The first periodical in Egypt to focus on women as both subject and audience, Al-Fatat (The Young Woman, 1892), heralded the founding by women of many periodicals for women in Egypt. The women's press emerged in a time of intense public debate concerning putative intersections of systemic gender relations and gender ideology with anti-imperialist nationalism: what would constitute “national” strength sufficient to assert, or force, an independent existence based on claims to autonomous nation-state status?1Women writing in the women's press, as well as in the mainstream—or “malestream”—press, shaped the debate over how gender did and should inflect social organization and institutional change.2 Equally, male intellectuals and politicians participated in a rhetoric of persuasion, edification, and ambition. When women and men wrote treatises on what was called the “woman question” (qadi¯yat al-mar[ham]a), articles in the women's press challenged, debated, and refined the points of these treatises. Writers approached that fraught “question” from another direction, too, establishing a thriving industry of conduct literature that fed on translations of European works as well as original works by Egyptian and other Arab writers. Books on how to behave as a proper father, a good mother, a fine son or daughter, or a responsible schoolgoer went through numerous printings for a reading public prepared by various rhetorics of nationalism, theology, and reform to bring this debate into everyday life by following the guides for behavior that such literature—including essays in the women's press—supplied.3

It is a widespread pattern in many countries in the Third World for men to leave their families and migrate long distances in order to earn money. The effects of labor migration are usually studied using a macro approach: how migration effects the wages, labor supplies, and governmental policies on the national level. In this study, labor migration is studied using a micro approach: the effect of the migration of the husband on the relationships between husband and wife, mother and child, and wife and in-laws.

This paper explores what I call “online experiments in ethical affect” through an analysis of one popular Islamic genre: the short video segments of Friday sermons (khuṭub, s. khuṭba) placed on the video-sharing website YouTube. In my discussion of this media form, I give particular attention to the kind of devotional discourse and ethical socius that is enacted online around these taped performances: notably, the practices of appending written comments to specific videos, offering responses to comments left by others or criticisms directed at either the preacher or other commentators, and the act of creating links between khuṭba pages and other web-based content. In examining these practices, I want to look at the way some of the norms of ethical and devotional comportment associated with the khuṭba in the mosque carry over to the Internet context of khuṭba listening/viewing while also engendering novel forms of pious interaction, argument, and listening.

One of the most significant, but unstudied, aspects of the reforms accomplished in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century under the leadership of the Tanzimat statesmen and of Sultan Abd ul-Hamid II was a radical transformation of the traditional Ottoman tax structure and the introduction of the system that has remained in force, with relatively few changes, to the present day, at least in the Republic of Turkey.

Because of the assassination of President Anwar Sadat, observers have felt a sense of urgency to analyze the conditions that favored the emergence of Islamic militancy in Egypt. Psychological, political, and socioeconomic categories have been widely used to explain—and even suggest the means to neutralize—the ill effects of sectarian and political violence on social harmony and the stability of the political order. Laudable as these attempts are, they must first be preceded by a clear conception as to whether the militants do represent a social movement whose existence can be supported by empirical data.

The history of political change in Libya during the nineteenth century has been obscured by subsequent events in the Middle East and North Africa. A relatively unimportant province of the Ottoman Empire, it went to the least important European colonial power in the region – Italy – and the Italian tenure destroyed much of the legacy of Ottoman reform. Even contemporary observers in the nineteenth century usually viewed the province through a prism whose primary focus was elsewhere, leaving distorted and partial accounts of the changes wrought by the Ottoman administration. This lacuna in the literature has hindered comprehensive assessment of the Ottoman reform period and, perhaps as seriously, distorted interpretation of Libya's subsequent political history.

In this article, I explore how the rapid commercialism and commodification of Turkish premier league football has affected the activities of a particular fan group, Çarşı, for the club Beşiktaş, one of Turkey's oldest teams. I look at how elements of the commodification of football have been harnessed and mediated by Çarşı to make ethical and political statements and convey an anarcho-socialist message. These processes, I argue, are driven by the possibilities opened up by rapid social and technological development. The shift to searching for identity among the forums and video websites of the internet, rather than on the terraces of Beşiktaş, is profoundly altering how fans construct their allegiance to the fan group and the club. This process, it will be shown, is not so much liberating supporters from the requirements of fandom as it is generating new conventions and processes to which Çarşı members must adhere.

