Islamic World and Near East History Commons^™

The Student Researcher Volume 1 (Full Publication), Selena Sanderfer Faculty Advisor

The Student Researcher: A Phi Alpha Theta Publication

No abstract provided.

Are Women’S Roles Changing In Oman?, Andrew Miller

The Student Researcher: A Phi Alpha Theta Publication

This is an exploratory research project on Omani women’s roles changing in the household. To start off, tradition will be defined by the definition I followed throughout my paper. Following that, I will explore what is women’s traditional role within the household. Next, information will be presented that will discuss major steps women have taken in education, employment, and gaining skills for the workplace. These points will be followed up with statistics and an explanation of each table. These tables examine the data of women’s education, freedom, encouragement to work, and overall skills they are gaining. You will read about …

Scholar Asks How Mesopotamians Lived, Felt, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Reviving The Reluctant Art Of Iranian Dance In Iran And In The American Diaspora, Anthony Shay

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

In this chapter, I look at the various ways in which different individuals--Iranians, Iranian immigrants in the West, Americans, and other non-Iranians--participated in several revival Iranian dance movements, beginning in the 1930s and continuing into the twenty-first century. The new interest in dance that began in this period coincided with a period of incipient modernity and its need to find ways in which to construct a modern national identity. As increasing numbers of Iranians made their way to the West, first as students and ultimately as immigrants and refugees, they discovered that dance as a representational field dovetailed with their …

The Development Of Personal Status Law In Jordan & Iraq, Kelsey Cherland

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis explores the historical development of personal status law, which governs a person’s marriage, divorce, and custody rights. It is significant because it is part of a framework that has defined women’s rights for centuries. I will argue that personal status law is a patriarchal framework that has been reinforced over time, leading up to the creation of nation-states in the Middle East. As such, this is the “institution” of personal status that will be traced using historical institutionalism theory. In this thesis I will argue that personal status has undergone a critical juncture, or crucial moment of potential …

Volume 5: Genealogy And Knowledge In Muslim Societies : Understanding The Past, Sarah Bowen Savant, Helena De Felipe

Exploring Muslim Contexts

Genealogy is one of the most important and authoritative organising principles of Muslim societies.

From the Prophet’s day to the present, ideas about kinship and descent have shaped tribal, ethnic, sectarian and other identities. An understanding of genealogy is therefore vital to our understanding of Muslim societies, particularly with regard to the generation, preservation and manipulation of genealogical knowledge.

This book addresses the subject through a range of case studies that link genealogical knowledge to the particular circumstances in which it was created, circulated and promoted. They stress the malleability of kinship and memory, and the interests this malleability served.

The Political Aesthetics Of Global Protest : The Arab Spring And Beyond, Pnina Werbner, Martin Webb, Kathryn Spellman-Poots

Independent Volumes

A remarkable feature of the Arab Spring and other protests that followed in Egypt, India, Botswana and the UK, among other places, has been the salience of images, songs, videos, humour, satire and dramatic performances.

This book explores the central role the aesthetic played in energising the mass mobilisations of young people, the disaffected, the middle classes, the apolitical silent majority, as well as enabling solidarities and alliances among democrats, workers, trade unions, civil rights activists and opposition parties.

Comparing the North African and Middle Eastern uprisings with protest movements such as Occupy, the authors bring to bear an anthropological …

Boycotts To Bombs: History, Causes, And Comparison Of The Palestinian Intifadas, Leah Wilson

Lewis Honors College Capstone Collection

One of the foremost geopolitical issues of the twenty first century, the conflict between Israel and Palestine has a complicated, ominous history, and limited signs of hope for resolution in the near future. Darkened by particularly bloody and significant events such as the 1948 Arab-Israel dispute, the 1967 Six Day War, and the continuously violent actions taken near the turn of the century, the conflict continues to detrimentally impact the security of the region, the socioeconomic livelihood of Palestinians, and the dwindling influence of international actors to curb recognizably illegal settlements and flagrant human rights violations. Particularly significant to the …

