The readiness of army commanders in Egypt and Tunisia to counter the internal security agencies deployed by their own governments against civilian protestors in early 2011 proved decisive in bringing down presidents-for-life Husni Mubarak and Zayn al-ʿAbidin bin ʿAli. This brings into sharp relief questions about how to approach and assess the various coercive agencies of the state. Should we regard them as different branches of a single coercive apparatus, through which the state seeks to exercise a monopoly on the legitimate means of violence? Or should we see them as manifestations of more fragmented political institutions and social forces and consequently as performing distinct, and potentially divergent, functions in constantly evolving relation to each other?

I propose that careful reading of films and film coverage provides a new research avenue for scholars interested in the social and cultural history of the 1950s and the 1960s in Lebanon. Looking specifically at the manner in which George Nasser's 1957 film Ila Ayn? (Where To?) embraces and modifies the generic conventions of neorealist melodrama to articulate anxieties over the effects of emigration on Lebanon, this article explores the manner in which contemporaneous cultural critics used the film to, in turn, express their dismay at migration from Lebanon. Reading the film closely for the affects it contains and for those it produced in its readers, I argue that this technique, attendant to both sides of this dynamic, affords us new insights into the manner in which cinema produced during Lebanon's golden period interacted with and complicated the dominant cultural narratives of that era.

Western scholars have long studied Jewish and Christian influence in shaping early Islamic tradition, but almost none of them has considered Eve's transformation as a critical part of the “genesis” of an Islamic historical framework and the evolution of its gender categories. I trace the transformation of the wife of Adam from the revelation contained in the Qurʾan and note the abrupt and distinct changes wrought upon this Qurʾanic persona in post-Qurʾanic sources in the matters of menstruation and motherhood. The figure of Satan plays a pivotal role in both of these biological aspects of Eve's biography. Her function as the first woman serves to explain not just the physiology of all women, but also the essential aspects of character that allegedly make all females different from the normative male in biology and behavior. As a wife, Eve is tested and fails, but as a mother, she both fails and passes the test of satanic temptation. I argue that in her role as wife, she is depicted in post-Qurʾanic sources in accordance with pre-Islamic monotheist precedent. However, in Eve's role as mother—especially as the mother of the prophetic patriline that culminates in Muhammad—Muslim scholars distinguished the meaning and implications of her temptation as distinctly Islamic. Eve embodied a fusion of traditions, a continuity of monotheistic meanings about the feminine in the Middle East, as well as an identity that distinguished her as the first woman of a new, emerging Islamic faith.

Comparative studies of writing systems and script conversion tend to emphasize the extent of cultural re-orientation and the rapidity of implementation of Turkey's shift from the Arabic to the Roman script, but they rarely mention the period that led up to this change. As early as 1863, the Azeri playwright Ahunzade Mirza Fethali presented a proposal for a Latin orthography for Turkish, before the Cemiyet-i ilmiye-i Osmaniye (Ottoman Society of Science) in Istanbul. A second event in Ottoman script reform, though less well known than Ahunzade's proposal, was the adoption by many former members of the Cemiyet-i ilmiye-i Arnavudiye (Albanian Society of Science), in Istanbul, in 1879, of a Latin-based alphabet for Albanian. This “Stamboul Alphabet” was designed by Shemseddin Sami Bey and, unlike Ahunzade's proposal, was immediately acted upon and subsequently adopted by the new Albanian presses in Bucharest and Sofia, from which it spread through southern and central Albanian lands, all still under Ottoman rule.

A key characteristic of inter-Arab politics since World War II has been seemingly ever-shifting alliances. In attempting to explain patterns in Arab state behavior, Arab and Western analysts alike have generally attributed the sources of alignment decisions, implicitly or explicitly, to the personalities of the leaders or to ideological positions. Although such explanations may be intuitively appealing, the historical record is replete with examples that challenge such an analysis: Syria and Iraq's rapprochement in 1979, secular Syria and theocratic Iran's alliance during the Iran–Iraq War, and conservative Jordan's honeymoon with Iraq during the 1980s. These are only a few of the numerous, significant examples of alignments that suggest a rethinking of the bases of Arab interaction may be in order.

