In recent decades, Iran has witnessed radical transformations concerning the conceptualization of and procedural standards for changing sex. Psychologists, medical and legal practitioners, law enforcement officials, and scholars of fiqh have debated the advisability (in debates among health and legal professionals) or the permissibility (among scholars of fiqh) of sex-change. This article asks what historical transformations of the concept of jins/genus have informed the debates and enabled the contemporary dominant concepts and practices that shape them. How has jins come to mean sex and how does this matter? The article first maps out the historical genealogy of these reconfigurations. What were some of the 19th- and pre-19th-century concepts that could be considered disparate precedents to this cluster around sex/jins? It then reviews some of the late-19th- and 20th-century reshaping of biomedical knowledge and marital practices that have contributed to the contemporary meanings of jins.

The construction of heritage can be a violent process. Authorizing state-sanctioned narratives and the spaces that materialize them are belligerent acts. Crafting and territorializing a singular history out of many entangled ones necessarily relies on the destruction, containment, and/or silencing of the evidentiary terrain—of people, places, and things. In this sense, the construction of the past—to play on Carl von Clausewitz's well-known maxim—is the continuation of war by other means. As networks of knowledge production and transmission, “lieux de mémoire” are everyday sites of violence that embody ongoing social relations and the attendant struggles over power. In times of peace as in war, they are terrains of symbolic and material contestation whose creative destruction can be deployed as political spectacles and projections of power. Examples of such dynamics abound, whether in the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North America or Palmyra, Baghdad, and Mecca in the Middle East. In its varied forms, then, heritage is as much a cause for celebration for some as it is a cause of injury for others. Heritage reflects the power to subjugate the past to the politics of the present and to dictate the future, both of which are intrinsic to state and subject formation.

In this historically and anthropologically oriented article, we situate the recent wave of Jewish-themed Moroccan films within the context of the liberalizing transformations and associated nationalist narratives promoted by the current Moroccan regime. Reflecting Mohammed VI's commitment to widening the space of civil society, the task of enacting these transformations and producing these narratives devolves increasingly to nonstate agents in the public sphere. Previously monopolized and managed more comprehensively by the state, the “Jewish Question”—that is, contestations over representations of Jews as authentic members of the Moroccan body politic—is now taken up in a range of public media less subject to direct government control. We demonstrate that the role of cinema in this process reflects the shifting relationship between state and civil society in the late postcolonial period. More specifically, we argue that the production, circulation, and reception of Jewish-themed films is diagnostic of the state's ability to open new spaces of public representation and debate that foster precisely those images of the state and nation promoted by the current regime in regional and global contexts.

In late 1931, German sexologist and gay-rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld, quoted above, visited Palestine for a lecture tour that attracted hundreds in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and kibbutz Beit Alfa. By this time, the Jewish settlers' community (or Yishuv) in Mandate Palestine had already been exposed to the science of sexology and to the reform movement it inspired. Sexual-hygiene manuals had been translated into Hebrew and Yiddish in both Tel Aviv and Warsaw. Hebrew readers had access, for example, to translations of Auguste Forel's Sexual Ethics and Max Hodann's A Boy and a Girl. Finally, in the fall and winter of 1931–32, three sex consultation centers were opened in Tel Aviv.

One of the more important developments in Iraq since the 1958 overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy was the nationalization of the Iraqi Petroleum Company on 1 June 1972. The nationalization of the IPC was the culmination of a long-standing power struggle between the IPC and the Iraqi government. This analysis is concerned with that power struggle and the consequent nationalization of the IPC.

The expected renewal of peace negotiations between Syria and Israel is likely to bring up again an issue that has been the central component of territorial conflict between the two since 1948: sovereignty in what were, between 1949 and 1967, three demilitarized zones (DMZs) declared on the Israeli side of the Syrian–Israeli frontier. The DMZs, the regime that maintained them, and the significance they had for Syrian–Israeli relations have been studied at some length.1 This article contributes an analysis of the history and implications of one of the three DMZs from the point of view of those for whom the zone was and still is a homeland—the Kirad bedouin moiety, who are now displaced and dispossessed.

