With this issue, I say a bittersweet goodbye to my life as IJMES editor. It has been a privilege to serve the Middle East studies community and to enjoy a front-row seat on the accomplishments and dynamism of our field. IJMES has long been an inclusive journal; scholars of different disciplines, origins, ranks, and theoretical persuasions submit their work. I have enjoyed reading it all and have been much encouraged by the originality, erudition, and overall quality of scholarship in our field. At a time when information, analysis, and understanding of the Middle East have been in short supply in many dimensions of public discourse, most scholars in our field have not wavered in their commitment to the high standards and intellectual honesty that must inform scholarly endeavors if they are to merit the name.

During the period from 1900 to 1950, the production and deployment of photographic images of the Egyptian child by Egyptian adults played a role in nationalism, a role as yet unstudied by historians of Egypt or of photography. The studio portrait selected here represents the commonly produced genre of photographs that showed Egyptian children as technologically capable and possessing Western symbols of progress. This picture of two girls and one boy surrounding an adult man's bike—whose wheels are larger than the smallest child and on whose seat seems to be placed the decorative vase of flowers in the backdrop—suggests that the children are present in the living room not to ride the bike but rather to show off their possession of a modern means of transportation (and perhaps to learn about it from the books resting on the bike's rear rack).

In December 2008, the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) released its thirteenth annual report on offsets in the U.S. defense trade. This chart displays numbers for the BIS category Middle East/Africa, taken from these reports beginning in 1993. Offsets are a variety of industrial and commercial incentives that defense firms provide to foreign governments to facilitate purchases, from coproduction of particular weapons systems to overseas investment. They have become such big business in the Middle East that a system has evolved to allow defense contractors to bank and trade offset credits like any other investment. Unlike ordinary investments, however, offsets represent transfers of substantial resources to authoritarian governments under conditions of near total unaccountability. Because offsets are usually a percentage of the overall contract value, regimes that spend more on weapons get more in offsets.

One of the oldest extant documents in Islamic history records a set of deeds executed by Muhammad after his migration (hijra) in 622 from Mecca to Yathrib, subsequently known as “the City [madīna] of the Prophet.” Marking the beginning of the Islamic era, the document comprising the deeds has been the subject of well over a century of modern scholarship and is commonly called the “Constitution of Medina”—with some justification, although the first modern scholar who studied it at the end of the 19th century, Julius Wellhausen, more accurately described it as the “municipal charter” (Gemeindeordnung) of Medina. In 1889, Wellhausen highlighted the text's antiquity, which has been acknowledged by even the most skeptical of contemporary “source-critical” scholars, Patricia Crone, who thinks that, in Ibn Ishaq's Sira, “it sticks out like a piece of solid rock in an accumulation of rubble.”

Thus wrote Dr. Asher Goldstein in the Hebrew daily paper Haʾaretz (The Land) in 1935, lamenting the disregard for hygiene among Palestine's Jews. In Goldstein's text, hygiene is metonymic to Western progress, which the Jews were to bring with them to Palestine. Yet the Jews in this text occupy an ambivalent position: they are not only to bring the West to the “entire backward Orient” but also to themselves. A hygienic way of life, far from being a secured component in their cultural compendium, is presented as a goal yet to be achieved. Indeed, it constituted a project in which Dr. Goldstein—author of several hygiene manuals and editor of the health column in Haʾaretz—played an important role.

Shaykh Naʿim al-ʿArqsusi is one of Damascus's most popular Muslim scholars. A leading figure of a local Islamic movement called Jamaʿat Zayd (Zayd's Group), he is widely praised for his knowledge, modesty, and asceticism. Every week, this frail, short-bearded fifty-six-year-old attracts several thousand people to the huge concrete al-Iman mosque next to Baʿth party headquarters in the middle-class neighborhood of al-Mezraʿa.

In this article we present a threefold argument—chronological, geographical, and sociocultural—in order to demonstrate that interest in the woman question and the lively and at times charged debate that it stimulated began in Greater Syria in the early nahḍa (awakening) period and persisted throughout, drawing into its orbit leading intellectuals as well as members of the general public and permeating even peripheral areas of Greater Syria. We do so by examining the public reflection of this debate in the early nahḍa press, mainly privately published Beirut journals and newspapers.

This study gives voice to three ways of becoming modern in the Turkish experience through a reading of the novels of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Oğuz Atay, and Orhan Pamuk. The first possibility, represented by the works of Tanpınar, is more conservative and defensive, concerned with preserving what is considered authentic culture. Anti-individualistic, it nonetheless attempts to appropriate Western culture and the change generated by its impact within “the traditional essence.” The second possibility, represented by the works of Atay, is open ended: it reaches beyond the limitations of the Turkish social-historical domain to create a new individual (and implicitly social) existence while remaining critical of Western “individuality.” The last possibility, represented by the works of Pamuk, expresses the dominant concept of “modernization” in Turkey, which equates modernization with Westernization. Individualization comes to mean replication of “Western individuality.”

This quote from a character in the 1974 novel Al-Karnak (Karnak Café) by Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) sums up the reaction of millions of people in Egypt and the Arab world to the June 1967 Arab–Israeli war. Why did this war shatter their worldviews? A military defeat may occur for purely military reasons, in this case the better preparation of Israeli troops. Why should it cast doubt on a whole way of life? The answer to this question lies in the social and cognitive structure of nationalism, which I examine in a moment of crisis, after the 1967 war, when it became necessary for nationalist intellectuals to debate issues that had previously been taken for granted. Al-Karnak, which was made into a highly profitable and controversial film, provides a good starting point for studying these debates. However, it is important to understand them as products of the nationalist project of which Mahfouz was a part. I first analyze the history of that project, explaining its raison d'être and its success by the 1960s.