scholarly journals Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East

2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 129-132
Author(s):  
Safoi Babana-Hampton
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Legal Subject ◽  
Cultural Variables ◽  
Political Dimensions

The fourteen case studies that compose this volume address the variousinstitutional, economic, social, cultural, and political dimensions of thedebate on gender and citizenship in the Middle East. Using a crossculturalcomparative approach, the theoretical introduction as well as theindividual case studies seek to challenge dominant (especially western)feminist models of analysis of the question of gender and citizenship in theMiddle East. The validity of dominant feminist paradigms is questioned byintroducing new social and cultural variables, and putting at stake anumber of traditionally unquestioned or unrecognized modes of identityformation, such as kinship, family, tribe, and sects, which critically affect awoman's citizenship status. The volume purports to contest essentializingmyths about the Middle East that artificially give it a character of regionalcoherence, and homogenize the image of Middle Eastern women as acategory. The volume thus theorizes the gendering of citizenship from thelargely unexplored perspectives that open up from introducing the abovevariables, toward a better understanding of the complex nature of the laws(religious, political, patriarchal and patrilineal) governing the constructionof a gendered citizenship in the Middle East.The theoretical introduction to the volume outlines the dynamics of anumber of points of departure that presumably underlie the writing of the"legal subject in the Middle East," namely nations, states, religion, family.The contributors seem to all concede that "most Middle Eastern states havecemented the linkage between religious identity, political identity,patrilineality, and patriarchy-that is, between religion, nation, state, andkinship." The Middle Eastern countries studied in the volume are dividedregionally into four areas: North Africa (including Egypt, Algeria, Tunisiaand Morocco); Eastern Arab States (including Lebanon, Palestine, Jordanand Iraq); the Arab Gulf (including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Yemen); theNon-Arab Middle East (including Turkey, Iran, and Jewish and PalestinianArab women in Israel). The authors of the various case studies conductedan exhaustive investigation of the related topics, albeit with a notabledifference of outlook varying between liberal individualistic and communitarianconservative positions.The methodological approach adopted by various contributors draws ...

IRAN, SAUDI ARABIA AND TURKEY: EMERGING RELIGIOUS IDENTITY OF AZERBAIJAN

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 157-167
Author(s):  
Askar Battalov ◽  
Svetlana Kozhirova ◽  
Tleutai Suleimenov
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Political Factor ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Southern Caucasus ◽  
The Impact

The authors discuss the evolution of religious identity of Azerbaijan and the impact of Middle Eastern actors (Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey) on the process. Today, the pro-Islamic leaders of the Middle East are attempting, with the persistence that can hardly be overestimated, to move into the Southern Caucasus, one of the world’s strategically important regions. Thus, the uncompromising rivalry of religious ideologies is hardly surprising. It means that the national and religious identities of post-Soviet Azerbaijan have come to the fore in the context of Iranian-Turkic, Iranian-Arab and Shi‘a-Sunni confrontation. Today, there are enough drivers behind the already obvious awareness of their religious identity among young Azeris. The complicated search for national and religious identities in independent Azerbaijan is driven by an outburst of national and religious sentiments during the protracted Karabakh conflict and two wars with Armenia (in 1992-1994 and 2020). The process is unfolding under the huge influence of theocratic Shi‘a Iran, the closest neighbor with its twenty-five million-strong Azeri diaspora; proliferation of the puritanical Wahhabi teaching of Saudi Arabia and Salafism as its export variant throughout the Caucasus, and, last but not least, strategic rapprochement with Turkey that is moving away from nationalism towards Islamism. This has made Azerbaijan a fertile soil for a confrontation within the multipolar Islamic world, which is expanding the geography of its conflicts to the Southern Caucasus. The proxy wars in Syria and Iraq, in which the Shi‘a-Sunni confrontation is also obvious may destabilize the Caucasus in the future. Here the authors assess the impact of the Middle Eastern heavyweights—Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey— on the process of shaping the Azeri religious identity as an Islamic political factor.

