This article examines the historical development of Arab–Palestinian soccer under the British Mandate, and then afterward under the State of Israel. It strives to explain why the Arab sporting grandstands—particularly those of soccer—did not become a site for the construction and expression of Palestinian national pride in Israel.

A single photograph taken during the Constitutional Revolution portrays the nature of that historical event better than most of the accounts purporting to explain the Revolution in terms of the ideological impact of the West. It is a picture of some fourteen-thousand artisans and shopkeepers (pīshivarān), dressed in their traditional attire, taking sanctuary (bast) in the garden of the British Legation in Tehran and demanding mashrūīyat (constitutional rule). At first sight the picture is perplexing; it stands at odds with the present studies of the Revolution: How could a “modern,” or a “national bourgeois” revolution have been brought about by a social class who appeared—and indeed were—traditional in every sense of the word?

[Fade in from commercial, sonorous male voice advertising the evening news.]

Once again a cinci hoca, once again a sexual harassing…

Recently in our country, this exorcizing of spirits, witchcraft, fortune-telling, and mediumship, which are all products of primitive, magical thought, have been spreading like an epidemic. For years, either knowingly or unknowingly, they have been given extensive advertisement in newspapers and on television stations that seek to increase their circulation with dramatic news.

—Dr. Orhan Öztürk, Cumhuriyet, 1997

Between December 1947 and the first four months of 1948, the fabric of a centuries-old Palestinian Arab society unraveled with astounding rapidity, producing 750,000 refugees. The collapse occurred within the context of widespread socioeconomic disruption and dislocation among peasants and migrant and urban workers. The eroding socioeconomic foundation severely weakened this lower stratum's defense against Zionist settlement, colonial state policies, and military pressures. Beginning in late Ottoman times and throughout the British Mandate period (1918–48), the agrarian social economy had been slowly undermined by the urban landowning class and oppressive tax and land-tenure systems. Peasant dispossession, begun in the 19th century and aggravated by Zionist land-buying in the 20th, created a significant landless rural population that was increasingly dependent on wage labor in scattered rural locations and in the cities. During the British Mandate, as Palestine was rapidly incorporated into the world market, communal harmony and social integration were further strained by urban–rural and peasant–landowner tensions, disjointed urban–working–class development, unemployment, and overcrowding. As a result, by the late 1940s Palestinian Arab society was on the brink of disintegration.

College education, whatever its form, has always carried with it a consciousness of possibilities for women.In the Company of Educated Women, B. M. Solomon Iranian college campuses are highly guarded terrains. One enters the gated and walled campuses through security guard offices. Until recently, women's attire—hijāb—and makeup would be entirely checked by one of the khwāharān at these gates. Today, Iranian women nonchalantly pass through the gates, despite their heavily applied makeup and revealing hijāb—a sign of changing social order. Student identification cards allow them through the gates, whereas nonstudent visitors, such as myself, need the prior permission of an administrator to enter. The time of my entrance is recorded, a birth certificate or an identity card is withheld, and a slip is issued to be signed by the hosting administrator. I am instructed to “fix my hijāb” and then am allowed to enter the campus.

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.

Since the 1950s Turkish foreign policy toward the Middle East has centered on the question of support for the Arab position on the Palestinian question. Ever since the U.N. General Assembly resolution of November 1947 that partitioned Palestine between the Palestinians and Israelis, all the Arab countries—even though diversity of regime has prevented them from otherwise acting as a unit in Middle Eastern politics—have consistently supported the establishment of an independent Palestinian state (in opposition to the Israelis and the United States) as a condition for stability in the Middle East. In November 1973, the heads of the Arab states declared the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—created in 1964 through the initiative of the Arab League—to be the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and they have supported its efforts to establish an independent Palestinian state in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip ever since.

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.

A number of Arab countries have been exposed to structural adjustment programs. Under the guidance of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, these programs are aimed at making various kinds of Arab socialist and mixed-economy regimes more “market-friendly,” a policy that started in the 1950s and 1960s in countries like Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, and Egypt. Considering the mounting social tension that results from continuing population growth, urban agglomeration, and unemployment, it would be naive to expect—with Fukuyama—an “end of history” as most countries try to adopt market regimes and to strengthen civil society and parliamentary democracy. As Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) well knew, economic and social change is a never-ending process. In the search for viable and sustainable strategies it may be stimulating to consider the insights of this great scholar of the Arab world who wrote 600 years ago.

