This paper attempts to provide a comprehensive description and analysis of Al-Qaeda affiliates fighting in Syria. The implications for Middle Eastern Security, US foreign policy and Islamic extremism in the future are projected.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Michael Krysko / David Stone / Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who was a nationalist leader and founder and first president of the republic of Turkey, still remains an important figure in the Turkish political and social landscape. Kemalist historiography, which is based on Mustafa Kemal’s six-day speech (Nutuk) in October 1927, emphasizes the foundation of the Republic as central to Turkish history. While this historiography emphasizes that Mustafa Kemal had an explicit plan during his modernization efforts, this dissertation will cover how Mustafa Kemal was incoherent in his actions and changed his discourses over and over again during the change of the political structure of Turkey. Beyond that, this study will suggest that Mustafa Kemal was an opportunist and pragmatist who utilized every single event to establish a Jacobin style autocracy. This research will discuss how Mustafa Kemal succeeded in using every opportunity, such as the Law of Supreme Commander Act in August 1921, the abolition of Sultanate in 1922, the establishment of Republic in 1923, the abolition of Caliphate in 1924, and the elimination of opposition in 1925, to establish his personal autocracy. In particular, the records of Assembly debates, not sufficiently used by Turkish historians, will be helpful to understand the creation of this personal autocracy. While Kemalist historiography credits Mustafa Kemal Ataturk with the original and unique conception of the social, legal, and educational reforms of the early Republican period, this dissertation argues that this approach is not balanced. Although the Kemalist historiography asserts that Mustafa Kemal and his legacy represent carrying out Enlightenment ideals in an obsolete society almost totally ignorant of these principles, the Kemalist modernization got a great inheritance from its predecessors, the Young Turks. Therefore, the Kemalist overstatement of an idealist figure of Mustafa Kemal is wrong in some degree. This dissertation aims to scrutinize the contribution of the Ottoman reformers and contradictions, mistakes, and overstatements of the Kemalist modernization project in social, legal, and educational areas by the help of wide primary sources which include official reports of the Grand National Assembly, the Republican Era archives and a mass of periodicals which were published in 1920s in Turkey.

abstract: Sexual harassment has emerged as a widespread problem facing women in public space in Egypt. Activism to combat sexual harassment began in 2005. However, just prior to and in the years following the January 25, 2011 Egyptian Revolution, which witnessed an increase in the collective sexual harassment, assault and rape of women, this activism has increased. Subsequently, scholarly attention to sexual harassment and public sexual violence has also expanded. Much of the attention in scholarly analyses has been directed toward politically motivated sexual violence, focused on understanding the state commissioning of sexual violence against female protestors to drive them from protest participation. There is an emerging critique of activist approaches that seems to ignore the politicalized nature of sexual harassment to focus instead on “cultural” targets. The early work of the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR) and current work of HarassMap have been criticized for depoliticizing sexual harassment by failing to include an analysis of state-commissioned sexual violence in their work. Similarly, both have been accused of expanding the scope of the security state by calling for increased policing of public space to protect women from “culturally-bad” men. With data collected through one year of participant observation with HarassMap, interviews with activists from eleven anti-sexual harassment initiatives and advocacy NGOs, and community-level surveys with non-activist individuals, this dissertation argues that “cultural” work undertaken through the community-based approaches by entities like ECWR and HarassMap is, in fact, an inherently political process, in which political engagement represents both an attempt to change political culture and state practice and a negotiative process involving changing patriarchal gender norms that underpin sexual harassment at a society-wide level. New conceptualizations of sexual harassment promoted by anti-sexual harassment initiatives and NGOs in Egypt frame it as a form of violence against women, and attempt to make sexual harassment an offense that may be criminalized. Yet, this dissertation contends there is a tension between activist and widespread public understandings of sexual harassment, predicated on the incomplete framing of sexual harassment as a form of violence. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Anthropology 2016

