Advanced search

Making and Unmaking of the Greater Middle East

What longer-run dynamics underlie present realities in the Middle East? Kevan Harris traces changing state formations and social compacts, from decaying Ottoman and Safavid empires, through colonization and postwar corporatism to infitah, authoritarian retrenchment and military intervention.

Good Enough for the Middle East?

Ece Temelkuran on Cihan Tuğal, The Fall of the Turkish Model. Unsparing dissection of AKP-Erdoğan rule.

Revolution in Bad Times

Euphoric celebrations of the Arab uprisings have skated over their profoundly ambiguous character. Asef Bayat explains the failure to make a clean sweep of the old order in terms of a self-limiting programme that stems from the discredit of traditional revolutionary models.

Between Past and Future

Responding to Asef Bayat, Tariq Ali argues that any adequate analysis of the outcomes of the Arab Spring must reckon with Washington’s tight defence of its interests in the region. The dynamics of the revolts located in a long history of Western intervention.

Democratic Janissaries?

Turkey has been hailed in the West as a democratic model for the Islamic world. Cihan Tuğal takes a cool look at the Erdoğan government’s domestic and foreign-policy record, from ‘zero problems’ diplomacy to the blockade of Libya and dirty war on Damascus, airstrikes on Turkish Kurds and silence on Bahrain.

Arab Revolts and Nation-State Crisis

The triple crisis—of Western hegemony, of capital and of the nationstate form—within which the Arab uprisings of 2011 have unfolded, and longer-run history of Anglo-American strategies for containing popular aspirations to sovereignty.

On the Concatenation in the Arab World

From Tunis to Manama, 2011 has brought a chain-reaction of popular upheavals, in a region where imperial domination and domestic despotism have long been entwined. A call for political liberty to reconnect with social equality and Arab fraternity, in a radical new internationalism.

The New Egyptian Novel

The slums of Cairo find their homology in a new genre of narrative fiction, argues Sabry Hafez. Striking formal innovations of a generation raised under the asphyxiating rule of the Mubarak dictatorship.

Sadrist Stratagems

Vijay Prashad on Patrick Cockburn, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq. Perceptive portrait of the Occupation’s single most elusive foe, and of the traditions of Shia militancy from which he descends.

War and the City

As Bush pours extra troops into Baghdad, Pentagon strategists plan for the urban future of warfare. Stephen Graham surveys the emerging network of US military training facilities—Potemkin battlefields and slum simulacra designed to replicate the alleyways of the global South.

Fear and Money in Dubai

On the rim of the war zone, a new Mecca of conspicuous consumption and economic crime, under the iron rule of Sheikh al-Maktoum. Skyscrapers half a mile high, artificial archipelagoes, fantasy theme parks—and the indentured Asian labour force that sustains them.

Mid-Point in the Middle East?

As fears are voiced within the US establishment of impending debacle in Iraq, a survey of the embattled landscape from Baghdad, Ramallah and Tehran to Beirut and Damascus. American control is slipping, Ali argues—but it is too soon to count on imperial defeat.

An Arabian Master

The remarkable life and literary career of Abd al-Rahman Munif, author of the Cities of Salt quintet. Sabry Hafez charts the emergence of Munif’s searing fictions. Evocations of desert traditions, foreign interference, the deformities of despotism and lessons of resistance.

The Novel, Politics and Islam

The astonishing story of the uproar in Egypt over the publication of a Syrian novel set in Algeria—a work of literature as trigger for political crisis and polemical turmoil, two decades after it was written, in a landscape completely transformed. Haydar Haydar’s fiction as tuning-fork of stark dissonances of time and outlook in the Arab world.

The Arrival of the Taliban

Tariq Ali on John Cooley, Unholy Wars, and Ahmed Rashid, Taliban. How the US fought its proxy war in Afghanistan, and what kind of Islamist regime has resulted.

The War against Feminism in the Name of the Almighty: Making Sense of Gender and Muslim Fundamentalism

“A version of this article was presented at the 1997 annual meeting of the American Historical Association in New York. I am grateful for many helpful comments and suggestions by Kevin Anderson, Robin Blackburn, Sondra Hale, Valentine Moghadam, Claire Moses, Rayna Rapp, and especially Nikki Keddie on various . . .” read more

The Gulf War, Iraq and Western Liberalism

“The states of the North Atlantic have, since the days of Palmerston, frequently hoisted the flag of liberalism on their way to war. But rarely since 1945 have the principles of right, law and justice been invoked as strongly as in the call to arms for Desert Storm. . . .” read more

