This article examines the origins of the walled and fragmented Palestinian landscape by situating it within a context of recurrent encounters between dominant groups with territorial ambitions and less powerful subalterns focusing on the interplay of power and territorial space. The argument is that the Palestinian landscape is part of a long-standing narrative in which groups coveting territory transform the economy, demography, and culture of territorial space through the time-honored practice of enclosure. Enclosure is the exercise of force upon space by groups with territorial ambitions resulting in the remaking of landscapes. Mobilizing the institutional power of property law and the material power of the built environment, these groups reorder land ownership, use, and circulation on the landscape in an effort to consolidate systems of control over subalterns and reorganize socioeconomic life and demography in a place. This article argues that the project of state building launched by Zionists in Israel or Palestine is fundamentally an exercise of power on space similar to the making of enclosure landscapes from the past, notably, the enclosure landscape of early modern England. By exploring the contours of this pattern, this article seeks to uncover a more general meaning in the landscape of Palestine today.

This study focuses on the nature of the Lebanese encounter with modernity in Lebanese fiction over the past forty years or so, a time of great ideological, political, and cultural upheavals. The first part traces the effect of modernity on works by Lebanese writers since the 1950s, a period of “revolutionary political and social change,” and of learning and cultural and social ferment. The second part of the study focuses on Rashid al-Daif's novel עAzizi al-Sayyed Kawabata. My choice of this particular novel is related to the fact that it is a representative work that underlines the impact of modernity on Lebanese individuals and society during and in the wake of the civil war. The novel raises questions about rationality, ideology, the individual self, and the relevance of these Western constructs to the local situation in Lebanon. The structure of the novel itself and the use of the epistolary and autobiographical modes of writing underscore the novel's obsession with modernity. Within this context, one could say that al-Daif's novel can be viewed as a complex work of fiction that encompasses different forms of modernity, the tensions between these modernities, and between modernity and authenticity.

This article documents the ḥawākīr of Nazareth. Once widespread in the city, these traditional domestic gardens were integral to households of all economic backgrounds. They served as a space for work and socializing, constituted a center of collective (extended family) life, and provided a wide diversity of crops. However, in recent decades ḥawākīr have disappeared rapidly as new houses were built overtop them and residents’ tastes changed. Today people prefer gardens with green lawns and flowers. Intended strictly for recreation and ornament, this new kind of garden acts as a marker of privacy and economic success. We use ethnographic data to provide detailed descriptions of historical and contemporary examples of the traditional garden. The analysis dwells on the resonances between changing practices around and meanings of ḥawākīr and the changing character of the urban landscape, on the value of ḥawākīr as sites of attachment and identity, and on the potential of their revival to generate urban sustainability.

Over the course of the 18th–early 20th centuries, a curious narrative emerged in Central Asia wherein the Turko-Persian monarch Nadir Shah Afshar was converted from Shiʿism to Sunnism by a group of Islamic scholars outside of Bukhara. While this legend was rooted in Nadir Shah's theological ambitions to bring Shiʿism back into the Sunni fold as a fifth school of canonical law, the memory of that event in the subsequent two centuries was intimately tied to the establishment of several scholarly dynasties, which managed to perpetuate themselves all the way to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. This article engages the memory of this mythological conversion to explore sharpening conceptions of sectarian divisions and the role of genealogy in projecting spiritual authority. Most broadly, it argues that—far from a passing depredation—the Afsharid Empire profoundly shaped the geopolitical and social landscape of Persianate Asia.

The Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Tapline), which extended from Dhahran in Saudi Arabia to Zahrani in Lebanon and operated from 1950 to 1982, was haunted by the Arab–Israeli conflict throughout the years of its operation. The route of the pipeline—which traversed Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon—was chosen so as to circumvent Palestine/Israel. However, following the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights in the 1967 war, Israel became an active participant in this project, with the full consent of the transit states and Egypt. This article uses Tapline as a means to analyze the interconnected world facilitated by oil pipelines, which defies common wisdom about state sovereignty or the function of interstate boundaries. In addition, Tapline demonstrates how this interconnected network created possibilities for Arab–Israeli cooperation that might have seemed inconceivable initially, given the hostile dynamics of the conflict.

