Diplomatic historians of all persuasions agree that the Iranian Crisis of 1945–1946 played a considerable part in initiating the Cold War. For revisionist writers, the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that took place during these months resulted from American efforts to carve out a sphere of influence in the oil-producing areas of the Middle East. By the autumn of 1945, according to this view, U.S. firms had gained controlling interests in the consortia holding exclusive rights to work the extensive petroleum deposits located in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain; more importantly, Iranian officials were making repeated overtures to American concerns in an effort to counterbalance established British interests with more dynamic ones based in the United States. When the Red Army prevented the government in Tehran from suppressing separatist movements in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan in December 1945, the Truman Administration manipulated the Security Council of the United Nations into mandating a Soviet withdrawal from northern Iran.

This article focuses on petitions by Ottoman women from Greater Syria during the late Ottoman era. After offering a general overview of women's petitions in the Ottoman Empire, it explores changes in women's petitions between 1865 and 1919 through several case studies. The article then discusses women's “double-voiced” petitions following the empire's defeat in World War I, particularly those submitted to the King-Crane Commission. The concept of “double-voiced” petitions, or speaking in a voice that reflects both a dominant and a muted discourse, is extended here from the genre of literary fiction to Ottoman women's petitions. We argue that in Greater Syria double-voiced petitions only began to appear with the empire's collapse, when women both participated in national struggles and strove to protect their rights as women in their own societies.

This article focuses on Islamist conscientious objectors (COs) in Turkey who have resisted both mandatory conscription and the Turkish state's use of Islamic discourses of jihad and martyrdom to legitimize it. Examining military conscript training and the post-1980 coup national school curriculum, the article first outlines the Turkish state's production of a particular interpretation of Islam and its dissemination of it through nationalist and militarist discourses and practices. The article then pursues an ethnographic analysis of Islamist COs’ resistance to conscription through nonviolent civil disobedience based on antiauthoritarian and antinationalist interpretations of Islam. Weaving together their own interpretations of jihad and martyrdom with transnational theories and ideologies, Islamist COs present a powerful critique of Turkish militarism and its religious claims. A focus on Islamist COs potently highlights the diversity of Islamic groups and sensibilities in contemporary Turkey, and the difficulties faced by nationalist projects to discipline religious imaginaries and put them to the service of the modern state.

Some anthropologists can argue that it is impossible to separate the social organizational (the realm of groups or aggregates—e.g., households, lineages, and farms) from the cultural (e.g., norms, rules, values, ideologies, and the like—hereafter, normative mental representations) and that the distinction between social and cultural anthropology is therefore an artificial one. To the contrary, others can argue that the social organizational (or “groupal”) and cultural perspectives refer to two analytically separate albeit intertwined levels of reality, sometimes shed a different light on a single phenomenon, and have different analytical value. This distinction I show through the study of the notion of “honor” and its relation to the gender division of labor and to the status of women in Tunisia.

The history and development of land tenure in Iran have been affected by many factors, including climatic conditions, scarcity of water, lack of security, widespread tribalism, and legal and administrative confusion. In addition to limitations in resources, political instability in the premodern period molded systems of land tenure in Iran. Changes of dynasty were frequent and usually followed by the confiscation and redistribution of land. The Qajar dynasty (1788–1925), which came to power after a long period of anarchy and civil war, continued that general pattern. There were three classes of land ownership in Iran in this period: waqfs (religious endowments), arbābī (land owned by large landlords), and khāliṣah (state-owned lands). This last category was composed of lands confiscated by the government as punishment for rebellion or failure to pay taxes. As land was often the only form of wealth landlords had, the threat of government confiscation was an instrument of control as well as a source of revenue for the state. The khāliṣah were usually rented out on long-term leases or were granted as ṭuyul, that is in lieu of services rendered or salaries deferred. The khāliṣah were also in some instances farmed directly by the government. These lands were cultivated by peasants under conditions similar to those of the arbābī lands. They were scattered throughout the country and were also subject to various local and regional variations in agricultural taxes.

