“At the heart of this topic is a puzzle (lughz),” my long-term friend and interlocutor Ahmad often said. I long thought Ahmad's interest in questions of disease at the intersection of psychiatry and Islam was only intellectual until I learned about one of his cousins’ past ailments. A skillful narrator, Ahmad had colorful ways of depicting that puzzle. “Imagine,” he once told me, “a young pious woman, a college student. Suddenly, she stops praying and studying, is morose, even aggressive sometimes. She locks herself in her room when she does not wander the streets, disappearing for hours. The family is worried, and they wonder: what is the problem?” Switching the tone from evocative to analytic, Ahmad continued: “In Egypt, when it comes to symptoms like seizures, hallucinations, and sudden behavioral changes, people use one of two main diagnoses: jinn possession (mass al-jinn) or mental illness (maraḍ nafsī). The young woman is either possessed or insane.” Ahmad's appeal to the imagination worked, as I came to think of Wittgenstein's famous duck-rabbit image that can alternatively be seen as a duck or a rabbit, with the duck's beak appearing as the rabbit's ears and vice versa.

This article provides an ethnographic account of automated surveillance technologies' impact in the occupied West Bank, taking Blue Wolf—a biometric identification system deployed by the Israeli army—as a case study. Interviews with Palestinian residents of Hebron subjected to intensive surveillance, a senior Israeli general turned biometric start-up founder, and testimonies from veterans tasked with building up Blue Wolf's database provide a rare view into the uneven texture of life under algorithmic surveillance. Their narratives reveal how automated surveillance systems function as a form of state-sponsored terror. As a globalized information economy intersects with the eliminatory aims of Israeli settler colonialism in Hebron, new surveillance technologies erode Palestinian social life while allowing technocratic settlers to recast the violence of occupation as an opportunity for capital investment and growth. Attending to the texture of life under algorithmic surveillance in Hebron ultimately reorients theories of accumulation and dispossession in the digital age away from purely economistic framings. Instead, I foreground the violent political imperatives that drive innovations in surveillance, in Palestine and worldwide.

Egypt was at the center of a wave of uprisings and revolutions that swept the region between 2011 and 2013, the common denominator of which was demands for a radical democratic alternative to authoritarian regimes variously formulated around social justice and political rights. While the Middle East was a major theater of these events, with Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen sharing the headlines, the processes that informed these uprisings were also deeply global. The year 2011 was a revolutionary year, maybe the last in history, when actors differently positioned in the neoliberal social landscape mobilized in different ways, from the Occupy Movement to the London riots. The demise, or better, defeat, of these movements has reverberated profoundly around the globe, highlighting the postdemocratic nature of governance in contemporary states. One of the effects of the rise of new authoritarianism across Europe and the United States is a palpable transformation in the asymmetry between outside observer and the local observed. Researchers now face a reshaping, in some ways a leveling, of differences between “us” and “them” and the distinct temporality used to underpin this asymmetry. Nothing could illustrate this better than the fact that as I write, Egypt's president ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Sisi is enjoying a warm welcome in the White House. The narrative is no longer framed through the worn-out trope of an Arab leader aspiring to modernize his country through pledging allegiance to the leader of the Free World in exchange for aid and armaments; now the man in the White House implicitly pledges to learn from the Arab dictator. Egypt is the pioneer; the United States is the relative latecomer to the Age of New Authoritarianism.

The first twelve months following the arrival of the American Protestant missionaries to the shores of Syria, the eastern Mediterranean haven of religious dissidence, constituted the “bright spring time of the mission” as one observer put it. Soon thereafter in 1824 the ecclesiastical authorities of the Maronites, “Romanists”, and Uniat Meichites awoke to the danger threatening them and began to resent their presence. The reason for the short honeymoon is not difficult to perceive: when the missionaries took stock of the situation it soon dawned upon them that they could function in one of two ways, “either silently in the bosom of native churches to revive religion or attempt a reformation of rites and ceremonies”. They chose the second course, and the end result was both hostility to their activities and a feeble Protestant community at best, unable to survive without outside protection and support.

