This article explores the American role in the Syrian political scene in Cairo toward the end of World War I and in its immediate aftermath. It challenges the absence of the United States and of American actors as primary players in much of the historical writing on the Middle East in this period. It illuminates a neglected episode of regional American diplomacy, argues that the United States was not relegated to the periphery in local debates surrounding the dismemberment of Ottoman Syria, and emphasizes the broader uncertainties that characterized the competition for Mandate territories in the Middle East prior to 1920. In doing so, it takes a close look at the long-forgotten reports of William Yale, the U.S. State Department's “Special Agent” in Cairo in late 1917, and situates them within evolving trends in Syrian-Arab politics. Yale, who surfaced in Egypt after serving with Standard Oil in Palestine, was the key Arabic-speaking American “on the spot” and proved to be an astute if imperfect observer of the diversity of Syrian national sentiment. A survey of his reports allows for a new perspective on Cairo's Syrians and their pragmatic and ideological turn toward the United States as World War I unfolded. Alienated from Britain and France, they looked increasingly to the United States, and the appeal of a postwar American trusteeship over Syria gained currency among émigré intellectuals and aspiring powerbrokers.

Research into ego-documents has being going on around the world for several decades, especially in continental Europe. The Dutch historian Jacques Presser, the inventor of the term, used “ego-document” to refer to materials such as diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and personal letters. The term was first used in the English language by Peter Burke. Some groups of historians, such as the one in Berlin under the leadership of Claudia Ulbrich, prefer to use the term “self-narrative” instead. Kaspar von Greyerz, leader of the Basel team and a leading critic, considers the term “ego-document” an unfortunate one on account of its connotation of Sigmund Freud's concept of ego. He claims that early modern material does not reflect the inner psychological state of the writer but rather the formal, outward facade. Artificial periodization prevents us from understanding the nature and intellectual heritage of the human being. The question is, “What changed with the transition from premodern to modern when suddenly characters started to see themselves as historical figures worth talking about?”

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This roundtable focuses on the marginalization of ethnicities or religious denominations within Middle East studies, and in the larger realm of history writing. Without a nation–state of their own to preserve their language and history, the Assyrian people and the Church of the East denomination of Christianity fell subject to repression in Turkey, only recently finding a voice. Marginalization in history books and educational curricula is one symptom of broken treaty commitments and lack of equal access to state institutions and funds. In our century, marginalization has given way to something perhaps even worse: vilification and expulsion even from countries outside of Turkey where the Assyrians reside, during a neo-Ottoman period in which parts of Iraq and Syria came to more closely resemble Turkey, a resemblance that included the presence of Turkish arms.

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in British rule in Palestine. Although invariably selective, recent scholarship has nevertheless attempted to deal with the administration of the Palestinian Mandate over its entire time span. These studies provide an opportunity to reconsider more generally some of the methodological problems posed by the writing of Mandatory history. There already exists for Palestine a large body of literature, one that has prompted several historiographic reviews identifying particular assumptions, preoccupations, and conceptual frameworks.1 They include the extent to which histories of Mandatory Palestine invariably reflect current thinking and are thus not solely concerned with the past; the reliance on official archives, particularly British and Israeli; and the tendency to concentrate on Zionism as the moving force behind developments during the Mandate period (thus committing a conspicuous act of retroactive determinism).

This is the first issue of the journal that I edited and sent off to the press, but I did so as part of a team rather than as an individual. I must offer warm thanks to my predecessor as editor, R. Stephen Humphreys, for having done much of the pre-production editing, with his usual attention to detail and search for excellence, and for consulting so closely with me on acceptances. And, of course, I am deeply in his debt for having done such a fine job with the journal for the past five years, leaving to my charge a flourishing enterprise. Thanks, too, are owed to Liz Montana and the others at the Santa Barbara office who shepherded these pieces through the editorial process, as well as to our book-review editors.

