The duality of nomad/sedentary or nomads/settlers—in Arabic badu/hadhar—is a classic feature of the social history of the Middle East. Related to this duality is the notion of tribe and its cultural ideology, tribalism. These are all concepts familiar to the students of the region, although increasingly, they are acquiring an antiquated character due to rapid urbanization and other forms of socioeconomic change. In the Arabian Peninsula, the dichotomy is still widely used. Whereas important research has been carried out over the years on the relationship between tribalism and nationalism in the Middle East, the persistence of this particular dichotomy in the Gulf has received little analytical attention. Many studies on the region speak of “bedouin” as groups, constituencies, or social or political actors, without clarifying what lies in the term and without asking by what criteria this category is defined or how it differs from other, non-bedouin categories. The association of bedouinism/tribalism with the Arabian Peninsula, “home of all the Arab tribes,” is so deeply anchored in the imagination of both inhabitants and outsiders that to speak of Arabian bedouin in the late 1990s to early 2000s hardly raised any eyebrows. On closer observation, however, one has to acknowledge the growing lack of consonance between the original lexical meaning of the term bedouin (pastoral nomads) and its derivative meaning (“country” as opposed to “city,” or “primitive” as opposed to “civilized”) and the category to which it is purported to apply. Both meanings beg the question of why the hadhar–badu dichotomy has such a central place in Kuwaiti popular discourse—Kuwait being for all purposes a city-state with hardly any country and where “the rural areas” is a euphemism for the sprawling suburbs around the capital city. At the same time, official history tells us that Kuwait was founded by bedouin who had fled drought and famine from Central Arabia in the first half of the 18th century. Under these circumstances, what does it take to qualify as a badu or to disqualify as a hadhar in present-day Kuwaiti society? There is one more thing: far from slipping into oblivion as a result of urbanization, the hadhar–badu dichotomy has made a noticeable comeback in popular discourse over the past two decades. This article seeks to explain the present popular concern in Kuwait with a dichotomy whose analytical, if not historical, validity has often been questioned. It explores the reasons why important symbolic barriers are being raised between hadhar and badu that contribute to turning them into mutually exclusive identities. Throughout history, hadhar and badu have always been porous categories and the distinction was never clear, regardless of what the ongoing discourse may claim. Even today, ascription and self-ascription of badu and hadhar identities are contextual rather than absolute; they are also contested, more often than not. The first task at hand is to clarify the meaning of hadhar and badu in Kuwait and their use at the turn of the millennium. The article, thus, begins by pinpointing the social groups that these categories encompass and by giving a brief description of each group's stereotypes of the other. Through the description of Kuwaiti social practices in relation to marriage and the use of surnames, and the exploration of the pervasive role of the state, I hope to show that social reality in Kuwait is a lot more complex than the discourse of polarization suggests. Finally, it is argued that, to explain the revival of the dichotomy, we need to understand the ongoing hadhar criticism of the badu as an expression of anti-immigration feelings, of the kind one commonly hears in societies where the state has pledged to take in charge the cradle to grave welfare of its citizens. A parallel with anti-immigration discourse in Western European welfare-state nations is drawn up as an argument against an exclusively historical–cultural interpretation of the phenomenon under study.

College education, whatever its form, has always carried with it a consciousness of possibilities for women.In the Company of Educated Women, B. M. Solomon Iranian college campuses are highly guarded terrains. One enters the gated and walled campuses through security guard offices. Until recently, women's attire—hijāb—and makeup would be entirely checked by one of the khwāharān at these gates. Today, Iranian women nonchalantly pass through the gates, despite their heavily applied makeup and revealing hijāb—a sign of changing social order. Student identification cards allow them through the gates, whereas nonstudent visitors, such as myself, need the prior permission of an administrator to enter. The time of my entrance is recorded, a birth certificate or an identity card is withheld, and a slip is issued to be signed by the hosting administrator. I am instructed to “fix my hijāb” and then am allowed to enter the campus.

