In the early 1590s an obscure chieftain of the Druze district of the Shûf, in the mountain hinterland of Sidon, was appointed multazim (tax farmer) of the whole Druze mountain (the Shûf along with the Gharb, Jurd and Matn, in the hinterland of Beirut) by the Ottoman beylerbeyi (provincial governor) of Damascus. The name of this chieftain was Fakhr al-Dîn ibn Qurqumâs (Turkish Korkmaz), and he belonged to the family of the Ma'ns, who had been hereditary chieftains of the Shûf at least since the fifteenth century1. In time, Fakhr al-Dîn made use of favourable circumstances to extend his dominion over the whole of Mount Lebanon, and also over other parts of the Syrian countryside. In 1633, however, the Ottomans turned against him and crushed him, and a mysterious figure called ‘Alî ‘Alam al-Dîn was appointed to replace him in the paramount chieftainship of the Druze mountain. For over three decades this man, and his sons after him, maintained themselves in power as paramount chieftains of the Druzes, while the Ma‘ns were reduced to their original size as traditional chieftains of the Shûf. Finally, in 1667, Emir Ahmad Ma‘n, a grandnephew of Fakhr al-Dîn’s, was appointed multazim of the Druze districts of the Shûf, Gharb, Jurd and Matn, and of the Maronite district of the Kisrawân, and the Ma‘nid hegemony over the southern Lebanon was thus re-established. When Ahmad Ma‘n died without male progeny in 1697 he was succeeded in his iltizâm, and hence in the hegemony of the southern Lebanon, by the Shihâbs–Sunnite chieftains of Wâdî al-Taym, on the western slopes of Mount Hermon, who were descended from the Druze Ma‘ns in the female line (see Table I). In 1710-11 the ‘Alam al-Dîns, in eclipse since 1667, re-emerged on the political scene to challenge the Shihâb succession; their revolt, however, failed and they were massacred to extermination. The Shihâbs subsequently became the unchallenged masters of the southern Lebanon, and remained so until their downfall in 1841.2

Ibn Ṭufayl (d. 1185), the Spanish Muslim philosopher, is at once a scientist, a mystic, and a believer. His science-oriented spirit, his mysticism, and his religious belief fall naturally into their proper places within the framework of his philosophy. This philosophy is imbedded in his distinguished treatise Ḥayy Bin Yaqẓân. In this work, he fuses his comprehensive knowledge of various disciplines in an all-embracing view of things which bears the results of his intellectual labor and culminates in a science-based mysticism. In preparing for the presentation of his views, Ibn Tufayl writes an Introduction to his work which includes a rigorous criticism of the philosophies of his predecessors. This Introduction imbues the treatise with philosophical seriousness and systematic value, and reveals the author's metaphysical presuppositions and basic motives for writing Ḥayy Bin Yaqẓân. He also draws a fundamental distinction between naturalistic knowledge and mystical gnosis, two methods of cognition that are not, in his opinion, mutually exclusive, and the rigorous training in the first necessarily leads to the, attainment of the latter. Such a distinction determines the entire philosophic plan of the treatise which commences with Ḥayy's early scientific and conceptual development and culminates in his inevitable union with the Necessary Being. Had Ibn Ṭufayl not written this Introduction, a great amount of scholarly work and historical investigation would have been required to trace the historical and intellectual threads with which Ḥayy Bin Yaqẓân was uniquely woven.

Waqf documents in Cairo form an invaluable yet relatively unexploited source of Egyptian history for the last six centuries. In a body of records of immense value for the quality of their content as well as their number is to be found data of great significance for virtually the entire spectrum of the extended social sciences. By waqf records is meant not simply the original waqfîya, or ḥhujja establishing the waqf, but those subsidiary documents that modify the original donation in some way. Each class of these documents provides information of a unique character. Together they afford one of the most intimate glimpses into the inner functioning of Egyptian urban and rural society.

On New Year's Eve, before the tumultuous events of 1978–79, President Jimmy Carter, while toasting the Shah in Tehran, referred to Iran as an “island of stability” in the Persian Gulf. President Carter's remarks reflected the consensus opinion about Iran not only among United States government officials but among most business firms operating in Iran as well. A typical U.S. corporate attitude was represented by a 1975 Business International (hereafter BI) report about business prospects in the Middle East.

These characteristics (infrastructure development, population size and high absorptive capacity), which favorably distinguish Iran from the Arab Middle East, make the country the prime market in the area for many Western exporters. Political stability, the government's benevolent attitude toward private enterprise, and a well-protected internal market give Iran a similar edge in the eyes of foreign investors. Few international companies will thus want to stand aside as Iran races toward its goal of becoming the Japan of the Middle East.1

Three years ago, the film Nasser 56 (1996), from Muhammad Fadil, a dramatic reenactment of the Suez crisis, set unprecedented attendance records in Egypt. Opening at the end of another disappointing year marked by a steady decline in studio film production and a dearth of high-quality offerings—and held back from public screening a full year by wavering government support—the film breathed new life into the movie industry and precipitated a national discussion about the legacy of Gamal Abdel Nasser. The film has come and gone from Cairo theaters (although screenings abroad continue), but Nasser 56 will remain a historic film. In dramatic fashion, it broke a long-accepted taboo against cinematic depiction of modern political leaders. It is also the first serious attempt at film biography by an Egyptian filmmaker in thirty years.

