Routinely required to lend religious legitimacy to contentious state policies, al-Azhar's moral authority has been under pressure since its nationalization in 1961. This article outlines how Shaykh al-Azhar Ahmad al-Tayyib's recent alliance with President ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Sisi has, however, exposed al-Azhar's moral authority to unprecedented risks. This is for three reasons. First, the tactics used by al-Sisi's government to quell the Muslim Brotherhood have been more extreme than those used by previous regimes. Second, the al-Azhari establishment's defence of these violent tactics has been more unqualified than in the past. Third, current state-led reforms of al-Azhar's curriculum are more controversial than prior efforts along these lines. As I show, these recent developments are not a complete break from the past; rather, they are a natural outcome of incremental shifts that have been occurring within al-Azhar since its nationalization over fifty years ago.

In this article I argue that the Egyptian state emerged as a welfare provider in the mid-20th century, first by depending on the services of charitable societies to feed, educate, and provide medical assistance to the poor, and later by imitating and harnessing the activities of charitable societies. Drawing on correspondence between the state and service societies from the 1880s to 1945, when King Faruq (r. 1936–52) granted the Egyptian Ministry of Social Affairs (MOSA) the authority to define and to circumscribe the activities of social welfare organizations, the article illustrates the interactions of and the similarities between private and state-sponsored charity. The article further suggests that the establishment of MOSA helped to consolidate the hegemony of the Egyptian state over society and, at the same time, exemplified a dialectical process of state formation engaged in by Egyptian heads of state, service organizations, and the Egyptians whose needs they served.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, tobacco exports from the Ottoman Empire rapidly increased. Thousands of workers began to earn their livelihoods in warehouses, sorting and baling tobacco leaves according to their qualities. Ottoman towns where tobacco warehouses were concentrated soon became the sites of frequent labor protests. This article analyzes strikes that broke out in two such towns, İskeçe (Xanthi) and Kavala, in 1904 and 1905. It underlines the active role of the Ottoman government in the settlement of these strikes. It also shows that mobilized tobacco workers devised effective protest tactics and often secured a say in key decisions, such as when and under what conditions the warehouses operated. However, in both towns, labor activism was characterized by fragmentation as well as unity. The workers who took to the streets did not equally share the burdens and benefits of their collective actions. That inequality, the article argues, was rooted in gendered power relations, intercommunal rivalries, and other social tensions among the workers.

At the turn of the 20th century, agricultural experts in several countries assembled a new agro-scientific field: dryland farming. Their agricultural research practices concomitantly fashioned a new agro-ecological zone—the drylands—as the site of agronomic intervention. As part of this effort, American scientists worked in concert with colleagues in the emerging Zionist movement to investigate agricultural practices and crops in Palestine and neighboring regions, where nonirrigated or rainfed agriculture had long been practiced. In my larger manuscript project, I consider how the reorganization of rainfed farming as dryfarming is central to the history of both the Middle East and North America, where it was closely related to modern forms of power, sovereignty, and territoriality. I suggest that American interest in dryfarming science emerged out of a practical need to propel and sustain colonization of the Great Plains, but later became a joint effort of researchers from several emerging settler enterprises, including Australia, Canada, and the Zionist movement. In contrast to a naturally ocurring bioregion, I argue that the drylands spatiality was engineered through, rather than outside, the territorialization of modern power.

In 1924 the doors of the medreses of Turkey were ordered closed by the Grand National Assembly. The century-old movement to modernize and secularize Turkish education reached a crucial watershed with the abandonment of the traditional Islamic system of mektebs and medreses. The bifurcation which had characterized Ottoman education since the early nineteenth century and which had been reflected in the empire's educated élite could not be tolerated in the new, secular republic envisaged by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

It has become something of a commonplace to argue that music played an important role in the revolutionary upheavals that overthrew the Bin ʿAli regime in Tunisia and forced Husni Mubarak from power in Egypt. This recognition let the larger scholarly community—indeed, the world—in on a secret that a small group of MENA scholars have for decades been trying to share: it's not merely that music is society, as Jonathan Shannon argues in his contribution to this roundtable; it's society in “Real 3D,” at once a microcosm, mirror, and prism of “all the social forces and contradictions of culture, politics, and history.” As a mirror, music reflects society's contending forces back onto itself. Under the right conditions it also refracts them prismatically, acting as a filter and an amplifier that brings (and sometimes forces) subaltern sentiments into the public consciousness. Music, like other art forms, can help foster and sustain social and political change.

