In the 1990s, the concept of civil society has inspired a variety of publications by Western scholars studying the Middle East and has become the rallying cry for representatives of Western governments interested in promoting democracy in the region. The great majority of such publications and government promotions assume that the Middle East does not have, or has only in very weakly developed forms, the institutions that constitute a civil society. By “civil institutions” they mean such things as labor unions, political parties, independent newspapers and universities, and, most important, voluntary associations—for example, human-rights organizations, professional associations, charitable organizations, and non-governmental organizations.1 Discounted in this discussion is the possibility that the Middle East has its own resilient civil institutions undergoing their own transformations in the global society at the end of the century. In Jordan, this gigantic oversight reflects a misunderstanding of what “tribal” institutions are and do.

By the late seventeenth century, Algeria and Tunisia had established regimes that were largely independent of Ottoman sovereignty in almost every regard, although the Porte continued, in strictly legal terms, to exert minimal rights of sovereignty.

        Michel Le Gall1

But, let there be no mistake: the more a regency of Barbary has become fearsome to the Christian princes, the more the Sultan is its absolute master. He had only to utter a word to end an unjust war and fix even the terms for peace.

        Jean-Michel Venture de Paradis2

Separated by two centuries, these two quotations describe the role of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa in very different—indeed, contradictory—terms. On the one hand, Ottoman North Africa is depicted as a region where independent political entities emerged out of a century of Ottoman rule, ready as it were for the eventual emergence of nation-states in the 20th century. Venture de Paradis's earlier description, however, is devoid of the hindsight gained by our knowledge of the “end of the story.” It tells us that by the end of the 18th century, contrary to the contemporary accepted view of the remoteness of the Maghribi “regencies” from the imperial center in Istanbul, the three Ottoman provinces of North Africa were indeed an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, and the rulers of these provinces were obedient subjects of the Sublime Porte.

The 18th-century European Enlightenment championed rational philosophy and scientific methodology, rather than any form of traditional theology, as the way to understand the objective truth.1 In their quest for the fundamental truth, France's philosophes, the rational and anticlerical intellectuals of the Age of Reason, were forced to brave official censorship, persecution, and imprisonment as they disentangled themselves from their Christian heritage. Thus, the French Enlightenment was informed by a dualistic view of history—an ongoing contest between reason and faith. Although faith had gained ascendancy with Christianity's triumph over classical antiquity in the late 3rd and 4th centuries, according to the philosophes, many of whom served as key contributors to the Encyclopédie, religion and science had once again joined battle in the 18th century, this time with science and reason poised to overcome religious irrationality.2 In this context, the renowned philosophe Voltaire, in his highly controversial Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), attacks Christian dogma, refutes the tenet of Christ's divine nature, and rejects the possibility of miracles as running contrary to all scientific evidence.3 Similarly, in Système de la Nature (1770), another philosophe, d'Holbach, deplores man's pursuit of the chimeras of religious revelation and refusal to engage in rational methods of inquiry.4 The arguments of Voltaire and d'Holbach are just two examples of the French Enlightenment tenet that knowledge can be based only on science and reason.

This is the first issue of the journal that I edited and sent off to the press, but I did so as part of a team rather than as an individual. I must offer warm thanks to my predecessor as editor, R. Stephen Humphreys, for having done much of the pre-production editing, with his usual attention to detail and search for excellence, and for consulting so closely with me on acceptances. And, of course, I am deeply in his debt for having done such a fine job with the journal for the past five years, leaving to my charge a flourishing enterprise. Thanks, too, are owed to Liz Montana and the others at the Santa Barbara office who shepherded these pieces through the editorial process, as well as to our book-review editors.

Safavid Iran's foreign trade is usually described as the highly profitable export of silk to Europe. That is at best an incomplete description. One problem is that it focuses on only one side of the trade (exports) rather than looking at both sides. Taken to its extreme, the usual story could make Iranians look like mad mercantilists determined to export without thinking much about what they got in return, while Europeans could look like crazed consumers so eager for Iranian silk that they would buy without thinking about the bill. At the very least, an account of trade should examine what is going in each direction, not just at what one side exports and the other side imports. That is one major lacuna of the usual story. Another is that it concentrates on Iranian–European trade without as much attention to Iranian trade with other areas. Safavid Iran's trade with Europe can be understood only in the context of its overall trade, for only in that context can we know whether Europe was an important market or an incidental one.

Al-Azhar, traditionally Egypt's most respected and influential center for Islamic study, adopted an increasingly bold platform opposing Egyptian government policy throughout the mid-1990s. Al-Azhar defied government policy on a variety of sensitive issues, including population control, the practice of clitoridectomy, and censorship rights. Moreover, al-Azhar directly challenged the government in high-profile forums such as the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in September of 1994. This open opposition was remarkable in light of the tremendous capacity that the Egyptian government has shown in the past to manipulate and control al-Azhar. Over the past century, and particularly since the 1952 Free Officers' coup, the Egyptian government virtually incorporated al-Azhar as an arm of the state through purges and control over Azhar finances, and by gaining the power to appoint al-Azhar's key leadership. Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Husni Mubarak all benefited from this dominance over al-Azhar by securing fatwas legitimating their policies. Given this overwhelming leverage, what can explain al-Azhar's increased opposition to the government throughout the mid-1990s?

