A crisis narrative dominates current public discourse about the artisanal sector in Fes, Morocco. Through historical and ethnographic research on Fessi crafts and craftspeople, this article elucidates the rise of the crisis narrative and its relationship to modernity and moral and political economy. Sustained analysis of the dialectical relationship between craftspeople's practical knowledge and public narratives highlights the existence of a “pool” of multiple and cross-cutting storylines from which the artisans draw to depict their profession. These storylines are marked by intertextual reverberations of precolonial Islamic philosophy, colonial Orientalist discourses, modern governance, and liberal and neoliberal economic policies. This article claims that the current, widespread crisis narrative took precedence over other storylines with the arrival of colonialism and modernity in Morocco. Drawing on the analytical framework of colonial modernity, it argues that from the colonial period to the postcolonial present, rulers and ruled alike have produced, maintained, and enhanced the crisis narrative, which is deeply rooted in modernity.

Academic diversity has been an important consideration in hiring processes within academia since the late 2010s. The term diversity encompasses race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, geographical representation, and political beliefs. There are three significant considerations during the hiring process. To put it simply: “equity is the promotion of fairness and justice for each individual that considers historical, social, systemic, and structural issues that impact experience and individual needs; diversity is a measure of representation within a community or population that includes identity, background, lived experience, culture, and many more; and inclusion is the creation of an environment where everyone shares a sense of belonging, is treated with respect, and is able to fully participate.”1

Scarcity of information can present a difficulty for writing a biography. Abundance of information can do the same. As perspectives multiply, a subject sometimes becomes clearer; other times it becomes complicated. In Islamic studies, for example, the more sources that are uncovered on central historical figures such as the Prophet Muhammad, al-Hasan al-Basri, and al-Ghazzali, the more scholars are in dispute over their biographies. Yet historical figures of the second degree—those individuals whose biography has not yet attracted a separate study but who are studied for their role in larger questions—are often portrayed with deceptive simplicity. Scholars tend to stick to the most coherent and simple biography and move on to the question at hand. Such coherence and simplicity, however, often is not found in the sources.

This quote from a character in the 1974 novel Al-Karnak (Karnak Café) by Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) sums up the reaction of millions of people in Egypt and the Arab world to the June 1967 Arab–Israeli war. Why did this war shatter their worldviews? A military defeat may occur for purely military reasons, in this case the better preparation of Israeli troops. Why should it cast doubt on a whole way of life? The answer to this question lies in the social and cognitive structure of nationalism, which I examine in a moment of crisis, after the 1967 war, when it became necessary for nationalist intellectuals to debate issues that had previously been taken for granted. Al-Karnak, which was made into a highly profitable and controversial film, provides a good starting point for studying these debates. However, it is important to understand them as products of the nationalist project of which Mahfouz was a part. I first analyze the history of that project, explaining its raison d'être and its success by the 1960s.

Mehmed Emin âli Paşa (1815–1871), one of the leading Ottoman statesmen of the Tanzimat period, was the purported author of a political testament that was published in 1910, though said to have been written just before his death. When finally published, it was in French rather than in Turkish. The “Testament politique,” with the signature “Aali” at the end, appeared in two sections in successive issues of the Revue de Paris. In the same year it also appeared as a separate brochure.1 Its authenticity has, ever since, been a question. Discussions of the point have reached no satisfactory conclusion.2 Now that the papers in the Basbakanlīk Arsivi in Istanbul are available to research, there is opportunity for a new judgment. Several documents in the Yīldīz collection there pertain to Âli Pasa's political testament.

Le grand commentaire du Coran de l'Imam Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī pose un problème. Dans la notice que Ibn Abī Usybi'a (m. en 1270 A.D.) consacre à un personnage qui mourut Grand Qādī de Damas en 637/1239–40 et qui se nommait Shams al-Dīn Ahmad b. al-Khalīl b. Sa'āda al-Khuwayyī al-Shāfi'i, on lit que, parmi les oeuvres de ce dernier, figure un complement du “Commentaire du fils du Prédicateur de Rayy”. Il s'agit ici du grand commentaire de Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī dont le père était bien connu sous ce titre, ses dons de prédicateur (khatīb) l'ayant rendu célèbre en son temps.

In 1887 or 1888, a small group of Syrian Isma'ilis journeyed to Bombay to visit Sultan Muhammad Shah, the third Aga Khan, and on their return to Syria recognized him as their Imam. Unexpectedly in consequence, little more than a decade later, the religious leader of that section of the Isma'ili sect in Syria and a number of his followers found themselves arrested and imprisoned, accused of treason and other crimes. Their trials before criminal courts in Damascus lasted, intermittently, from 1901 until 1906, and before those trials were concluded, more men of their faith had been similarly accused, imprisoned, and put on trail. The persecution of the Isma'ilis only ended, and even then not completely, with the Ottoman constitutional revolution of 1908.

Recent scholarship on the manuscript libraries of North Africa has substantially increased the amount of literature available for analysis of the formative period in Islamic law, particularly for the nascent Malikite school. Students of Islamic law are now in a position, for instance, to begin a re-assessment of the 9th century, the vital transition period between the ancient schools of the 7th and 8th centuries, and the establishment of the classical schools in the 10th and 11th centuries.1 Not only will these new texts make the process of establishment of the classical schools clearer, they will also provide a much stronger basis for the study of earlier centuries, throwing into question the canonical status that has been granted to early legal texts by Western and traditional Muslim scholars alike.