Islamic Nationalism: Tracing Paradoxes In The Evolution Of The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Henry Johnson

CMC Senior Theses

This paper presents a narrative history of Iranian revolutionary ideology and its evolving impact on foreign policy. It looks at this history primary through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an institution established after the revolution and designed to defend the Islamic political order in Iran as well as oppressed Muslims abroad. The Revolutionary Guard, or Guard for short, became a focal point in the efforts of Iranian revolutionaries to export their ideology and has evolved overtime into a politicized and unconventional military force, often associated in the media with supporting foreign terrorists and militants. This paper argues that the Guard …

Pieces Of A Mosaic: Revised Identities Of The Almoravid Dynasty And Almohad Caliphate And Al-Bayan Al-Mugrib, Rolando J. Gutierrez

CMC Senior Theses

This study seeks to clarify the identities of the Almoravid and Almohad Berber movements in the larger Crusade narrative. The two North African Islamic groups are often carelessly placed within the group identified as “Islam” in discussions about the series of military campaigns that took place not only in the traditional Holy Land but also throughout regions of the Mediterranean such as Spain; this generalized identifier of “Islam” is placed against a much more complex group of generally Christian parties, all of them seen as separate, unique groups under the umbrella identifier of Christianity. This foray into a late 13 …

Atatürk's Balancing Act: The Role Of Secularism In Turkey, Patrick G. Rear

Global Tides

The intersection of religion and politics in the form of a civil religion has been present since time immemorial. This paper looks specifically to the relationship between Turkey’s development of a secular civil religion after gaining independence and the advancing of women’s rights and democratic values. In examining the intersections of state and religion in a secular Islamic society, it draws parallels to the French civil religion as it came to be following the French Revolution. Though Atatürk and other secularists were strong forces in developing the civil religion, the paper also examines liberal democratic and conservative Islamic groups in …

Politicized Historiography And The Zionist-Crusader Analogy, Emma Kellman

Scripps Senior Theses

This study offers a look at the ways in which discourse shaped by the contemporary Israel-Palestine conflict serves as a framework for modern historiography on Palestine. It focuses specifically on the variety of historical narratives proffered as to the “truth” of the Crusade period in Palestine, roughly the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, and their mobilization in political agendas through the Zionist-Crusader analogy. This comparison, a historical analogy likening Zionists to Frankish Crusaders or the State of Israel to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, appears frequently in contemporary dialogue on the Israel-Palestine conflict; it comes from a diverse range of …

Arab Spring In Tunisia And Egypt: The Impact Of New Media On Contemporary Social Movements And Challenges For Social Movement Theory, Victoria Carty

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

The events of Arab Spring were shocking for those who study societal movements as long-term dictators were swiftly removed from office and a democratic wave hit the region. Although the outcomes of the Arab Spring revolutions are yet to be determined, what we can gleam from these outbursts of collective behavior is that new media platforms played a significant role in the planning and mobilization efforts that brought people onto the streets and posed serious challenges to the existing political systems. This paper examines the importance of the communication field in influencing the political environment and motivating ordinary citizens to …

Part Of Imperial Communications: British-Governed Radio In The Middle East, 1934–1949, Andrea L. Stanton

Religious Studies: Faculty Scholarship

From 1934 to 1941, three British-governed radio stations were established in the Middle East: Egyptian State Broadcasting (ESB) in Cairo (1934), the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS) in Jerusalem (1936), and the Near East Broadcasting Service (NEBS) in Jaffa (1941). These three stations were modeled on the BBC and run as colonial or imperial stations – but they were also considered national stations. As a result, they operated as hybrid entities with overlapping and sometimes conflicting mandates.

