Middle East Centre

Dr Saeb Erekat (Secretary General of the Palestine Liberation Organization) gives the 2019 George Anronius Memorial Lecture. Chaired by Professor Eugene Rogan (St Antony's College).

Dr Dorthe Engelcke (Max Planck Institute, Hamburg) gives a discussion Chair: Dr Michael Willis (St Antony's College). Family law – the law regulating marriage, divorce, custody, polygyny and guardianship among others - is one of the most sensitive areas in Muslim-majority countries. Morocco and Jordan both issued new family codes in the 2000s, but there are a number of differences in the ways these two states engaged in reform. These include how the reform was carried out, the content of the new family codes, and the way the new laws are applied. In Morocco, the process of reform became less dominated by actors who had received religious training, whereas in Jordan the da'irat qadi al-qudat, the shariʿa court administration, retook control over family law reform. In Morocco it was King Muhammad VI who took the lead. By contrast, in Jordan King Abdullah II was largely absent from the reform process. The 2004 Moroccan code proclaims international law as one of its sources, whereas the preamble of the Jordanian 2010 law states that the law is based entirely on Islamic sources. Whereas international actors like UN Women were engaged in the implementation of the 2004 family code in Morocco, they did not play a similar role in Jordan. This talk investigates why similar states varied in their engagement with family law reform. It demonstrates that the structure of the legal systems, shaped by colonial policies, had an effect on how reform processes were carried out, and on the content and the application of the law. The talk draws attention to why and how certain inequalities have developed over time and how they impact on women’s and children’s rights today.

Professor Benny Morris and Professor Dror Ze'evi give a talk for the Middle East Studies Centre seminar series. Chaired by Dr Laurent Mignon (St Antony's College). Morris and Ze'evi will talk about the destruction of the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian communities of Asia Minor - some 4-5 million people - during the reigns of Abdulhamid II, the Young Turks and Ataturk, 1894-1924. Most were dispossessed and exiled and some 2 million were murdered in three massive bouts of violence. The mass murder, in each bout, was accompanied by mass rape and abduction of girls, women and children into Muslim households, and mass conversion. They will describe the process and its causes and results. Professor Benny Morris was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh in 1948 and brought up in Israel and New York. After IDF service, he did a BA at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD - both in modern European history - at Cambridge University. Thereafter, he worked as a journalist at The Jerusalem Post and subsequently, between 1997 and 2017, as a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, Dartmouth College, LMU in Munich, and the University of Maryland and among his books are The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (1988); Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956 (1993); Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict 1882-1999 (1999); 1948, A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (2008); and, impending, jointly authored with Dror Ze'evi, The Thirty-Year Genocide, Turkey's Destruction of its Christian Minorities 1894-1924 (2019). He has published articles in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, Corriere della Sera, Die Welt, Haaretz, etc. Professor Dror Ze'evi received his Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University in 1992, and after Post-doctoral studies at Princeton joined the faculty at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he teaches Middle Eastern Studies, with an emphasis on modern and early modern cultural history. His book, An Ottoman Century: The District of Jerusalem in the 1600s, (Ithaca, SUNY Press 1996) is a portrait of a Palestinian society in the early modern period, which was soon translated into Hebrew and Turkish. Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900 (University of California Press, 2006), is a study of the shifts in sexual outlook in the region, on the eve of modernity. A Turkish Translation was published subsequently. An edited volume (with Ehud Toledano), Society, Law and Culture in the Middle East: “Modernities” in the Making, was published in 2015 by De Gruyter, and his current research (with Benny Morris) has resulted in the volume The Thirty Years of Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of its Christian Minorities, (Harvard University Press, with an Italian translation by Rizzoli). Zeevi founded the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben Gurion University and served as its first chair until 1998 (and once again from 2002 to 2004). He was among the founders of the Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies and Diplomacy in 1997, and it's first chair, until 2002. In 2009 he was elected President of The Middle East and Islamic Studies Association of Israel (MEISAI), and in 2015 appointed Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Studies. During his career he was invited to work and lecture at many universities and research centers abroad. Among others, he was senior visiting fellow at Brandeis University and Skidmore College in the U.S. and at Koc and Sabanci Universities in Turkey. From the mid 1990s to this day Zeevi participates in a series of "track-2" meetings with Palestinian delegations, and at the end of a recent round of talks hosted by Sweden, participated in writing One Land, Two States: Israel and Palestine as Parallel States (Mossberg and Levine eds. Berkeley, 2015). He is among the founders of the Forum for Regional Thinking, engaged in presenting deeper and more accurate portrayal of the Middle East to the Israeli public, and publishes regularly in Israeli journals and websites, including Haaretz, Yediot, Ynet, and Wallah.