One achievement of the philosophy represented by Ghazâlî is disentangling the creation argument for the existence of God from rival forms of design argument which allow or assume the eternity of the world. From its earliest expressions as an isolated insight which might easily be explained away as myth, the notion that the universe had been brought to be out of what is not was gradually tranformed under pressure of severe Aristottelian criticism into a precise concept, and the argument implicit in such a notion metamorphosed into an elegant and sophisticated demonstration. Backed up by the closely reasoned philosophy of being into which it was now integrated, the argument from creation might confidently hope to be proof against attack.

As elsewhere in the developing world, the Arabian peninsula has undergone sweeping changes since World War II, with the important difference that the process here has been blessed with unprecedented prosperity and not marred by economic difficulties. To say that the effects of modernization upon the local societies differ as a result from what can be observed in other countries would be to state the obvious. Yet, when it comes to understanding the position and status of contemporary women in the Arabian oil producing countries, prosperity and the particular circumstances around it are rarely considered as crucial variables. The women's situation often is evaluated, mainly if not exclusively, in light of the religious injunctions and traditional norms that govern the female condition in a Middle East that, by the same token, appears curiously monolithic and timeless. There seems to be an assumption that Arabian women are not part of the societies in which they live, and that, by virtue of some unique cultural principle, their condition remains unaffected by the vectors of change that have turned upside down all the other areas of life around them. Hence the general tendency to assess women's opportunities and constraints in terms of what the Qurʾan and Islamic tradition dictate, not in terms of secular and more immediate concerns they may share with the rest of the society. Aside from assuming a spurious dichotomy between the women and their societies, such an approach disregards the historical and material specificity of particular areas in the Muslim world. It also arbitrarily and a priori defines the character of the meeting between “Islamic tradition” and “modernity,” instead of leaving it open to empirical investigation.

It is indeed an interesting endeavor to investigate the impact of economic policies on social stratification. Doing so enables us to see to what extent economic policies bring changes in class structure in a society. We take the case of Syria to study its economic policies and their accompanying impact on the evolving pattern of the Syrian elite from the late 1950s to the early 1980s and then look at accompanying impact on class structure.

The two poles or aspects of this paper are (1) economic policies themselves and (2) their impact on class structure. The question that we are going to raise in the first pole is the following: what is the nature of the economic policies? This refers to land reforms, industrial and commercial reforms, and foreign trade controls.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries religion continued to play an obvious role in the Middle East. Among observers of that area the significance of the impact of religion on political development was consequently never minimized to the extent that it was among observers of political trends in the West. Western scholars interested in the Middle East, however, have tended to overrate the importance of the Muslim modernists with whom they felt a certain affinity. They also have accepted too uncritically the views of modernists concerning the lifelessness of traditional expressions of Islam. As a result, not until recently have we begun sufficiently to appreciate traditional Muslim religious leaders both for their impact on and for the diversity of their responses to modern political and intellectual currents. I believe that this diversity is not accidental but rather is susceptible to analysis and explanation. This essay demonstrates how four variables (historical circumstances, theological considerations, socioeconomic considerations, and governmental policies toward Muslim religious leaders) affected the political involvement of the Islamic ulama throughout the Middle East generally and in Tunisia particularly during the ‘liberal age’.

Virtually all underdeveloped countries suffer acute and sometimes debilitating geographical inequalities in the distribution of wealth and opportunity. These spatial inequities exist at all levels: between regions, between urban and rural areas, and between center and periphery. Some regional planners view such imbalances as essentially transitory and argue that with increasing economic development, wealth and opportunity will eventually spill over from growth centers and trickle down through the urban hierarchy to backward, less-developed areas.

