<p> This dissertation provides a history from below of Palestinian national movement and Arab society during the tumultuous decade of the 1930s. It argues that the influence and authority of the small group of factionalized and disunited notable politicians that are conventionally understood to have monopolized the leadership of the national struggle during the era of British Mandatory rule has been greatly overstated. This is especially so for the restive and rebellious middle period of the Mandate (1929-1939), during which the movement turned from a conciliatory and quietist strategy of gentlemanly diplomacy preferred by elite politicians to confrontation, mass mobilization and armed struggle, culminating in "the Great Revolt" (1936-1939), a prolonged anti-colonial rebellion against both British rule and the Zionist project it sponsored. By examining the political practices, organizing, self-understanding, and leadership capacities of "youth" and peasants, the dissertation explicates the eclipse of elite preeminence within the national movement and the rise of the new, horizontally-organized social forces that reshaped and radicalized Palestinian politics in the 1930s. </p><p> The dissertation first explores the proliferation of youth associations in the early 1930s and illuminates how the rise of youth as an assertive, ambitious, and politically frustrated element had profound ramifications for the tactics, strategy, and trajectory of the national movement. The narrative then turns to track the decomposition of the Arab rural order from the late Ottoman era to 1936, paying particular attention to the crisis of the countryside under the British, who fecklessly intensified pre-existing tendencies towards peasant destitution, bankruptcy, and dispossession, thereby helping to create a disaffected class of uprooted ex-peasants. The final section analyzes the Great Revolt, focusing on the critical roles of youth, peasants, and workers in initiating and propelling it and on the popular and revolutionary institutions that organized and sustained it against great odds for over three years. This section also interrogates British counterinsurgency, highlighting the role of specific forms of colonial violence, especially collective punishments, in ending the rebellion, and with it the ascent of popular forces within the national movement.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Elizabeth Fifer.

<p> This research project examines the tactics used by Ibn Sa&rsquo;ud and the officials of the early Saudi State during the years 1922 to 1932&mdash;when it existed as the Kingdom of Najd and eventually the Hijaz&mdash;to project sovereignty through institutions like the passport, operation of consuls abroad, and claiming various populations as subjects. Ultimately, this project finds that these actions were significant contributors to the formation of Saudi Arabia and establishment of Saudi sovereignty. It adds another explanatory dimension, one not often explored, for understanding the history of the Saudi Kingdom. Moreover, the project shows that the assertiveness of Najdi officials to operate in the name of a sovereign nation forced the British to more clearly articulate their own claims, dispensing with their preferred state of ambiguity, and sometimes causing local officials to establish official British policy on the spot. This combination of British and Najdi action (and reaction) contributed significantly to the overall form and shape of national borders, mobility of individuals, and designation of nationality across the Persian Gulf and in the world writ large. Ibn Sa&rsquo;ud and his officials were not attempting to enter a game where the rules were already fully established. Rather, they were part of the fabric of individuals and forces that came to make sense of a newly forming international regime of nation-states, nationality, and greater controls on human mobility.</p><p>

The so-called Crusader States established by European settlers in the Levant at the end of the eleventh century gave rise to a variety of Latin literary works, including historiography, sermons, pilgrim guides, monastic literature, and poetry. The first part of this study (Chapter 1) critically reevaluates the Latin literary texts and combines the evidence, including unpublished materials, to chart the development of genres over the course of the twelfth century. The second half of the study (Chapters 2–4) subjects this evidence to a cultural-rhetorical analysis, and asks how Latin literary works, as products by and for a cultural elite, appropriated preexisting materials and developed strategies of their own to construct a Frankish cultural identity of the Levant. Proceeding on three thematically different, but closely interrelated, lines of inquiry, it is argued that authors in the Latin East made cultural claims by drawing on the classical tradition, on the Bible, and on ideas of a Carolingian golden age. Chapter 2 demonstrates that Latin historians drew upon classical traditions to fit the Latin East within established frameworks of history and geography, in which the figures Vespasian and Titus are particularly prevalent. Chapter 3 traces the development of the conception of the Franks in the East as a “People of God” and the use of biblical texts to support this claim, especially the Books of the Maccabees. Chapter 4 explores the extent to which authors drew on the legend of Charlemagne as a bridge between East and West. Although the appearance of similar motifs signals a degree of cultural unity among the authors writing in the Latin East, there is an abundant variety in the way they are utilized, inasmuch as they are dynamic rhetorical strategies open to adaptation to differing exigencies. New monastic and ecclesiastical institutions produced Latin writings that demonstrate an urge to establish political and religious authority. While these struggles for power resemble to some extent those between secular and ecclesiastical authorities and institutions in Western Europe, the literary topoi the authors draw upon are specific to their new locale, and represent the creation of a new cultural-literary tradition. / Classics

