While MERIP's offered incisive critiques of the power relations that defined the existing field of Middle East studies, this essay explores how it also represents an alternative model of knowledge production, built outside academia, that has helped reshape scholarship and teaching about the Middle East and North Africa and more broadly about the US relationship to the region. The essay also introduces the other contributions in this forum including an edited transcript of 2020 MESA roundtable on the impact of MERIP on Middle East studies, a historical account that traces the origins of the MERIP collective and three essays exploring the evolution of MERIP's approach addressing, in turn, contributions and innovations within the areas of critical political economy, gender studies, and the politics of culture. Finally, drawing on these contributions as well as Middle East Report issue no. 300 that reviews how MERIP covered various topics, the essay concludes by highlighting the continuing value of MERIP as a teaching resource that allows students and others to understand the transformations across the region over the past half century as well as shifting approaches and theories that have come to help define Middle East studies as an academic field.

A key component of Middle East Studies methodology is to identify and deconstruct the relationship between knowledge about the region and the power structures that give knowledge meaning. Typically, that methodology is applied to Middle East Studies at the post-secondary level. This paper applies that methodology to public schools in Washington, D.C. Through structural analysis, I will tease out the “epistemological commitments” (Abu El Haj 2001) of what the government of Washington, D.C. calls “social studies learning standards” -- short sentences which “detail the knowledge students are expected to acquire at a particular grade level.” Based on my experience teaching the Middle East in a Washington, D.C. public high school, I also raise questions about the relationship between the content standards and teachers’ work conditions, and whether such conditions support or inhibit the development of a praxis (Freire 2016) which could deconstruct US colonialism inside American public schools. One goal of this paper is to bring Middle East Studies into conversation with American Studies, broadly defined, and in particular ethnographic studies of DC that consider the colonial relationship between the US Government and Washingtonians. I conclude by calling for a deeper engagement with the American public school system by Middle East Studies scholars at both a theoretical and practical level

In anticipation of the fiftieth anniversary of its founding, past and present members of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) organized a roundtable for the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) entitled “MERIP's Impact on Middle East Studies.” Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, on October 14, 2020, the roundtable was conducted as a virtual webinar. The participants included Joe Stork, Judith Tucker, Zachary Lockman, Ted Swedenburg, Norma Claire Moruzzi, Jacob Mundy, and Stacey Philbrick Yadav. The roundtable was moderated by Waleed Hazbun and offered reflections about MERIP's original mission, explained how its model for “research and information” evolved, and explored how over fifty years MERIP's contributions have helped transform Middle East Studies scholarship. The following is a transcript that has been edited for clarity and length.

During the late 1960s, left-wing American activists faced challenges when trying to find out about what was happening in the Middle East and what their government was doing there. Yet overall, some activists still felt that by 1970 the American Left suffered from an overall dearth of solid information and regular, independent, critical analysis of the Middle East. As a result, the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) and its publication, MERIP Reports, were established in 1971 to fill that void. However, in many ways a major impetus for MERIP's formation was not just its founders’ hunger for better analysis of the region, but also the deep impressions made on them by a dramatic and influential trip several of them took to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan in August and early September 1970. Thus, while it is true that, since its inception, MERIP has shaped the study of the Middle East, it is also true that it was the Middle East that first shaped those who formed MERIP.

This study examines attributes associated with U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Omar's unique intersectionality of identities as a Black, immigrant, Muslim woman presents a rich case study for an examination of attribute agenda setting. A sample of Tweets, all Wall Street Journal articles referencing the congresswoman, and Google searches were obtained for the hashtags (“IlhanOmar,” “GoBack,” and “WelcomeHome.”) from May 2019 to January 2020. The Tweets and articles were then coded for a variety of dimensions. Analysis of the frequencies of words associated with the coding and the hashtags showed that the majority of the messages were negative despite the hashtag for which they were collected. A cross-correlation time series analysis showed that articles and editorials published by the Wall Street Journal predicted spikes in Google searches and Twitter messages. This article pinpoints underlying sociological phenomena about the representations of gender, race, religion, and immigration status to show the arguments that link attributes of Ilhan Omar together on Twitter.