The sharifs of Hasanid descent, commonly referred to as the Banū Hasan, who ruled Mecca and its dependencies from the middle of the fourth century A.H./tenth century A.D. until the early twentieth century, can be divided into three major dynastic branches, each of which bears the name of the first of its members to attain the office of emir of Mecca. Thus, the first dynasty of the Hasanid sharifs of Mecca, known as the Jaʿfarids, was founded by Jaʿfar b. Muhammad b. al-Husayn al-Amīr, a descendant in the ninth generation of al-Hasan b. ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, in about the year 357/968, shortly before the conquest of Egypt for the Fatimids of North Africa by their general, Jawhar, in 358/969. Control of Mecca remained in the hands of the Jaʿfarids until the last representative of the line, Shukr b. Abī'l-Futūḥ, died without leaving a male heir in 453/ 1061.

In the following article, I present an account of the legacy of the famous saintly mystic Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili (d. 1258). The parameters of the study will be narrowed geographically to Tunis and thematically to prayer. Tunis played an important role in the formation of the saint's ṭariqa (mystical order or brotherhood, pi. ṭuruq), and the city today still has a branch of the brotherhood and a number of sacred sites. The theme of prayer as used here includes prayer texts and a wide variety of activity, from popular devotions to spiritual discipline. As will become clear, this is a central element in any discussion of the ṭariqa's organization, ritual, and literature. In addition to the brotherhood and the sites, there is a Tunisian edition of the only recordedcompositions of the saint, his prayers—known as aḥzāb (sing, ḥizb). This study will thus reflect the saint, his brotherhood, and the use of the aḥzāb as integrated elements of the living Shadhili legacy in Tunis. This presentation will go beyond the usual academic treatments of Sufism, which rarely enter the modern period and are concerned mostly with the larger Sufi treatises. I hope not only to bring to light the importance of some lesser known liturgical and ritual practices, but also to begin to appreciate the “lesser tradition,” as it were, of Sufi prayer texts.

In antiquity and in the Middle Ages slavery played a significant role in the military, economic, political and social life of the Near East. Many studies have been made of these aspects of life, but little has been said in the context of Islam about the psychological bonds which, at least to some extent, characterize the relationship between slave or freedman and master. The institution of ‘mutual alliance’ also played an important part in Islamic history, and there were certain similarities between the relation of the ‘ally’ to the patron on the one hand, and of the freedman to the former master on the other. But it is the purpose of this discussion, in part, to point out some basic differences between the two relationships.

This article explores the relationship between the administration of President John F. Kennedy and the Arab Baʿth Socialist Party's first regime in Iraq from February to November 1963. It demonstrates that Kennedy administration officials had adopted a paradigm of modernization through which they believed recently decolonized countries could achieve high-consumption economies with democratic governments. Because this process appeared threatened by communist-supported insurgencies, the administration developed a doctrine of counterinsurgency, which entailed support for the repressive capacities of developing states. Administration officials regarded the Iraqi Baʿth Party as an agent of Iraq's modernization and of anticommunist counterinsurgency. They consequently cultivated supportive relationships with Baʿthist officials, police commanders, and members of the party's militia, despite the regime's wide-scale human rights violations. The American relationship with militia members began before the coup that brought the Baʿthists to power, and Baʿthist police commanders involved in the coup were trained in the United States.

Based on interviews with Lebanese in over 150 mixed-religion marriages and their extended family members, I argue that sect may conceal or stand in for other forms of difference, including ideas about status and hierarchy related to class and regional origin in Lebanon. Because it is the most readily available discourse for understanding social difference, parents often use sectarian rhetoric to describe their concerns about a variety of problems they see in their children's chosen partners. By listening between the lines of parental objections, I suggest that expressions of bias against people of other sects may mask concerns with other forms of social difference, in effect reducing a complex and shifting social field of multiple axes of difference into sect. Rather than assume sectarianism's a priori importance, this approach allows me to bring other discourses of difference and analytic lenses to the foreground.

