Modern Middle East and North Africa Studies (MENA)

MODERN MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA STUDIES (MENA). MENA in Anglo-American academia grew out of the discipline of Orientalism – the study of Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish texts of the classical Islamic era (roughly from the emergence of Islam in 610 to the fall of the ‘Abbasid Empire in 1258). Orientalist scholars believed that these texts revealed the essential nature of “Islamic civilization,” which subsequently entered a long period of decline.

After World War II, US-based social scientists married modernization theory to Orientalism to advance a new hybrid methodology suitable for studying the modern MENA, typically in interdisciplinary area studies programs framed by the Cold War. This paradigm was hegemonic in Anglo-American academia until the 1970s. Most of the founding members of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), established in 1966, embraced it to one degree or another.

Francophone Marxist scholars rejected the Orientalism/modernization theory paradigm, led by three Egyptians. Anouar Abdel-Malek posed a comprehensive critique in his 1963 Diogenes article “Orientalism in Crisis.” Abdel-Malek’s Egypt: Military Society: The Army Regime, the Left, and Social Change Under Nasser, Hasan Riad’s (pseudonym of Samir Amin), L’Égypte nasserienne, and Mahmoud Hussein’s (pseudonym of ‘Adil Rif‘at and Bahgat al-Nadi), Class Conflict in Egypt, 1945-1970 sharply criticized the regime of President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Maxime Rodinson, a member of the Communist Party of France from 1937 to 1958, deployed his Orientalist textual skills in projects like his Marxist-Freudian biography, Muhammad, and Islam and Capitalism, which sought to refute the modernization theory notion that Muslim societies did not engage in capitalist accumulation. Rodinson’s work demonstrates that the problem with Orientalism was not studying texts per se, but decontextualized, ahistorical, and ideological textualism and anti-Muslim prejudice.

The formation of a left pole in MENA studies in the 1960s was influenced by armed struggles for national liberation in Algeria, Yemen, and Palestine (although both the academic and broader left were deeply divided on the Palestine/Israel). The 1966 docudrama, “The Battle of Algiers,” epitomized the spirit of militant decolonization and anti-imperialism of that era.

Because Anglo-American MENA studies was hostile to all forms of left thinking, the beginnings of its radicalization were outside the academy. The Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) was founded in 1971. Initially, it sought to inform and win the anti-Vietnam War movement to the program of the Arab new left: opposition to “Zionism, imperialism, and Arab reaction.” Fred Halliday’s Arabia Without Sultans and Joe Stork’s Middle East Oil and the Energy Crisis exemplify MERIP’s orientation in the early 1970s.

By the late 1970s, MERIP Reports (now the online Middle East Report, MER) adopted a more scholarly tone and extended its influence due to its well-informed analysis of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90) and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, both of which contradicted modernization theory expectations, as well as Egypt and Israel/Palestine. Long-time editors Joe Stork (1971-95) and Chris Toensing (2000-17) decisively shaped the style and contents of MER. Several prominent figures of the post-1960s academic left in MENA studies were deeply engaged with MERIP in its formative years.

In 1975, members of the Socialist Organization in Israel (usually identified by the name of its journal, Matzpen, or compass) and émigré Arabs in Paris launched Khamsin: Journal of Revolutionary Socialists of the Middle-East. After four issues, Khamsin relocated to London and began publishing in English until it closed in 1989. Articles originally published in Khamsin were anthologized as Forbidden Agendas: Intolerance and Defiance in the Middle East.

MERIP and Khamsin were explicitly political projects. More traditional scholarly publications with a left leaning agenda emerged about the same time.

In 1975, the University of Hull (UK) Middle East Seminar began to publish the Review of Middle East Studies (ROMES) edited by Talal Asad and Roger Owen. In his essay in the inaugural issue, “The Middle East in the Eighteenth Century: An Islamic Society in Decline: A Critique of Gibb and Bowen’s Islamic Society and the West,” Owen sharply refuted a canonical work of the Orientalist/modernization theory paradigm.

From 1976 to 2005 Immanuel Wallerstein directed the Fernand Braudel Center at the State University of New York in Binghamton. It attracted many émigré leftist Turkish graduate students and visiting faculty (their numbers augmented after the military coup of 1980) who were influenced by Wallerstein and encouraged by the Ottoman labor historian, Donald Quataert. In 1977 the inaugural issue of the center’s journal, Review, featured a bold “Agenda for Ottoman History” by Huri Islamoğlu-İnan and Çağlar Keyder. Using World-Systems theory and Marx’s concept of an Asiatic Mode of Production, they advocated refocusing research on the processes of the incorporation of Ottoman territories into the world capitalist market on a subordinate basis. Islamoğlu-İnan republished the article a decade later in her edited volume, The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy with an autocritique rejecting World-Systems theory as economistic and attributing too much agency to Europe.

