Anthropology of the Middle East

This article furthers the study of post–civil war memorialisation in Lebanon by analysing the trajectory of the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri from statesman to martyr. This transformative process offers a window into the symbolism of Lebanese statehood, and demonstrates how the politicisation of confessional martyrs is used to decry injustice and stake out claims to the state. There is no tradition for prosecuting and punishing political murders in Lebanon, causing victims to be pronounced martyrs. Impunity is therefore the major reason why martyrs and memorialising are so widespread. To this end, the article offers a semiotic reading of Hariri’s posthumous transformation from political patron to patron saint, and is a contribution towards the importance of martyr symbolism for understanding the purported weakness of Lebanese statehood.

As Qatari women attend and graduate from institutions of higher education and many enter the work force, their mobility and visibility increasingly juxtaposes their roles in the family and tribe with their new roles as partners in the creation of a nation. I utilise ethnographic data from fieldwork in two Qatari home majâles (sitting rooms) to understand how Qatari women negotiate their new roles in society. Qatari women have increasing forms of cultural capital in one arena but also have recourse to kinship capital, where gender segregation and family name protect women’s social status. I argue that Qatari women combine the different forms of capital available to them in order to ‘find a place to sit’ in the new Qatari nation.

This article explores emerging themes from the first stage of ethnographic research investigating pregnancy and loss in Qatar. Issues around the development of foetal personhood, the medical management of the pregnant body and the social role of the pregnant woman are explored. Findings suggest that Qatari women are expected to be calm vessels for their growing baby and should avoid certain foods and behaviours. These ideas of risk avoidance are linked to indigenous knowledge around a mother’s influence on a child’s health and traits. Motherhood holds a particularly important place in Qatari culture and in Islam, and women are ultimately responsible for protecting and promoting fertility and for producing healthy children.

Discussions on bioethical issues within the Saudi society are a relatively new development. However, they have taken increasing importance over the last two decades. This accompanied the massive advances in medical care, the beginning of medical and biological research, the establishment of pharmaceutical companies and the exposure of society to international norms. By and large the driving forces of the need for bioethical discourses are the practical needs arising from these recent developments in our region rather than that being due to theoretical or academic investigation. In this article, we discuss issues related to the interaction between society and medical ethics in Saudi Arabia with particular reference to organ transplantation ethics.

Iranian women in the diaspora have a long history of representing their experience of emigration and exile and of defining their identity and the status of women inside Iran. In the early 1990s, Internet access gave them more liberty of expression and enabled collaboration around women’s issues. This article seeks to answer the following research question: How do diasporic websites assist women’s rights activists in tackling women’s issues and supporting women’s status in Iran? It aims to explore online efforts of Iranian women’s rights activists in the diaspora and more importantly to investigate the functions of the Iranian diasporic websites addressing women’s issues in Iran. Through content analysis of ten diasporic websites, as well as interviews with women’s rights activists in the Iranian diaspora, this article argues that these websites have the potential to transfer information and make connections between those inside and outside Iran, addressing diasporic concerns and controversial issues.

In her novels, acclaimed Armenian Iranian novelist Zoya Pirzad engages her characters in transgenerational and transnational conflict in their interaction with each other. In her last novel, We’ll Get Used to It (‘Âdat Mikonim), a household of three women, consisting of a widowed grandmother, a divorcee mother and a daughter, is presented, and the absentee father, who lives in France, pulls the strings of the young daughter to gain control. The novel represents the conflict of three generations, two decades after the 1979 revolution. This article examines the ways this fictional representation of transgenerational and transnational conflict reflects and throws light on the nature of everyday life in contemporary Iran, thus contributing to anthropological knowledge and analysis of Iran and the complexities of its diverse communities.

This article examines French-Iranian literary interactions in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, which arguably had ongoing effects in Iran on attitudes towards links between morality and social and economic inequality. Some of the earliest fictional stories published in Persian-language newspapers, in the 1850s, were French. This trend continued, through Iran’s Constitutional Revolution (1906), into the early decades of the twentieth century. During this period, Morteza Moshfeq-e Kazemi began writing the first Persian serial story and novel, Tehran-e Makhuf (Appalling Tehran). The present study investigates the effects of the translation of French serial stories on Persian ones, with a specific focus on the impact of the novel Les Mystères de Paris (1842–1843), by Eugène Sue, on the Persian novel Tehran-e Makhuf (1924).