Discovering the mechanisms that invested particular forms with meaning and created Islamic systems of signification is of major concern in the study of Islamic architecture. Although we know that these mechanisms exist, and that they produce meanings as complex as those of other cultural traditions, we do not yet know how they operate or even how they were manipulated at specific moments in response to particular aesthetic or practical needs. These mechanisms were most critical at the earliest stage of the Islamic architectural tradition, when forms were often taken over from a variety of contexts but transformed in ways that altered their cultural associations and re-created them as patently Islamic. This creative process is exemplified by that most Islamic—and problematic—architectural feature, the mihrab.

The following four stories were recorded among hundreds and thousands of others in the sharica court records of turn-of-the-century Jaffa and Haifa. There is no obvious connection among these four court cases. They raised various legal issues; the litigants were city-dwellers as well as villagers; and they also differed from one another in their socio-economic backgrounds. What these stories illustrate is that there was a major difference between the perception of family loyalties and obligations typical of men and women in the Muslim families of late Ottoman Jaffa and Haifa. I believe that it is important to recognize this difference if we want to understand gender relations in these families. I shall tell these stories first, then discuss the gender relations.

Recent scholarship on the manuscript libraries of North Africa has substantially increased the amount of literature available for analysis of the formative period in Islamic law, particularly for the nascent Malikite school. Students of Islamic law are now in a position, for instance, to begin a re-assessment of the 9th century, the vital transition period between the ancient schools of the 7th and 8th centuries, and the establishment of the classical schools in the 10th and 11th centuries.1 Not only will these new texts make the process of establishment of the classical schools clearer, they will also provide a much stronger basis for the study of earlier centuries, throwing into question the canonical status that has been granted to early legal texts by Western and traditional Muslim scholars alike.

With the generalization of production for exchange in modern times and the corresponding expansion of monetary and commercial transactions, the issue of contractual freedom has become a major concern for Muslim jurists and legislators, instigating a reconsideration of the classical doctrines of Islamic law on the subject. Due partly to its religious character and partly to the historical circumstances presiding over its formation in the first three centuries of the Hijra, Islamic law does not permit freedom of contract. Broadly speaking, three kinds of considerations intervene to restrict freedom of contract in classical fiqh: (a) those arising from the prohibition of usury (ribā); (b) those delimiting the licit object of legal obligation (maḥall alʿaqd); and (c) those concerning the stipulations attached to the contract (shurūṭ). In the present article, I investigate the third category of restrictions and touch on usury and the licit object of obligation insofar as the latter affect shurūṭ (sing., sharṭ), namely the conditions attached to a contract.

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.

In 929, the eighth Umayyad ruler of al-Andalus, ʿAbd al-Rahman III (r. 912–61) formally assumed the exclusive caliphal prerogatives of khuṭba and sikka. After nearly two centuries of independent Umayyad rule in the Iberian peninsula, ʿAbd al-Rahman III issued a circular to his governors directing them to address him forthwith as amīr al-muʾminīn, or Commander of the Faithful, and to ensure that the khuṭba, or Friday sermon, in every congregational mosque invoked his name with this designation. With this he reclaimed the Umayyad dynasty's rights to the caliphal title: “We have understood that to continue not to use this title, which is incumbent upon us, is to allow one of our rights to decay and a firm designation to become lost.” Later the same year, he established a mint in Cordoba and ordered the striking of gold dinars in his name (sikka), resuming the minting of gold coins in al-Andalus, which had been suspended since the overthrow of the Umayyad caliphate in Syria.

The vast majority of states in the international system, democratic and non-democratic, are multi-ethnic (Gurr 1993). A liberal-democratic multi-ethnic state serves the collective needs of all its citizens regardless of their ethnic affiliation, and citizenship—legally recognized membership in the political structure called a state—is the single criterion for belonging to the state and for granting equal opportunity to all members of the system. Whether a multi-ethnic democratic state should provide group rights above and beyond individual legal equality is an ongoing debate (Gurr & Harff 1994).

The rise of Islamist groups in Egypt's polity and society is given force through the articulation of a set of competing yet inter-linked discourses that challenge the authority of the post-independence secular nationalist discourse and attempt to reconstitute the field of struggle and domination in religious terms. Concurrently, these discourses seek authoritative status over the scope of meanings related to questions of identity, history, and the place of Islam in the world. The interpretations and definitions elaborated in reference to these questions by radical Islamist forces (the jihad groups and other militant Islamist elements) are often seen to dominate the entire field of meaning. However, claims to authority over issues of government, morality, identity, and Islam's relationship to the West are also made in and through a discourse that can appropriately be labeled “conservative Islamist.” The discourse and political role of conservative Islamism are the subject of this article.

