Middle East

Educating Egypt: Civic Values and Ideological Struggles By Linda Herrera. American University in Cairo Press, 2022, 264 pp.

Acollection of studies conducted over the last 30 years by the preeminent American scholar of education in Egypt, this book paints an evocative portrait of the educational philosophies, institutions, and practices that have so poorly equipped Egyptian young people for the world they encounter as adults. In the process, she reveals how decades of failure to invest in education created perverse incentives for teachers, families, and, most important, generations of children. Herrera’s inquiry ranges from a girls’ middle school in Cairo in the early 1990s, where discipline was more important than learning, to the private Islamist schools that proliferated later in the decade to the underpaid teachers and desperate families that have conspired to support a system of private after-school tutoring that makes a mockery of the notion of free public education. Overcrowding in schools led Ministry of Education bureaucrats to falsify year-end exam results, giving students passing grades to make room for incoming classes. Herrera ends on a note of cautious optimism, hoping the technologically minded strategies of Minister of Education Tarek Shawki will bear fruit; his departure in the summer of 2022 suggests, however, that big problems remain.

Creating Local Democracy in Iran: State Building and the Politics of Decentralization By Kian Tajbakhsh. Cambridge University Press, 2022, 304 pp.

In this unusually revealing account of decentralization efforts in Iran, Tajbakhsh provides a deeply researched and often moving account of how contemporary politics in Iran actually works. Deploying a remarkable mix of personal memoir and professional expertise—Tajbakhsh was a student, an urban planner, a government adviser, and ultimately a political prisoner in Iran—he endeavors to make sense of his work there, notably the failure of an initiative to decentralize local government by authorizing elections for local government councils. In the late 1990s and the first decade of this century, reformists promoted decentralization as a way of making local government more responsive to the needs and desires of citizens. Technocrats framed such efforts as integral to the strengthening of local administration. And ruling Islamists supported decentralization as an opportunity for public mobilization in support of the regime.The reformists lost, partly because of developments on the national and international stage but also, as Tajbakhsh persuasively suggests, because of flaws in their understanding of decentralization itself, which they often equated with democratization. Tajbakhsh shows how local governments were, in fact, deprived of taxing authority, which kept local policy tightly linked to central government largess. Candid, rueful, scholarly, and reflective, this book opens a revealing window onto everyday politics in Iran.

Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East By Jonathan Wyrtzen. Columbia University Press, 2022, 336 pp.

The conventional wisdom about the impact of World War I on the Middle East is that in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, European perfidy carved up the region and determined its future. Wyrtzen argues against this orthodoxy, insisting instead that World War I really started in 1911 with the Italian invasion of Libya and the French and Spanish occupation of Morocco—and did not end until the mid-1930s, after the upheavals of the Arab revolt in Syria, the Turkish independence struggle, the Saudi conquest of the Hejaz, the uprisings in Kurdistan, the Rif rebellion in Morocco, and the Sanusi resistance in Libya. These events may have been erased from the standard textbook histories of the region, but they continue to burn bright in local memory. They were as influential in shaping contemporary politics as were any imperial European efforts to manipulate local sentiment or draw regional boundaries. Indeed, many of the sites of conflict in the 1920s still play host to violent contests today, including the 2016 rebellion in Morocco’s Rif, the ongoing Libyan civil war, and the continuing struggles over Kurdish autonomy in Iraq and elsewhere.

The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People By Walter Russell Mead. Knopf, 2022, 672 pp.

By turns lyrical and dyspeptic, Mead explores the role that Zionism and Israel have played in the American imagination and in U.S. foreign policy. He attributes Washington’s steadfast support for the Jewish state and the American fascination with Israel to a sometimes bewildering combination of culture and politics. Protesting, perhaps too much, that pro-Israel lobbying is perceived to be more influential than it truly is, he looks instead to forces such as religious conviction and realpolitik to explain the U.S.-Israeli relationship. His account of the embrace of Israel by Christian evangelical movements in the United States is subtle and revealing in explaining the substantial influence of Christian Zionists in U.S. policy debates about the Middle East. Mead suggests that the interminable peace process, in which everyone genuflects to an ever-receding mirage of concord, has been a hard-nosed strategic choice, useful to virtually all parties to the conflict. Although the peace process has inhibited full-blown war, it has also built and sustained troubling local power holders (notably an emboldened Israeli right wing and a feckless Palestinian Authority), provided a rationale for continuing U.S. arms sales to both Israel and the oil-producing Gulf countries, and guaranteed that the United States remains the uncontested global power in the Middle East.

Struggles for Political Change in the Arab World: Regimes, Oppositions, and Eternal Actors After the Spring Edited by Lisa Blaydes, Amr Hamzawy, and Hesham Sallam. University of Michigan Press, 2022, 488 pp.

An unusually strong collection, this volume showcases writing by some of the best scholars working on politics in the Arab world today, all of them at the top of their game. These essays together offer a thorough and sophisticated examination of the political change and contestation that has shaped the decade after the uprisings in 2011, from Algeria to Sudan. The authors focus on three themes: the persistence of political mobilization among populations that are young, dissatisfied, technologically adept, and unreconciled to autocracy; the adaptations of regimes that are also increasingly tech-savvy and equally determined not to surrender their power and privileges; and the ever more visible importance of international and local actors in the dynamics of domestic conflict across the region. The authors puzzle over the unwillingness of many of the protest movements to develop more coherent institutional forms, skeptical as they are of conventional organizations such as political parties, ideological commitments such as Islamist or nationalist dogmas, and, it sometimes seems, authority of any kind. Still, the book’s contributors make a convincing case that the Arab world will see continued activism and growing regime ruthlessness in the face of discontent.