During the long 19th century, British coal proliferated throughout the Ottoman Empire in increasing quantity, rapidity, and regularity via junctions and political arrangements that became evermore stable and dominant. The British used coal export to project their power elsewhere, offshoring the Industrial Revolution by building an infrastructure that could support it overseas and connect it to existing facets of the imperial project. Examining this “outsourcing” and the importance of foreign coal markets to industrialization helps provincialize the steam engine and anchor it in a global context. It also allows us to explore the impact of fossil energy on the Middle East and the ways coal both set the stage for the arrival of oil and informed the possibilities for translating carbon power into politics. Coal, the article suggests, animated political participation in England while reinforcing authoritarian tendencies in the Middle East.

Aspects of space and place shape daily life, social structures, politics, and intimate relations among people. In the late 1980s and 1990s, anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists—influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre on the meaning of social space—started to highlight the spatial in their analysis of social phenomena. These scholars focused on the production of urban space and asserted that space is dynamic and often shaped by the needs of its users as well as by those who design it. With the exception of Setha Low's work on Latin America, these writings were mostly centered on the United States.

Around the mid-19th century, the cigarette, the latest fashion in tobacco consumption, gained popularity in Egypt, as it did globally and throughout the Ottoman Empire. Some fifty years later, the cigarette had become the predominant smoking preference in Egypt, and luxury Egyptian cigarettes were being exported around the world. Indeed, Egyptian and Turkish brands played a significant role in introducing cigarettes to different parts of the globe and thus in shaping world cigarette production. This article sets out to tell the fascinating story of the luxury Egyptian cigarette and uses this case to reflect on the development of modern markets in Egypt.

Islam is a faith as well as a cultural commitment. Whether Islam also provides a framework of political ideology is still questionable. Some sociologists employ the notion “the politicization of the sacred” to depict this claim. Ideology is a very modern notion that Muslim thinkers have adopted from Western culture. The suggestion of the Moroccan philosopher Lahbabi, at a conference of C.E.R.E.S., that the arabized term “fikrologia” be employed as a substitute for “ideology,” (in Arbaic: al-ideologiyya) nevertheless does not change this situation.

Recent years have witnessed a resurgence throughout the Muslim world of movements calling for radical social reforms and for changes in the form of government. These movements are characterised by a strong religious component. Their calls for reform are couched in the Muslim idiom — that is, in demands for social justice (adala) and the satisfaction of man's basic necessities, and are accompanied by demands for a return to an Islamic form of government, one that is ruled by the sharia. The supporters of such movements frequently are dressed differentlyfrom the rest of their compatriots, an outward manifestation of their allegiance to a Muslim-guided and a Muslim-oriented goal. It has become customary in the West to refer to such movements as Muslim fundamentalists, but the Arab world refers to them more correctly as Muslim organizations, or jamaat islamivya. This nomenclature covers a multitude of organizations with different principles and slogans, but all have one common denominator — their reformist appeals derive from religious belief and are asserted to be founded in Muslim principles.

This paper is an attempt to show how the economy and society of rural Iraq was affected by a combination of changing world economic circumstances and structural innovations in the pattern of land tenure. Iraq's gradual incorporation into the world market in the latter part of the nineteenth century was assisted by the application of the legislative and military reforms of the Tanzimat, which served generally to extend the powers of the Ottoman state over its provinces. Although the effects of the application of the new system were less direct than the Ittomans desited, it did set in motion a gradual process of detribalisation, which tended to reduce the powers of tribal shaikhs and promote the emergence of private prooerty in land.

