We conclude our celebration of the fortieth volume of the International Journal of Middle East Studies with an excerpt from another article of yore recommended by a former IJMES editor.

[European Union] EU environment policy aims to promote sustainable development and to protect the environment for present and future generations. It is based on preventive action, the polluter pays principle, fighting environmental damage at source, shared responsibility and the integration of environmental protection into other EU policies. The acquis comprises over 200 major legal acts covering horizontal legislation, water and air quality, waste management, nature protection, industrial pollution control and risk management, chemicals and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), noise, and forestry. Compliance with the acquis requires significant investment. A strong and well-equipped administration at the national and local level is imperative for the application and enforcement of the environment acquis. . ..

What is the relationship among gender, embodiment, and consumption? How does the media constitute consumers, desires, and subjectivities? How are we to conceptualize the role of media representations in the making of bodies and selves without granting these representations a deterministic power? These questions were central to my anthropological work on the embodiment of femininities and masculinities in a low-income neighborhood in northern Cairo.

“Jack of all trades” Ahmed Midhat Efendi, one of the most famous and popular Ottoman writers of the 19th century, ranged widely in his subject matter, which included economics. Although he was criticized for not having a proper education in the field, his independent thinking made him the most important critic of the laissez-faire system that prevailed in the Ottoman Empire. He disapproved of the liberalism transferred from the West in a normative framework.

Every society has subterranean fractures—ethnic, regional, racial, tribal, or sectarian. Given the right confluence of events, these can erupt and take on new life. When imperial and colonial powers produce a body of knowledge about those they rule, they often construct sociodemographic categories along these very fault lines. In the Middle East, this process has coincided with an attempted regional remapping using imagined and yet real (although newly configured) social categories. With the democracy project fading, the mosaic—in which the region is conceptualized as a multitude of discrete sociocultural units based on sect, ethnicity, and tribe—has appeared. Complex social categories are distilled into bounded categories whose correspondence to reality is problematic.

In 1978 Barbara Pillsbury and I dedicated our coedited book, Muslim–Christian Conflicts: Economic, Political and Social Origins (Westview), with these words: “To those who struggle to demystify religion and to those who suffer and die because the struggle is yet unfinished.” Charles Issawi observes in his preface that the contributors to the volume tend to interpret the conflicts more in economic and political terms than in “religious” terms. In an effort to develop analytical tools, my introduction distinguishes between “religion/religious identity and consciousness” (as theology/theological consciousness) and “sect/sectarianism” (as social organization, relationships, dynamics/group identity, and consciousness). I argue that sectarianism is about how “differences” are constructed; because people can believe they are very different when they are not, the task of the scholar is to describe what differences do exist, how they emerged, and why people believe they are different. Differentiation is a process, I suggest, that operates through the everyday—through socialization, through family systems, and through various other aspects of social organization in both systematic and erratic or contradictory ways.

The problem of “Middle East exceptionalism” is perhaps nowhere as apparent as in the study of Middle East politics, particularly its purported sectarian nature. Our understanding of Middle East politics suffers less from the lack of empirical data than the poverty of the conceptual and theoretical frameworks through which it is studied. Unlike other non-Western regions, the Middle East continues to be analyzed through a conceptual prism that has changed little since the collapse of colonial rule.

The notion of sectarianism can be useful in understanding the Middle East. As in India and Ireland, sectarian (or communal) identities have been crucial to the elaboration of modern politics in many parts of the region. Unlike India and Ireland today, however, the Middle East is subject to American domination. The result is that the study of Middle Eastern sectarianism is extraordinarily politicized. As scholars struggle to study sectarianism in such a climate, they need to recognize—and, ideally, find a way to move beyond—several problematic assumptions.

Khalil Sarkis (1842–1915) was an eminent figure in late Ottoman Beirut and an important contributor to the nahḍa, the Arab literary-cultural “awakening” that began in the latter part of the 19th century. Less known to Western scholarship than Butrus al-Bustani, Faris al-Shidyaq, or Jurji Zaydan, he is not usually regarded as a pillar of that awakening. He may not have been, but he certainly was an indispensable brick in its edifice. Born in 1842, when the most exciting changes were still in the future, Sarkis spent all his life in the service of his country's cultural betterment. He is mostly remembered for his newspaper, Lisan al-Hal, which was launched in 1877 and for many decades was one of the most credible Arabic organs. More than a journalist, however, Sarkis was a pioneering printer, a prolific publisher, and the author of nine books. In the last quarter of the 19th century he built one of Beirut's largest printing businesses, which turned out several journals, hundreds of books, and numerous publications. In the 19th-century Middle East, being a printer often meant being a publisher; Khalil Sarkis was both on a grand scale.

On 19 March 1877, the first Ottoman parliament opened at Dolmabahçe Palace when Sultan Abdülhamit II crossed a velvet carpet to stand beside a golden throne. Seen later as the finale of the Tanzimat reform era, the parliament appeared to diplomatic observers as the strategy of former grand vizier Midhat Paşa. Midhat's constitutionalism was a plan for “reform, revival, and indeed survival” that included seeking allies against Russia and containing Russian influence in the Balkans. Abdülhamit listened as his secretary charged the new body: “The progress effected by civilised states, the security and wealth they enjoy, are the fruit of the participation of all in the enactment of laws and in the administration of public affairs.” Among the most urgent priorities was “the development of agriculture and industry, and the progress of civilisation and of public wealth.” Parliament later responded with a pledge to deliver the empire from its malaise, to “eliminate the last traces of abuses, the heritage of the regime of despotism.”

Some anthropologists can argue that it is impossible to separate the social organizational (the realm of groups or aggregates—e.g., households, lineages, and farms) from the cultural (e.g., norms, rules, values, ideologies, and the like—hereafter, normative mental representations) and that the distinction between social and cultural anthropology is therefore an artificial one. To the contrary, others can argue that the social organizational (or “groupal”) and cultural perspectives refer to two analytically separate albeit intertwined levels of reality, sometimes shed a different light on a single phenomenon, and have different analytical value. This distinction I show through the study of the notion of “honor” and its relation to the gender division of labor and to the status of women in Tunisia.

With the dust settling on Operation Iraqi Freedom in the spring of 2003, the U.S. Army 4th Psychological Operations Group developed for the occupation forces a special deck of playing cards that featured head shots of the most wanted Iraqi regime officials. Saddam Hussein figures prominently as the Ace of Spades. The experiment was repeated in the autumn of 2007, but this time the cards represented some of Iraq's and Afghanistan's archaeological sites (Figure 1).

It is perhaps self-evident to suggest that military conquest shares something with tourism because both involve encounters with “strange” landscapes and people. Thus it may not surprise that the former sometimes borrows rhetorical strategies from the latter—strategies for rendering the strange familiar or for translating threatening images into benign ones. There have been numerous studies of this history of borrowing. Scholars have considered how scenes of battle draw tourist crowds, how soldiers' ways of seeing can resemble those of leisure travelers, how televised wars have been visually structured as tourist events (e.g., the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq), and how the spoils of war can function as a body of souvenirs. These lines of inquiry expand our understanding of tourism as a field of cultural practices and help us to rethink the parameters of militarism and warfare by suggesting ways they are entangled with everyday leisure practices.