Professional attorneyship emerged in the Ottoman Empire in tandem with the consolidation of the Nizamiye (“regular”) court system during the late 19th century. This article analyzes the emergence of an Ottoman legal profession, emphasizing two developments. First, the Nizamiye courts advanced a formalist legal culture, exhibited, inter alia, by the expansion of legal procedure. Whereas the pre-19th century court of law was highly accessible to lay litigants, the proceduralization of court proceedings in the 19th century limited the legibility of the judicial experience to legal experts, rendering legal counseling almost indispensible in civil and criminal litigation. Second, the reformers made efforts to render state-granted legal license a sign of professional competence, presenting a formal distinction between the old “agents” (vekils), who lacked formal legal training, and the professional “trial attorneys” (dava vekils). In practice, however, lawyers of both categories had to adapt to the Nizamiye formalist culture.

An increased awareness of the activities of Orientalists has occurred in recent years due to the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism. However, as most students and scholars who study the East know, Said's work is only one of the more recent discussions of this subject. Others who have critiqued Orientalists and Orientalism include A. L. Tibawi and Abdallah Laroui, and, at an earlier time, Jamāl al-Dīn “al-Afghānī” and Muḥammad Abduh. Western Orientalists have even been engaged in evaluating the work of other Orientalists, and even critiquing the critics; for example, J.-J. Waardenburg, D. P. Little, and the participants in the recent Giorgio Levi Della Vida Biennal Conference.

The recent crisis in Turkey has been described primarily as a political crisis caused by an unworkable political system under attack from organized terrorism from both the right and the left. While this may be valid as an immediate cause, there are some structural and ideological contradictions in the Turkish economic system which must also be highlighted. These contradictions have evolved gradually over the last half century in the course of Turkey's efforts to achieve industrial and economic growth. They have been exacerbated in particular by a process of lopsided industrialization after 1960 which, as in most other developing countries, has resulted in increased poverty and unemployment while achieving overall growth rates of 6 percent or better.

The Arab region is generally thought of as wealthy, being the recipient of a large income from oil. In reality, oil wealth is confined to a small minority of states and peoples; most of the region's population are poor.

This paper discusses the employment pattern and future problems of the six poorest countries of the Arab region: Syria, Jordan, Sudan, South Yemen (Peoples' Democratic Republic of Yemen), Egypt, and North Yemen (Yemen Arab Republic).

Throughout the nineteenth century, the cities on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, Tunis, Alexandria, Beirut, Smyrna, and Istanbul among them, experienced an influx of foreign communities which, combined with an increase in the indigenous populations and new urban policies on the part of certain rulers, tended to disrupt customary patterns of urban relationships. Although the scholarship of recent years has provided a new awareness of the network of interrelationships which held together the segments of medieval Islamic urban society, studies on the nineteenth-century changes in those relationships as represented by the policies of Muhammad ῾Alī, Aḥmad Bey, and the Ottoman Tanzimat reformers, have tended to focus more on aspects of state and government than on cities as such. Yet cities, especially capital cities, reflect most intensely periods of social and institutional transition.

There is no precise English equivalent to this Hindustani proverb. A rolling stone gathers no moss, between the devil and the deep blue sea, between a rock and a hard place, torn between two masters—none of these really fit. The dhobi ka kuta is the dog who figuratively and literally runs every day between two places, two obligations, and two choices. Does he stay behind to guard the master's house or does he guard his master as he washes clothes by the river? There will be a trade-off either way. The phrase does not conjure up vagabond restlessness or nomadic liberation. It evokes the anxiety of rootlessness, and the lack of certainty about choice and loyalty. It is about the doubt cast your way for not picking one thing over the other. It is about being stuck in the vagaries of the in-between.

Viewing an exhibition of civil war paintings in 1886, Lea Barakat wrote that her “country came to mind: the splendor of its ruins, the wonders of their form like the fortress of Baalbek, the ruins of Palmyra, and the scenes of Lebanon…” Native women should paint like this, she states, and “not leave a scene [of Lebanon] unpainted… They can decorate the rooms of their homes and sitting rooms with these pictures…” She concludes that “since the ladies of our country are smarter and more industrious in their handcrafts than [American] ladies,” they too can obtain a similar level of “wealth, honorable work, admiration of the masses, and praise for the virtue of their [arts and crafts]. This study is a prolegomenon to examining the topography of visual culture and modernity to which Barakat alludes. Rather than painting, this article focuses on photography produced by Arabs during the late Ottoman and early Mandate periods in Lebanon. Less concerned with using photographs to document social transformations, this study theorizes how production and deployment of the photographic image played a part in the conceptualization of a bourgeois individualist subjectivity in Lebanon, which is claimed not to exist in the Arab world.

