Under the Bourguiba and Bin ʿAli regimes, the early 20th-century women's rights advocate Tahar Haddad (1899–1935) was a symbol of “state feminism.” Nationalist intellectuals traced the 1956 Personal Status Code to Haddad's work, and Bourguiba and Bin ʿAli claimed to “uphold” his ideals and “avenge” the persecution he suffered at the hands of the ʿulamaʾ at the Zaytuna mosque-university. Breaking with “old regime” narratives, this article studies Haddad as a reformist within Tunisia's religious establishment. Haddad's example challenges the idea that Islamic reformists “opened the door to” secularists in the Arab world. After independence, Haddad's ideas were not a starting point for Tunisia's presidents, but a reference point available to every actor in the political landscape.

This article brings area studies approaches to Arabic novels into dialogue with world literature through a critical engagement with the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), commonly known as “the Arabic Booker.” This prize launches Arabic novels out of national fields and into a world marketplace whose reading practices have been shaped by the Anglophone postcolonial novel, canonized by the IPAF's mentor: the Booker Prize Foundation. Against this institutional backdrop, the article develops a scale-based method to revisit the intersection of postcolonial tropes and national epistemologies in two winning IPAF novels: Bahaʾ Taher's Wahat al-Ghurub (Sunset Oasis, 2007) and Saud Alsanousi's Saq al-Bambu (The Bamboo Stalk, 2013). By interrogating the literary and political work performed by comparative scale in these novels, the article argues that dominant applications of theoretical methods inherited from postcolonial studies fail to supply trenchant forms of critique for Arabic novels entering world literature. Bridging the methods and perspectives of area studies with those of comparative literature, this article develops new reading practices that are inflected through contemporary institutional settings for literature's circulation, translation, and canonization.

Social scientists often consider feasts to be reflections of social structure. They assume that people living in community, sharing a common culture and participating in the same political framework, will also celebrate the same feasts. This may be superficially true. But a closer look at such feasts shows that the manner of their celebration varies a great deal between sectors of the community. Different positions in the social structure are reflected in the details of ritual, in the composition of the participants, in the nature of gifts, and in other aspects of the feasts. These distinctions are very evident in the circumcision feasts of the Negev Bedouin.

Modern views on pre-Islamic poetry have not markedly advanced our understanding of the structure of the poem beyond the views of the critics of the first three centuries of Hijra. In fact, if anything, modern views are more rigidly formulated, show a greater tendency towards generalizations, and are far less perceptive, as well as being based on a degree of knowledge and familiarity with the poetry inferior to that of the early critics. Ibn Qutayba's famous passage which attempts a description of the process through which the poet developed his poem remains one of the most perceptive statements on the subject. He, at least, had the objectivity and modesty to attribute the view expressed in his passage to ba'd ahl al-adab (a person, or people, of knowledge in the field of language and poetry). Ibn Qutayba does not claim that the statement he quotes was based on an analysis of the properties of the corpus of the poetry. However, the most interesting aspect of this statement is that it interprets the structural properties of the poem in psychological terms. It does not label the process a conventional device imposed by the tradition and by the poets' lack of desire to break away from that tradition. The interpretation the statement offers is also functional, in that it asserts that the process of growth in the poem is not arbitrary and illogical but purposeful, conscious, and pertaining to the total structure of the poem. In this sense Ibn Qutayba's remark is also structural, because it considers the structure of the poem in relation to the structure of other poems in the tradition.

Since the famous tenth-century man of letters Abū Hayyān al-Tawĥīdī (Ca. 320/932–414/1023) named four specific contemporary writers as the authors of the otherwise anonymous encyclopedic work Rasā'il Ikhwān al-Safā', it became almost traditional for both medieval and modern scholars to accept his story as fact.

This essay is an attempt to read popular melodrama as a reflection of changing societal appreciations of sentimentality, romance, family relations, and, ultimately, political authority over the course of a tumultuous decade in Egyptian and Middle Eastern history, the 1960s. I focus my gaze upon two particular films that were in their day popular hits, one of them an unprecedented blockbuster, and that remain genre classics. Both feature popular screen icon ءAbd al-Halim Hafiz, the greatest vocalist of his generation, a recording and performing artist who came of age with the onset of the July 1952 Free Officers' revolution and was intimately associated with the Nasserist project. Both films treat generation gaps relating specifically to issues of dating and courtship—what might be called, in the context of their era, “free love.” Both are concerned with troubled relationships between a son and his disapproving, authoritarian father. Halim's father in both films is played by the same actor, ءImad Hamdi, and Halim's love interest—albeit in very different contexts—is played by the same ravishing starlet, Nadia Lutfi. Finally, both films turn upon a single powerful dramatic act of parental discipline, a slap (or series of slaps) delivered by an outraged patriarch across the cheek of a rebellious, yet ultimately dutiful, son.

