Laura Bier

Dissertations in Middle East Studies from 2000-2007: Topical and Methodological Trends

I. Methodology and Summary of Quantitative Findings

The aim of this research was to track the topical, theoretical and methodological

trends within Middle Eastern studies among a new generation of Middle East scholars.

In order to do that I undertook (with the assistance of Susan Aaron) a broad survey of

dissertations in the field of Middle Eastern Studies written in the humanities and social

sciences over the last seven years. For the purposes of this article, humanities and social

sciences includes the following disciplines: History, Anthropology (including

ethnomusicology and folklore studies), Middle East Area Studies Department, Sociology,

Political Science, International Relations, Literature (including comparative literature and

cinema studies) Education, Economics, Religious Studies, Geography, Art History and

Architecture, Communications and Mass Media, Management and Public Administration

and Demography. Using the database Proquest Dissertation Abstracts, I conducted both

geographically and topically based searches and then grouped the results according to

discipline.

Dissertation Abstracts as a database is, at best, an imperfect medium for such an

endeavor. The discipline within which the PhD was awarded is not specified by Proquest

and the keyword tags reflected the content of the thesis and its subject matter rather than

discipline. It was often (but not always) possible to find out by looking at the title page of

the dissertation, included in the "preview this dissertation" section of the entry. In cases

where the discipline could not be determined by looking at Proquest, I used the

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departmental affiliation of the advisor as a guide. Despite its difficulties, categorizing by

disciplines was necessary, both to avoid the conceptual slipperiness of categorizing by

subject and in order to better locate exchanges, methodologies and trends across and

disciplines.

Surveying and describing a field inevitably means participating in its

construction; defining for the purposes of this study, I have interpreted the Middle East

studies to include not only studies which focus on the geographical region which

encompasses the Arabic speaking world, Turkey and Iran, but also diaspora populations

hailing originally from that area. There are certainly arguments for excluding studies

which focus on Middle Eastern communities outside of the Middle East, however, that

would also mean excluding the work of young scholars who identify themselves as

actively contributing to Middle Eastern studies as a discipline and who count themselves

as members of the community of Middle East Studies scholars.

Research indicates that, since the year 2000 the largest number of dissertations in

Middle East Studies were awarded in Education departments (193), followed by Middle

Eastern Studies Departments (191)1 History (167)2 Politics (160) Literature (149)

Anthropology (121)3 Sociology and International Relations (both at 79) Communications

and Mass Media (77) Art History and Architecture (74) Economics (69) Religious

Studies (51), Management and Public Administration (25) and Demography (7). Given

the sheer numbers involved (not to mention the constraints on the knowledge and

expertise of the author) it simply not possible, despite the title of the article, to analyze

1 This number includes nine dissertations which were awarded jointly by History and Middle East Studies Departments and one awarded in Middle Eastern Studies and Anthropology. 2 This number includes nine dissertations which were awarded jointly by History and Middle East Studies Departments and two awarded jointly in History and Anthropology departments. 3 This number includes two dissertations which were awarded jointly in History and Anthropology.

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trends within and across all disciplines. Thus, the qualitative analysis part of the article

will confine itself to the analysis of trends within four disciplines: History, Middle East

Studies, Political Science and Anthropology. Even within this framework it will be

impossible to include and cite every dissertation, so I will confine myself to commentary

on the works which seem to fit within the broads methodological and empirical trends I

have identified.

History

According to Juan Cole's survey of monographs written on ME Studies from 1980

to 2002, social history was a dominating force, and the "cultural turn" seemed to have

had little effect: "Unlike in mainstream U.S. Historiography, where social history was

challenged from the 1980s or so by the linguistic turn and the new cultural history, the

latter two made little headway at the Middle East Studies Association. For better or

worse, postmodernism and the new cultural history have had relatively little influence."

I would argue that, for most of the younger generation of Middle East historians, this is

not the case.

While social history methodologies continue to produce some excellent and

innovative histories (Ergut 2000; Chalcraft 2001; Ergene 2001; Gutelius 2001; Matthews

2001; Joseph 2005; Deal 2006; DeGeorges 2006; Khalek 2006) as well as some more

traditional ones, primarily dealing with social and economic change during various eras

of the Ottoman empire (Tabak 2000; Toksoz 2000; Schad 2001; Zens 2004; Birdal 2006;

Mirkova 2006) many of the dissertations surveyed for this section bear the implicit or

explicit imprint of the theoretical and epistemological concerns of poststructuralism,

postcolonial studies, feminist theory and cultural studies. Questions around marginality,

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hybridity, difference, subject formation, the technologies of governance, and, perhaps

most prominently, the construction of identities, which have been a central preoccupation

of poststructuralist and postcolonial theorists, have provided the foundation for many of

the dissertations produced in Middle East history over the last six years. Moreover, the

increasingly common usage of literature, autobiography, mass media and popular culture

as sources for historical research (as well as the use of conventional sources read in new

ways) suggests that this new generation of scholars is more willing (and perhaps more

able) to draw from the methodological tool box of other disciplines, than that of its

predecessors. In order to elucidate on some of the trends in historical scholarship on the

middle east mentioned above, this section will provide an overview of how this new

generation of middle east historians have addressed the subjects of women and gender,

religious and ethnic identities, the nation and nationalism and, finally, colonialism.

