The aim of this article is to explore the distinctiveness of İzmirli İsmail Hakki (1869–1946) in the context of late Ottoman intellectual history and to suggest several implications of his thought on our understanding of debates on religion and modernization among Ottomans in the modern period. Studies on modern Islamic thought in the 19th and 20th centuries are mostly limited, especially in Western literature, to works dealing with a few well-known figures in the Arab world, such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh. However, a close investigation into several mostly neglected or yet uncovered thinkers of the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, can provide us with more interesting aspects of this period. The earlier interest of Istanbul ulama in modernization, their closer and more direct contact with Europeans, and the long historical experience of central Ottoman intelligentsia in similar reviving attempts are some of these aspects. This article aims to demonstrate that central Ottoman studies can make significant contributions to the current knowledge of the period, not only in political history, as has been the main focus so far, but also in religious and intellectual thought. It will show how a contact was established between modern European and Ottoman religious thought, in which ways the issue of modernization became an important topic in religious circles, and what kind of perceptions took place among them about its content and limits.

Shaykh al-Qusi is a charismatic spiritual leader in Cairo whose followers have been recording their dream visions and waking visions in a handwritten collection since 1997. Drawing on the shaykh's dream-inspired poetry and his followers' vision narratives, I describe the ways in which this community of believers understands the relationship between authorship and authority, as well as between imagination (al-khayamacr;l) and tradition. Dreams and visions do not circumvent idioms of the textual tradition, but in their narrative form they often mirror and reinscribe its genres. Some of the group's vision narratives emulate the face-to-face encounters of the hadith whereas others signify eruptions of a timeless truth from elsewhere, similar to the Quran. Through mirroring the sacred genres, dreams and visions bring believers closer to these texts. Just as dreams are understood through the tradition, the tradition is understood by some through dreams.

This research paper provides an historical analysis of urbanization in Egypt and its relationships to her incorporation into the world capitalist economy during the last two centuries. My major concern is to discover more about the following issues: (1) the historical reasons for the structural disjunction of the peasant population from rural areas; and (2) the dynamics of rural–urban migration and the problem of overconcentration of population in a few major urban centers.

A number of the basic works on Iranian history have attempted to characterize seventeenth-century Iran as a whole, usually from a non-Marxist perspective. Vladimir Minorsky, for example, employs the term “tribal feudalism” to describe the pre-'Abbas I system, and speaks of the “great transformation” in the period to 1630 from tribal feudalism to “patrimonial absolutism.” These leads have been followed by Nikki Keddie, with “tribal feudalism”; Alessandro Bausani, with “pastoral nomadic feudalism”; and Amin Banani, with “patrimonial absolutism.” James Reid offers the term “uymaq system” (tribal state), while Hafez Farmayan notes the transition from Isma'ils “theocratic-feudal form of government” to 'Abbass “military and bureaucratic” centralized state. Marshall Hodgson's panoptic view of Islamic history provides the general term “agrarlanate citied society” and specific characterizations of Safavid Iran as heir to “military patronage state,” as a “bureaucratic absolutism” and as an “agrarian absolutism.” Each of these conceptualizations has its merits, not the least being that their authors include some of the most perceptive and empirically well-informed twentieth-century historians of Iran, Islam and the Middle East. While it is impossible to discuss their theoretical approaches in detail here, it should noted that the terminology tends to disclose two basic (if somewhat overlapping) orientations: (1) these are largely political conceptualizations—patrimonial absolutism, agrarian absolutism, theocratic feudalism, tribal state, military patronage state, and (2) a number of them suggest hybrid economic entities—tribal pastoral nomadic feudalism, agrarianate citied society. Without denying the interest of the first, primarily political approach to characterizing seventeenth-century Iran as a total system, it is the second set of terms—those of Minorsky, Bausani, Keddie and Hodgson—that is of particular significance for the present analysis, since each hints at the mixed economic bases of the Iranian social formation, to which we shall return after a look at the standard Marxist approaches.

