The Other from within: Pan-Turkist mythmaking and the expulsion of the Turkish left

The British sovereign bases on Cyprus, granted with the 1960 treaty establishing the Republic of Cyprus, played a key role in maintaining the fragile military structure of the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). Although Britain and the United States urged the alliance to play a more active role, CENTO degenerated into an organization with no assigned forces with the exception of RAF bombers carrying nuclear weapons, stationed on Cyprus. Thus, Britain's contribution in political and military terms became vital for CENTO's deterrence capability. The Shah of Iran, one of the key regional leaders, was interested in the RAF bombers on Cyprus; the FCO and the MoD were always cautious over how force restructuring would be presented to the Iranians. Eventually, the need for cutting defence spending for non-NATO purposes made Whitehall decide in 1975 to withdraw the bombers permanently based in Cyprus. Britain could not be the only power paying for this ‘alliance of the unwilling’, as CENTO could be called with the benefit of hindsight. In 1976, Whitehall started scaling down financial support of military exercises; by 1983 they had planned to spend nil on the alliance. The British disengagement policy proved the correct one since this alliance had only a few years of life left. After the fall of the Shah, CENTO collapsed in 1979.     

Coping with Continuous Crises: The Case of Turkish Inbound Tourism

In 1889 the pioneers of the Arabian Mission – a mission under the direction of the Reformed Church in America – arrived in Arabia with the aim of Christianizing Muslims of the Najd and Arabian Peninsula. By the turn of the century, the missionaries were using medical knowledge and service as an interface for dialogue and evangelism. This article's aim is two-fold. First, it examines the history of the Arabian Mission and the history of medicine in the Gulf. Second, it explores the impact of the Americans on the Muslim communities from 1920 to 1960 by examining the experience of missionaries as well as the discourses missionaries constructed about Arabs and Arabia. It investigates how the missionaries transcend the label of cultural imperialist, and how both the function and language of the missionaries evolved as oil wealth transformed the Gulf nations of Bahrain and Kuwait. The impact the missionaries made in later years (1939–60) will be examined in the next publication of Middle Eastern Studies as a continuation of this article.     

Soldiers and civilians: the dilemma of Turkish democracy

This historical analysis of Mahatma Gandhi's views on the Jewish–Arab conflict in Palestine at the time of the British Mandate distinguishes four phases. The initial involvement is Gandhi's intervention in support of the Caliph's temporal rule in Palestine. The second deals with a secret offer of mediation addressed to the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem. The third is his highly controversial letter to ‘The Jews‘. In the last phase, Gandhi chose to remain silent, but is alleged to have stated that the Jews had a good case and a prior claim, a statement that seems at variance with previous attitudes. The question is raised as to how far Gandhi's views were consistent. They are explained by the evolving political context in India, as well as in Palestine, the two being intertwined in an ever tightening knot. Gandhi's commitments are revisited and clarified in the light of new research.