This paper describes the political life of Jews in Tunisia and Morocco in the early 1970s. The findings reported are part of a comparative study of Jews in Tunisia and Morocco and Arabs in Israel.

This article analyzes the changing treaty law and practice governing the Ottoman state's attitude toward the subjects of its most important neighbor and most inveterate rival: the Russian Empire. The two empires were linked by both migration and unfreedom; alongside Russian slaves forcibly brought to the sultans’ domains, many others came as fugitives from serfdom and conscription. But beginning in the late 18th century, the Ottoman Empire reinforced Russian serfdom and conscription by agreeing to return fugitives, even as the same treaties undermined Ottoman forced labor by mandating the return of Russian slaves. Drawing extensively on Ottoman archival sources, this article argues that the resulting interimperial regulations on unfreedom and movement hardened the empires’ human and geographic boundaries, so that for many Russian subjects, foreign subjecthood under treaty law was not a privilege, but a liability.

What can we gain by looking at maritime spaces? Does this enable us to work towards a global history of the Middle East that moves beyond at times arbitrary geographical and disciplinary borders? In this essay I argue that maritime spaces might be particularly suitable for exploring the boundaries of Middle East studies and their interconnection with global history. By implication, the study of Middle Eastern maritime connections might be especially well fitted to develop new and more complex global histories. To make this point, a specific and perhaps unusual maritime site in the Middle East will be assessed. The Suez Canal opened in 1869 and quickly turned into a major artery of traffic between Europe on the one side, and Asia, East Africa, and Australia on the other. More importantly for our purposes, it is located at the very heart of the Middle East, where Africa and Asia, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea (and with it the Indian Ocean world), and water and desert intersect.

The question behind this article evolved from two separate observations. While the expansion of comparative and cross-regional research has been actively promoted by leading scholars of the Middle East (and was later encouraged by such bodies as the Middle East Studies Association and this journal), so has the incorporation of scholarly insights from area studies been urged by leading political scientists as a prerequisite for revitalizing all of the discipline's subfields and institutionally endorsed by the American Political Science Association. Viewed as interrelated, these observations prompted the question framing this text: if the aims of many Middle East scholars and institutions are compatible with the aims of many political scientists and their association, why have they remained largely parallel, as suggested by scholars within both fields?

Diglossia has been the subject of attention of many linguists and philologists dealing with Arabic for many decades. The term itself was coined by W. Marçais (1930) and was brought to the attention of general linguists and ethnologists (socio-linguists in particular) by Ferguson in 1959. Diglossia is also a well-known phenomenon in Modern Greek, Swiss German, and Haitian Creole. Fishman (1967) and Valdman (1968) deal with it in terms of methodology and theory. Kaye (1970, 1972a) deals with it in the light of modern linguistic theory and is restricted (not entirely though) to a discussion of Arabic. The monograph under review is an attempt to survey the diglossia situation using Classical Arabic and colloquial Iraqi (almost entirely Baghdadi) data. Much of the work can already be found in Altoma (1957, 1966).

Concerns about lying and sincerity in politics are common in most societies, as are concerns about conspiracy theories. But in the occupied Palestinian territory, these concerns give rise to particular kinds of effects because of the conditions of Israeli occupation. Political theorists often interpret opacity claims and conspiracy theories as responses to social disorder. In occupied Palestine, disorder and instability are standard. Opacity claims and conspiracy theories therefore require a different kind of analysis. Through an examination of the semiotic ideology of sincerity, especially as it has emerged in the conflict between Fatah and Hamas, this article argues that opacity claims act as a form of nationalist pedagogy, at once reinforcing the basic principles of sincerity of action and word, and encouraging a wariness of political spin.

In his essays on “Self-Expression” and “The Human Ideal” in the medieval Islamic world, the late Gustave E. von Grunebaum argued that both expressions and portrayals of individuality were a comparative rarity in the literature of pre-modern Islamic civilization.1 Von Grunebaum concluded from reviewing both autobiographical and biographical works written by Muslims that the social customs, religious values, and literary conventions of premodern Islamic society combined to discourage evocations or depictions of idiosyncratic personalities in favor of representations of impersonal stereotypes.

