Violence and the City in the Modern Middle East (eBook, ePUB)

Redaktion: Fuccaro, Nelida

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

This book explores violence in the public lives of modern Middle Eastern cities, approaching violence as an individual and collective experience, a historical event, and an urban process. Violence and the city coexist in a complicated dialogue, and critical consideration of the city offers an important way to understand the transformative powers of violence-its ability to redraw the boundaries of urban life, to create and divide communities, and to affect the ruling strategies of local elites, governments, and transnational political players.

The essays included in this volume reflect the diversity of Middle Eastern urbanism from the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries, from the capitals of Cairo, Tunis, and Baghdad to the provincial towns of Jeddah, Nablus, and Basra and the oil settlements of Dhahran and Abadan. In reconstructing the violent pasts of cities, new vistas on modern Middle Eastern history are opened, offering alternative and complementary perspectives to the making and unmaking of empires, nations, and states. Given the crucial importance of urban centers in shaping the Middle East in the modern era, and the ongoing potential of public histories to foster dialogue and reconciliation, this volume is both critical and timely.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 312
• Erscheinungstermin: 9. März 2016
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780804797764
• Artikelnr.: 48420194

Autorenporträt

Nelida Fuccaro is Reader in the Modern History of the Middle East, University of London, SOAS. She is the author of Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800 (2009).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1Urban Life and Questions of Violence  Nelida Fuccaro
chapter abstract
Drawing on theoretical, regional, and cross-regional literature on cities
and violence this chapter argues for the salience of urban violence in the
study of the early modern, modern, and contemporary Middle East. It
explores methodological, conceptual and ethical issues from a variety of
perspectives. It examines violence and the city as objects of academic
knowledge in combination with each other and with analytical categories
such as power, space/place, language, and modernity, highlighting the
protean nature of violence both as a productive and a destructive force.
This chapter also brings attention to specific themes emerging from
historiographies on Europe, Asia, and Africa and their relevance to the
study of urban violence in the context of the Middle East. It also
introduces the contents of the volume, and sketches urban geographies and
experiences of violence using examples from the region in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
2The Semantics of Violence and Space  Rasmus Christian Elling
chapter abstract
This chapter explores how urban histories of violence are reflected in
language, whether in piercing words and clear images or in distorted
allegories and muted allusions. It explores the intersection between the
semantic categories of 'space' and 'violence' drawing on methodological
issues emerging from the case studies presented in this volume, and on
relevant theoretical literature. The chapter discusses the fluid and
sometimes controversial boundaries between vocabularies employed in the
historical sources and those used in historical research; between language
about violence and language as violence; and between the numerous languages
in which the historians in this volume have conducted their research.
3Elite Conflict and the Urban Environment: Eighteenth-Century Cairo  James
E. Baldwin
chapter abstract
This chapter explores the violent factional conflicts fought by the Ottoman
political elites in the city's streets. Drawing on narratives of violent
conflict in eighteenth-century chronicles, the chapter suggests that this
violence was constrained by norms and values that were informed by notions
of personal honor, courage, and manliness, and by a conception of justice
focusing on the daily needs of ordinary Cairenes. The chapter explores the
operation of these norms with respect to the impact of violence on the
urban environment, including private homes, public spaces, and
infrastructure.
4Urban Space and Prestige: When Festivals Turned Violent in Jeddah,
1880s-1960s  Ulrike Freitag
chapter abstract
This chapter discusses a traditional dance, the mizmar, as a locus of young
male sociability and quarter mobilization in Jeddah. Besides entertainment,
it served the purpose of territorial demarcation within the city and could
turn into a violent confrontation, notably between quarters. With the
monopolization of violence by the nascent Saudi state and with urban growth
and change, the dance became folklorized and lost its social function in
urban politics.
5Citizenship Rights and Semantics of Colonial Power and Resistance: Haifa,
Jaffa, and Nablus, 1931-1933  Lauren Banko
chapter abstract
Historians have studied acts of violence in Mandate Palestine in strictly
nationalist, communal, or, in the case of the Arabs, anti-Zionist, terms.
This chapter approaches specific episodes of urban unrest in the early
1930s as the first example of a shift from nonviolent to violent opposition
against the British administration's disregard for the civil and political
rights of the Arab population. Taking into consideration Haifa, Jaffa, and
Nablus as politically-networked urban centers and focusing on citizenship
rights, the chapter shows how this transformation in tactics occurred in
the crucial years of urbanization that transformed the political
socialization of urban residents leading to the emergence of new civic
associations. The chapter also analyses the language of resistance to
colonial authority used in the Arab press and that of colonial repression,
the latter particularly after the 1933 riots in Jaffa.
6Challenging the Ottoman Pax Urbana: Intercommunal Clashes in 1857
Tunis  Nora Lafi
chapter abstract
In 1857 the city of Tunis witnessed the first anti-Jewish riots in Tunisian
history. These events marked the end of the communal balance that had until
then characterized the Ottoman pax urbana under the old regime, and took
place in the context of the difficult implementation of Ottoman reform in