Two years after naming himself a Black Man as opposed to an American in his 1964 expression of alienation from mainstream, white U.S. society, Muhammad Ali announced, “I ain't got no quarrel with the Viet Cong.” In doing so, he powerfully linked his racialized status in the United States to his unwillingness to fight a war against other similarly racialized, marginalized, and disempowered people. He thus embraced a message of Third World solidarity as a First World resident with a similarly subaltern status in “his own” country. The second epigraph shows Ali's effort to articulate his sense of belonging within the United States, thus pushing at the limits of both his “Black” and “American” identities. The two epigraphs demonstrate the contradiction in the way in which African Americans can be identified as both “Black” and “American” in the United States, here in statements by one of Black America's most iconic public figures. This paradox of African American identity will be explored in this article in relation to two Arabic literary texts: Adonis's “Qabr min ajl New York” (“A Grave for New York”) and Radwa Ashour's al-Rihla:ayyam taliba misriyya fi amrika (The Journey: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Student in America), both of which are particularly concerned with Black Americans and firmly rooted in the tradition of commitment literature, which sees them as brothers and sisters in solidarity with Third World struggles.

The Arab Gulf remains a marginalized, even unfashionable, area of research in the Middle East academy. In spite of—or maybe because of—this marginality, the region offers an interesting vantage point for reflecting on the production of knowledge about geographic and cultural regions. The frame of knowledge production casts into relief discourses of “the city” in Middle East, and particularly Gulf, studies over the past decade.

Why are humans fated to remember and forget? For Plato, it is because we are wounded by our memory of a previous existence, namely the Platonic “realm of ideas,” to which we forever long to return. In the social sciences, especially history and anthropology, burgeoning cross-disciplinary methodologies and approaches have emerged to study the ways in which humanity remembers and forgets; “cultural memory studies” and the “anthropology of memory” constitute a contemporary realm of ideas concerned with discursive contestations over memory and history. The books under review here, all of which relate to the study of collective memory in Lebanon or Israel/Palestine, have recourse to French theories, despite time lags due to delayed English translation. Foundational writers of a field loosely grouped under the rubric “memory studies” include French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, whose Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925) and posthumously published La mémoire collective (1950) both appeared in English in 1980, under confusingly similar titles. The English-language publication of Halbwachs’ corpus on the individual in relation to “collective memory” coincidentally corresponded with the American Psychiatric Association's 1980 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition, in which categories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) extended collective memory into collective traumatic memory, through the notion that “Post-traumatic disorder is fundamentally a disorder of memory.” Another seminal thinker in this field is Pierre Nora, especially the multivolume, multiauthored essays produced under his direction entitled Les Lieux de mémoire, which appeared in French between 1984 and 1992.

The manuscript tradition of the Zaydi branch of Shiʿism, which since the 9th century has been preserved primarily in Yemen, is nowadays dispersed over countless libraries in Yemen and the Middle East, Turkey, Europe, and the United States, of which only a fraction has been digitized and is available for open access. Its treasures came to the attention of scholars outside Yemen at a relatively late stage. Whereas the bulk of Arabic manuscripts nowadays housed in the libraries of Europe were acquired between the 17th and 19th centuries in centrally located cities and regions such as the Ottoman capital Istanbul, Syria and Palestine, and Egypt—all strongholds of Sunnism—the collections of Zaydi/Yemeni manuscripts were established only at the end of the 19th and first decades of the 20th century. Among the European explorers and merchants who collected manuscripts in South Arabia and later sold them to libraries in Europe was Eduard Glaser, who visited Yemen on four occasions between 1882 and 1894. After Glaser sold the manuscripts purchased during his first and second journey to the Königliche Bibliothek zu Berlin in 1884 and 1887, Wilhelm Ahlwardt made them the last acquisition to be included in his Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts, published between 1887 and 1899. The third Glaser collection was purchased in 1889 by the British Museum in London—with the exception of the Lane collection that was purchased in 1891 and 1893, it was the last acquisition to be included in Charles Rieu's Supplement to the Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts published in 1894. The fourth Glaser collection was sold in 1894 to the Kaiserlich-Königliche Hofbibliothek in Vienna, constituting the most important acquisition of Arabic manuscripts by the library at the time—unlike the Berlin and London Glaser collections, the Vienna Glaser manuscripts were never described in a published catalogue. An even larger collection of Zaydi/Yemeni manuscripts was brought together by the Italian merchant Giuseppe Caprotti during his sojourn in South Arabia from 1885 to 1919. Portions of the Caprotti collection now belong to the Bavarian State Library in Munich and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, while the majority of the collection is owned by the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. European libraries and increasingly US libraries have continuously purchased manuscripts of Yemeni provenance during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Over the past half century, the scholarly literature on Middle Eastern economic history has grown substantially. By mining the surviving records of states and towns, scholars steeped in the region's languages have produced detailed studies of waqfs, guilds, taxation, government expenditures, monetary trends, production, land use, charity, and court systems, among many other topics. In carrying out their work, Middle Eastern historians can now draw on abundant publications that describe economic life in particular places and periods.