This essay analyzes the organizational culture(s) of Egyptian public-sector firms. I accomplish this through an ethnography of two state-owned textile companies in Alexandria. I describe the cultures of these organizations in terms of hierarchy, accountability, trust, and authority relations and assess the effects of these features on the quality of working life and overall efficiency.1 What is it like to work in these companies? How is authority exercised, and what is the nature of relations between superiors and subordinates? What impact, if any, do the cultures of these firms have on performance, efficiency, and productivity?

The 19 August 1953 toppling of Muhammad Musaddiq's government in Iran was an important historical event from various perspectives, many of which are being discussed by Middle East observers to this date. First, it was the first covert post-World War II operation by the U.S. government, in cooperation with Britain, to topple the constitutional government of a sovereign nation. Operation AJAX, as the coup d'état came to be called by the CIA, was implemented at the height of the Cold War, and as such was accompanied by many familiar justifications. The most important of these were the improbability of any resolution to the oil-nationalization crisis between Iran and Britain as long as Musaddiq remained in power and the communist threat posed by the Tudeh Party of Iran and its Soviet sponsor.1 The long-term consequence of this intervention can partially explain the 1979 revolution in Iran and the ongoing crisis in Iran–U.S. relations.

In 1976, Michel Foucault gave a unique interview with the editors of the French geography journal, Hérodote. The interviewers pushed him to explicitly reflect on the many spatial concepts that pervade his writing, such as region, province, field, archipelago, and territory. In one reply, Foucault explained:

In this paper we focus on the Republican Mosque in Derinkuyu, Turkey, a Greek Orthodox church built in 1859 and transformed into a mosque in 1949 that still exhibits many obviously Christian structural features not found in most such converted churches. We utilize the concept of religioscape, defined as the distribution in spaces through time of the physical manifestations of specific religious traditions and of the populations that build them, to analyze the historical transformations of the building, and show that this incongruity marks a specific stage in the long-term competitive sharing of space by the two religiously defined communities concerned. This shared but contested space is larger than that of the building or even the town of Derinkuyu. We argue that syncretism without sharing correlates with a lack of need to show dominance symbolically, since the community that had lost the sacred building had been displaced as a group, and was no longer present to be impressed or intimidated.

Over the past two decades, scholars of the Middle East have produced an impressive body of scholarship that seeks to understand diverse groups and practices that are together called political Islam. Much of our work has drawn little attention outside of academia despite the obsession with Islam shared by policymakers and the general public. The many careful studies produced by academics and some journalists—typically based on extensive field research and use of primary sources in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian—have to contend with bestselling books that trade in fears about the irrational, West-hating Muslim fanatic. Unfortunately, serious scholarship on political Islam cannot ignore this terrain of stereotypes and fearmongering, as it dominates mainstream debates about Islam and the Middle East. But in responding to these discourses, we often allow them to dictate our analytic starting point, resulting in less theoretical innovation and empirical insight than might emerge if we moved beyond the focus on Islamist groups and whether most are moderate or radical. Indeed, we might do well to abandon altogether the idea that “political Islam” represents a tangible object of study.

While I was working on my Ph.D. thesis on Ikhwan in the Sudan,1 a Sudanese colleague of mine working in a related area used to joke that we have all become “Orientalists.” There was a certain sense of irony—and truth—in this “accusation.” Our endeavor was either the negation and supersession of Orientalism, or its final triumph. For here we are, fiery Islamic militants, squatting meekly and dutifully at the feet of our Orientalist sheikhs, hoping to drink at their hands the cup of knowledge on which we had simultaneously turned our backs. Is this conceding defeat or starting an invasion?

This study undertakes an examination of Lebanese women's fiction over the past forty years or so. For many women, the urban environment is an escape from the restrictive traditional community that is closely aligned with a rural mentality. Many of these writers tend to see the city in stark contrast to the country, which, in their eyes represents restraining cultural values. If in some cases the city and the country are represented as real, tangible places, the majority of women tend to view them as “states of mind and feeling”1 or as representations. Some female writers see the city and the village in ontological opposition between repression and freedom, backwardness and progress, and past and present—or, as Raymond Williams refers to it, “of consciousness with ignorance; of vitality with routine; of the present and actual with the past or the lost.”2 Nevertheless, it is clear that in many cases the city incorporates and embraces both the traditional and modern patterns, because “an old order, a ‘traditional' society, keeps appearing, reappearing, at bewilderingly various dates.”3 Far from viewing themselves as alienated and degraded beings in the corrupt and hellish city4 or the modern wasteland, women see the nurturing city as a symbol of well-being, independence, and freedom from shackles. Indeed, they become so immersed in city life that, for some of them, there is “little reality in any other mode of life.”5 The city gives them the opportunity to escape the narrow confines of home, family, and stifling traditions that have relegated them to a corner and associated them with a nostalgic past. Accordingly, for many of them, the city has become, as Williams puts it, “the physical embodiment of a decisive modern consciousness,”6 a place consistently in flux and motion7 where women attempt to keep the ever-haunting past at bay and reveal a thrust for change and for experience and knowledge that they try to replenish in the city.

