In Mount Lebanon, 1860 and the years immediately preceding it witnessed the turbulence of social and economic change. These were years of sporadic civil disorder culminating in a paroxysm of religious strife. These events and their antecedents have elicited enlightening studies from social scientists and historians.2 By comparison, the years immediately following 1860 were less disturbed, and might initially even appear less interesting. Under closer scrutiny, however, they provide revealing and instructive insights into the mechanics of change and the continuing history of the social and political formation of the specifically sectarian policy that is the core of the Lebanese fact.

The purpose of this article is to present to a wide public the documents relating to the construction of Süleymaniye published by the late ömer Lutfi Barkan and his team of collaborators in Süleymaniye Camii ve Inşaati, Vols. I, II (Ankara 1972, 1979). They strikingly illustrate the ability of the Ottoman central administration to co-ordinate complex operations minutely from a distance; and nothing of such detail exists for any monument of Istanbul before the early seventeenth century, or for any other building in the Islamic world.

Some topics have already been considered in detail by Barkan, which explains the present choice of the sections of the accounts relating to furnishing and decorating Süleymaniye. They offer a mass of material of considerable intrinsic interest and of considerable value for the history of the luxury trades, both domestic and foreign, in sixteenth-century Ottoman Turkey. But simple translation is not enough: there are too many variant or dubious readings; the technical vocabulary is often recondite and the senses of certain terms must be a matter for conjecture; and the identification or designation of many of the materials is problematic.

None of the editions of Hajji Baba of Isfahan nor the monographs and articles on its author, James Morier, that have come to my attention so far has made any comments on the introduction to this book. This introduction is couched in the form of a letter to the Reverend Doctor Fundgruben, Chaplain to the Swedish Embassy at the Ottoman Porte, and is dated London, 1st December, 1823. Doctor Fundgruben is characterized as being preoccupied with “hieroglyphic lore” and as the author of the book The Biography of Celebrated Mummies.

Israeli political, economic, and social achievements have apparently made Israel a developed nation. Social scientists customarily ignore its geographic setting in the developing world and study the country as a phenomenon of political, social and economic development. One aspect, however, is still problematic and controversial. This is the administrative. Israelis doubt the extent to which their governmental administration is developed, by which they mean the extent to which their administration is staffed by trained officials appointed on grounds of merit. While the forms of a modern government service exist, Israelis are skeptical of their substance, because of what they suspect to be widespread instances of inattention to the rules for appointment and promotion to civil service positions. Social scientists seem to have accepted the conventional wisdom of Israeli public opinion and they, too, have judged the Israeli civil service to be embryonic or stunted in development, largely because of political interference in appointments and advancement to senior positions. It is true that in every country the issue of which governmental offices should be political and which administrative is a problem. But this problem is exacerbated in Israel where, because of party politics, it is, ostensibly, one resolution which exists in law and another in fact.

The field of education, its various components and means of putting it into effect, have not received the attention of those who have studied the history of Arabic thought. It has been only recently that Arab education has received the attention of scholars. But thus far, research has been limited mostly to histories of educational institutions and to certain fragmentary aspects of education. Theories of education, or of areas within the field of education, have not been examined.

Trade, mobility, and the sea—as concepts and practices—have, in the last several years, been the focus of superb and fascinating scholarly work. This essay explores some of the themes and arguments linking, and dividing, a body of work that has reinvigorated and shifted conversations about the Middle East toward a recognition of the significance of the Arabian Peninsula and Indian Ocean for our understanding of colonial and economic history. As with any review, this one cannot be comprehensive; these texts are far too rich for these limited pages. Nevertheless, I aim to trace some of the main lines of inquiry of each monograph as well as to note some of the overlaps of and differences between their arguments and approaches.

