop of arid regions that were domesticated ∼7,000 y ago in the Near or Middle East. This species is cultivated widely in the Middle East and North Africa, and previous population genetic studies have shown genetic differentiation between these regions. We investigated the evolutionary history of P. dactylifera and its wild relatives by resequencing the genomes of date palm varieties and five of its closest relatives. Our results indicate that the North African population has mixed ancestry with components from Middle Eastern P. dactylifera and Phoenix theophrasti, a wild relative endemic to the Eastern Mediterranean. Introgressive hybridization is supported by tests of admixture, reduced subdivision between North African date palm and P. theophrasti, sharing of haplotypes in introgressed regions, and a population model that incorporates gene flow between these populations. Analysis of ancestry proportions indicates that as much as 18% of the genome of North African varieties can be traced to P. theophrasti and a large percentage of loci in this population are segregating for single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that are fixed in P. theophrasti and absent from date palm in the Middle East. We present a survey of Phoenix remains in the archaeobotanical record which supports a late arrival of date palm to North Africa. Our results suggest that hybridization with P. theophrasti was of central importance in the diversification history of the cultivated date palm.

The Middle East in World History: Spatial and Temporal Reorderings

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-148
Author(s):  
Carter Vaughn Findley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Academic Career ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
World History ◽  
Basic Research ◽  
First Year ◽  
Ottoman History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ex Nihilo

In addition to my primary research specialty in Ottoman history, I prepared to teach the history of the Islamic Middle East from my first year in graduate school onward, and I did so throughout my academic career, including preparing graduate students to teach Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern history. My start in world history came later. Around the time I got tenure, my department decided, for comically bad reasons, to create a single world history course on the twentieth century. Having never witnessed creation ex nihilo in a department meeting before, I volunteered for the course. The department's reasons for creating the course were farcical, but I recognized it as a valuable intellectual property. In the existing state of the pedagogical literature, no one had paused to analyze the issues that made the twentieth century into more than the last chapter of a comprehensive world history book. A couple of years later, just as we finished teaching the course for the first time, an editor came along and asked if I had ever thought about writing a textbook. Yes, I had thought about it. Only I had assumed many years would pass before anyone would ask. Such were the origins of my coauthored Twentieth-Century World, having gone through seven editions from 1986 until 2010. It would be an understatement to say that radical revisions were required for each new edition, given not only the lengthening chronology but also the often radical revisions and improvements in the literature. If this presentation sounds more like a memoir than a research paper, the reason is that my dual lives in Middle Eastern and world history interacted in the pedagogical realm, raising issues that redirected my basic research and theoretical inquiries along the way.

scholarly journals Development, Growth and Policy Reform in the Middle East and North Africa since 1950

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tarik M Yousef
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
World War ◽  
Development History ◽  
History Of ◽  
September 11 Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Economic Imbalances

The September 11 terrorist attacks ignited global interest in the Middle East. Observers in the region and abroad were quick to highlight the development “deficits” in Middle Eastern countries which have been linked to everything from structural economic imbalances to deficient political systems, the curse of natural resources, and even culture and religion. This paper reviews the development history of the Middle East and North Africa region in the post-World War II era, providing a framework for understanding past outcomes, current challenges and the potential for economic and political reform.

Reporting the Diaspora

2021 ◽  
pp. 621-641
Author(s):  
Yaron Tsur
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
The One

This chapter presents a historical typology of Jewish periodicals, beginning with Moses Mendelsohn and his pupils in eighteenth century Germany. Two main trajectories, distinguished by the extent of the periodicals’ openness to the surrounding society, characterized the development of the Jewish press—that of Western Jewish communities, on the one hand, and that of Eastern Europe and the Middle East and North Africa, on the other. Dividing modern and contemporary Jewish history into two periods of demographic turmoil (1880–-1945 and 1947–-2000), the chapter surveys the evolution of the Jewish press in various parts of the diaspora, paying particular attention to the role of demographic transformations in these developments.

Another Cartography is Possible: Relocating the Middle East and North Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-313
Author(s):  
Harun Rasiah
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
Liberal Arts University ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Student Demands

AbstractTeaching the history of the modern Middle East and North Africa at a small liberal arts university offered an opportunity to address student demands to “decolonize the curriculum.” As the survey course comes under increasing scrutiny, we asked where exactly is the Middle East located in our political imagination today? This essay focuses on the role of maps in rethinking geographic frameworks by using a seaborne perspective, that of the Mediterranean, Arabian and Red Seas (MARS) in contrast to the familiar Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

AL-AHBASH AND WAHHABIYYA: INTERPRETATIONS OF ISLAM

2006 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 519-538 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mustafa Kabha ◽  
Haggai Erlich
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
Active Participation ◽  
Significant Issue ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
The World ◽  
Islamic Countries ◽  
History Of

Islam is a universal religion and culture. Scholars who tend to focus on Islam in specific societies may overlook connections that, over the centuries, were important in shaping various Islamic intercultural dialogs. One case in point is the role of Ethiopia in the history of Islam. Although situated next door to the cradle of Islam, Ethiopia conveniently has been perceived by many Western historians of the Arab Middle East as an African “Christian island,” and as largely irrelevant. In practice, however, the Christian-dominated empire has remained meaningful to all Muslims from Islam's inception. It has also been the home of Islamic communities that maintained constant contact with the Middle East. Indeed, one of the side aspects of the resurgence of political Islam since the 1970s is the emergence in Lebanon of the “The Association of Islamic Philanthropic Projects” (Jamעiyyat al-Mashariע al-Khayriyya al-Islamiyya), better known as “The Ethiopians,” al-Ahbash. Its leader came to Beirut from Ethiopia with a rather flexible interpretation of Islam, which revolved around political coexistence with Christians. Al-Ahbash of Lebanon expanded to become arguably the leading factor in the local Sunni community. They opened branches on all continents and spread their interpretation of Islam to many Islamic as well as non-Islamic countries. This article is an attempt to relate some of the Middle Eastern–Ethiopian Islamic history as the background to an analysis of a significant issue on today's all-Islamic agenda. It aims to present the Ahbash history, beliefs, and rivalry with the Wahhabiyya beginning in the mid-1980s. It does so by addressing conceptual, political, and theological aspects, which had been developed against the background of Ethiopia as a land of Islamic–Christian dialogue, and their collision with respective aspects developed in the Wahhabi kingdom of the Saudis. The contemporary inner-Islamic, Ahbash-Wahhabiyya conceptual rivalry turned in the 1990s into a verbal war conducted in traditional ways, as well as by means of modern channels of Internet exchanges and polemics. Their debate goes to the heart of Islam's major dilemmas as it attracts attention and draws active participation from all over the world.

Middle East Studies in Japan

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-36
Author(s):  
Miyazi Kazuo
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Present Status ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
African Studies ◽  
North African ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Middle East Studies ◽  
The Relationship

The Purpose of this Paper is to present the history and the present status of Middle Eastern and North African Studies in Japan. As the status of the studies is closely related to the status of the relationships between Japan and the regions concerned, I will first write about the history of Japan-Middle East (including North Africa) relations and the relationship thereof to the studies.

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