The spring of 1894 was an important period for Constantinople's Armenian community. Two assassination attempts targeted the Armenian patriarch Khoren Ashekian, and the chairperson of the Armenian Political Assembly Maksudzade Simon Bey, respectively. In both cases, the assailants were partisans of the Hunchakian Party, an Armenian revolutionary organization established in 1887. Analyzing the reasons behind these two attacks, and the imperial context in which they took place, this article challenges aspects of mainstream Armenian and Turkish historiography on the Hamidian period. It argues that a critical look at these two attacks through a socio-economic paradigm rather than an ethno-political one provides a viable analytical framework for deconstructing the notion of the “Armenian millet” as an undifferentiated community. More generally, the article explores the role of violence in shaping intracommunal relationships in the early 1890s.

The article explores the Zionist cultural economy in interwar Palestine, by studying the emergence of the field of consumption as an arena for political struggles among Jews and between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish nationalist movement employed dominant contemporary assumptions about economic nationalism in attempts to politicize the economy of British Palestine, including through campaigns advocating ethnonational separatism in consumption. Unlike other “buy local” movements around the world, these were not directed solely against imports; rather, they were often “buy Jewish” campaigns waged against the consumption of commodities produced by the rival ethnonational sector in Palestine. Using a variety of archival and media sources, the article tracks the development of Jewish separatist consumption campaigns in interwar Palestine, uncovering a gradual amplification of their ethnonational emphasis that paralleled the escalation of the Arab–Jewish conflict. The cultural mechanisms used to attribute ethnic qualities to objects and define them as either “Jewish” or “foreign” are analyzed with particular attention to the conceptual contradictions in the definitions of a Jewish product, which were shaped by economic conflicts and the diverse political conceptions of Jewish identity. The study of separatist consumption sheds new light on the “dual society” thesis, revealing the deep grip of separatist approaches across multiple layers of the Jewish middle class in the Yishuv.

As our main guidelines in judging the probability of success in the formation of an economic union, we have used past trade patterns to indicate complementarities between the prospective partners, oil revenue projections to estimate the degree of future expansion of both demand and supply, and the principles of mutual self-interest and universal gain to argue for the likelihood of cooperation of all members. The essential participants in a Middle East Economic Community (MEEC), on these bases, would have to include most of the countries now producing food and other commodities in sufficient quantities for export to the partners, and enough of the major oil producers to provide the capital resources the community will need to accelerate its development during the next decade. At a minimum this would involve the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. The arguments put forward to indicate the interest of the last two countries in unification apply also to the other oil producers considered here—Libya and the smaller Gulf states. The need in the Middle East for enhanced food-producing capabilities recommends inclusion of the Sudan, though the latter suffers from internal political problems that might limit its participation in an essentially Arab enterprise.

We have not considered the possible participation of other neighboring states in a Middle East Economic Community—Cyprus, Iran, Turkey, or even, after a settlement with the Palestinians, Israel—in order not to further complicate the discussion. While none of these countries might be interested in full MEEC membership in the foreseeable future, each might find considerable advantage in some sort of a link, possibly like Turkey's current associate standing in the European Community. Possible Iranian interest would have the same basis as that of the Arab oil exporters, promising investment opportunities in non-oil countries and a larger market in the long-run for new Iranian industries. On the other hand, Turkey is more like Egypt or Lebanon. It has already seen a considerable jump in its exports to the major Arab countries, from about $71 million in 1972 to $168 million, close to an eighth of all its exports, in 1975.

Although Iran's imports from the potential community members account for less than 1.5 percent of its total imports, 10 percent of the value of its non-petroleum exports are destined for these Arab States. Almost 16 percent of its food exports and over 11 percent of its manufactured exports constitute the major categories of Iran's exports to this market.

Cyprus, whose economy has suffered serious setbacks after the 1974 crisis, has, paradoxically had an extremely healthy growth of exports to these Middle Eastern states. By 1975, the total value of Cypriot exports to these countries was nearly 270 percent of its 1973 export figures to the same market. The principal factor behind this remarkable expansion of trade was due to the civil strife in Lebanon which disrupted its exports of vegetable and food products to these countries. Cyprus immediately filled the gap left by the Lebanese civil war; it remains to be seen, however, how strong and permanent the Cypriot foothold is in this market, since the end of the disturbances in Lebanon.

