The reform process in the Arab world has been largely stagnant. Political change is moving at a very slow pace despite claims to the contrary by autocratic leaders. Whereas change from top to bottom is slow and at times nonexistent, change at the grass roots is another matter. For one thing, the population is becoming younger and younger, and this young generation of Arabs is being exposed to many new trends and communication tools, of which many older generation leaders are for the most part not even aware.

Viewing an exhibition of civil war paintings in 1886, Lea Barakat wrote that her “country came to mind: the splendor of its ruins, the wonders of their form like the fortress of Baalbek, the ruins of Palmyra, and the scenes of Lebanon…” Native women should paint like this, she states, and “not leave a scene [of Lebanon] unpainted… They can decorate the rooms of their homes and sitting rooms with these pictures…” She concludes that “since the ladies of our country are smarter and more industrious in their handcrafts than [American] ladies,” they too can obtain a similar level of “wealth, honorable work, admiration of the masses, and praise for the virtue of their [arts and crafts]. This study is a prolegomenon to examining the topography of visual culture and modernity to which Barakat alludes. Rather than painting, this article focuses on photography produced by Arabs during the late Ottoman and early Mandate periods in Lebanon. Less concerned with using photographs to document social transformations, this study theorizes how production and deployment of the photographic image played a part in the conceptualization of a bourgeois individualist subjectivity in Lebanon, which is claimed not to exist in the Arab world.

Few Islamic concepts have undergone as radical a semantic shift over the past couple of centuries as ijtihād. This Arabic term, confined for centuries to sophisticated works of legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh), has been liberated and transformed into the handmaiden of modern Muslim reformists throughout the world. Numerous Western scholars have investigated either the classical legal ijtihād of the first definition above or the modern employment of ijtihād among reformists encapsulated in the second, succinct gloss of this word. Valuable studies have been published on topics ranging from the relationship between ijtihād and writing fatwas (iftāء) to the so-called “closure of the gate of ijtihād” to the role of ijtihād in 19th- and 20th-century reform movements. In short, ijtihād is ubiquitous in modern studies and formulations of Islam.

The immigration of Muslims into the Ottoman Empire, especially from Russia and the Balkans, is a feature of late imperial Ottoman history whose legacy remains strong to this day. Millions of individuals in present-day Turkey trace their roots back to the Balkans or Russia, and interest in these regions remains high in Turkey. Estimates of Muslim immigrants to the Ottoman Empire vary, although most sources place the total number of Muslims leaving Russia for the Ottoman Empire in the latter half of the 19th century and early 20th century at well over one million. As Russian Muslims in 1897 were considered to number nearly 20 million while Ottoman Muslims counted in the same year numbered 14.1 million, this population shift involved a significant proportion of the Muslim populations of both empires.

This essay is an attempt to read popular melodrama as a reflection of changing societal appreciations of sentimentality, romance, family relations, and, ultimately, political authority over the course of a tumultuous decade in Egyptian and Middle Eastern history, the 1960s. I focus my gaze upon two particular films that were in their day popular hits, one of them an unprecedented blockbuster, and that remain genre classics. Both feature popular screen icon ءAbd al-Halim Hafiz, the greatest vocalist of his generation, a recording and performing artist who came of age with the onset of the July 1952 Free Officers' revolution and was intimately associated with the Nasserist project. Both films treat generation gaps relating specifically to issues of dating and courtship—what might be called, in the context of their era, “free love.” Both are concerned with troubled relationships between a son and his disapproving, authoritarian father. Halim's father in both films is played by the same actor, ءImad Hamdi, and Halim's love interest—albeit in very different contexts—is played by the same ravishing starlet, Nadia Lutfi. Finally, both films turn upon a single powerful dramatic act of parental discipline, a slap (or series of slaps) delivered by an outraged patriarch across the cheek of a rebellious, yet ultimately dutiful, son.

Compiled in 987–88, Ibn al-Nadim's work al-Fihrist (The Catalogue) needs little introduction to scholars of Middle Eastern and Islamic history. Countless specialized studies have used the Fihrist as a source of data. Because it includes the titles of a large number of works that are no longer extant, as well as biographical information on little-known early authors, it throws light on otherwise obscure facets of medieval Islamic intellectual history in many fields. Choice anecdotes, such as the account of al-Maءmun's (r. 813–33) conversation with Aristotle in a dream, considered to have triggered the translation movement, have been quoted in numerous studies. Little attention has been paid, however, to Ibn al-Nadim as a thinker, despite the fact that the Fihrist, like Dewey's decimal system, is as much an exercise in mapping out the organization of human knowledge as a simple inventory of book titles. The following remarks focus first on the methods Ibn al-Nadim adopted in compiling the Fihrist and second on the arguments he makes about the history of Islamic sciences, in many cases not explicitly but through order, presentation, and the calculus of inclusion and exclusion, emphasis and de-emphasis. Particular attention will be paid to the Islamic legal madhhabs and theological schools. Determining Ibn al-Nadim's views on these topics, as an Imami Shiʿi and Muʿtazili theologian, promises to provide a better understanding of his conception of the Islamic sciences, the overall message of his work, and Islamic intellectual history itself.