This article will illustrate how using interdisciplinary student-faculty collaborative research can help decolonialize Islamic Studies. This article will be based on a case study of our recently completed student-faculty collaborate research project, Seeing and Hearing Omar ibn Said. Faculty members led a student-faculty research and public outreach project regarding Omar ibn Said, an enslaved Muslim man from the Senegambia region. The students’ work focused on the biographical opera Omar, which was planned for debut at the 2020 Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. This interdisciplinary collaboration combined religious studies, history, and performance studies. The students produced outreach materials designed for public engagement and education. Ultimately this article brings to light several important topics: the pedagogy of interdisciplinary studies, giving students agency in an interdisciplinary setting, and the lack of recognition of early Muslims in America.

The Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) was founded in 1971 as a project of the American New Left in solidarity with and drawing inspiration from the Beirut-centered Arab New Left and anti-imperialist struggles for national liberation in the Middle East and North Africa. The question of Palestine was a central, but certainly not exclusive, concern. From its origins MERIP was committed to political economy as a key method to understanding the Middle East and North Africa. It highlighted the importance of oil in the regional power structure and to the emergent U.S. empire. Many of its articles featured analyses of the social relationships of class and capital. MERIP was wary of “Arab socialism” and pan-Arab nationalism as official state ideologies. Its analysis of the 1979 Iranian revolution won MERIP and its emphasis on the importance of political economy a respected place in Anglo-American academia. Political economy never disappeared from MERIP's orientation, although its salience declined from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s. The financial crisis of 2008 drew renewed attention to the structure of global capitalism. MERIP's history positioned it to participate in the renewed attention to class, capital, markets with more attention to the racialized and gendered character of these relationships.

This article examines the ways that Iranian women have been situated in the nation-building exercise from the White Revolution of 1963 to the 1979 revolution and period of consolidation of clerical power. Social Reproduction Theory elucidates critical facets of both state control and spaces of counterhegemonic resistance. These spaces include publications like Tawfiq, a political satire magazine published in the Pahlavi era, which is featured in the analysis as a site of political contestation that could be utilized and expanded by other opposition groups. This paper argues that in contrast to the popularly accepted dichotomy between liberalized and regressive gender roles, this arena represented a critical failure on the part of the secular opposition, which enabled the clerical faction to co-opt and take control of narratives in which they cast themselves as protectors of women and other vulnerable groups.

Drawing on a reading of MERIP's articles related to women's and gender studies over the course of its 50-year history, this piece reflects on how MERIP's forays into this field formed part of its overarching aspiration to place scholarship in the service of progressive political projects. I explore how intellectual trends and political commitments worked together to shape the topics and approaches related to gender that appeared in MERIP's pages. The political purposes of knowledge production were omnipresent in the minds of authors and editors, and we see evidence of a conscious program of critique of past scholarship on women and gender in the region, as well as sustained attention to research and writing that could connect, or perhaps even be useful, to struggles in the Middle East region and the amelioration of U.S. policy. The framing of issues varied over time, from a focus on political economy to political action to broader cultural questions, in rhythm with shifts in scholarly paradigms and events on the ground.

Many Afro-Arab women novelists, if not all, have been addressing feminist issues for ages while homeland issues have been masculinized. Against this trend, Leila Abouzeid's academic interests span not only women's issues, but also those of men and of her country as well. Her book shows how a woman is dominated by patriarchy and colonization and how she herself appears to be an executioner. It also shows her struggle and resistance against patriarchy and imperial power, without sacrificing her commitment to her national and religious identity. In contrast to secular feminism, Abouzeid views religion as a source of relief and solace. The study also argues that the men happily adopt the colonial culture whereas their women resist it. Tackling the experience of double colonization in Year of the Elephant captures the experiences of millions of women in both the eastern and western hemispheres who rebel over the laws that govern their lives.