Turkey imports 10 percent of its total imports from these countries and exports nearly 12 percent of its total exports to them. There is, however, a great difference in the composition of imports and exports. Eighty-eight percent of Turkish exports to these countries are varied. In terms of its total exports to this market, Turkey exports 36 percent in food products, 39 percent in non-fuel crude materials, and 15 percent in basic manufactures.

The truly unique set of economic circumstances taking shape in the Middle East offer the region a chance for rapid development that could even exceed that of post-war Japan or Stalinist Russia. Such massive capital inflows that the oil-producers are now and will continue to enjoy for several years have never previously been seen in such a short period by any people. The Arabs will add this ingredient to economic structures which have already undergone considerable modernization in the past two generations. Transportation networks, educational and public health systems, and administrative bureaucracies, among other infrastructure elements, throughout the area are fairly well developed, thanks in no small part to past oil-related revenues.

These oil revenues will bring their recipients sufficient wealth to provide adequately for their descendants, economic union or not. But, the degree to which their descendants live by their own economic activities, provided for by today's investments, and the extent that oil benefits will fuel regional development depend upon whether, when, and how much economic integration occurs.

Both oil and non-oil states could reap considerable benefits from an economic union, and given their mutual needs for each other, they all would enter serious negotiations from individual positions of strength. To no small extent, the success of an Arab union may be as much dependent on the progress of an Arab-Israeli peace settlement. But, the advantages of integration to the core states of the Arab world, we maintain, are clear, and the degree to which these advantages can be realized depends upon how early in the upsurge of oil revenues economic union advances to an operative level. Some important early steps have been the Economic Unity Agreement and the establishment of the Kuwait Fund, the Arab Fund, the Abu Dhabi Fund, and the Inter-Arab Investment Guarantee Corporation. Most of these proposals have not achieved their full potential, and more genuine commitment is needed.

Stirrings of movement toward such commitment were seen at the June 1975 meeting of the Arab Economic Unity Council. Rather than issuing still another call for immediate integration with more rhetorical value than economic content, the participants pledged a five-year effort to coordinate the policies of their governments with the aim of initiating a Middle East Economic Community in 1981. Of course, progress remains to be seen, but considerable political realism appeared to be shown at the 1975 AEUC meeting, recognizing the need for a step-by-step approach to integration, not only over the first five years, but also in the twenty-year period beginning in 1981 that was seen as necessary for complete implementation of the economic community.

The challenge to integrate facing the Arabs is not as drastic as the economic equivalent of life or death, but the way in which it is met is likely to determine whether they emerge from the next quarter century as the major world economic power that their numbers, history, and fortunate endowment of natural resources seem to make possible.

When World War I ended and the political map of the Middle East was redrawn, the ruler-straight borders separating the Fertile Crescent countries were not determined wholly in Europe, when the mandates were divided between Britain and France, as is commonly believed. The border between Syria and Iraq was determined between 1918 and 1920, when Iraqi officers serving in the Syrian army brought about the annexation of regions originally designated for British-occupied Iraq to Faysal 's Arab government in Syria.

In response to the outbreak of the Arab Revolt of 1936, a coterie of five prominent entrepreneurs and intellectuals in the Mandatory Jewish community formulated a capitalist binationalist resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This paper examines the genesis of and debate over the little-known Concord they proposed and compares it with better-known liberal and socialist binationalist plans. “The Five,” as they came to be known, were the only binationalists seeking to base political parity on economic integration. The occasion of their blueprint allows further exploration of the preconditions for an effective binationalist program, among them the structure of labor markets, political preferences of minorities and majorities in regard to sovereignty, and levels of mutual trust. Ultimately, binationalist resolutions of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict were precluded by the Labor Settlement Movement's separatist state-building strategy.

By resolution of the ruling Command Council on 19 March 1977, a new judicial organization known as the niyāba (formal name: al-niyāba al-'āmma) was introduced in the Yemen Arab Republic. Derived ultimately from a French model, the new institution has been provided with wide statutory powers, many of which are new to Yemen. Essentially, the niyāba is an agency of investigation and prosecution, with jurisdiction in criminal cases and other areas of “public” rights, It has responsibilities also in family law, especially in cases involving the dissolution of marriage and the protection of minors. In addition, the niyāba has authority over the “officials of judicial enforcement,” and it is charged with the oversight of jails. Although the niyāba's institutional ancestry is traceable to the French ministère public (or parquet), the transfer of the European institution to Yemeni soil was not direct, since Yemeni legislators modelled their niyāba on an Egyptian legal organ of the same name. The Egyptian niyāba was instituted in 1876 as a copy of the ministère public, but evolved considerably since its introduction there (Hill, 1979). The arrival of the niyāba in Yemen thus was mediated by an interval of one hundred years of development outside of France.

