Islamicists have long been interested in the historiography of the sīra and maghāzī literature. Ibn Ishaq's Sīra has been fruitfully compared with al-Waqidi's Maghāzī, and both have been compared with sections in al-Bukhari's Ṣaḥīḥ or with other collections of hadith. It has often been observed that the materials constituting the Sīra of Ibn Ishaq or the Maghāzī of al-Waqidi—works which may for convenience, but only with reservations, be designated “historical”—are often the same as those preserved in collections of hadith such as al-Bukhari's. It has also been observed that what distinguish these materials from one another are essentially the former's narrative and chronological structures and the motives and methods governing these structures. John Wansbrough, who has compared these texts, postulates as well a “development from loosely structured narrative to concise exemplum & [which] illustrates perfectly the stylistic difference between Sīra and sunna, between the mythic and normative preoccupations (Geistesbeschäftigungen) of early Muslim literature.”

In a famous passage in his Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, E. W. Lane described the ceremonies commonly held to celebrate the circumcision of a young boy in 19th-century Cairo. Family and friends of the boy, his schoolteacher, the barber who performed the operation and his assistant, musicians, and other retainers all participated in a celebration of an overtly public character. Dressed in fancy clothes and feted with song and dance, the boy, aged five or six or slightly older, was paraded through the streets of his neighborhood, often on horseback, to his parents' house, where the operation was performed. Cups of coffee might be distributed to passersby while guests and relations were, of course, treated to a celebratory feast. Modes of celebration may have changed, but festivities surrounding the circumcision of a young boy are still common in the Muslim countries of the Near East.

The rise of a vigorous and sometimes violent Islamist movement in Egypt over the last quarter century has attracted considerable attention from the media and scholars, as have the efforts to control it at the political and police level. Less attention has been given to those who have responded to this challenge at the level of ideological debate and in their writings sought to defend the essentials of the existing system on Islamic grounds. One of these is a prominent judge, Muhammad Saʿid al-ʿAshmawi. The purpose of this article is to present and examine some of his views and arguments.

On 29 October 1956 Israeli paratroopers landed deep inside the Sinai Desert, launching the second Arab-Israeli war and adding another level to the bloody edifice of Israel's relations with its neighbors. The Israeli leadership justified its decision to go to war by pointing to “the mini-war which the Arab rulers have waged against us for eight years.” Many scholars have accepted that version of the events, which seeks to connect the multitude of border incidents from 1949 to 1956 with the war in the latter year. Indeed, a central approach in the study of the period viewed the Sinai campaign as the inevitable consequence of the succession of violent events which occurred between Israel and its neighbors, Egypt in particular, beginning shortly after the 1948 war. Benny Morris, in fact, describes Israel's participation in the 1956 war as the direct continuation of the border clashes with Egypt, finding no regional connection in Israel's involvement. Similarly, Nadav Safran, Mordechai Bar-On, and Michael Oren have argued that the border clashes, the infiltrations, and the Israeli reprisals followed one another in a relentless sequence until the final explosion in October 1956. This approach draws a connection between two “types of security” which are a permanent component of the Israeli defense doctrine: “basic security” and “day-to-day security.” The latter incorporates operational activity, unrelated to preparations for war, which the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) constantly engages in during peacetime; whereas the former refers to a situation of total war for which the IDF has prepared itself. Conventionally, events falling within the domain of day-to-day security are considered the cause of the aggravation in relations between Israel and Egypt during the early 1950s; the Sinai campaign thus becomes the inevitable end of a process of deterioration engendered by the border clashes and incidents of the preceding eight years.

By order of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) a new school was opened in Istanbul in October 1892 to provide an Ottoman education for the sons of leading tribal notables. The Aşiret Mekteb-i Hümayun, or Imperial School for Tribes, was a five-year boarding school that admitted boys between twelve and sixteen years old. The school has been rightly interpreted as part of a broader policy pursued by Abdülhamid II of integrating the Arab provinces more closely to the Imperial center. However, the school, which reached beyond the Arab provinces to recruit eastern Anatolian Kurds, was essentially an experiment in social engineering which sought to foster an allegiance to the Ottoman state within one of the most alienated segments of its society: the empire's tribes. On the precedent of urban notables whose sons were educated in Istanbul, obtained government offices, and became Ottoman loyalists, Abdülhamid II and his advisers aimed to create a similar body of intermediaries between the state and its tribes. The experiment ran for fifteen years before the Aşiret Mektebi was closed in 1907; yet in that time the school sent waves of graduates on to higher education in special sections of the civil and military academies and thence to government office in the provinces. In all, the tribal education system represents one of the more ambitious Ottoman initiatives to integrate its tribal communities into the political life of the state.