The collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago engendered both hope and fear about the future of Islam in Uzbekistan (and Central Asia in general). Many Muslims from other countries hoped that, freed from the constraints of the Soviet regime, Uzbeks and other Central Asians would rediscover their religious traditions and rejoin the broader Muslim world.1 Other observers feared that Islam would emerge as a political force and threaten the security of the region.2 As the decade progressed and militant Islamist organizations appeared, fear tended to overshadow hope. The events of autumn 2001 in Afghanistan, when fighters belonging to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) played a prominent role alongside the Taliban, seemed to vindicate the darkest fears,3 and to justify the unremitting campaign that the regime of President Islom Karimov has waged against “religious extremism” since 1998.

Recent Palestinian Authority (PA) initiatives to help Palestine adapt to climate change help shine light on the role that climate uncertainties play in how political futures can be represented. UN-led adaptation has occasioned opportunities for new networks of actors to make claims about Palestinian futures and to perform PA readiness for statehood. These actors weigh scientific uncertainties about climate against uncertainties over if and when settler colonialism in Palestine will end. How they do so matters because it is the foundation of requests for capital that could be translated into some of the most important institutions and infrastructures of Palestinian governance over the next several years, including those that provide Palestinians with access to water. It also matters because it constitutes the image with which PA officials represent what needs to be “fixed” in Palestine in important international forums such as the UN. Climate change adaptation is a new approach to the management of uncertain environmental futures. This analysis offers insight into how this approach shapes and is shaped by practices of statecraft in places marked by the volatilities of war, economic crisis, and occupation.

Orthodox theories of crime in the Third World and in regions of uneven economic development offer a unilinear explanation of the relationship between economic development and increased crime rates. Simply stated, this Durkheimian position views the transition from traditional to modern society as being associated with the weakening of mechanical forms of solidarity and the emergence of secular and impersonal role structures based on a complex division of labor. Universalistic and achievement criteria replace ascriptive and particularistic values, and deviance-derived social control models based on formalized coercive sanctions substitute for traditional and community-based forms of control. Anomic behavior, frustration of expectations, and norm violation are considered an expected, if transitory, outcome of social change, and are explained on the basis of a clash between modern and traditional value systems.

Historians, among others, expose the lies and deceptions of politicians, dead and alive. But historians themselves often are deceived by the limitations of their own approaches to history. While they themselves may act emotionally or sometimes irrationally in their personal lives, they are too often committed to seek rational explanations for the behavior of statesmen. Grossly understimates in many instancees is the power of retionalization as a factor in the ‘decisionmaking process.’ Often great decisions have been made on the basis of inadequate or false information, with consequences that the decision-makers could not foresee. Sometimes decisions are the result of muddleheadedness. Sometimes a governmental decision seems to be the product of a succession of miscalculations. But it is the natural impulse of those in positions of authority to justify their decisions by some explanations that relate to their zeal for the ‘national interest.’ In so doing they do not necessarily deliberately lie; often they deceive themselves as well as others. Reasons developed after the fact provide a cerebral gloss for unintellingent decisions leading to unintended actions. The background for the occupation of Egypt in 1882 provides an illustration.

By order of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) a new school was opened in Istanbul in October 1892 to provide an Ottoman education for the sons of leading tribal notables. The Aşiret Mekteb-i Hümayun, or Imperial School for Tribes, was a five-year boarding school that admitted boys between twelve and sixteen years old. The school has been rightly interpreted as part of a broader policy pursued by Abdülhamid II of integrating the Arab provinces more closely to the Imperial center. However, the school, which reached beyond the Arab provinces to recruit eastern Anatolian Kurds, was essentially an experiment in social engineering which sought to foster an allegiance to the Ottoman state within one of the most alienated segments of its society: the empire's tribes. On the precedent of urban notables whose sons were educated in Istanbul, obtained government offices, and became Ottoman loyalists, Abdülhamid II and his advisers aimed to create a similar body of intermediaries between the state and its tribes. The experiment ran for fifteen years before the Aşiret Mektebi was closed in 1907; yet in that time the school sent waves of graduates on to higher education in special sections of the civil and military academies and thence to government office in the provinces. In all, the tribal education system represents one of the more ambitious Ottoman initiatives to integrate its tribal communities into the political life of the state.

Of all man's cultural badges, that of language is perhaps the most intimately felt and tenaciously defended. Even chauvinists who are prepared to concede under pressure that language, race, and culture are not the same thing—that their national ethnicity may be mixed, their religion imported, their culture synthetic to a degree—will still cling to the national language as the last bastion of irrational totemic pride. Hence, one of the most controversial features of the programs of westernization and modernization fostered by Kemal Atatürk in Turkey and Reza Shah in Iran was that of state-sponsored language reform, characterized chiefly by attempts to “purify” Turkish and Persian of their centuries-old accretion of Arabic loanwords. A case study of this process also affords some insight into the differing attitudes to national social reforms in Turkey and in Iran, and among the respective regimes, intelligentsia, and masses, which might help to explain why on balance one “succeeded” while the other “failed.”

