In Failing the Crystal Ball Test, Ofira Seliktar, a political scientist at Gratz College, seeks to account for the “policy and intelligence debacle” (p. x) associated with the pre-eminent crisis of the Carter years. It is her hope that by understanding what went wrong with policy toward Iran, future policy-makers will be able to reduce the risk of similar disasters elsewhere in the relatively unstable conditions of the post-Cold War world. To achieve her objective, she focuses on the three-year period from the beginning of 1977 to the seizure of the United States embassy in November 1979. Seliktar, whose previous work has centered on Israel, bases her study on the multi-volume series of American documents seized at the embassy and published in Iran during the 1980s. These materials cluster around the last several years of U.S.–Iranian relations prior to the takeover of the compound. In addition, she has relied on an extensive list of secondary works in English.

The study of non-Muslims in Islamic societies has long been a robust subfield in the historiography of the medieval Middle East. But its literature has blind spots, a significant example of which concerns slavery as a constitutive institution of non-Muslim communities. Much recent scholarship on medieval non-Muslims has tended to privilege religious affiliation as an explanatory category of social experience, leaving other legal statuses and modes of identification—especially slavery—underanalyzed. This piece will survey this historiographical hole. It will then offer a brief analysis of some Abbasid-era Syriac Christian material in which slavery figures prominently, concubines and concubinage in particular. My goal is to provide an example of how attending to the place of slavery in non-Muslim communities facilitates a much-needed historiographical shift of focus from reified religious identities to the social practices, institutions, and hierarchies upon which those communities were built.

The camp and the city are both important for understanding the relationship between space and identity in the refugee experience of exile. In the Palestinian example, the camp has emerged as a potent symbol in the narrative of exile although only a third of refugees registered with UNRWA live in camps. Moreover, the city and urban refugees remain missing in most of the scholarship on the Palestinian experience with space, exile, and identity. Furthermore, there is little attention to how refugees understand the concept of the city and camp in their daily life. This article examines how Palestinian urban refugees in the Old City of Damascus conceptualized the relationship between the camp and the city. It illustrates how the concept of the camp remained necessary for the construction of their collective national identity while in Syria. However, the city was essential in the articulation of individual desires and establishing social distinction from other refugees. Thus, during a protracted exile it is in the interstice between the city and the camp, where most urban refugees in the Old City situated themselves, that informed their national belonging and personal aspirations.

Scholars often acknowledge reproductive behavior as a core issue in Israeli politics but they seldom examine how public policies affect family size. Israel has designed no official government fertility program, but the country's leaders are nevertheless obsessed with Jewish natality. Israeli women are bombarded with regulations affecting access to contraceptives and abortion procedures and with all sorts of unsubtle massages about the importance of mothering as a factor in the state's continuing vitality and fulfilling its national purpose. Jacqueline Portugese explains Israel's ongoing efforts to encourage a high Jewish birthrate by focusing a feminist lens on public discourse, popular culture, and particular policies, all of which, she argues, have a highly pernicious impact on women. Despite the differences in feminist perspectives on the issue of fertility, they share a critical stance toward state regulation of the family, and all aid Portugese's narrative in uncovering and explaining the large repertoire of relatively intrusive regulatory mechanisms at the disposal of the government. The special insight of Fertility in Israel lies in its clarifications of the connections between seemingly benign welfare benefits and tax incentives and denying women autonomy with regard to the decision to bear children.

“The wife: I bet your friends envy you your domestic happiness!” Reprinted with permission of Mohammed Elchamaa.

This cartoon comes from a 1948 edition of the Egyptian periodical Akhir Saʿa. I happened across it in Cairo, as part of some exploratory research into the fate of the female image of the Egyptian nation-state that was so central to the 1919 revolution. In previous inquiries, I had noticed that “lady Egypt” or “mother Egypt” or “Egypt as a woman,” to use historian Beth Baron's expression, lost pride of place in popular periodicals as 1919 gave way to nominal independence and nation building. By the late 1920s, cartoon and caricature space was more frequently dedicated to men engaged in laying the foundations of new political, legal, and educational systems, as well as erecting the buildings that would house them. Throughout the 1930s, political caricatures also frequently lampooned prominent Egyptian men for their behavior in the institutions that they had been active in creating. In the popular press, the reified female figure of the Egyptian nation was all but usurped by the men who built the state (and who seemed determined to keep Egyptian women out of the body politic).

The Soviet Union's collapse and the end of the Cold War have been accompanied by a declining interest in Marxian-inspired theories of political economy in the study of core–periphery relations. Concepts such as dependency and imperialism have been replaced by market forces and structural adjustment. Similarly, post-modernism's impact has been to erode interest in historical theories, especially those with a teleological bent. Thus, Robert Tignor's study, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire, is refreshing in raising issues that have not been central to the recent intellectual agenda in the study of non-Western societies.