These institutions, journals, and their authors focused on five research areas: 1) asserting the relevance of class analysis; 2) demonstrating that in some countries of the region there had been a significant Marxist left rooted in an emergent urban working class and a radicalized young intelligentsia; 3) using political economy to refute the thesis of Ottoman decline and demonstrating that Ottoman land tenure practices were not a barrier to commercial agriculture, the commodification of agricultural lands, and capital accumulation; 4) challenging the Zionist historical narrative, exposing Israel’s aggressive actions in the Arab world and asserting the existence of the Palestinian people; and 5) developing a critique of US foreign policy. Towards the end of the 1970s, women’s and gender studies became part of the agenda of the left in MENA studies.

Eric Davis’s Challenging Colonialism: Bank Misr and Egyptian Industrialization, 1920-1941, Hanna Batatu’s The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba‘thists and Free Officers and Ervand Abrahamian’s Iran Between Two Revolutions were the first scholarly works in anglophone academia to deploy class analysis. Batatu and Abrahamian devoted extensive attention to communist movements of Iraq and Iran, which were influential political forces in the in the 1940s and 1950s. Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman adopted a version of their method in Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954. The imprint of Princeton University Press on these books established the validity of political economy approaches to MENA studies.

Kenneth Cuno’s The Pasha's Peasants: Land, Society, and Economy in Lower Egypt, 1740-1858 and Beshara Doumani’s Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 undermined the traditional explanation for the “absence” of capitalist development in the Middle East. They showed that farmers in the Nile Delta the Northern West Bank sold, mortgaged, and bequeathed their usufruct rights to land at least as early as the mid-eighteenth century; while in the Nablus region, farmers were linked to a rising class of merchants who engaged in the pre-industrial manufacturing of soap (from olive oil) for a regional market. The books of Cuno and Doumani, and Robert Vitalis’s study of Bank Misr’s rival, ‘Ahmad Abbud, When Capitalists Collide: Business Conflict and the End of Empire in Egypt, all published in the first half of the 1990s, mark the end of the first wave of radicalism in MENA studies in which political economy and historians (and historically-minded political scientists like Davis and Vitalis) predominated.

By the late 1980s, post-structuralism, cultural studies, and feminism became the most prominent theoretical frames for radical scholarship in MENA studies, exemplified by Timothy Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt, Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, Lisa Wedeen’s Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria and Ted Swedenburg’s Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. The latter three works are ethnographies (though Wedeen is nominally a political scientist), reflecting the prominence of anthropologists in this period. Suad Joseph and Talal Asad were prominent senior figures who influenced feminist and a genealogical approach to secularism in anthropology respectively.

Palestinian scholars led in posing an alternative to the Zionist narrative in Anglo-American academia. One of the first efforts was Ibrahim Abu-Lughod’s 1969 edited volume, The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective. At the same time, Noam Chomsky, already well-known for his opposition to the Vietnam War, emerged as a prominent critic of Israel’s approach to the Palestinians. Other Palestinian-led projects include the Journal of Palestine Studies, launched in 1971 by the Beirut-based Institute for Palestine Studies and the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG). In 1979 AAUG began publishing Arab Studies Quarterly, edited by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and Edward Said.

With the appearance of Orientalism in 1978 and The Question of Palestine a year later, Said promptly became the foremost critic of traditional MENA studies and a leading figure in Palestinian studies. Said’s innovation in critiquing Orientalism was that the scholarly discipline was only one element of a hegemonic discourse - a regime of truth, a mode of representation and a complex of institutions - that enabled the West to assert power over much of the Muslim world. That fact that Said was a scholar of European literature amplified Orientalism’s impact. His deployment of canonical European texts to illustrate his arguments, made Orientalism legible to a broad audience of humanistic scholars.

While the academic left generally embraced the main thrust of Orientalism, some – among them, Maxime Rodinson, Roger Owen, Nikki Keddie, Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm, Aijaz Ahmad, and James Clifford – expressed theoretical or empirical reservations. Many traditionalist scholars, most notably Bernard Lewis, willfully misread Orientalism. Orientalism became a foundational text of postcolonial studies. Said’s intellectual prestige and the influence of poststructuralist theory and the “linguistic turn” in historical study shifted the center of gravity of the left in MENA studies away from the study of society to the study of representation and other modes of cultural studies.

