In spite of many competing views on peasants, their politics, and the state in 19th-century Egypt, the historiography contains certain striking continuities in its understanding of peasant–state political relations. Historians influenced by Marxism, modernization theory, and nationalism alike have usually seen state and peasantry as sharply distinct and conflicting. Peasants have often been depicted as locked in a struggle against the penetration of state agency into a previously autonomous rural domain. Whether seen as a force for benevolent modernization or for the predatory extraction of conscripts and taxes, the state has regularly been viewed as self-propelled and sui generis, reforming or invading the world of an either passive, silently subversive, or violently revolutionary peasantry. The figure of the tradition-bound, submissive, or apathetic peasant simply marks out a terrain for state agency, albeit an agency obstructed by peasant hostility, irrationality, or resentment. The silently subversive peasant, further, who uses James C. Scott's “weapons of the weak,” merely undermines in antagonistic and wordless fashion projects emanating from above. The revolutionary peasant, finally, becomes the self-generating locus of the nationalist or socialist modern and seeks the violent overthrow of the predatory state, transforming the latter into only the negative—albeit treacherous—terrain on which the positive historical agency of peasants and their allies can work. In short, the existing historiography, while varying the historical role, value, and meaning of peasant and state, preserves both as radically distinct, self-creating, and self-defining collective agents involved in zero-sum and often violent antagonism.

Iranian agriculture and rural society have undergone profound socioeconomic and political changes over the past four decades. While recognizing the significant impact of urbanization, economic development, and integration of the rural economy in the market, this paper contends that the land-reform program of the 1960s and the 1979 revolution represent the primary turning points in the rural transformation. Land reform, through intense state intervention, dramatically changed the traditional landlord-sharecropping system (nizam-i arbab-rayati). Peasant uprisings, the forcible occupation of large estates, and the agrarian policies of the postrevolutionary regime have led to the demise of the urban agricultural bourgeoisie and the empowerment of the peasants. There has been a disintegration of large-scale public and private agricultural production systems, including agribusinesses, farm corporations, and the agricultural production cooperatives developed under the shah's regime.

Between 1936 and 1939, the Egyptian Medical Association held a series of forums on birth control and the population problem; the first full-length book on Egypt's population problem was published; the first life tables for Egypt were calculated; a group of university professors organized under the rubric of the Happy Family Society to discuss the need for planned families; the first fatwa on birth control in the 20th century was issued by the mufti of Egypt, Shaykh Abd al-Majid Salim; and the Ministry of Social Affairs was created, part of its mandate being to study the population problem.

Jihane al-Halafawi's small apartment above a barbershop in Alexandria is exceedingly orderly, a cool oasis on a sweltering summer afternoon. Plant leaves brush up against curtains undulating with the breeze from the nearby Mediterranean. As she walks into the living room with a tray full of cakes and tea, al-Halafawi is the picture of a kindly Egyptian mother, a genuine smile gracing her youthful face. But when this fifty-year-old mother of six and grandmother announced her candidacy for Egypt's parliamentary elections in fall 2000, the state geared up a massive security force outside polling stations; leftists shrugged her off as a “front” for her husband; and state feminists dedicated to the electoral empowerment of women were silent. When Halafawi outperformed her ruling-party rival in the first round, despite rigging, the Interior Ministry promptly stepped in and canceled the results on the pretext of respecting an earlier court ruling postponing the elections.

Two years after naming himself a Black Man as opposed to an American in his 1964 expression of alienation from mainstream, white U.S. society, Muhammad Ali announced, “I ain't got no quarrel with the Viet Cong.” In doing so, he powerfully linked his racialized status in the United States to his unwillingness to fight a war against other similarly racialized, marginalized, and disempowered people. He thus embraced a message of Third World solidarity as a First World resident with a similarly subaltern status in “his own” country. The second epigraph shows Ali's effort to articulate his sense of belonging within the United States, thus pushing at the limits of both his “Black” and “American” identities. The two epigraphs demonstrate the contradiction in the way in which African Americans can be identified as both “Black” and “American” in the United States, here in statements by one of Black America's most iconic public figures. This paradox of African American identity will be explored in this article in relation to two Arabic literary texts: Adonis's “Qabr min ajl New York” (“A Grave for New York”) and Radwa Ashour's al-Rihla:ayyam taliba misriyya fi amrika (The Journey: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Student in America), both of which are particularly concerned with Black Americans and firmly rooted in the tradition of commitment literature, which sees them as brothers and sisters in solidarity with Third World struggles.