At the dawn of the 21st century the “War on Terror” ushered in an era in which some were besieged by wars and others by war-related imagery. For the fortunate who live outside of war zones, mostly in the Global North and West, the experience of war has been primarily a mediated one. With the advent of digital imagery and its many evolving and developing technological transmutations, the possibilities of reproduction, representation, manipulation, and circulation have grown exponentially in the past twenty years. Yet in the grand scheme of human communication history, the “pictorial turn” is a relatively recent phenomenon that requires further analysis. In this article, I unpack and analyze some of the key media moments from the vast visual lexicon and iconography of the “War on Terror” to reveal its scaffolding and machinations and offer counterstrategies of resistance. I argue that the “War on Terror” is the orchestrated sum of literal and figurative imagery, a coordinated public relations disinformation media campaign designed to hide real wars and their true destruction and costs.

With the reinstatement of the parliament in 1908, the Ottoman state faced new challenges connected to citizenship. As a policy to finally make citizens equal in rights as well as duties, military conscription figured prominently in this new context. For the first time in Ottoman history, the empire's non-Muslims began to be drafted en masse. This article explores meanings of imperial citizenship and equality through the lens of debates over the conscription of Greek Ottomans, the largest non-Muslim population of the Ottoman Empire. In contrast to the widespread suggestion of the Turkish nationalist historiography on these matters, Greek Ottomans and other non-Muslim populations enthusiastically supported the military service in principle. But amidst this general agreement was a tremendous array of views on what conscription ought to look like in practice. The issue came to center on whether Greek Ottomans should have separate battalions in the army. All units would eventually come to be religiously integrated, but the conscription debates in the Ottoman parliament as well as in the Turkish and Greek language press reveal some of the crucial fissures of an empire as various actors were attempting to navigate between a unified citizenship and a diverse population.

Do purple designer kufiyas spell the end of Palestine solidarity?

Kufiyas, especially multicolored ones, started becoming fashionable U.S. urban hipster wear around 2005. They are so trendy, in fact, that W's Meggan Crum called the restyled kufiya featured in French designer Nicholas Ghesquière's fall 2007 Balenciaga fashion line, and worn by Brazilian supermodel Flavia de Oliveira, one of “Fall 2007's Top Ten Accessories.” Meanwhile, over the last couple of years, kufiyas of all colors have been spotted on such celebrities as Mary-Kate Olsen, Kirsten Dunst, Cameron Diaz, Colin Farrell, David Beckham, Justin Timberlake, and even John McCain's daughter Meghan. In spring 2007, Urban Outfitters marketed the kufiya, in several colors, as an “anti-war woven scarf” until protests prompted the cancellation of the line—but not the sale of the item. It is available in the winter 2008 catalog, described now as a “houndstooth scarf.”

If historians of the Middle East have turned their attention to the environment rather later than those in other subfields, a recent crop of books indicates that a new generation of scholars has spent much productive time considering environmental histories of other geographies. The books reviewed in this essay stand out for their insistence on examining Middle Eastern environments as both ecological facts and representational spaces. Taken in concert, they indicate the vibrancy of environmental history in the field. Moreover, their careful attention to methodology and creative use of sources opens up spaces for new investigations of politics, culture, and religion as mediated through environmental management and representation. Following on the recent work of Diana K. Davis, Edmund Burke III, and others, these historians have marshaled environmental, climatological, epidemiological, biological, and geological data for historical argument. Thus, the resulting works situate themselves deeply within their respective historiographic narratives, yet also interrupt, redelineate, and unsettle those narrative assumptions. At its best, the so-called “environmental turn” in the history of the Middle East represents not an intellectual fashion, but rather a major methodological shift that involves a reframing of our understanding of the formation of the field.

This article explores the social impact of North African soldiers’ experiences in French military hospitals during World War I. In particular, it examines improvised “Muslim hospitals” that were opened in order to isolate North Africans from French civilian society. Colonial and military officials believed that North Africans, presumed to be warlike, pathogenic, and promiscuous, could corrupt and be corrupted by the French public. Yet while existing literature tends to highlight the dehumanization of North Africans at the hands of military and medical authorities, this article, drawing from personal correspondence, photographs, and military and medical records, reveals a more ambiguous daily reality. I argue that the individual needs and desires of wounded North Africans and of French nurses, as well as material limitations and contingencies, created spaces for an unprecedented series of humanizing personal encounters. In military-medical “colonies within the metropole,” these soldiers found themselves caught between a newfound sense of affinity with the French public and a starker sense of the boundaries of colonial practice.

