CIAO DATE: 07/2011
Volume: 13, Issue: 2
April-June 2011
The Middle East is in Transition—to What?
Marina Ottaway
The Arab world has been changed irreversibly by the popular uprisings that started in early 2011. The long period of dormancy that enveloped the Arab world has come to an end. The uprisings have been triggered in all countries by similar mixes of economic hardship and lack of civil and political rights. But we should not expect the uprisings to lead to similar changes in all countries. Already, three different patterns are emerging. In Tunisia and Egypt, the presidents have been overthrown by members of their own regime, including the military; they are now trying to limit the extent of change and to transform a potentially revolutionary process into one of reform from the top. In Yemen and Libya, the challenge to the leaders has turned into a challenge to the survival of the state itself: the two countries have no institutions that can persist if the presidents are ousted. In other countries affected by protest, the regimes have been trying to subdue the protest through a mixture of populist concessions, cautious reforms introduced from the top, and the occasional use of force.
Arab Revolts: Islamists aren't Coming!
Asef Bayat
There has been strong concern about the direction of the current revolts in the Middle East. The fear has been that the revolts may result in the Iranian-style Islamic revolutions in the Arab countries. This commentary questions the empirical validity of such claims, showing that the Arab revolts differ considerably from the Islamic revolution in ideology and trajectory. It suggests that we are witnessing the coming of a post-Islamist Middle East, in which the prevailing popular movements assume a postnational, post-ideological, civil, and democratic character. It is, therefore, argued that we are entering a new era in the region where Islamism—undermined by a crisis of legitimacy for ignoring and violating people’s democratic rights—is giving way to a different kind of religious polity, which takes democracy seriously while wishing to promote pious sensibilities in society.
The Arab Revolution of 2011: Reflections on Religion and Politics
Nader Hashemi
The democratic uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East have been widely celebrated but in the West they have generated concern and apprehension. Most of this concern involves the future role of religion in the politics of the Arab world. In this essay, I make two broad observations. First, concern in the West about the rise of mainstream Islamist parties is partly based not on the illiberal orientation of these groups but the fact that they are politically independent actors who challenge Western geo-strategic interests in the region. Second, the role of religion in government has never been democratically negotiated en masse in the Arab world. To assume that this issue has been resolved and a broad consensus exists is to project a Western understanding of religion-state relations on the Arab-Islamic world. Doing so is both erroneous and analytically distorted. The battles over the role of religion in politics have yet to begin in the Arab world.
The Arab Uprisings: Debating the "Turkish Model" (PDF)
Alper Y. Dede
Mass uprisings on the Arab streets have become the vehicle for reform as the availability of modern means of communication has enabled the Arab opposition to express their frustration caused by the stagnancy and inefficiency of the status quo-oriented authoritarian-bureaucratic regimes of the region. There is currently an ongoing debate about whether Turkey could become a model for the region with its growing economy, strengthening democracy, and spreading soft power due to Turkey’s increasing popularity in the region and its warm relations with the Arab world. Thus, it is not Turkey’s authoritarian secularism or its debacles in the process of democratization that has brought forth Turkey’s prominence as a model. This article discusses what the Turkish model is, whether it is applicable to the rest of the region, and the potential risks of proposing Turkey as a model country for the region.
Turkey's "Demonstrative Effect" and the Transformation of the Middle East (PDF)
Kemal Kirisci
A string of uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt followed by those in other countries have rekindled the issue of Turkey constituting a model for reform and democratization in the Arab world, a point raised by many Western and Arab commentators. Independent of this debate, what is lacking in the literature is an analysis of how come there is a “demand” for the Turkish model. This article develops the concept of a “demonstrative effect” and argues that it is this “effect” that makes the Turkish model of interest to the Middle East and that this “effect” is a function of three developments: the rise of the “trading state”, the diffusion of Turkey’s democratization experience as a “work in progress”, and the positive image of Turkey’s “new” foreign policy. The concluding part of the article discusses several challenges Turkey has to meet so that its “demonstrative effect” can have a positive impact.
Beyond the Democratic Wave in the Arab World: The Middle East's Turko-Persian Future
Mohammed Ayoob
It is unlikely that the Egyptian revolution will have a major impact on the political and strategic landscape in the Middle East in the short and medium terms. Egypt, the Arab state with the greatest capacity to act regionally, will be tied down for a considerable period of time in getting its house in order and sorting out the relationship between the civilian and military components of the new political order. This means that the shift in the center of political gravity in the region from the Arab heartland comprising Egypt and the Fertile Crescent to what was once considered the non-Arab periphery – Turkey and Iran – which was becoming clearly discernible before the recent upheavals in the Arab world will continue. The shift in the strategic and political balance in the Middle East in favor of Turkey and Iran is the result of a combination of factors, some domestic, some regional and some global.
