Contemporary feminists have stressed the importance of women's networks in empowering women. In the Western context, professional networks, support groups, and the availability of role models are seen to provide a collective basis for the development of confidence and self-esteem as well as a potential base for political action. Feminist attention to the Middle East has uncovered patterns of interaction suggesting that there, too, women have found in feminine networks both the basis for power and the personal attributes that undergird social competence. Aswad, for example, describes the kabul, an upper-class formal visitation network in Turkey with distinct political overtones. Women exchange information that might be dismissed as gossip were it not for the fact that participants are from powerful land-owning families, and the discussions have impact well beyond the immediate setting.1

No historical treatment of the first decade of the British occupation of Egypt overlooks the abortive mission of Sir Henry Drummond-Wolff to Cairo and Istanbul from 1885 to the spring of 1887. Most, however, fail to discuss the diverse political interests within Egypt itself, which, in one fashion or another, stood to be affected by the mission and its objectives. Consequently, an entire segment of the negotiations which led to the 22 May 1887 convention setting the conditions for withdrawal, including an original draft article covering the future status of the capitulatory and mixed court regime in Egypt, has all but disappeared from the record. The circumstances behind this forgotten article demonstrate in capsule form the degree to which the issue of judicial reform indirectly dominated London's Egyptian policy in stages from 1876 to the Montreux Convention on the capitulations concluded by Nahhas Pasha in 1937.

During the winter and spring of 1990 Farghanachi Uzbek refugees from Afghanistan were the subjects of my ethnographic research in Karachi, Pakistan, where they form an unregistered community. The Farghanachi frequently play cassette tapes that explain the ongoing jihad in Afghanistan through stories about the Prophet Muhammad. Women and children use the tapes to accompany conversation and to facilitate discussion of Islam and martyrdom; occasionally they cry at the stories, which remind them of their own dead kin, the extraordinary circumstances of jihad, and their transformed lives. This paper draws conclusions about the ideal roles of women in jihad from a tape recorded in Baghlan province in northern Afghanistan. On the tape the exemplary behavior of a mother, wife, and daughter during the famous battle of Uhud that Muhammad and his followers fought against the Meccans is recounted. The infamous Hind the liver eater—who symbolizes the brutality and violence of female vengeance—is ultimately vanquished by these good women.

The Samaritans summarize their basic religious beliefs in five tenets:(1) The Lord is the one and only God and there is none beside him.(2) The only prophet is Moses and no other prophet was or will be beside him.(3) The only Holy Book is the ‘Torah’…(4) …the only Holy place in the world is Mt. Garizim the Blessed Mountain, not Jerusalem…(5) The Day of Judgement of the Lord will be according to the laws of the Old Testament, then every man will be judged and punished for his sins.’

As indicated in the title, this study will deal with Jewish sects in Israel, not with Moslem or Christian ones. The restriction is not altogether arbitrary, for while one could beneficially explore other religious sects in modern Israel, both for their own sake and in order to analyse their position in the predominantly Jewish society, it is the exploration of the Jewish sects which, besides dealing with a matter of intrinsic interest, may provide a peculiar insight into the meaning of Jewishness in Israel.

Prior to 1964 the Iranian budgets were only a simple record of the receipts and expenditures of the central government. Such conventional administrative budgets were the results of the reforms of A.D. 1911 (21 Safar 1329 A.H.D.) when a Comprehensive Financial Law for the country was legislated. This law was modeled on the existing laws of France. The French laws were in turn based on the philosophy of government as conceived by the classical economists. These economists thought of the governments as an organization which protected the right of the individual to pursue his best interest without trespassing on the rights of others. Also, they advocated government non-intervention and non participation in economic activities.

The aim of this essay is to explore the possibility, remote as it is or might be, of dramatists employing their trade and using their skill to transmit political messages. In Arabic culture, there is enough ground to suspect that such an endeavor is possible, forthe culture is known to have used the medium of drama to support religiopolitical ideas. I am referring to the well-known fact that the Shī'a sect of Islam, perhaps as early as the time of Yazīd (late A.D. seventh century) has been mourning the martyrdom of Husayn at Karbalā in dramalike fashion. We may well pause to contemplate the ultimate sociopolitical reason for the performance of this ancient Arabo-Islamic passion play.

In the course of studying all surviving copies of Arabic Dioscorides manuscripts I have come across some interesting statements in the introduction and colophon of a Leiden manuscript of De Materia Medica. This manuscript belongs to the Warner Collection or Legatum Warnerium of the Library of the University of Leiden, Cod. Or. 289. This vast and valuable collection of oriental manuscripts was acquired by Levinus Warner in the early seventeenth century during his term of appointment as Dutch ambassador to the Ottoman court in Istanbul. The collection was given to the university upon the death of Mr. Warner in 1665.

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The history of the archive is the history of the state. Or so say conventional approaches to the archives. Until recently, the archive has been seen solely as a site, or rather a repository, of modern state power and governmentality, and a crucial medium for the making and preservation of national memory in the late 19th century. There is a truth to this state-centric perspective: the archive was conceived as a place where governments keep their records; they usually contain a term such as “state,” “government,” or “national” in their names; and they are often funded by and connected to a governmental body.

From 1891 to 1911, a disenfranchised shaykh of the Muntafiq tribe, Saʿdun al-Mansur, led a large uprising against Ottoman rule in southern Iraq. Feeling that he had been disinherited from properties that were his birthright, he fought battle after battle against rival family claimants, shaykhs in Arabia and the Gulf, and reformist Ottoman governors in Baghdad and Basra. This article analyzes Saʿdun's insurgency both within the context of his life and against the background of shifting socioeconomic and political events in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf at the turn of the 20th century. One of the last rebellions against Ottoman central authority in southern Iraq, the insurgency was also notable for the indirect but intriguing links between the rebel shaykh and his nominal overlord Sultan ʿAbd al-Hamid II, who paid special attention to the rebel's fate.

Historical sociology has long been concerned with the study of organized state violence. Since the mid-1970s, a substantial body of work has come to focus on the importance of warfare to historical processes of state formation. The first generation of this literature proposed that the relentless existential struggle between the warring polities of medieval Europe had favored the survival of states that could adopt ever more efficient means to extract and mobilize resources from the local population to feed the war effort. Early states therefore evolved the institutions to collect taxes and administer territory largely as a functional byproduct of interstate military competition. From this perspective, the logic of war making was the driving force behind the rise of the modern state in Europe.

We have come to understand developmental indices such as growth, standard of living, and the calorie as “universal.” Such indices promise an objective means of erasing developmental differences. They promise sameness. However, what happens when we shift our focus away from inclusion and exclusion in the process of development, and instead look at when and how these categories themselves were constituted?

Incorporating descriptions and analyses of sound into Middle Eastern history offers a wealth of opportunity for enriching our understanding of the historical record. But sometimes we need to get back to the basics: the “five w's and one h” of sound studies, so to speak. In what follows I would like to run this simple exercise with radio in the Mandate-era Levant, in order to lay out the basic data and begin to reflect on how it might aid scholars in better understanding other aspects of life in this period. I will do this by first addressing some of these basic what, who, when, where, why, how questions, and then by examining one day's programming of the Palestine Broadcasting Service in 1937: the day immediately following the release of the Peel Commission Report. What can we learn from examining this day's programming?