The fate of Afghanistan's written history has been interconnected with the progression and regression of the Afghan state's ability to live with its past as much as with its present. Afghan historiography, in both the official and unofficial versions, has generally sought to “prove” or “disprove” the official versions of Afghanistan's evolving national narrative rather than be, in the words of Edward H. Carr, “a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.” Despite unprecedented freedoms of expression and exposure to international methods of research, post-Taliban Afghanistan still seems far from coming to terms with its past. One particular trend continues to haunt the country as it tries to move forward in deconstructing or reinventing its history: official Afghan narratives continue to downplay or ignore the violent and divisive period commencing with the 1973 coup that ended the country's monarchical system.

The very use of the term “Bakhtiyārī” with its implicit notion of sociopolitical unity has obscured the nature of the organization and relationships of these pastoral nomadic tribes.1 At the same time that observers of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran described the Bakhtiyārī as a unit, they could not explain the prevailing disunity that characterized tribal relationships. Major obstacles for analysis of this problem have been the office of the īlkhānī, paramount chief of all the Bakhtiyārī, and the domination of tribal history by the family of those eligible for this position, which has imposed a certain unity upon recent Bakhtiyārī history. The view that an īlkhānī had long ruled the Bakhtiyārī and that the tribes constituted a confederation has been accepted since the late nineteenth century. Yet the first īlkhānī, Husain Qulī Khan, was not appointed until 1867, and possibly only during his. tenure in office (d. 1882), and again during the Persian Revolution, have the Bakhtiyārī functioned as a true confederation. The significance of prevailing disunity under a temporary political and administrative unity goes beyond the history of the Bakhtiyārī and has important implications for an understanding of Iranian society and history itself.

At the outbreak of World War I, Lebanon was a part of the Ottoman Empire and comprised mainly the Mutasarrifîyah, or Independent Sanjaq, of Mount Lebanon and the Wilâyah, or province, of Beirut. Because of its position in international power politics, Lebanon was not under as strict Ottoman control as other provinces, with Mount Lebanon enjoying a considerable degree of local autonomy. Turkish involvement in the war, however, resulted in military occupation of Lebanon, which comprised part of the Fourth Army Command under Jamâl Pâsha, in prosecution of the war effort against the British in Egypt.

How can scholars of Sudan now write about the landmass still called “Sudan”? What do we mean when we use the word? How can the name, which denotes a whole, encompass the fragments that make up its official boundaries? For the last several years, events in Sudan have been changing more rapidly than we Sudanists can analyze them or than Sudanese themselves can process them. Now, in its truncated form, delineating national identity—always problematic in the past—becomes far more complex. Considering extant cultural flows of art, language, customs, and religion, the dividing lines are, at best, dubious. A number of events are transpiring at the moment of writing this brief essay that have changed and will continue to change the future of not just one country but now two. For example, nothing is resolved in Darfur (in western Sudan), with peace talks stalled, more violence being perpetrated by the northern central government and its proxies, guerilla groups proliferating and battling among themselves, and a probable link among some Darfur groups and South Sudan forces.

This paper is the result of fieldwork carried out in Kalardasht, a mountainous region of the Caspian provinces. It has two interrelated purposes. First, it is offered as a contribution to the economic ethnography of Iran. Second, it examines the process of continuity and change in the economic structure of rural Iran. Changes in rural communities as a result of transitions in the broader society have attracted much attention in recent years. Here, a number of such economic changes are documented and analyzed for Kalardasht from 1977 to 1985.

The continued use of the term “tribe” to describe groups with segmentary organization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has long been recognized as problematic, albeit without viable alternative English translations of the local terms: qabīla, ‘ashīra, sha‘b, ‘ilt, and others. Yet the equally problematic but enduring uncritical acceptance of genealogical classification of MENA's tribes leads to fundamental misunderstandings of the basic principles of tribal organization as well as the multiple roles of kinship in the region. This propensity is not only misleading but is loaded with social evolutionary assumptions about presumed “stages of development” that hinder scholarship on tribes and have a negative impact on international policy toward countries like Yemen with significant self-identified tribal populations. Key to this essay is the wide diversity and flexibility in the terminology applied to tribal segments and in the sizes of segments.

After his premature death in exile in Beirut in 1937, the body of former Iraqi prime minister Yasin al-Hashimi became a matter of contention between the Syrian and Iraqi governments, as did his legacy as an avid Pan-Arabist. When the coffin with the deceased stopped in Damascus on its promised transfer to Baghdad, the Syrian National Bloc government used the opportunity to stage a solemn republican funeral to bolster its Arab nationalist credentials. Syrian conflicts with the Iraqi government that had removed al-Hashimi in a military coup in the previous year ultimately made Yasin's return impossible, however, and he was buried in Damascus, next to Saladin's mausoleum at the Umayyad Mosque. Unfortunately for the National Bloc, the funeral coincided with the first clashes over the Alexandretta crisis. The resulting street protests destroyed all public confidence that the bloc had gained during the funeral, underlining the volatile nature of nationalist politics at the time.

