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.

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.

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.

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.

This article concerns the place of late Ottoman Jews in Palestine on the eve of the 1948 War. It focuses on Israel Ben-Zeʾev (Wolfensohn), a Jerusalem-born educator and Nahda intellectual who led a movement of self-identified “native” Jews, including both “Old Yishuv” Ashkenazim and Sephardim, to combat their marginalization by the Zionist institutions. I examine his lifetime struggle to advance the study of Arabic and “Arab Jews” (yahud ʿarab) under early Islam by creating institutions of knowledge production and educational programs modeled on those he knew from his early academic career in Cairo. It was in the context of these struggles that demands for separate political representation for native Jews and for a specialized field of Arab Jewish studies coalesced as part of a broader project of a shared Arab-Jewish cultural modernization. They culminated in 1948, when Ben-Zeʾev finally realized his Arabic library project, ironically using looted Palestinian books, only to see its destruction four years later by Zionist leaders and Hebrew University professors.

Starting with Said's critique of Orientalism but going well beyond it, poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques of modernity have challenged not only one-dimensional visions of Western modernity—by “multiplying” or “alternating” it with different modernities—but also the binaries between the modern and the traditional/premodern/early modern, thus resulting in novel, more inclusive ways of thinking about past experiences. Yet, while scholars working on the Middle East have successfully struggled against the Orientalist perception of the Middle East as the tradition constructed in opposition to the Western modern, they often have difficulties in deconstructing the tradition within, that is, the premodern past. They have traced the alternative and multiple forms of modernities in Middle Eastern geography within the temporal borders of “modernity.” However, going beyond this temporality and constructing new concepts—beyond the notion of tradition—to understand the specificities of past experiences (which are still in relationship with the present) remains underdeveloped in the social history of the Middle East.

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Owen Lattimore, the premier chronicler of China's inner-Asian frontier, designated by the term ‘frontier feudalism’ a particularly significant and recurrent process in the social history of that area. By it he meant the pattern in which nomadic Turko-Mongol chiefs either sold their allegiance as ‘wardens of the march’ and border guardians to Chinese emperors in return for titles and land investitures, or else conquered territory along imperial frontiers in their own names. Ineither case, the chiefs' authority over his followers then changed from a kin-oriented tribal base to a patron–client-oriented feudal base, as his followers became peasantized and lost their ability to move away from the chief – anability that underlay what Lattimore viewed as the much more fluid tribal–nomadic social order and polity. To Lattimore frontier feudalism was an important vehicle in the establishment of social and political stratification along ethnically differentiated lines (as tribesmen settled down as rulers of a subordinate peasantry).It also created articulation between state and tribal polities and served as a major factor in the sedentarization of nomads (Lattimore 1962a, b). In this connection one recalls the proverb recited to Genghis Khan's son and successor, Ogotai, by an adviser: ‘The empire was created on horseback, but it cannot be governed on horseback’ (Grousset 1970: 257).

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.