“Are you going to behave like a factory girl?!” With this phrase, an 1880s peasant in Mount Lebanon not only admonished a daughter, but also encapsulated the social and economic transformations which were altering the notions of family and society, and the gender roles underlying both. Typically enough, these transformations came about between 1843 and 1914 as a result of the interaction between the local peasant economy and European capitalism. Modernization and dependency narratives of such an encounter follow the line of “tradition” versus “modernity,” with Europe ultimately dictating an inevitable outcome to its absolute benefit. Yet closer examination reveals the story in Mount Lebanon to be far more complicated. In particular, gender replaces this artificial bipolarity with a triangular struggle among peasant men, peasant women, and European capitalists. Furthermore, rather than being historical victims, women and men in Mount Lebanon—with intersecting and diverging interests—worked to contour the outcome of their encounter with Europe and to take control over their individual and collective lives. While the equation of power was most definitely in favor of European merchants and capitalists, the struggles of these peasants were not for naught. Rather, as I will argue in this paper, their travails made the outcome multifaceted and less predictable than European capitalists would have liked it to be.

The term “secularization” is used to qualify that manner of change which occurred in the Islamic system of civil law from 1451 to 1926. It refers to the processes that caused gradual revision and/or change in Islamic Ottoman and Turkish civil law and connotes a departure from the orthodox tenets prescribed by Islamic law. This departure is a process that may create gradual or abrupt change. Also that which in retrospect is classified as a change may not at the outset be classified as such. Specifically, this change may begin in the form of supplementation and continue in this manner without the process taking the form of major change. On the other hand there may be total change within the structure undergoing these experiences. This structure, which is the subject of discussion, is the Islamic Ottoman and Turkish civil law. The secularization process in this case represents: (1) supplementation, (2) reform (Tanzimat and the Mecelle), (3) change (abrogation of the capitulatory system), (4) complete secular change in civil law (adoption of the Swiss Civil Code).

The revolutionary “spring of freedom” did not last long in the Iranian universities. The revolutionary movement had turned the universities into centers of political activity, where crowds gathered and rival political groups clashed. Control over the Tehran University soccer field for mass rallies became a sign of a political organization's power. On 11 February 1979, the first tank liberated from the Shah's army was driven to the campus of Tehran University; the Organization of the People's Mujahedin set up its headquarters in the Faculty of Sciences, and the Organization of People's Fadaʾian Guerrillas in the Faculty of Engineering. Between them, the university mosque became the headquarters for an “Imam's committee,” where fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds stored weapons captured from the Shah's artillery. When the universities reopened shortly after the February insurrection, similar divides were made within academic buildings of all universities. Various groups partitioned public areas, claimed various rooms, and even parceled out the walls for poster space. Life was as chaotic in the universities as it was outside. However, the difference was that while the Islamic Republic was gaining political hegemony in Iranian society, it was losing the ideological battle in the universities, where radical groups were recruiting and training student activists, many of whom were political organizers in factories, farms, and neighborhoods. The students and faculty who supported the Islamic regime constituted only a small minority.

The “new Arab woman” of the early 20th century has received much recent scholarly attention. According to the middle- and upper-class ideal, this woman was expected to strengthen the nation by efficiently managing her household, educating her children, and contributing to social causes. Yet, we cannot fully understand the “new Arab woman” without studying the domestic workers who allowed this class to exist. Domestic workers carried out much of the physical labor that let their mistresses pursue new standards of domesticity, social engagement, and participation in nationalist organizations. This article examines relationships between Arab housewives and female domestic workers in British Mandate Palestine (1920–1948) through an analysis of domestic reform articles and memoirs. Arab domestic reformers argued that elite housewives, in order to become truly modern women, had to treat maids with greater respect and adjust to the major socioeconomic changes that peasants were experiencing, yet still maintain a clear hierarchy in the home. Palestinian memoirists, meanwhile, often imagine their pre-1948 homes as a site of Palestinian national solidarity. Their memories of intimate relationships that developed between elite families and peasant maids have crucially shaped nationalist narratives that celebrate the Palestinian peasantry.

