GRADING RUBRIC FOR ACADEMIC JOURNAL ARTICLE REVIEW FA2015 1. Have you included all of the key information on your chosen journal article: the article’s title, author/author’s names, publishing journal info, page numbers? (3 points)

2. Does your review contain a clear and thorough summary of your chosen article? (5 points) 3. Have your clearly explained the issue/topic written about in your journal article? (2 points) 4. Have you analyzed and explained how the author or authors are addressing the issue/topic in your article? (5 points) 5. Have you effectively connected the article to our course? ( 5 points) 6. Have you explained why the article is effective or why it is not? (5 points) 7. Have you included your own insights on the issue or issues addressed in the article? (3 points) 8. Have you provided a clear conclusion? (2 points)

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vides a clear definition of “political moder- nity,” and his discussion of the “effendiyya” would have been more far-reaching had it incorporated more recent scholarship on ef- fendi writers and culture producers (some of which is included in the bibliography but not cited in the text). Relatedly, some of Whid- den’s historiographical touchstones seem somewhat obsolete; one wonders if Albert Hourani’s “politics of the notables” essay, or his half-century-old Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, really offer the best bench- marks for historical revision at this stage.

This is an incisive, thought-provoking work of political history that goes far in chal- lenging conventional views of the interwar period in Egypt. It is highly recommended for specialists who wish to consider the deep- er roots of Egyptian conservatism in the evo- lution of Egypt’s modern political culture.

Matthew H. Ellis, Department of History, Sarah Lawrence College

THE GULF STATES The Superlative City: Dubai and the Urban Condition in the Early Twenty- First Century, edited by Ahmed Kanna. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2013. 167 pages; $24.95 paper.

Dubai Amplified: The Engineering of a Port Geography, by Stephen J. Ramos. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010. 212 pages. $119.95.

Demystifying Doha: On Architecture and Urbanism in an Emerging City, by Ashraf M. Salama and Florian Wiedmann. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013. 300 pages. $119.95.

Reviewed by Pascal Menoret

In 1968, American architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown took their Yale students on a trip to Nevada. The group explored the Las Vegas Strip, visiting hotels, shopping malls, and casinos. They mapped the spaces of the city, meticulously docu- menting its parking lots and billboards. Back

on the east coast, they wrote Learning from Las Vegas. In this book, they attacked mod- ernist architecture for its belief in tabula rasa and grand authoritarian gestures. “Learning from the existing landscape,” rather than to “tear down Paris and begin again,” became the way to be innovative and revolutionary. “Fine art follows folk art” and not func- tion. Venturi and Scott Brown had officially launched postmodernist architecture.

From Mecca to Riyadh to Dubai, com- mercial hubris and themed developments have often sparked comparisons with Las Vegas among journalists and researchers. Man-made islands visible from the moon, submarine hotels, and the highest towers in the world could as well have been built in Nevada, they seem to say. Ahmed Kanna and a group of researchers decided to take the Las Vegas metaphor seriously. In The Superlative City, they show that there is more to the comparison than theme park vernacular. Both cities share a similar desert ecology, experienced extremely fast growth, and have booming real estate markets. Kev- in Mitchell (pp. 148–65) explains that, like Las Vegas, Dubai thrives off the fresh blood of cheap imported labor, visitors, and tour- ists. Like Las Vegas, it has grown out of pro- portion with its infrastructure. Roads, water supply, and electricity networks have had a hard time following population growth. Like Las Vegas, it consumes excessive amounts of electricity and water to repel the sur- rounding desert, green the landscape, and cool off inadequately engineered buildings.