Ever since the Persian intelligentsia first discovered French literature in the 19th century, it has remained fascinated with its various genres: first with the writings of the Philosophe, then with the Romantics, the roman aventure, the realists, and, in the mid-20th century, with the existentialists and the thèâtre absurde. Moliere's comedies, in particular, were the subject of great interest and the source of many adaptations in the secularizing Iran of the Constitutional period (1905–19) and the Reza Shah era (1921–41). These comedies, often staged with the government's blessing in the newly built playhouses in Tehran and other major cities, had a great impact on the ethos of the growing urban middle classes, who viewed theater-going as a chic habit with a moral essence.

Britain's strategic interest in Mesopotamia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a consequence of her control over India. The valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates constitute a natural highway from Syria to the Persian Gulf, and thence to the Indian Ocean. Not until a relatively late stage in Imperial history, however, did Britain extend her formal protection to this region. In the nineteenth century successive British governments had refused to finance the establishment of either a Mesopotamian steamer service or railway line. Subsequently, they had first (1903) rejected participation in an international Baghdad railway scheme, and then (1914) sanctioned complete German control over the project as far as Basra. A small Indian force was despatched to the head of the Persian Gulf in October 1914, but the subsequent Mesopotamian campaign was ‘a haphazard affair from start to finish’ lacking political or military direction. Thus, the De Bunsen committee, which reported on Britain's desiderata in Asiatic Turkey in June 1915, had concluded that Ottoman “devolutionary control” over Mesopotamia was preferable to Indian annexation of any part of the region other than the Basra vilayet; that October, the War Cabinet experienced difficulty in deciding whether to sanction an advance on Baghdad. No proclamation of political interest in Mesopotamia was in fact made by a British government until the capture of the city in 1917. The immediate and local arguments impelling that operation have been fully investigated. By contrast, the strategic tradition that deprecated it has been relatively neglected. This paper proposes to survey the latter and to indicate the degree to which the extension of the Mesopotamian campaign contradicted previous British strategy toward the region.

Spain in the sixteenth century was far from presenting the racial and spiritual homogeneity that the Spanish monarchs from Ferdinand and Isabella had sought to attain. That uniformity was the common aspiration of Spanish society during this period cannot be denied, but this was an ideal that bore little relation to reality. Regardless of the efforts put forth by the forces of racial and religious purity, there existed in Spain throughout the sixteenth century both social dissidents and unassimilated classes whose survival was considered an affront to the Spanish government, church and people. The largest of these non-conformist groups was the Moriscos (converted Moslems), who were scattered about the country in their own communities, each with its distinctive features and problems. In Valencia and Aragon, for example, the Moriscos were a rural people gaining their subsistence from the land; in Castile, on the other hand, they were concentrated in the towns, where they lived a ghetto-like existence on the fringes of society. Large numbers of these urban Moriscos lived in Andalusia and especially in Seville, a town that became as a result of its monopoly of the Indies trade, the most famous and important city in Spain at that time. The size and cosmopolitan atmosphere of this ‘new Babylonia’, as it was called by the literary figures of the period, naturally attracted all kinds of dissident elements; it was, in the words of Cervantes, ‘the asylum of the poor and the refuge of the outcast’.

Western scholarship is today at work ‘rediscovering’ the Egyptian archives. After a decade of relative absence, scholars have in the past few years converged on Cairo in ever growing numbers to mine the archival treasures hidden away in mosques, palaces, and old public buildings. Between 1968 and 1970 American scholars researched eight archive projects, Europeans several more; and in 1971–2 The American Research Center in Egypt administered 29 projects (a near threefold increase from the immediately preceding years), of which 18 proposed to use archival material1.

For centuries Muslims have asked whether the Qurʾan should be recited and memorized first and foremost, or whether one must prioritize understanding the meaning of its complex language. What is the best way to encounter God's Word? To explore this question, a women's Qurʾan lesson in a slum of Old Cairo illustrates modern Muslim anxieties over the place of discursive meaning in encounters with the Qurʾan. This article elaborates the concept of affirmation as an analytic to grasp how the women relate to the truth of revelation. Affirmation is a performative and discursive hermeneutic practice that deploys Qurʾanic citation, situates Qurʾanic concepts in daily life, and sutures the efficacy of Qurʾan education with correct language and with right action. Their lessons are indicative of reformist trends in Qurʾan education that open onto questions of meaning and understanding in relation to human interactions with divine speech.

And, if we wonder why the mythmaker resorts to myths when he has more sophisticated tools at hand, the answer is that, although he doubts whether his mythical argument can stand alone, he regards it as being more lucid and compelling than an argument from abstract principles.1

More than twenty-five years ago, a small group of South Asianists challenged the bourgeois-nationalist and colonialist historiography of Indian nationalism. Based mostly in India and critical of “economistic” Marxism, they aimed to recover the occluded histories of what Antonio Gramsci calls “subaltern social groups” and to put into question the relations of power, subordination, and “inferior rank” more generally. The influence of subaltern studies quickly became international, inspiring research projects in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East.