From Distance to Engagement: Turkish Policy towards the Middle East, Iraq and Iraqi Kurds
Mesut Ozcan
Turkey’s Middle East policy has witnessed revolutionary changes since 1999. The changes in the attitude of Turkey towards the region can be easily grasped by examining its policy towards Iraq. Today Ankara is an active player in the region using non-military means of diplomacy, such as economic tools and international conferences. This paper analyzes the changes in Turkish foreign policy towards Iraq through a framework of processes, means and outcomes. The article covers approximately the last ten years and looks at three turning points that triggered change. These turning points are the capture of the PKK leader Öcalan in 1999, Turkey’s refusal to allow the transfer of US soldiers to Iraq in March 2003, and the Turkish responses to the PKK attack on the Aktütün military post on the Turkish-Iraqi border in October 2008. The article contends that as a result of the transformations in Turkey’s foreign policy, it has become an indispensable actor in Middle Eastern politics.
Turkey as a Migration Hub in the Middle East
Secil Pacaci Elitok, Thomas Straubhaar
This article focuses on Turkey’s process of transition from a country of emigration to a country of immigration and transit. The paper is organized in the following way: After a brief introduction, the second part of the paper will analyze the pattern of emigration from Turkey and immigration to Turkey (from the EU and Middle East) in its historical context. In the third part, theoretical expectations and empirical considerations with respect to the potential for migration from Turkey within the context of possible EU membership are outlined. In this section, a critique of the available literature estimating the amount of potential migration from Turkey and projections on the possible future migration obstacles for Turkey- if it is not successful in its accession bid for the EU membership- are presented as well. The fourth and final part of the paper analyzes the challenges and opportunities for Turkey, as it waits at the EU’s gates, in terms of migration and concludes with a call for a necessary change in Turkey’s policy to improve the management of its migration policies.
Trade among OIC Countries: Limits of Islamic Solidarity
Savas Alpay Atlamaz
Since the early 1970s, member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) have been pursuing the goal of enhancing economic and commercial cooperation to improve the economic linkages and coordination among themselves and to jointly act against the global challenges facing them. Special attention has been given to trade and considerable efforts have been exerted at various OIC forums to develop ways and means of joint cooperative action to increase trade among the OIC countries. Enhancing intra-OIC trade was also among the priorities of the Ten-Year Programme of Action, which set a target of a level of 20 percent for intra-OIC trade to be achieved during the period covered by the Programme (by 2015). It is with this inspiration that this study presents an analytical overview of the evolution and the current structure of the merchandise trade among the OIC countries. Also, broad policy recommendations are outlined to enhance intra-OIC trade.
John Haldon
This volume is a welcome contribution to the study of the last centuries of the existence of the Byzantine state, the ‘empire’ that until its demise in 1453 had dominated the Bosphorus and the link between Europe and Asia Minor, even though its political authority was minimal from the early years of the 14th century. Yet authority and legitimacy aside (for the Byzantines always saw themselves as the legitimate heirs to the Roman empire) it exercised both a fascination for those around it as well as an having an importance and, until quite late on, an influence far in excess of its actual military or economic power. Necipoğlu’s book focuses on the politics of the empire, more particularly on the ways in which different groups within the empire adopted, fought for, or abandoned particular views of their situation within Byzantine society and in the wider world, and more particularly in the context of the influence, cultural, military and economic, of the regional powers around it
Mustafa Sitki Bilgin
Turkey, due to its geopolitical position, was subject to political and military pressures by the Great Powers during and immediately after World War Two. During the war, the Great Powers exerted substantial pressures on Turkey to obtain its compliance in operating the Straits policy in accordance with their own strategic interests. This situation led to collaboration and competition among the Great Powers. In fact, the rivalry and collaboration of the Great Powers in the eastern Mediterranean during these periods, and the interaction of British, Soviet and American policies with those of regional states, has been examined by a number of Turkish and foreign researchers in recent years. Nicholas Tamkin is one of these authors and he has meticulously trawled through British archives and other published and unpublished sources available in Britain to elucidate Turkey’s role in British strategy and diplomacy during World War Two. He makes a significant contribution on the formulation of British foreign policy and wartime strategy towards Turkey with a special emphasis given on Turkey’s place in the uneven relationship between Britain and the Soviet Union
Selen B. Morkoç, A Study of Ottoman Narratives on Architecture: Text, Context and Hermeneutics (PDF)
Nina Ergin
