In very rich rentier-states, such as Kuwait, citizens have a smaller immediate stake in the success of the nonoil economy than do citizens in nonrentier economies. This is because the nonoil sector does not pay much in the way of taxes, nor does it employ many citizens. For the most part, citizens work for the state or state-owned enterprises, and their paychecks are ultimately funded by oil revenues. Foreigners dominate private-sector employment. Kuwait's parliament—by far the strongest in the Gulf—reflects the interests of citizen employees of the state and is widely seen as an obstacle to private-sector growth. In the United Arab Emirates, by contrast, citizens have little political voice. Public policy instead reflects the interests of capitalists (especially ruling families) in the development of a diversified economy.

Exploring how railway technology was incorporated into the everyday lives of Iranians during the second quarter of the 20th century, this article focuses on spatial discourses and practices around the Iranian railway. The first part investigates Iranian journalists' construction of the railway traveler prototype as the propagator of modernity prior to the completion of the Trans-Iranian Railway in 1938. The second part shows how in the 1940s the railway space became a microcosm of the heterogeneous Iranian nation, and explores how middle-class travelers experienced the railway space. I argue that the railway space, rather than creating a homogeneous experience of railway journeys, was conducive to fragmented experiences among its diverse occupants, who were divided by religion, socioeconomic status, cultural orientation, and ethnicity. The visibility of heterogeneity in the railway space compelled modern middle-class travelers to consolidate their class identity and distinguish themselves from the rest of Iranian society. Wanting to achieve a homogeneously Europeanized Iran, they also felt compelled to travel the country more extensively to create a national community connected through direct interaction.

The dowry is the movement of women and goods in the same direction (Goody 1973: 18). Or, as Tambiah puts it, ‘Wherever dowry is paid, wealth is not transferred in one direction and women in the other, for both wealth and women travel in the same direction’ (1973: 62). This one-sided exchange is rather curious as one side in the transaction gets all the values while the other seems to give them all away. A person who gives a dowry as a father has once received a dowry as a groom. As a consequence of his once being a receiver he has an obligation to his daughter to be the giver of a dowry. Unlike other types of wife-giving and wife-receiving, in this system it is individuals and not lineages or families who give and receive women. As a consequence alliances between families are not formed.

The long American war on Iraq is not over. In a country ravaged for more than two decades by crippling sanctions and military occupation, the social, cultural, and political-economic legacies of war seem unending. Perhaps even more disturbing, Iraqis now face widespread environmental destruction and a dystopian environmental future. The ecological wages of America's long war in Iraq are partly the consequence of “routine” violence, resulting from the systemic destruction of vital electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure over two decades. It is possible to imagine that Iraq's cities and villages can be rebuilt. But even if it finds its way to the kind of political accommodation that makes reconstruction possible, parts of the country face other pernicious long-term environmental threats, among the most dangerous being the hidden toxic and radiological dangers that have settled in Iraqi bodies and deep in its landscape.

On 26 April 1920, three days after the opening of the Grand National Assembly in Angora (Ankara), Mustafa Kemal addressed his first officially confirmed message to the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) of Russia. Shortly thereafter, Bekir Sami Bey (Kundah), Turkish foreign minister, departed for negotiations in Mosocow.A draft treaty was initialed in August and delivered to Angora in September, and in March 1921 the governments of the Turkish Grand National Assembly and of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic established formal bonds by concluding the Treaty of Moscow. During the few intervening months the small Caucasian Armenian republic, which had been created in May of 1918 and which had become the fulcrum of Armenian aspirations for an independent state encompassing both the Russian Armenian provinces and the contiguous Turkish Armenian provinces of eastern Anatolia, was crushed by the invasion of General Kazim Karabekir's XV Army Corps. The offensive, begun after attainment of a vague Soviet-Turkish understanding, not only overturned the Allied-imposed Treaty of Sévres, which had awarded to the Armenian republic much of the four eastern vilayets of Van, Bitlis, Diyarbakir, and Erzurum, but also restored to Turkish dominion the sanjaks of Kars and Ardahan, since 1878 parts of Russian or Eastern Armenia. What was more, Nationalist Turkey annexed the Surmalu district, embracing Mount Ararat, the historic symbol of the Armenian people.