In this essay, we examine how MERIP has navigated the frictions between the political economic critique of extraction and domination in the region, and more semiotic models which center “culture,” variously understood, in their analyses of power and inequality. Broadly speaking, MERIP authors have addressed four dimensions of culture writ large: aesthetic expressions and artistic performances; everyday practices and ordinary life in their various multisensorial, affective experiences; identity performance along intersectional terrains of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race; and discursive formations in which the very categories of the “political” and the “economic” are produced and reproduced within shifting fields of power. In all its dimensions, culture is embedded and entangled in material conflicts over production, distribution, and consumption, and thus necessarily political, but not merely so. How to approach cultural politics and political culture without reducing them to a play of hegemony and resistance has been a persistent challenge in cultural analysis. By exploring how MERIP authors have negotiated this fraught terrain—by outlining MERIP's effective culture concept with a focus on its aesthetic dimensions—we offer a window into a central tension within the broader field of Middle East studies.

This essay explores insights from our experiences teaching undergraduates a set of paired history and political science courses on protest and revolution in the Middle East. Working in groups, students developed simulations of key moments of revolution or protest explored during the courses. The simulation assignment was designed to engage students in an active learning setting and as a shared assignment across both courses. The most interesting result of this project, from the teaching perspective, was its unanticipated ability to expose students to the contingency and emotion that scholarship has recently emphasized as critical to understanding social movements, but which so often falls out of the study of history and political science analyses of protest and revolution. In this paper we explore the simulation assignment, how student groups designed the simulations with limited guidance from instructors, how students took on the assigned roles by engaging deeply with the histories of the events, and how the engagement in the simulations complicated the analyses that formed the bedrock of our course readings. In our analysis we draw on two iterations of the paired courses and use both student qualitative assessments of the course and student reflections on the simulations that were included in group papers.

In thinking through the stark differences in how a research project in Lebanon was received in 2018 versus 2020, this paper seeks to reflect on the fragile relationship between academic researcher and community, on the legitimacy of research in moments of crisis, and on the complexity of pursuing decolonial research in the contemporary West Asia North Africa region.

Descriptions and analyses of the 2011 “Arab Spring” uprisings constitute a veritable cottage industry for journalists, academics, and think-tank consultants. The three books under review here join an ever-expanding library that documents and interprets those crucial events in December 2010 and January 2011, that so passionately raised our hopes only to later so bitterly crush them.

In Turkish Kaleidoscope, social anthropologist and novelist Jenny White has expanded her repertoire to the graphic novel format to create an account of the violence and political chaos that pervaded Turkey in the late 1970s.2 White builds here on her academic work and her own student experience at Hacettepe University in Ankara. Artist Ergün Gündüz has created visual interpretations of place, space, events, and emotions that bring the story to life. This review is a collaborative class exercise for “Turkey: From Atatürk to Erdoğan” at Brandeis University in the Spring 2021 semester. It reflects on the novel as a text for Turkish history; the format of the work; the aesthetic choices of artist and author; and the experience of encountering this work in the contemporary historical moment. The review incorporates student comments as direct quotations. It was co-authored by Chris Martin, a student in the course.

Evliya Çelebi (d. after 1685), in his Seyahatname, Book of Travels, completed circa 1683, records a host of languages and dialects spoken within the Ottoman Empire at the time and provides practical word lists in transcription, especially for those less familiar to his Turkophone audience, such as Hungarian in the western borderlands and varieties of Kurdish in the eastern regions. Evliya also remarks of places where he met bilingual speakers. For instance, about the city of Ohrid in the central province of Rumelia, he informs us that, though its people mainly speak Greek or Bulgarian, they could converse in “elegant Turkish,” some in a “very urbane and witty” manner typical of Ottoman literati. Yet curiously, about the capital of Istanbul, his hometown, Evliya says nothing specific about any interaction, besides that he had learned “fluent Greek and Latin” from a Christian goldsmith, to be able to read certain chronicles, and in exchange instructed Persian to the craftsman.