Autograph books (“memory books”) circulate among adolescent students, who fill their pages with dedications, memories, and wishes for the future. Although related genres like yearbooks and personal websites are replacing them, in East Jerusalem the tradition continues to evolve alongside newer media. In interviews with Palestinian women about the memories evoked by these keepsakes, I delve into the turbulent period of adolescence to explore such issues as friendship, romance, school, and home life. I treat autograph books as records of the changes that have occurred in Palestinian youth culture over the last fifty years and as catalysts for women's reflections about these changes.

Do purple designer kufiyas spell the end of Palestine solidarity?

Kufiyas, especially multicolored ones, started becoming fashionable U.S. urban hipster wear around 2005. They are so trendy, in fact, that W's Meggan Crum called the restyled kufiya featured in French designer Nicholas Ghesquière's fall 2007 Balenciaga fashion line, and worn by Brazilian supermodel Flavia de Oliveira, one of “Fall 2007's Top Ten Accessories.” Meanwhile, over the last couple of years, kufiyas of all colors have been spotted on such celebrities as Mary-Kate Olsen, Kirsten Dunst, Cameron Diaz, Colin Farrell, David Beckham, Justin Timberlake, and even John McCain's daughter Meghan. In spring 2007, Urban Outfitters marketed the kufiya, in several colors, as an “anti-war woven scarf” until protests prompted the cancellation of the line—but not the sale of the item. It is available in the winter 2008 catalog, described now as a “houndstooth scarf.”

By all accounts, the population of enslaved Africans in Egypt increased in the 19th century compared to earlier times. An estimated 5,000 African slaves were imported annually during the 1840s and 1850s, and as few as 1,000 in 1860. However, during the cotton boom (1861–64), some 25,000 to 30,000 slaves were brought to Egypt each year to satisfy the demand for labor generated by the rapid expansion of cotton cultivation.

For years, I struggled with the presentation of the category of “Middle East” to my students at Howard University, a historically black college. Like many of their professors, my students did not consider North Africa to be part of Africa. The reason was simple: the study of the continent was bifurcated between two fields, African and Middle East studies. African studies focused on sub-Saharan Africa; North Africa was the purview of Middle East studies.

In Pensée 1, “Africa on My Mind,” Mervat Hatem questions the perceived wisdom of creating the African Studies Association (focused on sub-Saharan Africa) and the Middle East Studies Association a decade later, which “institutionalized the political bifurcation of the African continent into two academic fields.” The cleaving of Africa into separate and distinct parts—a North Africa/Middle East and a sub-Saharan Africa—rendered a great disservice to all Africans: it has fractured dialogue, research, and policy while preventing students and scholars of Africa from articulating a coherent understanding of the continent.

“Area studies” as a way of trying to understand human experience is undergoing a major transition. Questioning the connection between Middle East and African studies highlights important dimensions of the changing nature of area studies at the beginning of the 21st century.

Recently I completed an initial foray into the underutilized 1848 census of Egypt that was commissioned by Muhammad ʿAli in the last years of his long rule. This enormous unpublished document provides a fascinating bird's-eye view of Cairo in the middle of the 19th century, permitting one to snoop into thousands of households, great and small, in Egypt's greatest and largest city to see a population undergoing profound social transformation. Here we find ordinary Egyptians, each identified by gender, age, nationality, civil status, occupation, religion, and relationship to the head of the household, living in houses, tenements, wakalas (caravansaries/residential hotels), mosques, and slums in a fantastic maze of streets, alleys, and byways. Here may be located various nationalities that contributed to the city's rich tapestry: Turks, Armenians, Syrians, Nubians, Sudanese, and Maghribis; Christians as well as Muslims and Jews; merchants and artisans; and soldiers, servants, and slaves.

Within a few years of 1820, Muslim-owned printing presses were established under state sponsorship in Iran, Egypt, and India, marking the true beginning of printing in the Islamic world. Printing projects had been initiated before this period—most famously by Ibrahim Müteferrika (1674–1745) in Istanbul—but these were isolated and unsustained ventures. None gathered the joint momentum of state support and technological transfer to compare with what emerged simultaneously in Tabriz, Cairo, and Lucknow. In attempting to understand the common processes behind this “triplet” birth of Muslim printing, this article reconstructs the small circle of individuals whose at times discordant projects collided in creating a sustainable Muslim print tradition in several distinct centers around 1820.

The prevailing perception within the academy, policy circles, and the media inside and outside Iran has been that the members of bazaars are a unified social class engaged in a symbiotic relationship with the political elite of the Islamic republic and the conservative faction in particular. This approach is largely built on the perspective that there is a historic predilection for bāzārīs and clerics to cooperate (“mosque–bazaar alliance”), and thus ideological compatibility and familial ties between the clergy and bāzārīs have continued and developed into an alliance under the current regime headed by segments of the clergy. For instance, one of the leading experts on 20th-century Iran, Nikki Keddie, comments that, despite Mohammad Khatami's reformist agenda, “the ruling elite, who represent an alliance between the commercial bazaar bourgeoisie and conservative clerics, resist giving up their economic privileges as they do their political ones.”

This is how Ismaʿil bin ʿAbd al-Qadir, a Mahdist chronicler of late 19th-century Sudan, gave a broad Islamic significance to the defeat of Ethiopian armies by Mahdist forces at al-Qallabat in March 1889. Culminating in the death of Emperor Yohannes IV, the four-year confrontation between Mahdist Sudan and Christian Ethiopia (1885–89) had repercussions that transcended the local setting, reaching far into the intertwined history of Sudan, Ethiopia, and European imperialism in the Nile Valley and Red Sea regions.

Although some contemporary Egyptian studies have broached aspects of the relationship between the Coptic Orthodox Church and the regime, few have examined developments in the political rapport between the two in the last decade. Important studies have touched on the relationship between the state and church during Nasser's regime, the Sadat years, and the early years of the Mubarak regime, up to the first half of the 1990s. However, there is a paucity of literature on the relationship between the Coptic church and the Egyptian state in the past ten years, a lacuna that this study addresses.

One of the central issues in the study of urban politics today is the fact that many cities have become multicultural arenas. The liberal viewpoint stresses the potential of the city—unlike other spaces—to offer many and equal opportunities for all residents regardless of religion, gender, or ethnic affiliation, but the critical body of knowledge highlights the ways in which the city, although apparently released from the shackles of nation- and state-building projects, continues to reproduce existing power structures and is a stratifying place, maintaining patterns of discrimination, exclusion, and segregation. This tension between the city as an enabling space versus the city as a reinforcer of socionational stratification is at the center of this article.