In the late nineteenth century, when American boys were devouring the success stories of Horatio Alger and cultivating the prescribed virtues of thrift and industry in hopes of jumping from rags to riches overnight, boys on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean were dreaming similar dreams. The Christian boy of the Levant was particularly drawn to such success stories. His decision for a business career was not entirely of his own choosing, for as members of a Christian minority in a Muslim land his ancestors had long been excluded from the most prestigious official careers of the Ottoman Empire–the bureaucracy, the military, and the Muslim religious profession. Since these choice callings were reserved for Muslims, the dhimmî subjects of the Sultan had no choice but to concentrate their energies on banking and trading, shopkeeping and shipping. Making the best of the situation, the indigenous Christian of the Ottoman Empire threw himself into these business careers and sometimes amassed such a fortune that he came to occupy unofficial positions of considerable influence. Often his position as agent and protégé of a European shipping house gave him a decided advantage over Muslim merchants. Increasing the toehold given to it by the Capitulations agreements, Europe made its power increasingly felt in the Middle East during the nineteenth century, and the protégé of a European power could no longer be treated arbitrarily by Ottoman authorities.

Students of nineteenth-century Ottoman political history have concentrated on the central provinces of the Empire. Students of Arab political history of the same period have concentrated on anti-Ottoman nationalism centered in Cairo and Beirut. Relatively little work has yet been done to illuminate the nature of Ottoman government in the Arab provinces. The picture that is presented by Western travelers, Arab nationalists reminiscing about their youth, and diplomatic reports has been incomplete, biased against the Imperial government, and sometimes factually inaccurate.

During the final years of Ottoman rule and the three decades of British rule, Palestine witnessed the emergence of a community of professionally trained Palestinian Arab doctors. This study traces the evolution of the medical profession in Palestine against the background of the shifting cultural and symbolic capital of an expanding urban middle class and the educational possibilities that enabled this development. Palestinian Arab doctors are examined through a number of interconnected prisms: their activity in social, political, and professional regional networks, their modus operandi under British colonial rule, their response to Zionism and its accompanying influx of immigrant Jewish doctors, and their ability to mobilize collectively under a shared national vision.

At the dawn of the 21st century the “War on Terror” ushered in an era in which some were besieged by wars and others by war-related imagery. For the fortunate who live outside of war zones, mostly in the Global North and West, the experience of war has been primarily a mediated one. With the advent of digital imagery and its many evolving and developing technological transmutations, the possibilities of reproduction, representation, manipulation, and circulation have grown exponentially in the past twenty years. Yet in the grand scheme of human communication history, the “pictorial turn” is a relatively recent phenomenon that requires further analysis. In this article, I unpack and analyze some of the key media moments from the vast visual lexicon and iconography of the “War on Terror” to reveal its scaffolding and machinations and offer counterstrategies of resistance. I argue that the “War on Terror” is the orchestrated sum of literal and figurative imagery, a coordinated public relations disinformation media campaign designed to hide real wars and their true destruction and costs.

There is a stock argument on whether Iraq is an “artificial” creation of colonial power or a “real” entity with historical and psychological depth and identity. It is a futile question because all nation–states, in one form or another, are historical creations. The processes of their creation are diverse and lead to different outcomes in the degree of coherence and permanence. Our thinking on the subject has been highly influenced by the seminal concepts advanced by Benedict Anderson on the “imagining” of the nation, which is, in turn, underlined by the socioeconomic processes of modernity. The state, often superimposed from above, is a principal actor in this process. Educational systems, tied to qualifications and employment, for instance, are powerful means of enforcing a unified national language and, in turn, the medium of literacy, the press and media, and the means of imagining the nation. The state makes the nation, more or less successfully. The intelligentsia are the cadres of these processes. They and the state class, with which they overlap, are subject to the vagaries of political conflicts and struggles and, in the case of Middle Eastern states, to the repression and violence of the state and militant sectors of the population. In the case of Iraq these troublesome manifestations are particularly evident. The books under review are concerned with these processes and in particular with the role of the ideological cadres and institutions in their unfolding.

