In the summer of 2002, more Americans – 1.3 million – heard the music of Central Asia in just a few days than in the entire previous history of the United States. Some 370,000 of them picked up the extensive, well-documented guidebook to the 36th annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which broke all attendance records. As they traipsed through the humid haze of the Washington Mall, staggering into the sun baked tents to see crafts and hear music, this crowd was in a good mood. Kids asked to see the Bactrian camels, who, like their handlers, were Texans. People crowded the sprawling crafts exhibits to watch artisans, then jammed the sales pavilions to scoop up gifts and albums, also at unprecedented levels. The surging spectators jammed the tents for most of the shows on the two days I was there. The reception was rousing. The organizers had brought not just “classic” performers, but contemporary musicians, like the Kazakh rock band Roksonaki. The small stock of their CDs sold out on the first day, and their performances regularly received standing ovations.

“Water,” wrote the mayor’s council late in the nineteenth century, “is the only thing holding Algiers back from expanding its glory as the queen of African cities.” Paris uses 240 liters of water per person per day, it reported; New York, Philadelphia and Chicago 400 liters. Algiers could only muster a meager 60 liters per day per person, far below the levels necessary to feed a population, fill wells, and scrub a city of its toxins. For over half a century, the council reported, Algiers had thirsted after the clean water necessary to make it a great city. If the French were to make Algiers truly modern, they would need to solve this vexing problem of water.

Thus the council summed up one of the ongoing challenges in continuing settler colonialism in Algeria. Environmental projects—battling epidemic disease, drought, locust invasions, and providing/establishing hydraulic control—became important factors in the rise and expansion of the colonial state. In the midst of a crippling environmental disaster, water—access to fresh water for drinking, controlling agricultural infrastructure, and ensuring cities were “hygienic”—became a site of contention in the creation of the modern state. In this paper I will briefly examine how the physical control of water resources, along with discourses about modernity and modern governance, contributed to the expansion of the colonial state by the end of the 1860s.

A consideration of the contemporary musical soundscape in Syria provides unique insights into how Syrians of multiple classes and generations discriminate between critical points in their own past, who they perceive they are today, and how they might think about their future. This review, based on fieldwork in Syria conducted between 1997 and 2001, suggests that people in Syria can use music to negotiate the following complex issues: 1) the struggle between an identity rooted in the modern nation-state of Syria and one rooted in the more traditional concept of ‘Bilad al-Sham’ (roughly ‘the lands governed from Damascus,’ a region that included all of modern Lebanon, as well as portions of Turkey, Palestine, and Jordan); 2) the struggle between a Syrian identity and an Arab identity; and 3) the maintenance of a strongly Arab and necessarily anti-Western canon.

According to its Mission Statement, MESA's Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF) is tasked with monitoring violations of academic freedom in the MENA region as well as in North America. Violations of academic freedom are often understood as comprising governmental attempts to prevent scholars from conducting scholarly research, publishing their findings, delivering academic lectures, and traveling to international scholarly meetings. However, CAF often addresses cases in which professors and academic researchers irrespective of discipline are harassed, persecuted, dismissed or detained for their peaceful professional or personal activities, particularly if they encourage respect for human rights. In some instances, the committee has also protested state violence that has deliberately targeted educational institutions’ buildings or campuses.

On February 7, 2018, Anoush Baghdassarian (Claremont McKenna College ‘17) conducted a presentation of her undergraduate research on Syrian refugees in Armenia called “Coming ‘Home’: Documenting 100 years of Displacement of Syrian-Armenians.” This interview was lightly edited for clarity.

The 1990s marked an important moment in Egyptian television, when the country turned its attention increasingly (although never monolithically) toward historical drama as a means of recreating and reinterpreting modern Egyptian history. Mahfouz Abd al-Rahman and Osama Anwar Okasha, in particular, scripted long multi-year series aired during Ramadan, the peak season for television viewing, that covered decades of the late ninteenth century and pre-Nasserist history, in many ways re-writing public history, and making historical drama—and history—fashionable. I focus here on the former and his first mega-hit Bawabat al-Halawani (Halawani Gate). Biographical dramas, initially of artists, but later politicians, kings, and religious leaders would follow. As the Egyptian industry atrophied in the following decade these dramatists passed the mantle on to the Syrians, later the Turks, who broke the Egyptian monopoly and brought their own stories to the fore. But a rebirth may be in view.

This article addresses the early formation of Sunni “orthodoxy” through the prisms of historical memory and collective identity rather than those of theology, law, and formal political power.2 It does so by exploring the socio-political context in which the phrase luzūm al-jamāʿa3 (adhering to the community) was deployed during the late Umayyad/Marwanid (64/684–132/750) and early Abbasid (132/750–333/945) periods, primarily among the networks of hadith transmitters who circulated the idea during that period. The results of this analysis reveal that ideas central to Sunni conceptions of community first developed in Umayyad patronage structures and networks, before being adopted by the so-called “proto-Sunni” elite.

Is The Cold War finally coming to an end, as some would have us believe? And if so, what does this mean for the Middle East? These are questions that will be with us for some time. They do not lend themselves to clear answers, but they nonetheless demand our attention.

For students of the contemporary Middle East, these questions pose special analytical problems—how can one best assess the relationship between the area that we study and the broader currents of international politics? Middle East specialists are rightly skeptical of efforts to analyze their region of study from a “globalist” perspective. Most of us have little patience with theorizing that fails to take into account that which is distinctive in the cultures, politics, and societies of the Middle East. We have even less use for crude empiricism which tries to reduce the complexities of the Middle East to quantifiable events or entries in simplistic classification schemes.

This report summarizes the results of a survey of Kansas high school teachers of World History conducted in the Spring of 1972. Though the data were gathered in the state of Kansas, the textbooks used in the World History course are “national” in the sense that (1) the authors are not local or even regional and (2) the books are widely used in various parts of the country.