This paper introduces methods to estimate wealth levels and disparities amongMuslim inhabitants of 18th-century Ottoman Kastamonu. Our sources in thispursuit are estate inventories of the deceased (sing. tereke) as recorded in Kastamonu court records (sicils), mainly in the first half of the 18thcentury (1712-60). By analyzing information provided by these sources through avariety of quantitative techniques, we measure levels of inequality amongMuslims of Kastamonu and describe the relationship between economic privilegeand social, political, religious, and occupational status as well as genderidentity. Our work outlines the contours of economic stratification in18th-century Kastamonu and reveals the relative positions of various socialgroups within this hierarchy.

The Sudanese Mahdī has been pictured as a villain, as a hero, as a reactionary, as an anti-imperialist revolutionary, and in many other ways. The romance and excitement of the nineteenth-century Mahdiyya has inspired novels and movies, while the many faceted reality of the movement has caught the attention of a wide range of scholars in search of case studies of specific phenomena. In recent years the Mahdī has been used as an example of a ‘charismatic’ leader,1 the founder of a religionpolitical party in the ‘third world,’2 the leader of a millenarian revolt,3 an African rebel against alien rule,4 and a Semitic messiah in an African context. Many of these analyses are the constructive products of the changing situation in the world of contemporary historical studies. Each tends to reflect a broader analytical concern aroused by modern developments.

This article analyzes the increased visibility and frequency of public weeping by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Building on the literature that conceptualizes populism as a particular political style, I argue that crying in public can be understood as a populist performative act of legitimation, serving to dramatize the basic components of the populist discourse. I also contend that the increased frequency of public weeping by Erdoğan relate to two major dilemmas that populists in power encounter. Both dilemmas stem from the growing discrepancy between populist rhetoric and practice, diminishing the credibility of the populist leader. Signaling emotional authenticity, Erdoğan’s tearfulness serves to communicate a message of closeness to the people and sustain the anti-elite rhetoric at a time when his political power and economic wealth increasingly set him apart from the politically and economically marginalized. It also attempts to justify authoritarian practices while sustaining the claim to rule in the name of popular power and mobilize constituents against the opposition.

The term effendiyya (singular: effendi) appears in many articles and books on the social and political history of the Middle East between the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. Many authors have made use of this term, but very few have paused to discuss its meaning. At least one important scholar, however, raised doubts about its usefulness.

A prominent feature of the literature on Islamic law is the absence of reference to concrete cases. The preference given to oral testimony over written evidence by the ulema may have been one of the reasons for this neglect. But a more crucial factor can be traced back to the conceptual apparatus of the researchers who made use of the blurred notion of “traditional” society. As obedience to norms in such societies was supposedly automatic, the researchers could legitimately focus on ideals instead of the complexities of concrete behavior.

The causes for the mahdi's revolt in Sudan have been fully studied by modern historians and point to economic, social, religious, and administrative short-comings of the sixty-year Turco-Egyptian domination there. As for the timing, one must look attwo factors that together had a decisive influence. First, Egypt's financial difficulties subjected it to increasing European control and, consequently, to the deposition of the Khedive Ismaʿcil in June 1879 and the appointment to the throne of his son Tawfiq, a puppet of the great European powers, thus damaging the prestige of Muhammad ʿAli's dynasty. Further, Cairo was preoccupied throughout 1880–82 by a confrontation between the government and the nationalist movement of the native Egyptian officers in the army, led by Ahmad ʿUrabi, resulting among other things in the lack of a clear policy as regards Sudan. Second, there was the resignation in January 1880 of Colonel Charles Gordon, the governor-general of Sudan, who enjoyed wide political and economic autonomy, and the appointment of Muhammad Raʿuf Pasha, who was subordinated directly to the government in Cairo, as his successor in Khartoum. While Gordon, who had an energetic, enterprising, and authoritative personality, left Sudan in the midst of reforms in almost all fields, Muhammad Raʾuf Pasha had a different nature altogether. He was a mild and gentle ruler whose authority was narrowed by Cairo, where the political state of affairs was turning into chaos.

Subsidies are a widespread economic practice in most developing countries and in centrally planned economies such as those of Eastern Europe. In the United States and Western Europe, they are generally associated with price support for producers, especially in agriculture. In the less-developed countries (LDCs), subsidies usually support consumers. When extended to producers, the benefit is passed on to consumers through official price controls. The question is whether such price support is the best means available to meet the basic needs strategy of development.

Subsidies in LDCs often begin as measures to help the poor, but they usually expand beyond the target population and constitute by and large a wage supplement for almost all salaried workers.

