The mineral and stone quarry-rich Jordan Valley is also the agricultural heartland of Israel/Palestine. It is located in Area C, which constitutes over sixty percent of the West Bank. Settlers control roughly ninety percent of this valley and have used classic tactics of settler colonialism to try to absorb the land without the people. The academic literature on settlers and settlements often focuses on the drive for Israeli land expansion as purely ideological or religious, but this fails to acknowledge the prevalence and dangers of business and economic settlements that impact Palestinians residing there, as well as the environment. In the Jordan Valley, business/economic settlers will collaborate with the Israeli military in harassing, harming, and exploiting Palestinian labor while also driving them out of the region. This paper looks at the history of Palestinian life in the Jordan Valley since 1967 before exploring the ways that the creation of Area C by Oslo sets up a horrific situation. These dynamics are contradictory in character. Israel extracts resources from the environment, limits access to basic necessities for Palestinians, and explores how settlers use violence as a tool to push people from the land. The paper’s argument is that Israel’s occupation necessitates the imposition of two legal systems over separate groups in the same place. Israel extracts natural resources, which is dependent on Palestinian labor, to illegally profit from the occupation while trying to eliminate them from living there. The aim of this paper is twofold; first, to provide a historical analysis of the region in order to understand the present day conflict since 1967 and especially after the Oslo Accords. Then, to illustrate the ways in which Israel uses exploitation of natural resources, labor, legal manipulation, and settlement construction and expansion in order to annex the Jordan Valley.

This paper investigates the role that the Sharjah Biennial (SB), an international art showcase in the United Arab Emirates, plays in the development of a local artistic and cultural taste, arguing that the SB contributes to the molding of local aesthetic values through its selection of curatorial themes, artists, artworks, and venues. Using interviews and archival research informed by sociological theories on aesthetics, the author shows that organizers of public art exhibitions and programs are in a key position to shape the art to which people are exposed and how this, in turn, creates a public valuation of aesthetics. This project fills a gap in contemporary biennial literature by shedding light on the roles of art events in shaping communal aesthetic values.

Historically, Palestinians inside and outside the diaspora detail their experiences of expulsion, humiliation, and persistent attachment to historic Palestine. These works of poetry, stories, narratives, and oral histories contain themes of nationalism and identity, turbulent connections to land and family, and the tragedies of experiencing a disintegrating Palestine. This paper explores these themes to understand how diaspora Palestinian authors conceptualize Palestine within their writing, and how this affects their relationship to it and other Palestinians through an analysis of their contemporary literature. This paper examines these themes by analyzing recent literature written by Palestinians in diaspora, focusing specifically on how they create an imaginative geography of Palestine that is founded upon stories and memories of the past, family connections, and intermittent visits instead of through a steady, anchored presence. By reevaluating their literature, this paper will document how the concept of Palestine is constructed through imagery, metaphorical language, symbolism, and memory, while considering how this affects the personal process of connecting to a land and people that are continually under siege and prone to rapid change both domestically or abroad. In order to analyze diaspora Palestinian conceptions within their writings, I will look solely at their literature translated into English, or written directly in English which are compiled into different anthologies and collections. I will compare and contrast how different authors construct the idea of Palestine through various literary prose, methods, and practices. The findings of this paper will not only humanize Palestinians in the eyes of academia, but just as importantly highlight a crucial aspect of how Palestinians construct and continually replenish their national identity, but also how they become connected to one another across short and long distances in relation to their conception of Palestine.

Oral storytelling is a continued living tradition in Syria, practiced both in cafes and gatherings of family and friends. Stories, like the people who narrate and listen to them, change because of migration. Based upon a series of semi-structured interviews with Syrian women living in Jordan and organizers of storytelling projects, as well as observation of oral storytelling sessions, this paper explores how Syrian storytelling traditions have changed because of Syrians’ forced displacement to Jordan and Lebanon. Since 2011, close to 600,000 Syrian refugees have fled to Jordan, and over 900,000 to Lebanon. Forced migration has transformed the themes of stories and how Syrian storytellers narrate them. Along with folklore, oral storytellers draw upon lived experiences, and recording oral stories brings the oral history of the storyteller into the historical record. For displaced communities, oral storytelling connects Syrians to a distinctly different past, and opens an alternative space for the storyteller to confront lived experiences. Limited civil society efforts have been made to celebrate this tradition. Instead the storytellers themselves, predominantly Syrian women, negotiate its future. In a time when politics and media consistently deny the humanity of Syrians, stories highlight the creativity, humor, and resilience of storytellers and Syrian society. Oral stories belong to popular literature: there is no singular author or owner. For these reasons, this research focuses on oral stories narrated by Syrian refugee storytellers. With limited attention from journalists, scholars, and civil society, these women are the primary practitioners of oral storytelling. Studying oral storytelling among Syrian communities in Jordan and Lebanon reveals that storytelling is not a dying art, but rather a changing one. Through their courage to speak, in the most challenging of circumstances, Syrian women sustain oral storytelling as a vibrant, dynamic, and very much living tradition.

