For a generation of scholars aware of the informal ways in which power is acquired and built up in the Middle East, yet dissatisfied with Western “institutional” approaches, Albert Hourani's insightful essay on the politics of notables has had a profound impact. Describing a form of politics that existed in the urban centers of the Ottoman empire, Hourani distinguishes between two political roles: that of governing, which belonged to the Ottoman authorities; and that of directing and mobilizing local opinion, which lay in the hands of certain urban grandees. grandees. These two kinds of power were interrelated. The grandees became truly influential only by having connections with the Ottoman authorities, who in turn needed them because of the social influence they possessed. When Ottoman power became weakened, or during interregnums, these notables came forward to form coalitions that were used to lead revolts and occasionally displace the ruling authority altogether. A politics of notables, therefore, exists when men possessing an independent source of power and access to the ruler are able to attain a measure of free action and so shape political activity.

A survey of the contributions of political science to the understanding of the Middle East and of Middle East studies to the development of political science shows that one of the most fruitful areas of cross-fertilization is in elite studies.1 It might be interesting to speculate on the reasons behind this: Are politics and society in the Mideast especially elitist, or is it simply an accident of research that one scholar who stumbled on a mine of elite data inspired his students to pursue similar types of analysis?2 Whatever the reason may be, another characteristic of Mideast elite studies that stands out is their single- polity focus. If some of the elite studies of the Muslim East have developed a diachronic dimension, none has undertaken multinational comparison.

The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) was founded in 1602 and began its trading activities in Iran and the Gulf in 1623, when factories (trading stations) were established in Bandar Abbas and Isfahan, after a favorable commercial treaty had been concluded with Shah Abbas I. This was the beginning of a very profitable trade for the VOC, which throughout the 17th and in the beginning of the 18th century was Iran's most important foreign trading partner. VOC activities in Iran were not restricted to Bandar Abbas and Isfahan: the VOC also had a trading station in Kirman (1697–1739) for the collection of goat's wool, and in 1738 its sphere of activities was extended to Bushire.

The forms, themes and patterns of classical Arabic poetry were laid down in the Arabian Peninsula before the advent of Islam. Indeed the oldest poem of which we have any record dates back to the period of Jâhiliyya, a derogatory term meaning ‘ignorance’ coined by the early Muslims to denote the state of religious and moral depravity of pre-Islamic Arabs. This period covers scarcely more than a century and a half (c. a.d. 500–622). Yet when the Arabs first sprang onto the stage of world history to carve an empire for themselves, they already had an extremely complex and refined poetic art. This remarkable phenomenon has baffled the student of Arabic literature and history: ‘The most striking feature in Arabic literature is its unexpectedness’ remarks Gibb, while Goitein refers to it as ‘the miracle of pre-Islamic poetry and literary language’. The Jâhili poets, though springing from primitive and illiterate nomadic tribes, were no beginners declaiming shaky lines in a mixture of dialects in prevalence at the time. These were a host of poets erupting all over northern Arabia, from Syria to Yemen and from the fringes of Iraq to the borders of Egypt, masterfully reciting highly developed qasîdas (odes) in one and the same language, betraying little of the dialects of their region. Above all, their poetry, vigorous and vivid as it was in general, was cast in the same, steel structure of a set of complex metrical schemes.

Duldul, a beloved she-mule of the Prophet Muhammad and ʿAli b. Abi Talib (d. 661), fourth caliph and Muhammad's son-in-law, was a venerated riding beast in early Islamic tradition. The article argues that Duldul reflected the transmission of political authority and became a tool of legitimation for hadith compilers and medieval Muslim writers to use, contest, and navigate an emergent Shiʿa-Sunni rift. Exploring the responsive relationship between hadith construction and the Shiʿa-Sunni polemic, the article first analyzes three literary genres—maghāzī, hadith, and sīra—to describe Duldul and her role in early Islamic history. Second, the article examines the writings of al-Jahiz (d. 868) and al-Damiri (d. 1405) to understand medieval Muslim attitudes toward Duldul and she-mules in general. By taking Duldul more seriously as a historical actor, we can gain deeper insight into the disputes over Muhammad's legacy in medieval Islam.

Although mountainous regions remained relatively isolated and almost untouched by the Ottoman rule, labor migration connected the inhabitants of these regions to the socioeconomic and political processes in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Kruševo, a highland village located in present-day North Macedonia, provides an excellent case for understanding these connections. This paper presents systematic evidence from the Ottoman archives to document and analyze the social, economic, and demographic impacts of labor migration during this period. It provides an in-depth analysis of the Ottoman population and tax records of Kruševo in the 1840s, demonstrating the occupational profiles, migration patterns, and family and neighborhood networks of village residents during this period. Based on this analysis, it argues that labor migration was key to the transformation of social, economic, and demographic relations in rural communities and to the integration of even the most remote highland villages with the modernization processes that characterized the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century.

In this article, I detail the British imperial system of human resource mobilization that recruited workers and peasants from Egypt to serve in the Egyptian Labor Corps in World War I (1914–18). By reconstructing multiple iterations of this network and analyzing the ways that workers and peasants acted within its constraints, this article provides a case study in the relationship between the Anglo-Egyptian colonial state and rural society in Egypt. Rather than seeing these as two separate, autonomous, and mutually antagonistic entities, this history of Egyptian Labor Corps recruitment demonstrates their mutual interdependence, emphasizing the dialectical relationship between state power and political subjectivity.

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.

In February 1939, the Syrian government received two documents from ʿulamaʾ protesting two decrees of the French High Commission that were intended to reform personal status law in Syria: decree 60/L.R. of 13 March 1936 and decree 146/L.R. of 18 November 1938. The first was a petition signed by Muslims from Homs to the Syrian prime minister (pictured); the second was a letter from the Damascus Association of ʿUlamaʾ to the Syrian interior minister.