Towards the end of the decade long Iran–Iraq war, Saddam Hussein launched a deadly attack against the Kurds, known as the Anfal Campaign, killing more than a hundred thousand. One of the largest acts of genocide occurred on 18 March 1988 in the Kurdish city of Halabja. On that day, sweet-smelling poison gas was poured over the city, killing at least five thousand. Since 2001 Kurdish moviemakers have memorialized the tragedy of the Halabja massacre by producing cinematic dramas and narrative documentaries. These films are part of a discourse of authenticity and a politics of culture that permeate the Kurdish independence movement. This essay proposes that Halabja films can be divided into three stages: the era of consolidation, 2000 to 2009; the golden era, 2009 to early 2014; and the fall which followed the fall of Mosul to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Each era reveals new attitudes towards politics, society, and the massacre.

This essay presents a reflection on a selection of collections of Islamic art in Europe and the Middle East, focusing on new installations that emerged in the last decade. While various approaches have been discussed in the context of new installations, chronological narratives still prevail. Perhaps, these are indeed the best way to introduce audiences unfamiliar with the material to its complex historical and cultural contexts. The overarching goal of many of these displays may be to create positive public engagement with Islamic art in a global context where Islam is often associated with war and destruction.

This short piece describes an experimental course at Florida State University in which undergraduates digitize issues of a turn-of-the-century Egyptian newspaper. Beginning students of Middle East studies can benefit from exposure to raw primary sources. Learning to read and process this newspaper using digital methods such as character recognition and text encoding, they generate a repository of text that can be of value to scholars in the field. Training students to do this work certainly offers them valuable, transferable technical skills. The combination of technical and conceptual work in a collaborative, laboratory setting is not easily accomplished, however. From an area studies perspective, it can be challenging to train students to discern what material is of significance, and how they might proceed to analyze it. Nevertheless, a great deal of knowledge in our field is produced incrementally, provisionally, and collectively. We can use institutional moves to re-imagine teaching to involve even inexpert students in this process of knowledge production.

In November 2017, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) sponsored the fourth annual Undergraduate Research Workshop in Washington, D.C. Organized by MESA's Committee for Undergraduate Middle East Studies, the workshop provides an opportunity for talented undergraduate students to present their scholarship in a professional context. Participants are selected through a competitive application process, and, since the program's inception have come from universities in Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, France, and across the United States.

The year 2017 was important for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, commemorating both the centennial of the Balfour Declaration and the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 war. That war, which resulted in Israel's defeat of three Arab armies and its occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights, transformed the politics of the Middle East. According to UN Security Council Resolution 242, issued in November 1967, the occupation was illegal: Israel would have to withdraw from the territories it occupied if it were to achieve peace with its neighbors. In international law, military occupations are temporary by definition. Israel, however, only returned the Sinai to Egypt in 1982. (One year prior, it unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights from Syria.) Despite a twenty-five-year-long political process initiated in 1993, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has continued unabated.

Şerif Mardin, the preeminent Turkish social scientist of his generation who left a deep mark on the study of Ottoman and Turkish society, passed away on 6 September 2017 in Istanbul.

On 25 July 2017, Jordan lost one of its great educators and feminists: Rula Quawas. Rula was an outstanding educator for generations of young Jordanian and Arab feminists. She took on challenges that no one else dared to approach in a conservative patriarchal society, knowing fully well that she might have to pay a dear personal price for each of these battles.