“Black Headbands in the Highlands” is a focused and analytical historical analysis of the Chechen wars spanning from 1994-2009, focusing on the roles of non-state actors. It attempts to dissect the fragmentation of Chechen resistance forces as the conflict progressed, and why, if resistance fragmented, the conflict cycle continued and grew worse. It argues that leadership decapitation, economic devastation, and tactical devolution allowed non-native ideologically backed organizations to enter the conflict zone. In turn, the introduction of foreign, mainly radical Wahhabist organizations, lines of funding, and methods of support irreparably changed the nature of what, was at its core, a nationalist struggle. Simultaneously, the devolving battlefield helped shape the early narrative, method, and motivations of the, still young, international Jihadist organizations. Finally, the devolution of nationalist fervor, combined with the introduction of multipolar radical elements, championed by individual ‘middle management’ commanders, ensured a continuation of an already confusing and bloody conflict cycle. Black Headbands utilizes a chronological historical approach, broken into the first Russo-Chechen War (1994-1996), the interwar years (1996-1999), and the second Russo-Chechen War (2000-2009). Its sources are drawn from primary account of Russian, Chechen, and Arab fighters, field commanders, and politicians, as well as Western journalist accounts and articles. Scholarly work is sourced from American, European, Russian, and limited Chechen diasporic input. Although this work is geographically outside of the Middle East, it deserves consideration in that specific context. It is relevant to academic conversations regarding MENA. Radical Islamist organizations continue to be an extremely relevant non-state actor regarding conflict in the periphery of the Muslim world, and Chechnya is one of the first. Chechnya was the unfortunate location of two larger geopolitical happenstances (Russian decolonization, and global radical Islamism) butting against one another. Furthermore, analysis of non-state actors and their interaction with existing conflict locations deserve due deliberation.

In this essay, I provide an exegetical analysis of representations of the Virgin Mary within early Syriac Christian and Muslim texts in an effort to explore the shared history and geography of Christians and Muslims in the Middle East from the first through eighth centuries. In this analysis, I focus on the Syriac Christian Protevangelium of James and the third and nineteenth surahs of the Qur’an. These texts provide surprisingly similar descriptions of Mary and her role in the life of Jesus, a reality which challenges what we as a society have deemed “Western” Christianity – the Christianity which has been canonized in the Christian Bible and has defined as orthodox at the hands of white, male church fathers. I argue that, as the Syriac Christians of the first century developed a distinct focus on Mary’s purity, so too did the Muslim community. The portrayals of Mary in the Protevangelium and the Qur’an overlap as a result of these respective traditions’ shared geographies and histories. I suggest that Mary is a site, sometimes one apart from Christ, which must continue to be explored to better understand the shared traditions and identities of Christians and Muslims living in the Middle East.

The Iraqi Personal Status Law of 1959, Law No. 188, restricted polygamy, declared equal inheritance rights for women and men, raised the marriage age for women to sixteen, required stricter thresholds for men seeking divorce, allowed women to file for divorce and ensured that brides received their bridal payment and support. Law No. 188 was not only the first of its kind to be shaped by women, but it also secularized and unified Iraqi courts formerly run by religious judges. Contrary to perceptions of Law No. 188 as “revolutionary” in nature-- often suggested by scholars such as J.N.D Anderson and Noga Efrati-- this project claims the law was a starting point, rather than a monumental victory. Using the writings of three Iraqi feminist authors, Dr. Naziha al-Dulaimi, Sabiha al-Shaikh Da’ud, and Suad Khayri, I argue that women’s ideas encompassed more than what the law provided for. Among their writings, they included maternity care, political rights, economic liberty, education, health and inequality-- all missing from the law. Dr. Naziha al-Dulaimi was the first woman cabinet member in Iraq, and her writing focused on women’s needs for healthcare, legal marriage equality, and economic independence. Sabiha al-Shaikh Da’ud was a leader for the Iraqi Women’s Union and wrote about the women’s lack of education and political rights, arguing for women to obtain the right to vote. Suad Khayri was a feminist in the 1950s who lived through the enactment of Law No. 188. Khayri, in her writings, criticized the law thirty years after 1958, claiming the law was a “launch” of women’s rights, but did not radically help women’s situation in marriage and divorce, since the law granted men more rights. The significance of using these authors is their diverse points of views, which revealed the development and diversity of the Iraqi feminist movement before and after the law. While the women’s cause could easily be mistaken for a singular movement, their divergence proves the complexity of the Iraqi women’s movement. For example, while al-Dulaimi was a leader in the Iraqi Communist Party, Da’ud’s family was loyal to the monarchy. Key to this study is challenging the notion of Iraqi women as passive, when, in cases such as Law No.188, they had defined their own positions and catalyzed change despite the social limitations of their nation in the 1950s.