It is perhaps premature to spell out priorities of research in the history of Libya, since bibliographies of what has already been written have not been systematically read, nor even adequately compiled and indexed. The following observations and analyses are, of necessity, based on a cursory reading in a list—compiled by the author on the history of the Arab world and Ottoman Empire (sixteenth through nineteenth centuries)—of some 500 studies done since the 1950s by Arab scholars and historians. The fifties are taken as the period which signalled the achievement of political independence by the Arab States. I realize that individual scholars will be able to make exceptions here or ther to the observations, generalizations, and criticisms which are made in this study. The very exceptions, however, point to the dearth of modern critical scholarship on the history of Libya from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. However, the exceptions which one could point out as models for research to be done, do not in and of themselves amount to trends in research. To date, available histories of Libya are, in the main, focused on political if not outright dynastic history. The focus is usually placed on the peculiarities and the anomalies of political history rather than the primary similarities which make for comparative history. In the remainder of this paper we offer a novitiate's priorities for research under five headings.

In order to achieve socioeconomic progress in a developing society, it is important that modern technology, which is Western in genesis and has evolved over the past three centuries, be imported and applied. Modern technology requires not only the instrumentalities of technology and pure science as a body of knowledge and a dominant institution, but also a social and psycho-social structure at least compatible with, if not reinforcing of, the drive towards better technology and scientific inquiry. Developing societies, however, usually have an institutional apparatus and value system which are indifferent to, incompatible with, or hostile to, modernization. A process of modification, adaptation and reform of many social institutions and values is necessary in order for these societies to appreciably benefit from the introduction of science and technology. People and organizations must also restructure their modes of behavior in productive processes so that the full productivity of modernization can be obtained. The transfer of science and technology from modern to pre-modern societies is really a process of social change within the developing society, and not solely the physical importing of equipment and scientific-technical manpower, useful as these are in the modernization process.

Since 1957, Najîb Mahfûz has been regarded as the most outstanding author of Egyptian fiction. He has won critical acclaim and widespread popularity. Mahfûz's works deal with Egyptian society, and even his symbolic or surrealistic stories, which have universal significance, are distinctly Egyptian in their settings, conflicts and characters.

The success or failure of land reform programs in the past has been, in general, evaluated on the basis of whether agricultural output increases or decreases following their adoption and the implementation of their principal provisions. Yet this approach ignores other factors, such as the effect of prices on output, making it likely that the influence of land reform is under- or over-estimated. In this paper, we suggest that it is possible to isolate the effect of price on output from those of reform programs by using the Nerlove supply model. By applying this method to periods before and after the initiation of such programs, we can identify any change in the market responsiveness of the affected cultivators. In testing this approach, the output of major crops in Egypt, Syria and Iraq—countries which have seen major land reform efforts in the post-war era—was analyzed. Post-reform responsiveness was compared with that of earlier periods and with that of cultivators in two neighboring countries—Jordan and Lebanon—which underwent little reform.

European Orientalism of the 19th and 20th centuries has been the subject of a heated and vigorous debate ever since the publication of Edward Said's monograph. By contrast, the study of the early stages of academic and cultural Orientalism has been neglected. For the beginnings of Oriental studies in Europe one still largely relies on institutional histories and archival research, or even V. V. Barthold's 80-year-old study. The birth of academic Orientalism in the 17th century was occasioned by three major factors: a renewed interest in Islam, major advances in travel and exploration, and the emergence of modern approaches to science and education. Among important background developments were the decline of the perceived Arab threat followed by the rise of a very real Ottoman Turkish one, the geographical shift in hostilities from the European West to the East, and the realignment of European alliances and attitudes in the wake of the Protestant Reformation.

