Syria was one of the few areas of medieval Islam where cities emancipated themselves from centralized rule to a certain degree by shaping local self-representative institutions and by transforming “classical” government offices according to their special needs. For nearly two hundred years—from about the second half of the 10th century to the middle of the 12th century—Syrian cities possessed urban heads (ru'asā') and militias of young men (ahdāth) that, in a way, complemented or even replaced the rulers and garrisons representing the Fatimid and Saljuq central governments; in time, they became institutionalized collaborators within the Saljuq regimes. This development is most evident in Damascus and Aleppo, although things evolved differently in the two cities. By gaining the rulers' recognition, the urban forces (ru'asa' and ahdath) not only managed to take over the functions of the police (shurta) and partake in the rulers' military and political tasks, but they also controlled—to a certain degree—the economic, administrative, and financial affairs of the city (these, it will be argued, can be substantiated only with regard to Damascus, not to Aleppo). It is significant, for example, that the Arabic sources reporting on Damascus do not mention the muhiasib, the “classical” official for the urban administration and economy, when there was a ra'īs. Even more striking is the fact that sometimes the ra'īs also functioned as the vizier installed by the ruler. Thus, one can see that the ra'īs, the holder of a local urban office, became a very important member of the central ruling system, normally represented by a foreign-born elite that also supplied the vizier.

In his Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestine Conflict, Daniel Bertrand Monk opens with a critical analysis of the rhetoric employed to explain the violence surrounding the 1996 Jerusalem tunnel crisis. By tracing the discursive relationship between architecture and politics in Palestine/Israel during the Mandate period, Monk offers readers an innovative, theoretical approach to the uses of architecture in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. Through a concise, historical examination of how British, Israeli, and Palestinian political players assumed an equation between Jerusalem's architectural sites and political realities, Monk proposes that it is exactly this conceptual paradigm that allows for the normalization of the continuing violence within the representation of the conflict itself.

To write a review essay about three books on what at first glance appear to be very divergent topics may seem like an impossible task. Samera Esmeir's book, Juridical Humanity, is an exploration of colonial law as it conscripted Egyptians into the grid of humanity; Judith Butler's Parting Ways is a critique of Zionism and state violence from a Jewish perspective; and Hussein Agrama's Questioning Secularism is about the paradoxical nature of secular power as manifest in modern Egypt. Despite this divergence, I found a rich thematic resonance between the three books that was unexpected and illuminating. All three books are deep meditations on the nature of law, its violent and performative character, even as they are also about a lot more. In what follows, I discuss the central themes of each book with a short rumination on their shared themes.

The study of the Middle East is experiencing an explosion in the dimensions through which scholars study space. The five new books reviewed in this essay stand out for pushing the boundaries of how we conceptualize the production of space and mobilize it as a methodological intervention. Through remarkably sensitive ethnography, creative use of sources, and an array of vibrant theoretical and methodological tools, they expand upon an earlier pioneering literature that centered spatial analysis in the study of the Middle East. In this essay, I focus on three dimensions they have opened up: analyzing space in time; drawing connectivities across spaces; and reframing the agency of spatial tactics and the nonhuman.

Conventional scholarship views Baha⊃ism and its precursor, Babism, as intrinsically rooted in traditional Shi⊂ism—in both Shi⊂ism's central doctrines of messianism, millennarianism, and imamism, and its less important features of Neoplatonism, numerology, esoteric knowledge, ecstatic worship, and obedience to religious hierarchy. In short, Babism and Baha⊃ism have been treated as historic relics from a traditional worldview rather than birth pangs of the modern age.

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From arid cities to irrigated fields, hot deserts to Mediterranean mountains, costal enclaves to verdant oases, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) encompasses a range of environments for thinking through the relationships between nature and society, people, plants, and animals, human and nonhuman worlds. Early depictions of the region in terms of patriarchal, tradition-bound, and largely homogenous Muslim populations living in undifferentiated desert spaces has long given way to scholarship that identifies the diversity and dynamism of associational life, political subjectivities, state formations, religious practices, and gender performances. Only relatively recently, however, has a significant subset of scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa picked up newer approaches to environmental issues and taken a renewed look at older topics, such as the relationship between water and the state and local subsistence practices in arid lands. This shift in the scholarship is not necessarily a reflection of rising popular “environmental consciousness” in the Middle East and North Africa, although people of the region have always been living in and thinking about the material worlds around them. For while there have been recent efforts to connect local traditions to global environmental discourses, such as rereading religious texts for their “green” character and celebrating heat-shedding architectural design, “the environment” as a term has a more uneven resonance regionally than it does in some other parts of the world. Rather, this increasing scholarly interest stems from a growing recognition within the euromerican academy of the environment as comprising intertwined social, material, political, biological, and representational worlds, and thus constituting an important focus of study.

