Six and a half years after the start of the Arab uprisings, the initial euphoria of popular mobilization and optimism in revolutionary change is an increasingly distant memory. While a few countries in the region are moving in the direction of greater openness, most are gripped by a resurgent authoritarianism that is ever more repressive. Some states are collapsing amid mass violence and humanitarian catastrophe. In others, threat of brutal punishment continues to enforce red lines against permissible speech and action, even as those red lines continue to shift.

Over the past five years, from volume 37, number 1 (February 2005) to volume 41, number 3 (August 2009), IJMES published thirty-seven articles that deal with politics in the contemporary Middle East, broadly understood. This is my count, of course, and others might add or drop some articles. I define contemporary as post World War II and have a relatively expansive definition of politics. My count does not include short features, only full articles.

This essay examines how administrative documents categorized the mamluks who served Ottoman governors of Tunis from the early 18th to the mid-19th century. The categorization of these state slaves-cum-servants illuminates three issues, namely, the relationships between Islamic states and societies, interactions between the Ottoman Empire and its provinces, and forms of military slavery around the globe. Seeing registers, letters, and historical chronicles as spaces of interaction allows us to break free from an a priori definition of mamluks. By exploring how slaves and servants contributed to defining themselves in administrative documents, I not only argue for a new understanding of the mamluk category, but also show that mamluks did not separate state and society. On the contrary, in the Tunisian case, mamluks connected the state to various imperial and provincial social forces.

Since 1974, U.N. peacekeepers on the divided Mediterranean island of Cyprus have patrolled a buffer zone that divides the Greek-leaning, government-controlled south from the northern third, the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). The economy of Northern Cyprus resembles that of other small islands with negligible industrial production that rely on the service sector to generate income. What makes Northern Cyprus unique, however, is that the rest of the world does not acknowledge it as a separate political entity. This limits economic functions because the “country” cannot trade freely and depends on Turkey, the only nation to formally recognize Northern Cyprus.

“Relocating Arab Nationalism” locates various representations of nationalism in the Arab world in new and hitherto neglected contexts. The project was first conceived in a conversation among some of the contributing authors about the validity of nationalism as a research topic in a seemingly postnationalist period in the Middle East. This conversation turned into a panel at the 2007 MESA conference in Montreal as an attempt to contribute to a further shift of perspective in the study of Arab nationalism away from the realm of theory and politics toward that of cultural history. The articles in this volume therefore trace the contours of multiple imaginary Pan-Arab spaces between the Atlantic Ocean and the Tigris river, inquiring into the movements of people, terms, and ideas between physical locations and in time. The space is imagined but experienced; the people who moved in it were sometimes excited about its promises and sometimes disappointed about its corruption and containment. Such experiences are the focal points of the articles. They ask whether and in what ways a virtual Pan-Arab community transcending the borders of nation–states ever existed. They also present the multitude of national narratives that were at work—and more often than not in conflict—inside the boundaries of nation–states. The authors do not see Arab nationalism as first and foremost a political agenda of unification and cooperation but rather focus on the roots, establishment, and evolution of imaginative, symbolic, or “lived” ties between people(s) who claimed to belong to an Arab national community, or tried to claim space for dissident minorities through counterhegemonic narratives. Case studies from Algerian, Moroccan, Syro-Palestinian, and Iraqi contexts from the interwar to the postindependence periods investigate the ways these ties of community were established beyond the rhetoric of textbooks and political speeches.

Little is known about the twelfth-century poet called Qasmūna the Jewess. She was one of a constellation of Arabic-writing women poets of medieval Spain, and is the sole representative of her faith from whom we have surviving verses. These are collected in the fifteenth-century anthology of women's verse compiled by as-Suyūtu, who drew upon the Nafh at-tub of al-Maqqaru. The sketchy biographical data that as-Suyūtu records show Qasmūna as a witty and intelligent young woman who received an excellent education from a doting father named Ismā'il ibn Ba@dālah. Indeed, the first of the three poetic texts we have from her is the product of a collaboration between Qasmūna and her father. In addition, she was endowed with great physical beauty, as becomes apparent in her poetry.