Ironically, with the exception of Ted Swedenburg, the central figures in the maturation of Palestine studies – Beshara Doumani, Rashid Khalidi, Alexander Schölch, and Salim Tamari – did not adopt Saidian or cultural studies methodologies. However, Sarah Graham-Brown’s Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in the Photography of the Middle East, 1860-1950 departs from her earlier political economy studies of Palestine to extend the ambit of the critique of Orientalism to a technology Said had not examined.

The establishment of Palestine studies as a legitimate field of investigation led naturally to a critical understanding of the history of Zionism and the character of the state of Israel. In the mid-1960s both the PLO Research Center in Beirut and the Matzpen organization began analyzing Israel as a settler-colonial society. But their ideas were not readily available in western languages until after the June 1967 War.

Three weeks before that war, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes published an issue devoted to the Arab-Israeli conflict which included an article by Maxime Rodinson subsequently published in English as Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? Rodinson’s affirmative answer became the dominant left approach to understanding the history of the Zionist project, adopted by scholars around the world. The work of Gershon Shafir, Nira Yuval-Davis, Uri Davis, Gabi Piterberg, Shira Robinson, Zachary Lockman, Patrick Wolfe, Saree Makdisi, Noura Erakat, and Rashid Khalidi has been particularly influential.

Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, widely, but incorrectly, termed Israel’s “first war of choice,” increased the level of public criticism of Israel tolerated in the academy and among the general public. This was the occasion for Noam Chomsky’s most important contribution to Israel/Palestine studies, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians.

More vocal criticism of Israel set off alarm bells in the Jewish communal institutions, which tolerated even less deviation from pro-Israelism than is now the case. In 1983 the New England Regional Office of the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League, distributed a booklet designed “to help Jewish students deal with anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic activities on college campus,” making no distinction between the two. It contained a list of college and university instructors whose anti-Zionism, they claimed, was simply “a guise for their deeply felt anti-Semitism.” The same year the national ADL published Pro-Arab Propaganda in America: Vehicles and Voices, a Handbook, and in 1984 the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) compiled “The AIPAC College Guide: Exposing the Anti-Israel Campaign on Campus.”

At its annual meeting for 1984 MESA meeting adopted a resolution censuring the ADL and AIPAC for compiling these McCarthy-style blacklists. Formally, this was no more than a standard liberal defense of freedom of speech and academic freedom. In fact, it represented the strength of the left and its allies within MESA. The left has gained strength in MESA since then. Consequently, attacks on MESA members and the organization as a whole escalated sharply after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC.

In the late 1980s, declassified documents in the Israel State Archives enabled the emergence of what Benny Morris dubbed the school of Israeli “new historians.” Its leading figures were Morris himself, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, Tom Segev, joined some years later by historical sociologists Uri Ben-Eliezer and Guy Laron. Their research confirmed that militarism was a central element in labor Zionist ideology, that Israel expelled large numbers of civilian Palestinians during the 1948 War, that before the war it had colluded with Abdullah, the Emir of Transjordan, to block the emergence of a Palestinian state, that Israel had an aggressive stance towards its Arab neighbors after the 1948 war and was not anxious to conclude a comprehensive peace agreement, and that Israel was not facing an existential threat on the eve of the 1967 War.

Closer examination of Israeli society revealed the extent of discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Sabri Jiryis’s The Arabs in Israel, published in 1968 after he left Israel and went into exile in Beirut, was the pioneer in this field. Decades later Ian Lustick, Rebecca Stein, Susan Slyomovics, Shira Robinson, and Nadim Rouhana confirmed and expanded upon Jiryis’s basic arguments.

Discrimination against Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origins (Mizrahim) by Israel’s largely European Jewish (Ashkenazi) elite also became visible. Ella Shohat’s “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims” was the foundation stone for the work of many others, including Smadar Lavie, Shlomo Swirski, Yehouda Shenhav, and Orit Bashkin.

The 1967 War prompted the emergence of a new sub-field – study of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. Raja Shehadeh, Nasser Aruri, Rosemary Sayigh, and Salim Tamari were early anglophone Palestinian critics of the occupation. Meron Benvenisti was the pioneer among Israeli scholars in this field. Their numbers grew substantially after the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1987 and include Maya Rosenfeld, Tanya Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Jeff Halper, Eyal Weizman, Akiva Eldar, Idith Zertal, Ariella Azoulay, Adi Ophir, and Shir Hever. The Gaza Strip became an orphan topic after Israeli forces and settlers withdrew in 2005. Ilana Feldman, Sara Roy and Tareq Baconi are among the few who have kept it on the scholarly radar screen.