This study is an exploration of the ways in which early Islamic conceptualizations and judgments concerning liwāṭ (male-male anal copulation) and siḥāq (tribadism) were not simply based on self-evident Scriptural passages, but involved a number of extrapolations and interpretations by early jurists and exegetes. These extrapolations and interpretations in turn reflect the discursive cultural and historical milieu of early Muslim scholars. This study will serve to illuminate the correlation between social context and the early development of the Islamic canon. It will be the first step towards gauging the relationship between existing social practices and the substance of what became the Islamic normative doctrine on sex and sexuality at large, both of which serve to shed light on the formation of the early Islamic tradition. To study the process by which exegetes, ḥadīth transmitters, jurists, and scholars interpreted and adjudicated same-sex sexual acts, a process that can be extended to other issues facing the nascent Muslim community, is to study the making of the Sunnī Islamic tradition. The aim of this research is therefore, to reconstruct the historical discourses concerning same-sex sexual acts (liwāṭ and siḥāq) as a means of gaining insight into the formation of the early Islamic tradition. But the overall project is certainly not to rest content with that, but to make a more general theoretical point about the relation between scriptural texts and authoritative religious interpretations, and the ways in which the latter inevitably go beyond the former in a number of historically specific ways. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

From the eighth century through the tenth, the ‘Abbāsid capital of Baghdad witnessed the translation, in unprecedented numbers, of Greek philosophical, medical, and other scientific texts into Arabic, often via a Syriac intermediary. Muslim and sometimes Christian patrons from all sectors of ‘Abbāsid high society paid princely sums to small groups of Graeco-Arabic translators, most of whom were Syriac-speaking Christians. In this diverse ‘Abbāsid milieu, who could claim to own the Greek past? Who could claim to access it legitimately? Who were the Greeks for ‘Abbāsid intellectuals and how did the monumental effort to translate them make or fail to make the Greek past a part of the ‘Abbāsid present? This dissertation is divided into three chapters, each investigating a distinct ninth-century approach to accessing the Greek past. Chapter 1 investigates ninth-century narratives attempting to explain how the Greek sciences came to flourish in ‘Abbāsid Mesopotamia. Against this backdrop, I shed new light on the polymath and patron of translation al-Kindī and his attempts to claim direct access to the Greeks via both an abstract teleology inspired by Aristotle and a concrete genealogy that connected his ancestral tribe of Kinda to the Greeks. In Chapter 2, I analyze other Muslim intellectuals, such as the litterateur al-Jāḥiẓ, who radically doubt the ability of Graeco-Arabic translators—the majority of whom, once again, were Christians—to provide such access to the Greek past. I argue that previous commentators on these critiques have missed their subtext, namely the Islamic concept of taḥrīf whereby Christians are held to have corrupted the Bible in order to transmit a distorted version of the prophetic past that contradicts God’s ultimate revelation, the Qur’ān. Finally, in Chapter 3, I investigate the attitudes toward translation and the Greek past of the Ḥunayn circle of Graeco-Arabic translators, who do in fact alter Greek cultural elements in the texts they translate, presenting an idealized version of the Greek past which both Christians and Muslims can claim. / Classics

The thesis examines Western complicity in covertly aiding, concealing and covering up Israel's nuclear weapons program and the implications that process had on the Soviet Union and Egypt during the Cold War. At the circumvention of the democratic process, Dimona's history is defined by shadowy scientism, obsequious journalism, secretive bureaucracies, clandestine corporatism and great power imperialism. In late October 1956 Israel acquired from France an atomic weapons reactor, with construction beginning in the Negev desert at Dimona during late 1957 or early 1958. During the ensuing years Israel received heavy water from Norway and Great Britain and uranium from Gabon, Argentina and South Africa. The atomic project was covertly funded by private Jewish donations from Canada, London, Paris and Wall Street. As early as 1958 factions within the State Department, Atomic Energy Commission and CIA factions were cognizant of Dimona's existence yet the bureaucracy chose to remain silent. When Dimona was unveiled by the media in December 1960, the White House salaciously denied possessing any foreknowledge of the reactor's nature, status or origins. The CIA-controlled and Jewish-dominated U.S. media obsequiously followed the state script by informing the public that Dimona was dedicated towards peaceful ends. During the 1960s the U.S. conducted pre-arranged tours of the facility, provided Israel with uranium and missiles to guard the reactor, covered up Israel's nuclear ambitions following China's first atomic test in October 1964, and refused to pressure Israel to sign the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Even though Dimona was the key catalyst of the conflict, the U.S. also suppressed Israel's nuclear program from emerging as the defining subject of the Six Day War. Armed with intelligence deriving from Israeli sources, in early 1966 the Kremlin began utilizing Cairo as a proxy mouth piece to rhetorically denounce Israel's atomic agenda as Soviet relations with Egypt and the Arabs grew more intimate. In a failed attempt to destroy the reactor, the U.S.S.R. instigated the Six Day War crisis by fabricating false intelligence concerning Israeli troop concentrations and overflying the reactor with its most advanced plane in late May 1967.

