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Posts tagged: mena

  • Deniz Gezmiş during the Istanbul University Occupation, 11 June 1968.

    Turkey's 68

    Turkey's 1968 generation presents an interesting case, not only because the country was undergoing a major transformation, but also because it was a devout NATO ally neighboring the Soviet Union during the Cold War era.

  • Ali Abdullah Saleh, with his son Ahmed, 1984. via Wikimedia Commons.

    After Saleh

    Ali Abdullah Saleh is dead, but his politics are very much alive in Yemen.

  • Dome of El Koubba Mosque, Tunis; where Ibn Khaldun studied.

    Ibn Khaldun and The Myth of "Arab Invasion"

    In this excerpt from Ibn Khaldun: The Birth of History and the Past of the Third World, Yves Lacoste shows how Ibn Khaldun's work refutes the myth of the "Arab invasions [of the Maghreb] of the eleventh century," despite the uses to which it has been put by the authors of the myth.

  • McJihad: Empire and Islam between The US and Saudi Arabia

    McJihad: Empire and Islam between The US and Saudi Arabia

    It has become popular today to say that we live in an era of what Benjamin Barber has labelled "Jihad vs. McWorld." The globalising powers of capitalism ("McWorld") are confronted with or resisted by the forces that Barber labels "Jihad" — the variety of tribal particularisms and "narrowly conceived faiths" opposed to the homogenising force of capital. Even those with a critical view of the growth of American empire and the expansion of what is erroneously termed the global market usually subscribe to this interpretation. In fact it is the critics who often argue that we need a better understanding of these local forms of resistance against the "universal" force of the market.

    The terms of this debate are quite misleading. We live in an age, to adapt Barber’s nomenclature, of "McJihad." It is an age in which the mechanisms of what we call capitalism appear to operate, in certain critical instances, only by adopting the social force and moral authority of conservative Islamic movements. It may be true that we need a better understanding of the local forces that oppose the globalisation of capital; but, more than this, we need a better understanding of the so-called global forces of capital.