نشریه مطالعات خاورمیانه
سال هفدهم شماره 3 (پیاپی 62، پاییز 1389)

The Iran-Arab relations are an age-old one which has been affected by numerous questions during centuries. The rivalries and interactions in the relations between these two civilizational spheres are among the interesting subjects in historical, political and geographical studies. As a buffer state between Iran and the Arabs and Shia and Sunnis, since its independence, Iraq has played diverse roles in the relations between these two Iranian and Arab civilizational spheres. Hence U.S. occupation of Iran in 2003 has turned into a serious challenge in Iran-Arab relations. The main question of this research is how have been relations between Iran and the Arab states after U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003? Using the descriptive-analytical research method and exploiting statistical data, 3656 news items from the Fars News Agency have been analyzed so that the course of these relations, and the volume and important subjects in Iran's relations with each of the Arab nations are examined. The research findings show that relations between Iran and the Arab countries have not been at the same level in this period and the degree of Iran's convergence and divergence with each of them has varied. These two spheres, while having regional rivalries, have collaborated on certain questions, Iraq being the most important fact in this regard.

During the years after Saddam was overthrown, several elections have been held in Iraq including the elections for legislative delegations and provincial councils in January 2005, Iraq's constitution referendum on October 15, 2005, elections for the first Iraqi parliament in December 2005 and elections for the provincial councils in February 2009. In this relation, general elections for the second Iraqi parliament in March 2010 are of utmost importance. It is noteworthy that months after the elections, the new government, organs of the Iraqi government including president and vicepresidents, prime minister and the cabinet, and the speaker of the parliament are yet to be determined when writing this article. Reviewing the past elections in Iraq in this article, the second parliamentary elections are examined and we try to answer the question that given the findings of the research, which solutions are useful for the formation of the government and Iraq's future.

Iraq as an important country that influences the political and security environment of the Middle East was occupied in 2003, which in turn impacted the country and region's political space in various respects. However, apart from the international consequences of Iraq's occupation, the alien presence left numerous repercussions on the Iraqi people, because on the one hand, Saddam Hussein's iron government with all of its security-military apparatus collapsed, and on the other it should be kept in mind that the exacerbated anarchy and insecurity in Iraq was one of the immediate consequences of the occupation presence in the country. Under such circumstances, the role and importance of the reference institutions for the resolution of Iraq's problems was felt more than ever; institutions which seemed to manifest in the religious authority. In fact, Iraq's critical conditions and people's distrust in political groups and parties caused that the Shia religious authority in Iraq to take extra-ethnic role and function, able to play an essential part in Iraq's political developments. Considering these facts, this research seeks to demonstrate the extra-regional role and function of Iraq's Shia religious authority, examining three critical periods in Iraq's contemporary history.

Almost all sociologists agree that the new middle class has played a significant role in the new social movements in terms of ideology, planning, organizing and leadership. Since the 1970s onwards, the new middle class in Saudi Arabia has grown significantly because of certain developments and modernization in communicative, economic and educational structures and alike. The main hypothesis of this writing is that since the second half of the 1980s, particularly since the 1990s onwards, this class has posed serious challenges to and sociopolitical criticisms of the Saudi government. These challenges have led, on the one hand, to the expanded political and social consciousness among people of the government's inefficiency and corruption and on the other hand to a number of political, though limited, reforms. Despite the members of groups belonging to this class in Saudi Arabia are not uniform, they share the belief in the necessity of conducting political reforms, establishing democratic institutions, serious battle against corruption, autonomy of the judiciary and separation of powers. In this paper, the main political challenges to the Saudi government on part of the new middle class, the limited political reforms that have been conducted and briefly the reasons for the limited nature of reforms are explained.

This article considers Christian evangelization among Muslims in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and traces its relationship to the global and local dynamics of Western imperialism. Focusing on Egypt, where Anglo-American Protestant missionaries were active, the article examines why missionaries encountered fierce resistance from Muslim audiences despite the small number of Muslim conversions and how they inadvertently galvanized Egyptian anti-colonial nationalist and Islamist movements. Reflecting on this history of cultural encounter from a postcolonial perspective, the article then discusses the challenge of assessing missionary motives, social influences, and long-term legacies given the sharp differences of interpretation that have often prevailed among Christian and Muslim scholars and polemicists. It draws special attention to an Arabic postcolonial genre of antimissionary treatises that portray Christian missionaries as neo-Crusaders whose legacies have posed a continuing threat to the integrity of Muslim societies.