Nations and Nationalisms

In the two decades since Benedict Anderson wrote his now canonical work,

Imagined Communities, the nation, as a locus of identity and a framework for political,

social, cultural and economic processes has come to be a primary focus of modern

Middle East historians. (Kenan 2000; Panev 2000; Rostam-Kolayi 2000; Yaghoubian

2000; Katz 2001; Reeves-Ellington 2001; Spiegel 2001; Velcamp 2001; Taspinar 2002;

Afkhami 2003; Cagaptay 2003; Marashi 2003; Aksit 2004; Gasper 2004; Bracy 2005;

Jacob 2005; Khalili 2005; Martin 2005; Bier 2006; Khan 2006; Salhi 2006)

The scholarship produced by Middle East historians in the last seven years bears

the imprint of Anderson's general insights on the constructed and historically contingent

nature of nations, national identities and national communities, but in many respects has

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moved beyond it, both in terms of methodologies and conceptualizations of the nation

itself (work of this nature which is to found in recent studies of women and gender and

ethnic and minorities will be discussed in subsequent sections). Work which

conceptualizes the nation solely or primarily as an act of political imagining located in

the textual productions of secular elites is a minority among these studies (Bracy 2005;

Salhi 2006). Recent scholarship ranges from attention to the role of nation-state policies,

reforms and institutions in the formation of national identities4 (Childress 2001; Cagaptay

2003; Marashi 2003; Yilmaz 2006; Zorlu-Durukan 2006) to how visions of nation and

community are created and contested within historiography (Kenan 2000)urban space

(Katz 2001) and the discourses and practices of consumption (Reynolds 2003). An

interesting example of work which attempts to go beyond and analysis of discourses,

laws and institutions are dissertations--one focusing on practices and rituals of

commemoration among stateless Palestinian refugees in Lebanon (Khalili 2005) another

on Jewish festivals and competitions around physical culture in Mandatory Palestine

(Spiegel 2001)--which foreground the role of ritual, ceremony and performance in

representing and reinterpreting the nation and the national past.

Taken as a whole, work dissertations which deal with the construction of the

nation and national identities, while they have been successful in bringing new theoretical

and methodological insights to bear, also reproduce some the earlier elisions in the study

of the nation. One aspect which remains constant is that they tend to examine the

construction of nationalism from the perspective of political and cultural elites. While

4 These are heavily dominated by work on Turkey, perhaps a reflection of the overwhelming weight of the Kemalist legacy for contemporary Turkish politics, culture and society.

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such an approach has the advantage of making clear the ways in which defining the

nation and the nation's citizens entails the exclusion of particular groups, practices and

histories and is thus fundamentally implicated in creating and maintaining relations of

power, the targets of such policies and discourses (ie:non-elites) tend to occupy the role

of passive recipients. Insights from anthropology, particularly work which has been done

on issues of memory and commemoration, may be useful here as a way to go beyond

elite discourses and state institutions and also explore the ways in which ordinary people

negotiate and contribute to the process of "imagining" the nation in everyday life. Gender and Women's History

Since 1985, the year which marked the founding of AMEWS (Association of

Middle East Women's Studies), Middle East women's history has increasingly grown in

stature as a recognized and accepted sub-field within Middle Eastern History. Initially,

most of the work done in this area was situated within the framework of women's history,

aimed at recovering the voices and experiences of women and adding them to historical

narratives which, for the most part, had already been established. Beginning in the mid-

1990s, however, a new generation of historians (to greater and lesser degrees of success)

attempted to move beyond women's history paradigms by and look at how the notion of

gender difference itself has been articulated, deployed, negotiated and contested within

various political and social projects and legal and institutional regimes at particular

historical moments. Such studies understand gender not as immutable and fixed, but as

constructed, constitutive of (and constituted by) other sorts of power relations.

The dissertations surveyed for this article are definitely products of this shift in

focus, even as they have reproduced many of the lacunas of these earlier works.

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Moreover, the number of dissertations which can be classified as women and gender

history has declined over the preceding seven years (from 19 in the period between 1990-

1999 to 13 in the period under review), suggesting that the study of women and gender in

Middle Eastern history continues to face challenges, in spite of past gains. 5 This may

reflect the marginalized status of Middle East women's history within History

departments as a sub specialty of a sub-specialty, or it may paradoxically reflect an

increasing "mainstreaming" of gender as a category of analysis; more younger scholars

are addressing issues of gender in studies where women and gender are not the primary

object of focus.(Gualtieri 2000; Spiegel 2001; Amster 2003; Armanios 2003; Marashi

2003; Brodsky 2004; Gasper 2004; Trumbull 2005; Scalenghe 2006; Yilmaz 2006).

An overview of dissertations written in the last six years indicates that gender

history has largely overtaken work in women's history, although social histories of

women labor (Abisaab 2001; Weber 2003; Karakisla 2004) were represented as was a

single dissertation on the history of feminism in the Middle East (Weber 2003). In these

recent works on gender, (as with other, earlier works) the nation tends to be the

predominate focus of analysis, whether as a site for the construction and articulation of

gendered identities (Rostam-Kolayi 2000; Reeves-Ellington 2001; Aksit 2004) as a

category constituted by normative definitions of gender difference and the appropriate

relations between men and women (Lopez 2004; Bier 2006) or as the emerging

framework for institutions and practices which attempt to regulate ideals of masculinity,

femininity, and gendered respectability (Kozma 2006).

5 for an overview of the gains and challeneges facing the study of women and gender in the middle east see Sharoni).

