Drawing on a range of recent studies and original sources, this article calls for a revision of the usual paradigm of disease in Ottoman history by applying a more interdisciplinary approach and new insights from environmental history. The historiography of disease in the Middle East developed from the late 1970s to the early 1990s envisioned a steady mortality from inevitable cycles of bubonic plague supposedly accepted with pious resignation by Ottoman Muslims. Focusing on the period from circa 1500 to 1800, the article advances three arguments. First, Ottoman Muslims sometimes did take action to escape or contain epidemics. Second, the region actually suffered from a variety of other infections that together had an equal or greater impact than bubonic plague. Third, shifting political, social, and environmental conditions—especially Little Ice Age climate fluctuations and population movements during the 17th century—played a major role in disease mortality and Ottoman demography.

The number of studies on the status of women and their changing condition in recent times has increased internationally in the past decade, and this is bound to make the development of a comprehensive theoretical methodological framework for the study of women in particular regions or socioeconomic structures easier. In the Arab world, especially the oil-dependent Arabian Gulf states, a concern with the mechanisms of the socioeconomic and political structure of society and the dynamics of its rapid changes has also grown tremendously. A large number of scholars have provided field and theoretical studies on social change and development and its manifestations in the fields of women's studies, labor, education, and industrialization, among others. From this relatively large body of literature, most of it in Arabic, some consensus seems to have emerged. Since research is being done in all regions of the Arab world, from the Maghrib to the Gulf, both the heterogeneity of Arab society and some common denominators have emerged from it.

Social, political, and technological changes have forced changes in the contemporary Moroccan linguistic landscape. In print media, advertising, music, fictional writing, and translation, Moroccan Arabic (dārija) is being written in a variety of ways that point to a shift in perceptions and usage of dārija in daily Moroccan life. In this article, I provide a discussion of recent developments in the use of dārija in writing, and discuss how this evolving situation is articulated by intellectuals, journalists, publishers, fiction writers, and translators.

Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the twin goals of centralizing state power and inscribing a uniform national identity on all citizens resulted in the proliferation of disciplinary practices that required changes in habits and everyday life as well as in the locus of faith, allegiance, and obedience. Nowhere were the repercussions felt as deeply as in the Kurdish regions, where the urge to create a new citizen sparked considerable resistance. This article suggests that alongside Kurdish nationalist movements, kinship networks and morality constituted an alternative reservoir of resistance to the new disciplinary practices that followed state building. By subverting state practices to make citizens legible, kinship networks, I argue, undermined the state's attempts to establish bureaucratic authority and create an exclusive identity.

Law plays a vital role in establishing not only regulations but actual thoughts and behavior in defining what is acceptable by society and what is to be considered natural or unnatural. Thus, as the laws dealt with here become symbols of what society believes to be natural or unnatural, they assume far more serious implications than their strictly legal context; hence, the significance of this study. The law is the arena where different views or philosophies are contested. Thus, Rosemary Coombe maintains that “law concludes or limits everyday struggles, authoritatively determines the qualities of individuals or groups, the social identities which people can lay claim to, and the ways in which personhood and experiences of self can be legitimately represented.” Furthermore, by legitimizing certain conceptions of the self, the law by default suppresses alternative conceptions.

It is perhaps self-evident to suggest that military conquest shares something with tourism because both involve encounters with “strange” landscapes and people. Thus it may not surprise that the former sometimes borrows rhetorical strategies from the latter—strategies for rendering the strange familiar or for translating threatening images into benign ones. There have been numerous studies of this history of borrowing. Scholars have considered how scenes of battle draw tourist crowds, how soldiers' ways of seeing can resemble those of leisure travelers, how televised wars have been visually structured as tourist events (e.g., the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq), and how the spoils of war can function as a body of souvenirs. These lines of inquiry expand our understanding of tourism as a field of cultural practices and help us to rethink the parameters of militarism and warfare by suggesting ways they are entangled with everyday leisure practices.