Most analyses of Egypt in the 1970s, whether political or economic, have a central concern, the liberalization policies of the Sadat regime. The reason for this focus is clear; rather striking and deep-seated changes took place in Egypt under the heading of that policy. Most analyses, however, suffer two major drawbacks; they fail to integrate the political and the economic and they take an approach with a very short historical vision. In doing so, they run the risk of critical misinterpretations of the nature of the policy, the regime, and the changes in Egypt.

Since the reign of the Qājārs in Iran (1779–1925) and aslate as the early sixties of the present century, Iranian ‘ulamā’ proved, repeatedly, their ability and appeal to spearhead political opposition against the national government. Seeking the sources ofthe ‘ulamā’'s effective political power, several students ofmodern Iranian history and politics have attempted to determine the doctrinal status accorded to the ‘ulamā’ in Twelver Shi‘i Islam, the religion of Iran since the sixteenth century.Even though substantial research has been devoted in the West to Sunni juridical thought, the field of Twelver Shi'i jurisprudence has remained all but unknown. In the absence of systematic studies of Twelver Shi'i juridical sources, Twelver Shi'i theology and political theory, Western scholars have thus drawn on opinions expressed, sometimes orally, by contemporary Iranian learned men, mostly ‘ulamā’, to define the status of the ‘ulamā’. Lacking the advantage of scholarly collation provided by a firsthand acquaintance with the primary sources, they have accepted notions as Twelver Shi'i tenets that bestow on the ‘ulamā’ certain statutory privileges. Under scrutiny, though, these prove to be in contradiction with the spirit as well as the letter of Twelver Shi'i legal and theological doctrines.

In contrast to what might be expected after the triumph of a colossal revolutionary process and the establishment of a state deriving its power mainly from a strong ideological drive, in Iran the development of socio-political thought did not end with the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Indeed, the post-revolutionary period has witnessed a proliferation of socio-political discourses articulated by groups and individuals inside and outside the country, notwithstanding censorship and attempts to control the flow of information by the government.1

In the 19th century, Europe had a tangible impact on the Arab East. During this period, Arabic-speaking regions were brought into intimate contact with the West, both through military intrusion (e.g., the French in 1798–1801 and the British in Egypt in 1882), and institutional penetration (e.g., the founding of Western-style schools and higher-education institutions in the Levant in the 1800s by Christian missionaries such as the Syrian Protestant College in 1866, now the American University of Beirut, and [the Jesuit] St. Joseph University, also in Beirut, in 1874). This overpowering European encroachment on the Arab East in the 19th century resulted in cultural and linguistic identity crises. Muhammad ⊂Ali, who ruled Egypt from 1805 until 1848, dispatched groups of students to Western countries such as Italy, Austria, and France to study at their universities and technical institutions. At home, he established schools with Western-language instruction, and sponsored translations of scientific works initially into Turkish, and later into Arabic, from Italian and French, thus making available new disciplines such as various branches of engineering, military science, and agriculture. In 1822, he established a printing press in the Bulaq section of Cairo.1 From then on, Arabicized versions of European terms such as “theater” (tiy―atru), “journal” (jurn―al), “the post” (al-busta), and “politics” (al-bulit―iq―a) signaled the arrival of Western institutions and technology in Arabic-speaking regions, and such terms were adopted by writers in their writings. The cultural, political, military, and technological challenges that resulted from the European contact with the Arab East, and the institutional changes that accompanied them, proved to be a crucial turning point in the development of the Arabic language, particularly its lexicon. However, interest in language matters was central to the Arab renaissance (Nahda) of the 19th century. Arab writers; intellectuals; and translators such Rifa⊂a Rafi⊂ al-Tahtawi (1801/2–73), (Ahmad) Faris al-Shidyaq (1801/04?–87), Nasif al-Yaziji (1800–71), and Butrus al-Bustani (1819–83), among others, debated Arabic linguistic issues in terms of their own literary and linguistic heritage. These and other authors discussed the “internal” needs of Arabic, not only issues of translating the culture of the Western societies. They wrote grammars and compiled other literary textbooks to facilitate the teaching of Arabic and to overcome difficulties of learning the language associated with older, traditional ways of language teaching and to raise awareness of the literary tradition of Arabs. These intellectuals also engaged in the preparation of glossaries and dictionaries appropriate to the needs of their societies.2