In this thought piece, I use the recited Qurʾan as a case study for asking what it may mean to feel sound—and more specifically, “religious sound,” or sound in a religious context. A range of scholars, including myself, have asked related questions about what the recited Qurʾan sounds like, and why it may sound the way(s) it does. Here I consider the sound of the Qurʾan on the level of experience or nondiscursive meaning, asking what the recited Qurʾan feels like.

There exists a growing body of literature which either explicitly or implicitly utilizes semiotic theory to discuss various sign systems in the Middle East. I believe that by exploring these works and linking them to similar studies, we can acquire a fresh perspective on the symbolic life of the people of the Middle East. I do not argue that semiotics can or should replace other paradigmatic approaches to out analysis of culture, but rather that semiotics can serve as a complementary method for interpreting sign systems.

The present article is a study of provincial administration in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Albania and Kurdistan. It examines the transformation of provincial administration in Dibra and Hazro after two towns’ hereditary rulers were exiled. Focusing on the employment patterns of the notables in exile as well as the ones who occupied the posts in the absence of the former, this study challenges the binary framework mostly employed in conceptualizing the making of the modern Ottoman state. Particularly, the employment of the notables exiled to the distant parts of the empire necessitates a revision in the presumptions about the origins of appointed Ottoman officials. By focusing on the partnership operating by means of employment, this study argues that the making of Ottoman state follows a trajectory of flexible centralization based on the partnership between the government and notables, terms of which were constantly negotiated.

In this paper I argue that representations of homosexuality in modern Arabic literature have tended to isolate it and contain its threat through a conceptual strai(gh)tjacket that I term “epistemic closure.” I begin by analyzing Saʿd Allah Wannus's play Tuqus al-Isharat wa-l-Tahawwulat as an essentialist paradigm of closure, where a language of interiority and essence identifies male homosexuality with passivity and femininity, subordinated a priori to a sexually and socially dominant masculinity. Then, I examine ʿAlaʾ al-Aswani's novel ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan as a constructionist example of the same closure, in which homosexuality is explained through a narrative of abnormal development that circumscribes its diffuse potential. Finally, I read Huda Barakat's Sayyidi wa-Habibi as a “queer” novel that links homosexuality to the continuum of male homosocial desire, thereby disrupting the normative distribution of center and margin and suggesting a way out of the epistemic closure imposed on homosexuality.

Still prefaced in many commentaries as a taboo, the topic of the genocide in Turkey has ironically become a talking point de rigueur for anyone who is visible in the public sphere and who lays claims to an identity as an intellectual. “Anyone,” then, will momentarily serve as the working definition of the intellectual, for all intents and purposes, in this inquiry into the grammar among Turkish and Armenian intellectuals both within and outside Turkey. The litany of self-proclaimed firsts in addressing the topic of genocide in any given genre in Turkey is better understood in the light of Barthes' notion of the “inflexion” in myth. Such vocabulary of self-advertisement, of being a historic “first,” creates a curious hierarchy when it comes to the all-important topic of a foundational and denied genocide: it is not that the intellectual brings herself to the service of the topic, but that the topic serves up to the rejuvenation of the intellectual's prominence and controversial value in the public sphere. The emphasis is not on the quality, characteristics, or commitments of the works in question, but on the fact of the intellectual being a “first,” and thus, implicitly, a mythical figure above critical inquiry.

This article rethinks area studies through the diasporic histories of influential graduates of the Syrian Protestant College. My focus is on Philip Hitti and his ties with fellow alumni who migrated to the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Examining his first visit to Brazil in 1925, letter exchanges through the 1940s, and a second trip in 1951, I ask how Hitti and São Paulo-based alumni sought to establish an Arab studies program in Brazil. In borrowing a template for studying the Middle East, Hitti and colleagues imbued it with a widespread sentiment that Arab and Muslim legacies of the Iberian peninsula had shaped Portugal, and thus Brazil's historical and linguistic formation. They relocated a model of area studies but refitted its content. In revealing how the institution of area studies moved across and merged with varied sociocultural settings, these diasporic histories provincialize the U.S. model for knowing the Middle East.

The literary activity of Ya'qûb Sanû' and the birth of popular Egyptian drama constitute an important phase in the growth of modern Arabic literature, particularly worthy of our attention because Sanû‘’s work was to a high degree representative of his nation's spirit and sentiment.

The Kemalist leadership of early Republican Turkey attempted to transform the country's Muslim populace with a heavy emphasis on secularism, scientific rationalism, and nationalism. Several studies have examined the effects of this effort, or the “Turkish Revolution,” at the central and more recently provincial levels. This article uses first-hand accounts and statistical data to carry the analysis to the village level. It argues that the Kemalist reforms failed to reach rural Turkey, where more than 80 percent of the population lived. A comparison with sedentary Soviet Central Asia's rural transformation in the same period reveals ideology and the availability of resources as the underlying causes of this failure. Informed by a Marxist–Leninist emphasis on the necessity of transforming the “substructure” for revolutionary change, the Soviet state undermined existing authority structures in Central Asia's villages to facilitate the introduction of communist ideals among their Muslim inhabitants. Turkey's Kemalist leadership, on the other hand, preserved existing authority structures in villages and attempted to change culture first. However, they lacked and could not create the resources to implement this change.