In August 1894, as if by prearranged signal, a series of Muslim attacks on the Gregorian Armenian subjects of the Porte broke out in eastern Anatolia and spread gradually, province by province, throughout most of Asiatic Turkey. These disorders raged sporadically for two years until finally, in August 1896, they culminated in a similar assault on the Gregorian Armenian community of Istanbul, beneath the very windows of the embassies of the Great Powers. European estimates placed the total of Armenians killed throughout this period at between 250,000 and 300,000 men, women, and children, and 10 percent of the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire.

In the summer of 1976 Kuwait, after more than thirteen years of legislative experience, suspended its constitution, abolished the legislature, and embarked on what it called an “evaluation” of its democratic experience. After the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the downfall of the shah, Kuwait set up a special advisory committee to study, evaluate, and recommend the political system most appropriate for Kuwait. In 1980 the committee recommended a return to representative institutions. In March 1981, a legislative assembly was elected and was entrusted with the responsibility of drafting a new constitution and ratifying the basic statutes of the country.

The 1950s were years of profound change in the Middle East. In the realm of great power diplomacy, British hegemony gradually gave way to American ascendancy which, in turn, competed with the rapid spread of Soviet influence in the area. Within the region, the era witnessed the crystallization of a state system and, simultaneously, the growth of ideological movements dedicated to the unification of those states on national or religious bases. Internally, Middle Eastern governments sought new of opposition groups. These transformations, together with the dislocations of decolonization, the persistence of regional rivalries, and the introduction of new technologies, caused chronic instability throughout the Middle East, and in the winter of 1955–1956, combined to produce Britain's crisis in Jordan.

On 25 October 2017, the Saudi Arabian regime granted citizenship to Sophia, a humanoid robot developed in Hong Kong. Sophia became the world's first robot citizen. Some of the globe's wealthiest investors, foreign dignitaries, and foremost economists, journalists, and public relations experts celebrated the conferral firsthand. They were guests of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh, where they attended the inaugural Future Investment Initiative. Sponsored by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, the forum heralded the regime's renewed commitment to diversify the country's petro-economy, develop its human capital, and increase its global investment competitiveness. The national reform plan, dubbed Vision 2030, dominated the event's discussions. Vision 2030 was an ambitious blueprint that had as its goal nothing short of overhauling everyday life in Saudi Arabia. It entailed revamping bureaucratic capacity, building global gigacities, and opening the country to visitors and investors alike. Developing the tourism and entertainment sectors were key. Through these lucrative socio-technical experiments, the regime hoped to tackle the dire economic, financial, and social challenges it faced. To appeal to the global investor, it framed the reforms in the language of high-tech modernization, sustainable development, and socioreligious tolerance. Sophia, and all the trappings of modernization that “she” embodied, epitomized the ruling class's entrepreneurial vision for a new Saudi Arabia, and in turn, a new global citizen: the naturalized elite as well as the new Saudi Arabian citizen-subject (Fig. 1).

Israel is a nation replete with contradictions; its economics, politics, and sociology often defy understanding. This Jewish state, located on the periphery of the Moslem world, has few natural resources of its own, while its neighbors to the south and east enjoy the benefits of oil wealth. It is geographically Middle Eastern, yet politically finds itself considered European. Its population is predominantly Asian and African, yet its political institutions and leadership, civilization, and national cultural figures are rooted in the West. Another contradiction, less obvious but no less puzzling, provides the subject of this article. In typical periods of inflation, real wages are eroded and the laboring class suffers from a reduction in its purchasing power. Yet in the inflationary economy characteristic of most of Israel's existence, the wage-earner has managed to escape the harm threatened by the ever-diminishing value of the currency. The ostensible explanation—indexed wage contracts— appear to be inadequate, for such agreements never provided full de jure coverage against inflationary erosion.

