In his review of my book, Andrew Shryock asserts, “The interpretive key to Colonial Effects is located in its first paragraph,” in the preface, where I state that I am a “Palestinian Jordanian.” Indeed, this discovery—namely, that my national identity is the determining factor of my scholarship—is the interpretive key to Shryock's own grossly misrepresentative review. All his subsequent observations follow neatly in its footsteps.

In noting that Joseph Massad's identity as a Palestinian Jordanian should be central to any critical evaluation of Colonial Effects, I am taking seriously his claim that writing the book entailed, for him, a gradual “coming to terms” with this identity. I am also reapplying Massad's own interpretive method. “Throughout the book,” he tells us, “you will notice that I identify the geographic origins and the religious and ethnic backgrounds of people. This is done deliberately” (p. 16). Why? Because such specificity is needed to “interrogate” the claims people make about “Jordanian national identity and Jordanian national culture” (p. 16). I find it bizarre that Massad would cry “foul” when I conclude that his own (self-announced) “subject position” influenced his thinking on these topics.

Perhaps inadvertently, IJMES rendered a disservice to its readers by allowing Michael M. Gunter to review The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide, by Guenter Lewy, because not only the book but also the reviewer pose serious problems.

Michael Gunter should not have written a review of Guenter Lewy's The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide for IJMES or for any other scholarly journal, as he was intimately involved in the prepublication review and promotion of the book.

IJMES follows the standard academic practice of assuming that anyone who has played a substantive role in the prepublication preparation of a book manuscript—as a major adviser to the author or as a reviewer for the publisher, for example—will accordingly decline the invitation to review the book for IJMES.

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An examination of the structure of the Fihrist reveals a number of principles of organization on which Ibn al-Nadim drew in compiling and arranging his work, chief among which is that of chronology. A close reading of the fifth and sixth maqamacr;las of the Fihrist, dedicated to Islamic theology and law, respectively, indicates that they present not only a taxonomy of the theological and legal schools in Ibn al-Nadimiacute;s environment in Baghdad during the Buwayhid period but also chronologically arrange histories of the foundations of those schools of thought. This original conception is one indication of the value of the Fihrist as an intellectual history of the first four Islamic centuries from the point of view of an Imami Shiءi, Muءtazili thinker.

This article examines the origin and legacy of the rebel group that stormed the great Mecca mosque in November 1979. Extensive fieldwork and new primary sources show that the rebels represented a radicalized faction of a large pietistic organization established in Medina in the mid–1960s under the name al–Jama a al–Salafiyya al–Muhtasiba (JSM). The rebel faction had broken with the mother organization in 1977 and developed into an apocalyptic sect under the leadership of Juhayman al–Utaybi, who spent two years as a fugitive in the desert before the attack. Although the rebellion was crushed, the early 1990s witnessed a resurgence of Juhayman's ideas in Saudi Arabia. The article argues that the JSM, the Mecca rebels, and their heirs represent a widely ignored undercurrent of Saudi Islamism. Pietistic and isolationist, this so–called rejectionist Islamism is intellectually and sociologically distinct from the two other strains of Saudi Islamism, namely, reformism and jihadism.

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The social–policy environment reflects the nature of state society relations and the content of citizenship in any given country. The present article situates analysis of the Turkish modernization experience in a historical overview of perspectives on poverty and social policy during the republican period. In surprising contrast to the emphasis placed on etatism as the defining feature of state society relations in Turkey, this overview shows that the responsibility for social assistance assigned to and assumed by the political authority has remained very limited throughout the period under study. Until the 1980s, when the country adopted an outward–looking, market–oriented development strategy, several mechanisms that were hardly compatible with the logic of either state redistribution or market exchange substituted for formal social–assistance measures. Today social–policy approaches are in a position to deal with pressures generated by market forces. The social–policy outlook of the current ruling party, which comes from an Islamic political tradition, at times appears to be more in conformity with basic trends observed through capitalist modernization in Europe than with those of both Kemalist authoritarianism and the multiparty period preceding the transition to an open–market economy.

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This paper critically examines the term “diaspora” to describe contemporary Palestinian society. Exploring academic scholarship on diaspora more generally, and theway Palestinians can or cannot be subsumed by this conceptualization, opens the way for a critique of the concept itself. The goal is to complicate the notion of a Palestinian diaspora rather than to accept it as an unquestioned categorization. Focusing on demographic, spatial, and legal phenomena, in particular refugees' legal identity, provides a broad lens through which to probe the term's appropriateness in the Palestinian context. What are the political ramifications of assuming a Palestinian diaspora? Does an insistence on the right of return represent a refusal of diaspora?

This article investigates the history of the Muslim Brotherhood from 1954 to 1971, when thousands of its members were imprisoned and tortured in Gamel Abdel Nasser's prisons. The period is marked by intervals of crisis, attempts at organizational reform, and ideological discourse, which was prompted by Sayyid Qutb's activist interpretation. However, the Muslim Brotherhood finally developed a moderate ideology, which countered radical Islamist leanings growing within its midst while remaining loyal to Qutb's legacy. This centrist approach to Islamist activism and opposition is epitomized by Duءat la Qudat, which was composed by a number of authors and issued in Hasan al-Hudaybi's name. Written as a joint project of leading Brothers and al-Azhar scholars, the text is evidence of the first steps toward reconciling with the state system during Nasser's presidency.

The Copto-Arabic Synaxarion entry for the repose of Abraham ibn Zurءah (975-78), sixty-second patriarch of the See of Alexandria, commemorates the miraculous moving of Muqattam Mountain (outside of Cairo) in response to a devastating challenge posed to Coptic Christians by Fatimid caliph Muءizz li-Din Allah (969-75). The challenge—move Muqattam Mountain or be persecuted—unfolds as an important representative narrative of Christian-Muslim relations in medieval Coptic literature. The Muqattam narrative maintains hope by veiling religious-political commentary in the cloak of a miraculous or “unthinkable” event. This type of narrativizing, as archetypically displayed in the Muqattam narrative, is an important way for Copts to critique their dhimmimacr; status and Islamic governance while simultaneously maintaining hope in their Coptic faith. Through a close reading of this narrative, I argue that the miracle story provides an empowering vision and sustains a triumphant representation of Coptic faith.