It is with humility that we begin our tenure as editor and managing editor of IJMES. Given the breadth and depth of scholarly and editorial expertise within MESA, we feel privileged to have been chosen as the team to oversee the continuing publication of the flagship journal in Middle East studies. We are also mindful of the challenge of building upon the enormous momentum achieved by our predecessors, Professors Beth Baron and Sara Pursley, over the past five years. They and their team raised the profile of IJMES to make it one of the top area studies journals in the United States and, indeed, the world. This accomplishment is attributable to their remarkable work ethic and coordination, keen awareness of the field, vigorous editorial work, and attention to every detail of the journal's production. Daunting though their legacy may be, we are excited about the editorial team that we have assembled and comforted by the speed with which it has developed rapport and a common purpose. We also find solace in the outstanding scholars who make up the new editorial board and in the knowledge that they are as devoted as us to making sure that IJMES continues to thrive. But we are most heartened by the superb scholarship that abounds in Middle East studies. With so many outstanding young and established scholars in the field, we are certain that the pages of IJMES will continue to be filled by intellectually engaging essays that not only enrich existing areas of research, but also push the field toward new terrains of scholarly inquiry.

In the early 17th century, the Shiʿi juristic tradition experienced the first coherent refutation of uṣūliyya, the ijtihādī rationalism used by the mujtahids, at the hands of Mulla Muhammad Amin Astarabadi (d. 1626–27). The latter rejected the efforts of leading Iraqi and Syrian jurists to apply ijtihād (rational legal inference), hadith categorization, and dirāya (scrutiny and stratification of accounts) in deriving Shiʿi law. The main studies on Astarabadi's akhbārī (traditionist) movement treat it as a reaction to the “influence” of Sunnism on the mujtahids or to their excessive “borrowings” from it, and stress the traditionists’ abhorrence of assimilating any aspect of Sunnism. Underlining the shortcomings of these explanations, this article presents Astarabadi's thought as a discursive development within the Shiʿi juristic tradition, which is part of the grand Islamic tradition. Astarabadi became skeptical of the mujtahids’ epistemology and methodology and was concerned that they jeopardized God's law and hence the believer's salvation. He protested the Safavid monarchs’ legitimation of uṣūlī legal authority, the latter's hierarchical features, and, ultimately, the sociopolitical domination of the ʿAmili mujtahids from Jabal ʿAmil in Syria (or modern-day South Lebanon), starting with al-Muhaqqiq al-Karaki (d. 1534).

This article analyzes how Saudi Shiʿi historians have adapted tools associated with nationalism to create distinct historical narratives for the Shiʿa of Eastern Arabia. State-sponsored narratives have either left out Shiʿi Muslims or cast them as unbelievers and alien to the Saudi body politic. In contrast, historical narratives written by Shiʿi authors emphasize the Shiʿa's long history of sedentarization, their cultural heritage, and their struggles against foreign occupation. The article is based on fieldwork in Saudi Arabia and a close reading of hundreds of articles and books on local history published mainly since the 1980s. Through the Saudi Shiʿi case, I show that “identity entrpreneurs,” or activists who create, politicize, and profit from identities to further political aims, understand local historiography to be crucial to their overall projects.

This article examines the significant yet largely overlooked role of the Mzabis, a community from the northern edges of the Algerian desert, in Algerian and Tunisian anticolonialism and nationalism. In so doing, it pursues two aims: first, to shed light on the importance of Tunis to the politicization of the Mzabis in the 1920s and to their induction into local and regional anticolonial and national movements; and second, to highlight the tensions of subsuming regional identities into overarching national identities by focusing on Mzabi political activists’ negotiation of the relationship between the Mzab and Algeria as a national project. The article also explores the spectrum of political possibilities and alternatives envisioned by Mzabis as they participated in religious reform, anticolonial, and nationalist movements. This spectrum, I argue, conveys the fluid relationship between local, national, and regional identities, thus undermining teleological readings of national identity formation.

This article draws on extensive fieldwork and original data to trace the transformation of civil–military relations in Tunisia during the tenure of the former president Zayn al-ʿAbidin bin ʿAli (1987–2011). The republican ethos of the Tunisian Armed Forces (al-Quwwat al-Musallaha al-Tunusiyya) is often stressed to explain its traditional political quiescence. However, I maintain that it was the active hostility of the military's rivals within the Bin ʿAli regime that prevented Tunisian generals from playing a greater role in their country's public life. I disaggregate Bin ʿAli's regime into its fundamental institutional components—namely, the presidency, the party, the police, and the military—and investigate rivalries and alliances that structured the struggle for influence and power between Bin ʿAli's rise to the presidency and his downfall. I argue that there is a direct and causal relationship between the 2010–11 uprising and inter- and intrainstitutional dynamics within the regime. In other words, the study of contemporary Tunisian civil–military relations is critical to understanding the breakdown of the Bin ʿAli regime.

This article investigates the evolution of print culture and commerce in Tehran during the first half of the 20th century. The first section examines technological changes that facilitated the commercialization of texts and then details the history of early print entrepreneurs in the Tehran bazaar. The second section examines the expansion of the book trade between the 1920s and 1940s, tracing the emergence of modern bookstores in a rapidly changing Tehran. I argue that patterns of change in print commerce between 1900 and 1950 contributed to the emergence of mass culture by midcentury. This new mass culture involved the social and political empowerment of a diversity of new reading publics in the city, and enabled the emergence of new forms of popular politics.

