There are forty single-member districts in Bahrain. If a candidate wins a majority of the total votes cast in the district in the first round, he or she is elected. If no candidate receives a majority, the top two vote-getters compete in a runoff election one week later. Political parties are banned, but political “associations” act as parties, supporting lists of candidates, coordinating campaign activity, and publishing platforms. Districts are configured to overrepresent the Sunni minority.

Much of the scholarship on the history of Iranian cinema considers film spectatorship in the first three decades of the 20th century as a leisure practice with origins in royalist and elitist entertainment forms. However, a close reading of archival material from this era reveals that cinema's significance extended well beyond its role as a pastime, as it became engaged in the governance of the self and disciplinary strategies of the state in Iran's experience of modernity in the early 20th century. In this article, I reperiodize the history of cinema in Iran by demonstrating the entanglement of cinema in popular nationalist discourses on education prior to cinema's institutionalization in the 1930s. Drawing on newspaper articles, film announcements, official documents, and poems, I show how, despite the absence of a centralized cinema institution in the 1910s and early 1920s, cosmopolitan citizens in dialogue with global trends promoted cinema as a means for the governance of selfhood and moral edification in the service of national progress. With the appropriation of cinema by the Pahlavi state in the 1930s, cinema was used as a technique of governmentality that aimed to conduct the conduct of individuals and shape an Iranian civic society.

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 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 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.

From Paris in June 1928, Edmond Rabbath (1901–91) sent to Saעdallah al-Jabiri (1893–1947) his recently published L'évolution politique de la Syrie sous mandat. While the book is an early exploration of the legal underpinnings of the French Mandate, it is also the first nationalist history of Syria. Adopting a now familiar historiographical trope that the Ottoman past was a period of decadence and unjust alien rule, Rabbath organized recent episodes from the turbulent history of the Eastern Mediterranean since World War I, including Faysal's Arab kingdom, the Syrian Arab Congress, the rebellions of Salih al-עAlawi and Ibrahim Hananu, and the Great Syrian Revolt, into a linear narrative of an unfolding modern national consciousness.1 With a Preface by a prominent figure from pre-war Ottoman politics in the Levant, Shakib al-Arslan, the book outlined the logic in which much of inter-war Syrian opposition to French colonialism would be phrased:2 France must adhere to the letter and spirit of the League of Nations' mandate and emancipate the Syrians upon their achievement of national maturity. With some reservations, Rabbath argued that this maturity had already been attained.3

It is fair to say that some of the most vibrant work—and most challenging questions—surrounding “agency” and its intelligibility have come out of feminist scholarship on the “Muslim world,” broadly defined. This piece considers the transdisciplinary lives of agency as analytic tool, its uses and limitations, its particular proximity to gender-critical research, and, in turn, seeming synonymization with women.

Melani McAlister, currently assistant professor of American studies at George Washington University, attempts a multi-faceted and multi-layered coherence between U.S. political activities and agendas figuring the Middle East, and U.S. popular-culture appropriations of specific histories, religions, and symbologies of the region over a fifty-five–year span. McAlister sets herself a daunting task to interweave popular culture, politics, history, and criticism:

Like a mega-earthquake, the end of the Cold War sent lasting shockwaves throughout the international system. Outside the former communist bloc, the epicenter of this earthquake, nowhere else were those tremors more dramatic in their impact than in the Middle East—a region of long-standing geo-strategic standing and a legacy of incessant foreign conquest and intervention. The end of the Cold War exposed clearly the structural weaknesses of the region and drastically reduced its system immunities. As at previous turning points, the Middle East faced formidable constraints as well as luring opportunities. Middle East at the Crossroads is a collection of articles addressing the contours of this new environment and its challenges for both Middle Eastern states and the major powers. It is a welcome addition and an important contribution to Middle Eastern studies.