Laymen, Zionist leaders, and both Jewish and gentile analysts have maintained that in the 1930S the British government's policies toward Palestine were strongly affected by Britain's general orientation toward appeasement. Both contemporaneously and ex post facto, critics have made three assumptions about these policies. First, the decision-making elite which launched Britain's policy of appeasement was also responsible for Middle Eastern policies in general and policies toward Palestine in particular. Second, British actions in Palestine were an integral part of the general trend in British foreign and defense policies. Third, out of selfish interests Britain sacrificed the weaker democratic Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) to its more aggressive protagonist (the Palestinian Arab community) which was supported by the leaders of neighboring Arab countries.

Focused on the contest over water management in Nazareth during the early years of Israeli statehood (1948–56), this article traces the negotiations that took place between Palestinian residents of Nazareth and Israeli state authorities. I argue that the struggle over this vital natural resource, in a region where it is in short supply was in some measure a matter of fulfilling practical needs, but it was also part of the process of negotiating citizenship. The story of Nazareth's water in the early Israeli period is thus a microcosm of the incorporation of Palestinians as undesired and marginalized citizens into a self-defined Jewish state. Challenging the Palestinian resistance/collaboration dichotomy and the notion of a monolithic Israeli state, I show how both Palestinian citizens and Israeli authorities adopted wide-ranging positions on water management and its broad political implications. Although Palestinian citizens were able to use the space made available through citizenship to further their collective interests, they were ultimately unable to overcome the exclusions inherent to a political system that maintained the dominance of a Jewish majority over a Palestinian minority.

There are two established ways of recounting the emergence of the modern Gulf oil monarchies. The social scientific explanation describes anonymous structural forces, the “resource curse” of the “rentier state,” and how these have shaped politics and markets with their inexorable logic. The other narrative, of the popular history variety, offers romantic, personalized accounts of desert shaykhs, their whims, and the sudden riches of their families (complemented, in some less benevolent accounts, by tales of monumental corruption).

One of the most important lessons development agencies claim to have learned over the past decades is that the absence of local participation at various stages of project planning and implementation leads to what at best can be termed “inferior results.”1 The conclusion that community participation is necessary (if not sufficient) for project success has developed concomitantly with the belief in the halls of power that the state is not the ideal executor of a variety of tasks previously deemed its proper realm. Both of these changes in development thinking converged in practical terms beginning in the 1980s in the emergence of a greater stress on the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Not only were NGOs and other civil-society actors (including the private sector) seen as untainted by the rent-seeking behavior attributed to state bureaucracies; they were also seen as products of more local or community-based and -interested organizing, a critical vehicle for local participation that so many development projects had lacked. Some of this literature also regarded such institutions as the forerunners of and central to democratic transitions.2

The formative period of Imami Shiʿism from the mid-8th century to the mid-10th century remains obscure in many respects. This study is an attempt to organize the historical information about the period around a central problematic: the twin crisis of the nature of the Imamate and the succession to this office. The crisis of the Imamate and the efforts to resolve it serve as a focal point for constructing a conceptually coherent overview of these two formative centuries from a sociohistorical perspective. This perspective requires that the endeavors to create a stable system of authority in Imami Shiʿism be considered in the context of the social change and politics of the early ʿAbbasid era: ʿAlid–ʿAbbasid relations, massive conversion of the population of Iran to Islam, and the dialogue and competition between Shiʿism and other contemporary religious and intellectual trends and movements. Our approach suggests a new periodization of the early history of Imami Shiʿism.