The sixteenth century may be regarded as the “turning point” in the evolution of the murābiūṭūn tradition in the Maghrib.2 The crisis of Iberian imperialism in the Maghrib brought to the surface, by way of reaction, latent forces within the Maghribian social womb; the result was a social revolution which may be characterized as the “murabitun revolution” because of the rise to prominence of the murabitun in Maghribian society from the sixteenth century onward. Integral to the murabitun revolution was the religious ferment or renaissance generated by the anti-Christian reaction, a renaissance that was expressed in the effervescence of maraboutism, the characteristic Maghribian variety of oriental sufism.

There have been various anthropological conceptions concerning cultural minorities in the traditional Middle East. One model, the cultural mosaic (Coon 1958), stresses the cultural and religious autonomy of groups in contrast to their interdependence in the marketplace. Another view emphasizes the dominance of Islamic culture which clearly leaves its imprint on the culturally variant groups in its midst (Patai 1971). Both of these viewpoints are useful as starting points, but both oversimplify and overstate the case. The first implies extreme, and hence implausible, separation between the world of work and the rest of social life. The second views the processes of cultural influence in too mechanical a fashion, leaving little room for the dynamics of interaction and reinterpretation of cultural forms in varying milieus. Recent work on Jews and Muslims in Morocco (Rosen 1972; Bowie 1976) has given a more refined picture of the complexities of social contact but has either merged the conceptual level with the interactional, or paid little explicit attention to the intricacies of cultural form. All these views, therefore, ignore the existence of a religious interface and an arena in which cultural forms recognised by both the majority and minority are the subject of “discussion” –agreement and disagreement, negotiation and compromise. We wish to illustrate this point by presenting and analyzing a text dealing with Muslims and Jews in Tripolitania. Our emphasis is on a cultural understanding of the text, not on presenting an example of Jewish-Muslim social interaction.

Academic interest in the study of forced migration as a specific field developed only in the late 20th century. But its conceptual tools had a much earlier incarnation in the United States. In the early 20th century historical linguistic and ethnographic research was being conducted with Native American peoples who had been subjected to massive ethnic cleansings in the preceding two centuries. Much of that early work was with tribes who had been displaced, dispossessed, and involuntarily marched into resource-poor reservations. The scientists working with them thought they were engaging in a kind of salvage operation to record ways of life before they disappeared. These researchers largely ignored or failed to recognize the impacts of displacement—destroyed settlements, land occupation, nonviable reservations, inadequate welfare, and hostile administrations and lack of legal rights—and focused instead on trying to reconstruct memory culture of “what life was like in the old days.” Nevertheless, these studies gave us many of our basic concepts to describe and analyze the experience of uprootedness and dispossession. These fundamental concepts have become important in the discipline of forced migration studies. They include understandings of: role and identity, hierarchy, social networks, conflict mechanisms, reciprocity and trust, boundary creation, rites of passage, liminality, and the role of myths.

In her writings, the Egyptian-born Israeli author Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff advocated Levantine cosmopolitanism, which she dubbed Levantinism, as a unique cultural model particular to the Eastern Mediterranean. Through an analysis of Kahanoff's novel Jacob's Ladder (1951), this article questions the nostalgic image often associated with Egyptian cosmopolitanism. I argue that this text provides rare insight into the process through which Levantine culture developed amid several competing imperial and nationalist projects. In particular, I show how the novel's depiction of Levantine spaces documents the marginalized role of the working class in the education of elite Levantine society and its acquisition of cultural capital. My analysis also explores how the construction and sustenance of a celebrated image of the Levantine past depended on the racialization of labor, or what I call “ethnic classism.” Through this latter process, a labor force made up of other cosmopolitan subjects was Orientalized and relegated to the background where it served to highlight a European-like Levantine cosmopolitanism.

The kibbutzim of Israel show the world that communal living can be successful, and many observers have asked the questions: Can this success be repeated elsewhere? What are its lessons for other societies? In sociology, the validity and importance of comparative study and the intrinsic interest of the kibbutz way of life cannot be denied.