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In addition to these works which take the nation and the nation state as the

primary rubric, another field of concern for Middle East gender historians has

colonialism. These works have attempted to use a gendered analysis to move beyond the

binary categories of East and West; "colonizer" and the "colonized" which some

scholarship on colonialism has suffered from to focus on the complicated inter-relations

between European and indigenous populations on the ground (Stockdale 2000; Ross-

Nazzal 2001; Ruiz 2004). Others have investigated the ways in which colonial

epistemologies, practices and gender categories were translated by colonized elites and

eventually proved foundational to the constitution of gendered national subjects and anti-

colonial politics.(Abugideiri 2001; Jacob 2005)

Despite the inroads which gender (as opposed to women's history) has made over

the last ten years, certain lacunas remain. Perhaps the most significant is the persistent

conceptual slippage between "gender" and "women." Only one history dissertation in the

last seven years deals centrally with the construction of masculine identity (Jacob 2005)

although several others have attempted to give equal focus to the construction of both of

masculinity and femininity (Lopez 2004; Ruiz 2004).

Other gaps in the literature are within periodization and geographic coverage. The

vast majority of dissertations on gender still deal with the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries. Of the history dissertations surveyed, only two dealt with gender in the pre-

1800 period (Semerdjian 2002; Scalenghe 2006). Work in gender history, moreover, is

heavily dominated by works on Egypt followed by Turkey, Iran and, to a lesser extent,

the Levant. Histories of women and gender in the gulf countries and Iraq have yet to be

written.

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Religious and Ethnic Identities

The works produced on religious and ethnic identity in the Middle East

reproduce some of the patterns described above. The majority of such works deal with

the construction of the identity among ethnic and religious minorities. That is not

surprising, given that the nation remains such a prevalent framework for Middle Eastern

history. The presence of ethnic and religious minorities is problematic for nation states

and profoundly destabilizing to ideas of a primordial national identity which has existed

outside of time and place. Moreover, such works challenge the simplistic, but

dismayingly persistent assertions of timeless ethnic and confessional hatreds and conflict.

Some of these focused on the construction of ethnic and sectarian identities in the

context of nation-state nationalisms (Yaghoubian 2000; Miran 2004; Amanat 2006) or

the emergence of national identities among minority populations under Ottoman rule

(Panev 2000). More of a departure are two which trace the origins of sectarian conflict

and identity in the late Ottoman empire (Campos 2003; Evered 2005), by focusing on

Ottoman notions of citizenship and civic pluralism, rather than the emergence of

individual nationalisms. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this work is the argument

that for residents of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-linguistic empire there was

nothing inevitable about the emergence of ethnic, sectarian identities and national

identities; the co-existence of local, regional and imperial identities in the late nineteenth

century was suggestive of other possible futures. This is a needed addition to historical

work on the emergence of nationalism in the region in which the nation, in spite of

attempts to deconstruct it as a category, can often seem to be the somehow inevitable end

point to the historical processes of modernity.

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One finding worth noting was the comparatively sizeable number of dissertations

written about the Jewish community in Algeria under French colonial rule. This may in

part be because Jewishness represents a liminal and problematic category for both French

and Algerian national identities; four of these dissertations focus specifically on issues of

nationalism, national identity and affiliation (Shurkin 2000; Sussman 2002; Younsi 2003;

Godley 2006). The fifth examines French attempts to "civilize" both its metropolitan and

colonial Jewish populations, suggesting that colonial civilizing missions were not limited

only to colonized populations, but also to religious and ethnic minorities within the

metropole.(Schreier 2003)

As in the work on gender, scholarship which focuses on construction of religious

and ethnic identities prior to 1800 remains in the minority. In the case of ethnicity this is

not surprising: notions of ethnic identity and belonging and their politicization are a

relatively recent phenomenon and scholarship on the nation has largely delegitimized

studies which posit ethnic and national identities which stretch back hundreds of years as

being complicit in the political claims of nationalism itself. There is a small body of work

being done on the construction of religious, primarily Christian, identities (MacEvitt

2002; Armanios 2003; Jones 2004) including one on the Ottoman Balkans, which deals

with identity in the context of conversion from Christianity to Islam (Krstic 2004).

Surveying the work produced by younger scholars over the last seven years suggests that

work on religious identity remains, as in earlier scholarship, dominated by work on

religious minorities. Scholarship on the history of Islam tends to be heavily focused on

work on great Muslim thinkers, leaders or canonical texts (Bryson 2000; Cory 2002;

Yucesoy 2002; Mourad 2004; Fancy 2006; Wright 2006) the articulation of laws and

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legal systems (Khalafallah 2000; Lahmuddin 2004; Joseph 2005) or on Sufi groups

(Gutelius 2001; Curry 2005); within Islamic history, the construction of notions of

religious belonging and affiliation remain largely unexplored.

This suggests that in the case of both religious and ethnic identity, scholarship

continues to accord majoritarian religious and ethnic groups (whether explicitly or

implicitly) normative status. In addition to the paucity of works on Muslim identity,

there was not a single dissertation which dealt with the construction of "Arabness"

whether as the foundation of a transnational movement (Pan-Arabism) or as constituent

part of other sorts of identities. Moreover, the development of the categories "majority"

and "minority" themselves have yet to be a focus of historical analysis.