This paper asserts that in 1952 an entente was forged between the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Egyptian government that provided the church with concessions in return for its political allegiance to the regime. The period prior to 1952 also witnessed the Coptic church leadership forging alliances with regimes in power; however, its ability to represent Copts vis-à-vis the state was rivaled by other Coptic voices in civil society such as the Majlis al-Milli. From 1952 on, the inhibition of Copts' voices in civil society increased the church's political power, and it developed into the undisputed voice representing the Coptic community. The relationship between church and state in the past fifty years has been volatile, affected not only by the nature of the relationship between leaders of the church and state but also by the emergence of other important players within and outside these two entities. Strains characteristic of the period leading up to the temporary dissolution of the entente in the 1970s are becoming visible today in the church–state relationship. This paper suggests that the current entente between the church and the state is being stretched to its limit although it is not likely to be dissolved.

This article examines the creation of the first privately-owned Muslim banks in the first half of the twentieth century and the legal debates they instigated among Muslim communities. Whether in Bosnia or India, these banks appeared suddenly in the years immediately before the First World War. They were envisioned as a way to free up Muslim capital for productive ends, and as the means to jumpstart a Muslim economic renaissance. Far from masking their interest transactions, the banks' founders and customers pointed to a range of Islamic legal rulings that justified interest levied on deposits and loans. These rulings varied from one geographic locale to the next, and were expressive of diverse Muslim institutional and legal histories. Yet in an age when the formerly diffuse discursive terrain around interest, usury, and the Islamic foundational sources was shifting towards a consensus that rejected any interest/usury distinction, some of these banks faced acute challenges, particularly in India. There, novel notions of interest-free Islamic economics were articulated from the interwar period, which rejected any form of Muslim interest-banking. In time, the earlier iteration of Muslim interest banking became overshadowed by the new paradigm of “Islamic banks” which purportedly eschewed all financial interest.

By using the narrative approach and linking it to feminist research ethics and critical race methodology, this article seeks to understand how non-literacy and poverty hinder low-income women's access to justice and how these women experience the Moroccan state. The state here acts as an oppressive and marginalizing entity in women's lives, but also offers the potential for empowerment. This ethnographic study tells the stories of three victims of gender-based violence to demonstrate that the state needs to (1) set up an efficient and responsive infrastructure for those lacking know-how and money; (2) institute proper training of state agents for implementation of laws and to prevent them from acting on personal opinions and attitudes with regard to women's rights; and (3) strengthen procedures so that state agents can respond expeditiously to the needs and grievances of citizens.

The study of Coptic history usually brings to mind gnostic texts, remote monastic enclaves, archeological ruins, conflicts with Byzantium, or a long-forgotten language. Until recently, a disproportionate focus on early Christianity has bound Copts to an ancient and seemingly timeless heritage, which explains the dearth of critical examinations on Coptic life from the Islamic conquests to the early modern period. In general, Coptic experiences after 641 have been overshadowed by other themes in Egyptian history writing, in particular political and military changes. Although the latter are as relevant for a better understanding of the Coptic past, they have been predominately examined from the perspective of the Muslim majority, exclusive of Coptic concerns, perspectives, and beliefs. Only in recent years has scholarship on Copts begun to expand. Scholars have drawn from fields such as papyrology, gender studies, art history, and law in pursuit of a more comprehensive historical narrative. We are increasingly encouraged to evaluate the Coptic experience not only as a missing cog in Egyptian historiography but also as one that complicates canonical studies of postconquest Egypt and enriches our understanding of Middle Eastern history in general.

Last spring, while Tunisians and Egyptians erupted in the most determined and optimistic political protest movements seen in two generations, southern Sudanese prepared to secede. And in July, after months of watching dramatic images from the demonstrators in Tahrir Square, the world was presented with pictures of a new country with a beautiful, colorful new flag, of thousands of people who had voted into existence the Republic of South Sudan. On Al-Jazeera, CNN, and BBC, interviews with southern Sudanese revealed the profound relief and freedom that these new citizens felt as they repeated the word “liberation” to describe their feelings in this heady moment of independence.

Historical scholarship on Arab nationalism has experienced a conceptual revolution over the last two decades. It is now widely accepted among historians that local identities and loyalties have been crucial components of nationalist thought and action from the very beginning; it is equally well established that the line between nationalism and various elements of Islam is much harder to draw than one might imagine. In addition, there is solid evidence that nationalism across the Arab world took shape, arguably as an unintended consequence, out of sustained interaction among conflicting elite and popular conceptions of political community. Moreover, it turns out to be important to differentiate Arab nationalism as a cluster of ideological principles from Pan-Arabism as a set of diplomatic practices that constituted a basic component of regional statecraft, initially at the time the Ottoman Empire found itself disintegrating and later on as the newly independent states of the Middle East and North Africa experimented with ways to get along simultaneously with one another and with outside powers.