The poet known as Bâkî (d. 1600), the “King of Poets” of Sultan Suleiman I (1520–66), is generally acknowledged as the leading figure of the so-called “classical age” of Ottoman poetry (roughly from the mid-15th to the beginning of the 17th century), while the poet known as Nâʾilî (d. 1666) was a pivotal figure in the break between this classical age and the “post-classical age,” roughly the early modern era extending from 1600 to 1800. On the broadest level this break was signaled by a change in the use of metaphorical language. This paper will contrast the treatment of one series of metaphors common in the lyric gazels within the divâns of both poets, although further examples could be found within other poetic genres, especially the panegyric kasîde. It will also attempt to interpret the significance of these metaphors in Nâʾilî's poetry and to demonstrate their distance from the usage of the classical Ottoman period, exemplified by Bâkî.

The growth and transformation of Middle Eastern manufacturing industry has been little studied for the period before the advent of tariff autonomy, and thus protectionism, in the early 1930s The reasons for this are various but must have much to do with the many difficult problems involved. There is an obvious lack of data, particularly about the activities of the craft or small-scale sector which, even to this day, is regularly under-counted by government statisticians. There are also serious problems of definition which hage generally been ignored by the vast majority of economic historians who remain content to analyse manufacturing activity in terms of such simple dichotomies as modern/factory/capitalist versus traditional/workshop/pre-capitalist, a method which not only masks the fact that there are a whole range of activities which do not fall into such apparently neat categories but also — to introduce the major theme of this essay — makes it impossible to examine the complex interrelationship between plants of different size and degree of capitalisation. Finally, much of what passes for a ducussion of manufacturing activity has, in fact, got muddled with the much larger debate about the whole process of industrialisation, about whether particular areas of the Middle East could have developed their own industrial base before 1930, and about why they might have been prevented from doing so.

One would think that, after years of fieldwork and writing, I would be able to answer a pretty simple and straightforward question about who exactly I interviewed for my study of citizenship boundaries in the UAE: “Do you have any notion of the proportions [of interlocuters] of the different ethnic or descent lines that you spoke to?” This essay is about why it is so difficult to answer this question and the insights into citizenship that unfolded as I searched for an empirical answer. Spoiler alert: Answers to questions about “national” or “ethnic” origin are entirely dependent upon how we count—and miscount—time.

This article examines the symbiotic relationship between race and empire in British ethnographic discourse on the Arabs of Palestine. Drawing on the works of British explorers in late Ottoman Palestine, I show how native Palestinian Bedouin came to be viewed as a separate race within a hierarchy of Arab races, and how within this racial reconfiguration the Bedouin embodied not only an ideal model of racial purity, but also a racial archetype on which Arabness itself was measured, codified, and reproduced.

In recent decades historians specializing in the Middle East and North Africa have studied endemic and epidemic diseases as well as evolving medical and public health knowledge and policy to better understand major historical transformations. The study of gender and empire, class and ethnicity, and civil society and government in the determination of medical and public health policy has yielded new insights into questions of state power, colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, modernity, and globalization. Historians have asked why, when, and how Western medicine took root in Muslim societies, which had their own complex and longstanding medical traditions.

Despite a growing literature on peasant movements in the early 20th century, the story of the peasant rebellions of the Caspian region at the time of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906–11 has been little studied.1 A close look at three sets of materials—the newspapers of the Constitutional Revolution, among them Majlis (1906–1908), Anjuman (1906–1909), Habl al-Matīn (1907–1909), and Sūr-i Isrāfīl (1907–8); British diplomatic reports; and several regional studies and memoirs of the period—reveal that, during the First Constitutional Period of 1906–1908, a number of strikes and sit-ins were carried out by the peasants, often with the support of craftsmen and workers, who had initiated trade union activity. Such revolts were considerably more sustained and prominent in the northern areas of Gilan and Azerbayjan, which were directly influenced by the flow of radical ideas from the Russian Caucasus; they also benefited from a long history of social struggle among the craftsmen and small shopkeepers (pīshahvarāns), who maintained their guilds, and a tradition of alliances among the craftsmen, the urban poor, and the poor peasants.2

On the night of 9–10 July 1980, several hundred active-duty and retired Iranian paratroopers made their way to the Nuzhih air-force base near the city of Hamadan to initiate a coup d'état against Iran's fledgling Islamic regime. The Iranian government had learned of the plot, and many of the paratroopers were arrested as they arrived at the base. Several hundred additional participants in the plot were arrested in the following days. Those arrested were soon put on trial, and many were executed. Fearing that other military personnel were linked to the plot or sympathized with it, the government carried out an extensive purge of the armed forces in the following months. Hundreds of other participants in the plot were never apprehended, however, and many continued to plot against the Islamic regime, though they never again posed a serious threat to it.