The discovery of Jewish ossuaries in the nineteenth century raised a host of questions, paramount among them the questions of the origin and purpose of the ossuaries. It was also realized that ossuaries were a short lived phenomenon, appearing and disappearing relatively suddenly. A number of theories were proposed: The ossuaries were thought to have to do either with transport or space-saving, protection, martyrdom, resurrection, atonement, individuation, or Roman convention. All of these theories focused on Judea as the origin of the phenomenon. However, no one theory was satisfactory in itself. The dissertation presents a fresh examination of all available evidence in the light of ancient Jewish burial customs from the First Temple period to the Hellenistic and Roman times, using the approaches of archaeology, anthropology, and socio-rhetorical analysis. It concludes that foreign influence triggered the adoption of the ossuary in Judea during the Herodian period and that Judeans adopted the Greco-Roman ash chest as a model, modifying an aniconic version for use with bones alone. A comparison of the Jewish ossuary with the Greco-Roman ash urn reveals parallels and striking similarities in terms of ritual, material culture, terminology, manufacture and time lines. In particular, the temporal distribution of ossuaries and ash chests points to a general diffusion of the concept throughout the Empire over a long period of time, with ossuaries appearing relatively late in Judea. Using the innovation-diffusion theory of Roberts, the dissertation argues that, once implanted, the idea of ossuaries, in conjunction with ossilegium, spread rapidly throughout Judea, each special interest group or individual adopting it for their own unique reasons. Ultimately it became a fashionable secondary burial instrument. The disappearance of the Judean ossuary can be explained in terms of the adoption of the subsequent fashion in the Roman Empire to bury the dead in coffins or sarcophagi. In conclusion, it has been shown in the dissertation that Jews of the Second Temple Period were attracted to, adopted, re-invented and reconfigured a foreign convention in such a way that it became consistent with their Torah laws and their beliefs.

<p> The purpose of this study is to identify necessary and sufficient conditions in regime collapse that are shared cross-regionally by the Color Revolutions of the post-Soviet region and the Arab Spring uprisings of the Arab region by utilizing fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA or QCA). Two countries that experienced regime collapse were chosen from each region, Georgia and Ukraine as well as Egypt and Tunisia, and were compared with two countries from each region where the regime did not collapse even when faced with mass anti-regime protests, Armenia and Belarus as well as Algeria and Syria, for a total of eight case studies. This research presents conditions derived from popular theories on regime collapse, reviews the pre-revolutionary conditions of the case study countries, and applies QCA methodology to tests the necessity and sufficiency of conditions within countries where the authoritarian regime in power collapsed. Results of this analysis suggest that division among coercive forces, a political crisis that weakened the regime, and the high presence of a mobilized youth movement were necessary in regime collapse in both the Color Revolutions and the Arab Spring uprisings. Additionally, division among coercive forces combined with a political crisis that weakened the regime, high levels of unrestricted NGO presence, or a highly unpopular ruling elite present as causal combinations sufficient for regime collapse. Finally, Western intervention and influence presents as a possible stand alone sufficient condition, though further research is needed to identify the specific types of Western intervention and influence that are most effective.</p>

This dissertation examines the relationship between Israel's counter-terrorist policy and the extent and intensity of terrorism in Israel. The time frame of the study is from 1968 to 1987. Israel's counter-terrorism policy has been characterized as an iron fist approach to terrorism because of a consistent use of three categories of repressive actions: military reprisals, collective punishment, and legal imprisonment. / It has been suggested by a number of scholars that a repressive policy is the only way a government can combat terrorism. However, the evidence to date has not supported this claim, rather it indicates that repression increases rather than decreases terrorism. Because Israel has been consistent in its application of a repressive strategy, the policy of Israel was examined as a test of this assumption. The dissertation has revealed three major findings. First, military actions covary with the extent and intensity of terrorism. Second, the largest reduction of terrorism in Israel was caused by the Jordanian civil War. When Jordan exiled the leadership of the PLO and a bulk of PLO fighters to Lebanon, terrorism staged in Jordan completely disappeared. Moreover, even though the PLO was able to stage terrorism in Lebanon, the extent and intensity of this violence did not reach proportions similar to levels of terrorism originating in Jordan from 1968 to 1970. Lastly, Israel's indiscriminate application of military force and collective punishment has radicalized the Palestinian population on the West Bank and Gaza Strip and is thought to be an important cause of the Intifada that began in January of 1987. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-07, Section: A, page: 2135. / Major Professor: Monte Palmer. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.