The duality of nomad/sedentary or nomads/settlers—in Arabic badu/hadhar—is a classic feature of the social history of the Middle East. Related to this duality is the notion of tribe and its cultural ideology, tribalism. These are all concepts familiar to the students of the region, although increasingly, they are acquiring an antiquated character due to rapid urbanization and other forms of socioeconomic change. In the Arabian Peninsula, the dichotomy is still widely used. Whereas important research has been carried out over the years on the relationship between tribalism and nationalism in the Middle East, the persistence of this particular dichotomy in the Gulf has received little analytical attention. Many studies on the region speak of “bedouin” as groups, constituencies, or social or political actors, without clarifying what lies in the term and without asking by what criteria this category is defined or how it differs from other, non-bedouin categories. The association of bedouinism/tribalism with the Arabian Peninsula, “home of all the Arab tribes,” is so deeply anchored in the imagination of both inhabitants and outsiders that to speak of Arabian bedouin in the late 1990s to early 2000s hardly raised any eyebrows. On closer observation, however, one has to acknowledge the growing lack of consonance between the original lexical meaning of the term bedouin (pastoral nomads) and its derivative meaning (“country” as opposed to “city,” or “primitive” as opposed to “civilized”) and the category to which it is purported to apply. Both meanings beg the question of why the hadhar–badu dichotomy has such a central place in Kuwaiti popular discourse—Kuwait being for all purposes a city-state with hardly any country and where “the rural areas” is a euphemism for the sprawling suburbs around the capital city. At the same time, official history tells us that Kuwait was founded by bedouin who had fled drought and famine from Central Arabia in the first half of the 18th century. Under these circumstances, what does it take to qualify as a badu or to disqualify as a hadhar in present-day Kuwaiti society? There is one more thing: far from slipping into oblivion as a result of urbanization, the hadhar–badu dichotomy has made a noticeable comeback in popular discourse over the past two decades. This article seeks to explain the present popular concern in Kuwait with a dichotomy whose analytical, if not historical, validity has often been questioned. It explores the reasons why important symbolic barriers are being raised between hadhar and badu that contribute to turning them into mutually exclusive identities. Throughout history, hadhar and badu have always been porous categories and the distinction was never clear, regardless of what the ongoing discourse may claim. Even today, ascription and self-ascription of badu and hadhar identities are contextual rather than absolute; they are also contested, more often than not. The first task at hand is to clarify the meaning of hadhar and badu in Kuwait and their use at the turn of the millennium. The article, thus, begins by pinpointing the social groups that these categories encompass and by giving a brief description of each group's stereotypes of the other. Through the description of Kuwaiti social practices in relation to marriage and the use of surnames, and the exploration of the pervasive role of the state, I hope to show that social reality in Kuwait is a lot more complex than the discourse of polarization suggests. Finally, it is argued that, to explain the revival of the dichotomy, we need to understand the ongoing hadhar criticism of the badu as an expression of anti-immigration feelings, of the kind one commonly hears in societies where the state has pledged to take in charge the cradle to grave welfare of its citizens. A parallel with anti-immigration discourse in Western European welfare-state nations is drawn up as an argument against an exclusively historical–cultural interpretation of the phenomenon under study.

“Conquerors, my son, consider as true history only what they themselves have fabricated.” Thus remarked the old Arab headmaster to young Saeed on his return to Haifa in the summer of 1948 in Emile Habiby's tragicomic novel The Secret Life of Saʿid, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist. The headmaster spoke about the Israelis more in sorrow than in anger: “It is true they did demolish those villages … and did evict their inhabitants. But, my son, they are far more merciful than the conquerors our forefathers had years before”.

The International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo in September 1994 focused world attention on the interplay of religion, family-planning methods, and women's status. The most hotly debated topic of the conference was abortion. Before the conference convened, newspapers in the West and in the Middle East reported “a growing religious furor” that spurred an alliance between Muslim nations and the Vatican based on a common belief in the prohibition of abortion and concern for Western sexual mores. At the conference, Muslim delegations abandoned their slogans and moved away from the Vatican position by denouncing abortion as a method of family planning but leaving open its use under specific circumstances. Although a majority of Muslims worldwide agree with the stance taken at the population conference, and most would state that Islam forbids abortion, the Muslim theological position on abortion does not approximate the Roman Catholic condemnation of the practice. A full prohibition of abortion represents neither the sophisticated Muslim jurisprudence literature on abortion nor current practices of some Muslim women. Discussion with Muslim women and Muslim religious scholars (ʿulamāʾ) about the intricacies of the issues that abortion raises tells us that the question is not simple, consensus is far from being reached, and political concerns further complicate understanding of the paradoxical issues involved.