In his landmark study of historiography in the Islamic world, Franz Rosenthal identified the biographical dictionary associated with a particular locality and prefaced by a topographical introduction as a characteristic form of “theological local historiography.” What Rosenthal described as the “theological” nature of these dictionaries relates to their origins in hadith scholarship, a field of religious studies devoted to preserving an accurate record of the sayings and actions of the Prophet and his Companions passed down orally through an unbroken and authentic chain of trustworthy transmitters. Thus, the original motivation for composing such works, the earliest extant example of which dates to the 9th century, was to catalogue hadith scholars who had lived in a city to facilitate the assessment of their plausibility as transmitters of particular traditions. Furthermore, as expressions of local pride, these dictionaries allowed Muslims to celebrate the contribution made in their town to the sustenance of the most authoritative body of knowledge, after the Quran, in Islam. Although by the 10th century these works began to include notables who embodied a city's political, literary, and economic claims to fame, the defining feature of the majority of the biographical entries remained the individual's engagement with the religious sciences, particularly hadith studies.

This article examines modernist-nationalist thought on Sufi lodges during the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic via the controversial novel Nur Baba (1922) by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu. Widely translated and the basis of the first-ever Turkish motion picture, Nur Baba depicts a debauched Sufi lodge in turn-of-the-century Istanbul where drug use, alcoholism, and illicit amorous liaisons run amok. The novel played an important role in shaping public perceptions of Sufi lodges in the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire. This piece explores the novel's place among early 20th-century critiques of Sufism, its approach to national history, its historical setting (during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II), and its close relationship to the intellectual concerns of the Second Constitutional Period (1908–18). It argues for a revised understanding of the novel's historical setting and contends that the novel employs a combination of moralistic critique and romantic nostalgia that is central to modernist-nationalist treatments of Sufism that instrumentalize Sufi culture for nation-building purposes.

The traditional view of ʿUmāni history during the past two centuries is that the country was unified under the Āl Bū Saʿīd dynasty, which was based first in Rustāq and later, with the assumption of power by Ḥamad b. Saʿīd in 1785, in Masqaṭ. The supposed shift of the capital to Masqaṭ, the country's major port, was interpreted by Lorimer as a disruptive influence in ʿUmāni politics, whereas J. B. Kelly has depicted the move as representing a change in the basis of ruling power in ʿUmān from the land to the sea. This study takes exception to these two interpretations as well as to the general assumption that Masqaṭ was the capital of a unified ʿUmān. In 1785 Ḥamad b. SaḤīd Āl Bū Saʿīdī established an independent state in Masqaṭ in a move that enabled him to profit from trade with the interior of ʿUmān, which was dependent on Masqaṭ for imported foodstuffs, textiles, metals and other raw materials, while freeing him of the tribal opposition that has traditionally plagued any ruler in ʿUmān trying to control both the interior and entrepôt. Once established in Masquaṭ, Ḥ and his successors adopted an aggressive military and political policy in the Arabian Gulf (1785–1820) and then East Africa (1820–1829) which was designed to create a commercial empire centered on Masqaṭ. A fundamental principle of this policy was the avoidance of any unnecessay involvement in the affairs of ʿUmān, which was divided among various tribal leaders.

Pending a peaceful solution to the current war of liberation in Afghanistan, any consideration of alternative economic systems, as raised in some circles, must be based on the given structural conditions of the Afghan economy. Contrary to expectations by some, the basic structure of the economy in terms of size distribution of sectoral output is unlikely to change significantly despite any changes in the share of resources between the private and public sectors.

The Afgham economy is based on agriculture and it will continue to derive the major portion of its national income (output) from this sector in the foreseeable future. The potential for economic development, based on domestic resources, is also largely founded in agriculute.

The chronicle of Rabbi Elijah Capsali (ca. 1483–1555), which concerns itself with the history of the Ottoman Empire, turns up as a subject for discussion from time to time. Capsali, rabbi of the Candia community in Crete, wrote the chronicle entitled Seder Eliyahu Zuta during the plague of the spring and summer of 1523. It is divided into four parts and 166 chapters and includes an introduction in which he explains the reasons for writing it and mentions his sources. As yet, however, the importance of this chronicle has not been sufficiently emphasized. The interpretation presented by Uriel Heyd at the Sixth Turkish History Congress held in Ankara in 1961. dealt with a number of aspects such as the sources of Capsali and Jewish references in the text, but only in their most general form. In this paper I examine the importance and limitations of the chronicle more thoroughly.