Although this issue of the journal goes out with my name on the masthead as editor, all the pre-production editing was in the expert hands of my predecessor, Juan R. I. Cole, and his able assistant, Alissa Surges. I want to take this opportunity to thank them for their years of service to the journal and to the profession. Juan Cole guided the journal for five years with a remarkable blend of energy, vision, and attention to detail. We all profited from the breadth of his scholarly background and research interests, which bridge many of the geographical, disciplinary, and cultural divides of Middle East studies. During his tenure as the editor, the journal flourished and fulfilled its mission as a journal of record for our field. Juan Cole also left his particular stamp of engagement with current theoretical questions coupled with high-quality empirical research, as exemplified in the special issue he co-edited in May 2002 on nationalism and the colonial legacy. Thanks to his management skills, and those of Alissa Surges, the journal also moved into the electronic world of the 21st century under his watch. I am very grateful for the time and effort they put into developing the databases, office procedures, and filing systems that streamlined the editorial process. I am inheriting a healthy and thriving operation because of their skills and commitment.

Scarcity of information can present a difficulty for writing a biography. Abundance of information can do the same. As perspectives multiply, a subject sometimes becomes clearer; other times it becomes complicated. In Islamic studies, for example, the more sources that are uncovered on central historical figures such as the Prophet Muhammad, al-Hasan al-Basri, and al-Ghazzali, the more scholars are in dispute over their biographies. Yet historical figures of the second degree—those individuals whose biography has not yet attracted a separate study but who are studied for their role in larger questions—are often portrayed with deceptive simplicity. Scholars tend to stick to the most coherent and simple biography and move on to the question at hand. Such coherence and simplicity, however, often is not found in the sources.

But about this same time, we were exposed to an even stranger kind of rhetoric, the rhetoric of the Middle Eastern world…. This was a rhetoric that seemed to play by none of the rules that had come down to us from a tradition of rhetoric that had been practiced by the reigning nations of the Western World for over 2000 years. And then there is the distinctive rhetoric of the Oriental world…. But those are rhetorics that we still have to study and analyze and codify.

—Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (1990), viii.

With the advent of the 20th century, Sufism found itself under increasing attack in many parts of the Muslim world. In previous centuries, mystical movements had played a prominent role in the struggle for the revival of Islam and occasionally, where governments were weak or nonexistent, also in actual resistance to European encroachment. In the wake of the increasing consolidation of the state and the spread of Western rationalism, however, Sufis came to be regarded as a major cause of the so-called decline of Islam and an obstacle to its adaptation. In the Arab world, this anti–Sufi feeling was generally associated with the Salafiyya trend. The Salafi call for a return to the example of the forefathers (al-salaf al-**sdotu**āli**hdotu**) amounted to a discrediting of latter-day tradition, which was described as cherishing mystical superstition as well as scholarly stagnation and political quietism. Under the burden of this critique, and as a response to the general expansion of education and literacy, Sufism has been forced to assimilate new ideas and to make room for a new form of organization; the populist Islamic association. These developments culminated in the establishment of the Society of the Muslim Brothers.

This article aims to explore state–society relations during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876–1909) through the filter of a unique conjunction of state and society—that is, various social groups' voluntary activities, especially fund-raising campaigns with philanthropic and patriotic purposes, often initiated by the palace itself. These campaigns offer fruitful case studies for the study of state–society relations and the dispositions of the public sphere in the late Ottoman era. In light of these activities and their importance for understanding late Ottoman society, the public sphere in this context may be best defined as a dynamic political realm where social and political groups pursued their particular interests; at the same time, it was “the public domain where authority is constituted as legitimate and exposed to popular review, both inside and outside the accepted terms of the given discourse.” Within the parameters of this definition, which is descriptive of the multiple agencies and fragmented nature of the public sphere in this period, this article focuses on how the Hamidian regime sought to unify this fragmented social and political space by promoting public participation in voluntary activities in the broader political arena.

Why did they kill us? We wanted our rights—bonus, wages, health benefits, why did they kill us? To be honest we all cried, I cried too. —Textile worker remembering June 1972