The historiography of the past two decades of the demographic history of 16th- and 17th-century Ottoman Anatolia has seen diverse and often conflicting arguments among historians. Whether the Ottoman Empire witnessed “population pressure” in the 16th century, and whether this was followed in the 17th century by a serious “demographic crisis,” considered by some historians as a “catastrophe,” have constituted the central theme of the debate. The roots of these issues can be traced as far back as the early works of Ömer Lütfi Barkan in the 1940s and 1950s. It appears that the disagreements not only arose as a result of the different models of historical demography developed by diverse schools of thought, but that they also owed much to the highly disputed nature of the sources that provide the bulk of quantitative data for the demographic history of the Ottoman Empire.

In the decade and a half since economic liberalization began in Jordan, a little noticed but large-scale organizing trend has taken over the formal provision of social welfare, redefining the institutional conception of familial identity in the process. For over one third of the population, kin solidarities have been reorganized, formalized, and registered as nongovernmental organizations in an attempt to cope with the removal of basic social provisioning by the state. Although kinship clearly has been a major element in Jordan's history, the present phenomena alter traditional familial institutions, change kin lineages, and institutionalize the economic salience of family relations. In turn, the relationship of the populace to the state has changed, marginalizing previously regime-supporting groups and facilitating the implementation of economic neoliberalism without significant protest. Repackaged as charitable elements of civil society, these family associations are sanctioned and encouraged by the state and international community. Although they are not regime creations, family associations reinforce the Jordanian regime's efforts at political deliberalization. The new elites who head the organizations have been placated through indirect incorporation into the regime; they now wield significant economic power over fellow kin and have enhanced social status backed by the new group. Furthermore, the trend mainly consists of families without immediate ambitions of entering national politics. These are not the traditional elite families.

In the Middle East over the past half-century, three religious processes have grown together. One, the growth of fundamentalism, has received worldwide attention both by academics and journalists. The others, the bureaucratization of religion and the state co-optation of religion, of equal duration but no less importance, have received much less attention. The bureaucratization of religion focuses on the hierarchicalization of religious specialists and state co-optation of religion focuses on their neutralization as political opponents. Few commentators link the three processes. In Jordan, fundamentalism, the bureaucratization of religion (BOR), and state co-optation of religion (SCR) have become entwined sometimes in mutually supportive and sometimes in antagonistic relations. The following case study will describe and analyze the implications of this mutual entanglement for the relations of state and civil society and for the human beings simultaneously bureaucratized and “fundamentalized.”

The income inequality gap in prerevolutionary Iran was no doubt a contributing factor to the mass mobilization of Iranians in the 1979 Revolution. The Resolution of the Ashura March (December 11, 1978) demanded the establishment of “social justice, the right of workers and peasants to the full benefit from the product of their labor” and an end to “any form of discrimination, exploitation, profiteering and economic domination which may result in the accumulation of great wealth, on the one hand, and deprivation and poverty on the other.”

The 1876 constitution and its reinstitution in 1908 have been acknowledged as landmarks in the historiography of the late Ottoman Empire. The promulgation of a constitution signified a critical political transformation despite the brevity of the First Constitutional Period (1876–78). During the next three decades of Sultan Abdülhamid's autocratic rule, the ultimately successful struggle to restore the constitution against the Sultan's relentless resistance became central to the political life of the empire. In 1908, the Young Turk Revolution inaugurated a decade of social and political change, the Second Constitutional Period.

The European industrial revolution adversely affected the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century and was instrumental in its final collapse. The eastward flow of European goods grew rapidly in the years following the end of the Napoleonic era in 1815, and Ottoman lands soon became important markets for many European manufacturers. Their wares increasingly displaced traditional Ottoman products, made Ottoman handicraftsmen jobless, reduced Ottoman internal sources of taxes, and so contributed to eventual European control of Ottoman finances. These phenomena are well known and have received appropriate recognition as symptoms of an economic invasion that was aided by the diplomacy of West European consuls and ambassadors, and sanctified by largely unquestioned European arguments in favor of laissez-faire.

Traditionally renowned for their dislike of settling outside their own country, the Egyptians started to become active emigrants in the early sixties. In noting this fact we do not, of course, mean to imply that Egyptian emigration has never taken place. There are reports that quite a few peasants emigrated from Egypt to the Levant to escape from Muhammad 'Ali's tyranny in the nineteenth century, while more recently, several thousand Egyptians emigrated around the period of the First World War to Iraq, Turkey, Greece, and France.