Over the past decade, there have been increasing numbers of displaced scholars from the Middle East and Africa who have come under sustained pressures and threats from their governments; only a few of them have been able to relocate to European and North American academia through scholarships and grants.1 Even these temporary solutions for displaced scholars rarely result in sustainable institutional solidarity in the form of permanent teaching or professorial positions. The lack of institutional support, coupled with discriminatory and racialized immigration policies, pushes these few fortunate scholars to either accept exploitative conditions perpetuated by the neoliberal economy or leave academia altogether to support their families. These challenges, along with draconian economic sanctions and restrictions imposed by the US Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on citizens of countries such as Syria, Sudan, Iran, and Cuba are only a snapshot of what displaced scholars endure on a daily basis while trying to do research, care for their families, and compete with scholars with privileged citizenship status for shrinking opportunities in the academic job market.

The dislocations associated with modernity have driven scholarly, literary, and philosophical inquiries in various directions since the 19th century: Marx's materialist critique, Ranke's historical empiricism, Baudelaire's flâneur, Simmel's studies of urban anomie and alienation, Durkheim and Weber's sociology, and so on into the 20th and 21st centuries, and now reflected in this issue of IJMES on queer studies. Although there are vast differences among them, they share a compulsion to explain what appeared as massive reconfigurations of time and space. The proliferation of subjective possibilities was pegged to an acceleration of the former and compression of the latter; accordingly, on our radar appear the bourgeois, middle class, and worker in the long 19th century and gay, lesbian, and transgender in the late 20th, two moments of rapid globalization and subject proliferation. We are to believe that in the fullness of time all will be free and all will be good. However, in the here and now some must be unfree and some bad. The modern distinction between free and unfree, good and bad, subjects relies heavily on uninterrogated assumptions about the spatial origins, temporality, and trajectory of modernity.

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was one of the most renowned Arab Muslim scholars of the last two decades. The main focal points of the scholarly work that established his brilliant reputation worldwide were a valiant hermeneutical approach to the Qurʾan, a radical critique of the highly politicized religious discourse in Egypt and other Arab countries, and a penetrating view of Islamic culture.

In English the terms “political system” and “political regime” are used to distinguish different constructs. The first was initially developed by behavioralists such as David Easton and Gabriel Almond to replace the older, institutionalist term, the “state”; the second typically designates the arrangements for producing a government. In Arabic, though, the words “system” and “regime” both translate as niẓām. This piece argues that when millions of citizens across the Arab region came out in 2011 chanting al-shaʿb yurīd isqāṭ al-niẓām, those chants marked a critical juncture in a long process reflecting the end of not just the existing regimes, but also the states as we knew them. Whether defined in terms of governing institutions and capabilities, as Lisa Anderson, Ellen Lust, and Ariel Ahram do, or in terms of discourse, imagination, and symbolic power, as Ellis Goldberg and Charles Tripp do, the state was withering away long before the uprising. Concomitantly, the heightened levels of repression and shifts within official discourse by the changing ruling elite after the uprisings signal a perceived threat to the state itself, and not just to a particular regime. And while this piece focuses on Egypt, unlike some of the other contributions in this collection, I argue that the nation-state, as a conceptual and material construct, is being challenged.

In the past two decades, the rate of growth of agricultural output in Egypt has been quite low and, in particular, has fallen behind the country's population growth rate. Most observers seem to agree that despite certain natural constraints, such as limitation of arable land, the sector's performance could have been much better if the Egyptian government had chosen to pursue more supportive policies toward agriculture. There is, however, much less agreement over the specific policies that have been most responsible for the sector's past stagnation. Several recent studies have emphasized the role of price policies, pointing out that the government has taxed agriculture heavily by keeping the relative prices of most major crops quite low. Others, on the other hand, have held the government's investment policies responsible, arguing that the sector's resources have remained undeveloped because of insufficient public investment in research, extension, and infrastructure. While the debate over the relative importance of these sets of policies has generated a number of valuable contributions to the understanding of Egyptian agriculture, the past analyses of the sector's production system have not sufficed to settle the differences. One of the main problems is that, so far, most studies have concentrated on outputs and prices of individual crops and have thus failed to provide comprehensive analyses of the sector as a whole.

Only the introductory portion of the History written by the Armenian Mxit'ar of Ani has come down to us. However, an extensive passage on the Ghaznavids and Seljuks from the lost part of the work is quoted in the Universal History composed c. 1268 by Vardan Vardapet3. The content and the sources used for the compilation of this much-neglected narrative is the subject of this study.