In discussing the intellectual and religious history of the modern Muslim world, the attention of both Western and Middle Eastern scholars has hitherto focused on those who were, directly or indirectly, heavily influenced by Western thought and practices. For Egypt, the center of Arab intellectual life, we have studies of at-Tahtawi, Abduh, Rida, Mustafa Kamil, Lutfi as-Sayyid, and those close to them; for Turkey studies of the Young Ottomans, the Young Turks, Zia Gökalp, and those influenced by Ataturk's Turkish nationalism; and for Iran of Malkum Khan, Afghani, various Babis, Al-e Ahmad, Shariati, and other Western-influenced thinkers. Naturally, there are large differences in the thought of those qualified here as Western-influenced; even the most traditional aiim usually reflects Western influence in a mediated way. The point is, however, that there has been little analysis of thinkers and leaders who appear to be primarily traditional, whether they be ulama educated entirely in madrasas and carrying out primarily traditional functions, or heads of Sufi orders operating mainly within their own traditions. This concentration by Western and Middle Eastern intellectuals on leaders who were able to a large degree secularized and Westernized has been based on certain generally unspoken assumptions about progress and development. The assumptions are that progress and development include Westernized, secularized educational systems and an increasingly Western lifestyle with a decreased role for both ulama and Sufis, whom it is not particularly important for one concentrating on trends with a viable future to study or understand. Even those who did study “traditionalist” movements such as the Egyptian Muslim Brethren tended to see them as a trend with no future.

The struggle against gender-based violence in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region has witnessed some significant achievements since the late 1990s. A subject long excluded from public discourse in the region, it has now moved increasingly into the mainstream, compelling the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to take legal and practical measures against such practices as honor killings, female genital mutilation, and domestic violence. This article traces the sources of these shifts in the KRG's stance, looking especially at the role of transnational women's rights networks in the region. It highlights these networks’ successful strategy of binding their cause to the KRG's endeavor to legitimize and consolidate its contested sovereignty over the Kurdistan Region. In doing so, the paper addresses an underexplored subject in the literature on women's rights campaigns in the Kurdistan Region and contributes to the study of transnational advocacy as a source of normative change.

Colleagues with whom I spoke about this piece had one of two responses: “Why do you want to feed the flames of cliché and prejudice about violence in the Middle East?” and “Surely, there has been no theorization of violence in the Middle East.” Regarding the first response, I agree that thinking about violence in the Middle East can be a fraught enterprise. This is because a hysterical mainstream narrative locates the sources of violence in or emanating from the region in Islam(ism) or attributes it to some half-baked but remarkably persistent cultural explanations (tribalism, ancient hatreds, cycles of violence, etc.) which uncomfortably echo the racism of an earlier scholarly era. But enough innovative works have emerged on violence that we can move—at least in our scholarly conversations—beyond this terrain of prejudice and paranoia.

The conventional wisdom regarding the cultivation of cash crops (such as opium) is based on the assumption that raising a cash crop implies a certain degree of development of the productive forces of the economy. Having reached that degree, it is argued, the economy is better able to release portions of its land and labour from the production of basic necessities, i.e., food crops, and allocate them to the production of crops which are not immediately and directly consumed, but rather are produced to be exchanged in the market. This approach presupposes a relatively well-developed market economy and the existence of a relatively efficient transport system, both being, among other preconditions, essential for the emergence and development of an economy based on exchange. The main objective of this paper is to show that this model, despite being applicable to the Western European economies at an earlier stage of their industrialization, does not necessarily explain the situation in Iran during 1850–1906 (the period under review). We further argue that the production of opium or other cash crops had little to do with the development of Iranian agriculture or the development of the productive forces in the economy as a whole.

“Zein,” as friends and colleagues knew him, practiced an interpretive anthropology that, like the writing of history, is a craft in which the best work is realized only after long years of field experience, study, and the development of concepts and themes through teaching and writing. Zein's sudden death on 13 August 1979 at the age of 44 cut short his work just as it began to achieve its fullest form.

Zein's professional career was divided between two remarkably distinct periods. The first of these lasted for roughly the decade prior to 1966, during which he mastered the conventions of what might be called a standard, functionalist anthropology and applied them to ethnographic research in Egypt. The second period began in 1966 with his participation in the formative period of symbolic anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Deeply divided between opposing national, religious, and ethnic groups, contemporary Jerusalem is a paradigm of urban heterogeneity and dichotomous identities. The social divisions that split Jerusalem are many and deep; to list the more obvious lines of fragmentation, this small city of about a half-million persons includes Muslims, Christians, and Jews; secular and ultra-orthodox Jews; Palestinian refugees; peasants; and old established Jerusalemite families. Although Jerusalem's physical and social landscape is criss-crossed by multiple political and symbolic boundaries, there can be no doubt that the major fault line is between Israelis and Palestinians—or, to use the terms often employed by members of both groups, between Jews and Arabs. This results from Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967 and the forced imposition of Israeli sovereignty over the entire city. Israel holds political and legal control throughout Jerusalem, while the Palestinians, who consider themselves to be in a situation of illegal occupation, continue to be Jordanian citizens who are classified under Israeli law as ‘residents of Jerusalem’ (Romann & Weingrod 1991). As a consequence of this fundamental division, practically every feature of this Holy City—from urban space to everyday consumer products (such as milk, vegetables, bread, and cigarettes) and including buses, buildings, and even sounds and colors—is perceived and identified by members of both groups as either “Israeli” or “Palestinian.” These two basic group identities appear to be totally discrete and mutually exclusive.

Whoever builds a mosque for God, even like the nest of a bird to lay her eggs, God will build for him an abode in paradise.1.