Beyond the Nation and the Imperial Center: The Local and the Transnational

Perhaps in part because of the continued focus on the nation-state and histories of

regional empires which have traditionally focused on imperial administration, politics

and governance there has been a marked tendency within Middle Eastern historiography

to view "the center" as a representative of whole and to treat nations and empires as

bounded entities. One of the most encouraging developments over the last few years is

the number of dissertations which deal with the transnational (and/or transimperial) flow

of ideas (Elshakry 2003; Manela 2003; Weber 2003; Rouighi 2005; Khan 2006;

Robinson 2006; Rothman 2006) and people.(Kooshian 2002; Arai 2004; Miran 2004;

Trivellato 2004; Ghazal 2005; Rothman 2006). Several of these deal with Middle East

immigrant and diaspora populations and the development of distinctive immigrant

identities (Velcamp 2001; Brodsky 2004; Karam 2005), but tend to treat them within the

national context of their countries of residence. Only one of them (Gualtieri 2000)makes

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the argument that transnational processes of migration (and the influence of diaspora

communities) must be accounted for in discussions of how nation-hood is defined and

contested in the country of origin.

Another challenge to center dominated accounts of imperial rule is the growing

body of work which examine the workings of empire from the perspective of its border

and its frontiers, in ways which work to displace the very notion of periphery. Informed

by the recent insights of frontier studies in the United States, these studies analyze border

regions as sites where global, regional and local histories intersect.(Racine 2003; Blumi

2005; Kuhn 2005; Ates 2006). Others have looked at how local and regional identities

interacted in complicated ways with other broader notions of affiliation and belonging

(Antrim 2005; Gingeras 2006). The influence of such work, increasingly felt in Ottoman

studies, has largely yet to translate into changes in how nation-states are studied and

analyzed. But they represent a potentially fruitful source of inspiration for future studies.

Colonialism

One of the most significant areas of study which emerges in the work of a new

generation of scholars is that of colonialism. (Maghraoui 2000; Stockdale 2000;

Abugideiri 2001; Hanifi 2001; Keller 2001; Schad 2001; Abi-Mershed 2002; Alghailani

2002; Blecher 2002; El Shakry 2002; Mokhiber 2002; Amster 2003; Schreier 2003;

Segalla 2003; Brower 2005; Hale 2005; Jacob 2005; Robinson 2005; Trumbull 2005; Hill

2006) Much of this work displays the influence of postcolonial studies, in particular, its

interest in the epistemologies, institutions and technologies of colonial rule, its attempt to

deconstruct the binary oppositions between "tradition" and "modernity" as well as its

interrogation of the complicated legacies of colonial rule for "post-colonial" states and

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societies. Areas of interest (not including those already touched upon in other sections)

include colonialism and education (Abi-Mershed 2002; Segalla 2003), colonial medicine

(Keller 2001; Blecher 2002; Amster 2003) and the production of colonial knowledge(El

Shakry 2002; Trumbull 2005).

Reading old evidence in new ways: Autobiography and political press (used in political history to help reconstruct events) are now being read against the grain as a way to get at constructions of identity. Focus on social meanings of various categories for different groups of actors rather than a bounded focus on social and political processes suggests some influence from anthropology. Court records, used to be a source for social history, now being read for issues of gender and sexual morality. Lacunas: race, sexuality. Gulf, Iraq, North Africa (with the exception of work on colonialism), Sudan Politics

Dissertations on the Middle East produced in political science departments

represent the largest category of dissertations surveyed by this study. In order to both

review some of the trends in the discipline and to suggest some trends across disciplines,

I will focus my analysis on four areas: Dissertations on Islam and politics, national and

ethnic identity, transnationalism and globalization and the politics of women and gender.

As an aside, it is also important to note briefly that studies which focus on

democratization (Angrist 2000; VanDenBerg 2000; Hull 2001; Polisar 2001; Tiruneh

2001; Harb 2002; Mazie 2002; Moustafa 2002; Al-faqih 2003; Brownlee 2004; Eyadat

2004; El-Hasan 2005; Singh 2005; Matsunaga 2006) and structural adjustment policies,

economic reform and privatization (Alameddine 2000; Anninos 2000; Carroll 2001;

Salem 2001; Paczynska 2002; Aidi 2003; Baylouny 2003), make up a significant portion

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of dissertations produced on the Middle East in political science departments. Constraints

of time and space, however, prevent me from examining them in detail.

Islam and Politics Dissertations which explore the relationship between Islam and politics made up

the single largest category of work being produced within political science departments in

the last seven years, focusing primarily either on Islam, Islamism and the state (Cook

2003; Abdel Fattah 2004; Gregg 2004; Taylor 2004; Mousa 2005; Baskan 2006; Hibbard

2006; Kuru 2006; Yasar 2006) or the emergence and dynamics of Islamist political

movements (Cline 2000; Langohr 2000; Schwedler 2000; Al-Mekaimi 2003; Glicksberg

2003; Kurtoglu 2003; Medani 2003; Huang 2004; Lahlou 2005; Langston 2005; Eligur

2006; Makdisi 2006; Mecham 2006).

Dissertation over the last seven years which have attempt to analyze the

relationships between religious elites, Islamist movements and states have sought to

answer questions such as "What strategies do states employ in confronting Islamist

challenges to authority and rule?" "What are the patterns of conflict and cooperation

between states and Islamist movements?" and "What is the impact of state-building on

religious institutions?" Thus most frame their analyses of the politics of religion and the

state as a matter of accommodation vs. conflict (or, in some renderings, incorporation vs.

exclusion), with different patterns of conflict and cooperation determined by the interests

and strategies of states and non-state actors. Posing the questions (and answers) in such a

way suggests not only the influence of rational choice models of explanation (popular

within the discipline of political science as a whole) but a tendency to analyze states and

religion as separate categories. Dissertations which have attempted to look beyond the

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state/society dividing by analyzing Islam both as a "voice of opposition and a sanction for

state authority"(Hibbard 2006) remain in the minority.

