If the Islamic Community was founded to constitute the nucleus or model of the ‘good society’ on earth, why has it so manifestly failed to do so? This is the problem which haunts all thinking Muslims, confronting them with an insistent, nagging, exasperating demand to which self-respect requires an answer. The simple Muslim answer, which points to the ideal, says that it is ‘because we, the Community, have ceased to live now for many centuries in faithful obedience to the Sharî'a and in conscious striving to live up to its ethic’. Another mocking Western answer points to practice in the world of Islam: ‘because you Muslims did not learn to control your inward violences you were forced to submit to tyranny in political life and allowed your social institutions to be ravaged by lust and greed’. For the true Muslim, however, neither answer is satisfactory. To the Westerner he reacts with a natural surge of hot and outraged pride: ‘What kind of social ideals do you imagine your practice holds out to the world? We at least have nothing to learn from atheists, infidels, hypocrites and Hollywood’, he says. But when he contemplates the simple Muslim answer, he becomes aware that here too something is wrong. Only the most simplehearted believer can continue to take the entire Sharî'a system on trust, although there are many Muslims who want no change because the existing system suits their interests.

The vast uprisings across Iranian cities in the fall of 2022 caught many of Iranian studies scholars and academic feminists in the diaspora off guard. My first confrontation was with trauma. Like many others, I worried about the lives and safety of my loved ones, political dissidents and prisoners from different ethnic backgrounds, feminists and queer activists on the ground, and, of course, the millennials and Gen Z, who unexpectedly emerged as the new revolutionaries. However, with the first wave of emotional encounters settled, the uprising unlocked another level of cognitive puzzlement critical to my academic life. I struggled to find comprehensive theoretical frameworks and supporting scholarship within Iranian studies or Iranian academic feminism to help my media and scholarly audiences grasp what was unfolding. In this reflective piece, I discuss how the scholarship of Iranian studies and feminism/s formulated the question of gender in liberal and radical essentialist multiculturalism and argue that Woman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi; WLF) urges us to adopt an antiracist and radical democratic approach, deconstructing the imagined Iran in the scholarship, and reconstructing it as a welcoming and inclusive discursive space for racialized and queer Iranians.

This article explores the rhetorical function of al-Andalus (medieval Spain) in modern Syrian popular culture, with a focus on music. The rhetoric of al-Andalus in Syria is intimately related to the project of nation building. The nostalgic performance of links between modern Syria and medieval al-Andalus assumed great rhetorical force in the 1960s as a result of ideologies of pan-Arabism, the loss of Palestine, the rise of Islamist threats at home, and the emergence of petrodollar regimes in the Arabian Gulf. As a result, the rhetoric of al-Andalus became “good to think” for wide audiences of Syrians. Musical genres linked to al-Andalus play an important role as potent vehicles for constructing Syrian memory cultures. Drawing on heavily mythologized and nostalgic visions of an Andalusian golden age, musical performance in Syria sonically reinforces forms of nostalgic remembrance and enacts claims on Syrian pasts, presents, and futures.

Little is known today about the Arabic typewriter. American typewriters revolutionized clerical labor and became literary icons, but the Arabic typewriter is largely absent from scholarship and popular culture. Only one story about it recurs, namely that of its origins. It was reportedly invented multiple times: in 1890s Beirut by, among others, a portrait painter named Salim Haddad; in 1900s Vienna by Theodor Herzl, founding father of political Zionism; and in 1940s Cairo by Wadie Said, father of the pioneering postcolonial theorist Edward Said. Bringing three competing accounts of the machine's invention together, I find that in each the Arabic typewriter was turned to very different purposes. Consistently, however, it was co-opted into intensifying struggles over territory and language. Repeatedly, it exceeded its representations, unsettling the narratives into which it was written and provoking a sense of strangeness, even unease. And across the accounts, diverse names and places reappear: New York, Palestine, Sherlock Holmes. Taking seriously the doublings and coincidences that connect the typewriter's origin-stories, I ask finally whether they might alert us to the possibility of another mode of cultural history—one that is itself uncanny and estranged.

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.

For years, I struggled with the presentation of the category of “Middle East” to my students at Howard University, a historically black college. Like many of their professors, my students did not consider North Africa to be part of Africa. The reason was simple: the study of the continent was bifurcated between two fields, African and Middle East studies. African studies focused on sub-Saharan Africa; North Africa was the purview of Middle East studies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is perhaps premature to spell out priorities of research in the history of Libya, since bibliographies of what has already been written have not been systematically read, nor even adequately compiled and indexed. The following observations and analyses are, of necessity, based on a cursory reading in a list—compiled by the author on the history of the Arab world and Ottoman Empire (sixteenth through nineteenth centuries)—of some 500 studies done since the 1950s by Arab scholars and historians. The fifties are taken as the period which signalled the achievement of political independence by the Arab States. I realize that individual scholars will be able to make exceptions here or ther to the observations, generalizations, and criticisms which are made in this study. The very exceptions, however, point to the dearth of modern critical scholarship on the history of Libya from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. However, the exceptions which one could point out as models for research to be done, do not in and of themselves amount to trends in research. To date, available histories of Libya are, in the main, focused on political if not outright dynastic history. The focus is usually placed on the peculiarities and the anomalies of political history rather than the primary similarities which make for comparative history. In the remainder of this paper we offer a novitiate's priorities for research under five headings.

Although the activities of the first press established in the Ottoman Empire for theprinting of Turkish books, that of İbrahim Müteferrika which operated between 1927 and 1974, have been well documented, less is known about the circumstances under which printing in Turkish was revived later in the centurey. Two letters preserved among the papers of the British botanist and patron of science, Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820), however, throw interesting light on an abortive attempt to restart Turkish printing in the Ottoman capital under British auspices in 1779.

How do states produce religion and how can the study of state censorship cast light on this phenomenon? This article examines the logic by which two Egyptian government bodies, the Ministry of Culture and the Islamic Research Academy, censored the sermons of a premier Islamist preacher, Shaykh ʿAbd al-Hamid Kishk (d. 1999), between 1987 and 1993. To do so, it draws on two distinct sets of sources: a sixteen-volume printed edition of Kishk's sermons published in Egypt and MP3s of original performances recorded initially by audiocassette. While previous studies on religion and state power in the Middle East emphasize the strategies by which states use religion to assert their interests, this article uses the censorship of a leading antiregime preacher to probe the undertheorized distinction between claiming and producing religion. A focus on the strategies, in turn, casts light on both the internal diversity of religious visions within the Egyptian state and on the subtle, yet significant, ways in which state actors not only censor but also are shaped by their Islamist challengers.