Western scholars have long studied Jewish and Christian influence in shaping early Islamic tradition, but almost none of them has considered Eve's transformation as a critical part of the “genesis” of an Islamic historical framework and the evolution of its gender categories. I trace the transformation of the wife of Adam from the revelation contained in the Qurʾan and note the abrupt and distinct changes wrought upon this Qurʾanic persona in post-Qurʾanic sources in the matters of menstruation and motherhood. The figure of Satan plays a pivotal role in both of these biological aspects of Eve's biography. Her function as the first woman serves to explain not just the physiology of all women, but also the essential aspects of character that allegedly make all females different from the normative male in biology and behavior. As a wife, Eve is tested and fails, but as a mother, she both fails and passes the test of satanic temptation. I argue that in her role as wife, she is depicted in post-Qurʾanic sources in accordance with pre-Islamic monotheist precedent. However, in Eve's role as mother—especially as the mother of the prophetic patriline that culminates in Muhammad—Muslim scholars distinguished the meaning and implications of her temptation as distinctly Islamic. Eve embodied a fusion of traditions, a continuity of monotheistic meanings about the feminine in the Middle East, as well as an identity that distinguished her as the first woman of a new, emerging Islamic faith.

“Are you going to behave like a factory girl?!” With this phrase, an 1880s peasant in Mount Lebanon not only admonished a daughter, but also encapsulated the social and economic transformations which were altering the notions of family and society, and the gender roles underlying both. Typically enough, these transformations came about between 1843 and 1914 as a result of the interaction between the local peasant economy and European capitalism. Modernization and dependency narratives of such an encounter follow the line of “tradition” versus “modernity,” with Europe ultimately dictating an inevitable outcome to its absolute benefit. Yet closer examination reveals the story in Mount Lebanon to be far more complicated. In particular, gender replaces this artificial bipolarity with a triangular struggle among peasant men, peasant women, and European capitalists. Furthermore, rather than being historical victims, women and men in Mount Lebanon—with intersecting and diverging interests—worked to contour the outcome of their encounter with Europe and to take control over their individual and collective lives. While the equation of power was most definitely in favor of European merchants and capitalists, the struggles of these peasants were not for naught. Rather, as I will argue in this paper, their travails made the outcome multifaceted and less predictable than European capitalists would have liked it to be.

The closing decades of Ottoman rule in Palestine (the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries), a crucial period in the history of the area, have already received vast attention from scholars and other writers. They have used an abundance of source material, including documents belonging to individuals and institutions, consular reports, memoirs, travel books, and newspapers. But in contrast to earlier periods in Ottoman Palestine, very little has been done, as yet, to bring to light and utilize official Ottoman documents. This, of course, is absolutely necessary if the views and actions of the ruling power are to be described and analyzed, and—because the authorities must have had direct and reliable knowledge of the conditions of the land—if a more complete and balanced picture is to be drawn of the history of the country.

This quotation may be nothing more than a well-turned phrase by its author, Zaki al-Arsuzi. Nonetheless, it illustrates a dilemma that young men like him faced in the troubled years preceding Syrian independence: As French-educated young men, should they take their places as minor functionaries in the colonial machine and accept the promise of a comfortable and privileged life, or should they join the growing political and ideological struggle to found an independent, national statein Syria? Al-Arsuzi, who is venerated by the current regime in Damascus as the ideological father of Baʾthism, went on to answer this question by spending the next eight years in and out ofthe former Ottoman province of Alexandretta, working in support of the Arab-nationalist cause. Both his contemporary writings and later recollections of the period reveal a growing political consciousness and the formulation of a complex Arabism that was at odds with the dominant ideology emanating from the large cities of Syria. This ideology, as embodied by the National Bloc government in Damascus, was personality-based, hamstrung by European colonial interests, and unable to arouse any sustained political sensibility in the broader population; it centered its political legitimacy and parochial brand of nationalism on opposition to the French occupation. Al-Arsuzi and others, recognizing the weakness inherent in this form of nationalism, drew away from its leadership in the course of the 1930s and moved to create other, more radical and militant Pan-Arabist groups.

The Declaration of Prsinciples signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in September 1993 marked a dramatic about-face in Israel's traditional policy toward the PLO and the Palestinian issue in general. This turn of events came as a surprise not only to journalists and commentators following day-to-day political events, but also to scholars engaged in the academic study of Israeli society. The prevailing notion among these scholars had been that the Israeli polity was suffering from what Horowitz and Lissak (1989) called “overburden” due to domestic debates over the disposition of the occupied territories. Thus, it was concluded, Israel was unable to launch bold policy initiatives to try to solve its deadlocked conflict with the Arabs.