Social policy constitutes an area that clearly reflects the nature of state–society relations and the content of citizenship in a given country. The present article develops this idea by situating the analysis of the Turkish modernization experience in a historical overview of perspectives on poverty and social policy in the republican period.

Not long ago a MESA Bulletin reader objected to introducing coverage of the Internet, saying that there were few Middle East studies online. However, you do find Middle Easterners. With increasingly accessible technology, there are thousands of websites that are added to listservs and now supplemented by blogs from, by, and about Middle Easterners. The trend has been from witness to participant. Yet the subjective register of the Internet in Middle East and North Africa is often a new example of exceptionalism: less free than in the West, less extensive than in the Far East, slow to grow and stunted when it does, with limited access and high costs that confine it demographically and culturally, not to mention politically. That is also what most comparative measures tell, but those do not measure what is happening. Early interest a decade ago has subsequently faded—or phased—into something more interesting than another story of absences.

The growing gap in power and wealth between the West and the Muslim world from the end of the 18th century onward has engendered periodic demands for the rejuvenation of Islamic thought as a prerequisite for rehabilitating the status of the Muslim community. In Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, this quest for reform was led by Muslim modernists and Salafis (advocates of a return to ancestral piety and practice) in the late 19th century. Inter alia, these reformists opposed the gatekeepers of Islamic tradition—the establishment ʿulamaء as well as the popular Sufi orders or fraternities (ṭuruq). The Sufi orders were portrayed by their reformist adversaries as at best irrelevant to social change and at worst as responsible for the backwardness of Muslim society. Criticism of customs and ceremonies in popular Islam, especially the cult of saints—denounced as a deviation from Islam—also had nationalist overtones: these rituals were attacked for fostering national passivity and a detachment from reality, in addition to eliciting ridicule by foreigners. Religious reform was thus interwoven with the quest for national pride and power.

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).

The failure of social science expectations that several Arab states would democratize in the 1980s and 1990s forced a reappraisal. The belief that chronic fiscal crisis and waning popular support would lead regimes to loosen authoritarian controls and thus possibly lead to democratization proved disappointingly unfounded. Instead, regimes that launched liberalizations in the 1980s reversed or halted most political-reform components in the following decade. Given that rising oil and commodity prices since 2003 have eased budgetary constraints for many states (especially in the Gulf), the emerging pattern is political change and shifts under authoritarian regimes over time, not democratization. A number of recent works have responded by quantitatively and qualitatively assessing factors that account for regional imperviousness to democratization as well as change in different directions. The purpose of this essay is to contribute to these responses in two ways: one, conceptualizing important change in state–society relations short of democratization; and two, comparatively analyzing the cases of Jordan, Kuwait, and Syria to propose ways of explaining these outcomes.

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.

The aim of this article is to explore the distinctiveness of İzmirli İsmail Hakki (1869–1946) in the context of late Ottoman intellectual history and to suggest several implications of his thought on our understanding of debates on religion and modernization among Ottomans in the modern period. Studies on modern Islamic thought in the 19th and 20th centuries are mostly limited, especially in Western literature, to works dealing with a few well-known figures in the Arab world, such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh. However, a close investigation into several mostly neglected or yet uncovered thinkers of the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, can provide us with more interesting aspects of this period. The earlier interest of Istanbul ulama in modernization, their closer and more direct contact with Europeans, and the long historical experience of central Ottoman intelligentsia in similar reviving attempts are some of these aspects. This article aims to demonstrate that central Ottoman studies can make significant contributions to the current knowledge of the period, not only in political history, as has been the main focus so far, but also in religious and intellectual thought. It will show how a contact was established between modern European and Ottoman religious thought, in which ways the issue of modernization became an important topic in religious circles, and what kind of perceptions took place among them about its content and limits.

In an early 1980s interview, Amira Muhammad ءAli al-Houmani, daughter of one of the 20th century's most revered Lebanese Shiءi poets, insisted that the “southern woman” (al-marʿa al-janūbiyya) had always been a “partner” to the southern Lebanese man, both “in the house and in the field.” She explained how Lebanese women both in and from the south have historically played important domestic as well as productive economic roles spanning both the private and the public. Beyond casual nods toward their political and economic participation, however, disputes about and including Shiءi women in Lebanon and, more broadly put, discussions of and about gender, generally have been occluded from historical narratives. Considering the indisputable contemporary significance of Lebanese Shiءi communities in Jabal ءAmil (South Lebanon), the Bekaء Valley, and Beirut, it is even more remarkable that the diverse histories of gender in Shiءi Lebanon have yet to be written.