In 1774, the Mamluk shaykh al-balad Muhammad Bey Abu al-Dhahab began the construction of a large mosque-madrasa-takiyya in one of central Cairo's prime locations. The complex bearing the name of the donor lies within a rough triangle formed by the main gate of al-Azhar, the Khan al-Zarakisha, and the wikāla of the 16th-century Mamluk ruler Qansuh al-Ghawri and forms the most important part of Muhammad Bey's waqf. Extensive agricultural lands and urban properties were included in the waqf by the donor to support the personnel of the mosque, school, and rakiyya, to pay for the religious activities stipulated by the terms of the waqf, and for the upkeep of the buildings.

Since the 2012 sanctions that dis-embedded the Iranian economy from global markets, contraband commerce has become an explosive issue in Iran. Increasingly Iranians came to regard sanctions as enforced by both international powers and their own state officials, who criminalized certain kinds of cross-border trade, but not others. Although Iranian state actors distinguish between the trader—praised for contributing to the economy—and the traitor—denounced for undermining its integrity—what both unites and blurs the line between them is their shared struggle with a devaluing currency that some Iranians call nuclear. This article examines the “nuclear rial” by extending insights from anthropological scholarship on money to the study of sanctions to advance a dynamic understanding of currency. Studying Iranian trade in gold proves productive for understanding how people negotiate the effects of sanctions in an unevenly financialized world. At stake in the negotiations is a conditional articulation of monetary value that relies on contingent conversions between commodities and currencies and among currencies.

In his landmark book on the problems and progress of international organization, Inis L. Claude wrote:

“Settlement,” lİke “pacific,” is a relative term. In some cases, the realistic ideal may be not to achieve the permanent settlement of a dispute, but to persuade the parties to settle down permanently with the dispute. The agenda of the Security Council and the General Assembly are liberally sprinkled with items that are beginning to seem like permanent fixtures, quarrels which the United Nations has managed to subject to peaceful perpetuation rather than peaceful settlement.

As in several other disputes, the United Nations has in the Cyprus dispute operated on the assumption that Claude described: that the enforced postponement of a showdown between the parties would make the dispute conducive to peaceful settlement. Actually, some disputes, if properly controlled over a period of time, ultimately wither into insignificance or become ripe for settlement. In some other disputes, however, a long cooling-off period may actually lead the parties to adopt more rigid and uncompromising positions, and the prospects for reasonable compromise gradually diminish.

The legitimacy of stationing British troops on Egyptian soil for the defence of the Suez Canal, and maintaining a base in the Near East, were Britain's special requirements in Egypt. Accordingly, the security of these two vital imperial interests was the motive that dictated Britain's policy towards Egypt. The political pattern in the country, reflecting a continuous struggle between those two significant forces, the popular nationalist Wafd party and an autocratic palace, largely determined the course of Anglo–Egyptian relations.

The varied textual traditions of the premodern Islamicate World represent an opportunity and a problem for the Digital Humanities (DH). The opportunity lies in the sheer extent of this textual heritage: if we combine the textual output of premodern Persian and Arabic authors (not to mention Turkish and other less well-represented Islamicate languages), this body of texts constitutes arguably the largest written repository of human culture. Analytical methods developed for other linguistic heritages can be repurposed to make use of this wealth of texts, and efforts are now underway to apply to them a series of computationally enhanced methods that derive from a variety of disciplines (e.g., corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, the social sciences, and statistics). The application of these forms of analysis to these large new corpora promises new insights on premodern Islamicate cultures and the improvement of existing digital tools and methodologies.

Drawing on contemporary history and empirical research, this article revises traditional rentier state theory, which fails to account for the existence of Islamist movements in states accruing substantial outside wealth. Rentier state theory expects that citizens of such states will form opposition blocs only when their stake in rent income is threatened. Examining the development of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates in two archetypal rentier states, or super-rentiers, in the Gulf—Qatar and the United Arab Emirates—this article shows that ideology rather than rent motivated the formation of independent Islamist movements. This research helps to break the causal link established by rentier state theory between oil rents and lack of politically relevant Islamist organizations. We find that the presence of oil rents, instead of rendering Islamist complaint politically irrelevant, shapes the ways in which Islamist movements seek to influence government policies.

The problematic status of the historical urban core raises analogous questions for city planners in cities otherwise as diverse as Paris, Istanbual, or Mexico City. In the case of medinas of the Islamic world the historical core is less the site of monuments pertaining to our common heritage than it is a discrete part of the urban fabric which, while adapting somewhat to larger milieu, still stands apart as a striking testament to a peculiarly local way of life.

Research on the social strata that made up Ottoman society is still very much in its beginnings; extensive studies on the peasantry, the bureaucracy, the ‘ulemâ and others will have to be undertaken before any far-reaching conclusions can be drawn. This study focuses on the 'ulemâ of the late sixteenth century, their social composition and mobility within the hierarchy. Materials dealing with the 'ulemâ are more easily accessible than those dealing with other segments of the grup that governed the Ottoman empire, because, as in most other Islamic cultures, there was a great deal of contemporary interest in the lives of poets and learned men.