When I was preparing my PhD in 1993, the subject “Eastern Christians” or “Christians in the Islamic World” was almost nonexistent in the mass media or in scholarly works. In fact, I prepared my thesis not under the supervision of a specialist in the Middle East but rather under that of a specialist in European Catholicism during the early modern era.

On 27 February 1958, General Valiollah Qarani, commander of the Iranian army's intelligence staff (G-2), was arrested on charges of engaging in political activity, a practice that was forbidden at the time for all Iranian government employees. Dozens of other Iranians from a variety of political persuasions were also arrested or interrogated by the security forces in connection with Qarani's arrest. In a brief flurry of newspaper stories and official statements, it was alleged that Qarani and his collaborators had been conspiring with an unnamed foreign power—generally understood to be the United States—against the Shah's regime. Qarani was tried in the summer of 1958 and given a three-year prison term. He remained on the margins of Iranian political life until 1979, when he served briefly as chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces in the first postrevolutionary government. He was assassinated in April 1979 by the mysterious Islamic terrorist group Forqan.

On 24 January 2015, Shaymaʾ al-Sabbagh, a thirty-two-year-old mother of one and a member of the Egyptian Socialist People's Alliance Party, was walking with flowers in hand alongside her colleagues in a preauthorized march to Tahrir Square to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the January Revolution. Suddenly the police opened fire at close range and within a few minutes Shaymaʾ dropped dead. Despite strong evidence implicating the police, who were present at the scene in overwhelming numbers, and despite the wide circulation on social media of a video clip showing a masked policeman aiming in Shaymaʾ's direction, the attorney general initially refused to arraign the police officer in question and instead decided to charge Shaymaʾ's colleagues. After a massive public outcry, the suspected police officer was finally arraigned (although his identity was never revealed); however, he was charged not with manslaughter or excessive use of force, but with the much lesser charge of “beating that results in death.” Most crucially, the official cause of Shaymaʾ's death was slimness. In a TV interview, Dr. Hisham ʿAbd al-Hamid, the spokesperson of the Egyptian Medical Forensics Authority (EMFA), said that the birdshot that hit Shaymaʾ “was not fatal given that it was fired more than eight meters away, but since she was too skinny, the birdshot was able to penetrate her body easily and ended up hitting the lung and the heart. This is a very rare case.”

The increased interest in Afghanistan, highlighted by the Soviet invasion of that country in December 1979, calls for the reassessment of the more recent political history of Afghanistan, particularly its relations with the great powers. In this connection the period of World War 11 has often been treated superficially, and until today there has been only one book (L. W. Adamec, Afghanistan's Foreign Affairs to the Mid- Twentieth Century: Relations with the USSR, Germany, and Britain [Tucson, 1974]) which contains adequate coverage of the war years. These years ought to be considered as a watershed for the entire region since they clearly foreshadowed the events to come, which we are observing today with great amazement and alarm.

Iranian agriculture and rural society have undergone profound socioeconomic and political changes over the past four decades. While recognizing the significant impact of urbanization, economic development, and integration of the rural economy in the market, this paper contends that the land-reform program of the 1960s and the 1979 revolution represent the primary turning points in the rural transformation. Land reform, through intense state intervention, dramatically changed the traditional landlord-sharecropping system (nizam-i arbab-rayati). Peasant uprisings, the forcible occupation of large estates, and the agrarian policies of the postrevolutionary regime have led to the demise of the urban agricultural bourgeoisie and the empowerment of the peasants. There has been a disintegration of large-scale public and private agricultural production systems, including agribusinesses, farm corporations, and the agricultural production cooperatives developed under the shah's regime.