Established in 1920, al-Nadi al-Homsi in São Paulo, Brazil was a young men's club devoted to Syrian patriotic activism and culture in the American mahjar (diaspora). Founded by a transnational network of intellectuals from Homs, the fraternity committed itself to what it saw as a crucial aspect of Syrian national independence under Amir Faysal: the development of a political middle class and a masculine patriotic culture. Al-Nadi al-Homsi directed this project at Syrian youth, opening orphanages, libraries, and schools in both Syria and in Brazil. In these spaces, men and boys congregated to celebrate a polite male culture centered on secular philanthropy, popular education, and corporeal discipline through sports. This article argues that during the 1920s and 1930s, al-Nadi al-Homsi's politics of benevolence was part of a larger social milieu that drew analogies between strong Syrian minds and bodies and a sovereign, independent Syrian homeland.

At the time of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt—the conventional starting point of modern Middle Eastern history—central governments in the Arab world had long been exceedingly weak. The situation began to change after 1800: At an early stage, Egypt was brought under firm control, and toward the end of the century the Ottoman regime began to tighten its grip on its Arab subjects. In some places, however —the Arabian peninsula, for instance, or Morocco—it is only within living memory that the authorities have acquired the kind of power over their territories that a modern state is expected to have.

The Sahel of Tunisia is part of the arid zone that extends from Morocco to Afghanistan. People in this region profess the religion of Islam. Their views on the links between divine power, human actions, and rain are based on the Quran and are expressed in the rain prayers (salat a1-isrisqa') prescribed by the Prophet and therefore common to all of them. This article refers to North Africa, centering on the village of Sidi Ameur in the Sahel of Tunisia.

The Greco-Turkish War was one of the major aftershocks in the wake of World War I. In attacking war-ravaged Turkey, Greece sought to realize her goal of a new Hellenic presence in Asia Minor. This action, together with British, French, and Italian designs upon Anatolian territory, threatened Turkey's existence as a nation.

Revolutions are momentous events that shake the foundations of societies, transforming their social and political structures and often signalling the triumph of a new ideology. It has long been noted that the international ramifications of revolutions are no less profound than their domestic impact. This is not only because revolutions often give rise to powerful states, thus potentially undermining the extant balance of power, but also because they sometimes infuse those states with norms and objectives that are antithetical to those subscribed to by other members of the international system. They also exert a demonstration effect beyond the boundaries of their country of origin, with a potential for triggering waves of revolution and counter-revolution both within and between societies.

In the course of the nineteenth century, the relationship between Beirut and Mount Lebanon underwent important changes that have affected Lebanon's political life up to the present day. The city and the countryside had always been to some extent mutually dependent. They became more closely tied in response to the economic and political transformation of the region in the age of European penetration. This growing interdependence increasingly took the form of Beirut's ascendancy over the Mountain. While in earlier centuries it was the Mountain which had extended its sway over the city, in the nineteenth century the process was reversed. But Beirut's triumph as the dominant partner in the relationship was not an unmixed blessing: While bringing prosperity to the city, it also transferred to Beirut many of the unresolved tensions of the Mountain, preparing the way for the city's sectarian rivalries and tensions in more recent times.

On 13 July 2005, the Bursa edition of the Turkish daily Hürriyet announced the inauguration of a clock tower in the small Anatolian town of Çınarcık. The clock tower, which stands thirteen meters (roughly forty-three feet) tall, comprises a square-sectioned, white-colored, and fluted Classical column atop which a cube with four yellow-rimmed clock dials sits. Metal pennants, also colored white, project from the corners of the cube. Despite its questionable aesthetic qualities, the town's mayor, Murat Erdoğan, claims it “beautified” Çınarcık. Erdoğan further explains that Çınarcık had sorely needed a clock tower and that the city is happy to have finally built one.