In 1917, an Arabic treatise was published by the recently inaugurated Daudi Bohra dāʿī al-muṭlaq (chief cleric), Tahir Sayf al-Din (r. 1915–65). In the work, entitled Dawʾ Nur al-Haqq al-Mubin (The Brilliance of the Light of Transparent Truth), the dāʿī not only underscored his monopoly of religious interpretation in the Daudi Bohra community, but also engaged in a series of jibes against Sunnis and Shiʿis.1 As the book gained a wider readership beyond the confines of the Daudi Bohra community, several cities in Gujarat were beset by public campaigns against the dāʿī and his followers. Handbills in Gujarati and Urdu were disseminated challenging the dāʿī to a disputation and calling for his censure. Arabic, Persian, and Urdu fatwas were also penned castigating the dāʿī for engaging in what his detractors regarded as takfīr (excommunication).

This special issue originated in a series of conversations two years ago with IJMES editor Beth Baron regarding the Maghrib's positioning in historical scholarship on the Middle East generally and in our field's flagship journal more specifically. While IJMES has published a number of solo articles devoted to North Africa from a range of disciplines, we concluded that the journal's readers would welcome a corpus of recent work in the historical sciences for the modern period from roughly the late 18th century on. Emphasis upon the modern does not imply that other eras in North Africa's long history have languished for lack of renewed scholarly interest—far from it. The Punic and Roman empires are currently subject to vigorous reinterpretation in order to dismantle dominant colonial and Orientalist interpretations. Moreover, the literature on Muslim Spain and on medieval and early modern North Africa and Iberia, particularly the hotly contested idea of convivencia, has gone from artisanal to industrial production in terms of output. The regionalist frame for the special issue admittedly acknowledges a form of geographically informed “otherness,” but it does so in order to question that distinction. And although the call for papers had invited research whose primary (but by no means sole) focus was the peoples, societies, and states in what we now know as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, regrettably no submissions on Tripolitania/Libya were received.

Michal Biran fills an important gap in research on the 13th-century Mongol empire with her recent study of Qaidu (1236–1301), a great-grandson of Chinggis Khan and champion of the house of Ögödei. Characterizing Qaidu as a pragmatist, not an “ideological warrior” (p. 107), she challenges the conventional view that he was one of the quintessential defenders of nomadic values against the sedentarizing ethos of other Mongol rulers, and that he claimed the office of qa⊂an (supreme Mongol overlord). The work argues that his long struggle with Qubilai and his ruling career in Central Asia had two main goals: to restore to the Ögödeid ulus its rightful territory according to the original division of the empire by Chinggis and to secure the political and economic viability of that territory. It concludes that Qaidu did not aspire to become the qa⊂an but played a crucial role in the emergence of an independent Chaghadaid khanate in the early 14th century.

Iraqi women's struggle for equal rights has been shaped by similar circumstances and factors in both past and present. Since the founding of the Iraqi nation–state, ruling elites have repeatedly traded women's rights for building alliances with tribal and religious conservative forces in the interest of sustaining power. There was some progress in the areas of personal status and family law as well as women's access to education and the labor market throughout the years from the revolution of 1958 to the 1980s. Women's status declined dramatically during the 1990s due to intermittent wars, economic sanctions, repressive policies of the Baʿthist regime, and eroding state structures. Similar developments are notable since the toppling of that regime in 2003 at the hands of a US-led invasion. The selling rhetoric of liberating Iraqi women was quickly debunked when women's rights were de-prioritized and sacrificed for the sake of maintaining order and security, giving way for tribal and Islamist powers to control and discipline women. Iraqi women have been grappling with a new reality marked by a lack of security, an ethno-sectarian muḥāṣaṣa (quota-based) system, conflict, terrorist groups and militias, rampant corruption, the fragile rule of law, and the erosion of Iraqi institutions. All of these have allowed for the (re)emergence of different forms of patriarchies and masculinities, compounded by the empowerment of tribal and religious authorities, contributing to an increase in various forms of gender-based violence.