scholarly journals Investigating the Implementation of Critical Literacy Approach in the Middle-East Education Contexts: Three Main Constraints

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 410-418
Author(s):  
Sadegh Rahimi Pordanjani ◽  
Laode Muhammad Firman Guntur
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Critical Pedagogy ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Critical Literacy ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Communicative Language Teaching ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
Teachers And Students

Critical literacy, which is derived from critical pedagogy and critical thinking, is crucial for teachers and students to acquire throughout their education. According to critical literacy approach, students are not only expected to read and write different texts but are also required to challenge, synthesize, analyze, and go beyond these forms of skills analytically and critically. With regard to reviewing various literature, this approach is not implemented effectively in the Middle East education systems due to some main obstacles. This paper is aimed at reviewing different literature and case studies in order to grasp these pivotal constraints that students and teachers encounter while learning and teaching in Middle-Eastern educational settings. The main purpose of this article is to review critically the domination of education by politics and religion, the lack of communicative language teaching approach, and the exclusion of teachers from making decisions as to the major impediments of enacting critical literacy in the Middle-east contexts.

Interrupting planetary urbanization: A view from Middle Eastern cities

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Azam Khatam ◽  
Oded Haas
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Political Citizenship ◽  
New City ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

This paper argues that the ‘city’ as a political entity is significant in struggles over the ‘urban’, by identifying two moments of ‘differential urbanization’ in the Middle East. Our study in Iran and Palestine/Israel shows that the vision of the ‘city’ as a legitimizing space for political citizenship is at the heart of conflicting imaginaries: in Iran, ‘cities of revolution’ built through housing the poor around Tehran, and redistributive politics that stand on filling the ‘rural/urban gap’, and in Palestine, the new city of Rawabi as a city of Palestinian independence, where privatized urban development contrasts colonial spatialities with anti-colonial potentials. Thus, the right to the ‘urban’ involves claims for the ‘city’ that go beyond the capitalist logic of urbanization. This theorization points to a troubling gap in the planetary urbanization thesis, which moves from collapsing the ‘urban/non-urban’ divide into ‘concentrated’, extended’ and ‘differential’ urbanization to diminishing the role of distinct sociospatial configurations in claims over the ‘urban’. Our case studies show that examining the reconfiguration of inherited spatialities in the context of particular political regimes is imperative for epistemology of the ‘urban’ in its planetary stage. Urbanization otherwise remains an uninterrupted process towards a non-spatial ‘urban condition’.

scholarly journals Women’s Voices in Middle East Museums: Case Studies in Jordan / Dreaming of Change: Young Middle-Class Women and Social Transformation in Jordan

1970 ◽  
pp. 115-121
Author(s):  
Shelagh Weir ◽  
Lucine Taminian ◽  
Feisal Yunis
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Inner Core ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Single Women ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Anthropological Literature

Women’s Voices in Middle East Museums: Case Studies in JordanDuring the past few decades museums have proliferated in the Middle East, not only in the wealthy oil states, but also in poorer countries and even (notably) within the dreadful constraints of occupied Palestine. Rulers and their officials want them for international prestige, to promote dynastic or nationalistic narratives, to attract tourists, and to provide educational facilities for their publics. Dreaming of Change: Young Middle-Class Women and Social Transformation inJordanIn her book Dreaming of Change, Droeber studies young single women of middle class background and higher education as a social group that has great influence on the direction that social and political changes are taking in Jordan. Youth, male and female, are under-represented in the anthropological literature on the Middle East, despite the fact that they constitute almost one third of the population of any Middle Eastern country. Al-Rujula wa Taghayyur Ahwal al-Nisa’ (Manhood and Women Changing Conditions of WomenAzza Baydoun is not the kind of social psychologist you often encounter in our world of academia. She is a woman with a specific mission: to delve deeply into the inner core of society, so as to uncover intensely held perceptions, beliefs, and behavioral orientations that affect the most important and the most troubled relationship: that between man and woman.