During the final century of its existence, the Ottoman state, seeking to adapt and survive in a European-dominated world, launched a series of far-ranging reform programs touching nearly every aspect of Ottoman life. The financial basis of these programs rested on a predominantly agricultural economy characterized by Ottoman and foreign observers alike as backward and impoverished, yet possessing vast potential.Generally, these observers also agreed that Turkey's function in the industrializing world was to supply agricultural produce and raw materials. The expansion of Turkish agricultural production would not only help satisfy increasing European demand but also, by raising Ottoman revenues, both ensure the continuation of the Ottoman Empire and provide the additional funds required by the modernization efforts.

The question whether modern or “modernizing” societies tend to become similar has been a focus of great preoccupation among scholars—historians, sociologists, or political scientists—who, since the early fifties, have been concerned with the analysis of the contemporary scene, of processes of so-called modernization and development. Most of the studies of modernization in general and of convergence of industrial societies in particular, which developed in the fifties up to the mid-sixties, have stressed that the more modern or developed different societies become, the more similar will they become in their basic, central, institutional aspects, and the less the importance of traditional elements within them.

Amid all the attention that Iranian politics has received since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, local politics has been almost totally neglected. This neglect vitiates our understanding of contemporary Iran, as it is at the local level that state policies are carried out, contested, reshaped, resisted, or revised. Beginning with the centralizing state-building of Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1926–41), Tehran increasingly dominated Iran's politics, commercial activities, and cultural life, and most of the country's Westernized elites lived in the capital. The 1979 revolution was to some extent a populist revolt against this Westernized elite, and among the new rulers those whose social and family roots are outside Tehran abound. Among the common people, “the experience of participation in mass political activity … undermined the feeling of political abjection,” while the new rulers have attempted, not always successfully, to lessen the gap not only between rich and poor, but also between rich and poor provinces. The new prominence of provincials in national life has gone hand in hand with a greater recognition of Iran's ethnic and linguistic diversity, while at the same time the sense of common participation in the revolution and the Iran–Iraq War has knitted people of different ethnic backgrounds more closely together.

The conquest of the Mamluk sultanate by the Ottoman Empire brought into confrontation two centers in the history of Islamic civilization. One, Asia Minor and southeast Europe, was the center of the Ottoman Empire. The other, Egypt, had been the core of the Mamluk sultanate for 2½ centuries (1250–1517). Both states were dominated by Turkish-speaking elites based on the institution of military slavery. In both cases this slave-recruited manpower was the backbone of the army, and, to a lesser extent, of the administration.

In the historiography of Egypt it has long been accepted that private ownership of land was introduced in the nineteenth century. This development in statute law has often been linked analytically to a process of “modernization.” Modernization theory posits a fundamental dichotomy between two ideal-type societies, the traditional and modern, which implies an equally sharp discontinuity between historical eras: before and after the beginning of modernization. In this view, traditional societies lack the potential for generating significant social change from within. Change results rather from the expansion of communications and diversification of technology worldwide from modern Europe and North America. In the process of modernization, traditional norms and structures break down in the host societies, and new, rational values and institutions emerge in their place. The development of Egypt's new land regime is usually considered one such change.

It is ironic and perhaps telling that the one national independence movement largely ignored by historians of the Arab Middle East is the Syrian nationalist movement. The irony, of course, is that the birthplace of Arab nationalism was Syria; it was to Damascus that Arab nationalists in Palestine, Iraq and elsewhere looked for inspiration, guidance, and moral support in the interwar period; and out of the Syrian movement sprang the radical nationalism of the Ba'thists. Intellectual histories of the precursors, birth, and content of Arab nationalism abound, and, insofar as these histories deal with the birthplace of Arab nationalism, they must discuss Damascus and Syria just prior to and during World War I. But once the intellectual birth of Arab nationalism has been discussed, interest in the history of Syria wanes to be revived only after World War II, with the emergence of Ba'thism and the military in politics. What follows is by no means a comprehensive analysis of the nature and organization of the Syrian national independence movement; rather, it is a preliminary investigation of some salient characteristics of the politics of Syrian-Arab nationalism in the early years of the French Mandate.

Nationalism insists on the uniqueness of each nation. So, too, does the study of nationalism. For example, Ernest Renan, a cheerleader of nationalism, used the imagery of each nation “hold[ing] one note in the concert of humanity.” Elie Kedourie, who abhorred the excesses of nationalism, similarly identified its essence as a commitment to “the excellence of diversity.” Whether focused on political borders or social solidarity, the concept of the nation necessarily marks insiders with a special status, distinct from all others.