In Algeria as in many other cases, experiences of exile and diaspora played a major role in the creation of nationalist politics in the 20th century; exile has also been a recurring literary figure in expressions of Algerian cultural politics since independence. This article examines a range of literary sources to consider the politics of language and culture in Algeria since the 1940s. It shows how identification with Arabism has enabled Algerians to articulate claims to community, solidarity, and sovereignty, first in a conception of national “salvation” against the colonial state and then as both a state-sponsored project of political legitimacy and an indication of the limits of that project. A sense of these limits can be gained by a brief consideration of the complexity of the country's sociolinguistic landscape and the often unorthodox creativity of its literary self-expression since independence.

The Book of Dede Korkut is an early record of oral Turkic folktales in Anatolia, and as such, one of the mythic charters of Turkish nationalist ideology. The oldest versions of the Book of Dede Korkut consist of two manuscripts copied sometime during the 16th century. The twelve stories that are recorded in these manuscripts are believed to be derived from a cycle of stories and songs circulating among Turkic peoples living in northeastern Anatolia and northwestern Azerbaijan. According to Lewis (1974), an older substratum of these oral traditions dates to conflicts between the ancient Oghuz and their Turkish rivals in Central Asia (the Pecheneks and the Kipchaks), but this substratum has been clothed in references to the 14th-century campaigns of the Akkoyunlu Confederation of Turkic tribes against the Georgians, the Abkhaz, and the Greeks in Trebizond. Such stories and songs would have emerged no earlier than the beginning of the 13th century, andthe written versions that have reached us would have been composed no later than the beginning of the 15th century. By this time, the Turkic peoples in question had been in touch with Islamic civilization for seeral centuries, had come to call themselves "Turcoman" rather than "Oghuz," had close associations with sedentary and urbanized societies, and were participating in Islamized regimes that included nomads, farmers, and townsmen. Some had abandoned their nomadic way of life altogether.

Muhammad Kurd 'Alī referred to his teacher and close friend, Sheikh Tāhir al-Jazā'irī, as the Muhammad 'Abduh of Syria. Kurd 'Alī, however, was not alone in remarking upon the impact that al-Jazā'irī had in Syria during the lete nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Albert Hourani also mentioned him in comparison to 'Abduh:

Ideas such as those of 'Abduh were “in the air” in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. We find similar groups of reformers in all the more advanced Muslim countries, and perhaps it is too simple to explain them in terms of the influence of al-Afghānī and 'Abduh. It could be said… that al-'Urwa al-wuthqa could only have had its influence because there were already little groups of Muslims thinking on the lines which made it popular… In Syria similar men can be found in all the great centers of Muslim learning… Among those whom were roughly contemporary with 'Abduh and had some contact with him, was Tāhir al-Jazāir'ī,… a writer on literary and linguistic subjects, he had a wider importance through his work for the establishment of modern schools and the preservations of ancient books.

The two main issues in Israel's foreign policy are relations with the Arab world and relations with the Great Powers, and there is extensive literature on both. But whereas the literature on relations with the Great Powers is marked by a broad consensus, the literature on relations with the Arab world is dominated by a deep and often acrimonious debate. A major landmark in the evolution of this debate was the emergence in the late 1980s of a school of “new,” or revisionist, Israeli historians. Among the members of this group were Simha Flapan, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, and the present author. We were called the “new historians” because we challenged the traditional Zionist narrative of the birth of Israel and of the first Arab–Israeli war. The momentous events that unfolded in 1948 were the main focus of the debate. Subsequent books by some of these authors extended the critique of Israel's policy in the conflict to the post-independence period. The debate between the “old” and the “new” historians has been going on for nearly two decades, and it is still going strong.