War has been a political reality and human tragedy in some part of the Middle East since the beginning of the twenty-first century. In 2000, for example, Afghanistan was convulsed in civil warfare between a then new Afghan political-religious group, the Taliban, and a rival group known as the Northern Alliance, while in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, an uprising—intifada—against Israeli rule erupted in September, following the collapse of peace talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that had been taking place under the auspices of the Oslo Peace Process. In subsequent years, the United States (US) sent military forces to Afghanistan to drive out the Taliban, which it accused of sheltering al-Qaeda, the mostly (dissident) Saudi group, responsible for carrying out the attacks in 2001 that destroyed the Twin Towers in New York, and then to Iraq, to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. During the past decade, the US effectively forgot about Oslo and the plight of Palestinians under de facto Israeli rule; instead it has been providing military assistance to its Middle East allies, such as militia groups fighting against the Assad government in Syria and to the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to support their joint endeavor to prop up their favored ally in Yemen’s brutal civil war. Meanwhile, in the background throughout the past two decades a de facto cold war has persisted between the US and Iran while simultaneously in neighboring Afghanistan the US military remained to fight the Taliban and to prop up a civilian regime whose authority did not seem to extend beyond the capital, Kabul, and a few other cities.
In July 2021, the US announced it would withdraw all its military forces from Afghanistan in accordance with an agreement that the Trump administration had negotiated with the Taliban in Qatar in 2020. This prompted Afghanistan’s civilian president and several cabinet officials to flee in secret even before the Americans began their withdrawal. The Taliban quickly returned from their bases in Pakistan, took over towns with barely a fight, and then entered Kabul to observe what only can be described as a two-week chaotic withdrawal of US forces from the airport, along with thousands of Afghan civilians who had worked with the Americans and feared retribution. By mid-August, the twenty-year, multi-billion dollar American experiment of nation building in Afghanistan ingloriously ended, although multiple unresolved other conflicts in the Middle East remained.
Six months later, on February 24, 2022, Middle East issues were overshadowed by a very real hot war in the heart of Europe as a result of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, a former Soviet Republic (pre-1991). The first six weeks of war were extensive, brutal and deadlier than the earlier conflict in 2014 when Russia forcibly occupied and annexed Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula. In both the earlier and recent crisis, one important motive seems to be Russia’s desire to control part or even all of Ukraine’s coast along the northern shoreline of the Black Sea, a large marine body (ca. 422,000 sq. km/168,500 sq. mi.) on which each country has major ports for ship-borne international commerce. For centuries the Black Sea has been accepted as a border between Europe and Asia, specifically the western Asia area of the Middle East. Indeed, the entire southern shoreline of the Black Sea is part of Turkey. Furthermore, the outlet for the Black Sea, which empties into the Mediterranean Sea, is entirely within Turkey: The narrow, 700 meter-wide Bosphorus Strait, which flows south for 31 miles from the Black Sea into Turkey’s Sea of Marmara (11,350 sq. km), which contains several islands. The latter’s outlet is the 1.2 km-wide Dardanelles which meanders southeastward for 61 kilometers to the Aegean Sea, the common name for the northeastern section of the Mediterranean, which countries in three continents share: Europe in the north; Asia in the east; and Africa in the south. The Bosphorus Strait is also a border between Europe and Asia, with the sprawling metropolis of Istanbul on both its European (right) and Asian (left) banks.
Obviously, the conflict in the northern Black Sea between two maritime neighbors whose cargo-laden ships frequently transit the Turkish Straits is a matter of major concern for the government in Ankara. Indeed, in hopes of ending the warfare, Turkey’s president persuaded delegations from Russia and Ukraine to meet in Istanbul in late March for mediated negotiations on ways of resolving the crisis, but those talks ended inconclusively, with no halt to the warfare and even an intensification in some border areas. Possible negative economic consequences of the conflict are of concern in countries like Egypt, which buys large quantities of wheat from Russia and Ukraine, as both countries are major grain exporters.