This article presents a comparative analysis of the social role of two voluntary associations of Turkish businessmen: TUSIAD (The Association of Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen) and MUSIAD (The Association of Independent Industrialists and Businessmen). These associations are approached both as mechanisms of interest representation and as agents of two different class strategies. Hence, the article highlights two types of organizational activities that accompany interest articulation and representation: first, the activities which seek to bind the “bearers of interest” or “members of class” into coherent communities, and second, those aimed at the promotion of particular macro-level social projects.

Over the years, a number of important studies have been written on aspects of premodern travel in the Islamic world. Most of the literature examining the travel circuits of Ottoman/Arab bureaucrats, scholars, and merchants inevitably gives rise to the question of communal self-awareness and identity. How did pre-modern travelers envisage themselves and the “other”? What allowed some of them to create “imagined communities” of like-minded sojourners, incorporating space, ideology, and shared origin into a notion of exclusive commonality? How did travel contribute to the emergence of theories of “national” exceptionalism from among the fluid traditions of de-centralized imperial control? Why was it that the most favored classes in the empire's provinces were usually the first to register their unease with the status quo and to experiment with different levels of self-perception and identity? Benedict Anderson's thesis on pre-modern travel is instructive on all of these issues. His point of departure is that the frequent journeys of provincial functionaries, bureaucrats, and scholars, whether to perform the obligations of religious pilgrimage or to oversee the administrative needs of empire, paradoxically provided indigenous elites aspiring for representation and recognition in the mother country (or empire) with the catalyst for the development of a wider sense of identification with their home regions. Finding their desires for increased mobility thwarted by the central power, provincial elites in 18th-century Spanish America eventually chose the way of armed resistance to regain control of what was now perceived to be a “common” destiny.

With the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of British rule in Palestine, the nascent Zionist labor movement, shortly to become the backbone of the Zionist undertaking in Palestine, found itself confronted by a series of fundamental questions. The purpose of this paper is to show that there was never a consensus within the Zionist labor movement; that the leadership was divided on vital issues; that Israel's leader, David Ben-Gurion, represented only one approach within labor Zionism, and that even after his approach had prevailed, following drawn-out disputes, and he had risen to a position of commanding authority, his policies continued to be challenged by successive leaders during the decades preceding and following the establishment of the State of Israel.

The mass migration from rural areas to larger cities in the Third World and the rapid social changes entailed by this transformation have attracted the attention of social and political scientists since the 1950s. The problematic issue of the “integration” of rural migrants into the urban society and the changes this transformation has brought about have long been among the most studied questions. Yet they still call for more research to increase our understanding of the phenomenon, particularly in our era, which is witnessing radical shifts from earlier times in terms of social, economic, and technological characteristics. The question of “integration to what?” becomes important in political and practical terms. In the 1950s, when mass migration to cities started, the answer to this question seemed quite clear. The cities were the places of the modernizing elites, especially in the case of Ankara, the capital of the modern Turkish Republic. As in other Third World countries, the modernizing bureaucratic and military elites of the early republic, who had assumed the role of transforming the society into a modern, Western one, regarded the city as an effective means for the acculturation of its inhabitants to modern–Western values and ways of life. The modernization theory, which maintains a dichotomy between rural and urban, supported this idea.

Deeply divided between opposing national, religious, and ethnic groups, contemporary Jerusalem is a paradigm of urban heterogeneity and dichotomous identities. The social divisions that split Jerusalem are many and deep; to list the more obvious lines of fragmentation, this small city of about a half-million persons includes Muslims, Christians, and Jews; secular and ultra-orthodox Jews; Palestinian refugees; peasants; and old established Jerusalemite families. Although Jerusalem's physical and social landscape is criss-crossed by multiple political and symbolic boundaries, there can be no doubt that the major fault line is between Israelis and Palestinians—or, to use the terms often employed by members of both groups, between Jews and Arabs. This results from Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967 and the forced imposition of Israeli sovereignty over the entire city. Israel holds political and legal control throughout Jerusalem, while the Palestinians, who consider themselves to be in a situation of illegal occupation, continue to be Jordanian citizens who are classified under Israeli law as ‘residents of Jerusalem’ (Romann & Weingrod 1991). As a consequence of this fundamental division, practically every feature of this Holy City—from urban space to everyday consumer products (such as milk, vegetables, bread, and cigarettes) and including buses, buildings, and even sounds and colors—is perceived and identified by members of both groups as either “Israeli” or “Palestinian.” These two basic group identities appear to be totally discrete and mutually exclusive.