The discovery of relatively modest oil reserves in 1966 put Dubai on a peculiar course. Its rulers had to invest quickly. What Amale Andraos and Dan Wood (pp. 34–47) call “peak urbanism” does not only refer to the intensity of vertical development. It also describes the belief that, oil revenues being short lived, massive infrastructures and real estate projects had to become the engine of the city’s success. Yasser Elsheshtawy (pp. 104–20) and Maryam Monalisa Gharavi (pp. 138–47) analyze the corporations that engineered this rapid growth and exported the “Dubai model” to several cities across Africa and Asia. Emaar Properties, one of the world’s largest real estate developers, is emblematic of what Elsheshtawy dubs

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“Dubaization.” Right before the crisis that hit the city in 2008, “Emaar recorded im- pressive financials,” which according to its chairman were “testament to the strong fun- damentals that drive the company” (p. 145). Gharavi suggests that these fundamentals are linked to the United Arab Emirates’ ex- tremely weak labor regulations and structur- al exploitation of underpaid (if not unpaid) and disposable migrant workers. She ana- lyzes the 2006 Emaar strikes, during which 2,500 workers demanded better wages and working conditions, as an attempt to end Dubai’s unair-conditioned nightmare.

Researched before the 2008 real estate crisis, The Superlative City is still relevant for the study of an emirate that has come back full force, after having benefited from Abu Dhabi’s oil largesse and from renewed instability and wars in the region. Kanna and his team asked the question: what can we learn from Dubai? Stephen Ramos brings the most convincing elements of an answer. The book grippingly reconsti- tutes the story of infrastructure and power in Dubai. Like its Nevadan cousin, the city grew out of comparatively liberal policies: relaxed gaming laws in Las Vegas and a tax free port in Dubai attracted investors and consumers. Contrary to widespread clichés, the globalization of the city largely predated the discovery of oil. In 1904, the ruler, Emir Maktum bin Hashr Al Maktum, abolished port controls and taxes, which attracted Per- sian merchants from across the Gulf, and established the city as a reexport hub be- tween Britain and India. The neighborhoods of Bur Dubai and Dayra still attest, through their sidewalk vitality and urban density, of this chapter of the city’s growth.

Ramos explores the lineaments of the city’s early globalization, which benefited from imperial trade and from local geogra- phy. The Dubai Creek, turned into a float- ing airstrip, dredged, its silt used as land- fill, was the city’s first natural resource and opening onto the wide world. It was also the engine of the city’s growth. Both Grand Canal and Seine, its meandering banks wel- comed the rulers’ palaces, the merchants’ elaborate homes, Sunni and Shi‘i mosques, and even a Hindu temple. The first master plan of Dubai, designed by the British firm

Halcrow in 1960, used reclaimed land to lay out a central business district around Ga- mal ‘Abd al-Nasser (now Baniyas) Square. Growth did not go without tensions. When Shaykh Rashid bin Sa‘id Al Maktum told him he would not need British money to build an airport, Sir William Luce, politi- cal Resident and long-time opponent of the project, exclaimed, “in that case you may certainly have your damn airstrip” (quoted on p. 72). Stinginess was not the only reason why imperial elites often refused to help. They were also doubtful of the future of the city, and wanted to keep everything low: the number of berths in the port, loans to the ruler, and the height of buildings.

British elites had reasons to be cautious, as Dubai’s success was built upon the end of their control of the region. After the inde- pendence of South Yemen in 1967, ‘Aden’s port and refinery capacities, once among the finest in the world, “had to be redistributed to other ports across the region. Dubai’s his- tory as an entrepôt made it the obvious heir” (p. 95). Shaykh Rashid sped infrastructure and capacity building in the mid-1960s. Halcrow had dredged the creek in 1956, the very year when American transporta- tion mogul Malcom McLean launched the first container ship from Newark. In 1965, Shaykh Rashid betted on container ship- ping and commissioned the creation of Port Rashid, the first container port in the region. Ten years later, the largest industrial man-made port in the world was built in Ja- bal ‘Ali, and McLean’s shipping company, Sea-Land, started operating from there. The development of the city took a sharp turn. Dubai was no longer centered on the creek. The construction of the the Port of Jabal ‘Ali and of the World Trade Center, an elegant 39-story tower modeled on Manhattan’s Twin Towers, attracted development away from the old center. Dubai quickly sprawled along the shore of the Gulf, on both sides of the Abu Dhabi (now Shaykh Zayid) Road. It was becoming the linear city it is today.

