Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Archival and ethnographic interventions on Lebanon

“ This is the first time that China has officially brokered an international accord , and also its first involvement in the Middle East: the US has dominated this area of strategic importance for more than 70 years, despite its pivot to Asia at the start of the century. China’s success is partly due to favourable circumstances: Riyadh’s desire to assert its independence from Washington (especially after the US was slow to come to the rescue after terrorist attacks on its oil installations in 2019); and Iran’s concerns over its economic crisis as well as anti-government protests and threats of Israeli attacks on its nuclear facilities.  There is also the growing tendency of countries of the global South not to follow the West’s lead. This diplomatic initiative was driven by the need for hydrocarbons. Saudi Arabia became China’s leading supplier of oil; Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) also began supplying natural gas and oil. Between 2002 and 2022, China’s foreign direct investm

I wonder how I missed this excellent article on ‘sectarianism’ in the Middle East when it was published in 2017. It reminds me of at least a statement and a question by two English who did History at the London School of Economics. One said: “Now I understand why there are many conflicts in the Arab world. It is because there are many dialects.” The other asked me when the split between the Sunnis and Shi’a took place, implying that it is ‘a millennium-long conflict’.  Related Coexistence, sectarianism and racism – an interview with Ussama Makdisi Boundary making and sectarianisation in Syria 2011-2013 Making and unmaking of the greater Middle East

Deception, disinformation and social media

Excerpts from The Islamic Enlightenment

A very short introduction Related British atrocities in Kenya

The crisis of development: uneveness, polarization and contestation

  Qatar World Cup 2022: How football became a game-changer for the Middle East

Middle East and North African countries carried out most global executions last year Meanwhile in  Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan …

Sharing via google drive

The projects, mapped across the Middle East, are an effort to consolidate the influence of American capital and rebuff competition from China by creating a physical, economic bulwark that strengthens American and European supply chains. It is about to hit the Middle East

Are Ukrainians more deserving of sympathy than Afghans and Iraqis?

Introduction by Joel Beinin Political economy addresses the mutual and historical constitution of states, markets, and classes… In this perspective, causes are simultaneously effects; all events are situated in a relational matrix; all social hierarchies are subject to contestation. The historical development of social formations dominated by capital is inextricably intertwined with genocides, slavery and other forms of unfree labor, racialization, patriarchy, national oppression, and empire. Capital accumulation by individuals, partnerships, and even contemporary corporations can occur through exploiting many different forms of labor as well as cheap nature. The ambit of political economy also includes the legal, political, and cul- tural forms of the regulation of regimes of capital accumulation; relations among local, national, and global forms of capital, class, and culture; the so- cial structure of reproduction; the construction of forms of knowledge and hegemony; technopolitics;

I highly recommend Sami Zubaida’s book Beyond Islam from which I have chosen these passages: Islamism, the cosmopolitan and the transnational We have seen how the leading Muslim modernist reformers were in many senses ‘cosmopolitan’. They formed part of the elite circles of intellectuals, aristocrats and politicians, and focused their efforts mostly within these elites. A subsequent generation of Muslim leaders turned to populism and mass mobilization, deploying a much more puritanical and nativist Islam – notably the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt under Hassan al-Banna, which emerged in 1928; these were the ‘fundamentalists’. Their ideology was one of a return to the purity of early Islam and the first generations – hence ‘Salafi’ ( salaf means ‘ancestors’); but their politics were essentially those of modern populist mass mobilization. Their appeal was largely that of national liberation from foreign rule, but also, essentially, from foreign customs and lifestyles; they rejected not o

A MERIP’s online event 

And the roots of the 2011 uprisings

A region warming twice as much as the rest of the world

Rodinson argues that both in its traditions and history Islam was no more and no less able to control borrowing, lending, interest rates, merchant entrepreneurs than any other religious program; the stereotypes of Islamic submission to God's will, or Islamic belief in predetermination, have played little part either in the acquisition of Islamic wealth or in its administration. Islam was frequently a way ruling classes had of keeping their power, and Rodinson suggests that this is as likely to be true now as it has been historically. Maxime Rodinson explains the mysterious Near East

“Without knowing the fate of Arrakis and Paul, the current  Dune  appears no different from  Lawrence of Arabia  (1962): the story of a proud if uncivilised people born in a coarse if rich terrain who await a white messiah to grant them the peace and freedom that colonising forces have long denied. While the  Dune  saga starts as an allegory for colonisation, it ends as a warning against man-made ecological development and the danger of inherited myths.” Interstellar epic avoids Middle East cliches

An interview with Ussama Makdisi