It is now a familiar theme in the literature on the emergence and development of the state in the Western world to refer to war and war preparation—in short, war making—as an important contributing factor to the development of the modern state. As Charles Tilly succinctly put it, “War made the state, and the state made war.” We know, however, little about the relation between war making and the development of the state in the contemporary Middle East. This is rather surprising considering the importance of war and war preparation in the history of many states in the region and the current wave of academic interest in the study of state formation in the Middle East. A review of the literature would show that war is usually integrated as a contingent factor, but not as a systematic process that can influence state development. For instance, accounts of state development in Egypt mention the impact ofthe 1956 and 1967 wars on the capacity of the state to intervene in the economy and society; yet until recently no one had systematically studied the impact of war preparation on state formation in Egypt.

On 29 September 1995, a notice in the leading Palestinian daily Al-Quds announced the following: “After Friday prayers an honorable procession composed of notables from the Bethlehem district and notables from the Hebron district proceeded to the Dīwān of Ahl al-Ḥalāʾiqa in the village of Shuyukh in order to complete the rites of tribal conciliation (ṣulḥ ʿashāʾirī) in the wake of a sad car accident.” Among the jāha, the procession of important dignitaries invited to participate by the family of the driver, was Colonel Abu Khalid al-Lahham, a former officer in the Palestinian Liberation Army and currently an adviser to President Yasir Arafat. Originally from Bethlehem, to which he has recently returned after years of exile, al-Lahham was designated to become the governor of the Bethlehem district in the Palestinian Authority (PA) after it extended its hold over the town in December, as stipulated by the Oslo B agreements of 28 September 1995.

The Islamic shariʿa is central to Islam in the minds of most Muslims and non-Muslim scholars. In many ways, the centrality of the Islamic shariʿa has increased in recent decades. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—this centrality, the precise, even the general, role of the shariʿa in Islamic societies is the subject of contentious debate among Muslims. Outside of and underlying such debates are more subtle and rarely articulated differences about the meaning of the Islamic shariʿa. In this essay, I will put forward a general intellectual map for those varying meanings. More critically, I will suggest that important shifts in the meaning of the Islamic shariʿa have taken place in the Muslim world, and that these shifts are closely connected to the nature and viability of legal and educational institutions associated with the Islamic shariʿa in the past. As the Islamic shariʿa has become disconnected from these institutions, its meaning has changed in some fundamental ways. Most important, the shariʿa is approached less for its process than for its content. And because the shift in institutions and understanding has received much less attention from Muslims, widespread attempts to re-create older relationships (particularly involving the relationship between the Islamic shariʿa and the state) in fact involve a deepening rather than a counteracting of the transformation in the Islamic shariʿa.

One of the most important arenas of the ferment in contemporary Arab social thought is Egypt. Egyptian writers have been contributing to a rapidly growing body of literature on state and society. Its themes include methodological issues, the nature of the ideal Islamic society; the elite–mass gap; the state's role in public life; the appropriate model for socioeconomic development; and the social bases of Islamist movements.

In 1826, Sultan Mahmud II orchestrated the slaughter of 6,000–7,000 janissaries and, in order to incinerate any janissary remnants that had taken refuge there, burned the Belgrade Forest outside Istanbul. During his reign (1808–39), the sultan attacked many of the other bases of the ancien régime, such as the timar system, the lifetime tax farms, and the political autonomy of provincial notables. He also centralized the pious foundations, brought them under a special ministry, and expropriated their revenues. Such stories of Sultan Mahmud's dramatic and violent policies, as well as their 18th-century origins and their 19th-century legacies, are familiar ones in Ottoman and Middle Eastern history. It is a commonplace that Sultan Mahmud aimed to dismantle the power of the military and religious classes in favor of a new bureaucracy of administrators and scribes. And it is also known that his efforts had a major impact on the subsequent evolution of the Tanzimat reform programs during the later 19th century.