One mission of Ibn Kathir's Kitab al-Bidaya wa-l-Nihaya fi al-Taʾrikh (The Book of the Beginning and the End in History) is to provide a Sunni answer to a generally ʿAlid-legitimizing corpus of early Islamic historical accounts. Part of the 13th- and 14th-century movement that sought to rehabilitate the image of Syria and the otherwise reviled Umayyad dynasty (r. 661–750), Ibn Kathir's grand work of history cleverly reframes the early Islamic narrative to fit into what he considers a more “properly” Sunni framework than his sources provided. This article focuses on Ibn Kathir's presentation of the shūrā, the council appointed by ʿUmar and charged with choosing from among its six members his successor. It identifies the literary tools Ibn Kathir employed and offers a framework for his strategy of employing them. Whether through narrative aside or criticism of other historians, Ibn Kathir's recasting of a pro-ʿAlid grudge story as an Umayyad apologetic highlights moments of sectarian contention and emphasizes the evolution of Sunni opinion on ʿAli and ʿUthman.

The U.S. Military's turn to culture in the 21st century occurred largely because of its inability to achieve its stated objectives in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through conventional military force. Building on a long history of military strategies concerned with the cultural differences of others, the U.S. military crafted a warfighting strategy in 2006 based on a counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine of using cultural knowledge to battle the enemy. Charting how and why culture was embraced as a 21st-century “weapons system” shows us how technopolitical systems inside the military-industrial complex are envisioned, built, and then dismantled. Close tracking of these changing 21st-century strategies of war reveals, deep within the counterterrorism discourse, a fundamental belief in American exceptionalism. The principle that emerged from this ideological environment is that the enemies to be fought are not only terrorists or the ideologues of al-Qaʿida but also the countries and cultures that produced them. The implementation of this principle, despite its obvious failures, reveals the ideological underpinning that has justified the incredible destruction and securitized implementation of warfighting.

In 2005 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization accepted Lebanon's archaeological site of Nahr al-Kalb into its Memory of the World Programme, turning it from national heritage into a globally memorable text. I argue that it is not the content of the commemorative inscriptions but the mode of repeated commemoration that makes it possible to reinterpret potentially divisive markers of Lebanon's past into icons of national unity and a shared humanity. By focusing on the intersection of public monumentality, repetition, and the construction of community identity based on the logic of resemblance, I show that governmental elites at times of political transition need to make public interventions into the past to bolster their legitimacy, new commemorations are confined by rules and conventions of public memorializing, and the logic of resemblance inherent in commemorative processes can be used to convert a fragmented history into a memory of unity and strength

The events that took place in Iraq in 1941, commonly called Rashid Ali al-Kaylani or the Revolution of 1941 by the Iraqis, were very important to the subsequent political development of that country. They led Iraq to war with Britain, and most of what happened after that date, including the July 14, 1958, Revolution, can be explained in one way or another as an extension of what happened in May 1941.

In the fall of 1969 the Libyan monarchy was overthrown by a group of young military officers headed by Mouamir Quadafi. In the months prior to the revolution the tribal-based Monarchy had found it difficult to cope with the stress of rapid social and economic change, and had found itself immobilized by the conflict between Libya's traditional tribal and religious elite and a small but influential modernizing elite composed of students, technocrats and younger military officers. This new elite, a byproduct of Libya's oil wealth, had become particularly distressed by the arbitrariness and inefficiency of the Monarchy, the severe maldistribution of the oil revenues, and the existence of what they felt to be a poorly planned and managed development program which had largely failed to penetrate Libya's predominatly rural areas.

The cultural heritage of any one nation constitutes its collective experience and memory. Passed down from generation to generation, it contains a multitude of institutions, beliefs, and values that continue to act on the minds of people and affect their behavior. As an expression of the national identity, it is usually very wary of sudden change and prefers undisturbed continuity, its legitimate aims being self-preservation and the very existence of the nation as a group. It has its own checks and balances to allow any dose of change when the need for such arises. By an intricate historical process, it develops its own principles of inclusion and exclusion so that any change accepted or any change rejected will not affect its capacity for continued life and growth, but will rather enhance it.

It is too soon to measure the influence of G. E. von Grunebaum on developing trends in Islamic scholarship. But it is not too soon to assess the legacy of his writings. The assessment is bound to suffer from subjectivity and perhaps even border on the presumptuous. And I must confess at the outset that in this paper I have not ruled out a degree of inferential and impressionistic judgment, which in the end may only reflect my own limited vantage.

The change from an agriculturally based economy to one based primarily on industrial and services sectors requires a complex transformation in technology of productions, physical and human capital structure, social and political institutions, and cultural attitudes. Although broad similarities exist, no two countries have traced an identical path. One major economic and ideological concern in such a transformation is the fate of private property in general and land ownership in particular. Furthermore, the degree of redistribution of political power and material wealth of existing or emerging groups constitutes an important characteristic of the transformation itself. Thus, an important and interesting link in the chain of probable events is the occurrence or non-occurrence of land reform. The nature and degree of land reform, if it happens, or the variety of its substitutes, if it does not, provide vital clues to the specificity of the political economy of development.

Post-World War II studies of Egypt's economy devote considerable attention to her population growth and agricultural development. Such attention is necessary in that Egypt, (though) so limited in its habitable land, has experienced a quadrupling of population during the present century; and, as its most important sector is still agricultural, more than half of that population is concentrated in rural areas. Therefore, studies have focused on the effects of population pressure on the distribution of agricultural income, on the agrarian reforms of 1952 and 1961, and particularly on population growth and policies.

On Wednesday evening, 17 October 1850, at the height of ʿId al-adha, the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice, riots broke out in Aleppo in northern Syria, starting with Muslim riots in the Christian quarters of Judayda and Saliba. For two days, Muslim rioters looted homes and churches in these and other Christian quarters in the city, killing and wounding a number of the inhabitants. Only on Friday did the riots cease, but the insurgents then presented a list of demands to the authorities as a pre-condition for the restoration of order to the city. Their principal demands were that the authorities‧ intention to impose military conscription on Muslims be revoked, that the ringing of church bells and the carrying of crosses in public religious processions be banned; and that the owning of Muslim slaves by Christians be prohibited. The Ottoman governor, Mustafa Zarif Pasha, at first consented to the demands of the rioters, and even took certain steps to restore calm to the ruffled atmosphere, such as declaring that the firda head tax, one of the inflammatory factors that had contributed to the riots, would be transformed into a property tax.

Naguib Mahfouz's realistic treatment of his subject matter in Midaq Alley (Cairo, 1947) stands in sharp contrast to the symbolic mode of Tayeb Salih in Season of Migration to the North (Beirut, 1966). The style of Mahfouz here is simple, clear, and direct. His characters are common people who belong to the lower strata of life in Cairo and, more specifically, in the “Midaq Alley” of Cairo, this dark enclosed street which literally grinds down its inhabitants (as its Arabic name suggests), then carries on, indifferent to their plight.