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The Druzes in the Jewish State
Following the war of 1948 Palestine's Druzes became part of the state of Israel. Overwhelmingly rural, they sought to safeguard their community's age-old ethnic independence by holding on to their traditional ethno-religious particularism. Ethnicity and ethnic issues, however, were ready tools for the Zionists in the pursuit of their policy aims vis-à-vis the state's Arab population. Central among these was the cooptation of part of the Druze elite in an obvious effort to alienate the Druzes from the other Arabs - creating "good" Arabs and "bad" Arabs served the Jewish state as a foil for its ongoing policy of dispossession and control. The author painstakingly documents the political, social and economic factors that ensured the "success" of these Zionist policies, but concludes that the fissured identity of Israel's Druzes today bespeaks a feeling of musiba, tragedy, within the community itself.
Religious Minorities in the Middle East
Focusing on the situation of both Muslim and non-Muslim religious minorities in the Middle East, this volume offers an analysis of various strategies of resilience and accommodation from a historical as well a contemporary perspective.
America's Forgotten Pandemic
Between August 1918 and March 1919 the Spanish influenza spread worldwide, claiming over 25 million lives - more people than perished in the fighting of the First World War. It proved fatal to at least a half-million Americans. Yet, the Spanish flu pandemic is largely forgotten today. In this vivid narrative, Alfred W. Crosby recounts the course of the pandemic during the panic-stricken months of 1918 and 1919, measures its impact on American society, and probes the curious loss of national memory of this cataclysmic event. This 2003 edition includes a preface discussing the then recent outbreaks of diseases, including the Asian flu and the SARS epidemic.
In the Cause of Humanity
A major new history of the emergence of the theory and practice of humanitarian intervention during the nineteenth century.
Syncretistic Religious Communities in the Near East
This volume deals with Islamic sects in the Near East such as the Alevis (Turkey), Druzes (Libanon), Alawis (Syria), Ahl-i Haqq (Iran, Iraq) and Shabak (Iraq), which have in common a syncretistic system of belief with a strong Shi'ite influence, as well as secrecy and endogamy. The contributions in this volume focus on the present situation of these communities, their relation to mainstream Islam, their involvement in national and ethnic politics, aspects of faith and rituals, the relevance of sacred texts, modes of religious and social transformation, and the recent revival of Alevism. In view of the new visibility of these formerly "hidden" sects and their increasing social and political importance, this volume provides important information for all scholars interested in the religious and political situation of the region.
Who Needs Arab-Jewish Identity?
In Who Needs Arab-Jewish Identity?: Interpellation, Exclusion, and Inessential Solidarities, Professor Reuven Snir, Dean of Humanities at Haifa University, presents a new approach to the study of Arab-Jewish identity and the subjectivities of Arabized Jews. Against the historical background of Arab-Jewish culture and in light of identity theory, Snir shows how the exclusion that the Arabized Jews had experienced, both in their mother countries and then in Israel, led to the fragmentation of their original identities and encouraged them to find refuge in inessential solidarities. Following double exclusion, intense globalization, and contemporary fluidity of identities, singularity, not ident...
Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East
This book uses a study of Syria under the French mandate to show what historical developments led people to start describing themselves and others as 'minorities'.
Democratisation and Power-Sharing in Stormy Weather
Is democracy possible only in homogeneous societies? Does heterogeneity - clude a stable democracy? Throughout history, ethnic, linguistic, or religious homogeneity whether by circumstance, coercion, or choice, has seemingly been conducive to democracy. In France, democracy was established after the impo- tion of religious uniformity and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The United States pulled in immigrants who renounced their original affiliations to forge a new identity in a newly born state. Still, defying assumptions, democracies have emerged in heterogeneous states such as the Swiss Confederation, the Successor States of the Holy Roman Empire and, later, those carved out of the p...
Sunnis and Shi'a
"This book is a historical and sociological reading of the relation between Sunnis and Shias from the inception of the dispute for Mohammed's succession until today. It is divided in two parts. The first part offers a comprehensive history of the divide. It shows how Shiism was, during much of the Middle Ages, the main contestation ideology of the caliphate, but also how Sunnism and Shiism converged as Shiism progressively ceased to be an esoteric and politically radical doctrine to espouse a number of tenets of mainstream Islam. It shows the political dynamics that runs beneath theological debates and, in particular, how the Sunni/Shia conflict was revived when the Safavids made Shiism an o...