After the turn of the 1970s and the con- struction of the Port of Jabal ‘Ali, the city was no longer planned, but engineered. This might be the main thesis of the book, and the most chilling too, if we think of Dubai as hinting at what our future may look like.

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Since its reinvention in the late 19th century, urban planning had been geared toward al- leviating the negative effects of industrial- ization, as well as controlling restive urban populations. Industries were a city’s tool; churches, opera houses, and chambers of commerce were its monuments. Dubai turned 19th century urbanism on its head. Industrial infrastructure becomes the monu- ment, and the city itself becomes a tool (p. 129). Do not be fooled by the discourse of the boosters, for the reality of Dubai is gritty. The Port of Jabal ‘Ali was visible from the moon before the palm-shaped is- lands. Palm-shaped islands are actually a side effect of infrastructure development, as land reclamation is only one smart way to recycle the massive quantities of soil displaced by dredging. In other words: real estate is a consequence of port operations, not the opposite. A pattern of dredging, land reclamation, port operation, and real estate development was first developed around the creek, before oil was struck. The same pattern was amplified and replicated several times: first around Port Rashid and the Ju- mayra suburbs, and then around Jabal ‘Ali and the multitude of “cities” (dedicated to the Internet, the media, education, etc.) that sprung along the coast.

What can we learn from Dubai? Two things: First, cargo cults can become the engine of economic success, provided that the strip and wharves you build are big enough to attract first-rate partners (pp. 45– 47). This is probably what enrages West- ern elites most. Here you have a small city that becomes an important node of global trade and financial investment thanks to its central position, its natural port, and the boldness of its elites. Second, an economic boom can be engineered by strong govern- ment initiative. Even boosters got it wrong: The success of Dubai is not the result of free market policies, but of a state-engineered blueprint for rapid growth. Free market policies would have led Dubai to become a satellite of Western capital. Instead, the city’s rulers created a “competitive state” that funneled investments and streamlined policies to make Dubai a “misplaced Asian tiger in the Gulf” (pp. 132–33). The Emir- ate of Dubai has adopted corporate efficien-

cy, and become more aggressive. This is the opposite of liberalization. Administrations have not been privatized. On the contrary, private companies have been nationalized, and included in such massive state man- aged conglomerates as Dubai World or Dubai Ports World.

It is by shifting his gaze to Dubai’s infra- structure that Ramos offers what is to date the most convincing account of the city’s history. In Demystifying Doha, Ashraf Sal- ama and Florian Wiedmann keep their eyes on the architectural landscape. Doha, the capital of Qatar, has tried to emulate neigh- boring Dubai and Abu Dhabi at least since the Qataris refused to joined the United Arab Emirates in 1971. Salama and Wiedmann have assembled several of their publications, articles, and policy papers on the city. The whole does not make up a book, with a clear narrative and a structured argument per se; rather, it is a sprawling and repetitive text.

The book opens with an “overview of architecture and urbanism in the Arabian Peninsula” that is a collection of oriental- ist stereotypes. Do the authors really think that pre-oil cities were “a product of desert, tribal tradition and the sea” (p. 62)? What about the holy cities of Mecca and Medina? What about the southern cities of Sana‘a, Ta‘izz or Abha, built by ancient state powers in agricultural regions? What about the Na- jdi cities of Riyadh, ‘Unayza, and Burayda, developed by merchant dynasties and char- acterized by their conflicted relationship to tribalism and desert dwellers? In the age of oil, wealth was appropriated by Western corporations and by nascent states, which redistributed it through public employment and land distribution. Land ownership pat- terns, although crucial to the story of ur- banization, are not analyzed in the book, which focuses instead on the morphology and architecture of what its authors call “oil cities.” What is an oil city? We are left to imagine an answer to this question. In a sense, since they are operated and circulat- ed thanks to oil, contemporary cities are all oil cities. And Riyadh, Jidda, Kuwait City, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha were built around patterns of rent distribution and land development that reflect state power more than the workings of the oil industry.

