The term effendiyya (singular: effendi) appears in many articles and books on the social and political history of the Middle East between the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. Many authors have made use of this term, but very few have paused to discuss its meaning. At least one important scholar, however, raised doubts about its usefulness.

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Although Dubai's economic development constitutes an important case, it has received hardly any academic coverage. This article explores the path taken by Dubai in its development, especially since 1990. Based on extensive fieldwork, I identify nine parameters that, through interaction, have contributed to the country's economic progress over the last two decades. I argue that the apparent developmental success of Dubai may be understood as the outcome of conscious policies conducted by a “late–late” developing state in order to “catch up” with the “developed world.” Even in a government-controlled and neopatrimonial economic environment, Dubai has created circumstances where the virtues of neoliberalism seem to coexist with state dirigism. Yet the country faces a challenge of sustainability. Certain of the Dubai's risks and vulnerabilities are unlikely to disappear in the short to medium term: the dependence on foreign workers, the asset bubbles in real estate, regional security problems, and issues related to political leadership.

The article argues that to move beyond the standard nationalist narrative of Turkish history, scholars must employ new sources such as the provincial newspaper. Through a study of a religious nationalist provincial newspaper—Büyük Cihad (The Great Struggle)—from the early 1950s, it is possible to appreciate the extent and importance of a vibrant public debate concerning secularism and the place of Islam in Turkish society immediately after World War II. This debate has gone almost completely unnoticed, yet it constitutes an important foundation for understanding the present prominence of political Islam in Turkish society. Central to this debate is the person of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: ultimately it was criticism of Turkey's founding president rather than any real threat of “religious reaction” that prompted the government's decision to suppress religious publications in early 1953.

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In very rich rentier-states, such as Kuwait, citizens have a smaller immediate stake in the success of the nonoil economy than do citizens in nonrentier economies. This is because the nonoil sector does not pay much in the way of taxes, nor does it employ many citizens. For the most part, citizens work for the state or state-owned enterprises, and their paychecks are ultimately funded by oil revenues. Foreigners dominate private-sector employment. Kuwait's parliament—by far the strongest in the Gulf—reflects the interests of citizen employees of the state and is widely seen as an obstacle to private-sector growth. In the United Arab Emirates, by contrast, citizens have little political voice. Public policy instead reflects the interests of capitalists (especially ruling families) in the development of a diversified economy.

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This article examines processes of ethnic and regional differentiation through a study of the 1977 local elections in Turkey's Kurdish-majority provinces. An analysis of electoral data shows a high level of support there for independent candidates, a result sharply at odds with voting in the rest of the country that indicates a new correlation between ethnicity and political behavior. We argue that independents benefitted from mainstream political parties' inability to mobilize voters in the southeast because of the declining power of local notables, the emergence of new social movements, and alternative frames that the parties were unable to integrate. This context allowed social and political outsiders to build social coalitions outside the mainstream parties, as we demonstrate through a case study of the election of independent candidate Mehdi Zana, a working-class Kurdish activist who won the 1977 Diyarbakır mayoral race.

In 1925, the Turkish parliament commissioned a translation of the Qurʾan from Arabic to Turkish as well as a Turkish-language Qurʾanic commentary. This project is commonly misunderstood as an initiative engineered by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and linked to the radical institutional reforms of 1924: abolition of the Islamic caliphate, prohibition of the Sufi orders, and closure of the medreses. In fact, parliament's support of a Qurʾan translation was not a radical nationalist reform but an initiative supported and executed by devout intellectuals who opposed other facets of Islamic reform in the early years of the Turkish republic.