Studying Israel/Palestine perforce led to examining the US-Israeli alliance that developed after the 1967. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007) was not the first book on this topic. But it made the most forceful claim that the extraordinary level of US support for Israel is a function of the entirely legal activities of the Israel lobby. Other scholars who have examined this issue – Noam Chomsky, Naseer Aruri, Norman Finkelstein, Melani McAlister, Josh Ruebner, Nathan Thrall, Seth Anziska, and Rashid Khalidi – are arrayed along a continuum between the Mearsheimer/Walt thesis and the view that, while there are exceptional cultural and political interconnections between the United States and Israel, the Middle East policy of the United States is consistent with its global support for the status quo and opposition to radical nationalism.

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea and Basima Qattan Bezirgan’s 1977 anthology, Middle Eastern Muslim Speak, heralded the emergence of feminism and women’s studies as a challenge, not only to the Orientalist/modernization theory paradigm but also to the male-centered political economy approaches which challenged it. Other pioneers in this field include Lois Beck, Nikki Keddie, Judith Tucker, and Beth Baron. The establishment of the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies 1985 embodied this trend, although the association did not begin to publish its Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies until 2005.

Tucker’s Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt is the first history of women in any modern Middle Eastern country. Its Marxist-feminist analysis represents a bridge between the first wave of political economy studies and the development of gender studies influenced by Joan Scott’s essay, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” Scott’s basic argument, if not necessarily her poststructuralist theoretical commitments, was adopted by a second wave of feminist scholarship on the MENA region that highlighted the historical and social construction of gender relations, introducing terms like “the patriarchal bargain” (coined by Deniz Kandiyoti but also deployed by Suad Joseph) and “state feminism” (coined by Mervat Hatem).

The US invasions of Iraq in 1991 and 2003 informed the thinking of a younger generation of critics of US Middle East policy, including Jason Brownlee, Waleed Hazbun, Shana Marshall, and Joshua Stacher. US military engagement in the region created the fields detention and torture studies, in which Ilana Feldman, Lisa Hajjar and Laleh Khalili are leading figures and studies of jihadism in which Darryl Li is notable. The study of Iraq itself was reopened by the US occupation, although several scholars did so by relying on documents illegally removed from the country. Nadje Al-Ali, Omar Dewachi, Nida Alahmad, and Sara Pursely are prominent among those who have devised other ways to study Iraq.

The violent death of the “end of history” delusion, the 2007–08 financial crash, the manifest failure of neoliberal Washington Consensus policies in the MENA region, the Arab popular uprisings of 2011 and Turkey’s 2013 Gezi Park protests sparked a resurgence of the academic left in MENA studies. One of its most prominent manifestations is a series of projects under the umbrella of the Arab Studies Institute (ASI), initially established and driven by a generational cohort of graduate students at Georgetown University: Bassam Haddad, Sinan Antoon, Sherene Seikaly, Nadya Sbaiti, Noura Erakat, and Maya Mikdashi. Their initial project was the Arab Studies Journal, founded in 2002 and edited by Bassam Haddad and subsequently Sherene Seikaly and Nadya Sbaiti. Since then, the range of the participants in various projects has expanded considerably.

ASI’s Jadaliyya ezine, established in 2010, reaches well beyond academia and boasts about half a million visitors a month on the website. It is updated daily and publishes the work of academics, journalists, activists, and artists in English, Arabic, French, Spanish, and Turkish. The Arab uprisings erupted only months after Jadaliyya’s launch, making it a premier site for left-leaning current analysis.

Timothy Mitchell’s intellectual trajectory from Colonising Egypt to Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil is a synecdoche for the trajectory of the left in MENA studies from the late 1980s to the 2000s and the renewal of political economy as a central part of that project. The Iraq wars and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 drew attention to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Political economy and feminist studies of the Gulf by Robert Vitalis, Toby Jones, Adam Hanieh, Grace Wright, Mehran Kamrava, Zahra Babar, and Pardis Mahdavi emphasize its importance as a center of capital accumulation and its particularly abusive labor control and gender practices. Gilbert Achcar, Anne Alexander and Mostafa Bassiouny, Joel Beinin, Marie Duboc, Dina Makram Ebeid, and Brecht De Smet wrote about the Arab uprisings from a political economy perspective. The renewal of political economy also entailed revisiting several of its classical problematics like the origins of capitalism in the region (Kristen Alff) and the agrarian question and underdevelopment (Max Ajl).

Allen, Lori. The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.

Beinin, Joel. Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Hammad, Hanan. Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016.

Khalili, Laleh. Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Khater, Akram. Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Lockman, Zachary. Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.