In my contribution to a volume edited by Roger Owen, I have studied the economic development of Palestine from the Crimean War up to the beginnings of the first Jewish Aliya. In this article I propose to investigate the concomitant demographic development of Palestine, that is, of the Livās of Jerusalem, Nablus/Balqā', and 'Akkā, during roughly the same period.

It has long been recognized that much of the richness of Muslim women's ritual lives has been found outside of both the mosque and the “five pillars of Islam,” in a wide set of devotional practices that have met with varying degrees of affirmation and censure from male religious scholars. This recognition has given rise to a valuable literature on such practices as shrine visitation, spirit-possession rituals, and Twelver Shiʿi women's domestic ceremonies. The prevalence of such noncanonical rituals in Muslim women's lives, although waning in many parts of the contemporary world, raises questions about the relationship between women's religious practices and the constitution of Islamic orthodoxies. Have women, often given lesser access to mosque-based and canonical rituals, historically resorted to autonomous and rewarding religious practices that are, nevertheless, fated to be marginalized in the male-dominated construction of Islamic normativity—a normativity that women may ultimately internalize and master only at great cost to their religious lives?

In order to gain a proper historical perspective on opium production in Turkey, it is necessary to look into its worldwide impact during the first half of the nineteenth century. During this time, opium production and trade in both India and Turkey grew rapidly and international trade in opium acquired great significance in shaping England's commercial and political relations with the Levant and the Far East for over a century.

1.1. Among the most obscure aspects of the past of Arab towns, that of the number of their population at different periods of their history must be mentioned. A better knowledge of their demography would no doubt bring more accurate answers to the main problems of urban evolution (expansion or decline, prosperity or decadence) as, through lack of well-founded figures, they have often been resolved by authors from general impressions or even from a priori attitudes. The first really serious statistics go no earlier than the end of the eighteenth century (Description de l'Egypte) for Cairo. For earlier periods, the only available sources for a long time were the evaluations provided by chronicles or travel accounts which proposed more or less fanciful and often divergent figures, the more reasonable evaluations often being a question of chance, or being considered so only because they confirmed the users' prejudices.

Scholars who have conducted research on the different peoples of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have, as a general rule, focused their studies on the process by which the various national minorities gained their independence from “Turkish” rule. To study this complex problem, historians of the Balkans and of Middle Eastern countries other than Turkey have selected a methodological framework which seeks to analyze the nature of the struggles that led to the eventual emergence of nation-states such as Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, and Syria.

In explaining the determinants of economic growth, economists have attempted to distinguish the relative contributions made by various inputs. Theodore Schultz concluded that improvements in human capital have made larger contributions to growth than increases in physical capital. E. F. Denison was even more specific in his pioneering studies of changes in real national income in the United States from 1927 to 1967, estimating that 23 percent of the growth could be explained by improvements in the educational level of the labor force and 20 percent by advances in technological and managerial knowledge. On the basis of such results, we may conclude that expenditures on education and training, public health, and general research contribute significantly to productivity in the industrialized nations by raising the quality of human capital; thus these outlays command a continuing return in the future.

For more than century, race was a major interest in anthropology. Buildingon Johan Blumenbach's 1795 color classificaiton dividing humanity into white, black, brown, yellow and red, anthropologists further subdivided the people of the world into finer taxonomic categories. Hair form, shape of the nose, pigmentation of the eyes and the hair, stature, and the shaps of the head were among the many characteristics race classifiers added to skin color to enable them to fit populations into the typologies they designed. By the end of the 19th century, numerous races and subraces had been described, laying the groundwork for the direction the discipline would follow until the mid-20th century. It was expected that the development and refinement of a racial typology would lead to a framework for tracing lines of human evolution and routes of human migration.

When discussing the Kuzari of Halevi, Leo Strauss comments in a footnote that “One cannot recall too often this remark of Goethe (in the Noten und Abhandlungen zum besseren Verständnis der West-östlichen Divans): ‘Das eigentliche, einzige und tiefste Thema der Welt — und Menschengeschichte, dem alle übrigen untergeordnet sind, bleibt der Konflikt des Unglaubens und Glaubens.’” It will be argued here that the influence of such a conflict on Islamic philosophy has been much exaggerated, especially by the highly influential approach that Strauss brings to such a mode of thought and its means of expression.