Armando Salvatore (McGill University) gives a talk as part of the following conference: Neither Near Nor Far: Encounters and Exchanges between Japan and the Middle East. The lecture investigates the contribution to the study of Islam by a non-Muslim, yet non-Western and non-Eurocentric personality, the Japanese linguist and philosopher Toshihiko Izutsu (1914-1993). It traces Izutsu's original trajectory from his early practice of Zen Buddhism, through his discovery of the religious fervour of Greek philosophers, to his exploration of the spiritual and intellectual powerhouse represented by Islam as enacting a historical culmination of prophetic speech. It shows how this powerhouse represented for Izutsu a veritable Middle-Earth bridging Western (Abrahamic) and Eastern cultural and religious traditions and making obsolete the rigid geo-cultural divide on which their mutual radical divergence was premised. The lecture reflects on how the work of Izutsu has become a game changer in a variety of locales thanks to his power to help breaking through an increasingly suffocating short-circuit: the obsessive face-to-face between Western and Islamic views, between Euro-American academia and the Middle East, leading to an inconclusive and circular game of irenic openings and deep-sited conflicts. This unique development underscores the possibility for a scholar of the calibre of Izutsu to redesign the global intellectual map of the study of Islam also by relying on obvious failures and fissures in the Western monopoly of knowledge on the Middle East. By doing so, he contributed to institute vital, direct, and mutually enlivening scholarly connections between Japan and the Middle East.

Panel discussion on the Republic of Sudan. Joint event with The Sudanese Programme, held in St Antony's College on May 3rd 2019. Dr Ahmed Al-Shahi (Research Fellow, St Antony's College, Trustee of the Sudanese Programme), Dr Sara Abdelgalil (Paediatric Consultant, President of Sudan Doctors' Union UK), Dr Richard Barltrop (Consultant and researcher on the two Sudans, Trustee of the Sudanese Programme) About the speakers: Dr Ahmed Al-Shahi is a Research Fellow and, since 2002 co-Founder of The Sudanese Programme. He is a social anthropologist whose research interests are economic and social development, sectarian politics, social differentiations, popular culture and oral tradition. He has undertaken extensive anthropological research in northern Sudan. Selected Publications: Among his publications are: Wisdom from the Nile (with F.C.T. Moore), The Oxford Library of African Literature, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978; La Republique du Soudan, Berger- Levrault, Paris, 1979; Islam in the Modern World (co-editor with D. MacEoin), Croom Helm, 1983; Themes from Northern Sudan, Ithaca Press, 1986; The Arab House (co-editor with A. D. C. Hyland), University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1986; The Diversity of the Muslim Community: Anthropological Essays in Memory of Peter Lienhardt (editor), Ithaca Press, 1987; Disorientations: A society in Flux. Kuwait in the 1950s by Peter Lienhardt (editor), Ithaca Press, 1991; A Special Issue:Al-Tayyib Salih, Seventy Candles, Edebiyart: The Journal of Middle Eastern Literature, (co-editor with Ami Elad-Bouskila) 1991; Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia by Peter Lienhardt (editor), Palgrave/St. Antony's College Series, 2001; Middle East and North African Immigrants in Europe (co-editor with Richard Lawless), Routledge, 2005; Sudan: A Long Transition into Two States (editors: Ahmed Al-Shahi and Bona Malwal), published (in collaboration with the Sudanese Programme, St Antony’s College) by M.O. Beshir Centre for Sudanese Studies, Omdurman Ahlia University, Omdurman, Sudan, 2013; and Hikma min Al-Nil (Wisdom from the Nile) (editor with F.C.T.Moore), Abdel Karim Mirghani Centre, Omdurman, Sudan, 2017. His most recent publication are: Women Writers of the Two Sudans (2019, co-edited with Laurent Mignon) and Wisdom from the Desert (2019) in collaboration with FCT Moore. Sara Ibrahim Abdelgalil is a consultant paediatrician who is interested in international child health and development. She graduated from university of Khartoum in 1998 with Kitchener’ and Albagdadi’s prizes - best academic performance. While in Sudan she worked alongside other colleagues to establish an organisation that supports children with disadvantaged backgrounds e.g. orphans and street children. Sara moved to the United Kingdom to achieve her dreams in better training and medical practice. She campaigned for women and children rights as well as for human rights violations in particular in relation to health services. She obtained her masters and diploma degrees at Liverpool school of tropical medicine in tropical child health with an award and distinction - John Hey prize. Sara completed her paediatric training in the U.K. and has the fellowship of the royal college of Paediatrics and child health. Working among Sudanese diaspora in different societies and groups she promoted the activation and return of legitimate professionals unions back home. This campaign included Sudanese university graduates. Her role in the Sudan Doctors’ Union U.K. extended from establishing links with other Sudanese professionals in U.K. to working in epidemic campaigns in Sudan. As the president of SDU U.K. she is leading her organisation to support democratic change in Sudan and contribute to rebuilding of new Sudan. SDU U.K. raised concerns in regards to human rights violations against peaceful protestors in Sudan. Richard Barltrop is a consultant specialising in work on conflict, development and peace in the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. Since 2001 he has worked for the United Nations Development Programme in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Yemen. He has worked for the UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan, and for the UK Stabilisation Unit in Iraq and on Syria peace talks. He has also worked as a consultant on conflict resolution and peacebuilding for the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, International Alert, and the EU. Richard has a DPhil in International Relations, an MPhil in Middle Eastern Studies, and a BA in Classics from the University of Oxford. He is the author of Darfur and the International Community: The Challenges of Conflict Resolution in Sudan (IB Tauris, 2011), and was a visiting fellow at Durham University in 2015.