I thank Professor Nikki R. Keddie for her constructive critique and am using this opportunity to clarify a few points. First, let me reiterate that I do not consider statist approaches to be “wrong,” but “one-sided,” and that I am not calling for their disposal but for “trying out new sources and perspectives then fusing them with state-centered perspectives into a broader panorama of Pahlavi Iran” (pp. 38–39). I see neither “sins” nor “an ongoing struggle between ‘statists’ and ‘antistatists.’” Such language would undercut a productive debate now and disregard the fact that in the long run—as some excesses of the cultural turn in the 1980s and many historians' subsequent search for new historiographic syntheses demonstrate—the pendulum always swings back.

This article analyzes the restoration of Jordan's UN Dana Biosphere Reserve cottages for ecotourism and home building in the neighboring village of Qadisiyya as competing land projects. Whereas a multimillion-dollar endowment from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) restores Dana's houses as a “heritage” village for a tourist economy, families in Qadisiyya build houses with income from provisional labor to shore up a familial future. Each act of home building articulates a political claim to land. This article argues for attention to the architecture of the environment in the comparison of two, once-related villages. A comparative analysis of Dana and Qadisiyya reveals the competing socio-political objectives of home building for the future of Jordan and the implications of environment in that struggle.

Asma Barlas's objective in this book is to uncover the essentially egalitarian message of the Qurءan by defining the best methodology for reading the Qurءan and by applying this methodology to better understand its message concerning the ontological and social status of women. In Part I, she draws on the work of previous scholars to fashion a critique of interpretations that conflate the Qurءan with secondary texts such as a hadith and tafsīr, texts she views as instrumental in the incorporation of misogynist beliefs and customs into Islam. She calls for a reaffirmation of the primacy of the Qurءanic text but read in a new way—holistically and as a historically situated text. A Muslim who does not question the divine origin of the Qurءan, Barlas insists on the individual responsibility of its readers correctly to uncover its meanings through the use of their intellects, using the tool of ijtihād rather than the blind acceptance of traditional interpretations.

The year 1929 was a particularly disruptive period for the city of Kabul (perhaps the only comparable time was when the mujahedin fought over it in the 1990s). In January of that year, under pressure from a band of Tajik rebels who entered Kabul almost unopposed, the ruler of Afghanistan, Amir Aman Allah, abdicated his throne and fled the capital. The man who occupied his office was a former soldier-turned-highwayman from the village of Kalakân some twenty miles north of Kabul. He was named Habib Allah (and is so called throughout the work under review), but he is better remembered by the epithet “Bacha-i Saqqaw,” or “Water Carrier's Son,” his father having once served in that role for the military. A Tajik, he was the first non-Pushtun to occupy the throne since the birth of Afghanistan in the 18th century. He would hold it for only nine months.

Forced migration has come to be the defining feature of the contemporary Middle East, a region that is both the source of and host to some of the largest forcibly displaced populations in the world. In 2015, 65 percent of the world's 19.4 million refugees—including the 5.5 million Palestinian refugees—as well as 30 percent of the world's thirty-eight million internally displaced persons were in the Middle East, while one out of every four refugees worldwide was from Syria. Seeking security and stability, millions of people from the region are on the move within and across social spaces that are at once strange and familiar, and in which they themselves are familiar and strange to others. In 2015, Turkey became host to the world's largest refugee population of over two million, while Zaʿatari camp in Jordan has grown rapidly to become one of the world's largest camps since the Syrian civil war began. With 7.6 million people—or 35 percent of the population—internally displaced, Syria now has the highest number of internally displaced persons in the world. Iraq has produced multiple overlapping displacements, resulting in one of the largest refugee resettlement programs of the past decade. Thousands of Syrians, Libyans, and Iraqis have undertaken perilous journeys across the Mediterranean Sea to seek asylum in Europe and elsewhere. Palestinian refugees are now in a fourth generation of exile, making their plight the longest running unresolved refugee situation in the world.