Through their interactions with French archaeologists from around 1930, Afghan historians formulated a new official historical identity for Afghanistan based on its pre-Islamic past. This article provides the first analysis of this process by tracing the emergence of the new historiography through the career of its chief promoter, Ahmad ʿAli Kuhzad, as curator of the National Museum (founded 1931) and director of the Afghan Historical Society (founded 1942). Through placing Kuhzad in these official institutional settings and reading his major works, the article shows how traditional Persianate historiography was challenged by an imported and amended version of world civilizational history. In the decades after independence in 1919, this new historical vision allowed the young Afghan nation-state to stake its civilizational claims on an international stage. In these previously unexcavated historiographical strata lie the roots of the Taliban's iconoclasm, which are revealed as a dialogical response to the state cultural institutions that remade Afghanistan as Aryana.

Three decades later, the circumstances that led to the Arab–Israeli war of June 1967 bare again the subject of scholarly attention as the end of the Cold War and the release of official documents in the United States, Soviet Union, Britain, and Israel have allowed surviving participants to compare notes and made possible the detailed reconstruction of decision-making in those states. Much of this historiography has focused on the critical two months immediately preceding the start of hostilities, giving rise to broad agreement that Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser “stumbled into the crisis rather than provoking it deliberately,” through miscalculation and ill-advised brinkmanship. However, there is still no consensus regarding the relationship between Nasser's decisions in spring 1967 and his policy toward Israel in the preceding three years, partly because the dearth of official documents from the Egyptian side has made it difficult to substantiate his real intentions and “historicize” his crisis behavior. Most recent studies tend to skim over the earlier period, if they cover it at all, or now accept the view that Egyptian strategy before 1967 was essentially defensive, based on deterrence and containment, and that Nasser ultimately shifted course due to perceptions of threat that steadily heightened in the course of the previous three years due to the revival of the Arab “cold war,” fear of Israeli nuclear power, and deteriorating relations with the United States, all set against a background of the debilitating military entanglement in Yemen and economic malaise at home

This article explores the experience of the Great War in Syria and Lebanon with a specific focus on the famine that, combined with other wartime calamities, decimated the civilian population. Using food as its primary register, it looks at a wide range of largely untapped Syrian and Lebanese poems, zajal, plays, novels, memoirs, and histories written over the course of the 20th century, in order to illuminate the experiential dimensions of the civilians’ war and to delineate some of the discourses that structured it. More specifically, it argues that the wartime famine in Syria and Lebanon gave rise to a remembered cuisine of desperation that is deeply informative about the ruptured world of the civilians’ war.

The political mobilization of Palestinians in the occupied territories in the 1980s was closely tied to the rise of a new elite and the marginalization of the traditional notable leadership. Such mobilization was necessary in order to overcome, at least in part, the class, kin, and regional cleavages that had long fragmented Palestinian society and that had been used by occupying powers to undermine collective national action. The mobilization of Palestinian society by a new elite was made possible by structural changes that had led to the peripheralization of the traditional elite. The three most important structural changes were the dramaticrise of wage labor after 1967, which transfigured a basically peasant society, extensive land confiscations, and the widespread availability of university education after 1972. Each of these developments helped to break traditional patron–client relations that had been the social base of the old elite and paved the way for the rise of a more extensive, better educated, more rural, and nonlanded elite which had gained cohesion in thePalestinian universities. In addition, these developments, and in particular the diminution of the Palestinian peasantry, meant that large segments of the population had, in effect, been cleaved from their social moorings and were, thus, more open for recruitment into new forms of social relations and organizations. It is to refer to these structural changes in Palestinian society that I use the term “social mobilization.”