The reasons for the emergence and growing support of Islamist movements has

been a central question in the study of Islam and politics within political science

departments. Scholarship produced on Islam and politics in the 1980s and early 1990s

which focused on the emergence and political success of Islamist movements, tended to

stress the socio-economic roots of Islamism, locating growing support for Islamist

political alternatives within the increasing political and economic disenfranchisement of

urban populations as a result of market liberalization and the retreat of the state from

social service provision.

Studies in the last seven years have largely moved away from approaches which

foreground socio-economic factors. One approach has been an attempt to reframe

Islamism not as a product of social and political confrontation with the state, but as a

partial consequence of state institutions, policies and official discourses on national

identity (Langohr 2000; Glicksberg 2003). Another has been to analyze Islamist

movements from a perspective influenced by social movement theory. A social

movement approach to Islamism focuses on the dynamics, processes, and organization of

Islamic activism. Thus they focus heavily on the formation of Islamist parties and

organizations, strategies of mobilization and the interaction between Islamist parties and

the state. (Al-Mekaimi 2003; Langston 2005; Eligur 2006; Makdisi 2006).

Another area of inquiry has been the relationship between Islamism and

democratization, posed as the question: is the entry of Islamist movements into politics a

barrier to democratization, a product of it or a potential impetus to the growth of

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democratic politics? (Abdel Fattah 2004; Lahlou 2005; Mady 2005; Mousa 2005; Tezcur

2005). Such studies can be a useful corrective to those who argue that Islamism (often

conflated with Islam) is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. However, it is an

unstated, but nonetheless implicit assumption of such studies (even those which argue

that Islamist movements can come to operate peacefully in the democratic process), that

Islam is ontologically more problematic for pluralism than secularism, despite the history

of violence, exclusion and authoritarianism which characterizes secular regimes in the

region.

Politics of National and Ethnic Identity Study of the formation and dynamics of ethnic and (to a lesser extent national)

identities was also a popular topic for political science dissertations surveyed.

(O Murchu 2000; Ozdemir 2000; Behar 2001; Watts 2001; Zack 2001; Celik 2002;

Romano 2002; Nanes 2003; Gokcek 2004; Haklai 2004; Hovsepian 2004; Lowrance

2004; Otucu 2004; Kassem 2005; Erdem 2006). Like studies of Islamist movements,

dissertations on ethnic politics display the influence of social movement analysis, with a

focus on modes of activism, strategy and mobilization as critical elements in the

formation of ethnic identities (Watts 2001; Zack 2001; Celik 2002; Romano 2002). Other

works examined the role of state policies and institutions in the inculcation of identities

(Nanes 2003; Haklai 2004; Hovsepian 2004; Kassem 2005). It is interesting to note the

prevalence of works on the Kurds and ethnic minorities within Israel.

Globalization and Transnationalism

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Comparative work is more well represented in the dissertations coming out of

political science departments than in any other discipline surveyed for this study. Its

underlying aim is to discern patterns of political behavior and phenomenon which are

generalizable across different geographical and political contexts. Work on globalization,

a relatively small but increasing percentage of dissertations in political science, by

contrast, engages with the ways in which transnational forces translate within local

contexts(Wolfe 2000; Amar 2003; Medani 2003; Caliskan 2005; Altan 2006), allowing

both for a consideration of wider patterns and attention to specificity.

Women, Gender and Politics Finally, I would like briefly to mention studies being done on women, gender and

politics. According to Sue Tolleson-Rinehart and Susan, J. Carroll, studies of women

and gender overall have grown and has become increasingly institutionalized.

Nonetheless, study of women and gender in politics as a whole remains relatively

marginalized.(Tolleson-Rinehart and Carroll 2006). Only seven out of 128 Middle East

focused dissertations awarded in political science departments in the last seven years took

women and gender as a central focus (Habasch 2000; Halfon 2000; Warrick 2002;

Simmons Levin 2003; Bodur 2005; Stachowski 2005). The relatively few numbers of

dissertations which focus on women and gender is likely in part a reflection of this

overall marginalization. However, is also the likely that the study of women and gender

in the Middle East suffers some of the constraints of being a sub-field of a sub-field

which were discussed in the section on history.

Issues of identity construction, which are so prevalent within studies of women

and gender in history and anthropology, are largely absent from this literature which

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focuses the role of NGOs in the promotion of women's rights and empowerment

(Habasch 2000; Halfon 2000; Stachowski 2005), the political dynamics of feminist

movements (Simmons Levin 2003), and issues surrounding women's participation in the

labor market (Nachtwey 2001). Only two, a dissertation on the relationship of discourses

of gender and political legitimacy in Jordan (Warrick 2002) and another on challenges to

the gendered underpinnings of Kemalism and visions of democratization in

Turkey(Bodur 2005) employ gender as a central category of analysis, suggesting that the

turn towards the study of gender (as opposed to women) has yet to make the inroads into

political science which it has made into history and anthropology.

