Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski provide a spirited defense of their book, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, which I critiqued in the November 1997 issue of IJMES. They explain their ideas on nationalism and how they purportedly applied them in the book, and conclude that I have misread “both modern nationalism and Egyptian history.” That remains to be seen. What is certain is that one cannot find in Redefining the Egyptian Nation the analysis of the thought of Benedict Anderson and Anthony D. Smith presented in their response (“Print Culture, Social Change, and the Process of Redefining Imagined Communities in Egypt,” present issue). Neither can one find in Imagined Communities the ideas and the stress on “nationalism as a cultural construct” that they attribute to Anderson. Gershoni and Jankowski now allege intentions and arguments for books whose texts do not contain what they ascribe to them. Their claims here for Redefining the Egyptian Nation appear to reflect the more extensive reading on nationalism which they did for their recent co-edited book Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East rather than a familiarity with the literature evidenced in the book under discussion, which was published four years ago.

In 1933, the Urdu and Persian poet Muhammad Iqbal (1873–1938) became the first Muslim to worship in the mosque of Cordoba since its conversion into a cathedral after the Moors were expelled from Spain in 1492. Iqbal had gone to London as a delegate to the third roundtable conference on the political future of India. On his return, he was invited to lecture in Madrid by the Orientalist Asin Palacios, and took the opportunity to visit the monument. Dramatizing the symbolic significance of his visit to the mosque, Iqbal swooned upon entering and uttered verses that presumably came to be included in his celebrated Urdu poem “Masjid-i Qurtubah”. Some years before, in 1919, the Egyptian Arabic poet Ahmad Shawqi (1868–1932) ended his five-year exile in Spain with a similar visit to the Andalusian monuments, albeit with less dramatic fanfare. Nevertheless, Shawqi as well was accompanied by his muse. In the introduction to his own famous poem about Islamic Spain, the “Siniyyah”, Shawqi recounts how the embryonic verses of this poem came to him as he toured the mosque and the Alhambra of Granada.

Undeclared ambitions for the future notwithstanding, my current research profile is one that could qualify me as an “environmental historian” by only the most indulgent of standards. My contribution to this roundtable will thus be written less in the mode of a practicing researcher in the field and more from the perspective of a teacher (at a U.S. public land-grant university) currently in the process of trying to “environmentalize” two large survey courses in history.

By the late seventeenth century, Algeria and Tunisia had established regimes that were largely independent of Ottoman sovereignty in almost every regard, although the Porte continued, in strictly legal terms, to exert minimal rights of sovereignty.

        Michel Le Gall1

But, let there be no mistake: the more a regency of Barbary has become fearsome to the Christian princes, the more the Sultan is its absolute master. He had only to utter a word to end an unjust war and fix even the terms for peace.

        Jean-Michel Venture de Paradis2

Separated by two centuries, these two quotations describe the role of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa in very different—indeed, contradictory—terms. On the one hand, Ottoman North Africa is depicted as a region where independent political entities emerged out of a century of Ottoman rule, ready as it were for the eventual emergence of nation-states in the 20th century. Venture de Paradis's earlier description, however, is devoid of the hindsight gained by our knowledge of the “end of the story.” It tells us that by the end of the 18th century, contrary to the contemporary accepted view of the remoteness of the Maghribi “regencies” from the imperial center in Istanbul, the three Ottoman provinces of North Africa were indeed an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, and the rulers of these provinces were obedient subjects of the Sublime Porte.

For nearly forty years, scholars have utilized the metanarrative of a center–periphery cleavage first proposed by Şerif Mardin to explain a variety of phenomena in Turkish politics and society. When used to interpret electoral cleavages in the multiparty period, however, a center–periphery cleavage cannot effectively explain electoral outcomes. Focusing on the initial stage of multiparty competition, when the cleavage is often said to have been most salient, this article explores the empirical evidence to show that the concept as commonly employed has actually confounded an effective understanding of electoral behavior in Turkey. Rather than demonstrating a clear electoral division between the elites of the social center and the masses during this period, the article reveals two distinct cross-cutting patron-client strategies used by elite-dominated parties to cater to the rural population. The significant patterns of change in Turkey's electoral outcomes over time further illustrate the need to focus on how political parties and elites accumulate votes—that is, on their vote targeting strategies—rather than rely on static sociopolitical cleavages.