Few of the Egyptian schoolboys who now memorize the principles of Arab socialism have heard of Farah Antûn, Shiblî Shumayyil, or Niqûlâ Haddâd. Yet in the opening decades of the twentieth century this trio of Syrian Christians living in Egypt — along with the Coptic intellectual Salâmah Mûsâ — were among the foremost advocates of socialism in the Arab world. What was the connection between these Christian pioneers and the widespread but as yet ill-defined Arab socialism of today? The answer will fully emerge only as the roots of Arab socialism are probed. A beginning can be made by examining these writers themselves, why they were attracted to Western socialism, what they understood by it, and how they proposed to adapt and apply it to the Middle East. A correct evaluation of their positions depends to a considerable extent on understanding the precarious, but not entirely hopeless position, of the Christian minorities in a Muslim world which had long despised them.

One can ignore neither the role of diasporas nor colonial and imperial discourses of modernity in the construction of normative sexual identities and practices in the Middle East, whether in the past or the present. This is not to dismiss “local” forms of regulation, disciplining, and normalization of queers, but to point to the way that “local” state and nonstate norms of sexuality are not detached from “global” trends and transnational relationships of power. My own work on gender and sexuality within Iranian diasporic contexts engages with scholarship that postulates sexuality as a form of transnational governmentality and with analyses of homonationalism and necropolitics. I examine the representational economy of queer deaths during the “war on terror” and suggest that the Iranian transgender refugee, who has become a highly representable subject as a victim of Iranian transphobia in the civilizational discourses of the “war on terror,” dies an unspeakable death if her death disrupts the promise of freedom after flight.

This article deals with the material aspects of the late Ottoman home in Beirut, focusing on the notion of taste (dhawq) and its role in constructing class boundaries. It looks at how intellectuals used taste to articulate a prescriptive middle-class domesticity revolving around the woman as manager of the house and privileging moderation and authenticity in consumption habits. Rather than take such tastes as representative of actual consumption habits of an emerging middle class, and arguing for an approach that goes beyond taste as a construct, the article investigates the potentiality of new objects for subverting the existing social order. Based on a marital-conflict case brought to the Hanafi court, the article explores how one such object, a phonograph, opened interpretive possibilities in the gendered rigidity of court procedures.

The deportation of the majority of the Armenian population from the Ottoman Empire during World War I and the massacres that accompanied it are of commanding interest. The paucity of scholarly contributions in this area, however, has impeded the development of interest in the subject, thereby contributing to the nebulous state surrounding the conditions that led to the disappearance of an entire nation from its ancestral territories. Some maintain that this nebulousness is compounded by the intrusion of political calculation.1 At issue is whether or not the disaster was intentionally organized by the Ottoman authorities, and whether or not the scope of Armenian losses bore any relationship to that intention.

In Egypt, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, older, fragmented, and more localized forms of identity were replaced with new, alternative concepts of community, which for the first time had the capacity to collectively encompass the majority of Egyptians. The activism of Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908) and the populist message of the Watani Party began the process of defining and popularizing urban Egyptian nationalism. After Kamil's premature death in 1908, there was more of an “urgent need,” as described by Zachary Lockman, for “tapping into and mobilizing new domestic constituencies in order to build a more broadly based independence movement.” This article argues that the eventual mobilization of the Egyptian urban masses, and their “incorporation into the Egyptian nation,” was due in large part to the materialization of a variety of mass media catering to a growing national audience. To be more specific, I will examine early Egyptian nationalism through the lens of previously neglected audiovisual colloquial Egyptian sources. This, I argue, is crucial to any attempt at capturing the voice of “ordinary” Egyptians. Finally, the article documents the role of early colloquial Egyptian mass culture as a vehicle and forum through which, among other things, “hidden transcripts” of resistance and critiques of colonial and elite authority took place.