Like other area studies, Middle East studies has an interdisciplinary scope, which enriches scholarly debates on Islamist movements, groups, and actors. However, while Middle East studies brings scholars from a wide range of academic backgrounds together, it is still predominantly represented by two major disciplines: political science and history. Relatively less attention is paid to what other disciplines, particularly geography, sociology, and the humanities, contribute to the understanding and theorization of Islamist movements.

The study of human rights has gone through many phases, and the boom in the scholarly industry of human rights studies has yielded many subspecialties, including human rights in particular regions and the intersections of human rights with different religious traditions. One principal area of discussion likely to be of interest to readers of this journal has been the question of Muslim women's human rights and the role of religion in this respect. The problem was often presented as primarily an ideological one, a conflict between a local tradition, Islam, and the global demands for human rights.

Abu ʿUbayda (d. 825) was a mawlā (client) of Jewish descent who wrote prolifically about history, religion, and culture. As such, he exemplifies the well-known feature of early Islamic learning that is the Abbasid-era mawlā scholar. His grandfather was a freeborn convert, rather than the more common manumitted slave, and it happens that the grandfather's patron—his sponsor, as it were, for admission into Islamic society—was a slave trader named ʿUbayd Allah b. Maʿmar (d. ca. 665). And ʿUbayd Allah b. Maʿmar, on a conservative estimate, had purchased hundreds of slaves from ʿUmar b. al-Khattab, the caliph who, before his assassination by a slave, had presided over the explosive early phases of the Islamic conquests.

With the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of British rule in Palestine, the nascent Zionist labor movement, shortly to become the backbone of the Zionist undertaking in Palestine, found itself confronted by a series of fundamental questions. The purpose of this paper is to show that there was never a consensus within the Zionist labor movement; that the leadership was divided on vital issues; that Israel's leader, David Ben-Gurion, represented only one approach within labor Zionism, and that even after his approach had prevailed, following drawn-out disputes, and he had risen to a position of commanding authority, his policies continued to be challenged by successive leaders during the decades preceding and following the establishment of the State of Israel.

The tadhkira (biographical anthology) represents one of the most prolific and prevalent categories of texts produced in Islamicate societies, yet few studies have sought to understand the larger processes that governed their production and circulation on a transregional basis. This article examines and maps the production, circulation, and citation networks of tadhkiras of Persian poets in the 18th and 19th centuries. It understands tadhkiras of Persian poets as a transregional library that served as a repository of accessible and circulating texts meant to be incorporated, reworked, and repackaged by a cadre of authors separated by space and time. By relying on a macroanalytical approach, quantifiable data, and digital mapping, this article highlights the overall construction of the transregional library itself, the impact of state disintegration and formation on its constitution, and the different ways authors on opposite ends of the Persianate world came to view this library by the end of the 19th century.

After his premature death in exile in Beirut in 1937, the body of former Iraqi prime minister Yasin al-Hashimi became a matter of contention between the Syrian and Iraqi governments, as did his legacy as an avid Pan-Arabist. When the coffin with the deceased stopped in Damascus on its promised transfer to Baghdad, the Syrian National Bloc government used the opportunity to stage a solemn republican funeral to bolster its Arab nationalist credentials. Syrian conflicts with the Iraqi government that had removed al-Hashimi in a military coup in the previous year ultimately made Yasin's return impossible, however, and he was buried in Damascus, next to Saladin's mausoleum at the Umayyad Mosque. Unfortunately for the National Bloc, the funeral coincided with the first clashes over the Alexandretta crisis. The resulting street protests destroyed all public confidence that the bloc had gained during the funeral, underlining the volatile nature of nationalist politics at the time.