The most famous demand raised by protesters in the “Arab Spring” was “al-shaʿb/yurīd/isqāṭ al-niẓām” (the people/want /the fall of the regime). Three years later, little progress has been made—outside of Tunisia—in permanently replacing authoritarian regimes with the formal institutions of democracy. However, new forms of activism have emerged that increase citizens’ ability to directly combat pervasive social problems and to successfully pressure official institutions to alter policies. The evolution of activism against public sexual violence in post-Mubarak Egypt is a concrete example. Sexual harassment of women on the streets and in public transportation, widespread before the 25 January uprising, has likely since increased.1 Many women have been subjected to vicious sexual assault at political protests over the last three years. But activism against these threats has also expanded in ways unimaginable during the Mubarak era. Groups of male and female activists in their twenties and early thirties exhort bystanders on the streets to intervene when they witness harassment, and intervene themselves. Satellite TV programs have extensively covered public sexual violence, directly challenging officials for their failure to combat it while featuring the work of antiharassment and antiassault groups in a positive light. These new practices facilitated two concrete changes in the summer of 2014: amendments to the penal code on sexual harassment, and Cairo University's adoption of an antiharassment policy which was developed by feminist activists.

The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia … The Internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The Internet is a threat to human civilization.

Feminist interest in the social origins and the emotional/psychological development of gender roles has led to a new theoretical debate on the critical importance of mothering. The feminist contribution in this area lies in the formulation of a successful theoretical synthesis of Marxist and psychoanalytic insights to explain the development of gendered roles and personalities in contemporary capitalist society. In contrast to conventional Freudian approaches, which posit the universality of the psychological/emotional processes by which the self is developed, the feminist critics emphasize the historically (and socially) specific nature of the family, mothering patterns, and the way such patterns influence the development of gendered personalities in the West.

In his Interpreting the French Revolution, François Furet defines political sociability as the “specific mode of organizing the relations between citizens (or subjects) and power, as well as among citizens (or subjects) themselves in relation to power.” According to Furet, shifts from one form of political sociability to another can and do take place, particularly during periods of comprehensive economic, political, and social change. One such period preceded the events of 1789 when, as an unintended consequence of state building and economic development under the ancien régime, a democratic/horizontal political sociability increasingly replaced the hierarchic/ vertical political sociability that had previously ordered French society.

China is now becoming recognized as a nation with a significant Muslim population. With nearly 18 million Muslims (the recent 1990 census reported 17.9 million, with many Muslims still unaccounted for or refusing to register as members of the primarily Muslim nationalities), China ranks among the most populous Muslim nations. And, although its Muslim population is miniscule when compared with its total population (Muslims account for less than 2% of China's 1.1 billion), or insignificant when one looks at the vast Muslim populations in other Asian nations, such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, nevertheless, this article argues that the Muslims of China play an important role disproportionate to their numbers in influencing China's domestic and international politics.

On 29 September 1995, a notice in the leading Palestinian daily Al-Quds announced the following: “After Friday prayers an honorable procession composed of notables from the Bethlehem district and notables from the Hebron district proceeded to the Dīwān of Ahl al-Ḥalāʾiqa in the village of Shuyukh in order to complete the rites of tribal conciliation (ṣulḥ ʿashāʾirī) in the wake of a sad car accident.” Among the jāha, the procession of important dignitaries invited to participate by the family of the driver, was Colonel Abu Khalid al-Lahham, a former officer in the Palestinian Liberation Army and currently an adviser to President Yasir Arafat. Originally from Bethlehem, to which he has recently returned after years of exile, al-Lahham was designated to become the governor of the Bethlehem district in the Palestinian Authority (PA) after it extended its hold over the town in December, as stipulated by the Oslo B agreements of 28 September 1995.