the province of Tunisia, and of the growing influence of European consuls
in urban and provincial affairs. This chapter analyzes the various logics
that led to the outbreak of communal strife: the instrumentalization of
popular violence by different urban factions; the influence of state
violence on popular will; and the link between a novel form of resentment
against the Jewish community and the ambiguous actions of European consuls
who held increasingly evident colonial views of and ambitions over local
society.
7A Tamed Urban Revolution: Saudi Arabia's Oil Conurbation and the 1967
Riots  Claudia Ghawri
chapter abstract
This chapter discusses the riots that occurred during the Six-Day War in
June 1967 in the newly-urbanized centers of oil production in Saudi Arabia.
It refutes the widely accepted idea that the partly violent protests by oil
workers and the local population were a spontaneous and somewhat irrational
expression of anti-American sentiment. In the spirit of Henri Lefebvre's
famous concept of the "urban revolution," this chapter recognizes recurrent
social tensions and everyday violence in the oil conurbation as the reasons
for urban conflict. It argues that while the Arab war effort against Israel
surely triggered local reactions, the intensity of the protests, their
location, and the targets of the protesters were determined by this urban
problematic and orchestrated by the Saudi authorities who wanted to prevent
the expansion of local unrest.
8Making and Unmaking Spaces of Security:Basra as Battlefront, Basra
Insurgent(1980-1991)  Dina Rizk Khoury
chapter abstract
This chapter examines the impact of the Iran-Iraq and First Gulf wars on
the spatial organization of Basra between 1980 and 1991. It argues that the
Iraqi military, security, and Ba'th Party turned Basra and its surrounding
towns into spaces of security. This process of securitization took place
through the deployment of spatial strategies that included surveillance,
documentation, control, and extra-judicial violence. The security practices
of the party, military, and security organizations, and the social and
spatial dislocation created by the chaotic withdrawal of Iraqi troops from
Kuwait shaped rebels' patterns of participation and the targets of their
violence during the 1991 popular uprising at the end of the First Gulf war.
Thus, the chapter explores the links between the sustained violence of the
wars and the episodic violence of the 1991 uprising.
9A Patriotic Uprising: Baghdadi Jews and the Wathba  Orit Bashkin
chapter abstract
This chapter deals with the participation of Jews in the Wathba, a wave of
grassroots demonstrations that occurred in Baghdad during the winter of
1948. Students, workers, the middle classes, and the urban poor took to the
streets demanding liberty, fair distribution of state resources, social
justice, and an end to British intervention in Iraqi politics. These events
are used to reflect on how Baghdadi Jews interacted with urban space and
the urban sphere, informing their political choices, relationship with
Iraqi Muslims, and their identity politics. It argues that participation in
the Wathba, and in the ceremonies commemorating its martyrs, gave Baghdadi
Jews an opportunity to perform their nationalism and patriotism at a time
when the state gradually equated every Jew with a Zionist. The Wathba
created a sense of community from below, a moment of patriotism and heroism
which was silenced by Zionist and Arab nationalist historiography.
10Dissecting Moments of Unrest: Twenty-Century Kirkuk  Nelida Fuccaro
chapter abstract
Drawing on literature on Indian communalism, this chapter dissects two
episodes of civil unrest that took place in Kirkuk in 1924 and 1959 in
order to bring into focus some constitutive elements of state and popular
violence during the Hashemite monarchy. It considers a variety of actors
and historical factors: the city's communities, military, and police
forces; British colonialism and the oil industry. Urban space is analyzed
as a place of conflict, state repression, and communal memory, taking into
consideration the role played by different languages of violence and on
violence in causing bloodshed, and in mediating its interpretations. The
chapter also draws attention to the long-term symbiosis between state
discipline, communal conflict, and the restoration of order. The aim is to
provide an alternative and more nuanced reading of the long-term conflict
between Turkmens and Kurds which has been interpreted as an expression of
ethno-nationalist confrontation.
11War of Clubs: Struggle for Space in Abadan and the 1946 Oil
Strike  Rasmus Christian Elling
chapter abstract
This chapter challenges simplistic representations of the intercommunal
violence that took place during the 1946 oil strike in Abadan, in the
Iranian province of Khuzestan, as rooted either in primordial ethnic hatred
or in an imperialist plot. The chapter reconstructs in detail several days
of tensions and clashes, and places them within a historical context of
coercive industrial urban development, labor activism, ethnic mobilization
and global politics. Using oil company records, national archives and
personal accounts, the focus of the analysis is the socio-spatial unit of
the club as a place for socialization, a site of strife in the life of an
oil city, and as a key political space with significance in the evolution
of the modern Iranian nation state.
12Urban Rupture: A Fire, Two Hotels, and the Transformation of
Cairo  Yasser Elsheshtawy
chapter abstract
This chapter seeks to spatialize the construct of urban violence by
examining how one particular event - the great Cairo fire -led to the
reconfiguration of the city's downtown space and to a shift in Cairo's
planning paradigm. Two hotels, Shepheard's and the Nile Hilton, are used as
case studies to illustrate these trends. Both are analyzed as symbols of a
prevailing socio-political order. The destruction of the former in 1952 and
the construction of the latter in the following years are discussed within
the overall framework of urban violence. Both of these buildings reveal a
specific moment in Cairo's history in which the past was cast aside,
removed, and destroyed, and in its place a new vision was promulgated aimed
squarely at engaging Cairo and in turn Egypt with the wider world. It
argues that Cairo's twentieth-century urban development can be read through
these two incidents.