The study of the Ottoman state in tĥe latter part of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth demands a broader analytical framework than hitherto used if its transformation and the social and political history of the Middle East, the Balkans, and even North Africa, which were parts of the Ottoman State at one time or other, are to be properly evaluated and interpreted.

Much of the meaning we commonly attach to the term ‘revolution’ grows out of our image of the French Revolution.1 The social upheavals we associate with the latter have been deeply etched in the history of thought by Taine's accounts of bloodshed and terror, and later generations have only broken the spell with difficulty.

Not long ago, two safe generalizations could be made about the Gulf monarchies: ruling families dominated their politics, and oil dominated their economies. In recent years that has begun to change. In Kuwait the parliament challenges the political predominance of the ruling family. Meanwhile, Dubai and, increasingly, the other emirates of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have made real progress in diversifying their economies away from oil—at least until the recent economic crisis. Yet political liberalization and economic diversification have not gone hand in hand: Kuwait's economy remains dependent on oil, and the United Arab Emirates remains resolutely authoritarian. This is no accident. Kuwait's high level of political participation encourages its dependence on oil while the UAE's economic diversification requires a lack of political participation by citizens. The reasons for this are specific to the peculiar political economy of these labor markets: in these richest of rentier-states, there is little need for the class compromise between capitalists and workers on which capitalist democracy usually rests.

The term “post-colonial” is a relative newcomer to the jargon of Western social science. Although discussions about the effects of colonial and imperialist domination are by no means new, the various meanings attached to the prefix “post-” and different understandings of what characterizes the post-colonial continue to make this term a controversial one. Among the criticisms leveled against it, reviewed comprehensively by Hall (1996), are the dangers of careless homogenizing of experiences as disparate as those of white settler colonies, such as Australia and Canada; of the Latin American continent, whose independence battles were fought in the 19th century; and countries such as India, Nigeria, or Algeria that emerged from very different colonial encounters in the post-World War II era. He suggests, nevertheless, that “What the concept may help us to do is to describe or characterise the shift in global relations which marks the (necessarily uneven) transition from the age of Empires to the post-independence and post-decolonisation moment” (Hall 1996, 246). Rattansi (1997) proposes a distinction between “post-coloniality” to designate a set of historical epochs and “post-colonialism” or “post-colonialist studies” to refer to a particular form of intellectual inquiry that has as its central defining theme the mutually constitutive role played by colonizer and colonized in shaping the identities of both the dominant power and those at the receiving end of imperial and colonial projects. Within the field of post-colonial studies itself, Moore-Gilbert (1997) points to the divide between “post-colonial criticism,” which has much earlier antecedents in the writings of those involved in anti-colonial struggles, and “post-colonial theory,” which distinguishes itself from the former by the incoporation of methodological paradigms derived from contemporary European cultural theories into discussions of colonial systems of representation and cultural production. Whatever the various interpretations of the term or the various temporalities associated with it might be, Hall claims that the post-colonial “marks a critical interruption into that grand whole historiographical narrative which, in liberal historiography and Weberian historical sociology, as much as in the dominant traditions of Western Marxism, gave this global dimension a subordinate presence in a story that could essentially be told from its European parameters” (Hall 1996, 250). In what follows, I will attempt a brief discussion of some of the circumstances leading to the emergence of this concept and interrogate the extent to which it lends itself to a meaningful comparison of the modern trajectories of societies in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Al-Azhar, traditionally Egypt's most respected and influential center for Islamic study, adopted an increasingly bold platform opposing Egyptian government policy throughout the mid-1990s. Al-Azhar defied government policy on a variety of sensitive issues, including population control, the practice of clitoridectomy, and censorship rights. Moreover, al-Azhar directly challenged the government in high-profile forums such as the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in September of 1994. This open opposition was remarkable in light of the tremendous capacity that the Egyptian government has shown in the past to manipulate and control al-Azhar. Over the past century, and particularly since the 1952 Free Officers' coup, the Egyptian government virtually incorporated al-Azhar as an arm of the state through purges and control over Azhar finances, and by gaining the power to appoint al-Azhar's key leadership. Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Husni Mubarak all benefited from this dominance over al-Azhar by securing fatwas legitimating their policies. Given this overwhelming leverage, what can explain al-Azhar's increased opposition to the government throughout the mid-1990s?