Domestic Incentives for the Gulf War

“Why did the United States fight the Gulf War? What factors entered into George Bush’s decision to avoid a negotiated solution? The timing of that decision goes some way to answering these questions, and two conflicting theories have been offered: first, that Bush wanted war from the beginning, . . .” read more

Realpolitik in the Gulf

“On the morning before Yom Kippur late this past September, I found myself standing at the western end of the White House, watching as the colour guard paraded the flag of the United States (and the republic for which it stands) along with that of the Emirate of . . .” read more

The Crisis of the Arab World: The False Answers of Saddam Hussein

“The crisis following upon Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait is unique in the contemporary world, above all because of the multiple levels upon which it is being played out. In international terms, it is comparable to the major crises of the post-1945 period—Berlin 1948, Korea 1950, Suez 1956, Cuba . . .” read more

Narrative, Geography and Interpretation

“Whenever a great intellectual and moral presence like Raymond Williams suddenly disappears from his habitual place among us it is natural at first to restore him by various ceremonies and activites of commemoration. The sense of loss and bereavement that was felt immediately after Williams’s death in 1988 . . .” read more

Kurdistan in the Middle East Conflict

“In March 1988 the Western media once again shocked their audience by bringing home horrific stories of the extensive and indiscriminate use of chemical weapons on the civilian population in remote Kurdistan. As two reporters visiting the area put it: ‘Neither side in the Gulf War has ever . . .” read more

Identity, Negation and Violence

“As something to be talked and written about, as a phenomenon with nearly hysterical descriptions and pronouncements routinely added to its name as a mobilizing theme for politicians, armies, navies and air forces, ‘terrorism’ has now lost a good deal of its power. A mere matter of months . . .” read more

A Reply to Hammami and Rieker

“The response by Hammami and Rieker to my article ‘Feminism or the Eternal Masculine in the Arab World’ cannot be seen as a straightforward critique of my analysis. Its approach is so contrary to my own, and rejects with such fervour my conception of feminism, social development and . . .” read more

Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Marxism

“Mai Ghoussoub’s ‘Feminism—or the Eternal Masculine—in the Arab World’ (nlr 161) is indicative of two fundamental problems plaguing radical analysis of the Middle East: the extent to which it is legitimate for Marxists to throw out their analytical categories and resort to Weberian notions of a ‘collective . . .” read more

Feminism--or the Eternal Masculine--in the Arab World

“It is difficult to utter your frustrations if a veil seals your lips. Today the yashmak covers the face of Arab women only in rare cases. Yet paradoxically, the more the West comes to terms with the gains of modern feminism, and waxes indignant at the ‘humiliations’ to . . .” read more

A Marxist View of Arabia

“Books on the contemporary Arabian peninsula tend to be rather impressionistic. Some are journalistic accounts or travelogues, others superficial narratives which use flowery language to conceal their author’s lack of understanding; others still are the works of orientalists who naïvely believe that their knowledge of medieval Islam is . . .” read more

On the PFLP and the September Crisis

“The Popular Front is best known in the non-Arab world for its hijackings in September 1970. A lot of criticisms of the hijackings have been made. Some of these are bourgeois criticisms. But there are two others which I would like to pose here. The first criticism has . . .” read more

Introduction to Kannafani

“World attention was riveted on the Palestinian liberation movement in September 1970 when the hijacking of four jet-planes and the holding of their passengers as hostages was shortly followed by the outbreak of civil war in Jordan, These developments gave the Palestinian struggle greater publicity than it had . . .” read more

Class Struggle in the Arab Gulf

“Since the 18th century, British imperialism has maintained control over the principalities of the eastern and southern coasts of the Arabian Peninsula; but this imperialist hegemony is now dissolving. As British forces retreat from the Gulf, new contradictions are exploding which threaten the position of world imperialism and . . .” read more

Rethinking the Middle East

“For Marxists, using a theory that began as an analysis of capitalist society, precapitalist and colonial societies have presented a dual, dialectically interrelated problematic: problems of the theoretical analysis of such societies, and problems of revolutionary strategy in the colonial societies—where Marxists have too often been guided by . . .” read more

'South Arabia'; 'Shades of Amber' and 'Yemen: The Unknown War'

“This fiftieth issue of New Left Review opens with a critique, by Perry Anderson, of the structures of bourgeois culture in Britain. The task of forging a revolutionary and internationalist political culture in this country has always been a central preoccupation of the Review. This involves attacking the . . .” read more

On the Israeli-Arab War

“As an introduction, could you sum up your general view of the Israeli-Arab war?” read more