In Legislative Politics in the Arab World, Abdo Baaklini, Guilain Denoeux, and Robert Springborg provide a long-overdue and important step toward understanding legislative institutions in the Arab world. In the first part of this work, they redirect scholars' attention to Arab legislatures, which they argue both reflect and affect the “dynamics of democratic transition and consolidation in the Arab world” (p. 6). In the second part of the book, they provide detailed case studies of legislative institutions in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, and Yemen. Throughout the book, they leave us with the simple but important message: “Arab legislatures matter.”

Long appreciated for its combination of lyric charm and mordant wit, Ibn Shuhayd al-Andalusi's (992–1035) Risalat al-tawabiʿ wa-l-zawabiʿ (Epistle of Attendant Jinn and Whirling Demons), as I have argued recently, also offers a sophisticated treatise on poetic influence and inspiration. Composed around 1013–17, the epistle consists of the young poet's highly ironic and parodic defense against accusations of plagiarism leveled by one Abu Bakr ibn Hazm. The epistle, as edited by Butrus al-Bustani, is divided into an introduction and four chapters on the attendant jinn of poets, the attendant jinn of writers (kuttāb), the jinn of critics, and animal jinn. These are held together by the conceit of a visit by Ibn Shuhayd, conducted by his own attendant jinni (“poetic muse”), Zuhayr, to the Valley of the Jinn. During what I have termed his “initiatory journey,” Ibn Shuhayd encounters and tests himself against his major poetic and literary influences, attends a literary majlis, and finally is asked to serve as judge for the poetry of a group of asses and mules (presumably the jinn of his contemporaries/competitors). The journey, however parodic and humorous, provides a revealing allegory of the poet–littérateur's struggles with his poetic and literary forebears, critics, and competitors on the one hand and his individual poetic “genius” on the other hand.

I came of age in the early years of the “War on Terror.” As a young student activist, my initial arguments against the wars in 2001 and 2003 followed a common logic, responding to disinformation, ahistorical narratives, and false claims about Iraq, Afghanistan, and Muslims. Like many who work in the fields of Middle Eastern studies, this work was driven by the belief that exposing the narratives of the target nations to be wrong would in turn expose the false premises behind the wars. I have by now spent my entire adult life researching, writing, and teaching about the “War on Terror” with a specific focus on the war on Iraq. My hope was that “humanizing” and providing more insight into the views of the people “over there” would alter popular ideas in the United States and steer American state actions in a different direction than intervention.

In 1762, a ghost ship appeared off the Tunisian coast between Tabarka and Bizerte during the spring equinox, notorious for treacherous weather. According to a local chronicler: “Perceived in the distance was a ship with masts but no flag flying that approached the shore, then drew away. It was the month of April [1762] and unusually cold . . . the next morning, we saw the vessel veer toward land while a violent tempest raged.” Wrecked on the rocky shoreline, it funneled unimaginable wealth to pastoralists, villagers, and scavengers from far and wide. The ship proved to be without passengers or crew whose fate remains unknown until this day.

This article lays the groundwork for a more systematic history of the Ottoman gendarmerie (jandarma), with special emphasis on the men in the corps and their working conditions. Through this paramilitary police institution, 19th-century Ottoman bureaucrats aimed to extend their authority into the provinces, which at that time could be described as only marginally under Ottoman sovereignty according to contemporary definitions of the term. From the late 18th century on, extending state sovereignty to recognized territorial boundaries emerged as a vital need for most European states as well as the Ottoman Empire. Along with other modern military and civil institutions and modern administrative practices, introducing various types of paramilitary provincial police forces enabled governments in Europe to enhance and extend their authority over territories where it had been limited. The gendarmerie thus emerged in both Europe and the Ottoman Empire as integral to modern state formation and its technologies of government. While acknowledging the Pan-European context of the gendarmerie's emergence and its theoretical ramifications, the present article is concerned more with the Ottoman context within which this police corps was established, evolved, and took on a uniquely Ottoman form.