The following is a report of a pilot study on nomad-sedentary relations viewed in terms of exchange. The study was conducted in the Zagros Mountains of Iran and in the central Hazarajat of Afghanistan during the summer of 1971. The research involved the application in a field situation of a theoretical framework that links exchange and social structure. In previous research we had investigated the relationship between social structure and exchange in societies having a particular kind of exchange system—the potlatch. Utilizing Levi-Strausss approach to structure, we have taken certain kinds of rules, preferential marriage rules or rules of succession, and built models of social structure on the basis of such rules (Levi-Strauss, 1963). These were related to other models based upon the analysis of exchange behavior. In an earlier volume, Feasting with Mine Enemy, we demonstrated the applicability of this approach in our analysis of six Northwest Coast societies by relating their different forms of social structure to the variations they exhibited in their potlatch activity (Rosman and Rubel, 1971). The purpose of the pilot study reported on here was to apply our conceptual framework relating exchange and social structure to more complex social systems.

In most Western universities, Arabic literature is rarely studied by itself or for itself. It is subject to disciplinary traffic and intersections, on the one hand, and to what might be called a political predicament, on the other. With this in mind, I outline below some thoughts underpinned by two examples of the state of the art in Arabic literary studies, published four decades apart.

Historians have recently started listening to the past, contributing to what David Howes has described as a “sensorial revolution in the humanities and social sciences.” In the same way that all five senses are relevant to our daily understanding of the world around us, they should be vital to our understanding of historical events. Interpreting how peoples of the past sensorially experienced their world makes possible a richer, more comprehensive grasp of historical events. A sensorially grounded historical narrative is an embodied history that is connected to everyday people and lives. Historians of the Middle East, however, with few exceptions, are still largely producing soundproof, devocalized narratives of the past.

This article analyzes the sensationalized media coverage of a serial murder case during the Egyptian revolution of the early interwar era. Despite conflicting evidence, the media blamed the murders on two sisters from southern Egypt named Raya and Sakina. Through a close reading of Egyptian editorials and news reports, I argue that middle-class nationalists constructed Raya and Sakina as barbaric women who threatened to pull the nation back in time in order to legitimize their claim to power. Borrowing from Ann Stoler's analysis of the relationship between race and sexuality and Maria Lugones's concept of the modern/colonial gender system, this article maintains that race was as central to nationalist conceptions of female barbarism as gender, sexuality, and class. The enduring depiction of Raya and Sakina as the quintessential barbaric Egyptian women symbolizes the way in which the modern woman was constructed at the intersection of race and sexuality.

One of the most complex questions in the study of the history of Arab nationalism is that of the relationship between Islam and nationalism in collective political identity. This complexity shows itself clearly in the specific case of the Palestinian national movement during the early Mandatory period, when the Islamic political sensibilities that historically had been central to the Ottoman Empire were thoroughly intertwined with Palestinian territorial nationalism and Pan-Arabism.1 It is not difficult to identify individual Palestinian activists who expressed their political identities at various times through any or all of these categories.2 Clearly, religious and nationalist bases of social and political identity are neither mutually exclusive nor unchanging over time. Concepts of identity, whether expressed through kinship relations, citizenship, or religious and national identity, are generated, chosen, and manipulated in specific historical circumstances. As Dale Eickelman explains, “These forms do not exist as objects that can be torn from social and cultural contexts by anthropologists for recording and classification into typologies.”3 One can therefore ask, Under what circumstances did Palestinian activists choose to express their political identity in terms of nationalism?

Abû al-Qâsim al-Shâbbî is one of the most attractive literary figures of twentieth- century North Africa, and probably the only Maghribi author of the modern period so far to attain the stature of greatness in the Arab world. His talent was first appreciated in Cairo in the thirties by the editors of Apollo magazine, and today literary men in all Arabic-speaking lands admire his verse.At the 1966 festival held in his memory in Tunis, critics and litterateurs from Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Iraq read papers and recited poems expressing their appreciation of this treasured child of the Tunisian desert.

Noting the limitations of the macroanalytic approach in the study of politics, a group of political scientists have focused their attention on individual members of the society—their systems of political belief, expectations, and aspirations. This group is concerned with the individual's “cognitive,” “affective,” and “evaluative” orientations toward the system.But unlike the United States, where numerous authoritative writings focus on the belief system of the individual, there has been only limited research investigating the belief system of Arabs in general and Kuwaiti Arabs in particular.