This article will examine the legal status of dhimmīs (non-Muslims) as documented in the sijills of the shariʿa courts of Ottoman Damascus in the 18th and 19th centuries. It will focus on two related aspects of dhimmī legal life: the extent of the judicial autonomy granted to non-Muslims and the kind of justice that dhimmīs obtained at the Muslim court.

An account already exists between us and the Arab world: the account of the compensation that accrues to the Arabs who left the territory of Israel and abandoned their property … The act that has now been perpetrated by the Kingdom of Iraq … forces us to link the two accounts … We will take into account the value of the Jewish property that has been frozen in Iraq when calculating the compensation that we have undertaken to pay the Arabs who abandoned property in Israel.

Charles D. Smith's review essay on our book Redefining the Egyptian Nation in the October 1997 issue of IJMES undertakes a critical analysis of the work. Simultaneously, it raises broader questions about the relevance of some of the insights of theoreticians of nationalism, particularly Benedict Anderson, to the case of Egyptian nationalism. The essay's attempt to evaluate the utility of recent theoretical writing on nationalism for the study of the Middle East is a worthwhile endeavor. However, we believe that the essay's analysis of the book itself is based on a familiarity with only a small selection of the sources relevant to understanding Egyptian nationalism, and that it provides a misleading interpretation of the contents of the work. We also feel that its observations about nationalist theory sometimes misconstrue our use of the same, and in general underestimate the importance of recent theoretical work on nationalism for the study of Egypt and the Middle East.

Comparative studies of writing systems and script conversion tend to emphasize the extent of cultural re-orientation and the rapidity of implementation of Turkey's shift from the Arabic to the Roman script, but they rarely mention the period that led up to this change. As early as 1863, the Azeri playwright Ahunzade Mirza Fethali presented a proposal for a Latin orthography for Turkish, before the Cemiyet-i ilmiye-i Osmaniye (Ottoman Society of Science) in Istanbul. A second event in Ottoman script reform, though less well known than Ahunzade's proposal, was the adoption by many former members of the Cemiyet-i ilmiye-i Arnavudiye (Albanian Society of Science), in Istanbul, in 1879, of a Latin-based alphabet for Albanian. This “Stamboul Alphabet” was designed by Shemseddin Sami Bey and, unlike Ahunzade's proposal, was immediately acted upon and subsequently adopted by the new Albanian presses in Bucharest and Sofia, from which it spread through southern and central Albanian lands, all still under Ottoman rule.

Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski provide a spirited defense of their book, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, which I critiqued in the November 1997 issue of IJMES. They explain their ideas on nationalism and how they purportedly applied them in the book, and conclude that I have misread “both modern nationalism and Egyptian history.” That remains to be seen. What is certain is that one cannot find in Redefining the Egyptian Nation the analysis of the thought of Benedict Anderson and Anthony D. Smith presented in their response (“Print Culture, Social Change, and the Process of Redefining Imagined Communities in Egypt,” present issue). Neither can one find in Imagined Communities the ideas and the stress on “nationalism as a cultural construct” that they attribute to Anderson. Gershoni and Jankowski now allege intentions and arguments for books whose texts do not contain what they ascribe to them. Their claims here for Redefining the Egyptian Nation appear to reflect the more extensive reading on nationalism which they did for their recent co-edited book Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East rather than a familiarity with the literature evidenced in the book under discussion, which was published four years ago.

Preventing the development of an ethnic Kurdish cultural and political movement has been a priority of the Turkish state since the Kurdish-led Shaykh Said Rebellion of 1925.' Nevertheless, beginning around 1959 this effort was steadily if slowly undermined, and events of the past ten years suggest that it has indeed failed. Not only have Kurdish activists gained some measure of international recognition for themselves and for the concept of Kurdish ethnic rights,2 but promoting the notion of specifically Kurdish cultural rights has almost become a standard litany for a wide array of Turkish civic and state actors, from Islamist political parties to business organizations, human-rights groups, prime ministers, and mainstream newspaper columnists. Although the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its insurgency against Turkey have claimed a great deal of academic and popular attention, it is these diffuse but public re-considerations of minority rights taking place within legitimate Turkish institutions have contributed the most to the sense that past policies of coping with the “Kurdish reality” are ultimately unsustainable, and that it may be difficult, if not impossible, to return to the climate of earlier years, when discussions of ethnic difference were suppressed, limited to the private realm, or confined to the fringes of radical politics.