The Arab “Street” and the Middle East’s Democracy Deficit

Rising education, easier travel, new communications media, and liberalizing voices are quickly making the Arab “street” a true “public sphere”—a force with which governments, and the West, will have to reckon. The good news, argues a scholar of the Muslim world, is that channels exist by which the West can address the Arab public. But that public, better informed, will be quick to notice gaps between statement and action

Justice and Tyranny: Law and the State in the Middle East

This is an offprint version of the article published in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Third Series, 9:375-88, made available by permission of the publisher. The version made available in Digital Common was supplied by the author.Publisher's Versiontru

A demographical study in order to relocate the Colorado Optometric Center

A demographical study in order to relocate the Colorado Optometric Cente

Symposium on American Culture and Anti-Americanism in the Middle East

Streaming audio requires RealPlayer.The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.Dale Eickelman is best known for his ethnographic field research in the Middle East, and he is the author of several books, including The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach, 4th ed. (Prentice Hall, 2002), Knowledge and Power in Morocco (Princeton University Press, 1985), and Muslim Politics, co-authored with James Piscatori (Princeton University Press, 1996). Eickelman is former president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, and recently completed a two-year Euro-American postdoctoral field-building project, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), called "Public Spheres and Muslim Identities." Eickelman is also a member of the International Advisory Board of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, Leiden. Jillian Schwedler is Assistant Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland at College Park. She received her PhD in Politics from New York University in September 2000. Dr. Schwedler's publications include three edited volumes, Understanding the Contemporary Middle East, 2nd ed., with Deborah J. Gerner (Lynne Rienner, 2003), Toward Civil Society in the Middle East? A Primer (Lynne Rienner, 1995), which she edited and for which she contributed the key article, and Islamist Movements in Jordan (Amman, 1997). Her articles have appeared in Journal of Democracy, Comparative Politics, Social Movement Studies, Journal of Palestine Studies, Middle East Report, and elsewhere, as well as in several edited volumes. Her book manuscript, Faith in Moderation: The Dynamics of Islamist Political Parties, is currently under review. Richard K. Herrmann is professor of political science and Director of the Mershon Center at The Ohio State University. He has written widely on politics in the Middle East, international security, and American foreign policy. From 1989 to 1991, Herrmann served on Secretary of State James Baker’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State and from 1991-1996, he served as coeditor of International Studies Quarterly, the flagship journal of the International Studies Association. Herrmann has been a frequent visitor to the Middle East, lecturing and conducting research in Israel and the West Bank, as well as in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates. In 1996-97 he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations of New York task force that produced the book Differentiated Containment: Rethinking U.S. Policy in the Gulf.Ohio State University. Middle East Studies CenterOhio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studiesweb page announcement, event summary, streaming audios, photo

Local Production of Islamic Knowledge An Ethnographer's View

The AKMI1/ISIM Summer Academy brought together 20 nationalities at the Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul. For eleven days and nights, from early morning until late evening, the core of this group - the invited participants (pre-doctoral candidates and recent Ph.D.s),2 and tutors, together with several of the locally invited lecturers - listened to and commented on lectures, presented and discussed one another's projects, and visited local research centres

Khalid Masud's Multiple Worlds

Over the last years Dale Eickelman has been in close contact with Muhammad Khalid Masud while at the ISIM. Often, while travelling the globe and changing flights at Amsterdam's international airport, the two would meet over lunch or breakfast. Eickelman paid frequent visits to the ISIM office, also in his capacity as member of the ISIM Academic Committee, and participated in several of its workshops. T h e friendship between the two scholars dates back to the 1980s. On the occasion of Masud's retirement, the anthropologist reflects on his career and their mutual interests

the significance of the course events take in segmentary systems

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136445/1/ae.1986.13.2.02a00070.pd

'Signs of churning': Muslim Personal Law and public contestation in twenty-first century India

Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009. Published version reproduced with the permission of the publisher.For many Indian Muslims, the preservation of Muslim Personal Law has been the touchstone of their capacity to defend their Muslim identity. This article examines public debate over Muslim Personal Law less as a subject uniting Indian Muslims, but rather as a site in which a varied array of individuals, schools and organisations have sought to assert their individual identities. This is done through a discussion of the evolution of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, the most authoritative such organisation since the 1970s, with particular focus on its recent fragmentation at the hands of a number of alternative legal councils formed by feminist, clerical and other groups. These organisations have justified their existence through criticism of the Board’s alleged attempts to standardisation of Islamic law and its Deobandi dominance. In truth, however, this process of fragmentation owes to a complex array of embryonic and interlinked personal, political and ideological competitions, indicative of the increasingly paradoxical process of consensus-building in contemporary Indian Muslim society

The anthropology of media and the question of ethnic and religious pluralism

This essay discusses anthropological approaches to the study of media interacting with contexts of ethnic and religious diversity. The main argument is that not only issues of access to and exclusion from public spheres are relevant for an understanding of media and pluralism. Background assumptions and ideologies about media technologies and their functioning also require more comparative analysis, as they impact public spheres and claims to authority and authenticity that ultimately produce and shape scenarios of ethnic and religious diversity. This additional dimension of diversity in the question of media and ethnic and religious pluralism is particularly apparent in crises of political and religious mediation. The latter often result in desires to bypass established forms of political and religious mediation that are in turn often projected on new media technologies