When in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and South African apartheid soon followed, it appeared even to political realists of the period that such systems, with their landscapes of walls and practices of separation, would rapidly be consigned to historical memory. In one of the great ironies of recent history, however, a new generation of such landscapes is proliferating in the wake of 1989, used by practitioners of power to promote systems of segregation and control movements of groups designated as threats by virtue of their representation as “other.” Reflecting collective psychologies of fear, these environments range from urban-based gated communities, where class prejudices against the poor and apprehension about crime coalesce in “fortified enclaves” within Cities of Walls, to borderlands between nation–states where hostility to immigrants and prejudices against ethnic others converge in creating what scholars describe as The Wall Around the West. Despite differences, these landscapes share a similar aim: they use built environments as defensive fortifications to preempt the circulation of people across territorial space based on class, religious, and ethnic divides. In this way, gated communities in São Paulo and Los Angeles, the walled borderlands of Melilla and Ceuta separating the European Union from Africa, and the walled border of Operation Gatekeeper separating the United States from Mexico, are broadly comparable.

The classical Muslim modernists of the nineteenth century envisaged Islamic Reform as a comprehensive venture: it took in its purview law, society, politics and intellectual, moral and spiritual issues. It dealt with questions of the law of evidence, the status of women, modern education, constitutional reforms, the right of a Muslim to think for himself, God and the nature of the universe and man and man's freedom. A tremendous intellectual fervour and ferment were generated. The liberals and the conservatives battled; the intellectual innovators were opposed and supported, penalized and honored, exiled and enthusiastically followed. Although the modernist movement dealt with all the facets of life, nevertheless, in my view, what gave it point and significance was its basically intellectual élan and the specifically intellectual and spiritual issues with which it dealt. This awakening struck a new and powerful chord in the Muslim mind because intellectual issues had remained for centuries under a state of selfimposed dormancy and stagnation at the instance of conservative orthodoxy. The nineteenth century was also the great age of the battle of ideas in the West, ideas and battles whose strong injections into Muslim society found a ready response. The character of this movement was then primarily intellectual and spiritual.

Critical citizenship studies have argued that researchers should not take the myth of the universal unmarked citizen to heart, but rather focus on the distance between the ideal of citizenship and its everyday embodied practices and on what the citizen and the state do rather than on the state's narration of itself. As Partha Chatterjee writes in his critique of Benedict Anderson, to endorse “unbound serialities” such as the universal and anonymous citizen is to imagine that nationalism and state practices can function without governmentality. In fact, the state's job is to organize and regulate the shared life of its structurally and practically unequal citizens and residents. Normative political theory of citizenship elides the ways that governmentality and biopower produce each citizen (as well as groups of citizens) as a particular derivation from the norm. It is with each iteration of these technologies that the state comes into view as a bounded entity.

Throughout its history, Islam was influenced by the nature and extent of its contacts with other religions. It began as a relatively simple set of beliefs and practices fully circumscribed by Quranic injunctions and the example (sunna) of the Prophet Muhammad. But because it was cast into an adversary position with Byzantine Christianity, many of its institutions were developed from early times on in response to the intellectual confrontation thus generated. Consequently, by the tenth century Islam had evolved a highly refined theological foundation.