For seven dramatic days in late November 1979, bloody street violence between state security forces and thousands of frustrated Shiites rocked the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Sparked by the Saudi regime's brutal repression of those peacefully celebrating Ashura—the annual mourning of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein—the fury resulted in an unknown number of dead and wounded. Among the destruction, demonstrators burned the British bank in Qatif as well as the offices of the Saudia National Airline. They destroyed state-owned vehicles, attacked police, raided the coast guard office in the village of al-Awamiyya, seized weapons from soldiers, and even occupied the old city in downtown Qatif, from which they held off the Saudi military for days. One report relates that a group even burned a toy store owned by a government official. Women as well as men marched in anger. The security forces, which included 20,000 Saudi National Guard, cordoned off the major roadways, particularly those in Qatif, Sayhat, and Safwa to localize the protest, control the flow of information, as well as to prevent nearby oil facilities from being destroyed. Reports swirled that soldiers fired on virtually any public gathering of people, including at least one funeral procession in Safwa, forcing the mourners to flee and abandon the corpse in the street. State and hospital officials refused to release other bodies from the morgue for burial until the uproar quieted, leveraging the dead as blackmail. The National Guard relied on the heavy firepower of helicopter gun ships for crowd control, turning the area into a deadly conflict zone characterized by terror, hostility, and fear.

This article discusses a critical factor that has influenced Israel's politics, society, economy, and public discourse since this state's establishment in 1948, and particularly after the 1967 war: a highly informal but at the same time very potent “Security Network.” This Network has been critically involved in the political, social, economic, and cultural spheres, and its impact is felt in major and lesser issues. It is made up of actors who (a) are connected by informal, nonhierarchical ties; (b) share common values and perceptions regarding Israel's security and the ways to promote it; (c) have identical or similar individual and collective interests; and (d) are capable of joining hands to influence policymaking on different levels and in various spheres of the country's public life.

Little research has been done on the intellectual life of the Arab-Islamic world between the 15th and 19th centuries. This scholarly neglect almost certainly reflects the widespread assumption that intellectual life in the Arab-Islamic world entered a long period of stagnation or “sclerosis” after the 13th or 14th century. This state of affairs is often believed to have lasted until the 19th century, when European military and economic expansion awakened the Arab-Islamic world from its dogmatic slumber, and inaugurated a “reawakening” or “renaissance” (nahḍa). An influential statement of this view of intellectual life in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire before the 19th century is to be found in Gibb and Bowen's Islamic Society and the West. Although they noted that “the barrenness of the period has been greatly exaggerated,” they still stated that Arabic scholarly culture had degenerated, on the whole, into a rote, unquestioning acquisition of a narrow and religiously dominated field of knowledge. No “quickening breath had blown” on Arab-Islamic scholarship for centuries. Isolated even from Persian and Turkish influences, it was reduced to “living on its own past.”

Successive Ottoman governments excluded the religious colleges (medreses) from the ambitious educational policies they pursued beginning in the 19th century. Many historians and contemporary observers have seen this trend as an anomaly, because this was a period characterized by governmental activism and broad changes imposed from the top, including in the field of education. The inactivity of the government during the long reign of Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) appears particularly intriguing. The Hamidian regime enunciated the ideological, social, and political importance of Islam and extended its patronage to the religious establishment and its institutions. Nevertheless, the Hamidian government kept medrese education outside the fold of its educational project. The medreses were left unchanged in terms of administration, pedagogy, and curricula, even as the Hamidian regime impressively expanded the state school system, initiated a series of educational reforms, and promoted state education as a vanguard of progress and modernity. Meanwhile, in other parts of the Islamic world, initiatives were taken to reform and modernize institutions of Islamic learning. In the Ottoman Empire, the government took similar steps to reorganize medrese education only after the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) came to power in the wake of Constitutional Revolution of 1908. However, the new regime also gradually, but consistently, diminished the former prominence of the religious establishment and its institutions and prepared the ground for the complete nationalization of religious education in 1924 by the fledgling Turkish Republic.