With some notable exceptions (Ozdemir 2000; Schwedler 2000; Shehata 2000;

Lawrence 2004) one category of analysis which was comparatively absent from political

science dissertations produced over the last seven years was that of culture, defined here

as symbols inscribed in practices to produce observable political effects (Wedeen 2002).

Political science methodologies, with their focus on political strategies, state institutions,

patterns of mobilization and the interests of elites and other state and non-state actors

have the benefit of suggesting what aspects of politics in the Middle East may be

comparable to those in other places and generalizable, but they have been less adept

at suggesting what is specific about "Islam," "Kurdishness," "Arabness" etc. as systems of meaning and identity as well as bases for collective action.

Area Studies Departments

This category, the second largest in the study, includes dissertations which were

awarded in Middle East area studies departments, broadly defined. The exact titles and

scope of these departments vary, from Islamic Studies departments (UCLA and McGill),

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Middle Eastern Studies (University of Texas) Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

(Harvard, University of Chicago, Indiana, University of Washington, University of

Pennsylvania) Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (NYU), Middle East and Asian

Languages and Cultures (Columbia) Near Eastern Studies (Princeton, Michigan,

University of Arizona) although for the most part much of the work produced in these

departments tends to focus on the areas which fall within the geographic boundaries of

the contemporary Middle East. Area studies departments are often categorized as

"interdisciplinary" to distinguish them from the more "mainstream" disciplines in the

humanities and social sciences. While the departments themselves produce work which

ranges from history to literature to religious studies, this work as a whole, for the most

part, is not itself interdisciplinary. It would perhaps then be better to describe Middle

East and Islamic Studies Departments as multi-disciplinary, rather than interdisciplinary.

Given the sheer scope of work being produced in area studies departments, it will

be impossible to give a through accounting of all of it, or perhaps even a majority of it.

For the sake of expediency, I will make a few broad generalizations and then chronicle

the work being done in area studies departments in three overlapping areas: the study of

Islam, the social history of Muslim and non-Muslim communities and work on women

and gender. Given the prevalence of work on the nation and nationalism within other

disciplines, it may be surprising not to see it included as an area of comparison here. I

have chosen not to deal with studies of nationalism in this section because, although the

number of studies which focus on the nation and constructions of nationalisms is sizeable

within works which deal with the nineteenth century and twentieth centuries (Kaufman

2000; Semmerling 2000; Radulescu 2002; Salmoni 2002; Stone 2002; Brockett 2003;

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Chalabi 2003; Di-Capua 2004; Goknar 2004; Salameh 2004; Davaran 2005; Yosmaoglu-

Turner 2005; Nassar 2006; Smith 2006; Wilson 2006) they tend to reproduce many of the

strengths (and shortcomings) of work already discussed in other sections.

Within area studies departments, although work on the contemporary period does

make a up percentage of the dissertations written in the last seven years, historical studies

predominate and in particular, historical scholarship which deals with periods prior to the

nineteenth century. This is part of what distinguishes the body of recent work in area

studies from that produced in mainstream history departments, not to mention

anthropology and politics, where historical studies remain in the minority. Geographic

coverage overlaps with the trends noted in other disciplines, but with a proportionally

higher number of works on what could be referred to as the early Islamic heartland: the

Arabian penninsula, and what is now Iraq and Syria. This is the reflection of the

predominance of studies of early Islam coming out of areas studies departments. It is

also undoubtedly a consequence of the availability of sources for early Islamic history

outside of the region. Getting permissions to do archival or field research on modern or

contemporary topics can be challenging in Syria and even more so in Saudi Arabia, as it

was in Iraq prior to the American occupation (let alone after it) Sources for the modern or

contemporary histories of these countries may be available, but ultimately, they are

primarily limited to what can be found in European colonial or Ottoman archives. With

the number of canonical texts, chronicles and manuscripts available at US and European

libraries scholars of early and medieval Islam have a comparative advantage in this

regard.

History of Islam

21

One category which is significantly better represented in the scholarship produced

in area studies departments is the history of religion, and the history of Islam in

particular. It is here where interdisciplinary methodologies appears most uneven; despite

the rich theoretical and methodological body of work done on Islam in the last two

decades arguing for the need to go beyond looking at Islam from the vantage point of its

textual and intellectual heritage, this work appears to have had limited impact on the

studies of religion coming out of area studies departments in the last seven years. (Ahmad

2000; Dakake 2000; Heck 2000; Hilloowala 2000; Parsa 2000; Sands 2000; Ajhar 2001;

Hussain 2001; Sahin 2001; Seymore 2001; Seyhun 2002; Wahyudi 2002; GhaneaBassiri

2003; Ibrahim 2003; Papan-Matin 2003; Al-Tikriti 2004; Ali 2004; Alshech 2004; Musa

2004; Riedel 2004; Terkan 2004; Ahmad 2005; Ali 2005; Davis 2005; Emon 2005;

Garden 2005; Massoud 2005; Mavani 2005; Tayyara 2005; el Omari 2006; Gunaydin

2006; Hollenberg 2006; Sadeghi 2006). While much of this work is attentive to situating

texts (and their authors) within the intellectual and political context in which they were

produced, their methods of textual analysis appear largely uncritical of texts themselves

and how they, and their authors, discursively stake claims to truth and authority.