Turning to the summer issue’s contents, the lead article examines issues that affect college and university teaching scholars throughout the Middle East, and actually the entire world, although the focus here is on academics in Palestine. In “Decolonizing Knowledge Production: Perspective on Promotion and Tenure Regulations in Palestine and Beyond,” authors Mudar Kassis, Rita Giacaman and Maher Hashweh argue that the procedures governing academic tenure and promotion at colleges in the West Bank—as well as elsewhere—are tied heavily to journal rankings, in particular to those that are published in the English language. This process tends to devalue and effectively marginalize local research that is published in Arabic while rewarding research that adheres to the dominant neo-liberal ideological perspectives of journals published in North America and the UK. The issues that the authors raise with respect to how this “system” skews knowledge production, especially concerning Palestine and the Palestinian issue, are broadly applicable for the entire Middle East and Third World. Their contention, that the pre-1960s colonial mentality has been preserved in the production of knowledge about much of Asia and Africa, is one this journal has maintained since our founding in 1992. Specifically with respect how this plays out in Palestine, the authors stress the difficulty scholars living and doing research there encounter when they submit papers based on research about local economic, political and social conditions: The most highly ranked journals tend to reject their articles without providing substantive reasons, but presumably because the research implies or even openly states criticism of Israel, the de facto occupying power. The consequent low number of publications scholars have in such journals impacts their prospects for promotion and tenure negatively.
In our second article, “The Mahdavī Society: The Rise of Millennialism in Iran as the Cultural Outcome of Social Movements (2000-2016),” Amirhossein Teimouri examines the rise of the politically and religiously conservative Mahdavi Society in the Islamic Republic of Iran and its accession to power after its candidate, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, won the 2005 presidential election. Teimouri argues that the Mahdavi Society, whose members referred to themselves as “principalists,” opposed what they believed to be the socially liberal policies of the Rafsanjani (1989-1995) and Khatami (1997-2005) governments. The Mahdavists were social conservatives who weaponized religion to push forward their political agenda for Iran. Their name anticipated the arrival of the 15th Islamic century, which according to the Iranian solar Islamic calendar would be March 21, 1400 (equivalent to the international calendar date of March 21, 2021).Footnote1 The Mahdavists wanted to prepare Iran for the expected approach of the end times when the Mahdi, a Muslim savior, would appear to save the faithful.Footnote2 Teimouri sees the closest parallel to the Mahdavist form of millennialism to be the American fundamentalist Protestants’ ‘premillennial dispensationalism.’
Teimouri argues that the Mahdavi discourse and policies represented a form of ‘cultural engineering’ by the state between 2005 and 2009 to return back to the religious ideals of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. However, the Green Movement that rose up to contest the Mahdavi agenda led to a split in the rightist movement over response tactics and eventually to a break with Ahmadinejad during his second term as president. In effect, the Ahmadinejad faction adopted what Teimouri describes as a ‘Persianized millennialism.’ In addition, external political developments, such as the Arab uprisings of 2011 and the establishment of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq with its anti-Shia rhetoric led to another splintering of the Mahdavis and the creation of the more militant Resilience Front.
In our third article, ‘Land Reform and Kurdish Nationalism in Postcolonial Iraq,’ author Nicola Degli Esposti explores the reason why the Kurdish Autonomous Region of northern Iraq, originally created in 1991 after Iraq was defeated following its invasion and occupation of Kuwait in the summer of 1990, has remained essentially a conservative regional government under the control of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Barzani family. Reviewing the history of the Iraqi Kurds’ quest for autonomy since 1961, and the prominent role of Mullah Mustafa Barzani in that struggle, Degli Esposti concludes that Barzani, a member of the Kurdish landowning class, never fully embraced the KDP’s original and radical ideology of land redistribution to the Kurdish peasants but rather created a military force inclusive of all economic classes. His military successes against the Iraq army in the various Kurdish insurgencies between 1961 and 1975 reinforced his popular status as a hero of Kurdish nationalism.
Iran, in which also lived a Kurdish minority along its western border with Iraq’s Kurdish region, decided in 1973 to provide military assistance to Barzani, not out of any sympathy for Kurdish autonomy but because it opposed the policies of Saddam Hussein, who had become ruler of Iraq following a 1968 coup.Footnote3 Over the next two years, Barzani’s forces, using US and Israeli military equipment supplied by Iran, scored successes in fighting with the Iraq army. In 1975, Saddam Hussein agreed to talks with Iran, dropping previous demands for adjustment of their river boundary along the Shatt ol-Arab, where it flows into the Persian Gulf. Iran then agreed to halt all military assistance to the Iraqi Kurds, thus enabling the Iraqi army to penetrate into the heart of Iraqi Kurdistan; Barzani and his KDP fighters, along with several thousand allies and family members escaped into Iran, while other Kurdish fighters fled into Syria, where they formed the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which Degli Esposti notes was a progressive alternative to the KDP. The Kurdish refugees would remain in exile for 16 years, during which time Mustafa Barzani died of cancer (1979) and the KDP chose his son, Masoud, as its new leader. Following the US-led military’s defeat of the Iraqi army in January 1991, the Kurdish Autonomist Region in Northern Iraq was created and protected by a US and UK enforced no-fly zone over its air space. The Kurds in exile in Iran and Syria gradually returned home, and the political rivalry between the KDP and the PUK resumed, playing a major role in the 2017 independence vote.