In retrospect, the United States sponsored coup d'état in Iran of August 19, 1953, has emerged as a critical event in postwar world history. The government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq which was ousted in the coup was the last popular, democratically oriented government to hold office in Iran. The regime replacing it was a dictatorship that suppressed all forms of popular political activity, producing tensions that contributed greatly to the 1978–1979 Iranian revolution. If Mosaddeq had not been overthrown, the revolution might not have occurred. The 1953 coup also marked the first peacetime use of covert action by the United States to overthrow a foreign government. As such, it was an important precedent for events like the 1954 coup in Guatemala and the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, and made the United States a key target of the Iranian revolution.

Even before an anthropologist‧s tour de force underlined the power of imagination as creation in narrative constructions of the “nation,” memory, myth, and might had been triumphantly parading the realm of historical scholarship. The torch of objectivity did not have to go cold for the heat of subjectivity to captivate and command audiences through print and signs, visual or aural. It is simply that the cornmodification of the past by the marketplace and the expansive imaginings of power have combined to reduce the once revered craft of the historian to a battlefield where mired imaginings posture as interpretations in a contest in which there are no umpires, only partisans. So it is not necessary to claim objective ground when presumably no such domain exists or even to spin yarns about “authenticity” and “falsification.” But it is possible to make an analytical distinction between the past as invention and the past as inspiration without denying the role of creativity or power in either conception.

A columnist in a Turkish newspaper recently asked, “Will nothing really be the same again?”3 referring to the impact of the massive earthquake of 17 August 1999 on the Turkish psyche. The writer Murathan Mungan used a similar metaphor earlier in what seems today like a prophetic statement: “I think Turkey has really come to lean against the wall. There is nowhere to go; either the wall will crumble or it will be dismantled. If it crumbles, we will be crushed below, if it is dismantled maybe we will move to another space—or at least try to.”4

Although every study of Arab society agrees on the central importance of the family to the organization of society, there has been relatively little discussion of the honor of the family, ‘ird. In the descriptions that exist, this honor is characterized as preoccupation with sexual purity and chastity, or as a cause of suspicion and jealousy between men and women. The distinctive characteristics of honor have never been spelled out; it is usually referred to briefly and then discarded in favor of such topics as the authority structure, the preference for marriage with the father's brother's daughter, and the seclusion of women.

The intention of this article is to show that, when applying his tribal policies, Saddam Hussein altered the Baʿth Party's most central tenets of faith, how and why he did this, and what it meant for Iraqi society and for the ruling party. Saddam Hussein's tribal policy started soon after the party came to power in July 1968, but it went through a quantum leap in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. First, rather than eliminating the tribal shaykh as a sociopolitical power, as dictated by party doctrine, he endeavored to manipulate the shaykhs and, through a process of socialization (or “Baʿthization”), turn them into docile tools in the service of the regime. Second, and a far sharper departure from party tradition, he turned the tribal shaykhs into legitimate partners for power-sharing; he tribalized the regime's Praetorian Guard; and he worked to reawaken long-suppressed and often forgotten tribal affinities in that part of Iraqi society which is no longer tribal and to graft onto it tribal values, or what he considered to be such values. Furthermore, he even took some steps to tribalize the party itself, and tribal customs, real or imagined, permeated the state's legal system. Kinship was legitimized as a principle guiding the selection of party leaders, and leaders' tribal roots were played up; tribal honor became a legitimate guiding principle behind foreign-policy decisions; and at least once, the president even called the Baʿth Party itself “a tribe.”

Max Weber's brief remarks on the nature of the Muslim city constitute a poignant example of what Bernard Lewis describes as the unfortunate division of labor which has pervaded the study of Islam: the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology and their successors have framed theoretical statements which were either elaborated or refuted by scholars more directly concerned with the Muslim world.

It is probably fair to say of labels such as “fundamentalist,” “modernist,” and “secularist,” which are in common use today in writing about modern Islam, that we cannot live very easily with them, but that we certainly cannot live without them.

Jordan's political-liberalization program, initiated in 1989, represents the longest sustained such opening in the Arab world today. During this time, Jordan has held three national parliamentary elections, enacted a number of liberalizing laws, removed many restrictions on the press, and minimized the role that the security services, or mukhābarāt, play in repressing opposition. Moreover, the liberalization program has survived a number of severe challenges, including the second Gulf War and the subsequent loss of Jordan's major regional trading partner, Iraq; the implementation of a difficult domestic austerity program; and the conclusion of a controversial peace treaty with Israel.