Much has been written recently about the severe domestic problems which Turkey has been experiencing since 1970. Instability in the form of worker strikes, student demonstrations, parliamentary stalemate over reform measures, and above all, urban guerrilla terrorism prompted the armed forces to intervene in March 1971 and impose a nonpartisan coalition government in order to put an end to what they deemed “anarchy, fratricide and social and economic unrest.” The following month, at the instigation of the armed forces, a state of emergency was declared and martial law was instituted in eleven of Turkey's sixty-seven provinces. Thousands of suspected “anarchists” were arrested and stood trial, with the result that an uneasy calm returned to the surface of Turkish affairs. Many civilian politicians in the Turkish Grand National Assembly (GNA) were restive under martial law, how ever, decrying their loss of independent action and demanding a loosening of the tight military control.

With the resumption of the search for an Arab–Israeli settlement, analysts have been debating the factors that have frustrated it for so many years. The fact that one Arab country, namely Egypt, concluded a peace treaty with Israel almost a decade and a half ago led some to reexamine that case to see what made it possible. The available literature on Egypt's disengagement from the Arab–Israeli conflict has been voluminous, as many policy makers and analysts in Egypt, Israel, the rest of the Arab world, and the United States published their accounts of this development. Despite many ideological and political differences among these writers, they all concluded that this foreign-policy shift represented a radical alteration of Arab policies toward Israel and that with Egypt out of the war equation, the regional balance of power had changed dramatically. Many of them also emphasized the centrality of President Sadat's role in explaining Egypt's exit from the conflict with Israel. One or another of Sadat's personal characteristics has been singled out by his admirers and critics alike as being the main factor behind the Egyptian foreign-policy shift. It is not that they considered other factors such as socioeconomic variables and regional or global structures irrelevant. They simply assessed them as not decisive in terms of their relative explanatory power.

This article draws on a year of ethnography conducted among cis heterosexual couples in contemporary urban Lebanon in order to argue that, in the absence of a serious project of national reconciliation, intersectarian love, despite its short lifespan, constitutes restorative instances in post–civil war Lebanon. Intersectarian hetero desire emerges as a counter-discourse that threatens the masculinist foundations of the Lebanese state. By tracing the timeline of love in the life of Lebanese citizens, this article places personal narratives of “impossible” intersectarian love stories in conversation with queer temporality scholarship in order to recognize the political, albeit limited, potential of romantic love. Here, societal expectations of married life are replaced by an ephemeral unity that operates in contra to hegemonic interpretations of “man and wife.”

This article investigates the opinions of three senior Ottoman jurists, Sarıgörez (d. 1522), Kemalpaşazade (d. 1534), and Ebussuud (d. 1574), on the subject of the Safavids and their supporters. Historians have treated these opinions as part of the vast polemical literature uniformly intended to justify an impending Ottoman attack against their Safavid rivals. Questioning the notion that all authors shared an undifferentiated attitude, this article underlines that, unlike most polemical literature, the opinions of these three jurists focused on the religiolegal aspects of the Safavid issue and varied and evolved in line with changing historical realities, the jurists’ divergent assessments of the Safavid threat, and their preference for different jurisprudential doctrines. Based on an analysis of the opinions, I argue that these jurists assumed a high degree of autonomy as producers and interpreters of the law and thus did not necessarily feel obliged to legitimate or excuse every imperial action.

In January 1950, in the first free election held in nearly eight years, Egyptians went to the polls to return a Wafdist government to power. After having been banished from office for five years, Egypt's majority party assumed office aware that it shouldered a heavy burden of responsibility. Between October 1944, when the King dismissed the war-time government of Mustafa al-Nahhas, and January 1950, eight minority governments governed, or tried to govern, Egypt. Escalating political violence marked a period of increasing disillusion with parliamentary rule that encompassed all sectors of Egyptian society. Indeed, it might be argued that Egypt's ancien régime survived until 1950 only because the minority governments marshaled the coercive powers of the state to control the streets, campuses, and factories, where dissidence was most manifest. At the time, many sensed that if the political establishment failed to achieve the evacuation of British troops from Egyptian soil, contain rampant inflation, and narrow the gap between rich and poor, martial law could not save the liberal order from collapse. What would follow was uncertain, but talk of revolution, fearful or hopeful, filled the air.