Charles D. Smith's review essay on our book Redefining the Egyptian Nation in the October 1997 issue of IJMES undertakes a critical analysis of the work. Simultaneously, it raises broader questions about the relevance of some of the insights of theoreticians of nationalism, particularly Benedict Anderson, to the case of Egyptian nationalism. The essay's attempt to evaluate the utility of recent theoretical writing on nationalism for the study of the Middle East is a worthwhile endeavor. However, we believe that the essay's analysis of the book itself is based on a familiarity with only a small selection of the sources relevant to understanding Egyptian nationalism, and that it provides a misleading interpretation of the contents of the work. We also feel that its observations about nationalist theory sometimes misconstrue our use of the same, and in general underestimate the importance of recent theoretical work on nationalism for the study of Egypt and the Middle East.

The history of Ottoman transportation as a whole still remains to be written. To date, scholars have concentrated mainly upon the institutional aspects of the problem. Thus Cengiz Orhonlu in his pioneering work has dealt with attempts on the part of the Ottoman administration to maintain street and road paving, establish ferryboat services, control river navigation, and ensure the safety of public roads. Boat traffic within Istanbul, which linked the different parts of the Ottoman capital and thus ensured their mutual integration, was also treated mainly from the Ottoman administration's point of view.1 After Orhonlu's untimely death, research into the institutional framework supporting Ottoman communications was continued by other scholars. Particularly the arrangements intended to supply official couriers with post-horses have recently been made the object of several monographs.2

A principal belief of the Ahl-i Haqq, an esoteric sect centered in Iranian Kurdistan, is that the Divine Essence has successive manifestations in human form. The Ahl-i Haqq religious universe comprises two distinct yet interrelated worlds: the inner world (ʿālam-i bāṭin) and the outer world (ʿālam -i ẓāhir), each with its own order and its own rules. We as ordinary human beings are aware of the order of the outer world, but our life is governed by the rules of the inner world, where our ultimate destiny lies.

On 24 July 1660, a great conflagration broke out in Istanbul. An Ottoman writer conveys the horror of the event: “[t]housands of homes and households burned with fire. And in accordance with God's eternal will, God changed the distinguishing marks of night and day by making the very dark night luminous with flames bearing sparks, and darkening the light-filled day with black smoke and soot.” The fire began in a store that sold straw products outside the appropriately named Firewood Gate (Odun kapısı) west of Eminönü, and it devastated densely crowded neighborhoods consisting of wooden homes. The strong winds of Istanbul caused the fire to spread violently in all directions, despite the efforts of the deputy grand vizier (kaimmakam) and others who attempted the impossible task of holding it back with hooks, axes, and water carriers. Sultan Mehmed IV's boon companion and chronicler, Abdi Paşa, notes that the fire marched across the city like an invading army: the flames “split into divisions, and every single division, by the decree of God, spread to a different district.” The fire spread north, west, and to Unkapanı. According to Mehmed Halife, in Süleymaniye the spires of the four minarets of the great mosque burned like candles. The blaze reached Bayezid and then moved south and west to Davud Paşa, Kumkapı, and even as far west as Samatya. The flames did not spare the Hippodrome (At Meydanı) in the east or Mahmud Paşa and the markets at the center of the peninsula, either. Abdi Paşa estimated that the fire reduced 280,000 households to ashes as the city burned for exactly forty-nine hours. Two-thirds of Istanbul was destroyed in the conflagration, and as many as 40,000 people lost their lives. Although fire was a frequent occurrence in 17th-century Istanbul, this was the worst the city had ever experienced. Thousands died in the plague that followed the fire as rats feasted on unburied corpses and spread disease. Because three months prior to this fire a conflagration had broken out in the heart of the district of Galata, across the Golden Horn from Eminönü, much of the city lay in ruins in the summer of 1660.