IBN KHALDUN'S SOCIAL SYSTEMS THEORY

Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis into an influential clan of South Arabian origin with substantial influence in Islamic Spain and, after the fall of Seville in 1248, in north-western Africa. He was exposed to the turmoils of his time. He held his first position in 1352 at the court at Tunis at the age of 20 and then went on to high political, administrative, diplomatic, and judicial posts in the service of various rulers in the Maghrib, Spain, and Egypt.

Islamic military slavery has been the subject of a number of studies in recent years. The central theme of these scholarly works has been the dominant role played by Turks, imported as slaves and trained as cavalry, for whom the term “Mamluk” is used to denote both racial background and occupation. A second aspect, which has not been as systematically studied, is that most Muslim armies were composed of cavalry and infantry units organized into units based on racial identities. The theory was that their racial affinities were the cohesive element within a unit; that the natural rivalries between these groups would bring strength to a ruler's position as they tried to outdo one another on the field of battle; and that these racial jealousies would create a balance which would prevent any one military/racial group from dominating the government.

In 1978 Barbara Pillsbury and I dedicated our coedited book, Muslim–Christian Conflicts: Economic, Political and Social Origins (Westview), with these words: “To those who struggle to demystify religion and to those who suffer and die because the struggle is yet unfinished.” Charles Issawi observes in his preface that the contributors to the volume tend to interpret the conflicts more in economic and political terms than in “religious” terms. In an effort to develop analytical tools, my introduction distinguishes between “religion/religious identity and consciousness” (as theology/theological consciousness) and “sect/sectarianism” (as social organization, relationships, dynamics/group identity, and consciousness). I argue that sectarianism is about how “differences” are constructed; because people can believe they are very different when they are not, the task of the scholar is to describe what differences do exist, how they emerged, and why people believe they are different. Differentiation is a process, I suggest, that operates through the everyday—through socialization, through family systems, and through various other aspects of social organization in both systematic and erratic or contradictory ways.

This article addresses the impact of novel consumption practices on the shaping and negotiation of modern social identities in the late Ottoman Empire. These issues are placed within the context of the rapid social, economic, and cultural changes that occurred during the 19th century and the powerful, though ambivalent, influence of the West. A number of studies have examined the diverse and complex relations between the Ottoman Empire and European societies during this period, stressing the fundamental role of Western influence on the shaping of the late Ottoman society.1 Although most of these studies touch on issues of cultural change, it is my contention that this important field still needs to be studied in its own right.

The Ulema are the power that holds the Sultan and his people together—the medium of control. But they seldom meddle in politics. This premise was expressed by Ameen Rihani, an Arab traveller, in 1928, before either Sultan 'Abd al-'Aziz became king or Najd and its dependencies became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Was Rihani correct in his conclusion? Is he right today? This article will endeavor to explore the term ulama in the Saudi context in the twentieth century. Later, an attempt will be made to discuss the participation of Saudi ulama in a number of key cases in the history of Saudi Arabia.

The house of Saud along with the house of Muhammad b. 'Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of the Unitarian movement, were parties to a unique coalition in the eighteenth century. The coalition embraced the Unitarian movement, or Wahhabiyah, founded in the mid-eighteenth century, and members of the Arab noble house of Saud of Najd.

This article discusses a critical factor that has influenced Israel's politics, society, economy, and public discourse since this state's establishment in 1948, and particularly after the 1967 war: a highly informal but at the same time very potent “Security Network.” This Network has been critically involved in the political, social, economic, and cultural spheres, and its impact is felt in major and lesser issues. It is made up of actors who (a) are connected by informal, nonhierarchical ties; (b) share common values and perceptions regarding Israel's security and the ways to promote it; (c) have identical or similar individual and collective interests; and (d) are capable of joining hands to influence policymaking on different levels and in various spheres of the country's public life.

In December 1977 an independent candidate named Mehdi Zana was elected mayor of Diyarbakır, one of the biggest cities in Turkey's southeastern region. His election was a striking event, upsetting the troika of class, party, and state that had maintained a tight hold over the local political apparatus in Diyarbakır since the 1940s. Unlike most prior mayors of Diyarbakır, Zana did not come from a prominent family of local notables but was a working-class tailor with a middle-school education. He was one of only two independent candidates who won electoral contests in Turkey's sixty-seven big-city races; his election therefore flew in the face of a national trend that favored candidates from the country's two main political parties. Zana was well known for his left-wing, Kurdist politics, and at the time of his election he already had spent several years in jail for his activism. In a system that suppressed collective expressions of Kurdish identity, he was thus a clear ideological interloper.