The “Christianization” of Israel and Jews in 1950s America

2004 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Mart
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Revival ◽  
The World ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Christian Family ◽  
Bible Stories

AbstractIn the 1950s, the United States experienced a domestic religious revival that offered postwar Americans a framework to interpret the world and its unsettling international political problems. Moreover, the religious message of the cold war that saw the God-fearing West against atheistic communists encouraged an unprecedented ecumenism in American history. Jews, formerly objects of indifference if not disdain and hatred in the United States, were swept up in the ecumenical tide of “Judeo-Christian” values and identity and, essentially, “Christianized” in popular and political culture. Not surprisingly, these cultural trends affected images of the recently formed State of Israel. In the popular and political imagination, Israel was formed by the “Chosen People” and populated by prophets, warriors, and simple folk like those in Bible stories. The popular celebration of Israel also romanticized its people at the expense of their Arab (mainly Muslim) neighbors. Battling foes outside of the Judeo-Christian family, Israelis seemed just like Americans. Americans treated the political problems of the Middle East differently than those in other parts of the world because of the religious significance of the “Holy Land.” A man such as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who combined views of hard-nosed “realpolitik” with religious piety, acknowledged the special status of the Middle East by virtue of the religions based there. Judaism, part of the “Judeo-Christian civilization,” benefitted from this religious consciousness, while Islam remained a religion and a culture apart. This article examines how the American image of Jews, Israelis, and Middle Eastern politics was re-framed in the early 1950s to reflect popular ideas of religious identity. These images were found in fiction, the press, and the speeches and writings of social critics and policymakers. The article explores the role of the 1950s religious revival in the identification of Americans with Jews and Israelis and discusses the rise of the popular understanding that “Judeo-Christian” values shaped American culture and politics.

Middle Eastern Middle Powers

2020 ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Marco Pinfari
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Conflict Prevention ◽  
Middle Power ◽  
Middle Powers ◽  
International Behavior ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter analyzes a selection of mediation and conflict-prevention initiatives promoted by Middle Eastern middle powers since the 1980s. It begins by noting that behavioral approaches to middle power status consider systematic engagement in mediation and conflict prevention as one of the key traits of “middlepowerness,” and reflects on how the literature on middle power mediation and norm-based international behavior can be applied specifically to the Middle East. It then turns to the analysis of three case studies of norm-based mediation or conflict resolution initiatives promoted by three Middle Eastern middle powers—Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt—since the 1980s.

Presbyterianism in the Middle East

2019 ◽  
pp. 194-213
Author(s):  
Kaley M. Carpenter
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
New Media ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Religious Activities ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
New Churches ◽  
Historical Trajectory

American Presbyterian missionaries in the Middle East, through their linguistic, educational, and religious activities combined with similar European efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, transformed sociocultural and political conditions in the native Christian and surrounding communities where they worked. By introducing faith alternatives where traditionally few had existed, Presbyterians separated religious identity from ethnicity, creating a way for Assyrians in Persia, Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Egyptian Copts, and other ethnic groups to view themselves through the lens of nationalism, or as entities within their own countries with distinct legal-political status. This was an unintended effect of Middle Eastern missions, which were originally directed toward the dominant but largely resistant Muslim population and later revised to focus on renewing the ancient Christian churches that had been established earlier by minority groups instead of on planting new churches. Nationalism contributed to, but did not cause, ancient rivalries between religions and ethnic groups, which became more heated and violent amid larger imperial contests (such as “Christian” Russia or Britain against “Muslim” Egyptians, Ottomans and Turks, or Persians). Although the Presbyterian missions failed to convert large numbers of Muslims or to transform ancient Christian sects, they did eventually facilitate the formation of independent Middle Eastern denominations and the emigration of Christian refugees to America. Descendants of both groups are now challenging Western narratives of religion and culture, while the number of Muslim converts in the Middle East is growing. They are proliferating through “new media” missions, forming underground house churches in Iran and seeking the help of American Presbyterians to establish congregations in Turkey, modeling for their Western brethren culturally sensitive evangelism in Islamic cultures, and reversing the historical trajectory of missional agency from the West to the East.