The seventh Abbasid caliph ʿAbd Allah al-Maʾmun (r. 813–833) was noted for the breadth of his intellectual horizons, and historians often associate him with the Golden Age of Islam. This image of glory is tarnished, however, by two particular actions that the caliph took: his declaration (in 827) of a doctrine asserting that the Qurʾan was created and his ordering of a miḥna an inquisition, that was designed to ensure acquiescence in this doctrine. The miḥna, an unprecedented event in the history of Islam, was begun by al-Maʾmun just four months before his sudden death in 833 and continued by his two immediate successors, al-Muʾtasim and al-Wathiq. It lasted some sixteen years until it was finally abolished by the tenth Abbasid caliph, al-Mutawakkil.

Although the effects of the Revolution of 23 July 1952 on Egyptian politics and the economy are well known, its impact on Egyptian culture has not yet been satisfactorily explained. Politically and economically, the Revolution has gone thrsough two more or less distinct phases. During the first decade of its existence, it moved cautiously on all fronts, and its spokesmen were fond of pointing out that their ‘ideology’ was experimental, pragmatic, and flexible rather than bound to any set of predetermined ideas. Then in 1961 the government veered sharply to the left. The so-called Socialist Laws were issued, altering profoundly the ownership and distribution of wealth in Egypt.

The concept of al-walāʾ wa-l-barāʾ (loyalty to Islam, Muslims, and God and disavowal of everything else) has developed in various ways in Wahhabi discourse since the 19th century. This can partly be ascribed to the civil war that caused the collapse of the second Saudi state (1824–91) and the lessons that both quietist and radical Wahhabi scholars have drawn from that episode. In this article, I contend that Wahhabi contestations of al-walāʾ wa-l-barāʾ can be divided into two distinct trends—one social and the other political—and that both show the enduring legacy of the second Saudi state, which can still be discerned in Wahhabi scholarly writings on the subject of al-walāʾ wa-l-barāʾ today.

Ceremony and elaborate protocols are commonly associated with kingship, authority, and power. The pageantry associated with the British monarchy in its public ceremonials, for example, is imbued with a sense of an ancient past. Yet, these traditions are recent inventions derived from the late Victorian period. Traditions, particularly Western practices, are often made up, choreographed, and then formally instituted in a matter of a few years, rapidly gaining a sense of permanence. Sometimes entirely new symbols and devices are invented to confirm gravitas and substance and to serve as rallying points for the new entity (e.g., Marianne, John Bull, or Uncle Sam).

What does it mean to “integrate” a complex and multifaceted tradition such as Islam into a transnational space as heterogeneous as that of modern Europe? And what kind of a project is precisely that of a “European Islam,” increasingly invoked today across the continent by a wide range of state and nonstate actors, including many Muslims? At a time dominated by variants of the clash of civilizations thesis, the project appears rather equivocal. What conceptions of Europe as a political space, and of Islam as a religious tradition, underlie the endeavor?

For more than a decade, post-Islamism has been at the center of a major debate in French academia regarding the historical evolution of Islamism. The concept was put forth in the early 1990s as an attempt to apprehend the apparent crisis within many Islamic movements of the Middle East. In Iran, the increasingly authoritarian character of the Islamic republic, as well as the predominance of the mullahs' discretionary powers, seemed to undermine the credibility of the Islamist alternative. Elsewhere, as in Egypt and Algeria, the advent of an Islamic order never came to pass and appeared illusory. Islamists were unable to cope with the repression and the containment policies of secular states. Therefore, a number of French scholars argued that Islamism—that is, the holistic, populist, and often revolutionary ideology whose goal is the establishment of an Islamic state and the governance of all aspects of society according to Islamic principles—had reached a dead end. Ruhollah Khomeini, Sayyid Qutb, and Abu al-Ala al-Mawdudi were passé. An era of post-Islamism was dawning.