Classes are objective positions defined by the social relations of production. These positions broadly determine, among other things, the occupants' political and ideological orientations and their potential to participate in revolutionary movements. The conflict between and the contradictory nature of these positions are the underlying mechanisms for the generation and reproduction of class struggle. Nevertheless, a simple structural analysis is insufficient for analyzing the role of classes in a revolutionary movement. Classes are not static entities fixed once and for all, nor are they completely determined by “objective” economic “facts” such as the social relations of production.1 To understand the success of the dominated classes in a revolutionary movement, one must analyze their level of class formation—namely, the capacity of the members of a class to realize their interests. Class capacity is contingent, among other things, on the level of organization and mobilization of the members of the class. Rather than deriving automatically from the structural positions, class capacity is “rooted in traditional culture and communities.”2 Class boundaries, interests, and mobilization are always shifting: interests change, coalitions are formed and break up, positions in the economy are created or destroyed, and demobilization occurs.3 Classes are continually organized, disorganized, and reorganized.4 The methodological strategy adopted in this article to demonstrate the importance of class in shaping the economic policy of the Islamic Republic is based on the analysis of the significant and controversial issues that appeared in the post-revolutionary period. It will be argued that these issues were a manifestation of class struggle and that the way they were finally resolved reflected the balance of class forces.5

Over the past century, most states of the Middle East have attempted to strengthen and centralize their legal systems, often following European models. Egypt undertook one of the first steps in that direction with its mixed-court system. These courts, which had jurisdiction in civil and commercial cases that involved a foreigner, however remotely, operated from 1876 until 1949. That this system could survive the political turmoil of those years, far outliving the circumstances which brought it into being, is remarkable.

This article focuses on the years after World War I, especially the first decade following the 1923 establishment of the Republic of Turkey, in order to analyze the position of minorities in the developing “we” of the new nation as projected by its political elite. Situating the discussion in the context of the League of Nations interwar minority protection regime, I demonstrate that the Treaty of Lausanne, which the Ankara government and the Allies signed in July 1923, played an important role in the conflicting treatment that minorities have since received in Turkey. The treaty's minority protection clauses entrenched divisions that had already been formed in the Ottoman Empire during the violence of the preceding decade, including the Armenian genocide. Moreover, reminding Turkish leaders of how 19th-century European imperial powers had used the cause of Ottoman Christians’ suffering as an excuse to infringe on Ottoman sovereignty, these clauses alarmed the Turkish political elite, especially as the “Great Powers” themselves were not bound by such minority protection guarantees. The goal of preventing a repetition of this unbalanced international power dynamic, which, according to the new Turkey's leaders, had led to the demise of the Ottoman Empire, engendered paradoxical policies toward non-Muslim Turkish citizens; they have been largely excluded from a Turkness (Türklük) to which they were sometimes included, even forcibly included.

The collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago engendered both hope and fear about the future of Islam in Uzbekistan (and Central Asia in general). Many Muslims from other countries hoped that, freed from the constraints of the Soviet regime, Uzbeks and other Central Asians would rediscover their religious traditions and rejoin the broader Muslim world.1 Other observers feared that Islam would emerge as a political force and threaten the security of the region.2 As the decade progressed and militant Islamist organizations appeared, fear tended to overshadow hope. The events of autumn 2001 in Afghanistan, when fighters belonging to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) played a prominent role alongside the Taliban, seemed to vindicate the darkest fears,3 and to justify the unremitting campaign that the regime of President Islom Karimov has waged against “religious extremism” since 1998.

A discussion of Turkish guild history becomes meaningless if it does not take as its point of departure that a guild is a professional organization. This means that a guild is neither an organization which is grouped according to professional criteria, nor just another name for groups of artisans or merchants about whose organization nothing definite is known. One may be justified in speaking about the existence of guilds if within a certain area all the people occupied in a branch of the urban economy constitute a unit which, at one and the same time, fulfils various purposes, such as economic, fiscal, administrative and social functions. A further condition is the existence of a framework of officers or functionaries chosen from among the members of such a unit and headed by a headman.

Recent Palestinian Authority (PA) initiatives to help Palestine adapt to climate change help shine light on the role that climate uncertainties play in how political futures can be represented. UN-led adaptation has occasioned opportunities for new networks of actors to make claims about Palestinian futures and to perform PA readiness for statehood. These actors weigh scientific uncertainties about climate against uncertainties over if and when settler colonialism in Palestine will end. How they do so matters because it is the foundation of requests for capital that could be translated into some of the most important institutions and infrastructures of Palestinian governance over the next several years, including those that provide Palestinians with access to water. It also matters because it constitutes the image with which PA officials represent what needs to be “fixed” in Palestine in important international forums such as the UN. Climate change adaptation is a new approach to the management of uncertain environmental futures. This analysis offers insight into how this approach shapes and is shaped by practices of statecraft in places marked by the volatilities of war, economic crisis, and occupation.