Introduction

Abstract

The Middle East is a region whose enduring and conflicting passions invite the luxury of lazy generalizations. But sooner or later most who study the extraordinary complexity and nuance of its modern history and politics come to the conclusion that its problems are not given to simple solutions. Part of the reason, they learn, is that for thousands of years the people of the Middle East have suffered the almost constant imposition of outside power and outside ideas. Yet within the Gordian knot of alternative histories and contending claims in the broad sweep of its lands from North Africa to Saudi Arabia to Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, there are core issues that may respond to fresh analysis in the search for solutions. For example, the apparent intractability of one of the Middle East’s most vexing problems—the Jerusalem Question—may be illuminated when examined through the familiar though underutilized prism of identity studies. Shibley Telhami and Michael Barnett note that “[a]though scholars of the region cannot escape the salience of identity, a powerful trend in contemporary international relations theory has proceeded as if identity mattered little for our understanding.”¹ Certainly there has been an abundance of work on identity in comparative studies, but Telhami and Barnett imply that much more attention is demanded of international relations specialists. Underlining their view, they state, “No student of Middle Eastern international politics can begin to understand the region without taking into account the ebb and flow of identity politics.”