Since the Second World War, United States currency has been accepted in almost every country in the world, and in many locations the ‘George Washington’ dollar has been in greater demand than local monies. In ancient, medieval and modern times, other currencies have had a similar success. Examples of this phenomenon are the ancient Athenian silver ‘owl’, the Byzantine gold solidus, the Florentine gold florin, and the Maria Theresa silver taler. In the late fourteenth century A.D. the florin was replaced by the gold coin of Venice, the ducat, as the ‘dollar of the Middle Ages’; that is, the international currency par excellence. The position of the ducat was associated with the international trading position of Venice as well as the fact that ‘the Venetian ducato, which was first coined in 1284, kept both its weight and fineness remarkably intact up to the end of the Venetian Republic’. The ducat's domination of the Eastern Mediterranean money market led to the appearance of a series of imitations, including Islamic imitations which were produced in response to the introduction of ducats into the internal economy of Mamluk Egypt. All the accounts based on Arabic sources date the domination of the ducat in the Mamluk market from a.h. 801/a.d. 1399. These same sources describe the various attempts by Mamluk sultans to meet the challenge of the ducat by coining imitations. Their efforts culminated in the ashrafî, first issued in 829/1425, which successfully replaced the ducat as the principal gold currency of the Mamluk Empire until the Ottoman conquest of 922/1517.

The notion of sectarianism can be useful in understanding the Middle East. As in India and Ireland, sectarian (or communal) identities have been crucial to the elaboration of modern politics in many parts of the region. Unlike India and Ireland today, however, the Middle East is subject to American domination. The result is that the study of Middle Eastern sectarianism is extraordinarily politicized. As scholars struggle to study sectarianism in such a climate, they need to recognize—and, ideally, find a way to move beyond—several problematic assumptions.

In the 1980s public policy shifted sharply in favor of market-based solutions, in contrast to the previously dominant “Keynesian” approach to economic management. A number of countries, irrespective of their regimes or stages of development, are currently implementing programs designed to reduce the size and scope of the public sector and strengthen the market. The privatization of public enterprises constitutes a key element in such a strategy.1 Yet hitherto, the extent of privatization—the number of enterprises involved as well as the scale of divestiture—has been extremely limited, especially considering the amount of rhetoric the idea has generated. In addition, the vigor with which privatization policies have been pursued also shows considerable variation among countries. These “stylized facts” of privatization clearly merit an explanation.2 Here I will look for that explanation by using the Turkish experience with privatization between 1980 and 1989 as a case study.

After almost five decades of industrialization—characterized, on the one hand, by considerable state intervention and, on the other, by protectionist import-substituting policies in domestic capital formation—in the early 1980s Turkey ostensibly entered a new era of export-led economic growth. Since 1960, the Turkish democracy has experienced a series of crises with astonishingly regular ten-year cycles of recurrence. The 1980 military intervention, however, brought about a radical attempt to restructure the economy, hardly comparable with the rather gradual changes in its recent economic history. Its ten years of experimentation with economic liberalization and structural adjustment provide us today with an adequate record to identify and discuss at least the salient features of this period by comparing the performance of the economy in different years.

On 4 February 1934, the secretary-general of the Republican People's Party (RPP) received an utterly distressed letter penned by Kerimoğlu Ethem, a young waiter employed at the restaurant of Şakir Usta, located in the small western Anatolian town of Bergama. Ethem's letter contained harsh complaints about the head of the RPP's Bergama branch, who had sworn at the waiter and beaten him because of a minor problem with service. “Except a few loyal supporters, no one likes him in Bergama,” wrote Ethem, “but people are afraid of raising complaints against him as he is the head of the party. I write to inform you about this immoral man, who degrades the esteem of the party in Bergama and openly defies the government's authority.” Upon receiving Ethem's letter, the secretary-general immediately ordered party inspectors to investigate the allegations. Ethem's complaint was just one among many that flooded the secretary-general's mailbox during the early 1930s.