Persia in the post-Mongol era is an ambiguous concept. The area is riddled with different ethnicities, religions, and seemingly endless claims to power. The Timurid Empire is no exception to this trend. Temür rises to power in 1370 using Central Asian nomadic styles of ruling and quickly dominates this geographic region inhabited by a plethora of ethnicities and religions. He understands the political volatility of maintaining a large, diverse empire and takes key steps in securing his “united” rule. The key political move that this paper examines is Temür’s commissioning of art. The art endorsed by the Timurid government surrounds the illumination of manuscripts and the illustration of literature. The Timurids conveyed two main messages to those living under their empire. The first message targets the main ethnic groups: Iranians, Mongols and Turks, justifying Temür as their rightful leader. The second message is delivered to the ethnic minorities, instilling fear to prevent rebellions and ensure subjugation. This paper will demonstrate that the reason the Timurids targeted culture is that changing the culture of the empire yielded the most success in portraying a political message. This paper will examine three pieces of art that demonstrate the physical depiction of the Iranians from the Persian epic the Shahnameh. Scenes are present where both the Iranian and Turanian (Turkic) armies battle, but their physical characteristics are identical. The Timurids needed to ensure Mongol support of their rule as well, thus this paper looks to a depiction of Chingiz Khan as a Caucasian man with physical descriptions akin to Persians. To establish the dominance over minorities such as the Armenians and even the Chinese, the paper analyzes an illustration by Siyah Qalam, where two demons resembling Chinese folklore are enslaved and forced to entertain by playing the Armenian Kamancha and serving tea from Chinese teaware.

In this paper, I explore the feminist reading of Islamic Shari’a that started in the 1990s in American academia, and examine the foundational premises of this discourse. In doing so, I will focus on two examples: Leila Ahmed, professor of Middle Eastern studies at Harvard university, and Amina Wadud, professor of gender and women studies at California Berkeley, showing that although they tried to counter argue against the orientalist narrative about the “oppressed” Muslim women, yet they implicitly deployed the orientalist definition of Shari’a without critically engaging with its premises. They built their own analysis on Joseph schacht and Noel Coulson views of Islamic law, in which they referred every Islamic law back to another civilization and depicting the Islamic scholars as if they were just imitating another civilization. I will critique the idea deployed by Joseph schacht concerning the closing of Ijtihad gate by the fourth hijri century using Wael Hallaq’s critique by showing that Ijtihad was not closed but it took different forms. Then, I will examine a very common argument among these feminists regarding the process of knowledge production in early Islamic period, during the second and third hijri centuries, showing that women were part of this process. I will examine books of Tabakat, a biographical encyclopedia of Islamic scholars during certain time or place specialized in certain discipline, to show that women were part of the religious scholarship sphere, and they were not always marginalized.

This paper discusses the contention over the city of Jerusalem following Israel’s annexation of the West Bank during the June 1967 War. First, the immediate aftermath of the war is discussed alongside the implications on the legal status of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. The paper then details the urban policies implemented by Israel in the decades following the war and describes their effects on the lives of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Furthermore, attention is given to the limited Palestinian response to the Israeli occupation of urban space. Finally, these issues are put into the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a whole. The findings of this paper reveal the effects that years of urban policy can have in shaping a conflict. As urban policy is used in an attempt to shape the demographic reality of Jerusalem, this paper concludes with an outlook on the future for Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