The question of the relations between Muslims and Jews in late niineteenth-Century Morocco is a fascinating and complex subject. Much has been written about the discrimination which most members of the Jewish community in Morocco experienced at the hands of the Muslims. That the Muslim Majority regarded the Jewish minority as inferiors cannot be denied. Historically, Islamic governments have relegated Christians and Jews to a lower status as ahl'l-kitâb or ‘People of the Book’, who possessed a religious book, although not the religious book. In the case of Morocco the Jews found their freedom of action circumscribed by certain regulations. First of all, in return for the payment of a poll tax, the jizya, the sultan guaranteed Jewish life and property. In areas which were beyond government control, Jews fell under the patronage of powerful figures in their regions. Secondly, their testimony was considered invalid in Muslim courts. Thirdly, they were compelled, quite frequently, to wear special clothing and to remove their shoes when passing in front of mosques. Fourthly, Jews were often not permitted to carry arms or ride horses. And lastly, the display of a properly respectful attitude toward Muslims was expected.

“Our present knowledge concerning the Arab city's past history is unsatisfactory,” remarked André Raymond in his Grandes villes arabes à l'époque ottomane.1 He went on to state that “the mediocrity of our information concerning the history of Arab cities is particularly noticeable for the modern period, that is, for the four Ottoman centuries.” Several explanations account for this insufficiency. First of all, “the absence of all statistical and numerical information about the urban population's social structure in relation to its dwelling conditions renders numerical and cartographical analysis difficult. As a result, specific descriptions concerning the geography of residential areas in relation to the different socioeconomic groups within a population and their dwellings is problematic.” Secondly, our knowledge concerning the better-off groups far overshadows that for the poorer levels of society: “We are only really well acquainted with the rich or middle-class dwellings in the Arab cities. In fact, it is only these types of dwellings for which urban archaeology provides a satisfactory sampling"2; archival documents usually concern only the most sumptuous and luxurious residences belonging to the highest urban real estate bracket. Finally, the study of Arab cities is obscured by several traditional ideas that affect all research in this field, particularly, the notion that traditional Islamic society was basically egalitarian and that therefore spatial segregation based upon socioeconomic criteria did not exist.

This article examines the association of homosexuality with madness in two contemporary novels, Hanan al-Shaykh's Innaha London ya ʿAzizi (Only in London) and Hamdi Abu Golayyel's (Julayyil) Lusus Mutaqaʿidun (Thieves in Retirement). Through a comparative reading of the figure of Majnun, an impassioned lover and mad rebel, I argue that literary articulations of queer desire operate as embodied resistance to social and political normativity, both in the Arab world and in the diaspora. Discussing the aesthetic transformation of the contemporary novel and drawing on the Arab-Islamic literary and philosophical tradition, I critically engage Michel Foucault's reading of sexual and epistemological developments in light of current debates about Arab homosexuality. I show how discursive models of sexuality are situated in modernity's intertwinement with other structures of power and systems of belief, crossing cultural contexts and linguistic registers.

This study looks at the history of two madrasas in Jerusalem, al-Madrasa al-ʿUthmaniyya and al-Madrasa al-Fanariyya from the 15th to the 18th centuries, in order to examine an understudied Ottoman institution: the imperial provincial madrasa. The imperial madrasas were assigned to the state-appointed Hanafi muftis of different localities across the empire. This essay argues that these learning institutions helped to consolidate the connection between the Ottoman dynasty, its appointed jurisconsults, and its broader imperial learned hierarchy. Beyond revealing some of its important institutional aspects, examining the imperial provincial madrasa casts light on the doctrinal role the Ottoman dynasty assumed in regulating the content of Hanafi jurisprudence that members of the imperial learned hierarchy were to apply. This role and the connections between the dynasty and its appointed jurisconsults had important effects within the diverse legal landscape of the empire, where multiple Sunni (especially Hanafi) legal and scholarly traditions coexisted. In further analyzing the identity of the endowers of these imperial madrasas, the article opens up new avenues for exploring how the Ottoman dynasty was defined in different contexts.