Yael Zerubavel (Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies and History, Rutgers University) gives a talk for the Middle East Centre, chaired by Professor Yaacov Yadgar (Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies, St Anne's). At once an ecological phenomenon and a cultural construction, the desert has varied associations in Zionist and Israeli culture. Yael Zerubavel tells the story of the desert from the early twentieth century to the present, shedding light on romantic-mythical associations, settlement and security concerns, environmental sympathies, and the commodifying tourist gaze. Drawing on literary narratives, educational texts, newspaper articles, tourist materials, films, popular songs, posters, photographs, and cartoons, Zerubavel reveals the complexities and contradictions that mark Israeli society’s semiotics of space in relation to the Middle East, and the central role of the “besieged island” trope in Israeli culture and politics. The talk draws on the new book published by Stanford University Press (2019).

Middle East Centre seminar with Touraj Atabaki (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam), Stephanie Cronin (Oxford University, Siavush Randjbar Daemi (University of St Andrews). Chaired by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi (University of Oxford) Paper titles and abstracts: Stephanie Cronin (University of Oxford) - The Global 1970s and the Iranian Revolution. The Iranian revolution of 1977-79 has usually been analysed within the confines of national history. This talk rather places both the revolution itself, and the new regime which eventually emerged from it, in their global contexts and historical periods. Beginning with some comments on the nature of revolutions in general, the talk then locates the Iranian revolution in the context of the 'Red Decade' of the 1970s, and the formation of the Islamic republic in the succeeding global period - one of neo-liberalism, authoritarianism and social conservatism. Siavush Randjbar​ Daemi (University of St Andrews) - Bystanders or Participants? The Non-Clerical opposition to the Shah in 1977-1979​ ​ Most scholarly accounts of the Iranian Revolution have focused on the role and agency of the clergy led by Ayatollah Khomeini and its close lay allies. This talk will provide an overview instead of the initiatives and agency of the non-clerical opposition to the Shah from the start of Jimmy-Kerasi in 1977 to the victory of the Revolution. It will note the non-clerical opposition’s role in the initial stages of the revolt against the monarchical regime, as well as the unfruitful attempts by the Shah to bring one of its main components, the National Front, into government. Touraj Atabaki (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam) - Was the Iranian Revolution (1978-1979) Inevitable?

Rory McCarthy (Magdalen College, Oxford) gives a talk for the Middle East Centre seminar series, chaired by Michael Willis (St Antony's College). In the wake of the Arab uprisings, the Tunisian Islamist movement al-Nahda voted to transform itself into a political party that would for the first time withdraw from a preaching project built around religious, social, and cultural activism. This turn to the political was not a Tunisian exception but reflects an urgent debate within Islamist movements as they struggle to adjust to a rapidly changing political environment. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Rory McCarthy explores the lived experience of Islamist activism to offer a challenging new perspective on one of the Middle East's most successful Islamist projects. Original evidence explains how al-Nahda survived two decades of brutal repression in prison and in social exclusion, and reveals what price the movement paid for a new strategy of pragmatism and reform during the transition away from authoritarianism.

Dr Ozlem Belcim Galip (Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow, The School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford) gives a talk for the Middle East Centre seminar series, chaired by Marilyn Booth (Magdalen College). A movement is observable that sees Kurdish migrant women moving from oppression within a traditional, patriarchal society; ethnic oppression; and being stuck between secularism and Islam, to exhibiting a liberated agency that challenges the monolithic perspectives of social power. The aesthetic and intellectual production of Kurdish migrant women, which leads to the empowerment of women and advancement of gender equality in the Kurdish diaspora, has not been the subject of any notable research yet. By going beyond stereotypical portrayals of Kurdish women either reflected as a victim of honour-based violence or someone who suffers war or violent conflict in any Kurdish region, my presentation titled 'From Kurdistan to Europe: Kurdish Literary, Artistic and Cultural Activism by Kurdish Women Intellectuals' examines the activism of Kurdish migrant women in selected host European countries (France, Belgium, Sweden, Germany and the UK) in terms of artistic, literary and cultural practices in both the language(s) of the host countries and women's native Kurdish languages. The goal of this presentation is first to reveal the changing dynamics within Kurdish migrant women's mobilization along with their cultural engagements in the selected European states, secondly to examine the integration policies of the selected European countries within a comparative approach, and thirdly to investigate transnational networking and dynamics between Kurdish migrant women (labour migrants/refugees) in Europe, the agents of cultural production in their home countries (Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey) and other European countries.

Andrew Arsan (University of Cambridge) gives a talk for the Middle East Centre. Chaired by Walter Armbrust (St Antony's College).