Ottoman architectural history has generally remained within the bounds of empirical scholarship, its monuments being the subject of description, formal analysis, and taxonomic studies. However, over the last decade or so, the number of interpretative studies has increased. As examples, one may refer to Gülru Necipoğlu’s work on the life and work of Sinan, 1 or Shirine Hamadeh’s publications on 18th-century architecture. 2 With the exception of Jale Erzen’s work on the aesthetics of Ottoman art, 3 these and other interpretative studies look to the patron as generator and consumer of meaning. A reception history about the experiences of the monuments’ users (or even the architect’s perception of his own creations) is still a major lacuna. It is this gap that Selen Morkoç attempts to fill, by conducting a hermeneutic analysis of several narratives: five 16th-century autobiographical treatises written by Mustafa Sa’i and Sinan, Cafer Efendi’s early 17thcentury Risale-i Mimariyye, and Dayezade’s 18th-century Selimiye Risales
Amy Mills, Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance and National Identity in Istanbul (PDF)
Sibel Bozdogan
Recent neoliberal/post-Kemalist shifts in Turkish culture and politics have ushered in, among other things, a rekindled interest in Istanbul’s cosmopolitan past and in the remaining vestiges of its historical urban fabric. While an increasingly sophisticated culture industry is mobilized to recast the former as an object of nostalgia for popular consumption, gentrification projects are transforming the social landscape of historical neighborhoods in new and often controversial ways. Amy Mills’s ethnographic study of Kuzguncuk offers a compelling account of these processes at work in a picturesque neighborhood on the Asian shores of the Bosporus, widely accepted to be the paradigm of multi-ethnic coexistence, neighborliness and aesthetic charm in a city that has lost most of these qualities to republican urban/social modernization during the latter half of the 20 th centur
Mitat Celikpala
With the assertion of being the first complete history of Central Eurasia from ancient times to the present day, Christopher Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road is a complex and well argued book. Beckwith unites the history of the peoples of the world’s largest landmass into a remarkable history by describing the rise and fall of the great Central Eurasian empires such as the Scythians, the Huns, the Turks, and the Mongols under Genghis Khan. The book is composed of twelve chapters, a prologue and epilogue, and two appendices exploring the spread of ProtoIndo-Europeans and Central Eurasian peoples. Each chapter opens with a brief Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present By Christopher I. Beckwith New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009, 472 pp., ISBN 9780691135892. summary of the arguments in the chapter and that makes for easier reading. The other strong aspect of the book, in addition to the footnotes, is that there is an extended set of endnotes that elaborate on the topics discussed in the text. The author’s aim is to clarify some issues in Central Eurasian history through writing “a realistic, objective view of the history of Central Eurasia and Central Eurasians” (p. xii). Beckwith rejects the stereotypes of pastoral nomads as warlike, difficult to defeat, poor, and entirely distinctive peoples.
Numan Telci
The Borders of Islam gives an insider’s view of the so-called “Islam’s bloody borders” through an examination of the countries that straddle two cultures/civilizations from across various regions. The book makes an enormous contribution to debates on “clash of civilizations” by critically examining various cases of war and conflict, which is one of the key elements of the thesis formulated by Samuel Huntington and popularized by the media. Hansen, Mesoy and Kardas take on Huntington’s main thesis with an aim to falsify it. The book stands out as one of the strongest counter-arguments to the main premises of the clash of civilizations thesis. It does so by arguing that the clash sometimes is constructed, as is the case of various internal and external conflicts taking place in and around Iraq, or it neglects the division within the Islamic civilization, as is the case with Lebanon where the Sunnis have a different agenda than the Shiite Muslims, or that the clash between Muslims and Christians is not necessarily religiously-driven in Nigeria, Ethiopia or Sudan. While laying out this argument, the book sets out to understand whether religion could be considered as the most tangible source of conflicts involving groups that hold different religious faith
Allen J. Fromherz, The Almohads: The Rise of an Islamic Empire (PDF)
Amira K. Bennison
As a dynasty based in medieval North Africa and southern Spain, the Almohads have received relatively little attention from Anglophone scholars in Islamic Studies, many of whom work from a Middle Eastern perspective. Allen Fromherz’s book is thus a very welcome contribution to the field. His over-arching aim is to present an account of the rise of the Almohads by looking at the Almohad movement’s leader, Muḥammad b. Tūmart; the Maṣmūda Berber tribal environment in which the empire arose; and the doctrines by which Ibn Tūmart galvanised these tribes from the High Atlas mountains of Morocco. He introduces the Almohads in a lively and engaging way, using primary sources as the basis for the arguments presented in each chapter. He begins with a brief summary of the Almohad empire’s history and then he wisely discusses the sources and their pitfalls, especially their mythic and legendary aspects (although inevitably he must also rely on them for his facts). He also flags up what he considers the neglected ‘Berber’ dimension within accounts of the rise of the empire
Kecia Ali, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (PDF)
Yossef Rapoport