The recent revolutions and uprisings in the Middle East represent a rare historic opening for scholars, offering us nothing short of the opportunity to rethink the possibilities of history and our conceptions of “the political” itself. In so doing, we might be more open to the ways in which the empirical continually challenges us to rethink our conceptual models. Thus, while some immediately sought to categorize and co-opt the revolutions for their own purposes (Žižek's impassioned, albeit simplistic, “freedom is universal”), others listened closely to the voices on the ground in Tahrir and elsewhere. Now, if ever, is the time to critically reevaluate some of our theoretical models, our tenacious binaries (chiefly among them secularism versus Islamism) and our catch-all monolithic frameworks, such as “the military dictatorship,” “authoritarianism,” and even “neoliberalism.”

Economic growth in underdeveloped countries, including Jordan, is associated with substantial social change. According to the theory of social deviance, underdeveloped societies are characterized by a traditional distribution of labor where customs and values greatly influence the manners of economic performance. These customs and values shape attitudes of people toward work in general, and the issue of participation of women in the labor force in particular.

The region of Mascara, Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century is an attractive terrain for one seeking to combine anthropology and history in a North African setting. It was from this milieu that the 'amīr ‘Abd al-Qādir had emerged to lead resistance to the French in the 1830s and’ 40s. And the region abounded in that quintessentially Maghribin social type best known to the Western world as “marabouts,” but known in local parlance as 'awlād sayyid. These were the descendants of walīs, saintly men whose mortal remains are sheltered by the qubbas, or small, white-washed domed shrines one sees throughout North Africa. The two subjects are closely linked, for the 'amīr himself came from a prominent 'awlād sayyid family, as did many of his most important followers.

The term “grammar” is ambiguous. This essay explores the meanings of the term in general and concentrates on its relevance to Modem Hebrew. The gap between the lexical meanings and the speakers' knowledge of grammaticality is demonstrated as being a result of the close linkage between Biblical Hebrew grammar and Modem Hebrew norms.

One of the central issues in the debate on the transformative impact of European economic expansion on agricultural structures in the Ottoman Empire concerns the formation of large agricultural estates. It has been argued that the growing demand for raw materials on the world market fostered efforts at the integration of small landholdings into larger units of production and an increasing commercialization of agricultural produce. This commercializaiton coincided with a tendency toward crop specializaiton and a regional differentitation between the rural areas.

The closing decades of Ottoman rule in Palestine (the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries), a crucial period in the history of the area, have already received vast attention from scholars and other writers. They have used an abundance of source material, including documents belonging to individuals and institutions, consular reports, memoirs, travel books, and newspapers. But in contrast to earlier periods in Ottoman Palestine, very little has been done, as yet, to bring to light and utilize official Ottoman documents. This, of course, is absolutely necessary if the views and actions of the ruling power are to be described and analyzed, and—because the authorities must have had direct and reliable knowledge of the conditions of the land—if a more complete and balanced picture is to be drawn of the history of the country.

Le mot arabe sultân se rencontre plusieurs fois dans le Coran au sens de pouvoir.* A titre d'exemple, je vous cite quelques versets coraniques provenant de l'excellente traduction de M. Blachére: ‘Quiconque a tuée injustement, nous donnons à son proche, pouvoir [de la venger]’ (Coran, XVII, 35/33). ‘A l'exclusion de ceux des Errants qui te suivront, tu ne disposes d'aucun pouvoir sur mes serviteurs’ (Coran XV, 42). Et encore, au sens de puissance: ‘Je n'avais sur vous aucune puissance, sauf de vous appeler et que vous me répondiez’ (Coran, XIV, 26/22).

The last three messianic claimants to appear in the Jewish diaspora appeared in Yemen in the 19th century. At this time and place the mutual influences of Jews and Muslims were notable both in messianic movements and in literary expression. Muslim society in Yemen was aware of the messianic tension among the Jews, and individual Muslims even took part in each of the known messianic movements. Conversely—and this is the subject of this article—Jewish society, at least on the popular level, was receptive to Muslim apocalyptic ideas and beliefs and integrated them into Jewish apocalyptic anticipations.

The belief in messianism and the sharing of ideas on redemption or of the golden age in the eschatological era (i.e., at the End of Time) have long been maintained by the Jews. Some of the concepts that served as paradigms for later messianic speculations were derived from the Bible. For instance, the concept of rescue—the rescue by God of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt—became the example of God's intervention to help his people and mirrored the rescue at the End of Days. Likewise, the Davidic kingdom was believed to be the fulfillment of an ancient covenant between God and the Israelites—and, therefore, the Davidic kingdom became in the history of Jewish messianism the paradigm for how the future kingdom would be, how the covenant would be fulfilled. Also, the term “messiah” (mashiah)—i.e., the anointed one—was originally the official title for the Davidic kings and the early root for the later messiah; hence, it would be a Davidic descendant who would lead the Jews into the messianic age.