The deposition of Imam Muhammad al-Badr in September 1962 was the culmination of a Yemeni nationalist movement that began in the 1940s with numerous failed attempts to overthrow the traditional religious legal order. Prior to 1962, both the USSR and Egypt had been cultivating alliances with al-Badr in an effort to secure their strategic interests in South Arabia. In the days following the 1962 coup d'état, Abdullah Sallal and his cohort of Yemeni officers established a republic and concealed the fate of al-Badr who had survived an assault on his Sana'a palace and whose supporters had already begun organizing a tribal coalition against the republic. A desperate appeal by Yemeni republicans brought the first Egyptian troops to Yemen. Saudi Arabia, pressured by Egyptian troops, border tribal considerations and earlier treaties with the Yemeni Imamate, supported the Imam's royalist opposition. The battleground between Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and al-Badr was transformed into an arena for international conflict and diplomacy. The UN mission to Yemen, while portrayed as a symbol of failed and underfunded global peacekeeping at the time, was in fact instrumental in establishing the basis for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. Bruce Condé, an American philatelist, brought global attention to the royalist-republican struggle to control the Yemeni postal system. The last remnants of the British Middle East Empire fought with Nasser to maintain a mutually declining level of influence in the region. Israeli intelligence and air force aided royalist forces and served witness to the Egyptian use of chemical weapons, a factor that would impact decision-making prior to the 1967 War. Despite concurrent Cold War tensions, Americans and Soviets appeared on the same side of the Yemeni conflict and acted mutually to confine Nasser to the borders of South Arabia. This internationalized conflict was a pivotal event in Middle East history as it oversaw the formation of a modern Yemeni state, the fall of Egyptian and British regional influence, another Arab-Israeli war, Saudi dominance of the Arabian Peninsula, and shifting power alliances in the Middle East.

This dissertation aims to provide an understanding of the historical and contemporary dynamics of India’s foreign policy towards Israel within the context of religious identity from 1947 to 2015. A historical analysis of the relationship between India and Israel exhibits the ways that religious identity has served as a primary factor impeding as well as facilitating relations between the two nations. The analysis was done within the context of the historical Hindu-Muslim relationship in India and how the legacy of this relationship, in India’s effort to maintain positive relations with the Arab-Muslim world, worked to inhibit relations with Israel prior to normalization in 1992. However, the five years leading up to normalization, and thereafter, the dynamic is reversed with this legacy playing an increasingly progressive role in India-Israel relations via the social construction of shared meanings and identities between India’s Hindu majority with Israel’s Jewish majority. Social construction of shared meanings and identities are based, in part, within an historical/modern-day context of conflict with a minority, religious Other (Islam), and through bridges of connection based in other historical, cultural, social, and religious areas. Formal interviews, archival primary-source analysis of government documents, and secondary-source review were methods employed in the evaluation of the role of religion in India’s foreign policy towards Israel. In conclusion, this dissertation demonstrates the normative and functional effects that religious identities have played, and continue to play, in determining India’s foreign policy towards Israel given the fundamental role religious identity has historically played in the structuring of social perceptions, interactions and worldviews within Indian society up and through the present-day.

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abstract: In this dissertation, I translate and provide a critical analysis of the Iranian play, Tomb Dwellers (2009), by Hussein Kiyani. It was first staged after the contested presidential election in Iran in 2009 which brought Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into power for a second term. The play depicts the socioeconomic situation of Iran and its relation to other countries, the situation of women and the working class during Ahmadinejad’s two terms of presidency. Tomb Dwellers is written as a comedy, a genre more likely to make it past censors in Iran or other despotic countries. My research and translation project are sparked by questions that move in two directions simultaneously: one, toward understanding the sociopolitical context for theatre in Iran after the revolution of 1979; the other, toward the challenges of translating into English a play that stands as a social metaphor in its own historical context. Regarding the former, which forms the basis of my critical analysis, I explore the strategies artists have used to avoid the limitations imposed by the authorities. In making this play available to English-speaking readers at a time of political tension between Iran and the United States I offer to USAmerican audiences a more nuanced perspective of the way Iranian people feel about their government and its relation to other countries. This play is both timely and informative. Timely because of the tensions between the US and the Middle East. Informative because it represents the Iranian community and may serve to create a bridge between the two cultures. Translating and staging this play along with the critical analysis I am providing will help American audiences and immigrants from other countries to know more about Iran in a creative and entertaining way. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Theatre 2019

The present study involved an examination of the delinquency problem in Saudi Arabia within the framework of social control theory. Specifically, the study was based on the thesis set forth by Travis Hirschi, i.e., that delinquent acts result when an individual's bond to society is weak or broken. Also taken into account, however, were the findings from the research of Wiatrowski, et al. that suggest a need for a) some modifications in Hirschi 's conceptual framework and b) inclusion of socio-economic factors in the social control model.

This thesis will examine the succession to the Islamic Caliphate as it existed during the time of the orthodox Caliphs (632-661).