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The Copto-Arabic Synaxarion entry for the repose of Abraham ibn Zurءah (975-78), sixty-second patriarch of the See of Alexandria, commemorates the miraculous moving of Muqattam Mountain (outside of Cairo) in response to a devastating challenge posed to Coptic Christians by Fatimid caliph Muءizz li-Din Allah (969-75). The challenge—move Muqattam Mountain or be persecuted—unfolds as an important representative narrative of Christian-Muslim relations in medieval Coptic literature. The Muqattam narrative maintains hope by veiling religious-political commentary in the cloak of a miraculous or “unthinkable” event. This type of narrativizing, as archetypically displayed in the Muqattam narrative, is an important way for Copts to critique their dhimmimacr; status and Islamic governance while simultaneously maintaining hope in their Coptic faith. Through a close reading of this narrative, I argue that the miracle story provides an empowering vision and sustains a triumphant representation of Coptic faith.

The article offers a revisionist account of how the modern Saudi state emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Differing with structuralist “rentier-state” accounts, I contend that individual agency has been very important in shaping the Saudi bureaucracy as oil money gave unique, although temporary, autonomy to princely elites to organize the state around their personal interests. Emerging institutions functioned as power tokens, leading to a fragmented administrative setup in which ministries serve as “fiefdoms” and bureaucratic capacities vary strongly from one institution to another. Through state growth and the “locking in” of distributional commitments, the autonomy of princely elites to redesign the state has strongly declined over time, meaning that many early institutional decisions have permanently impacted the shape and capacities of today's Saudi state. Vis-agrave;-vis rentier theory, I demonstrate that regime autonomy is not constant over time and that the quality of institutions is historically contingent and not determined by oil, which merely enlarges the menu of institutional choices available to rentier-state elites.

Ahmed Hilmi (1865–1914) was a prominent figure among the late Ottoman thinkers and writers who laid the foundations of intellectual life in modern Turkey. His oeuvre includes dozens of historical, philosophical, and political works, as well as novels and poems. The overtly modernist underpinnings of his works on the one hand, and his Sufi piety and firm rejection of materialism and positivism on the other hand, have earned him recognition as an early exponent of a kind of modernist, nonliteralist Islamic agenda that has been conspicuous in a variety of Turkish Islamic movements in recent decades. His untimely death, later attributed to a Freemason–Zionist conspiracy, added further to his mystique in some Islamic circles. Modernist yet deeply devout, Islamist yet uninterested in scripturalist paths of religious revival, Ahmed Hilmi stands out as a representative of an important intellectual trend that has often been overlooked in studies of the late Ottoman period.

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This article analyzes the origins and significance of cooperation among ideologically diverse forces in Yemen's Joint Meeting Parties. In response to studies that posit a causal relationship between political inclusion and political moderation, I argue that forging those interpersonal and conceptual relationships that initiated and bound together actors from traditionally opposed parties, such as the Yemeni Reform Gathering and the Yemeni Socialist Party, has been as much a result of marginalization as inclusion. Further, cooperation in this case cannot be attributed solely to changing structural relations but has also required changes in thinking by key individuals. They have developed and justified new strategies to account for changes in political practices, often facing down opposition from other forces within their own parties that are intent on maintaining old strategies.

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