Through three case studies – a contentious hire at the ESB, the PBS’ “Jerusalem Direct News Service”, and the NEBS’ Islamic broadcasts –, this …

Gardens In The Air: A Reexamination Of The Ottoman Tulip Age, Rachel R. Fry

Student Publications

Scholars have long considered the “Tulip Age” to be a sort of Ottoman renaissance—a golden age initiated by the 1718 Treaty of Passarowitz and lasted until the Anti-Tulip Rebellion in 1730. However, recent scholarship has questioned the objectivity of the field’s founding historian, Ahmed Refik, who based his theory off of the twofold concepts of a marked increase in tulip culture and a movement toward westernization in the Ottoman Empire. Because of this shaky foundation, this research reexamines the debate from the beginning: the tulip’s connection to earlier Turkic arts and the actualities of Ottoman “modernization.” This perspective on the …

The Consolidation Of The Consociational Democracy In Lebanon: The Challenges To Democracy In Lebanon, Micheline Germanos Ghattas

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation looks at democracy in Lebanon, a country that has a pluralistic society with many societal cleavages. The subject of this study is the consolidation of democracy in Lebanon, described by Arend Lijphart as a "consociational democracy". The research question and sub-question posed are:

1- How consolidated is democracy in Lebanon?

2- What are the challenges facing the consolidation of democracy in Lebanon?

The preamble of the 1926 Lebanese Constitution declares the country to be a parliamentary democratic republic. The political regime is a democracy, but one that is not built on the rule of the majority in numbers, …

A Subcontinent's Sunni Schism: The Deobandi-Barelvi Rivalry And The Creation Of Modern South Asia, William Kesler Jackson

History - Dissertations

This work presents the first-ever history of the 150-year religio-political rivalry between the Deobandis and the Barelvis--arguably the most important schism in the "Muslim world," and certainly the most significant within Sunni Islam. More recently, that rivalry has often been expressed by means of bullets and bombs, especially in Pakistan. But beyond the headline-grabbing violence of the Deobandi-Barelvi schism lies the story of a century-and-a-half-long religious antagonism: at first over converts, later for competing visions of the political future, then for a place within a new "Islamic" polity--for dominance within its political structure. For Deobandis, the rivalry was defined by …

From Pre-Islam To Mandate States: Examining Cultural Imperialism And Cultural Bleed In The Levant, Gabriel Willman

HIM 1990-2015

To a large degree, historical analyses of the Levantine region tend to focus primarily upon martial interaction and state formation. However, perhaps of equitable impact is the chronology of those interactions which are cultural in nature. The long-term formative effect of cultural imperialism and cultural bleed can easily be as influential as the direct alterations imposed by martial invasion. While this study does not attempt to establish comparative causal weight or catalytic impact between these types of interactions, it does contend that the cultural evolution of the Levant has been significantly influenced by external interaction for a period of time …

Imagining Kurdish Identity In Mandatory Syria: Finding A Nation In Exile, Ahmet Serdar Akturk

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation looks at the activities of the Kurdish nationalists from Turkey who were exiled in Syria and Lebanon during the period of the French mandate, and especially Jaladet and Kamuran Bedirkhan. Scions of a princely Kurdish family from the Botan region in Eastern Anatolia, the Bedirkhan brothers initiated a Kurdish cultural movement in exile following the failure of two armed rebellions against the new Turkish Republic in 1925 and 1930. Central to this cultural movement was the publication of journals in Damascus and Beirut, namely Hawar (1932-1943) Ronahi (1942-1945), Roja Nu/Le Jour Nouveau (1943-1946), and Ster (1943-1945).

This study …

“All Things Forget The Forest:” The Convergence Of The War And The Pastoral In Edward Thomas’S Body Of Work, Nicole Trobaugh

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Edward Thomas, often identified as a war poet, eludes definitive characterization despite the fact that his poems are often anthologized as war poems. However, unlike other widely-known war poets, such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, the imagery present in Thomas’s poetry contains much subtlety and features dominant usage of nature themes. This project attempts to navigate the multi-faceted world of Edward Thomas through consideration of his love for nature, his melancholic predispositions, and his preoccupations with the looming Great War in order to study Thomas’s use of natural imagery in the context of grief, melancholy, and traumatic experience. To …