Every society has subterranean fractures—ethnic, regional, racial, tribal, or sectarian. Given the right confluence of events, these can erupt and take on new life. When imperial and colonial powers produce a body of knowledge about those they rule, they often construct sociodemographic categories along these very fault lines. In the Middle East, this process has coincided with an attempted regional remapping using imagined and yet real (although newly configured) social categories. With the democracy project fading, the mosaic—in which the region is conceptualized as a multitude of discrete sociocultural units based on sect, ethnicity, and tribe—has appeared. Complex social categories are distilled into bounded categories whose correspondence to reality is problematic.

The period between the early 1930s and 1946 witnessed in Iran an intellectual phenomenon unique in the recent, history of that country. This phenomenon was embodied in the person of Ahmad Kasravî (1890–1946), one of the illustrious figures of Iran in the realms of scholarship and social reforms. Kasravî was a man of considerable and varied intellectual talents and great courage. His activities were spread over a very wide range.He became the center of many controversies, not the least important and widespread of which was that concerning classical Persian poetry. It is with this aspect of his work that the present series of papers is concerned.

International fairs—the “folk-festivals of capitalism”—have long been a favorite topic of historians studying quintessential phenomena of modernity such as the celebration of industrial productivity, the construction of national identities, and the valorization of bourgeois leisure and consumption in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. To date, however, such spectacles occurring in the modern Middle East remain largely unexamined. This article, an analysis of the discourse surrounding the first Damascus International Exposition in 1954, is conceived in part as a preliminary effort to redress this historiographic imbalance.

This essay analyzes three problems with the landmark Arab Human Development Report 2005 on women as a means of reflecting on some consequences of the transnational currency of a particular “dialect” of women's rights. Given the current geopolitical context, it first asks how the report's attribution of “unique” shortcomings in the Arab world to cultural and religious factors might make it vulnerable to appropriation for dangerous arguments about “the clash of civilizations.” Second, it asks how the urban, middle-class, cosmopolitan perspective on women's lives, aspirations, and everyday conditions colors the report's analyses of education, employment, and the role of family, eliding critical aspects of political economy and ignoring alternative values. Finally, it considers how the report's reliance on the dominant secular, liberal political paradigms that this “dialect” of women's empowerment indexes—modernization, human development, and (neo)liberalism—both narrows its recommendations and limits its potential appeal, given the Islamic revival and economic problems in the Arab world.

A synthesis of Ottoman administrative history has yet to be written, and it is unlikely that one will appear in the near future. The task is enormous, and more glamorous subjects continue to receive priority. Even now the field of administrative history exists largely as an ancillary to the study of Ottoman diplomatic instruments or as a foundation for the study of the moderization of traditional society. In the latter case it has fallen under the spell of institutional history, where three theses and at least one ‘antithesis’ scurry in their murine way across the tiles of the Ottoman edifice. Despite the fact that a developed literature is lacking, speceialists in other disciplines have used the Ottoman example for broad comparative studies of bureaucratic empires. Their premature attempts have perpetuated the notion already endemic in Islamist circles that what we know of Islamic government is all there is to know and need be known. Several themes, however, have dominated the study of governing institutions in the Middle East with a force that has surely impeded progress and fresh thought. Our first results from the four theses referred to earlier are terribly outdated at worst or in need of modification at best. New source materials in the Ottoman archives and new readings of older materials long subject to scholarly scrutiny call for a reexamination of those leading themes and the theses they inspire before any attempt at synthesis and comparison is made.

Ten years ago dissatisfaction with the state of studying Middle East politics may well have led one to believe that to a very large extent, the shortage of scholars qualified in the esoteric languages, elaborate traditions, and long history of the area was to blame. In fact, at the time there was a good deal of justification to speak of an expected shortage of experts in Middle Eastern studies, to the point where importing such scholars from abroad was considered as an alternative. Today, the problem seems to be more to find positions for fair numbers of fresh Ph.D.s in Middle Eastern history, sociology, and politics. The dissatisfaction with the state of the field, however, remains intact.