Standing inside a t-wall factory in Erbil in the summer of 2021, I was struck by the fact that, nearly twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq, these military walls were still in production. T-walls are six-ton steel-reinforced, blast-proof concrete wall segments named for their upside-down t-shape (Fig. 1). They were introduced to Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s. Derivative of the Berlin wall's design, they are recognizable to those who have witnessed the Israeli separation wall, which is composed of thousands of t-walls lined up.

In several scholarly works it has been asserted that opposition to tyranny is a fundamental and pervasive characteristic of Shi'i Islam.1 Here I shall try to show that the revolutionary character ascribed to the Shi'i ulama in Iran has been greatly exaggerated. I will argue that the ulama's perception of the socio-economic and political structure of Iranian society often did not basically differ from that of the secular power elite. Further, I will analyze the causes of the opposition of the ulama to the state during the early 1960s. It was in large part his analysis of these events that made Algar partially amend his conclusion to his study of the ulama in Qajar Iran, namely “that they failed to perceive the nature of what was being demanded and its implication for Iran and themselves.”2

One of the main arguments used to prop up the thesis that, as of the 16th century, there was a steady decline in virtually all spheres of the Ottoman Empire's administration and society has been that Muslim societies in the Ottoman Middle Eastproved incapable, or even unwilling, to open up and accept the process of Western modernization. In recent years, however, newly discovered local sources together with a change in methodological approach have led to a growing body of critical studies that challenge the decline theory on a number of points. The 19th century, for example, is increasingly viewed as still very much an Ottoman century, in which the Porte, instead of seeing its power in the provinces diminish under the growing impact of the West, succeeded in strengthening its hold through the centralization policies of the Tanzimat. Another significant example is that of local elites who, instead of opposing Istanbul's reformist policies across the board, are often found to identify and cooperate with the central government.

On 30 June 1989, a military coup overthrew the democratically elected government of al-Sadiq al-Mahdi in Sudan and replaced it with a fundamentalist Muslim dictatorship headed by Colonel ʿUmar Hasan al-Bashir and adhering to the radical Islamic ideology of the National Islamic Front (NIF), under the leadership of Dr. Hasan al-Turabi. Since June 1881 when Muhammad Ahmad ibn ʿAbdallah declared that he was the expected mahdī, the religious-political scene of Sudan had been largely dominated by Mahdists and Khatmiyya adherents. Even under colonial rule, in the years 1899–1955, Mahdism continued to flourish despite the fact that the British rulers treated it with suspicion and preferred Sayyid ʿAli al-Mirghani, leader of the more docile Khatmiyya Sufi order. The defeat of the Mahdist Umma Party in the first general elections in 1953, by a coalition of secularists and Khatmiyya supporters was only a temporary setback. After Sudan became independent, in 1956, Mahdist supremacy was challenged both by the Khatmiyya and other groups, but its mass support among the Ansar, a political Islamic movement, enabled them to gain control, except during brief periods when so-called secularists governed independent Sudan. This happened in 1953–56 when the Khatmiyya joined forces with the intelligentsia, and again between October 1964 and March 1965 when the country was governed by a secular, transitional, nonelected government that was ousted from power as soon as the sects regained control. Secularism also thrived briefly under the military dictatorship of Jaʿfar al-Numayri between 1969 and 1977.

Edmond Yafil was a key figure in the early 20th-century Algerian revival of Andalusi music, a high-prestige urban performance tradition linked to medieval Muslim Spain. Yafil's experiments with printing, transcription, audio recording, amateur associations, concert-hall performance, and new composition helped transform the production, consumption, and circulation of Andalusi music. Although Yafil was widely respected, his reputation was fraught with ambiguity during his lifetime and has remained so since. While not divorced from his position as a Jew in turn of the century Algiers, Yafil's ambiguity is best understood within the context of the complex Andalusi musical milieu of his day. This study of Yafil shows revival to have been a gloss for a partial but far-reaching shift in the social basis of Andalusi music making and calls for a broader rethinking of the familiar concept of revival in North Africa and the Middle East and beyond.

