Research on Islamism needs to move closer to its object and to study that object more closely in its interaction with its environment. Despite great advances in recent years, academic literature on the topic still too often suffers from a double distancing: the researcher tends, first, to remain unnecessarily removed from Islamic movements as the object of study and, second, to study those movements at a distance from the society in which they grow and in which they compete for support.

The surge in foreign direct investment (FDI)—investment with managerial control by the foreign investor, usually a multinational corporation—has been the major driver of globalization in the past two decades and the accelerator of economic development in many developing countries. It has, however, bypassed Turkey. By all relevant relative measures found in the United Nations' annual World Investment Report, Turkey has failed to attract much FDI.

Armenian sources from the 15th century provide distinctive viewpoints on the history of the Safaviyyih Sufi order before the foundation of the Safavid Empire. The history of T‘ovma of Metsop‘ suggests an earlier intermediate step in the militarization of the order, which scholars have typically viewed as an unprecedented development beginning after 1447, and ascribes to the Safavi shaykh the idea of taxing non-Muslims to encourage conversion to Islam. A second Armenian text, a previously unknown colophon, describes Haydar's attack on Shirvan in 1488 and the suffering of the Muslim and Christian sedentary population, as well as an episode of interreligious mockery. It is probably the earliest extant source to identify the Qizilbash by their distinctive red hats. Together, these sources suggest ways in which the Safaviyyih order's development was conditioned by the multireligious environment. They are examples of the value of non-Muslim sources even for late medieval Islamic history.

The three-week uprising in Egypt that ended with the removal of Husni Mubarak on February 11 happened to coincide with the section of my spring course syllabus on the Egyptian novel from Najib Mahfuz to Ahmed Alaidy. As was the case for many of my colleagues and their students, the rapid and awe-inspiring events unfolding daily before us pushed purely academic concerns to the margins of class discussion. This tidal wave of revolutionary politics erupting into the classroom forced me to the realization that my larger syllabus was not simply some neutral or systematic survey of half a century's worth of Arabic literature. I began to think about the largely invisible dystopic intellectual and historical paradigms through which modern Arabic literature is often framed, at least in the United States. The nahḍa/naksa narrative, which compelled many of us to read Arab cultural history of the 20th century as a story of brief “awakening” followed by irredeemable decline and corruption, is clearly no longer tenable in the wake of February 11. This same narrative underpinned the highly self-conscious postmodernism that began to emerge in Egypt in the 1990s and that reached its apogee a couple of decades later at the end of the 2000s, a postmodernism that was celebrated (though by no means universally) as the true beginning of literary modernity and the emancipation of the subject from the dead weight of a past ideological age.

The environmental history of the post-1500 Mediterranean (including the Middle East) has the potential to add significantly to our understanding of the history of the region. However, this is only if it is understood as a perspective (and not just a new specialization) that has the power to transform how we view familiar subjects. A ghettoized environmental history takes us nowhere nor do environmental histories that claim to explain everything. Let's take the role of pastoralism as one example of how an environmental perspective can reshape our understanding of the history of the modern Middle East.

In this article, I argue that audiocassette technology decentralized state-controlled Egyptian media long before the advent of al-Jazeera and the Internet. By enabling any citizen to become a cultural producer, as opposed to a mere consumer, the mass medium and its users sparked significant anxiety in the mid-to-late 20th century, when contentious cassette recordings led many local critics to assert that “vulgar” tapes were poisoning public taste, undermining high culture, and endangering Egyptian society. This article breaks down these arguments and shows that audiotapes actually broadcast a vast variety of voices. Thus, underlying many criticisms of cassette content, I contend, was not simply a concern for aesthetic sensibilities but a desire to dictate who created Egyptian culture during a time of tremendous change. By unpacking these discussions, this article harnesses Egypt as a case study to enhance prevailing investigations of sound, popular culture, and mass media in Middle East studies.

Scholarship has long held that Islamic reform was a preparatory stage for nationalism in the Muslim world. In challenge to this view, this article shows how in the context of 20th-century Algeria Islamic reformers and nationalists continued to maintain distinct political ideas, visions, and projects. The article examines the internal framework of the Association of Algerian Muslim ʿUlamaʾ, an Islamic reform movement founded in 1931 when Algeria was under French colonial rule, and its interactions with other local movements, especially the Algerian nationalist movement. Through a comparison of the discourse of the Algerian ʿulamaʾ to that of the nationalists, it argues that while both groups claimed to be successors of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, their understanding of politics (siyāsa) was different. Whereas the ʿulamaʾ associated politics with their own spiritual leadership, the nationalists associated it with institutions. The study situates these distinct visions within the post–World War II historical context, in which the expanding nationalist movement undermined the ʿulamaʾ’s popular appeal.

