The 1979 rise of political Islam reshaped academic study of Middle East ethnicity

Evidence

Glavanis locates part of the reason for this in the complex history of the region, which he sees as resulting in a commonly held view that ethnoreligious forms of identity are perhaps the key forces that shape the political institutions and socioeconomic relations in the region. Against the region’s historical background, Glavanis then looks in some detail at the ways in which ethnicity has been understood in the Middle East. He distinguishes between studies of ethnicity that were produced in the 1950s and 1960s and the accounts that have followed in the aftermath of the rise of political Islam as a key political force after 1979. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3113

Categorization

• QUESTION: What exactly changed in the analytic frame after 1979 — new ethno-religious categories, new state-identity questions worth chasing in Glavanis’s underlying article?