One of the basic characteristics of the social conditions that marked political life in the Arab states in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was the complex relationship between the politicians from among the elites of traditional notables of the Fertile Crescent cities and the effendiyya, or Westernized middle stratum. These elites consisted not only of traditional notable families, but also of families newly risen since the Tanzimat reforms in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire. Since the end of World War I, these elites had stood at the center of the new states established by the Western powers—Great Britain and France—and it was now the politicians from within those elites who headed the struggle of those states for independence. This relationship, as well as the character of the elite of notables and the effendiyya, constituted an important element in the social conditions characterizing the political and ideological environment in which the Iraqi politicians from the elite of notables had operated, and in which Arab nationalism and Pan-Arab ideology became a highly influential factor.

An amusing and indicative sign of changing times, in December 2014 Saudi cleric Ahmad ʿAziz al-Ghamdi, a religious scholar and former head of the religious police in Mecca (officially known as the Committee for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice), ignited a fierce national debate regarding the niqab when he replied positively to a tweet by a Saudi woman asking if it was permissible in Islam for her to post a picture of her face on social media. His affirmative answer went viral and his Twitter feed received more than 10,000 comments, ranging from congratulations to death threats. He subsequently appeared on Badriya, the popular weekly TV talk show broadcast from Dubai, together with his wife, Jawahir bint Shaykh ʿAli, who appeared without a face veil and wearing make-up.

Islamic political philosophy has always been pursued in a setting where great care had to be taken to avoid violating the revelations and traditions accepted by the Islamic community, since these offer guide-lines for the secular conduct of that community, as well as injunctions about the manner in which its religious life should be conducted. Political philosophy is the search for a thorough understanding of the good or the best political regime. Thus, a Muslim political philosopher must temper his conclusions about the character of the good or the best political regime with what the Islamic community holds to be appropriate for Muslims. This statement of what a Muslim political philosopher does immediately gives rise to two questions: (i) Can a Muslim political philosopher ever really engage in philosophy? (2) If he can, is it not at the expense of Islamic precepts?

One of the main obstacles to the development of Iran's foreign trade over the centuries has been the location of its fertile northern provinces, which are shut off from the world's open seas by vast deserts and huge mountain chains. Since these provinces produced the country's most valuable export—silk—and since, after the transfer of the capital to Tehran, they included its largest consuming centers, trade had to be conducted over long caravan routes. In the seventeenth century, much silk was shipped through the Persian Gulf ports, but with the end of the Turco-Persian wars the bulk of Iran's westward trade passed across the Ottoman Empire—through Baghdad, and thence to either the Persian Gulf or the Mediterranean, or through Erzurum (Erzerum), and thence to Istanbul (Constantinople), Izmir (Smyrna) or Aleppo. However, all these routes were long, insecure, and expensive.

So writers the British administrator Harold Ingrams about the chewing of leaves from the qāt tree in Yemen. Qāt is the Arabic term for Catha edulis, a species of the Celastracae cultivated in the highlands of southwestern Arabia for at least the last six centuries. The leaves of this tree are chewed as a stimulant, producing a feeling of euphoria followed by depression.

The rise and spread of Islamist political movements have been topics of focal concern for scholars and analysts in recent decades. Since Richard Mitchell's seminal work on the Muslim Brotherhood, a plethora of writers have analyzed the attributes of both Sunni and Shiʿa revivalist movements and the policies of Arab regimes and the West toward the Islamist phenomenon. Yet scant attention has been paid to the reactions generated within the larger Islamic community toward the Islamist groups and their militant offshoots. One such unnoticed source of reaction to political Islamism is the nebulous confraternity of Sufi orders (ṭuruq) whose mysticism and esoteric beliefs and practices have set them apart from the exoteric revivalism and political activism of the Islamist societies, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its many affiliates.

At the end of the 1950s Khi¯lid Muhammad Khālid, whose importance for the history of modern Islamic thought and sentiment can hardly be overestimated, propagated the rather preposterous thesis that the terms “tyrant” (derived from Greek lyrannos) and “Türān,” the customary (Persian) word used for the homeland of the Turks, were etymologically and, as a corollary, also semantically akin. What was so irritating about this anti-Turkish libel was not so much its insipidity as the reaction or, more to the point, absence of a reaction to such and similar statements in the Arab public. The lonely voices of historians such as Salālh al-Dīn al-Munajjid and Abdallah Laroui, who from very different ideological vantage points chided their Arab audience in the late 1960s for foolishly blaming all their troubles on the Turks, remained unheeded for a very long time.