October 1992, Page 39

Education

What Did You Do This Summer?

By Andrea W. Lorenz

While Washington Report readers were vacationing or wishing they were, here's what some of their Middle East scholar and activist colleagues were doing this summer.

John Duke Anthony, president of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations, led two groups of professors and community leaders on study visits to Syria. In addition, he completed a book on Bahrain for the Children's Press Enchantment of the World series and wrote an article entitled "Betwixt War and Peace, the GCC Between Summits" which will appear in the fall issue of Middle East Insight.

Michael Collins Dunn, editor of the International Estimate and Washington Report columnist, authored a study on Tunisia entitled Renaissance or Radicalism, Political Islam: The Case of Tunisia's Al-Nahda.

Islamic scholar John Esposito, of the College of the Holy Cross, finished a new book, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, published in August by Oxford University Press. He also worked on his contribution to The Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, to be published by Oxford University Press in 1995. In addition, he and historian John Voll, who was recently elected president of the Middle East Studies Association, are co-authoring two works, Democracy, Identity, and Conflict Resolution in the Islamic World, which will appear as a monograph next year, and Makers of Contemporary Islam, interviews with a dozen contemporary Islamic intellectuals and activists.

Nikki Keddie, author of books on revolutionary Iran, is editing a new journal, Contention: Debates in Society, Culture, and Science, published by the University of Indiana Press. The summer issue will contain articles on Christian Zionism, Islamic revival, and the work of Wilfred Thesiger.

Kanan Makiya, who wrote Republic of Fear under the pseudonym Samir Al-Khalil, spent the summer in London completing his new book, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World, to be published this fall by W.W. Norton in New York and Hutchinson in London.

Phebe Marr, the author of A Modern History of Iraq and senior fellow at the National Defense University's Institute for National Strategic Studies, finished a book entitled Riding the Tiger: The Middle East Challenge After the Cold War with William Lewis, director of Security Policy Studies at George Washington University. The book, due to be published this year by Westview Press, assesses the impact of global changes on trends in the region. Dr. Marr also traveled to northern Iraq and Jordan to gather material for a forthcoming update of A Modern History of Iraq.

RAND Institute Senior Research Analyst Graham Fuller wrote two studies published by RAND entitled The New Geo-Politics of Central Asia and Turkey Faces East. He focused much of his summer's work on the long-range outlook for Iraq, the implications of developments among the Kurds and the question of whether Iraq will remain a unitary state.

William Quandt, author of Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics and The Middle East Ten Years After Camp David, worked on his study of American diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations since 1967. He also traveled to Corfu for a conference on Arab-Israeli issues.

Following two visits to Algeria (the second after the assassination of President Boudiaf), journalist Milton Viorst wrote an article about events there for the New Yorker magazine. He also spent two weeks in Israel working on a second New Yorker article for September publication. Viorst continued work on a book about the Arab world tentatively entitled Sand Castles, due to be published by Alfred Knopf next year.

Edward Said, author of Orientalism and Covering Islam, visited Jerusalem this summer with his family for the first time since he left it as a child in 1947. In September, an account of his return will appear in the Observer in London and in Harper's in the U.S. After eight years of work, Professor Said has also completed his sequel to Orientalism. Entitled Culture and Imperialism, it will be published by Alfred Knopf in early 1993.

Jim Zogby, and the staff of the Arab American Institute which he heads, were very much in evidence at the Democratic and Republican conventions. In between conventions, Zogby wrote a weekly column for the newspaper Al Sharq Al Awsat and presented a weekly commentary on the U.S. presidential elections for the London-based television network Middle East Broadcasting Corporation. In addition, the Little League baseball team he coached made it to the semifinals!

Andrea W. Lorenz is the features editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

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