The topic of Christians in the Middle East appears to be enjoying a growing vitality within Middle East studies. This is not to say that scholarship ignored the subject in the past, but it was rarely seen as an independent area of study. Works tended to focus on the historical origins, faith, and rites of the different churches within Eastern Christianity. Those that looked specifically at Christian communities tended to concentrate on their relations with other groups, especially in the context of a minority framework. Some interdisciplinary volumes such as those edited by Andrea Pacini and Anthony O'Mahony moved beyond this limited approach to cover a wider range of issues, but several of the contributions retained this descriptive tendency rather than relating directly to theoretical debates within different disciplines.

“Place matters,” geographers are fond of saying. And it seems this sentiment is more and more embraced by scholars in other disciplines. The current outpour of writing in Middle East studies that draws on geographic themes goes a long way toward showing how “spatial form can alter the future course of the very histories which have produced it.” At the same time, geography in Middle East studies is at risk of being provincialized over the long term, instead of taken seriously as a source for new approaches to studying the region. For the so-called spatial turn to endure, it must be transformed from a vague thematic concern to a more self-conscious analytical perspective, one that reveals the many competing visions and practices that constitute space. More reflection on the purposes, limits, and politics of thinking geographically in research on the Middle East is required.

One of the first ways that many scholars of the Middle East encounter the region is precisely through the lens of “region” itself. Our ability to know the Middle East as a region today, we learn, is a complicated inheritance of imperialism, Orientalism, and Cold War area studies scholarship. To study the Middle East as the “Middle East,” in other words, is to be necessarily positioned within a contested and unequal field of knowledge, one whose contours are both historically and geographically specific. Much of the best research and teaching within Middle East studies continues to demonstrate that knowing about the region—and the world more broadly—is closely entwined with the politics of the region. The interdisciplinary spatial turn within Middle East studies has been and continues to be so fertile precisely because of that reflexivity.

Studies of legislatures in developing countries have to contend with a great deal of cynicism owing, in part, to a political controversy concerning the role of the legislative institution in the Third World. The executive branch, which is generally dominant in developing nations, often uses the legislature to legitimize executive actions. Legislators who agree to serve the executive in this fashion often exaggerate or misrepresent the importance of the legislature in their political system. Conversely, opposition groups, who are frequently excluded from the political process in Third World countries, denigrate the role of legislatures and often exaggerate their ineffectiveness. Scholars have mostly ingnored the role of legislatures in the process of development.

Direct consequences of pacification of the Yarahmadzai Baluch by the Iranian army in the campaigns of 1928–35 were the prohibition and cessation of raiding, imposition of Iranian military and civilian officials over the tribe, and limited access to previously unavailable labor and goods markets and to national government resources. Whatever the economic and psycho-cultural dislocations resulting from pacification, there was great structural continuity within the Yarahmadzai. There was no interference by the Iranian government, whose policy was external control through indirect rule, and who paid the Sardar (tribal chief) a substantial yearly stipend.

Connecting the stories of human rights violations perpetrated by the Syrian regime against the children of Darʿa in March 2011 to decades of writings about political detention in Syria, this article argues that particular works of Syrian prison literature (adab al-sujūn) articulate a poetics of recognition that both reaffirms and challenges the foundational dependency on political recognition in human rights theory. By focusing on narrative scenes of recognition and misrecognition, I contend that these texts, much like the stories of the children of Darʿa, depict different forms of acute human vulnerability. In doing so, they offer a mode of sentimental education that evokes readers’ empathy and awareness of human suffering. Yet such texts also demonstrate, in allegorical form, how the foundational reliance on political recognition in human rights regimes can limit their efficacy.

This article investigates the Ottoman state's endeavor to create the “second Egypt” by consolidating its imperial authority along the coastline and hinterland of Cyrenaica from 1897 to 1904. It examines the strategic settlement of Cretan Muslim refugees in territories situated between Benghazi and Derna and in al-Jabal al-Akhdar following the Cretan insurrection of 1897–98. I argue that Cretan Muslim refugees-turned-settlers served as skilled agriculturalists and experienced armed sentries who were integral to the Ottoman state's plans for economic development and expansionism in Cyrenaica. Focusing particularly on ‘Ayn al-Shahhat and Marsa Susa, this article contends that the establishment of Cretan Muslim agricultural colonies served to undermine the political and economic position of the Sanusi order by appropriating the order's properties and access to resources. This work offers a new perspective on how the Ottoman state reasserted its sovereignty in its frontier territory in Cyrenaica by harnessing the power of migration.

I have borrowed the term “frontier” from the late Professor Joseph Schacht for the Islamic marches where Islamic political power and Islam were once firmly entrenched. Unlike him I would apply this term also to the Islamic marches in Europe: Spain and Sicily. Division of Islamic lands into geographical categories “The Central Islamic Lands” and the “Further Islamic Lands,” has also been adopted in the recently published Cambridge History of Islam.

The field of education, its various components and means of putting it into effect, have not received the attention of those who have studied the history of Arabic thought. It has been only recently that Arab education has received the attention of scholars. But thus far, research has been limited mostly to histories of educational institutions and to certain fragmentary aspects of education. Theories of education, or of areas within the field of education, have not been examined.

None of the editions of Hajji Baba of Isfahan nor the monographs and articles on its author, James Morier, that have come to my attention so far has made any comments on the introduction to this book. This introduction is couched in the form of a letter to the Reverend Doctor Fundgruben, Chaplain to the Swedish Embassy at the Ottoman Porte, and is dated London, 1st December, 1823. Doctor Fundgruben is characterized as being preoccupied with “hieroglyphic lore” and as the author of the book The Biography of Celebrated Mummies.

