The purpose of the paper is to give a broad outline of the policies and principal features of economic developments in the fifty-year period that has elapsed since the foundation of the Republic, with a view toward helping to evaluate future trends and policies, hopefully in the coming fifty years.

In late 2015, approximately 2,000 Syrian asylum seekers made their way into Norway via the Arctic passage from Russia. What ensued are “global moments,” breakthrough events that have reshaped lives and futures for both the refugees and those who aided them, and it is the latter group on which this article focuses. As refugees began arriving in Arctic Norway, Refugees Welcome to the Arctic, an ad hoc grassroots organization, was formed to assist them. This group of ordinary people, most of them with no previous humanitarian experience, took action in defiance of Norwegian government policies, and providing food became the focus of their efforts. Refugees Welcome to the Arctic members often described being motived to act by their own traumatic memories of the region's experience of World War II, a time of deprivation and brutality suffered at the hands of the retreating German army. Food, as an enactment of compassion, is shown to be a powerful means through which people connect in very personal, concrete ways to the humanitarian enterprise.

Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, every Western student of the Near East, regardless of his or her position in the ensuing debate, has been forced to examine afresh the assumptions underlying even the most respected historical studies. As far as the first century of Islam is concerned, a significant contradiction emerges from such reexamination. Although the reliance of the Muslim conquerors on indigenous administrative classes, their continuation for some time of pre-Islamic coin tupes, and their acceptance of late antique material culture in general are commonly recognized, the conclusion ususally drawn from these facts is rather a curious one: that the Arabs, entirely lacking in experience of government and distinctive material culture, were forced to adopt the essentially alien practices taht prevalied in the conquered lands.

The growing gap in power and wealth between the West and the Muslim world from the end of the 18th century onward has engendered periodic demands for the rejuvenation of Islamic thought as a prerequisite for rehabilitating the status of the Muslim community. In Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, this quest for reform was led by Muslim modernists and Salafis (advocates of a return to ancestral piety and practice) in the late 19th century. Inter alia, these reformists opposed the gatekeepers of Islamic tradition—the establishment ʿulamaء as well as the popular Sufi orders or fraternities (ṭuruq). The Sufi orders were portrayed by their reformist adversaries as at best irrelevant to social change and at worst as responsible for the backwardness of Muslim society. Criticism of customs and ceremonies in popular Islam, especially the cult of saints—denounced as a deviation from Islam—also had nationalist overtones: these rituals were attacked for fostering national passivity and a detachment from reality, in addition to eliciting ridicule by foreigners. Religious reform was thus interwoven with the quest for national pride and power.

Roughly around the end of the 7th century, a distinct genre of Islamic literature began to develop under the rubric fadāʾil (“virtues” or “excellences”) that praised the merits, for example, of reciting the Qurʾan, of the Companions of the Prophet, of performing religious duties such as hajj and jihad, and of sacred cities such as Jerusalem. The fadāʾil literature initially was a part of the burgeoning hadith corpus, and the fadāʾ-Qurʾ an traditions appear to be the oldest strand. A variant term for this type of tradition, especially with regard to the Companions of the Prophet, is manāqib (and less frequently, khasāʾ is). A survey of this kind of “praise” literature indicates that the terms manāqib and fadaāʾil could be used fairly interchangeably.

Scholars working on Jewish communities in the Middle East are in the midst of an important historiographical moment, in which the major categories, historical narratives, and key assumptions within the field are undergoing radical changes. A cluster of books and articles written by scholars trained in history, anthropology, and area studies departments, and published in Middle East studies rather than Jewish studies book series and journals, suggests that the study of Middle Eastern Jewish communities in the American academy is undergoing a change which might be termed “the Middle Eastern turn.” For such scholars, the history of Jews in Muslim lands, as modern subjects and citizens, is typified by a multiplicity of categories related to their identities—Ottoman, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Arab-Jewish, and local-patriotic—which they explore by looking at the political organizations and social and cultural institutions that enabled the integration of modern Jews into new imperial and national frameworks. This new scholarly wave is transnational, as it illustrates the importance of Jewish networks and Jewish languages in the Middle East, and likewise seeks to draw comparisons between Jews and other transregional and religious minorities, such as Armenians and Greek Orthodox Christians. It is interdisciplinary, as it attempts to incorporate the insights of sociologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars. Finally, it is postcolonial, in its critiques of national elites, national narratives, and nationalist histories. These new accounts uncover how processes which affected the entire Middle East, like Ottoman and Egyptian reform politics and the rise of nation-states, shaped modern Jewish lives.