The effect of the coming of Islam on the condition of women has long been a subject of debate among scholars with divergent interests in the Muslim world, including Protestant missionaries, anthropologists, Muslim reformists, apologists, and feminists. The central question upon which this subject is focused has been couched in language of mutually exclusive extremes: Did Islam at its inception bring about an improvement in women's condition, or was Islam responsible for bringing about inequalities between men and women in Muslim societies? The purpose of this article is to suggest new directions for exploring the effect of Islam on women, to confront the inadequacy of the sources and methods that are presently brought to bear on the issues, and to introduce Christian sources to a debate that has been carried out within a self-contained Muslim-Arab context

Research on the Copts of Egypt has developed especially rapidly in new directions during the past twenty years. Having started as a corollary of Egyptology, it is advancing from the study of the early Christian centuries to include medieval, early modern, and contemporary Coptic Studies. Concurrently, Coptic issues are being inserted into studies of Egypt in general. Publications on the 19th century mostly ignored Copts, but they were given stereotypical cameo appearances in the prolific research on the profound transformations in 20th-century Egyptian society.

United States diplomatic historians have traditionally claimed that American foreign-policy makers employed the Open-Door principle in the Middle East after World War I merely to defend American rights from the Allied efforts to achieve economic hegemony over Turkey and other parts of the old Ottoman Empire. However, William Appleman Williams — supported by the works of several younger scholars — has asserted that Woodrow Wilson used the, Open Door to promote American economic expansion. Williams maintains that the Open Door was not an ad hoc policy, fashioned simply to meet the immediate postwar challenge of the Allies — as the traditional historians have alleged. Nor was it British-inspired, idealistic policy that received only sporadic support during the twentieth century, as George F. Kennan has asserted. According to Williams, the Open Door was an American-designed tactic that diplomats used continuously throughout the first half of the twentieth century for the express purpose of promoting American expansion, with a view to creating an American economic empire, a process that resulted in the extension of American political and economic influence.

Consider the data from the painstaking economic analysis of contemporary camel transport in Pakistan done by Alan Heston and several Pakistani associates in 1985 (see Table 1). It shows the typical annual costs and income in rupees of someone earning his livelihood by renting out a pack camel.

During the mandatory period following World War I Britain's attempts to implement the provisions of the Balfour Declaration and establish a ‘National Home’ for the Jews in Palestine encountered stubborn resistance from the local Arab population. As dissatisfaction mounted in the late 1930s, militant nationalists were able to mobilize popular support for the Arab cause and foster the growth of an opposition movement directed against the British. The most visible and significantleader of this movement was the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini.

This article examines the origin and legacy of the rebel group that stormed the great Mecca mosque in November 1979. Extensive fieldwork and new primary sources show that the rebels represented a radicalized faction of a large pietistic organization established in Medina in the mid–1960s under the name al–Jama a al–Salafiyya al–Muhtasiba (JSM). The rebel faction had broken with the mother organization in 1977 and developed into an apocalyptic sect under the leadership of Juhayman al–Utaybi, who spent two years as a fugitive in the desert before the attack. Although the rebellion was crushed, the early 1990s witnessed a resurgence of Juhayman's ideas in Saudi Arabia. The article argues that the JSM, the Mecca rebels, and their heirs represent a widely ignored undercurrent of Saudi Islamism. Pietistic and isolationist, this so–called rejectionist Islamism is intellectually and sociologically distinct from the two other strains of Saudi Islamism, namely, reformism and jihadism.

The Sudan came to know of Communism directly during the 1940s, through Egypt and Herbert Storey. Egyptian Communism had passed through two phases. The first phase was in the 1920s when, under Joseph Rosenthal and his Alexandria Group, it appeared first as a socialist movement and then as a Communist one proper. During this phase it made some impact on some of the Egyptian intelligentsia, a few trade unions, and a small number of workers. It also tried, though unsuccessfully, to join the Comintern so as to act as its official representative in this part of the world, thereby assuming for itself the role that organization had already entrusted to the Communist parties of the European colonial countries. However, the efforts of Egyptian Communism during this first stage received a mortal blow in the mid-1920s at the hands of Saʿd Zaghlūl, the leader of the Wafd party, when he began to see in the activities of the Communists a serious challenge to the hegemony of the Wafd in Egyptian politics.