The first three articles in this issue, grouped under the heading “Politics and Cultures of Capitalism,” address various ways that Middle Eastern actors dealt with European capitalist expansion in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They all focus on cultural and political aspects of economic change and maintain a global perspective while constructing an intensely local analysis. Gad Gilbar and Jens Hanssen trace specific institutions and networks in Qajar Iran and the late Ottoman Empire, respectively, that operated within what Hanssen calls the “interstices” of state bureaucracy, local business concerns, and European expansion. The interstitial nature of the arguments made by both authors is underlined by the impressive range of sources they draw on: Persian, British, Russian, German, and French in the case of Gilbar and Turkish, Arabic, German, British, and French in the case of Hanssen. The third article, by Nancy Reynolds, takes us from late Qajar and Ottoman societies to Egypt during the first half of the 20th century and from general commerce to the marketing and consumption of particular commodities.

European merchants and investors doing business in the Middle East during the long 19th century expected that commercial disputes in mixed cases would be conducted according to procedures and laws familiar to and accepted by them. In the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, mixed courts based on the French commercial code were established during that century. The Qajars, however, offered the foreign commercial community a different judicial institution: the local kārguzār (agent) and his majlis (court). By the beginning of the 20th century, thirty-six kārguzār offices operated in Iranian towns and harbors. Nevertheless, foreign (mainly British) merchants and their consuls complained bitterly that it was not an effective institution and that it clearly favored the local tujjār (big merchants). They claimed that these defects meant huge financial losses to them. The Qajars viewed this institution and its functioning differently. It served their policy of discouraging foreign penetration, and it contributed to the competitiveness of the Iranian tujjār in their struggle for commercial superiority.

This article examines the rise and fall of the Malhamé family at the court of Abdülhamit II. The point of departure is the flight and arrest of six Malhamé brothers and the accompanying outbursts of popular anger at them during the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. The analysis locates the historical conditions that made the Malhamé phenomenon possible in the interstices between Levantine society, late Ottoman bureaucracy, and European diplomacy and capitalist expansion. In order to bring into conversation the hitherto unconnected literatures on the Levant and the Ottoman state, the Malhamé story is framed in the analytical concept of transimperialism. This concept shares affinities with wider transnational studies. But it is also grounded in the specific political, economic, and social processes of the Levant—both within the Ottoman Empire and among it and its British, French, German, and Italian imperial rivals at the height of the “Eastern Question.”

The specific ways that cloth—“foreign silks,” “durable Egyptian cottons,” and “artificial silks”—emerged as a potent and visible symbol through which to contest the relations of colonialism and establish national community in Egypt varied with the changing realities of Egypt's political economy. The country's early importation of textiles despite its cultivation of raw cotton, the growth of its state-protected local mechanized industry working long- and medium-staple cotton for a largely lower-class market, and that industry's diversification into artificial silk technologies all helped structure a shift from “foreign silks” to “the nylon woman” as tropes in popular and political discourse defining the limits of the national community and the behaviors suitable for it. Although artificial fibers considerably lowered the cost of hosiery and other goods, thereby expanding consumption, the use of synthetics like nylon rather than cotton subverted the goal of national economic unity between agriculture and industry.

This article analyzes the exercise of state authority in Kurdish areas in the early Turkish Republic and discusses the state's ineffectiveness in dominating these areas. It argues that the mere existence of a highly ambitious social-engineering project, increased state presence in the region, and military power does not mean high levels of state capacity. Based on primary documents, this article discusses the problems of autonomy, coherence, and implementation that the Turkish state encountered in its nation-building project. It shows how the state's ideological rigidities and its shortage of resources and dedicated personnel undermined its capacity to control and shape the Kurdish areas. While the state attempted to regulate citizens’ private lives in Kurdish areas, the local society also tried to mold state employees in accordance with its own interests. A blurred boundary between the state and society was one of the unintended consequences of increased state presence in everyday life.

Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the twin goals of centralizing state power and inscribing a uniform national identity on all citizens resulted in the proliferation of disciplinary practices that required changes in habits and everyday life as well as in the locus of faith, allegiance, and obedience. Nowhere were the repercussions felt as deeply as in the Kurdish regions, where the urge to create a new citizen sparked considerable resistance. This article suggests that alongside Kurdish nationalist movements, kinship networks and morality constituted an alternative reservoir of resistance to the new disciplinary practices that followed state building. By subverting state practices to make citizens legible, kinship networks, I argue, undermined the state's attempts to establish bureaucratic authority and create an exclusive identity.

When writing biographies of historical figures, narrative convention requires that concision and clarity be wrested from sources that are multiple and often confusing. In this article, I argue that multiple accounts of a person's life may be more than an accident arising from the way that information was compiled. Rather, such multiplicity renders exemplary figures adaptable to a wide variety of circumstances, making them even more useful as a focus of devotion and emulation. Examining multiple accounts of early Maliki scholar Sahnun b. Saʿ id (d. 854), including those of his travels in search of knowledge and of his suffering under the miḥna (trial) in Kairouan, I find that close attention to apparently contradictory evidence may not get us any closer to understanding the man himself, but it does offer us much information about the ways in which he was considered an exemplary individual.

In this roundtable, we have asked a group of specialists anchored in different but overlapping scholarly communities to reflect on the academic study of Islamist movements, and they present their thoughts on its evolution as well as their suggestions for its future course. The contributions are worth reading in their entirety and quite short, so there is no point in summarizing them here. But it is worth observing that the contributions highlight and begin to explore three areas in which various modes of inquiry and communities of specialists can overlap, interact with, and even cross-fertilize each other.

Over the past two decades, scholars of the Middle East have produced an impressive body of scholarship that seeks to understand diverse groups and practices that are together called political Islam. Much of our work has drawn little attention outside of academia despite the obsession with Islam shared by policymakers and the general public. The many careful studies produced by academics and some journalists—typically based on extensive field research and use of primary sources in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian—have to contend with bestselling books that trade in fears about the irrational, West-hating Muslim fanatic. Unfortunately, serious scholarship on political Islam cannot ignore this terrain of stereotypes and fearmongering, as it dominates mainstream debates about Islam and the Middle East. But in responding to these discourses, we often allow them to dictate our analytic starting point, resulting in less theoretical innovation and empirical insight than might emerge if we moved beyond the focus on Islamist groups and whether most are moderate or radical. Indeed, we might do well to abandon altogether the idea that “political Islam” represents a tangible object of study.

The first wave of academic writings on Islamists emerged in the Arab world after the war of June 1967 and the subsequent resurfacing of religious ideologies and religiously inspired social and political movements. Examples in this first wave include works by the Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-ʿAzm, the Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi, and the Moroccan historian ʿAbdullah al-ʿArawi. These writings advanced three insights. First, the rise of “religious movements,” “religious currents,” and “religious ideologies”—the term islāmī or Islamist was yet to be coined—was seen by some writers as a serious challenge to the legitimacy of the secular state and the secular idea of Pan-Arabism. Second, other writers accused Arab ruling establishments in modernizing countries—the reference was primarily to post-1967 Egypt—of using religious currents and ideologies to enhance the state's popularity and legitimacy in times of crisis. Third, Wahhabism and petrodollars were held responsible by some for the resurfacing of religious currents and their increased appeal in the contest with secular ideas. Most of the writings of the first wave were Egypt centered and were clearly inspired by an antireligious sentiment that saw religious movements and currents as representing an existential threat to secular modernization and progress.

Research on Islamism needs to move closer to its object and to study that object more closely in its interaction with its environment. Despite great advances in recent years, academic literature on the topic still too often suffers from a double distancing: the researcher tends, first, to remain unnecessarily removed from Islamic movements as the object of study and, second, to study those movements at a distance from the society in which they grow and in which they compete for support.

Like other area studies, Middle East studies has an interdisciplinary scope, which enriches scholarly debates on Islamist movements, groups, and actors. However, while Middle East studies brings scholars from a wide range of academic backgrounds together, it is still predominantly represented by two major disciplines: political science and history. Relatively less attention is paid to what other disciplines, particularly geography, sociology, and the humanities, contribute to the understanding and theorization of Islamist movements.