The relationship between economic phenomena and revolution has intrigued political scientists from Aristotle2 to Zanzibar.3 As usual in political science, however, most studies of the matter have been limited to intuitive hypotheses, without any attempt at comparative empirical verification. As a result, a number of such hypothetical explanations have been proposed, each showing the persuasiveness of its own internal logic (as if convincing observers were the same thing as comprehending – let alone controlling – events) but none with any better claim on reality than the other.

In his classic study of revolution, Crane Brinton succeeds in uncovering certain common features, or uniformities, which are present in all four of the great Western revolutions. In analysing the English Revolution of the 1640s, the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the more recent Russian Revolution, he employs ‘the fever of revolution’ as a conceptual measure of social disequilibrium. This pathological analogy provides a means of focusing attention upon the key uniformities of revolution.

In recent Middle Eastern history, the experience of political exile has become a prevalent theme, as large numbers of Palestinians, Kurds, Iranians, and Afghans, among others, have sought refuge in various countries. Although the earlier numbers would pale in comparison with the present size of the Middle Eastern diaspora scattered around the globe, it was in the 19th century that the first noticeable groups of exiles from the Middle East began taking sanctuary in European countries, among other locations. Perhaps the best known of these exile communities were the Young Ottomans in France in the late 19th century.

Crowds have always puzzled historians. As essentially anonymous and spontaneous movements, they often seem to possess a mysterious, irrational, and even primal quality. They can form suddenly and unpredictably, unite strangers behind an apparently common cause, move through the streets as if acting with a single will, and then unexpectedly melt away into the surrounding neighborhoods and markets from which they came. Explanations are not easy to find. Once the sound and fury have subsided and participants have left the streets, it is nearly impossible to trace identities or determine individual motives for joining demonstrations. This obscurity only deepens when one moves to the more distant past, as the number of records and firsthand accounts rapidly dwindles.

During a revolutionary period of cultural production and anticolonial political commitment in 1950s Baghdad, the modernist poet Husayn Mardan was put on trial for his “obscene” collection entitled Qasaʾid ʿAriya (Naked Poems). Heavily influenced by Baudelaire, Mardan's poetics provide a revolutionary paradigm focused on the gratification of the corporeal. This paper considers how Mardan's poetry, largely marginalized from the canonized modernist Arabic poetic tradition, registers resistance to an increasingly rationalized and bureaucratic social order through a transgressive poetics that displace the political onto the body. Lampooning social uprightness and middle-class sterility, Mardan's poems encourage sexual licentiousness, embrace the space of the brothel, and celebrate filth and germs. Through a consideration of Mardan's appropriation of Baudelaire, this essay theorizes the translation and transformation of Baudelaire's paradigmatic literary representations of modernity into the context of a modernizing Baghdad and therefore historicizes the appearance of modernist aesthetics in a non-European space.

For what is needed is a philosophy of listening. But is this a possibility? If philosophy has its very roots intertwined with a secret vision of Being that has resulted in the present state of visualism, can it listen with equal profundity? What is called for is an ontology of the auditory.

This short essay focuses on three issues: how science studies may facilitate the rapprochement between the philological study of scientific texts and Middle East history; how it may help us reconsider ambiguous if not “black-boxed” terms such as the “state,” “Islam,” and the “West”; and finally, how it may build thematic and theoretical bridges with other histories and geographies of science currently emerging from a more global, and not merely local, perspective.

In their love for sports, Egyptians are no different from people in other parts of the world. They follow closely their favorite local teams in national-cup competitions, the careers of those stars who have taken their games to professional clubs in Europe, and, of course, the fortunes of their national teams in international competition. Success, such as Egypt's victory in the 2008 Africa Cup of Nations can draw millions into the streets of Cairo and Alexandria in celebration. Losses can result in full-scale political investigations launched by President Hosni Mubarak.

“Your political hegemony ended; your cultural hegemony, too, will end.”1