Khalil Sarkis (1842–1915) was an eminent figure in late Ottoman Beirut and an important contributor to the nahḍa, the Arab literary-cultural “awakening” that began in the latter part of the 19th century. Less known to Western scholarship than Butrus al-Bustani, Faris al-Shidyaq, or Jurji Zaydan, he is not usually regarded as a pillar of that awakening. He may not have been, but he certainly was an indispensable brick in its edifice. Born in 1842, when the most exciting changes were still in the future, Sarkis spent all his life in the service of his country's cultural betterment. He is mostly remembered for his newspaper, Lisan al-Hal, which was launched in 1877 and for many decades was one of the most credible Arabic organs. More than a journalist, however, Sarkis was a pioneering printer, a prolific publisher, and the author of nine books. In the last quarter of the 19th century he built one of Beirut's largest printing businesses, which turned out several journals, hundreds of books, and numerous publications. In the 19th-century Middle East, being a printer often meant being a publisher; Khalil Sarkis was both on a grand scale.

In the summer of 2015, the UN reported that there were more than 60 million refugees worldwide, making the current refugee crisis the largest in history. Though the refugee crisis is global, it has a particular regional and local geography that demands attention. As readers of IJMES undoubtedly know, this crisis has disproportionally affected people in the Middle East. Since the end of World War II, a majority of the world's refugees have originated from this region. Five years of war in Syria is the most recent cause of displacement, but the American-led Iraq War in 2003 and the displacement of Palestinians with the establishment of Israel in 1948 have produced tens of millions of refugees.

The thought-provoking roundtable on “theorizing violence” in the November 2013 issue of IJMES paid much attention to different manifestations of physical violence. This is the type of violence that as early as 1969 Johan Galtung, one of the founders of the field of peace studies, termed direct violence, distinguishing it from other forms of violence, to which I will refer below. Direct violence, Galtung noted, is related to “somatic incapacitation, or deprivation of health, alone (with killing as the extreme form), at the hands of an actor who intends this to be the consequence.” According to Galtung, direct violence is physically manifested, it is related to a discernible event, and it has to involve a perpetrator and a purpose.

Africa's largest country, Sudan, is first and foremost part of the Arab world, sensitive to the political tides which sweep the Arab peoples from the Atlantic to the Gulf. Like other members of the Arab League, Sudan was taken by surprise by the defeat of 1967. It was shaken by the tidal wave that later engulfed Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria; and on 25 May 1969, a military regime took over in Khartoum. Its ideology was Arab nationalism infused with socialism; its social base, the army and the urban classes; and its model, the Nasserist experiment.

In writing the history of the Middle East there is one aspect that deserves special attention: the influence of the choice of source material on the writer's point of view. Does the choice of different types of sources—in our case Western as opposed to local sources—really dictate an altogether different view of the matter under discussion? Are all sources of equal value, or should we accord each of them a different place on the scale? In this article an attempt will be made to address this question through an examination of one particular topic—the history of women in 17th-century Jerusalem.

Traveling from al-Minya, Egypt, north to Cairo by train in the mid-1980s, an observer could not help but notice the large numbers of women and children working in the lush agricultural plots adjacent to the railroad tracks. In fact, throughout the northern Sa⊂id and the Delta, too, women seemed to have taken over the fields. Furthermore, upon arriving at the Agriculture Ministry in Giza, a listener frequently overheard remarks referring to the “alarming” rise in the feminization of Egyptian agriculture. Yet Egyptian farm women have always lent a hand to agricultural production. So what, in recent years, has generated such a large-scale “invasion” of women into men's jobs? Particularly in light of the strict segregation of women from men, and their seclusion in the privacy of the home, what has brought about this public display of women?

Two frameworks of interpretation of history and society have long struggled with each other in the West and in the Islamic world: one is the modernization theory of the American type, aligned at times with the older orientalism, the other is some form of political economy. In the 1970s, the theory of political economy made a belated arrival in American intellectual life and still has scarcely the prestige it has in France, Germany, Italy, or the Islamic countries.

War in the Balkans over the past decade and a half has inspired a plethora of scholarly, journalistic, and diplomatic publications, all of which have sought to capture the region's “chaotic” history. Unfortunately, much of this work assumes that conflict in the Balkans can be understood only along ethno-religious lines.1 This reductive line of argument has been particularly evident in the treatment of the Ottoman period in the Balkans' past, a period that extends back some 600 years.2 Consequentially, such work has distorted our understanding of Balkan societies both during and after the Ottoman Empire.