Moreover, with a few notable exceptions (Ford 2000; Sajdi 2002; Campbell 2003; Brown

2006) the role of texts in actively constructing particular visions of history, community

and orthodoxy (as opposed to passively reflecting them) largely goes unanalyzed,

suggesting that "the literary turn" with its emphasis on critical textual analysis has made

limited inroads on the part of area studies which (after literary studies) is most focused on

textual study. On the other side of the spectrum, studies which situate disputes over

orthodoxy and doctrine within the social and political struggles of elites (Omar 2001;

22

Turner 2001), largely reduce religion to a function of politics, an approach which is

prevalent in political science as discussed previously.

In comparison to works focusing on Islam's textual tradition, the number of works

which deal with issues of piety, faith as embedded within the material culture and

practices of daily life and notions of religious self-hood (a growing focus within

anthropology) is slim (Weber 2001; Rustomji 2003). This suggests that there is an almost

complete disconnect between the prevalent ethnographical and the dominant approach to

religion found in area studies departments. Perhaps then, the most significant lacuna in

the treatment of Islam within area studies dissertations, is the paucity of analyses which

link Islam as a discursive tradition which is actively produced (as opposed to simply

transmitted) to the practices through which moral selves are formed.

Histories of Muslim and Non-Muslim Communities

Despite the preponderance of textually focused studies of Islam, dissertations

which attempt to shed light on the social and political worlds in which Muslims (and

other religious communities) lived are well represented. Such work includes studies on

how Islamic law is practiced and understood within particular social and historical

contexts (Stilt 2004; Othman 2005), marriage, kinship and family (Yazigi 2001; Rapoport

2002; Abouali 2004) the social and political dynamics of religious elites (Bein 2006;

Ahmed 2007) as well as studies of the social, religious and political histories of Sufi

orders (Bazzaz 2002; Niyazioglu 2003; Connell 2004; Ohlander 2004). In addition, there

are a number of dissertations which deal with the social and political histories of religious

minority communities (Allen 2000; Osman 2001; Leal 2003; Philliou 2004; Raj 2004;

Rustow 2004; Sisman 2004).

23

There is a tendency in such studies to deal with religious communities in isolation

from one another. There is, however, an emerging body of work which attempts to bridge

the gap between studies of Muslim and non-Muslim communities. One of these is the

body of literature on conversion (Minkov 2000; Baer 2001; Zaborowski 2003; el-Leithy

2005), which attempts to deal with the different registers on which conversion was

experienced, negotiated, and represented by converts themselves and various religious

communities. Another approach attempts to foreground the complex relations and

interrelated histories of religious communities by focusing on the dynamics within

particular locations, rather than within communities, whether that be the dynamics of

urban trade, space and governance in a single city (Margariti 2002) incorporation of a

particular region into the lands under Muslim rule in the first centuries of Islam (Mikhail

2004). Such studies are particularly important, as social histories on topics which should

cut across confessional lines often reproduce the assumption that "Muslim world" is

synonymous with Muslims. On the other hand, while studies of Muslim minority

communities are a useful correction to this assumption, they risk the danger of making

these communities seem marginal and cut off from the history of the majority

community. Histories which take as a the inter-relatedness of various communities as a

foundational premise, as well as those which interrogate the nature of communal

relations, would go a long way to enriching our understanding of the social and political

dynamics shaping the early and medieval Islamic world.

Women and Gender

The study of women and gender in area studies has not yet established itself as a

significant area for research and analysis. Not only is there a relatively lower percentage

24

of dissertations (insert stats here) concerned with women and gender, the mainstreaming

of gender as a category of analysis, discussed in the section on history, is almost nowhere

in evidence (Stone 2002; Goknar 2004). The goals of women's history--to recover

women's voices, contributions and experiences and add them to the historical record--are

reflected in these studies which either deal with the literary and historical contributions of

famous women (Sursal 2003; Kayaalp-Aktan 2005; Oehler-Stricklin 2005), highlighting

the important roles of elite women in early Islamic history (Sayeed 2005) or charting how

ordinary women experienced and negotiated social and legal institutions (Rapoport

2002). Gender as a category of analysis is utilized more often within literary studies

which foreground issues of identity, as opposed focusing on individual women's writing

(Rowe 2000; Alsarhan 2003; Landress 2004). The focus on gender as a component of

identity is a characteristic that gender studies dissertations produced in area studies

departments share with those in history (and to a lesser extent anthropology).

In a departure from the focus on gender and identity formation , one dissertation

employed a gendered analysis to interrogate forms of literary authority, conceptions of

artistic mastery and practices of criticism to chart the historical construction of a classical

Arabic cannon (and women's exclusion from it)(Hammond 2003). Another, comparing

various historical accounts of the life and death of a nineteenth century female Moroccan

Jewish saint, uses gender to interrogate modes of historical writing, truth-telling and the

construction of literature and literary audiences (Vance 2005). In addition, there is a

single dissertation which attempts to bring gender as an analytical category to bear on the

study of Islam (Ford 2000). This dissertation, which examines the role of gender in the

constitution of notions of sanctity in an early twentieth century collection of miracle

25

stories written by a Sunni Shaykh, exemplifies both the possibility and pitfalls of

particular gendered approaches to religion . On the one hand, takes notions of sanctity

and pious authority not as transparent and self-evident but as actively constituted by

relations of power. On the other, it reproduces the trend evident in area studies

dissertations, to treat Islam as a compendium of texts, rather than as something which is

lived and practiced. Also the tendency noted in other disciplines the to treat "gender" as a

synonym for women is also evident here (only one of the dissertations surveyed takes

masculinity as a focus of analysis (Loewen 2001)) as is the near absence of studies about

sexuality (Kadish 2001).