The victory which the Zionists have achieved…lies not in the superiority of one people over another, but rather in the superiority of one system over another. The reason for this victory is that the roots of Zionism are grounded in modern Western life while we for the most part are still distant from this life and hostile to it. They live in the present and for the future while we continue to dream the dreams of the past and to stupify ourselves with its fading glory.1

The expert is a quintessential figure of modern bureaucratic rule, offering a “protean image of authority and rational knowledge.” Tracing the development of modern rule, Max Weber describes the emergence in European government of a “professional labor force, specialized in expertness through long years of preparatory training…[and] based on the division of labor” as a “gradual development of half a thousand years.” Different fields, Weber suggests, demanded experts at different moments, but in three areas—finance, war, and law—“expert officialdom in the more advanced states was definitely triumphant during the sixteenth century.” For the British civil service, the triumph of the expert has been located in “the nineteenth-century revolution in government” such that the “modern image of the expert, canonised and criticised, was well established by the 1920s.” With this consolidation of the expert's place in modern rule, it has been generally agreed that, whether for good or for ill, “the expert in the civil service is here to stay.”

We did not see them growing up. We did not think these jaded middle-class boys and girls would one day be resilient and hold their ground. We did not realize that they would be brave, supremely articulate, and driven by aspirations beyond our dreams. The whole thing started with the desperate act of self-immolation by a young Tunisian man. His death sparked a wave of rage against poverty, social exclusion, and corruption. Almost overnight, young men and women created spaces in squares, streets, and alleys where we could imagine new Arab countries. Enraged yet nonviolent, they used technology and the vocabulary of democracy to connect and mobilize ordinary Arab citizens of all walks of life and capture the attention of the world. In Egypt, Tahrir Square became the epicenter of the people's demands for bread, dignity, and social justice. Without leaders or a timetable, but with unconditional demands for immediate change, online activists provided us with physical and social grounds to imagine a new country. We all brought something to the square: blood, medicines, bandages, food, water, blankets, generators, diapers, mobile-phone chargers, garbage bags, wipes, and our own personal notes to the regime (and the world) written in bold letters. Mine just said: “Leave.”

Despite the attention that scholars have lavished on Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima, the historiographical significance of that remarkable work is still not well understood. Scholars continue to discuss the Muqaddima largely within the context of Islamic historiography, even though most of them regard it as an anomaly that differs fundamentally from the works of other Muslim historians. In certain respects, the Muqaddima belongs to an Islamic historical tradition, that of al-Tabari and al-Masעudi. Yet, its dominant intellectual lineage is the rationalist thought that stretches from the Peripatetic philosophers, and especially from Aristotle (384–322 BCE), through such Greco–Islamic thinkers as al-Farabi (870–950 CE), Ibn Sina (980–1037 CE), and Ibn Rushd (1126–1198 CE) onward to European philosophical historians and sociologists of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It is precisely because Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406 CE) used the logical apparatus and materialist assumptions of this rationalist tradition as the conceptual basis for his new historical science that he can be characterized as the last Greek historian. He can be considered the first Annaliste historian because the same Greek philosophical heritage influenced both the sociologist Émile Durkheim, who wrote his Latin dissertation on Montesquieu (1689–1755 CE), and also Durkheim's student, Marc Bloch, the cofounder of the Annales School. This heritage is also visible in an attenuated form in Fernand Braudel's distinction between the longue durée and the history of events. Indeed, Ibn Khaldun developed what modern scholars would identify as a structuralist methodology, using classical logic to identify enduring socioeconomic realities underlying cultural phenomena and ephemeral events, what he describes as the “general conditions of regions, races and periods that constitute the historian's foundation.”

The creation of Pakistan was a crushing blow to those hoping to establish autonomous, ethnically defined states in the western borderlands of the Indian empire. The best known of these movements, the Red Shirts (Khudai Khidmatgar), was active in the North-West Frontier Province since the 1920s and moved from affiliation with the Indian National Congress to advocating sovereignty and ultimately an independent Pushtun state when faced with the inevitability of Partition.1 Similar Pushtun and Balochi movements arose in the last decades of the Raj in the areas that now constitute the Pakistani province of Balochistan. In the pivotal years of 1947 and 1948, the Muslim League was able to outmaneuver and suppress these ambitious young movements, but they did not die. In subsequent decades, Balochi and Pushtun nationalism became key elements in the political discourse and the equation of power in Balochistan, and they remain so today.