scholarly journals Review of Jean Said Makdisi, Noha Bayoumi and Rafif Rida Sidawi (eds.), Arab Feminisms: Gender and Equality in the Middle East (Contemporary Arab Scholarship in the Social Sciences Series, Vol. 7), London: I.B. Tauris 2014, in association with The Centre for Arab Unity Studies, xxxvi + 440 pp., ISBN 978-1-78076-672-0

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-208
Author(s):  
Catharina Elizabeth van den Bogert
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Middle East ◽  
The Social

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.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-316
Author(s):  
Rabab El-Mahdi ◽  
Ellen Lust
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Arab Uprisings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Procedural Outcomes

The nation-state is in crisis. The increasing mobility of capital and information, unprecedented waves of people moving across borders, and rise of actors, such as ISIS, unwilling to abide by the rules of the Westphalian system, challenge the very notion of territoriality, citizenship, sovereignty, and the state's monopoly over the legitimate use of force. Studies on the Middle East and North Africa since the Arab uprisings took the region by storm, upending “conventional wisdom” held by many political scientists and scholars, have focused largely on the causes, genealogy, and procedural outcomes of the events. These are important, but as we shall see, the uprisings also highlighted the need to think carefully about how the modern state has changed, is being adapted, or has been superseded. How is the “state,” a foundational conceptual construct in the social sciences, to be located in light of these events? And to what extent do the concepts we employ and the language we use accurately reflect and allow us to interrogate realities, or do they obscure them? This roundtable aims to spark this much-needed discussion.

Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniella Talmon-Heller
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Sacred Places ◽  
Sacred Place ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
Mamluk Period

Focusing on the construction of sanctity and its manifestations in individual devotions, formal ceremonies and communal rites, this book offers a fresh perspective on religious culture in the medieval Middle East. It investigates Islamic thinking about and practice in sacred places and times through the detailed research of two contested case-studies: the shrine(s) in honour of the head of al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAli, and the (arguably) holy month of Rajab. The narrative spans the formative period of Islam until the late Mamluk period, attuned to changing political contexts and sectarian affiliations, and to the input of the social sciences and the study of religion. The juxtaposition of sacred place and time reveals that the two expanses were regarded as complementary venues for similar religious devotions, and imagined by a common vocabulary.

The Study of Political Unrest and Violence: The Middle East

1978 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-31
Author(s):  
Farhad Kazemi
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Unrest ◽  
The Sixties

The late Hannah Arendt once observed that “violence itself is incapable of speech, and not merely that speech is helpless when confronted with violence. Because of this speech-lessness political theory has little to say about the phenomenon of violence and must leave its discussion to the technicians;” (Arendt, 1963, p.9). This may have been true at the time of Arendt’s writing. The situation, however, dramatically changed when the violence of the sixties began in earnest. The academic market was soon lost in a maze of articles, books, and analyses of political violence from the perspective of not only political theory but practically every discipline in the social sciences and humanities. These new works supplemented the traditional and earlier studies of violence by the Marxist school and others. Thus by the turn of the decade, the student of political violence was faced with the difficult task of trying to evaluate and sift his way through an ever-expanding plethora of concepts, theories, definitions, explanations, and models of political violence which abounded in the field.

MAHMUD A. FAKSH, The Future of Islam in the Middle East: Fundamentalism in Egypt, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997). Pp. 148. $49.95 cloth. MAHMOOD MONSHIPOURI, Islamism, Secularism, and Human Rights in the Middle East (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998). Pp. 270. $55.00 cloth.

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 154-156
Author(s):  
QUINTAIN WIKTOROWICZ
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Science Inquiry ◽  
Middle Eastern Studies ◽  
The Social

Middle Eastern studies is frequently criticized in the social sciences for being atheoretical and descriptive. While it is effective in elucidating the complexities of societies, a lack of theory tends to isolate Middle Eastern studies from social-science disciplines, because it often lacks applicable frameworks or concepts that can be applied outside the region. A growing group of scholars is attempting to address this concern by integrating strong empirical area expertise and the rigor of social-science inquiry to enhance the explanatory power of research.

Three Approaches to the Cultural Anthropology of the Middle East

1971 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-53
Author(s):  
Richard T. Antoun
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Graduate Students ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Field Work ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Cultural Anthropologist ◽  
Culture Area ◽  
The Social

Apart from the fact that anthropology has long been considered the bastard of the social sciences and the stepchild of the humanities, it is quite appropriate that a syllabus in Middle Eastern anthropology should follow those on geography, political science, and history. I cannot think of a single cultural anthropologist of my acquaintance dealing with Middle Eastern materials who has not urged, if not insisted, that his students familiarize themselves with the geography of the area, its ancient, medieval, and modern history, its religions, and its languages. Since most cultural anthropologists do field work in ar least one culture area, and many do it in two, the latter requirement is usually met with some degree of proficiency by anthropologists themselves and their graduate students. However, despite the obvious relevance of such great religious traditions as Islam, Christianity, and Judaism to the study of particular communities and regions within the Middle East, the acquaintance of anthropologists (not to mention students) with historical and religious materials remains sadly deficient, if only because of the richness of the literature available.

Media Studies, the Spatial Turn, and the Middle East

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-48
Author(s):  
Hatim El-Hibri
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Place And Space ◽  
Arab Media ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Media

What questions do the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and the social sciences pose for the study of the media and culture of the Middle East? And how might attending to the spaces and spatiality of media in the Middle East help us to better understand the historical present? This article puts Middle East and Arab media and cultural studies into dialogue with an interdisciplinary literature that considers media as spatial and geographic phenomena. I examine how the question of space has arisen or might contribute to the study of media and culture in the Middle East by examining three areas of research in which that question has emerged: the place of media in domestic and public spaces and mobilities, the representation of place and space, and the geography of media industries and media infrastructure.

New Trends in the Use of the Computer for the Study of the Middle East

1975 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 16-26
Author(s):  
Phil Pritchard
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Computer Processing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Western Area ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Research ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Literary Methods

The use of the computer as a research tool for the study of the Middle East is a relatively new phenomenon. As the social sciences preceeded history and the humanities in making use of the computer, so have American and European studies preceeded non-Western area studies in this respect. Older, purely literary methods are still dominant in area-specialist journals, computerized and quantitative articles appearing in any quantity only in the journals dealing with the modern period or those which have begun publication within the past decade or two (see my article in the American Research Center in Egypt Newsletter, 93 [Fall 1975]). Much of the social scientific research done on the Middle East, has, in common with that done on Europe and America, involved routine computer processing and statistical analysis, but this material is also generally published in disciplinary journals where most area scholars never see it. Many students of the Middle East are therefore often unaware of the very existence, let alone the potentialities, of much of this new methodology.

scholarly journals Women and Photography

1970 ◽  
pp. 4-6
Author(s):  
Yasmine Nachabe Taan
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Women Photographers ◽  
The Social

This special issue of al-raida on Women and Photography addresses photography as a medium that challenges gender roles, positions, and attributes as seen in the mainstream media. It includes papers by contributors who examine the practice of women photographers in the Middle East as well as the different ways women are represented in photographs from a variety of perspectives that range from critical art disciplines to the social sciences.

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