The following four stories were recorded among hundreds and thousands of others in the sharica court records of turn-of-the-century Jaffa and Haifa. There is no obvious connection among these four court cases. They raised various legal issues; the litigants were city-dwellers as well as villagers; and they also differed from one another in their socio-economic backgrounds. What these stories illustrate is that there was a major difference between the perception of family loyalties and obligations typical of men and women in the Muslim families of late Ottoman Jaffa and Haifa. I believe that it is important to recognize this difference if we want to understand gender relations in these families. I shall tell these stories first, then discuss the gender relations.

For several months after the September 2005 publication of twelve cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, the debate was largely confined to a Danish context. Early international protests of the cartoons were voiced by government officials in several countries, including Pakistan, Iran, and Egypt. However, until late December 2005, in what I will call phase one of the controversy, Danish Muslims fought a primarily domestic battle for some kind of recognition from the newspaper and the Danish government that the cartoons had hurt religious feelings. In October 2005 an ad hoc coalition of Danish Muslim organizations, with The Community of Islamic Faith (Det Islamiske Trossamfund) and its affiliated imams at the lead, tried to put pressure on the Danish government through ambassadors from Muslim countries posted in Denmark. The ambassadors' request for a meeting with the Danish prime minister was turned down, as were other attempts by Danish Muslims to raise claims with the government.

Since its political independence in 1956, Sudan has witnessed the rise of armed ethnic and regional protest movements that have resulted in great human suffering and the largest number of refugees and displaced peoples in Africa. These protest movements have challenged the legitimacy of the independent Sudanese state, led by Arabized and Islamized elites at the pinnacle of power, to extend and define citizenship rights and responsibilities. In Darfur, Southern Kordofan, and Blue Nile, these movements are not only currently demanding equal citizenship rights, but they are also demanding recognition of special rights including claims to land, autonomous government, and the maintenance of ethno-national identities. They are thus opening up a debate about what citizenship entails, particularly in a multicultural context; how the current state reconciles competing claims of citizenship; and what kinds of viable institutional mechanisms are required for an effective relationship between the state, its citizens, and local power structures.

This article explores the responses of Sephardi Jews to two moments of heightened tension and politicized violence in the Ottoman Empire during the late 19th century—the massacres of Armenians in Istanbul in 1896 and the Greco–Ottoman War of 1897. It argues that many of the strategies of representation that Jewish elites employed during these moments speak to their ability and willingness to work within a framework of Islamic Ottomanism. Recognizing this pattern complicates scholarly assumptions about the relationship of religious minorities to the deployment of state religion in general and about the responses of non-Muslims to the Hamidian regime's mobilization of Islam more specifically. Identifying the pattern is not to celebrate it, however. Sephardi Jews' relationship with Islamic Ottomanism was in many cases deeply ambivalent. Finding themselves torn between civic and Islamic forms of imperial identification during this period, Ottoman Jews soon learned that both positions could entail uncomfortable choices and disturbing consequences.

Fadwa Tuqan, Assia Djebar, and Latifa al-Zayyat are three Arab women who are well known for their literary and artistic creativity, as well as for their political activism. Each has written at least one autobiographical work charting her struggles in the personal, political, and literary arenas, and each has chosen to express these struggles in terms of finding a voice that resists silence but also acknowledges that silence is a form of resistance.1 In writing their autobiographical works, these women are interested in creating not simply a female autobiographical tradition but, rather, a tradition that specifically does credit to their need to authorize their voices without posing as authorities from above, to write narratives that are simultaneously antiauthoritarian and authoritative, and to do so by speaking for and on behalf of others without appropriating them or subsuming them into their own agendas. Their autobiographical works are thus marked, and ultimately enriched, by tension, hesitation, and anxiety, particularly regarding their own power and authority as authors. This hesitation enables them to express collective sorrows and dreams in this seemingly most individualistic of genres.2