The governorships of Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan Vakil al-Mulk (1859–68) and Murtaza Quli Khan Vakil al-Mulk II (1868–78) in Qajar Kirman were highlighted by an extensive building campaign which initiated a period of significant social and economic change in the province. This article explores the activities of local elites in managing their family estates in the context of this project through a careful analysis of provincial geographical and historical writings, Persian-language travelogues, and commentary by European administrators and travelers. Kirmani elites began investing in land and commercial agriculture on an unprecedented scale, accelerating Kirman's absorption into global economic patterns as a producer of raw materials like cotton, wool, and opium. An integrated political economy developed regionally through the expanding networks of elite households and their estates, reinforced by families combining landownership with administrative functions in rural areas. This process demonstrates the extent to which Iranians were active participants in transforming their communities in the context of the advance of global capitalism, with longstanding patterns of elite household competition playing an important role in mediating social and political change locally.

At first glance, in contrast to political documents, official demographic data, particularly total population figures, “look innocent.” The common tendency is to accept them “as is” because governments tend not to manipulate the declared number of their citizens. In most cases this assumption is true. Is it also true for Saudi Arabia? In the 1970s and 1990s, Saudi authorities published the results of two demographic censuses that numbered the Saudi citizenry at 6,218,361 in September 1974 and 12,310,053 in September 1992. However, many experts found these figures to be highly inflated, as shown in the table.

Scholars of the Middle East based in social science disciplines—especially my own, political science—are likely to feel a bit more welcome by their colleagues as a result of recent events in the Middle East. Not only will we be informative conversationalists in the hallways for a while because of our regional expertise, but also, far more profoundly, the sorts of things that political scientists study, from voting patterns to regime change, are suddenly interesting subjects in the region. This is not to say that Middle East elections were not studied in the past or that research on political change was not undertaken—far from it. But the questions posed, the terms used, and tools employed were often different from those more prevalent in the discipline. Political scientists focusing on the Middle East are therefore likely to find this a gratifying time, ripe with opportunities for comparative and cross-regional analysis. And those nonregional specialists whose interests lie in a wide variety of topics from voting behavior to revolutions may work harder to incorporate Middle Eastern cases into their own work.

This article analyzes Turkish forestry as a site of nation building. To understand the ways in which forestry shaped ideas of the state and citizenship, I explore the history and memories of the forestry enterprise, Zingal, from the early 20th century to the present. I argue that the conflicting narratives around Zingal in archives and memory are symptoms of the contradictions inherent to nationalist modernity. I also reveal the continuation of similar contradictions in the 21st century by showing how citizens’ discourse of resentment over deindustrialization can coexist with their objection to a potential nuclear industry.

On August 31, 2020, a US military plane returned the archive of the Baʿth Party Regional Command, more commonly known as the Baʿth Party Archive, to Iraq from California, where it had been held by Stanford University's Hoover Institution Library and Archives since 2008. A leftover issue from the 2003 Iraq War, it had been static as a policy matter for years, but appeared on the agenda of the US–Iraq Strategic Dialogue in summer 2020. Mustafa al-Kadhimi's emergence as the compromise choice for prime minister by Iraq's competing factions that May facilitated this development. Kadhimi, a journalist and human rights activist by background, was one of the cofounders with Kanan Makiya of the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF), a nongovernmental organization that followed in the wake of the US-led invasion in 2003 as a US Department of Defense contractor. The origins of this relationship dated to the aftermath of the 1990–91 Gulf War. Shortly after arriving in Iraq in 2003, and responding to the rumor that looters were headed toward the mausoleum and museum of Baʿth Party founder Michel ʿAflaq, Kadhimi and Makiya by chance discovered the Baʿth Party Archive underneath the structure, which was adjacent to the Baʿth Party's headquarters in Baghdad.

Since the 1979 revolution, Iranian Jews have faced two powerful and inherently contradictory calls to compromise their voice and identity. From one side, Israel has consistently held the opinion that as an at-risk community they should be evacuated and resettled. On the other, Iran's revolutionary regime has made “Islamic” a centerpiece of Iranian identity, placing Jewish identity directly at odds with what it means to be an Iranian. For decades, foreign opposition groups have spread baseless and unsubstantiated claims suggesting that Iranian Jews are to be placed in concentration camps or forced to wear yellow stars. At the same time, Iran's top politicians repeatedly peddle anti-Semitic innuendo and promote Holocaust denial conspiracies. Yet such narratives miss the central fact rarely acknowledged in Israel or Western academic and public spheres: Iranian Jews have continued to maintain ownership of their story and narrative as both Iranian and Jewish. This article seeks to analyze the navigation of Iranian Jews between their struggle as a religious minority in the Islamic Republic and maintenance of their autonomous voice as represented outside Iran.

The Arab Human Development Report 2005, the fourth in a series that has received much acclaim and stirred much controversy, takes up the issue of women's development in the Arab world. Through a careful reading and analysis of sections of the report that address education and economic participation, this paper offers a critique of the human capabilities framework that frames this report. I highlight critical tensions between the claim that providing education is an essential element of expanding choices and the assumptions embedded in discussions about women and education regarding which choices are acceptable and/or desirable. These tensions point to the persistence of values derived from the mandates of global capital, albeit in the new language of neoliberal choice, revealing that ‘human development’ does not represent a significant departure from earlier conceptualizations of development. I draw on my ethnographic research in Jordan as one example to interrogate such assumptions and to shed light on the ambiguities built into the educational project for young women today.