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This article introduces the legal methodology of independent mujtahid (legal scholar) Abu Bakr ibn al-Mundhir al-Naysaburi (d. 930) in order to shed light on the nature of ijtihād (independent judgment in a legal or theological question) on the eve of crystallization of the four Sunni legal schools. Ibn al-Mundhir's presentation of laws concerning punishment for theft indicates that the Qurʿan and Prophetic hadith played a modest role in early elaboration of Islamic law. Instead, the bulk of this early mujtahid's efforts were devoted to culling and evaluating legal opinions of the companions, successors, and, in particular, a small group of postsuccessor jurists. I conclude by locating Ibn al-Mundhir within the literature of juristic disagreement (ikhtilāf) and highlighting the features that make his writings exceptional within this tradition.

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Based upon research undertaken in Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, and the Crimea, this article consists of three principal and interconnected fields of inquiry. The first focuses upon changing Russian and Ottoman policies toward the immigration of Russian Muslims to the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 19th century. The second examines questions that complicate the historiographical narrative surrounding this immigration, including issues such as Muslim return immigration to Russia and the retention of Russian citizenship by Muslim immigrants in the Ottoman Empire. The third examines the increasingly contested nature of citizenship and its role in the relations between Russian Muslims and the Russian and Ottoman bureaucracies. This section investigates battles between Ottoman and Russian bureaucrats who assert authority over Muslims of ambiguous citizenship status and the strategies deployed by Russian Muslims to take advantage of this ambiguity in their dealings with the bureaucracies of both empires.

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This article analyzes the origins and significance of cooperation among ideologically diverse forces in Yemen's Joint Meeting Parties. In response to studies that posit a causal relationship between political inclusion and political moderation, I argue that forging those interpersonal and conceptual relationships that initiated and bound together actors from traditionally opposed parties, such as the Yemeni Reform Gathering and the Yemeni Socialist Party, has been as much a result of marginalization as inclusion. Further, cooperation in this case cannot be attributed solely to changing structural relations but has also required changes in thinking by key individuals. They have developed and justified new strategies to account for changes in political practices, often facing down opposition from other forces within their own parties that are intent on maintaining old strategies.

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This article examines the language, content, role, and historical significance of petitions written by ordinary people to the secretary-general of the Republican People's Party in the 1920s and 1930s. Given the highly authoritarian circumstances in which other forms of expressing popular opinion were suppressed, petition writing was one of the few modes of interaction between the bureaucratic/political elites and the people. Although petitioning was an effective mechanism for the Kemalist elite to gain insight into attitudes toward the new regime, people who lacked control over bureaucratic malfeasance and injustice used petitions to involve the political elite in their everyday concerns in order to have their demands fulfilled and justice restored. Through various strategies, petitioners mediated and/or transformed the regime's nationalist and populist discourse to further their own interests. In this sense, the founding principles and the master narrative of the regime turned into a discursive field in which the meanings of “state,” “nation,” and “citizen” were being constantly redefined and contested. Petitions prove that in early republican Turkey there was a much more complicated, multilayered, multifaceted relationship between the people and state and party authorities than has previously been assumed.

In this article I address the transnational dimensions of memory production. In particular, I analyze how interpretations of past events define Shiءi relations across borders in the Middle East. Focusing on how the Lebanese Shiءi political party of Amal and the current Iranian government remember the figure of Mustafa Chamran—an Iranian Shiءi anti-Shah activist based in Lebanon from 1970 to 1979—I discuss the debates that inform the creation of such contested memories and reasons for and consequences of their divergence. Participants' ideas about the history and characteristics of this transnational network cannot be understood separately from their claims to political and religious authority in the Shiءi world. Thus, transnational Shiءi networks do not self-evidently reproduce themselves based on a shared sense of religious identity and history. It takes ideological work both to construct differences and to create solidarities across borders among Shiءa. This ideological work must be situated within larger political, religious, and socioeconomic contexts.

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