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.

In November 2005, the secretary generals of Yemen's largest Islamist party, the Reform Gathering (al-Tajammuʿ al-Yamani li-l-Islah, hereafter Islah); of the Socialist Party (YSP) that ruled the south prior to unification; of the Popular Nasirist Unity Organization; and of a small party consisting largely of liberal Zaydi intellectuals, the Union of Popular Forces (UPF), announced the publication of “The Program of the Joint Meeting for Political and National Reform,” in a joint press conference. The conservative Zaydi Party, al-Haqq, also signed the document. In July 2006, these same five parties upped the ante of their alliance by nominating Faysal bin Shamlan, a former oil minister and independent member of parliament, to oppose President ʿAli ʿAbdullah Salih in the 2006 election. The composition of the oppositional alliance that has come to be known as the Joint Meeting Parties (Ahzab al-Liqaء al-Mushtarak [JMP]) is particularly surprising when one considers that since unification in 1990 the ruling General People's Conference (GPC) and President Salih have sought to pit the JMP's two main parties—the YSP and Islah—against each other through a process of allying with or bolstering one at the expense of the other. As recently as 1994, these two parties were literally killing each other in Yemen's war of succession.

On 4 February 1934, the secretary-general of the Republican People's Party (RPP) received an utterly distressed letter penned by Kerimoğlu Ethem, a young waiter employed at the restaurant of Şakir Usta, located in the small western Anatolian town of Bergama. Ethem's letter contained harsh complaints about the head of the RPP's Bergama branch, who had sworn at the waiter and beaten him because of a minor problem with service. “Except a few loyal supporters, no one likes him in Bergama,” wrote Ethem, “but people are afraid of raising complaints against him as he is the head of the party. I write to inform you about this immoral man, who degrades the esteem of the party in Bergama and openly defies the government's authority.” Upon receiving Ethem's letter, the secretary-general immediately ordered party inspectors to investigate the allegations. Ethem's complaint was just one among many that flooded the secretary-general's mailbox during the early 1930s.

The storming of the Mecca mosque by Juhayman al-ʿUtaybi and his fellow rebels in November 1979 represents one of the most spectacular events in the modern history of Saudi Arabia. Yet, it is one of the least understood. Even decades after the event, many important questions remain unanswered. Who were the rebels, and what did they want? Why and how did Juhayman's group come into existence? What happened with the rebels and their ideas after the Mecca events? This article seeks to shed light on the story and legacy of Juhayman al-ʿUtaybi with new information gathered from extensive fieldwork in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

In 2002 the Cultural Center of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Beirut invited Mehdi Chamran to visit Lebanon. Chamran's late brother, Mustafa, was a member of an anti-Pahlavi opposition movement with bases in Lebanon from 1970 to 1979. During his visit, Chamran was to meet several Lebanese Shiءi personalities and to visit Shiءa-run institutions in South Lebanon, including institutions affiliated with the Lebanese Shiءi political party Amal (Afwaj al-Muqawama al-Lubnaniyya), which is headed by the current speaker of the Lebanese Parliament, Nabih Berri, in order to speak about his late brother. In fact, many of the Lebanese Shiءa attending the speech had personally known Mustafa. He had, after all, offered military training to many active in Lebanon's first Shiءi militia, which subsequently became the Amal movement. On February 15, at the Nabih Berri Cultural Complex (Mujammaʿ Nabih Berri al-Thaqafi), in Tallat al-Radar, a town near Nabatiyya, in South Lebanon, Chamran began a speech by reading passages from his brother's letters and notes from 1973 that described the political atmosphere in South Lebanon amid Israeli military attacks. Chamran went on to discuss the relationship between the Islamic Revolution and Lebanese Shiءa, emphasizing the theme of closeness and unity. For a moment, as he read these passages, Chamran implied that Iranian and Lebanese Shiءa had been moving back and forth for centuries between their respective countries and hence were what one scholar calls “distant relations.”

It is a strange interaction that occurs between Muslim and Copt in the passage above, which was written in the 11th century and set in the 10th century. What might be proven by such a debate over a dog's religion? What is more, why record such an incident in a church-sanctioned history? Because the dog cannot speak, there must be another way to know whether it is Christian or Muslim (for those are the only two possibilities in the story). In the end it is through the dog's ritual practice—drinking wine or eating meat or not drinking wine or not eating meat—rather than through the dog's outward proclamation of religious affiliation that the Copt and the Muslim come to an agreement about what distinguishes one from the other. Ritual practice, action such as abstinence from meat or alcohol that demonstrates adherence to particular religious ideas, distinguishes Copt from Muslim even in the absence of a shared spoken language to communicate that difference. Copts and Muslims in Egypt, the story teaches, are different, and they may be distinguished even by something as minor as their food and drink.