A political trial, according to Steven E. Barkan, is a trial revolving around highly publicized legal controversies. In some cases, such a trial may determine fundamental political questions, exceeding the legal realm, which are in debate inside a given polity. The 1957–58 trial related to the 1956 massacre in Kafr Qasim, Israel certainly belongs to this category. The trial established the doctrine of a “manifestly unlawful order” in Israeli military law, contributed considerably to the reshaping of civil–military relations, and influenced the civic status of the Arab minority in Israel. In this article, using hitherto underexamined primary sources, I argue that the most important contribution of the trial, the doctrine of a “manifestly unlawful order,” was not only a creation of the bench but also a result of a complicated interaction between the actors present in the courtroom: the defendants, their defense lawyers, the prosecutors, and the judges. Above all, the article shows how the bitter struggle between the two main attorneys helped shape the doctrine of a “manifestly unlawful order,” that is, an order that is illegal for a soldier to obey.

This article explores the vitally important yet often neglected role of medicine and health care in the conduct of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). Using French, Swiss, and recently opened Algerian archival materials, it demonstrates how Algerian nationalists developed a health-service infrastructure that targeted the domestic and international arenas. It argues that they employed the powerful language of health and healing to legitimize their claims for national sovereignty and used medical organizations to win local support, obtain financial and material aid from abroad, and recast themselves as humanitarians to an increasingly sympathetic international audience. This research aims to situate Algerian efforts into a broader history of decolonization and humanitarianism and contributes to rethinking the process through which political claims were made at the end of empire.

Until now, there has appeared no party in the Arab world that can compete with the SSNP for the quality of its propaganda, which addresses both reason and emotion, or for the strength of its organization, which is effective both overtly and covertly. By virtue of its organization, this party succeeded in creating a very powerful intellectual and political current in Syria and Lebanon.

During the last decade, the postcolonial approach has become influential in the humanities and the social sciences. Tracing its own historical origin to interaction with Western European modernity, it focuses on contemporary power inequality, which it intends to eliminate by demonstrating the connection between power and knowledge. Hence, this approach not only puts the present in conversation with the past but also poses power inequality as the analytical lens through which to approach states and societies. In the last decades, a number of scholars working on the Middle East have adopted the postcolonial approach. In this review essay, I initially discuss its application in the study of the region and then contextualize eight recent works within that framework.

Over the past two decades scholars have become aware of the great importance of the so-called Cairo Geniza documents as a primary source for medieval Mediterranean socioeconomic history. This awareness is due principally to the indefatigable work of S. D. Goitein. The Geniza documents also provide an important source for one aspect of the art history of the period. The some 750 trousseau lists from the Cairo Geniza, in combination with ancillary Geniza records, offer a wealth of information—hitherto unexploited—on the attire of Jewish women in medieval Egypt, and by extension, the attire of Muslim women as well. The trousseau lists dating mainly from the Fatimid and Ayyubid periods (969–1250)—and to a lesser extent from the Mamluk (1250–1517)—contain the complete wardrobe of a medieval Egyptian bride.

With much of the Arabian Peninsula characterized by hot and arid weather conditions during long summer seasons, residents are forced to rely on air conditioning to cool their surroundings. Before the construction of air conditioning infrastructures, many would leave the coast during the summer months to head to oases, such as Al Ain near Abu Dhabi, or live in tents in the desert to find relief from the heat. From the 1950s, European and American building practices shaped the region with little consideration of vernacular design elements or energy conservation. These building practices introduced air conditioning as a cooling method. For instance, the 1951 Report of Operations to the Saudi Arab Government by the Arabian American Oil Company explained how “automobiles, air conditioning units, sewing machines, washing machines, refrigerators, and many other modern conveniences are now readily available” in Al Hasa, a significant region for Aramco's operations on the east of Saudi Arabia. By 1952, workers residing in Aramco's camps could have air conditioning units installed in their rooms on a rental basis. Air conditioning technology reconfigured urban environments, altering the relationship between indoors and outdoors, and ultimately constituting what Jiat-Hwee Chang and Tim Winter term a “thermal modernity” that transforms how built forms are imagined and inhabited. The current widespread use of air conditioning in the region is therefore connected not only to high temperatures, but also to how air conditioning is singled out as the ultimate technical fix in confronting the climate. Other solutions to managing heat, such as improving insulation mechanisms for residences and office buildings, have been less pervasive.

In the decade following independence, the Tunisian state embraced secular feminism as part of the single-party monopoly on political life and economic development. Yet its celebration of new family laws as an aspect of modernization was marred by anxieties about the sexual and moral implications of modern womanhood. Tracing references to the miniskirt in presidential speeches and the women's press, I demonstrate how efforts to delineate the boundaries of proper appearance gave tangible form to the amorphous question of morality. Parallel concerns about long-haired youth further indicated the bourgeois basis of the modernizing visual aesthetic as it restrained young men. Through fashion, urban educated women utilized the press to negotiate the limits of the more politically sensitive topic of state feminism. Middle-class debates about dress reveal that nationalist secular feminists who benefitted from the state's definition of women's rights questioned hegemonic conceptions of womanhood and articulated alternate versions of masculinity.