In 2011, a series of uprisings took place throughout the Arab World in order to remove the authoritarian leaders that had ruled for decades. Surprising political analysts and scholars in the field, these uprisings succeeded in the removal of the authoritarian Egyptian and Tunisian dictators Hosni Mubarak and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The success of these Arab uprisings hinged on the logistical efforts that were orchestrated across the region. In this paper I investigate the role that Egyptian and Tunisian women, ages 20-40, played in the success of the Arab Spring. I define “success” as the removal of Egypt and Tunisia’s respective authoritarian dictators. I argue that without the organizational and logistical efforts of young to middle aged women, the protests that took place in 2011 would not have been as effective in shaping the political goals of the uprisings. To assess the role that women in this age range played in perpetuating/organizing the uprising, I will conduct a historiography of the usage of the social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, and blogs in order to demonstrate how these women were able to use the technological advancements of the time as a catalyst to assist them in reaching citizens in the most rural of places. Lastly, I examine these women and the unconventional role they played in shaping the political atmosphere post-revolution. Understanding the need for a political strategy if these uprisings were successful, the college educated, young to middle-age women widely contributed to the cultivation of political strategy and goals such as public diplomacy in order to provide the Egyptian and Tunisian people with a government intended to support the people. Ultimately this paper argues for sustained interest in the role of women in the shaping of Arab politics. The role of women is often overlooked by scholars which prevents an accurate historical analysis when examining momentous events in the Arab World.

This senior thesis explores the intersection of the social, cultural and political elements that defined the Levantine migrant experience in Mexico during the 1920s. During this decade, a series of immigration laws restricted access for Levantine migrants entering Mexico. These changes in policy were partly a reflection of a larger process of state-formation, which included the institutionalization of a post-revolutionary national identity in Mexico. This thesis argues that bringing attention to the dynamics between Levantine migrants and Mexican citizens can help understand the anti-immigration policies of 1920s Mexico as part and parcel of a larger social history of Mexican nationalism.

A growing body of literature, the laboratory thesis, explains how the Israel Defense Forces ("IDF") and the Israeli military and security industry uses the occupied Palestinian territories ("OPT") as a laboratory for weapons testing and demonstration to better market their products at international arms fairs. First, in order to further investigate the laboratory thesis, I will explore a political-economic history of Israel’s military and security industry, noting significant trends and forces that shape armament production in Israel today. Second, I will conduct an empirical analysis of the laboratory thesis in practice. My methodology uses two proxies that I argue are representative of Israel’s military and security industry at large. This empirical analysis will compare the occupation’s violence against military and security industry financial interests. I will investigate how IDF operations in the OPT correlate with industry profits. This research can help to refocus the conversation on the questions of endurance of the occupation and violence in the occupation onto the arms manufacturers and defense contractors who have a material interest in its continued prosecution.

"Between Community and Self: The Politics of Queer Organizing and Being in Post-revolutionary Tunisia" focuses on the experiences of queer Tunisians in the aftermath of the 2011 Jasmine Revolution. This paper analyzes the political dynamics behind the emergence of sexual minority organizations, and the complexities of creating a queer collective identity, processes that ultimately led into distinctions between a queer and LGBT politics within such groups. At the same time, the essay explores the individual processes of self-identification and queer becoming of Tunisian queer activists and community members, pushing against dichotomizing ideas of coming out, queer shame, and visibility. Engaging queer theory, anthropology, and Middle East Studies—and drawing, in particular, on theories of homonormativity and homonationalism developed by Lisa Duggan and Jasbir Puar, respectively—this research is attuned to the practical implications and geopolitical significance of queer rights discourses, and to imagining, in conversation with the Tunisian queer community, the contours of a decolonized queer rights discourse. This study draws on unstructured interviews with members of the Tunisian queer community, conducted in 2019.

Joseph Mathia Svoboda, a European residing in Baghdad and working as a steamship purser, kept a series of daily diaries from 1861 to 1908, in which he recorded his trips on the Tigris as well as local news and personal concerns, providing a remarkable insight into life in late-Ottoman Iraq. Since 2006, the University of Washington Svoboda Diaries Project, part of the Newbook Digital Texts publishing house, has been digitizing, transcribing and studying these diaries and making them available to the public in web and print formats. Digital humanities work, such as ours, changes not only the literal, physical forms of texts but their literary forms as well. Digitizing a diary and opening it to public scholarship presents new questions about how we think about private writings. When what is personal to the diarist is made widely visible, incidental details become matters of scholarly importance and discussion. At the same time, macro factors such as twentieth and twenty-first-century world and Iraqi history, war, colonialism, global trade, and epidemic disease shape their use and study. In my project, I consider the history of the diaries as text-objects by considering the significance of the material, contextual, and theoretical transformations they have undergone since their writing. While digital humanities seeks faithfulness to the original contents of a text, drastic transformation of forms such as “making the private public” naturally opens those same contents to new uses, and understanding these changes is crucial to understanding the full possibilities and impacts of digital scholarship.

