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Archive for the 'Culture' Category

‘Culture and Conflict in the Middle East’

MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Philip Carl Salzman is professor of anthropology at McGill University and a member of MESH. His new book is Culture and Conflict in the Middle East.

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Why the ‘return’ to Islam?

From Philip Carl Salzman I would like to take up and elaborate somewhat Adam Garfinkle’s point (in a comment on an earlier post) about “a theologicalization of Islamic societies, defined as the process whereby the status of religion as a legitimate carrier of the public weal grows and the status of politics of a legitimate […]

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From J. Scott Carpenter As early as this weekend, Geert Wilders, controversial Dutch politician and vocal critic of Islam, will release his new film, Fitna, on the internet. Fitna, which in Arabic means “dissension,” promises to be even more inflammatory in Muslim-majority countries than the Danish cartoons that sparked riots in many capitals in 2006. […]

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From Michael Reynolds Despite all that is going on in the Middle East, what caught my eye recently are three items concerning western Europe. Each is very different, but all indicate that the question of the integration of Muslims into European societies will remain contentious for some time to come.

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From Stephen Peter Rosen I am worried. Last year I did some historical research on the shifts in discourse within British, Japanese, and South African official elites prior to their use of biological weapons. In all these cases, including the deliberate distribution of small pox-infected blankets by the British in North America, the use of […]

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Elie Kedourie (1926-1992) was a rigorous interpreter of Middle Eastern history and contemporary affairs, famous for his penetrating style and principled conservatism. In 1970 he published an essay on “The Middle East and the Powers,” as the opening piece in a collected volume named after its most renowned article, The Chatham House Version. Below, we […]

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From Walter Laqueur Detail from Eugène Delacroix, The Fanatics of Tangier, 1837-38. It is not “the West against the rest.” Throughout human history, civilizations have coexisted and competed, and there is no good reason to assume that this will change in the foreseeable future. True, there is still considerable resistance to accepting such obvious facts […]

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