This paper proposes that domestic political conflict presents opportunities for positive change with long-term effects despite the “inherent plausibility” of its harmfulness. This position is tested using examples of Arab bread riots in the context of the wave of Arab democratizations over the past twenty years. Although generally guided and controlled, Arab political liberalizations (especially those of Sudan, Algeria, and Jordan) have their roots in pressure from below. Elsewhere (as in Tunisia and Egypt), similar pressure has helped consolidate—or, at least, place—political reform on the agenda of de-legitimized ruling elites. Democracy and democratization in the Arab Middle East have almost invariably meant a trend toward “parliamentarization” and “electoralization,” without yet presaging polyarchal rule. Between 1985 and 1996, the Arab world has experienced more than twenty pluralist or multiparty parliamentary elections, twice the number that took place in the entire preceding period since the early 1960s, when many Arab countries won independence from colonial rule. A focus on the khubz-iste (the quietist bread seeker who abandons quietism as soon as his livelihood is threatened by the state) and the hitiste (the quietist unemployed who becomes active in bread protests) provides a new perspective on democratization processes in Arab societies.

As R. H. Tawney once remarked, ‘the past reveals to the presenr what the present is capable of seeing’. Present political scientists who are interested in comparing past power structures have been the first observers to reveral methodically the fundaqmental differences between feudalism and oriental despotism. They have shown how the feudal monarchies of Europe, in their ideal form, were restricted by hereditary and independent aristocrats, by institutions representing the estates of the real, and with civil societies with corporate rights, immunities, and inalienable privileges. And they have shown how despots in the East, in their ideal form, ruled through patrimonial bureaucracies, did not contend with estate institutions, could withdraw concessions granted previously, and were unhampered by independent intermediaries between themselves and their subjects.

I begin with a pair of narratives:

From the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, the forces unleashed by the age of European imperialism and its rapid encroachment on dār al-Islām increasingly brought the hajj under the scrutiny and regulation of non-Muslim powers. The driving force behind these dramatic changes in administration of the hajj was the expansion of the British Empire. As Britain's power in the Indian subcontinent grew, so too did its maritime supremacy throughout the Indian Ocean basin. Looking to secure its access to India, ward off its European competitors, and expand its commercial interests in southwestern Arabia, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Aden, Britain's role in the region was intensified by the transit opportunities that emerged with the development of regular steamship routes between the Mediterranean and India from the 1830s to the 1860s and the eventual opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. With the exponential growth of maritime traffic that accompanied these technological advances came a similarly dramatic rise in the oceangoing pilgrim traffic from and through British India. Owing to this expansion in the number of seaborne pilgrims, the hajj soon came to be recognized as the primary conduit for the globalization of epidemic diseases, such as cholera and plague.

The fact that fifteen of the nineteen terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 were Saudi citizens inevitably raised serious questions about the social conditions that have produced such violent personalities capable of the mass taking of innocent lives and devastating an entire city, if not a nation. Answers were quick to come by, as the U.S. media pointed to the Saudi culture. Charges were made that the youth were brainwashed by the most extremist school in Islam, namely, Wahhabism. The Saudi educational institutions were also blamed for promoting anti-Semitism, anti-Western attitudes, and intolerance of other religions. Saudi society was also condemned for having a corrupt and backward political system. Naturally, in this land of intolerance and authoritarianism, resorting to violence by its inhabitants became a foregone conclusion.

Since the late 1940s, and especially since the mid-1960s, a wealth of pamphlets, articles, and books have appeared that constitute the corpus of what is now known as “Islamic economics.” This literature, whose exponents call themselves “Islamic economists,” purports to provide the blueprint of an economic system consonant with the original sources of Islam. The central feature of the proposed system is that individuals are guided in their economic decisions by a set of behavior norms, ostensibly derived from the Qur'an and the Sunna. Two other features stand out: zakāt, a tax considered the basis of Islamic fiscal policy, and the prohibition of interest, viewed as the centerpiece of Islamic monetary policy. Virtually all Islamic economists consider this trio—the norms, zakāt, and zero interest—the pillars of the Islamic system.’