Indian Muslims have always been keenly aware of the differences between their own communal group and the Hindus on the one hand, and between themselves and the Christian foreigners on the other. This awareness of a separate Muslim identity was much stronger at the level of the elite, however, than at the level of the masses. At times, these feelings erupted into calls for jihad against the British, for example, the Wahabi and Fraizia movements. They also manifested themselves in the creation of religious schools, like Deoband, to preserve the Muslim way of life. Finally they emerged as the reformist Aligarh Movement to promote modern education, reinterpret the teachings of Islam, and secure the rights of Muslims as a minority community. In the early twentieth century, various attempts were made to forge a united front with the Hindus for an India independent of Great Britain. These attempts met with repeated failure.

This article concerns the dominant institution of religious authority within modern Usuli Twelver Shiʿi Islam: the marjaʿiyya. The most senior clerics serve as “sources of emulation” (marājiʿ al-taqlīd), informing the moral conduct of their lay “imitators” (muqallidūn). Despite the importance of this relationship, academic writing on what we call its “affective” qualities, especially from lay perspectives, is limited. We provide ethnographic data from anthropological research into Islamic medical ethics in Lebanon. Interviews in 2003 with infertile Shiʿi patients who were considering controversial assisted reproductive technologies revealed rare insights into which authorities they followed and in what numbers and how this relationship was experienced and drawn upon by those in need. We compare the very different relationships inspired by the two authorities most cited in our study: the late Beirut-based Ayatollah Fadlallah; and the Iranian Ayatollah Khaminaʾi, Hizbullah's patron. From his local base, Fadlallah offered a vivid and responsive persona of a qualitatively distinct type.

This article examines the depiction of women and gender within Coptic Orthodox video films or “hagiopics” produced between 1987 and 2010. As part of a recent religious renewal, hagiopics have expanded, altered, and reinvented traditional stories of saints and pious figures and have also generated, within this traditionally patriarchal setting, a wider space for the articulation of female voices. While their inclusion can be seen as potentially empowering for women, this paper suggests that during Pope Shenouda III's reign (1971–2012), the films became a powerful vehicle for broadcasting the church's conservative teachings on female power and authority, marriage and marital dissolution, spousal abuse, and femininity. By highlighting an array of exemplary female characters, hagiopics capture women's role as custodians of a distinctive Coptic ethos and of family and communal cohesiveness. The films’ emphasis on women's physical modesty, submissiveness, and obedience to male figureheads also hints at the modern church's anxieties about women's increasing autonomy in choosing marriage partners and their growing demands for more equal treatment within the church.

This article analyzes the microprocesses that imbue bread with meaning and the macropolitics that shape its subsidized provision. It begins by outlining bread's multiple forms of value and significance, some easily quantifiable, others not. It problematizes the predominant approach to studying moral economies before putting forth an alternative framework. Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork in Jordan, the following empirical sections examine the different ways in which bureaucrats, bakers, and ordinary citizens portray the government's universal subsidy of Arabic bread. I unpack the diverse opinions encountered in the field and discuss their links to the Hashemite regime's polyvalent legitimating discourse. The article then dissects the politics of provisions that contribute to the bread subsidy's paradoxical persistence. It concludes by considering the relationship between moral economies, opposition politics, and authoritarian power in the context of Jordan's ongoing food subsidy debate.

This article explores the “fundamentalist dilemma,” or how fundamentalist movements participate in secular political systems, especially when they gain prominent political positions that allow them to impose their extreme ideology on the entire society. After analyzing prevailing responses to this dilemma, ranging from political integration to aggressive takeover, the article turns to the case of Israeli Haredim. It explores three models of political integration through which Haredim have applied religious practices in the public sphere: protest, consolidation, and takeover. The study's main finding is that, opposite to a commonly accepted assumption that fundamentalists’ integration into secular politics causes them to moderate, the more political power that fundamentalists accrue the stronger is their tendency to promote their religious agenda. Yet the Israeli Haredi case also reveals the limitations of this tendency: fundamentalists often restrain their expansionist instinct when having to take nonfundamentalist reactions into consideration.

The social organization of industrial work in Turkey provides us with an interesting case for the examination of the relationship between established social forms and meanings and the technological ad organizational exigencies of economic production. The organization of Turkish industrial production is, on the one hand, clearly an outgrowth of the technological apparatus that was imported from the Vest in the process of development since the nineteenth century. On the other hand, it is also deeply rooted in an indigenous social structure and culture. In this paper I hope to outline the interrelationship between these diverse factors.