In modern Arabic scholarship, it would be difficult to find a hypothesis more implausible than that advanced by Tāhā Husayn in his fī‘l-’adab al-jāhilī. Yet it may be wondered whether any other book, written by a contemporary Arab, has had a comparable influence in changing the fundamental attitude of the Arab intelligentsia towards their classical literature and history. The unsoundness of the book's central assertion—that the bulk of pre-Islamic poetry was fabricated by Muslims, and portrays Islamic, rather than pre-Islamic, conditions and conceits—has been exposed by several critics, both native, in varying degrees of wrathful condemnation, and orientalist, with different approaches to conclusiveness. Of the latter, one at least, the late A. J. Arberry, had some pretty strong words to say, not of the Arab propagator of the fallacy, but of D. S. Margoliouth, who, in the same year 1926, had, as it happened, published identical views, supported by largely similar arguments. Said Arberry, introducing his stern refutation, “The sophistry — I hesitate to say dishonesty — of Professor Margoliouth's arguments is only too apparent, quite unworthy of a man who was undoubtedly one of the greatest erudites of his generation.” He went on to castigate Margoliouth's disregard of certain Qur'anic meanings and intentions of which “he must have been very well aware,” his “shocking misapplication of scholarship,” his “immodesty”, and the rest. Quite restrained criticism when compared to the diatribe which the Arab debaters poured on the heads of their fellow citizen and his presumed infidel mentor, but rather unusual in the serene Arcady of orientalism.

In late 1912, the Ottoman imperial armies suffered a series of quick defeats at the hands of the Balkan League, comprising Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro, resulting in significant territorial losses. The Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars (1912–13) often stands at the center of teleological accounts of a neat and linear transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic. These teleological readings see the Ottoman defeat as a historical turning point when Ottoman elites turned nationalist, discovered Anatolia, and embraced the Turkish core. This article contends that such approaches frame late Ottoman history in anticipation of the later reality of nation-states, and overlook the messy and historically complex nature of the collapse of empire and the emergence of the nation-state. Although the defeat was certainly shocking for the Ottoman ruling elite, I argue that it initiated an era of debate rather than one of broad consensus. Similarly, the defeat neither marked the end of the Ottoman Empire nor heralded the coming of the Turkish Republic, but rather reinvigorated the Ottoman imperialist project.

The myopia of nations regarding the availability of petroleum in unlimited amounts led to an irrepressible conflict between oil-producing and oil-consuming nations. This conflict, culminating with the energy crisis of 1973, created both benefits and costs for all parties dealing in oil. In the future, OPEC and the consuming nations will have to resolve the conflicts between costs and benefits resulting from any strategy chosen concerning the future price and quantity of oil.

In 1795, i.e. three years before Napoleon's arrival in Egypt, Egyptian opposition to the Ottoman Wâlï and the Mamlûks brought the country almost to what might be described as a popular movement of resistance. This was climaxed in a dramatic incident in which the leaders of the Azhâr and the masses were able to secure a rare hujja from the Wâlï and the two Mamlûk leaders, Murâd Bek and Ibrâhïm Bek, which can be considered the first ‘legal document’ Egypt ever had known in its constitutional history.

Over the years, a number of important studies have been written on aspects of premodern travel in the Islamic world. Most of the literature examining the travel circuits of Ottoman/Arab bureaucrats, scholars, and merchants inevitably gives rise to the question of communal self-awareness and identity. How did pre-modern travelers envisage themselves and the “other”? What allowed some of them to create “imagined communities” of like-minded sojourners, incorporating space, ideology, and shared origin into a notion of exclusive commonality? How did travel contribute to the emergence of theories of “national” exceptionalism from among the fluid traditions of de-centralized imperial control? Why was it that the most favored classes in the empire's provinces were usually the first to register their unease with the status quo and to experiment with different levels of self-perception and identity? Benedict Anderson's thesis on pre-modern travel is instructive on all of these issues. His point of departure is that the frequent journeys of provincial functionaries, bureaucrats, and scholars, whether to perform the obligations of religious pilgrimage or to oversee the administrative needs of empire, paradoxically provided indigenous elites aspiring for representation and recognition in the mother country (or empire) with the catalyst for the development of a wider sense of identification with their home regions. Finding their desires for increased mobility thwarted by the central power, provincial elites in 18th-century Spanish America eventually chose the way of armed resistance to regain control of what was now perceived to be a “common” destiny.