Editor’s Note

Readers of the print edition of The Middle East Journal already will have noticed that, as we begin our 63^rd year of publication, our cover has a new look. The Journal has had many changes in cover art in its more than six decades of life, and as we adapt our role to the information age (with an electronic edition and our full archive available through JSTOR and other services), it seemed time for a more modern, cleaner, and more readable look for the cover.

We have returned to an older tradition of incorporating a photo on the cover, as was done at various times, and with varying success, from the 1950s through the 1980s. Too often in the past we were limited to stock photos which did not really illustrate any of the articles, or did so poorly. With the greater availability of good photography in the digital age, we hope to be able to use more arresting photos to illustrate one (or more) of the major articles. The photo of Beirut by Alexandra Avakian seems striking without being overly stereotypical, and is appropriate to inaugurate our new look.

Rest assured, however, that the scholarly quality of our articles remains unchanged; though the cover may use shorter titles as a guide to what is inside, the articles themselves carry their fuller titles in the inside pages.

The issue opens with an analysis of the much-used (and abused) phrase “the Arab street” by Professors Terry Regier of the University of Chicago and Muhammad Ali Khalidi of York University. They argue that the Western media’s reliance on the term “the Arab street” implies a volatility that is not present in the more neutral term “public opinion,” usually applied to Western countries.

Professor Mark Long of Baylor University, who is a former intelligence analyst, offers a penetrating and useful contribution to the understanding of al-Qa‘ida’s ideology by analyzing the concept of ribat, or defense of the frontiers of Islam, and its role in al-Qa‘ida’s thinking and rhetoric. It is a complex argument, drawing on traditional Islamic scholarship to understand the thinking of the group today.

Returning to public opinion, the attitudes of young Middle Easterners is, of course, an important factor in whatever the future may hold for the region. Roseanne Saad Khalaf, a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the American University of Beirut, interviewed her own students, many of whom had left the country during the civil war years, on their experiences in post-civil war Lebanon. While clearly a rather elite sample, it is an interesting contribution.

As a historian myself, I’ve been struck by the number of solid contributions to reexamining the history of the 1950s and 1960s that have been produced in recent years, mostly because of the declassification of Western, Israeli, and Soviet archival sources. (Sadly, there has been little equivalent access to archives in the Arab countries.) Guy Laron’s article looks at one of the turning points in Middle Eastern power relationships of the 1950s, the Egyptian arms deal with Czechoslovakia, which led to much else, including the Suez crisis and the 1956 Arab-Israeli-Franco-British conflict. He examines the arms deal and its aftermath specifically in terms of what Israeli intelligence at the time was able to assess about Egyptian military capabilities in the wake of the arms deal. Not surprisingly, the intelligence assessments were more reality-based than the expressions of alarm made public at the time.

Sena Karasipahi of Texas A&M examines the Islamic revival in Turkey over the past few years by comparing and contrasting it with the experience of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Comparisons can sometimes be useful in reminding us of the distinctive factors involved in analyzing events in different countries, especially the somewhat striking differences between Shi‘ite Iran and Sunni Turkey.

Our book review essay this time, by Joseph Montville, offers a lengthy review of a new biography of Amir ‘Abd al-Qadir (Abdelkader), the Algerian resistance leader and later prominent exile.