“I have heard, Salim,” said my master, “that you are a good dancer and singer. I wish you to show my guests what you can do!”

After the cease-fire, I visited villages and towns in South Lebanon that suffered terrible destruction during the July 2006 war and that were facing the challenge of reconstruction. When I arrived to the border town of Bint Jbeil, I saw bulldozers demolishing beautiful, old stone structures. I stopped to inquire why; who authorized such actions and on what bases? With these questions, I approached the workers, the Council of the South (the government agency in charge of damage assessment and rubble removal), local residents, and the municipality. The answers varied: the structures were too damaged to save, we needed to widen the street, to build a better building, to erase the scars of war, to get full compensation, and so forth.

There are forty single-member districts in Bahrain. If a candidate wins a majority of the total votes cast in the district in the first round, he or she is elected. If no candidate receives a majority, the top two vote-getters compete in a runoff election one week later. Political parties are banned, but political “associations” act as parties, supporting lists of candidates, coordinating campaign activity, and publishing platforms. Districts are configured to overrepresent the Sunni minority.

I consider it nontrivial that IJMES invites reflection on the question, “What is private in the Middle East?” without positioning “private” against “public.” Conceptually, a private–public polarity refers to a division of space that has become reified into a heuristic paradigm used to describe gendered social and cultural activities.

The most glaring aspect of America's failure at democratizing Iraq has been policymakers' inability to take local political culture and values into consideration. Democracy was understood to consist of such trappings as a well-drafted constitution, regular elections, and a vociferous parliament; it seems no thought was given to the influence of tribal affinities and networks or the implications of sectarian identity on politics. Constitutions, elections, and parliaments are important elements in democratic systems, but they do not in and of themselves lessen autocratic rule, as can be witnessed in many Middle Eastern countries. Something else in terms of political practice must exist for autocracy and despotism to be blunted. I argue here that attention should be given to private forms of political engagement that are rooted in tribal and Islamic norms and practices.

Viewing an exhibition of civil war paintings in 1886, Lea Barakat wrote that her “country came to mind: the splendor of its ruins, the wonders of their form like the fortress of Baalbek, the ruins of Palmyra, and the scenes of Lebanon…” Native women should paint like this, she states, and “not leave a scene [of Lebanon] unpainted… They can decorate the rooms of their homes and sitting rooms with these pictures…” She concludes that “since the ladies of our country are smarter and more industrious in their handcrafts than [American] ladies,” they too can obtain a similar level of “wealth, honorable work, admiration of the masses, and praise for the virtue of their [arts and crafts]. This study is a prolegomenon to examining the topography of visual culture and modernity to which Barakat alludes. Rather than painting, this article focuses on photography produced by Arabs during the late Ottoman and early Mandate periods in Lebanon. Less concerned with using photographs to document social transformations, this study theorizes how production and deployment of the photographic image played a part in the conceptualization of a bourgeois individualist subjectivity in Lebanon, which is claimed not to exist in the Arab world.

This essay is an attempt to read popular melodrama as a reflection of changing societal appreciations of sentimentality, romance, family relations, and, ultimately, political authority over the course of a tumultuous decade in Egyptian and Middle Eastern history, the 1960s. I focus my gaze upon two particular films that were in their day popular hits, one of them an unprecedented blockbuster, and that remain genre classics. Both feature popular screen icon ءAbd al-Halim Hafiz, the greatest vocalist of his generation, a recording and performing artist who came of age with the onset of the July 1952 Free Officers' revolution and was intimately associated with the Nasserist project. Both films treat generation gaps relating specifically to issues of dating and courtship—what might be called, in the context of their era, “free love.” Both are concerned with troubled relationships between a son and his disapproving, authoritarian father. Halim's father in both films is played by the same actor, ءImad Hamdi, and Halim's love interest—albeit in very different contexts—is played by the same ravishing starlet, Nadia Lutfi. Finally, both films turn upon a single powerful dramatic act of parental discipline, a slap (or series of slaps) delivered by an outraged patriarch across the cheek of a rebellious, yet ultimately dutiful, son.

It was a warm November night in 2003 when I first heard about the Book of Visions. Shaykh al-Qusi and his followers were holding a Ramadan gathering on a large parking lot in one of Cairo's more affluent neighborhoods. Next to me at the gathering sat a middle-aged, wealthy Sudanese woman who was wearing an elegant green silk veil and many golden bracelets. She was visiting from Australia to spend the month of fasting in Cairo, close to her spiritual teacher. The woman had been among Shaykh al-Qusi's followers for many years. I, in contrast, had met him only recently but was already intrigued by his charismatic aura, his cosmopolitan demeanor, his habit of smoking Marlboros while talking casually about the saints as if they were his next-door neighbors, and, finally, his own saintlike status.

In an early 1980s interview, Amira Muhammad ءAli al-Houmani, daughter of one of the 20th century's most revered Lebanese Shiءi poets, insisted that the “southern woman” (al-marʿa al-janūbiyya) had always been a “partner” to the southern Lebanese man, both “in the house and in the field.” She explained how Lebanese women both in and from the south have historically played important domestic as well as productive economic roles spanning both the private and the public. Beyond casual nods toward their political and economic participation, however, disputes about and including Shiءi women in Lebanon and, more broadly put, discussions of and about gender, generally have been occluded from historical narratives. Considering the indisputable contemporary significance of Lebanese Shiءi communities in Jabal ءAmil (South Lebanon), the Bekaء Valley, and Beirut, it is even more remarkable that the diverse histories of gender in Shiءi Lebanon have yet to be written.

In 2002 the Cultural Center of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Beirut invited Mehdi Chamran to visit Lebanon. Chamran's late brother, Mustafa, was a member of an anti-Pahlavi opposition movement with bases in Lebanon from 1970 to 1979. During his visit, Chamran was to meet several Lebanese Shiءi personalities and to visit Shiءa-run institutions in South Lebanon, including institutions affiliated with the Lebanese Shiءi political party Amal (Afwaj al-Muqawama al-Lubnaniyya), which is headed by the current speaker of the Lebanese Parliament, Nabih Berri, in order to speak about his late brother. In fact, many of the Lebanese Shiءa attending the speech had personally known Mustafa. He had, after all, offered military training to many active in Lebanon's first Shiءi militia, which subsequently became the Amal movement. On February 15, at the Nabih Berri Cultural Complex (Mujammaʿ Nabih Berri al-Thaqafi), in Tallat al-Radar, a town near Nabatiyya, in South Lebanon, Chamran began a speech by reading passages from his brother's letters and notes from 1973 that described the political atmosphere in South Lebanon amid Israeli military attacks. Chamran went on to discuss the relationship between the Islamic Revolution and Lebanese Shiءa, emphasizing the theme of closeness and unity. For a moment, as he read these passages, Chamran implied that Iranian and Lebanese Shiءa had been moving back and forth for centuries between their respective countries and hence were what one scholar calls “distant relations.”