This paper considers how home economics n education policy was employed to shape the social development in Iraq in the early 1950s. During this period, Iraqi policymakers and internationl advisors sought to build a modern Iraq using the development of home economics education for young women and girls. In this work, I engage closely with the reports and collected writings from the archives of Ava Milam Clark who was a Dean of the School of Home Economics at Oregon State College and who served as an advisor for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In a report to the government of Iraq in 1952, she recommended that the Ministry of Education expand the home economics curriculum especially at secondary schools and at the Queen Aliya College for Women in Baghdad. Building on the existing work on gender in Iraqi national development, I provide an analysis of Milam Clark’s recommendations to examine how the ideals of American home economics education were adapted and deployed in the context of Iraqi national development. I compare Milam Clark’s recommendations and observations about Iraq with her work in the United States and other countries where she served as an advisor. Through this I show how differences in the utilization of home economics curricula reflect differences in the intentions behind educating women for the home and for the nation. The limitations in the implementation of Milam Clark’s recommendations shed light on the contested nature of the types of education available for young women and girls in 1950s Iraq.

In urban planning, governments usually hold the decision-making power to shape not only city landscapes but also people’s lives with the promoted goals of social welfare. Although states expect their own version of ideal scenarios in mind when carrying out infrastructural developments, after competition, people in reality have their own ways of perceiving and utilizing state-made infrastructures and urban transportation, sometimes in alignment with government plan, and sometimes at odds with it. Abu Dhabi is one of the cities in the world in which the government planned out the whole city and created urban infrastructure from scratch, including the city bus system. Although the Abu Dhabi public buses started operating in 2008, car dependency is still high and many residents consider public buses to be inefficient and time consuming and only used by certain immigrant working population. This paper will analyze the Department of Transport (DoT)’s initial goals of establishing the public bus system, the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the currently implemented bus system, and real users’ experiences and social meanings of public transport in Abu Dhabi. While the DoT constructed the urban transportation system to facilitate economic activities and comply to the idealized version of modernity, the public buses reinforce social stratification and are evaluated to be inefficient. By looking at a specific case of Abu Dhabi’s public bus system, this paper strives to provide a better interface of government-led urban design and the actual practice of the residents in terms of urban planning and transport infrastructure, commonly practiced and constructed on a global level.

What mechanisms are available to the international community to prosecute violators of human rights? More specifically, how can this be applied to the war in Yemen? By analyzing the literature surrounding international criminal law, this paper seeks to identify different mechanisms including universal jurisdiction, questions of sovereignty, and analyzes the challenges the international community faces in prosecuting human rights abusers. This analysis looks at the application of conservative minimalism and universalism and questions of universal jurisdiction and violations of sovereignty. By focusing on international criminal law, I will apply these theories to the UN reported human rights violations occurring in Yemen, and the possible repercussion mechanisms available to the international community.

This paper will focus on three mediums of commemoration; the monument, the memorial, and the museum as tools of state-sanctioned memory creation and thereby spaces for politicized rituals of memory which create national subjects. Specifically, during and after The Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) the al-Shaheed Monument (1983), and the Victory Arch (1989) in Baghdad and the Martyrs’ Museum (1996) in Tehran functioned as politically strategic representations of collective trauma. Both the Ba’ath party in Iraq and the emerging Islamic Republic in Iran used these sites to render and politicize memories of violence and loss. Despite obvious differences, the projects in Baghdad and Tehran appealed to a need to address national trauma while curating idealized images of nationhood and national subjects. The Ba’athist party under Saddam Hussein capitalized on the collective trauma of the Iraq-Iran war to further a hegemonic Sunni identity, which was both religious and political. The use of immense scale, vulgar displays of power, and Islamic imagery in both the al-Shaheed Monument and Victory Arch linked Sunni and Ba’athist causes and allowed Hussein to characterize the Iran-Iraq War as a sacred project of national and religious vindication. Similarly, the Martyrs’ Museum in Tehran constructs a specific version of history using motifs of the Battle of Karbala, Imam Husayn, martyr and civilian deaths, and blood to tie Iranian national identity to ritualized Shia martyrdom. The Martyrs’ Museum parallels the religification of national identity as seen in Iraq, and configures death as a public, religiopolitical act. Despite Ba’athist Iraq’s secular self-image, the strategic harnessing of trauma both Iraq and Iran demonstrates a constructed connection between political state hegemony, religious practice, and rituals of grief. In these ways, state propagated imagery through physical commemorations of the Iran-Iraq War constructed political—and resulting religious—sectarian divide in the official positions of the two nations.