Following the 1990–91 Gulf War and the subsequent March 1991 uprising, the Iraqi government launched a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in the marshes of southern Mesopotamia. Alongside mass killing and forced population resettlement, the state used hydrological infrastructure to divert water from the wetlands, permanently desiccating the area. Using newly available Iraqi government archives, this paper argues that the destruction of the marshes was the result of a complex interplay between sectarianism, development planning, and security imperatives. Inhabited by peripatetic Marsh Arabs (Maʿdan), the marshlands stood out as an impenetrable wilderness. Baʿth policies in the marshes combined measures meant to promote social and economic modernization with counterinsurgency tactics meant to achieve control over the marsh region. After 1991, the regime set out to obliterate a terrain it deemed a strategic liability and a population that seemed an obstacle to modernization.

The foundations of both Arab and Turkish nationalism lay in the late Ottoman mass education and conscription project and in the region-wide struggle against colonial rule in the 1920s and 1930s. The anticolonial insurgencies of the 1920s and 1930s have passed into history as the formative expressions of new nations: the Turkish War of Independence, the Iraqi revolt of 1920, the Syrian Battle of Maysalun, the Great Syrian Revolt, and the Palestinian uprisings of 1920, 1929, and 1936. But all insurgents of the 1920s had been Ottoman subjects, and many and probably most had been among the nearly three million men mobilized into the Ottoman army between 1914 and 1918. The Ottoman State, like all 19th-century European powers, had made mass education and conscription a centerpiece of policy in the decades before the Great War.

This article seeks to address how Lebanese youth are dealing with the legacy of civil war (1975–90), given the national backdrop of official silence, persisting injustice, and competing memory discourses. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory, it explores the memory of a generation of Lebanese who have grown up dominated not by traumatic events but by narrative accounts of events that preceded their birth. This residual form of memory carries and connects with the pain of others, suffusing temporal frames and liminal positions. The article examines how postmemory is mediated and transformed through the mnemonic lenses of visual landscapes and oral narratives. Consideration is given to the dynamic production of “memoryscapes”—memories of violence localized in particular sites—and to narrative constructions of the past implicated in the ongoing search for meaning, historical truth, and identity. This article seeks to challenge pervasive notions of Lebanese postwar amnesia and of a generational detachment from the residual effects and future implications of war recollections.

“In a state of rude nature”, wrote Edmund Burke, “there is no such thing as a people… The idea of a people is the idea of a corporation. It is wholly artificial; and made, like all other legal fictions, by common agreement. What the particular nature of that agreement was, is collected from the form into which the particular society has been cast”. Whether the Iranians in the early Islamic period — that is, the period from the seventh to the twelfth century — were in Burke's sense a “people” is a question that the cautious scholar would be eager to disregard and loath to handle. After all, those specialists on early Islamic Iran who have, directly or indirectly, expressed opinions on this subject have all too often projected events from the life of their own nation and times back to these earlier centuries. In no case is this projection more obvious than in the many essays written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which see this question only as a question of “national liberation”: did the Iranians hate the Arabs, and did they hope to regain their empire by destroying, or profoundly reshaping, the empire of the Muslim caliphs?

It was a warm November night in 2003 when I first heard about the Book of Visions. Shaykh al-Qusi and his followers were holding a Ramadan gathering on a large parking lot in one of Cairo's more affluent neighborhoods. Next to me at the gathering sat a middle-aged, wealthy Sudanese woman who was wearing an elegant green silk veil and many golden bracelets. She was visiting from Australia to spend the month of fasting in Cairo, close to her spiritual teacher. The woman had been among Shaykh al-Qusi's followers for many years. I, in contrast, had met him only recently but was already intrigued by his charismatic aura, his cosmopolitan demeanor, his habit of smoking Marlboros while talking casually about the saints as if they were his next-door neighbors, and, finally, his own saintlike status.

