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.

The study of Islamic movements has taken on a special relevance since the tragic events of 11 September 2001. More than ever, people inside and outside of academe are inquiring about the origins, motivations, and consequences of Islamic activism around the globe. The three books under review contribute to our understanding of Islamic activism in three countries: Algeria, Palestine/Israel, and Jordan. Camille al-Tawil's Al-Haraka addresses the rise of armed movements in Algeria since 1992 and their justification for violence, especially anti-civilian carnage, in the mid-1990s. Khaled Hroub's Hamas covers the origins, strategic orientation, and ideological evolution of one of the most controversial and militant Islamic movements in the Muslim world. Quintan Wiktorowicz's The Management of Islamic Activism sheds light on a moderate Islamic movement in the Middle East and the mechanisms of social control that foster such quiescent Islamism. These three works speak to the diverse nature of contemporary Islamic movements and the importance of political context in shaping Islamic strategic orientations. Each offers original empirical and theoretical insights that will surely enhance the discussion of Islamic activism in years to come.

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The article offers a revisionist account of how the modern Saudi state emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Differing with structuralist “rentier-state” accounts, I contend that individual agency has been very important in shaping the Saudi bureaucracy as oil money gave unique, although temporary, autonomy to princely elites to organize the state around their personal interests. Emerging institutions functioned as power tokens, leading to a fragmented administrative setup in which ministries serve as “fiefdoms” and bureaucratic capacities vary strongly from one institution to another. Through state growth and the “locking in” of distributional commitments, the autonomy of princely elites to redesign the state has strongly declined over time, meaning that many early institutional decisions have permanently impacted the shape and capacities of today's Saudi state. Vis-agrave;-vis rentier theory, I demonstrate that regime autonomy is not constant over time and that the quality of institutions is historically contingent and not determined by oil, which merely enlarges the menu of institutional choices available to rentier-state elites.

This short collection of essays provides new insights into the medium of political cartoons in the Middle East, where it has long played an important role. Drawing on materials from Turkey, Iran, and Tunisia, contributors “focus on the multiple cultural spaces that political cartoons in the Middle East creat across societies” (cover text).

I consider it nontrivial that IJMES invites reflection on the question, “What is private in the Middle East?” without positioning “private” against “public.” Conceptually, a private–public polarity refers to a division of space that has become reified into a heuristic paradigm used to describe gendered social and cultural activities.

Oymak. Al. Boy. Cemaat. Taife. Aşiret. These are the terms Ottoman officials used in imperial orders (mühimme) to describe diverse human communities linked by their mobility and externality to village administration in Ottoman Anatolia between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1924, Turkish historian Ahmet Refik compiled Ottoman imperial orders concerning such communities into a volume he titled Anadolu'da Türk Aşiretleri, 966–1200 (Turkish Tribes in Anatolia, 1560–1786). His use of the term aşiret (tribe) in the title is striking, because this term was only used in 9% of the orders in his volume (23 out of 244 total). However, by the late nineteenth century and in Refik's early Republican context, aşiret had become the standard term for these rural, extra-village, mobile human communities, which he understood as similar enough to include in his painstaking effort of compilation.

In December 2008, the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) released its thirteenth annual report on offsets in the U.S. defense trade. This chart displays numbers for the BIS category Middle East/Africa, taken from these reports beginning in 1993. Offsets are a variety of industrial and commercial incentives that defense firms provide to foreign governments to facilitate purchases, from coproduction of particular weapons systems to overseas investment. They have become such big business in the Middle East that a system has evolved to allow defense contractors to bank and trade offset credits like any other investment. Unlike ordinary investments, however, offsets represent transfers of substantial resources to authoritarian governments under conditions of near total unaccountability. Because offsets are usually a percentage of the overall contract value, regimes that spend more on weapons get more in offsets.

The globe is estimated to have 6 billion people today. The rapid increase of the human population has for decades been a common Western bogeyman. Now, at the turn of the millennium, the threat is brought out again. Today “the human time bomb” connotes uncontrolled fecundity in the Other, the non-Western or non-European. Demographic research shows that many countries in the Middle East and North Africa have among the highest rates of population growth in the contemporary world. Unlike Europe, where the nightmare of demographers and politicians is the aging and decreasing population, the Middle East still has a rapidly increasing and young population. Quite clearly, many politicians in the European Union are worried about the “uncontrollable overflow” of populations over its borders from the southern and eastern Mediterranean shores.

Increased access to archival and other textual sources and the situating of “Afghan” history within wider theoretical, comparative, and interdisciplinary thinking have opened Afghanistan-related studies to new fields of research and analysis. This offers new opportunities to reimagine and move beyond established historical narratives and preoccupations. At a point when English-language archives have been comprehensively mined for the political histories of Afghan dynasties, intruding Western empires, and the dynamics of modernity and state-building, non-English-language primary-source material has become increasingly available, including in translation and in online digital archival formats. The recent English translation by M. Mehdi Khorrami and Robert D. McChesney of volume three of The History of Afghanistan by the Afghan Hazara historian Fayz Muhammad Katib (c. 1863–1931) offers new material with which to reconsider not only elite political careers but also ethnic identity and competition, the sociology of provincial political networks, and the creation of governing rules codified by ʿAbd al-Rahman and Habibullah.

The proliferation of technologies in use for popular music in Morocco points to cultural interactions beyond the most local or national influences that inform musical practices there. Examining the integration of technologies from outside Morocco—including musical instruments, recording media, and distribution systems—sheds light on negotiations of novelty and difference in contemporary Moroccan social and political life and thus on multiple facets of how late modernity has played out there. Among other broad areas of significance that musical practices help illuminate are the social and economic effects of colonial and postcolonial interactions, including the development of cash economies, globalized exchange, and cultural tourism; nationalist initiatives to define culture; and large-scale migration to Europe and elsewhere in recent decades, following a longer population shift in 20th-century Morocco from primarily rural locales to burgeoning urban centers.