The article is a case study of work organization at the Services d'Egypte of the Suez Canal Company from the outbreak of World War II to the company's nationalization in 1956. In this multinational and multicultural workplace, organizational hierarchies and division of labor were traditionally defined according to “national” identities, while maintaining a strict segregation between européens and indigènes, to use the company's terminology. Starting in the 1930s, the company faced new measures of economic nationalism imposed by the Egyptian government, including required quotas of Egyptian personnel. These measures progressively redefined the political boundaries of the company's action in the management of its workforce. Using unpublished archival documents from the company's personnel files, this article analyzes the processes of feminization and Egyptianization of the company's office workers during World War II and the 1950s. The process was driven by a precise organizational strategy, based on both “racial” and “gender” criteria, which aimed to redefine the company's internal hierarchies and to keep management and decision making in the hands of the “Europeans,” while complying with the terms of the conventions of 1937 and 1949 that regulated the relationship between the company and the Egyptian government.

This article develops a concept of social brokerage to explain leftist–Sadrist cooperation during Iraq's 2015 protest movement. Conventional understanding holds that Iraq's secular-leftist civil trend and Shiʿi Islamist factions have been mutually isolated, and at times fierce antagonists, in Iraq's post-2003 politics. This view has been challenged by an emergent political alliance between a faction of the civil trend and the Shiʿi Islamist Sadrist movement. By comparing this alliance with the failure of another Shiʿi Islamist group, ʿAsaʾib Ahl al-Haq, to involve itself with and exploit the protest movement, this article isolates the conditions which determined the dynamics of leftist–Islamist interactions. Shifting the focus away from elite politics and structural-instrumental explanations favored by rational choice models, this article reveals a longer backstory of social and ideological interactions between less senior actors that transgressed leftist–Islamist social boundaries. From this context, potential brokers emerged, capable of skilfully mediating leftist–Sadrist interactions.

In June 1669 the Safavid ruler Shah Sulayman dismissed his grand vizier Mirza Muhammad Mahdi and appointed Shaykh ʿAli Khan Zanganah as his successor. Shaykh ʿAli Khan served in the exalted function of grand vizier or iʿtimad aldawla for a full twenty years and in this period grew into perhaps the most remarkable administrator of Safavid times.

A boycott may be denned as ‘The refusal and incitement to refusal to have commercial or social dealings with offending groups or individuals’.1 More specifically, international economic boycotts are devices by which one or more states (or their citizens) attempt to inflict economic hardship upon a target nation. The method of coercion takes the form of a disruption of the target state's normal foreign trade and financial flows. In the vast majority of instances, the imposition of a boycott is a political act, designed to influence the practices and policies of the offending country, utilizing economic weapons as the coercive force. A boycott may be deemed successful if it attains the ends desired by its initiators. As a rule, economic sanctions must be effective (i.e. cause economic damage) in order to succeed; however, it is quite possible, indeed, often probable, that boycotts may be effective without being successful.

Certain conditions of the contemporary period are bringing to the fore a shifting regional politics in which today's young people, the most numerous and educated generation in history, are recognized simultaneously as critical objects and agents of change. Youth in the Muslim Middle East are struggling to exert their youthfulness in the present and prepare for life transitions in the future in a context of ubiquitous neoliberal reforms, authoritarian regimes, and ongoing regional conflicts with no resolution in sight. At the same time, due to their sheer numbers and the meteoric spread of ever mutating youth-led cultures and movements via horizontal spaces made possible by the new media and information and communication technology (ICT), youth embody a force of cultural regeneration.

On 29 October 1956 Israeli paratroopers landed deep inside the Sinai Desert, launching the second Arab-Israeli war and adding another level to the bloody edifice of Israel's relations with its neighbors. The Israeli leadership justified its decision to go to war by pointing to “the mini-war which the Arab rulers have waged against us for eight years.” Many scholars have accepted that version of the events, which seeks to connect the multitude of border incidents from 1949 to 1956 with the war in the latter year. Indeed, a central approach in the study of the period viewed the Sinai campaign as the inevitable consequence of the succession of violent events which occurred between Israel and its neighbors, Egypt in particular, beginning shortly after the 1948 war. Benny Morris, in fact, describes Israel's participation in the 1956 war as the direct continuation of the border clashes with Egypt, finding no regional connection in Israel's involvement. Similarly, Nadav Safran, Mordechai Bar-On, and Michael Oren have argued that the border clashes, the infiltrations, and the Israeli reprisals followed one another in a relentless sequence until the final explosion in October 1956. This approach draws a connection between two “types of security” which are a permanent component of the Israeli defense doctrine: “basic security” and “day-to-day security.” The latter incorporates operational activity, unrelated to preparations for war, which the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) constantly engages in during peacetime; whereas the former refers to a situation of total war for which the IDF has prepared itself. Conventionally, events falling within the domain of day-to-day security are considered the cause of the aggravation in relations between Israel and Egypt during the early 1950s; the Sinai campaign thus becomes the inevitable end of a process of deterioration engendered by the border clashes and incidents of the preceding eight years.