In our next article, Raz Yosef explores the role of Arab music in ‘Forbidden Melodies: Music and Arab-Jewish Identity in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema,’ a sub-genre of Israeli film that is not well known outside of Israel. Mizrahi is a Hebrew adjective meaning eastern or oriental, and it is used to refer to Jews—and their descendants–who immigrated to Israel after 1948 from Middle Eastern countries in North Africa and Asia. Several children and grandchildren of these immigrants are filmmakers who utilize Arabic music in their films, which collectively have helped to form a Mizrahi identity in Israel. Yosef focuses on three such films: The Ballad of the Weeping Spring by Benny Torati (2012), which is about a multi-generational search for members of a former Mizrahi band so that they can reunite one last time to play a new Arabic symphony composed by a dying former member; Testimony by Shlomi ElKabetz (2011), which is not a fictional film but a documentary in which Palestinians give testimonies of their mistreatment in Israeli prisons and Israeli soldiers give testimonies of the abuses and tortures they inflicted on Palestinians; and Three Mothers by Dina Zvi Riklis (2005), which is a story of three sisters, born as triplets in Alexandria but are forced to leave Egypt after Israel attacked the country in 1956. The sisters never adjusted to life in Israel and as adults dream of revisiting Egypt and their happy childhoods there.
Yosef argues that the use of Arab music in the above films enables the Mizrahi filmmakers to trace musical routes to an Arab-Jewish past that they never knew and which cannot be revisited. At the same time, the Arab music allows them to depict both the complicated and imaginary relations between the Jew and Arab, the West and the East, and Israel and the Middle East. In effect, these musical routes take them—and perhaps their audiences—to paces, histories and encounters they have not known before. By doing so, the grounded certainty of their Mizrahi roots is replaced in the films by the contingencies of the routes that the music enabled.
The final article in this issue, co-authored by Maha Samman and Yara Saifi, brings us back to the Palestinians. In “Reproduction of Palestinian Heterotopic Space: Encountering First wave of Covid-19 in East Jerusalem,” the authors analyze how Palestinians living in East Jerusalem, which is effectively under Israeli occupation although part of the West Bank, organized to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic during the spring of 2020. It was necessary to approach the pandemic within the context of Israeli occupation, which limited how health professionals could deal with the West Bank and the international medical community. Under the circumstances of a de facto health emergency, Samman and Saifi describe how medical staff used their limited power to reproduce what the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) termed heterotopic spaces. In heterotopic spaces, the people articulate spaces accumulatively as they seek meaning in their daily lives. In East Jerusalem, this meant managing the Covid pandemic while benefitting from past experiences during their numerous struggles against Israeli occupation (since 1967). In addition to Lefebvre’s social concept of heterotopic space, the authors also employ theories of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and Edward Soja (1940-2015) to deduce insight on the evolving role of civil society in supporting local action to deal with the pandemic and to understand COVID from the people’s perspectives. This multi-layered methodology also builds on participant observation, official and media sources, and semi-structured interviews conducted with the heads of committees of the Jerusalem Cluster community initiative.
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Notes
1 Ancient Iranians were one of the earliest civilizations to adopt a solar calendar based on 365 days with an extra ‘leap’ day added periodically. For over two thousand years, they have observed the New Year at the precise time of the spring equinox. The modern calendar, adopted in 1925, is a solar calendar based on one developed by Omar Khayyam in the 11th century as a solar hijri calendar, that is, it starts with the hijra of the Prophet Muhammad to Medina (622 CE in the Western solar calendar). However, the majority of Muslims generally use the Islamic lunar calendar, in which years are 10 to 11 days shorter than solar years. Currently, it is now year 1443 after the hijra, but according to the Iran’s Islamic solar calendar, it is 1401 years after the hijra. Iranians use the Islamic lunar calendar for religious purposes, i.e., the observance of Islamic rituals such as the month of fasting, Ramadan (Ramezan in Persian).
2 Twelve Iman Shia Muslims—approximately 90 percent of all Iranians—associate the Mahdi figure with the Twelfth Iman—direct descent of Ali and the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima–whom they believe did not die but rather God took him into a suspended state to return to bring justice to the world at end times.
3 These events occurred before the 1979 Revolution when a shah (king) stilled ruled Iran. The shah had closely aligned Iran with the United States during the Cold War and also with Israel, which maintained a huge trade mission in downtown Tehran.