The study of manuscripts was traditionally the preserve of scholar-curators in research libraries who devoted their lives to the exhaustive study and description of collections that were often gathered from several sources. The expected result of their solitary labor was a printed catalog that might describe at most a few hundred manuscripts from a particular linguistic or religious culture. That model has been challenged by the advent of large-scale digital projects that aggregate thousands or even tens of thousands of manuscripts from multiple libraries in a single database or portal.

This article traces the ways that the Moroccan Police Journal, a state-produced periodical that first appeared in 1961, constructed and disseminated an aspirational identity for the Moroccan police, one that was radically distinct from the image of the brutal security forces of the Protectorate period. Unlike other state-produced periodicals in Morocco or the Middle East at the time, Police Journal included fictional short stories written in the form of a police procedural, a genre that places a real-world criminal detective in the center of a narrative depicting a believable police investigation into a puzzling crime. As this article shows, these stories are the first examples of police procedurals in the Arabic language. The article examines three stories from Police Journal, tracing how they projected a new professional institutional culture for the police in the era of independence and served as both didactic pieces for police readers and entertaining works of fiction for the literate public.

Egypt was firmly ensconced by the early 1980s in the ranks of the Third World's more dependent, financially troubled economies. The country's total foreign debt, under $3 billion in 1973, had grown to 16 billion by 1979. In 1982–83, the external debt was estimated at $20 billion, with the servicing of medium and long-term obligations absorbing more than one-third of export earnings. The terms of trade were also moving against Egypt as its major exports lost value. A trade deficit, registered largely with EEC countries and the United States, stood at the equivalent of $4.7 billion in 1982–83.

The history of Turkistan in the second half of the 19th and the early 20th century has repeatedly attracted the attention of social scientists. It is widely recognized that the tendency of most Soviet authors was to consider this history under the rubric of “the progressive consequences of annexation to Russia,” at a time when the main historiographical trend was to investigate the history of revolutions, movements of the working class and peasants, riots among the people, and national-liberation movements. Under the same rubric, during a rather long period until the end of the 1980s, many problems of local Turkistan society were written about. As a result of this approach, some questions remained unasked—questions that challenged the officially mandated proposition that “despite tsarist colonialism, the annexation of non-Russian peoples to Russia was a progressive reality.” In particular, one of these questions has to do with the history of the state that governed the territory of Turkistan in the colonial and post-colonial periods.

The expansion of U.S. power across the Middle East has led to a convergence between what had previously been distinct historical fields. As U.S. foreign relations scholars turn their attention toward the Middle East and as Middle East historians address the implications of American imperialism, both groups have produced new research on the Cold War era. Since 2001, Rashid Khalidi, Juan R. I. Cole, and Ussama Makdisi have reexamined American foreign policy during the Cold War to understand the antecedents of current events. With the evolution of U.S. diplomatic history into a more cosmopolitan international history, its practitioners have consulted sources in regional languages. Recent scholarship has incorporated the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) into global narratives based on the themes of superpower rivalry, decolonization, and the struggle for development. While these global narratives help to counter regional exceptionalism, historians of the Cold War would also do well to read more Middle East historiography. The growing significance of American power for the MENA region calls for greater collaboration between the two fields on common interests that they have developed, at least so far, mostly in isolation.

This article traces a conflict that erupted in the late 19th century between the Armenians and the Süryani. This conflict, I argue, precipitated nothing less than the creation of the Süryani community itself. The dispute began over the key to a closet in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but it quickly evolved. Soon, the Armenians and the Süryani were clashing over holy places all around Jerusalem. The dispute centered on an Ottoman administrative arrangement which had been institutionalized nearly 400 years earlier: yamaklık. The Ottoman investigators, however, were unfamiliar with this archaic arrangement and had to be reeducated as to its terms and its history. The Süryani and the Armenians offered divergent accounts. Where the Armenians furnished hard documentation, however, the Süryani could produce only claims to tradition and local practice. In this article I argue that, through this protracted conflict, the Süryani came to understand the importance of the documentary record in a post-Tanzimat Ottoman world. They thus turned to an alternative strategy that would conform to this documentary sensibility and render their community visible to the state: a series of petitions with thousands of Süryani signatures from around the Ottoman Empire.

As neither the reviewer nor the author contacted me before reporting critically on my work during the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis, I appreciate IJMES's offer to state my position. Subsequently, I have been in touch with both James Goode and Ofira Seliktar. The latter told me 1. She made a decision not to conduct any interviews because interviewees are apt to offer self-serving or faulty memories and because she might face “threats.” 2. Although she felt sorry for the way I was treated in the book, she seemed to place greater blame on the academics advising the State Department who put forward the “reigning academic consensus” (New Left and moralpolitik) that captured Foreign Service minds (especially mine) and led to destructive policies. I'll bet that few Middle East Studies Association members realized they could have such power over policy-making.

You do not have to wait long to find out what this book is all about. The Preface trumpets it as a veritable consumer's report on Middle East studies, ominously warning “let the buyer beware.” Martin Kramer comes out swinging and cuts his opponents very little slack over the next 130 pages.

The specific ways that cloth—“foreign silks,” “durable Egyptian cottons,” and “artificial silks”—emerged as a potent and visible symbol through which to contest the relations of colonialism and establish national community in Egypt varied with the changing realities of Egypt's political economy. The country's early importation of textiles despite its cultivation of raw cotton, the growth of its state-protected local mechanized industry working long- and medium-staple cotton for a largely lower-class market, and that industry's diversification into artificial silk technologies all helped structure a shift from “foreign silks” to “the nylon woman” as tropes in popular and political discourse defining the limits of the national community and the behaviors suitable for it. Although artificial fibers considerably lowered the cost of hosiery and other goods, thereby expanding consumption, the use of synthetics like nylon rather than cotton subverted the goal of national economic unity between agriculture and industry.