On Wednesday evening, 17 October 1850, at the height of ʿId al-adha, the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice, riots broke out in Aleppo in northern Syria, starting with Muslim riots in the Christian quarters of Judayda and Saliba. For two days, Muslim rioters looted homes and churches in these and other Christian quarters in the city, killing and wounding a number of the inhabitants. Only on Friday did the riots cease, but the insurgents then presented a list of demands to the authorities as a pre-condition for the restoration of order to the city. Their principal demands were that the authorities‧ intention to impose military conscription on Muslims be revoked, that the ringing of church bells and the carrying of crosses in public religious processions be banned; and that the owning of Muslim slaves by Christians be prohibited. The Ottoman governor, Mustafa Zarif Pasha, at first consented to the demands of the rioters, and even took certain steps to restore calm to the ruffled atmosphere, such as declaring that the firda head tax, one of the inflammatory factors that had contributed to the riots, would be transformed into a property tax.

One of the basic characteristics of the social conditions that marked political life in the Arab states in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was the complex relationship between the politicians from among the elites of traditional notables of the Fertile Crescent cities and the effendiyya, or Westernized middle stratum. These elites consisted not only of traditional notable families, but also of families newly risen since the Tanzimat reforms in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire. Since the end of World War I, these elites had stood at the center of the new states established by the Western powers—Great Britain and France—and it was now the politicians from within those elites who headed the struggle of those states for independence. This relationship, as well as the character of the elite of notables and the effendiyya, constituted an important element in the social conditions characterizing the political and ideological environment in which the Iraqi politicians from the elite of notables had operated, and in which Arab nationalism and Pan-Arab ideology became a highly influential factor.

It is a well-known anachronism of historians to treat areas within the Ottoman Empire (Egypt, Syria) as if they had a meaningful existence of their own in the prenationalist period. There is no question that before the appearance of nationalism in the later part of the 19th century the major political community was Islam, whose actual political manifestation was the Ottoman state. It is assumed that as a consequence, no other form of collective identity could exist at the time. The received wisdom on this issue may be expressed by one study of Arab nationalism which claimed:“None of the [Arab] new states was commensurate with a political community. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Transjordan, Palestine—these names derived from geography or classical history.” Yet it is possible that the debate over these issues is not yet over. One is entitled, for example, to doubt whether we know enough in social psychology to determine that the human mind is so simple that it cannot accommodate multi-faceted phenomena such as double identity, both in terms of regional Egyptian nationalism, for example, and all-inclusive Arab identity. Dichotomization makes for sharper and more impressive arguments, but sometimes it can be pushed too far and thus rendered misleading. In line with this last consideration, the argument of this paper is that though the all-inclusive identity of Middle Eastern Muslims under the Ottomans was Islamic and Ottoman first, territorial identities existed beneath them and that these territorial communities are commensurate with the modern Middle Eastern states.

Jordan's political-liberalization program, initiated in 1989, represents the longest sustained such opening in the Arab world today. During this time, Jordan has held three national parliamentary elections, enacted a number of liberalizing laws, removed many restrictions on the press, and minimized the role that the security services, or mukhābarāt, play in repressing opposition. Moreover, the liberalization program has survived a number of severe challenges, including the second Gulf War and the subsequent loss of Jordan's major regional trading partner, Iraq; the implementation of a difficult domestic austerity program; and the conclusion of a controversial peace treaty with Israel.

Three decades later, the circumstances that led to the Arab–Israeli war of June 1967 bare again the subject of scholarly attention as the end of the Cold War and the release of official documents in the United States, Soviet Union, Britain, and Israel have allowed surviving participants to compare notes and made possible the detailed reconstruction of decision-making in those states. Much of this historiography has focused on the critical two months immediately preceding the start of hostilities, giving rise to broad agreement that Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser “stumbled into the crisis rather than provoking it deliberately,” through miscalculation and ill-advised brinkmanship. However, there is still no consensus regarding the relationship between Nasser's decisions in spring 1967 and his policy toward Israel in the preceding three years, partly because the dearth of official documents from the Egyptian side has made it difficult to substantiate his real intentions and “historicize” his crisis behavior. Most recent studies tend to skim over the earlier period, if they cover it at all, or now accept the view that Egyptian strategy before 1967 was essentially defensive, based on deterrence and containment, and that Nasser ultimately shifted course due to perceptions of threat that steadily heightened in the course of the previous three years due to the revival of the Arab “cold war,” fear of Israeli nuclear power, and deteriorating relations with the United States, all set against a background of the debilitating military entanglement in Yemen and economic malaise at home

Ever since the Persian intelligentsia first discovered French literature in the 19th century, it has remained fascinated with its various genres: first with the writings of the Philosophe, then with the Romantics, the roman aventure, the realists, and, in the mid-20th century, with the existentialists and the thèâtre absurde. Moliere's comedies, in particular, were the subject of great interest and the source of many adaptations in the secularizing Iran of the Constitutional period (1905–19) and the Reza Shah era (1921–41). These comedies, often staged with the government's blessing in the newly built playhouses in Tehran and other major cities, had a great impact on the ethos of the growing urban middle classes, who viewed theater-going as a chic habit with a moral essence.