This article explores the so far little explored animal dimension of the significant social, economic, and ecological transformations that occurred in Western Anatolia in the late Ottoman Empire. It focuses on how the use of the hybrid, one-humped “Turcoman” camel transformed the way in which trade and transport operated in the region. In light of Ottoman, Turkish, and European sources, it suggests that the camel was a visible yet often underestimated actor in the incorporation of Western Anatolia into global markets and integrating the camel as important history-shaping actor into the historical narrative allows us to better grasp the complex relationships that existed between humans, nature, and technology and to change the way we think about the Ottoman Empire.

Long before the French Revolution, an anonymous geographer of the 10th century had already imagined the “boundaries of the world”—(ḥudūd al-ʿālam)—as comprising distinct regions. According to this unknown figure, each territory varied from another “First, by the difference of water, air, soil, and temperature (garma-va-sarma). Secondly, by the difference of religion, law (sharīʿat) and beliefs (kīsh). Thirdly, by the difference of words (lughāt) and languages. Fourthly, by the difference of kingdoms (padshāʾī-hā).” These criteria, as well as natural barriers—mountains, rivers, deserts—allowed the author of this work to divide the world into tracts much like nation-states today.

A recent burst of interest in revisionist interpretations of early Islamic and especially Abbasid history may be attributed in large measure to the availability of a number of fresh source materials, one of the most important of which is an anonymous history of the Abbasid family. A number of problems surrounding this work are still far from being satisfactorily resolved, including the questions of its title, the date of its composition, the identity of its author, and its historical and historiographical value.

In the winter of 1910, the Salonikan Judeo-Spanish newspaper La Tribuna Libera published a plebiscite in which it asked its readers to decide where the future of Ottoman Jewry lay: nationalism, assimilation, or Zionism. The paper's appeal was an effort to settle the battle that had raged in the Judeo-Spanish press of the empire in the preceding eighteen months over the growing clash between Ottomanism and Zionism. According to the paper, the situation was “bordering on fratricide,” threatening to engulf Ottoman Jewry entirely.

On 19 March 1877, the first Ottoman parliament opened at Dolmabahçe Palace when Sultan Abdülhamit II crossed a velvet carpet to stand beside a golden throne. Seen later as the finale of the Tanzimat reform era, the parliament appeared to diplomatic observers as the strategy of former grand vizier Midhat Paşa. Midhat's constitutionalism was a plan for “reform, revival, and indeed survival” that included seeking allies against Russia and containing Russian influence in the Balkans. Abdülhamit listened as his secretary charged the new body: “The progress effected by civilised states, the security and wealth they enjoy, are the fruit of the participation of all in the enactment of laws and in the administration of public affairs.” Among the most urgent priorities was “the development of agriculture and industry, and the progress of civilisation and of public wealth.” Parliament later responded with a pledge to deliver the empire from its malaise, to “eliminate the last traces of abuses, the heritage of the regime of despotism.”

Machiavelli, in The Prince, compared the Ottoman Sultan's authority with that of the King of France and found the latter wanting.

All the Turkish monarchy is governed by one ruler, the others are his servants, and dividing his kingdom into ‘sangiacates’, he sends to them various administrators, and changes or recalls them at his pleasure. But the King of France is surrounded by a large number of ancient nobles, recognised as such by their subjects, and loved by them; they have their prerogatives, of which the king cannot deprive them without danger to himself.

In Jordan, tribal dispute settlements have played a pivotal role in the management of various types of grievances between individuals since long before the establishment of the modern state. To varying degrees, Jordanians—from the East and West Banks, Muslim and Christian, urban and rural—cherish the kinship networks associated with these procedures, and the ʿaṭwa (truce) and ṣulḥ (reconciliation) processes remain time-honored mechanisms for preventing revenge and making amends for wrongs committed. However, under the state's influence, the purpose of observing tribal settlements is evolving within an increasingly heterogeneous society. Drawing on documentary analysis combined with ethnographic material from across the kingdom, this article investigates the current status of tribal dispute resolution traditions among different sectors of the population. I argue that observance of such traditions can signify conformity with the hegemonic values that the state promotes as well as resistance to aspects of state control.