This paper analyzes the large network of Ottoman vocational orphanages (ıslahhanes) opened from the 1860s onward in the provincial centers of the Ottoman Empire as a new educational and disciplinary institution for orphan, destitute, and poor children. I argue that ıslahhanes embodied new conceptualizations of order/disorder, obedience/disobedience, security/danger, and progress/decline in the urban space. In opening these institutions, Ottoman reformers aimed at the beautification and sterilization of urban centers by removing unattended children and youth from the streets and at the rejuvenation of economic activity by turning idle and wandering children into skilled and productive laborers. The establishment of orphanages was not only considered a means to solve a public-order problem but was also represented as a means of reintegration, of reshaping civic responsibility in children who had either lost or never embraced it. Islahhanes were also significant in the more abstract context of “Ottoman reform” and centralization and in the dissemination of Ottomanist ideals. On an imperial level, they were instrumental in linking the center with the provinces and local communities with Ottoman identity.

The uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) were primarily centered on profound economic grievances, which protestors addressed directly to state institutions, thereby making the grievances political. As a political scientist, I ask: under what conditions does economic protest transform into political demands? How and why did this happen in the MENA region, and why now? A deep exploration of authoritarian state institutions will be necessary to understand how a young generation that graduated from public educational institutions was unable to find economic opportunities and eventually lost all trust in an inefficient and corrupt state. Workers’ protests and resistance movements had started to organize in the decade before the uprisings and need to be studied as well.

The events of the Turco-Italian War (1911–1912) presented several complex problems for Germany's diplomatic and economic policies in the Near East. First, the War served as a test of strength for the Triple Alliance, because the Wilhelmstrasse (German foreign ministry) had guaranteed to maintain Italian interests in Tripolitania, but the hostilities threatened to spread into Macedonia where the Wilhelmstrasse had guaranteed Austrian interests. If the status quo of the Balkans was disturbed by the War, then an Austro-Russian diplomatic struggle might ensue, thus requiring German support for Austria-Hungary. The Germans were forced to support Italian interests in Tripolitania, while simultaneously preserving Austrian interests in the Balkans. Under these circumstances, could Germany preserve the solidarity of the Triple Alliance against internal dissension?

The late Professor Paul Wittek (1894–1978) had an oddly ambivalent attitude towards England. From 1940 until his death he left London only rarely, for short visits to the continent, where (we understood) he would declare that England was the only place to live; but once back across the Channel he would, in conversation and in his seminars, resume his criticisms, ranging from the British Government's unwisdom in promoting the dismantlement of the AustroHungarian and the Ottoman Empires to the irrationalities of the English language. The first research which he undertook after coming to (what was to be) his adopted country was the critical study of seventeen Turkish documents, dating from 1553 to 1594, preserved, in English or Latin translation, in the two editions (1589/1590 and 1598–1600) of Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations … of the English Nation. In 1940 he found in the Bodleian Library some original Turkish documents belonging to this early stage of Anglo-Turkish relations, and over the next wartime years prepared a monograph covering the period 1553–1588, that is, from the isolated ‘safeconduct or priviledge’ granted by Siileyman in Aleppo to Anthony Jenkinson to the return from Istanbul of the first resident ambassador William Harborne.

This article deals with the origins, development, and popularity of boycott fatwas. Born of the marriage of Islamic politics and Islamic economics in an age of digital communications, these fatwas targeted American, Israeli, and Danish commodities between 2000 and 2006. Muftis representing both mainstream and, surprisingly, radical tendencies argued that jihad can be accomplished through nonviolent consumer boycotts. Their argument marks a significant development in the history of jihad doctrine because boycotts, construed as jihadi acts, do not belong to the commonplace categories of jihad as a “military” or a “spiritual” struggle. The article also demonstrates that boycott fatwas emerged, to a large degree, from below. New media, in particular interconnected computer networks, made it easier for laypersons to drive the juridical discourse. They did so before September 11 as well as, more insistently, afterward. Their consumer jihad had some economic impact on targeted multinationals, and it provoked corporate reactions.