ʿUthman Katkhuda, Ibrahim Katkhuda, ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Katkhuda, ʿAli Bey al-Kabir, Muhammad Bey Abu Dhahab, Ibrahim Bey, and Murad Bey will be familiar to students and scholars of Ottoman Egypt as the names of men who were in the forefront of the Mamluk resurgence and the leaders of the bayt, the Qazdughli, that became the dominant household from the mid-18th century to the French invasion of 1798. Less familiar—indeed, almost unknown—are the names of women such as Shawikar Qadin, the favorite concubine of ʿUthman Katkhuda and the wife and widow of three powerful Qazdughli amirs, including Ibrahim Katkhuda, the architect of Qazdughli dominance; Amnatullah al-Bayda, widow of ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Katkhuda; and Nafisa al-Bayda, the beautiful, intelligent, and literate widow of ʿAli Bey al-Kabir and wife of Murad Bey, who was also admired by the French during their occupation of the country.

These words, which were written by the unnamed editor of the book Duʿat la Qudat (Preachers Not Judges), summarize the Society of the Muslim Brothers' (Jamʿiyya al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin) prison discourse in the late 1960s. The writer claims that once the organization became aware that radical ideas had surfaced in its midst, it objected to these ideas, even as it lived through the very context of their germination, namely Gamal Abdel Nasser's prisons.

The [Japanese] government, adorned with great intelligence and ideological firmness in progress, has implemented and promoted European [methods] of commerce and industry in its own country, and has turned the whole of Japan into a factory of progress, thanks to many [educational institutions]; it has attempted to secure and develop Japan's capacity for advancement by using means to serve the needs of the society such as benevolent institutions, railways, and in short, innumerable modes of civilization.

—Malumat, mouthpiece for Yıldız Palace, 1897

We should take note of Japan, this nation which has become rivals with the Great Powers in thirty to forty years. One should pay attention to that—that a nation not separating patriotic public spirit and the good of the homeland from its life is surely such that [though] sustaining wounds, setting out against any type of danger that threatens its existence, it certainly preserves its national independence. The Japanese successes of Port Arthur…are a product of this patriotic zeal.

—Şura-yı Ümmet, Ottoman newspaper, Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), 1904

While the despot of Turkey and the despot of Russia tremble and hide…it has come to pass in the Far East among this admirable people that, like the Turks, have been treated…as barbarians…[that] the Japanese tended to develop in all the Far East their material and moral influences, “to make themselves the guardians, otherwise the masters, of the yellow world.”…And that is how one has to see this vast intellectual and moral organization…. They whose civilization, achieved in half a century, has become superior to European civilization which has fallen into decay; they who do not have to reproach massacres, who do not have to gag any mouths out of which a liberal word came, who do not have to exile or suppress patriots…. Indeed, for our part, it is this “yellow” civilization that we wish to see universalized because it is the fruit of a principled, faithful and highly intelligent organization, because it is based on a conception of human destinies that excludes holy icons and false sentimentalities, because, above all, it is the daughter of a constitutional government which Ottoman patriots—all their efforts striving for this goal—will conclude by understanding the absolute necessity for the poor Turkish people that Hamidian terrorism be plunged into the mire.

—Mechveret Supplément Français, French organ of the CUP, 1905

Little research has been done on the intellectual life of the Arab-Islamic world between the 15th and 19th centuries. This scholarly neglect almost certainly reflects the widespread assumption that intellectual life in the Arab-Islamic world entered a long period of stagnation or “sclerosis” after the 13th or 14th century. This state of affairs is often believed to have lasted until the 19th century, when European military and economic expansion awakened the Arab-Islamic world from its dogmatic slumber, and inaugurated a “reawakening” or “renaissance” (nahḍa). An influential statement of this view of intellectual life in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire before the 19th century is to be found in Gibb and Bowen's Islamic Society and the West. Although they noted that “the barrenness of the period has been greatly exaggerated,” they still stated that Arabic scholarly culture had degenerated, on the whole, into a rote, unquestioning acquisition of a narrow and religiously dominated field of knowledge. No “quickening breath had blown” on Arab-Islamic scholarship for centuries. Isolated even from Persian and Turkish influences, it was reduced to “living on its own past.”