Students of Islamic history have long demanded that more attention be given to social and economic affairs, and it cannot be denied that substantial progress is being made inthe field. Nevertheless, many gaps remain that will have to be filled in by detailed investigations of various periods and regions, notions, nad relationships. An attempt will be made in this article to elucidate the functioning of a faction, or ṭā⊃ifa in Central Asia in the second half of the 15th century. This ṭā⊃ifa was the system of patronage and protection installedby Khwaja Ahrar, a famous shaykh of the Naqshbandi silsila.

This article explores the role of Islam in contemporary Jordanian charities and social welfare organizations. In what ways do these organizations relate to Islamic traditions in their work? What role do religious convictions play in the construction of modern selfhoods among their employees and volunteers? Do these constructions relate to broader, globally relevant, social imaginaries? The article tries to answer these questions by applying a novel analytical framework to qualitative data from fieldwork conducted among Jordanian charities and social welfare organizations. We treat these organizations as “social sites” for the reinterpretation of Islamic traditions in the context of global modernity as well as for the construction of meaningful forms of modern selfhoods among their members. In doing so, we argue that these specifically Islamic identity constructions can fruitfully be understood with reference to different types of globally relevant social imaginaries.

The books that are the subject of this review essay comprise three new contributions and one revised edition about a topic that has become paradigmatic in defining scholarly and political approaches to key areas of Middle Eastern history. It has shaped studies of the historical and ideological roots of Arab nationalism, the Arab–Israeli conflict, and the emergence and perseverance of authoritarian regimes in the modern Middle East. The ways that politicians, intellectuals, political movements, and the Arab public related to Nazism and Nazi anti-Semitism have been used to contest the legitimacy of 20th-century Arab political movements across the ideological spectrum. Historians have theorized about the involvement of individuals such as Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini in the crimes of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Adolf Eichmann; the roots of Arab nationalist doctrine in German Volk ideas; the mimicry of Nazism in organizations such as the Iraqi al-Futuwwa and Antun Saadeh's Syrian Social Nationalist Party; and Arab public sympathies for Nazi anti-Semitism dating from the 1930s or even earlier. Until recently, European and Anglo-American research on these topics—often based on a history of ideas approach—tended to take a natural affinity of Arabs toward Nazism for granted. More recent works have contextualized authoritarian and totalitarian trends in the Arab world within a broad political spectrum, choosing subaltern perspectives and privileging the analysis of local voices in the press over colonial archives and the voices of grand theoreticians. The works of Israel Gershoni have taken the lead in this emerging scholarship of Arab nationalism. This approach was also the common denominator of a research project on “Arab Encounters with National Socialism,” which the Berlin Center for Modern Oriental Studies (Zentrum Moderner Orient) hosted from 2000 to 2003. Its members included the author of this review and the authors of two of the books under review (Nordbruch and Wildangel). The project used indigenous Arabic sources, especially local newspapers, for a close scrutiny of Arab reactions to the challenge of Nazism in a period when Arabs, especially nationalists, perceived that quasicolonial regimes undermined the ostensibly democratic and liberal ethos of the British and French Mandate powers.

Mecca's existence depended primarily on its location near the most important trade route in western Arabia which linked the surplus-producing region of Yemen with Syria. The route branched near Ayla in the north to proceed to Gaza on the Mediterranean and also to Egypt. Another route branched near Mecca to proceed in a northeasterly direction toward al-Ubulla, Ḥīra, and eventually Sasanid Persia. The commercially advantageous location of Mecca was enhanced further by the Zamzam waterwell which made Mecca a convenient stop in the trade of antiquity. Also the concept of the ḥaram, the sacred area, and its center, the Ka⊂ba, made Mecca the object of pilgrimage during the sacred months, pilgrims/merchants traveled with security of life and property and went to Mecca to trade their commodities.

The irruption of Persian-language blogging since 2001, known to its participants as Weblogistan, has been accompanied by enthusiastic claims that weblogs are promoting previously nonexistent forms of expression, thereby rupturing traditional Iranian social, cultural, religious, and political norms. The political scientist Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone juxtaposes Weblogistan against the conditions of theocratic rule as “a public social space that allows free expression of self outside the confines of the politically manipulated physical space.” In a 2005 book, which includes translated weblog postings, Nasrin Alavi takes this line of interpretation even further, asserting that by making “it possible for young Iranians to express themselves freely and anonymously,” Weblogistan “is nothing less than a revolution within the Revolution.”