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It is when it comes to post-oil urban- ism that Demystifying Doha is the most misleading. By making real estate liber- alization the alpha and omega of post-oil economic growth, the authors obliterate the mechanisms of diversification. It is not thanks to “the introduction of freehold property laws” that Dubai has known an “exponential growth” (p. 56). As Ramos explains, it is thanks to the state’s infra- structure investments. Salama and Wied- mann spend some time analyzing the re- cent importation of urban expertise from abroad. According to them, “the threads of Mediterranean cultural and economic unity have been woven and intertwined through centuries of trade.” Yet “Mediterranean- ism has taken a back seat” around the Gulf under the pressure of “Pan-Arabism,” “Is- lamism,” and “Middle-Easternism” (p. 119). This racially charged stereotype of a “good,” Mediterranean and cosmopolitan culture being endangered by “bad” Ara- bism and Islamism makes it difficult to take the rest of the book seriously. Demys- tifying Doha is a jeremiad about the loss of colonial architecture, and never enlightens the practice of urbanism today. For Salama and Wiedmann, nothing can apparently be learned from Doha, or from the Gulf in general. Their book is not only depress- ing. It does not teach us anything about the world in which we live.

Pascal Menoret, New York University Abu Dhabi, [email protected]

IRAQ Iraqi Federalism and the Kurds: Learn- ing to Live Together, by Alex Danilovich. London: Ashgate, 2014. 181 pages. $109.95.

Reviewed by Ibrahim Al-Marashi

Alex Danilovich has provided a timely analysis of the development of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq, situat- ed within the literature on how federal struc- tures can serve as mechanisms to resolve conflicts in states divided by identity-based differences. The first two chapters — “Fed-

eralism as a Tool to Manage Conflicts and Associated Risks” and “Introducing Iraq’s Federal System” — lay the groundwork for Danilovich’s central argument, namely, that what has transpired in Iraq illustrates the “paradox of federalism,” whereby federal institutions designed to address differences within a nation and maintain its territorial integrity can simultaneously serve as the blueprint for that federal entity to become an independent state.

In the subsequent chapters, Danilovich examines this paradox. Chapter 3 deals with federalism and the Kurdish armed forces, Chapter 4 with the KRG’s inter- national foreign policy, Chapter 5 (guest- authored by Francis Owtram) with the federalization of oil and natural resources, Chapter 6 with the “peculiarities of Iraqi constitutionalism that combines the princi- ples of Islam and liberal democracy in one constitutional system . . .” (p. 13).

The first critique deals with this last chapter, where the “peculiarities” of Iraq’s constitution are derived from literature that focuses on the relationship between Sunni political Islam and democracy. Danilov- ich should have engaged more with the arguments he cited from Iraqi-American legal scholar Haider Ala Hamoudi, who contends that the Islamist language in the constitution was drafted to meet to the de- mands of the Islamist parties representing Iraq’s Shi‘i majority. These Shi‘i parties have differing visions of the role of Islam in public life—something that the author needs to have acknowledged when exam- ining the Constitution and the judiciary. Although Danilovich mentions that the majority of those serving within judicial bodies are Shi‘a, he neglects to point out which parties they represent and whether, in fact, they act in a concerted manner.

While the author examines the incon- gruities in the Iraqi constitution, he fails to sufficiently contextualize how they emerged. He should have referred to the circumstances in which the constitution was written and adopted, how the drafting and public referendum on the document was a rushed process, how this process repre- sented conflicting Kurdish and Shi‘i parties’ demands, and how the US exerted pressure

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