This brilliant, eloquent and insightful book is not, despite its title, a provocative one. It does not claim that in Islam being a wife is like being a slave. Nor does it support the overly simplistic view of an egalitarian ethical Islamic core corrupted by social hierarchies. Instead, the author brings to the fore a very rich legal discourse, dating from the early centuries of Islam, in which the rights of wives and the rights of slaves are repeatedly compared and analysed in relation to each other. This discourse, the author shows, was central to the way the major Sunni jurists understood what rights and duties are entailed in marriage. The main point of the book is to tease out from the legal texts the central notions that shaped Muslim jurists’ views of marriage. Specifically, the author shows that marriage involved a transfer of authority to the husband over a wife’s sexual availability. The author says, and amply demonstrates, that the central notion about marriage was that the marriage contract granted a husband a dominion (milk) over his wife’s sexuality
Georges Corm, A History of the Middle East: From Antiquity to the Present Day (PDF)
Bezen Balamir Coskun
The Lebanese economist and historian Corm has written a timely book contributing to our understanding of a Middle East which is marked by complexities and conflicts. By putting the region’s long history into perspective, Corm aims to help reader go beyond the stereotypes that the media and many Western and Middle Eastern policymakers seem to use to legitimatize the violence that has taken over the region for over two centuries. Corm starts his discussion by showing the diversity of a region that has existed at the geographical level since ancient times. For a complete account of this complex geography Corm examines the “geographical foundations” of the region. Hence, the book has given a lot of attention to what Corm refers to as the geographic “arabesque” that has historically characterized the Middle East, in which the Anatolian, Iranian, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian empires were built. As a result, in the first part of the book Corm examines the Mesopotamian, Anatolian, Iranian and Egyptian civilizations as the major strata of Middle Eastern history. Corm’s account of the history of the Middle East reflects the “geology of cultures.” Corm criticizes the consideration of Muslim society in the region as if it were one unified ethnic or national body
Enes Kabakçı
This book brings together ten articles
that were presented at a regional conference
series on "Cultural Identities and European
Citizenship" organized by the Forum Europe des Cultures. Forum Europe des Cultures, an organization founded in Brussels
in 2003 (see pp. 149-151 for its brief foundation history, objectives, members and activities), aims to uncover the question of how
cultural identities could be recognized, one
of the most debated issues in the process
of European integration, by organizing six conferences in one year in Bruges, Rennes, Strasbourg, Santarem, Corfu and Brussels.
Thomans Banchoff (ed.), Religious Pluralism, Globalization and World Politics (PDF)
Nukhet Ahu Sandal
As the link between religion and international affairs has come under special scrutiny especially since 9/11, there has been an increase in the number of books and articles that investigate the issues of the public sphere from a faith-based perspective. Edited books have especially enjoyed considerable attention since they bring diverse voices in manageable bits. Some have explored theoretical links between international relations and religion, while others have drawn attention to more practical issues on the ground. Thomas Banchoff ’s Religious Pluralism, falling between these purely theoretical and completely practical projects, is a book worth reading especially given the diverse backgrounds of the 12 scholars it brings together. These contributors draw attention to the multiple roles religious actors have been playing in the international arena. Religious ideas constitute a market with its supply and demand side and the volume explores the actors, obstacles and possibilities in such a market. Especially with the trauma of 9/11 —and one can make the argument that the trauma actually started with the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran— there has been a disproportionate attention given to the violent manifestations of religion. Therefore, the acknowledgement of the constructive role of faith-based initiatives can still be considered a relatively new topic both to the academic and policy worlds
Andrew Williams, The Ethos of Europe: Values, Law and Justice in the EU (PDF)
Dario Castiglione
Although the analysis offered in this
book is not very innovative in its details,
the overall project is of some originality.
Andrew Williams's main contention is that
the EU project has developed its own institutional ethos, and that this is the product of both the entrenchment in European
public discourse of a number of values, and
of the way in which the European legal system (and its underlying philosophy) promotes and protects such values. Williams,
however, is critical of the particular ethos
that to date has supported the EU polity
since he finds it partly incoherent in the
articulation of its central values, and relatively uncommitted in the way in which it
sustains them. The ethos's incoherence lies,
in his view, in the way in which the values at the heart of the EU project are both
ambiguous and indeterminate; while the
lack of commitment is the product of the
half-hearted way in which the institutional
framework (in particular European law)
supports a public philosophy for Europe, while functioning more as a prop for European governance.