(In)visibility and the Muslim other: Narratives of flight and religious identity among Iraqi Christians in Denmark

Ethnicities ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 146879682094927 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Lei Sparre
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Social Location ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Interreligious Relations ◽  
Muslim Minorities ◽  
Middle Easterners

This article investigates identity and belonging among Christians of Iraqi origin in Denmark through an analysis of their narratives of flight and interreligious relations, with a particular focus on the underlying dynamics of a widespread anti-Muslim discourse. Based on qualitative interviews and informal conversations with Chaldean and Assyrian Christians from Iraq, I examine how they presented themselves to me through their stories of flight from Iraq and settlement in Denmark. The analysis draws on perspectives on positionality and belonging among migrants as well as the ambiguous concept of (in)visibility, understood both as something structurally enforced and as how individuals and groups experience their (in)visibility and strive towards mobility and recognition. In addition, the analysis incorporates insights and discussions from literature on racialization and minority–majority relations, while particularly focusing on religious identity and Muslim–Christian relations. Against experiences of racialization and misrecognition as Muslims, I explore how they make sense of, articulate and act on their complex social location as invisible Christians and visible Middle Easterners in a Danish context characterized by ambiguous expectations of religiosity and national belonging. I draw attention to three different, yet simultaneous, narratives put forward by the Iraqi Christians: flight from political oppression, flight from Muslim persecution in the Middle East, and Islam as a threat against Europe. I argue that Iraqi Christians interpret and navigate the experience of being bodily invisible as Christians but visible as immigrants and Middle Eastern Muslims by rewriting narratives of their flight from Iraq to Denmark. Consequently, they also rewrite their relations to both the ‘Christian other’ in Denmark and the ‘Muslim other’ in Denmark and Iraq. The article contributes with a perspective on ‘invisible’ and/or misrecognized non-Muslim minorities in Europe and thus offers insights into the diversity within assumedly homogenous ethnic groups.

scholarly journals Ethno-Cultural and Religious Identity of Syrian Orthodox Christians

Chronos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 71-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sargon George Donabed ◽  
Shamiran Mako
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Syrian Orthodox

Many Middle Eastern Christian groups identify or have been identified with pre-lslamic peoples in the Middle East: the Copts with Ancient Egypt, the Nestorians with Assyria, the Maronites with Phoenicians and some Rum Onhodox and other Christians with pre-lslamic Arab tribes. The concern of this study is the Syrian Orthodox Christians or Jacobite(s) (named after the 6th century Monophysite Christian bishop Yacoub Burd'ono or Jacob Baradaeus of Urfa/Osrohene/Edessa), specifically those whose ancestry stems from the Tur Abdin region of Turkey, Diyarbekir, Mardin, Urfa, and Harput/Elazig.

The Effect of the Political Situation in the City of Jerusalem on the Rights of the Jerusalem Women

1970 ◽  
pp. 36-47
Author(s):  
Fadwa Al-Labadi
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Sexual Life ◽  
Family Status ◽  
Colonial Legacy ◽  
Legal Principle ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City ◽  
Legislative Processes

The concept of citizenship was introduced to the Arab and Islamic region duringthe colonial period. The law of citizenship, like all other laws and regulations inthe Middle East, was influenced by the colonial legacy that impacted the tribal and paternalistic systems in all aspects of life. In addition to the colonial legacy, most constitutions in the Middle East draw on the Islamic shari’a (law) as a major source of legislation, which in turn enhances the paternalistic system in the social sector in all its dimensions, as manifested in many individual laws and the legislative processes with respect to family status issues. Family is considered the nucleus of society in most Middle Eastern countries, and this is specifically reflected in the personal status codes. In the name of this legal principle, women’s submission is being entrenched, along with censorship over her body, control of her reproductive role, sexual life, and fertility.

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