Anthropology

The discipline of Anthropology will be analyzed more thoroughly in a subsequent

draft of this paper. Very briefly, areas of study which were represented in anthropology

dissertations included work on the anthropology of women and gender (Conway-Long

2000; Lang 2000; Sa'ar 2000; Altinay 2001; Limbert 2002; Shively 2002; Crivello 2003;

Deeb 2003; Malik 2003; Kelly Spurles 2004; Newcomb 2004; Hart 2005; Young 2005;

O'Rourke 2006), Islam (Herrera 2000; Hirschkind 2000; Deeb 2003; Eltahir 2003; Doerre

2004; Henkel 2004; Agrama 2005; Hamdy 2006; Pearl 2006), ethnicity (King 2000;

Hood 2002; Kosansky 2003; Ahmetbeyzade 2004; Oram 2004; Brink-Danan 2005; Boum

2006; Brenneman 2006; Smith 2006), anthropology of the nation, nationalism and

national identity (Collins 2000; Neuman 2000; Seymour 2000; Libal 2001; Davis 2002;

Shively 2002; Goldstein 2003; King-Irani 2003; Wynn 2003; Fenichel 2005; Mills 2005;

Na'amneh 2005; Parla 2005), work which deals with the transnational movement and

circulation of people, ideas and commodities( including work on refugee and diaspora

26

populations)(Ho 2000; Chiba 2001; Balasescu 2004; Karam 2004; Tetreault 2004; Al-

Sharmani 2005; Budiani 2005; Clarkin 2005; Daughtry 2005; Fernando 2006; Leichtman

2006; Yukleyen 2007) and medical anthropology (Cousins 2000; Coker 2001; Loeffler

2001; Allen 2002; Dole 2002; Kangas 2002; Sanal 2005)

Conclusion: Interdisciplinarity and the Market

In conclusion, while the use of theoretical and methodological tools which

transcend conventional disciplinary boundaries among a new generation of Middle East

Studies scholars is uneven, certain topics of study are coming to have cross disciplinary

salience. Scholarship which deals with women and gender, Islam, ethnicity, the making

of nations and national identities and, increasingly, transnational processes are all areas of

focus common to the disciplines surveyed for this article. Other common trends include

a focus on identities and identity formation and the prevalence of the nation and the

nation-state as a framework of analysis. Institutions like the Middle East Studies

Association and the Association of Middle Eastern Women's Studies exist to help foster

conversations across disciplines, and to certain extent those conversations have been

successful in fostering interdisciplinary scholarship By way of conclusion, however, I

would like to suggest that, in future, it may well be the market for academic publishing

which is the greatest impetus to interdisciplinarity in Middle East Studies. With

declining budgets and increasing competition from electronic forms of publishing,

academic publishing is widely acknowledged to be experiencing a crisis. In this climate

of increasing competition, publishers are increasingly aiming to publish books which can

be marketed across disciplines and to multiple audiences. For example, Laura Deeb's

book, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi'i Islam (based on her 2003

27

dissertation) is marketed by its publisher, Princeton University Press under the headings

of Gender Studies, Middle East Studies, Religion and Anthropology, while Lisa Hajjar's

work Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza is

simultaneously included by University of California Press in listings of work on Law,

Politics, Anthropology, Sociology and Middle East Studies. Moreover, publishers'

marketing strategies are re-defining what constitutes Middle East Studies, listing studies

on Islam in China (Stanford University Press), Middle Eastern diaspora populations

(University of Texas, University of California and University of Indiana) and work on

Central Asia (University of California, Duke University Press), for example, under a

Middle East Studies heading. The pressure on academic publishing houses to produce

monographs which appeal to audiences within and across multiple disciplines coupled

with the pressure on young academics at most four-year institutions to publish a

monograph as a pre-condition of tenure may well mean that the biggest impetus to

interdisciplinary scholarship in Middle Eastern Studies in the future is the market.

28

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Lowrance, S. R. (2004). Ethnic identity, grievance and political behavior: Being Palestinian in Israel. United States -- Texas, The University of Texas at Austin.

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35

Matsunaga, Y. (2006). Struggles for democratic consolidation in the Islamic Republic of Iran, 1979--2004. United States -- New York, New York University.

Mazie, S. V. (2002). Faith in liberalism: Exploring religion and democracy in the state of Israel. United States -- Michigan, University of Michigan.

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Othman, A. (2005). And s[dotbelow]ulh[dotbelow] is best: Amicable settlement and dispute resolution in Islamic law. United States -- Massachusetts, Harvard University.

Otucu, F. O. (2004). Severe ethnic violence: An integrated explanation of the Turkish-Kurdish case. United States -- Kentucky, University of Kentucky.

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Scalenghe, S. (2006). Being different: Intersexuality, blindness, deafness, and madness in Ottoman Syria. United States -- District of Columbia, Georgetown University.

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38

Taylor, J. E. (2004). Prophet sharing: Strategic interaction between Islamic clerics and Middle Eastern regimes. United States -- California, University of California, Los Angeles.

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Yukleyen, A. (2007). The European market for Islam: Turkish Islamic communities and organizations in Germany and the Netherlands. United States -- Massachusetts, Boston University.

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Zorlu-Durukan, S. A. (2006). The ideological pillars of Turkish education: Emergent Kemalism and the zenith of single-party rule. United States -- Wisconsin, The University of Wisconsin - Madison.