A crisis narrative dominates current public discourse about the artisanal sector in Fes, Morocco. Through historical and ethnographic research on Fessi crafts and craftspeople, this article elucidates the rise of the crisis narrative and its relationship to modernity and moral and political economy. Sustained analysis of the dialectical relationship between craftspeople's practical knowledge and public narratives highlights the existence of a “pool” of multiple and cross-cutting storylines from which the artisans draw to depict their profession. These storylines are marked by intertextual reverberations of precolonial Islamic philosophy, colonial Orientalist discourses, modern governance, and liberal and neoliberal economic policies. This article claims that the current, widespread crisis narrative took precedence over other storylines with the arrival of colonialism and modernity in Morocco. Drawing on the analytical framework of colonial modernity, it argues that from the colonial period to the postcolonial present, rulers and ruled alike have produced, maintained, and enhanced the crisis narrative, which is deeply rooted in modernity.

The most famous demand raised by protesters in the “Arab Spring” was “al-shaʿb/yurīd/isqāṭ al-niẓām” (the people/want /the fall of the regime). Three years later, little progress has been made—outside of Tunisia—in permanently replacing authoritarian regimes with the formal institutions of democracy. However, new forms of activism have emerged that increase citizens’ ability to directly combat pervasive social problems and to successfully pressure official institutions to alter policies. The evolution of activism against public sexual violence in post-Mubarak Egypt is a concrete example. Sexual harassment of women on the streets and in public transportation, widespread before the 25 January uprising, has likely since increased.1 Many women have been subjected to vicious sexual assault at political protests over the last three years. But activism against these threats has also expanded in ways unimaginable during the Mubarak era. Groups of male and female activists in their twenties and early thirties exhort bystanders on the streets to intervene when they witness harassment, and intervene themselves. Satellite TV programs have extensively covered public sexual violence, directly challenging officials for their failure to combat it while featuring the work of antiharassment and antiassault groups in a positive light. These new practices facilitated two concrete changes in the summer of 2014: amendments to the penal code on sexual harassment, and Cairo University's adoption of an antiharassment policy which was developed by feminist activists.

“We are all enraged. Why don't you arrest us?” chanted protestors in the courtroom during the trial of El-Haqed (the enraged), a twenty-four-year-old rapper from Casablanca. El-Haqed is an active member of the 20 February movement (Feb20), which extended the 2011 North African uprisings to Morocco. Many believe that the civil charges brought several times against him are related to his political activism with Feb20 and his daring lyrics. El-Haqed's song “Long Live the People” is thought to be behind his first arrest because it disrupts the phrase “Long Live the King.” In June 2014, El-Haqed was sentenced to prison for the first time for a period of four months. While attending a sports match, he was arrested on charges of selling tickets on the black market. His multiple arrests, and Feb20 members’ sustained mobilizations against them, reveal that the rapper is not only an iconic figure for youth protesters, but also one of their greatest rallying forces.

Under President al-Sisi, Egypt has revealed itself to be less tolerant of dissent and more successful at cloaking itself in nationalist sentiment than under either the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces or Husni Mubarak. The massacre at Rabʿa al-ʿAdawiyya, the arrests, detention, and torture of youth and prominent activists, the proliferation of criminal and treason charges against journalists, nongovernmental organizations, and Muslim Brotherhood figures, the banning of various organizations, and the passage of restrictive laws on basic civil rights—these practices make clear that the regime has no commitment to democratization understood either as substantive participation or the safeguarding of basic civil liberties.

In The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen offers an interpretation of the biblical Good Samaritan according to which the Samaritan stops not because he recognizes the need of his neighbor, but because through the act of stopping he enters into a neighborly relation. Practice similarly helped to constitute neighborly relations for Yemeni activists who forged new solidarities through their experiences during the eleven-month uprising of 2011 and its aftermath. Yemeni activists across the political spectrum—from Marxists to Islamists to liberal constitutionalists—have remarked that late nights spent in the squares writing slogans, making posters, and preparing and serving meals fundamentally altered their sense of self in relation to differently situated others. Rather than articulating a single national(ist) project, however, many activists speak of solidarities made in difference, or what political philosopher Iris Marion Young described as “a relationship among separate and dissimilar actors who decide to stand together, for one another.” These solidarities resulted in new and concrete forms of activism, which the formal transitional process has severely undermined. The experiences of Yemeni activists stand as an important reminder to scholars to attend to the intersection of formal and informal in our analysis of the politics of the Arab uprisings.

Political scientists have struggled to understand the unexpected 2011 mass mobilizations in the Middle East and North Africa as well as ensuing sociopolitical transformations. Functionalist and regime-centered approaches in particular have been unable to grasp dynamics of mobilization and change on the ground. I argue in this short essay that “state analysis from below” helps us to better understand the underlying causes of the 2011 uprisings, the dynamics of ensuing power struggles, and sociopolitical microstructures of political mobilization and demobilization.