In this issue, we inaugurate a new front section, Quick Studies. Our intention is to expand the academic mission and international breadth of the journal by opening its pages to discussion of ongoing research in the field of Middle East studies and by inviting reflections on some of the critical questions in our field today.

People mentioned in court records tend to be anonymous, but Ja'far Pasha is known from several different sources: his biography in al-Muhibbi's Khulasat al-athar shows him to be a man of learning and a successful military leader Dutch East India Company records mention him as Ottoman pasha in Yemen from 1607 to 1616 and Egyptian historical sources place him in 1617 or 1618 as governor of Egypt, where he died of the plague which bears his name (fasl Ja'far). The above court case sheds light on Ja'far Pasha's economic dealings, indicating that he was doing business in Egypt years before being appointed governor.

The two photographs I am examining, which are taken from a series involving some sixty married couples from across Tunisia and over three generations (covering the period from the 1940s to the 1990s), concern the second generation of couples—those marrying in the 1960s and 1970s, when the marriage photo became a significant element in family practice. These portraits reveal new patterns of behavior, testifying to the impact of (1) discussions about a woman's right to choose her spouse that took place after the promulgation of the Personal Status Code in 1956, (2) mixed-gender education, and (3) campaigns denouncing the negative effects on new couples of expensive marriage ceremonies.

Ever since the great wave of European overseas colonization in the late 19th century, the notion of “imperialism” and the promotion of imperial projects has been a highly political one. Use of the term has been prompted for specific historical reasons and, usually, in response to debates which have arisen as a result of particular acts of imperial expansion. On some occasions, and generally when debates have been particularly intense, it has also encouraged the development of general theories designed to explain not just the drive for empire but also the dynamics of a world system in which an unequal distribution of economic and military power leads some nations to create empires based on the domination and control of others.

Given limits of time and space, I offer here an appraisal of what I see to be an important new trend: a number of scholars across disciplines and generations have taken what we have learned from the era of deconstructionist cultural analysis in the past twenty-five years and inaugurated an era of “reconstruction.” Some have moved beyond the “cultural turn” to consider how cultural forms of power interact with other forms of power—social, economic, political. They are finding new answers to the question, “How did colonialism matter?” Others have taken the next step, to reconstruct a new language of historical analysis free from Eurocentric assumptions of difference and superiority.

The immigration of Muslims into the Ottoman Empire, especially from Russia and the Balkans, is a feature of late imperial Ottoman history whose legacy remains strong to this day. Millions of individuals in present-day Turkey trace their roots back to the Balkans or Russia, and interest in these regions remains high in Turkey. Estimates of Muslim immigrants to the Ottoman Empire vary, although most sources place the total number of Muslims leaving Russia for the Ottoman Empire in the latter half of the 19th century and early 20th century at well over one million. As Russian Muslims in 1897 were considered to number nearly 20 million while Ottoman Muslims counted in the same year numbered 14.1 million, this population shift involved a significant proportion of the Muslim populations of both empires.

Social policy constitutes an area that clearly reflects the nature of state–society relations and the content of citizenship in a given country. The present article develops this idea by situating the analysis of the Turkish modernization experience in a historical overview of perspectives on poverty and social policy in the republican period.

The failure of social science expectations that several Arab states would democratize in the 1980s and 1990s forced a reappraisal. The belief that chronic fiscal crisis and waning popular support would lead regimes to loosen authoritarian controls and thus possibly lead to democratization proved disappointingly unfounded. Instead, regimes that launched liberalizations in the 1980s reversed or halted most political-reform components in the following decade. Given that rising oil and commodity prices since 2003 have eased budgetary constraints for many states (especially in the Gulf), the emerging pattern is political change and shifts under authoritarian regimes over time, not democratization. A number of recent works have responded by quantitatively and qualitatively assessing factors that account for regional imperviousness to democratization as well as change in different directions. The purpose of this essay is to contribute to these responses in two ways: one, conceptualizing important change in state–society relations short of democratization; and two, comparatively analyzing the cases of Jordan, Kuwait, and Syria to propose ways of explaining these outcomes.

The aim of this article is to explore the distinctiveness of İzmirli İsmail Hakki (1869–1946) in the context of late Ottoman intellectual history and to suggest several implications of his thought on our understanding of debates on religion and modernization among Ottomans in the modern period. Studies on modern Islamic thought in the 19th and 20th centuries are mostly limited, especially in Western literature, to works dealing with a few well-known figures in the Arab world, such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh. However, a close investigation into several mostly neglected or yet uncovered thinkers of the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, can provide us with more interesting aspects of this period. The earlier interest of Istanbul ulama in modernization, their closer and more direct contact with Europeans, and the long historical experience of central Ottoman intelligentsia in similar reviving attempts are some of these aspects. This article aims to demonstrate that central Ottoman studies can make significant contributions to the current knowledge of the period, not only in political history, as has been the main focus so far, but also in religious and intellectual thought. It will show how a contact was established between modern European and Ottoman religious thought, in which ways the issue of modernization became an important topic in religious circles, and what kind of perceptions took place among them about its content and limits.

The storming of the Mecca mosque by Juhayman al-ʿUtaybi and his fellow rebels in November 1979 represents one of the most spectacular events in the modern history of Saudi Arabia. Yet, it is one of the least understood. Even decades after the event, many important questions remain unanswered. Who were the rebels, and what did they want? Why and how did Juhayman's group come into existence? What happened with the rebels and their ideas after the Mecca events? This article seeks to shed light on the story and legacy of Juhayman al-ʿUtaybi with new information gathered from extensive fieldwork in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.