Since the 1970s, the Salafi movement in Jordan has grown substantially. Today, Salafis are ubiquitous in every major city in the kingdom, and Salafi bookshops, lessons, and activities are common. The purpose of the movement is to institute religious behavior and practices that capture the purity of Islam, as understood by the salaf (early Companions of the Prophet). Salafis believe that because the salaf learned about Islam directly from the Prophet or those who knew him, they commanded a pure understanding of the religion. All decisions in life must therefore be based upon evidence from the Qur⊃an and sunna, as recorded in authentic sayings (had―iths) by the salaf. In instances where particular actions or behaviors were not sanctioned by the original sources of Islam, they are rejected as “not Muslim.” Those who strictly adhere to this religious understanding are considered Salafis.1

Since the late 1970s, a voluminous body of scholarship has examined the socio-economic roots of Islamist politics. Much of this literature presents Islamist movements as angry responses to corrupt authoritarian regimes and broken moral economies in the post-oil boom era. In this view, Islam offers a culturally authentic alternative to a disinherited and disenfranchised generation.

In June 1959, Emperor Haile Sellassie of Ethiopia paid a visit to President Gamel Abdel Nasser of the United Arab Republic, during which the two leaders aired matters of acute strategic importance. Several issues, some touching the very heart of ancient Ethiopian–Egyptian relations, were in the stages of culmination. These included a bitter dispute over the Nile waters (some four-fifths of the water reaching Egypt originates in Ethiopia1), the emergence of an Arab-inspired Eritrean movement, Egyptian support of Somali irredentism, the Ethiopian alliance with Israel, the future of Pan-African diplomacy, and Soviet and American influences.2 Both leaders did their best to publicly ignore their conflicts. They were able to use a rich, though polarized, reservoir of mutual images in their speeches to emphasize the dimensions of old neighborliness and affinity.3 In a joint announcement issued during the farewell party of 28 June, they even underlined a common policy of non-alignment. Though they hinted at the issues mentioned earlier in all their public speeches, they refrained from referring to one culminating historical drama.4 On that very same day, in the main Coptic church of Cairo, the Egyptian Coptic Patriarch Kyrillos VI had ceremonially appointed the head of the Ethiopian church, Abuna Baselyos, as a patriarch in the presence of Haile Sellassie and Egyptian officials. In so doing, he declared the Orthodox Ethiopian church autocephalous, and for the first time since the early 4th century, the Ethiopian church had become independent of the Egyptian church.

The victory which the Zionists have achieved…lies not in the superiority of one people over another, but rather in the superiority of one system over another. The reason for this victory is that the roots of Zionism are grounded in modern Western life while we for the most part are still distant from this life and hostile to it. They live in the present and for the future while we continue to dream the dreams of the past and to stupify ourselves with its fading glory.1

Middle Eastern women have often been portrayed by Westerners as silent shadows or as helpless victims of suppressive customs and traditions who are unable to organize or form groups on their own and for themselves and are prevented from entering fully into the public sector of life. The past decade, however, has seen an explosion in research and publication that fully acknowledges women as people in their own right. Women in the Middle East have come to be seen as political and economic actors who fend for themselves and struggle and reflect on their lives and the future of their societies. Through their actions, the boundary that defines what is traditional cultural behavior and what is contemporary, foreign, or unacceptable is often blurred.1 The patriarchal state, however, fails to recognize the transformative power of women's contemporary behavior, which pushes the definition of “accepted” or “traditional” behavior beyond that found in official documents and local and regional legislation, with their largely male audience.

Recent scholarship has taken great strides toward integrating the history of the late Ottoman Empire into world history. By moving beyond the view that the West was the prime agent for change in the East, historians have shed new light on indigenous efforts aimed at repositioning the state, reconceptualizing knowledge, and restructuring “society.”1 A comparative perspective has helped students of the period recognize that the late Ottoman Empire shared and took action against many of the same problems confronting its contemporaries, East and West. The assertion of Ottoman agency has been critical to finishing off the stereotype of the “sick man of Europe,” but the persistent legacies of modernization theory and nationalist historiography continue to obscure our view of the period.

The creation of Pakistan was a crushing blow to those hoping to establish autonomous, ethnically defined states in the western borderlands of the Indian empire. The best known of these movements, the Red Shirts (Khudai Khidmatgar), was active in the North-West Frontier Province since the 1920s and moved from affiliation with the Indian National Congress to advocating sovereignty and ultimately an independent Pushtun state when faced with the inevitability of Partition.1 Similar Pushtun and Balochi movements arose in the last decades of the Raj in the areas that now constitute the Pakistani province of Balochistan. In the pivotal years of 1947 and 1948, the Muslim League was able to outmaneuver and suppress these ambitious young movements, but they did not die. In subsequent decades, Balochi and Pushtun nationalism became key elements in the political discourse and the equation of power in Balochistan, and they remain so today.

In the broadest sense, the process of development involves improving the quality of human life. Although most people support the idea of improving human lives, the concept of development is notoriously difficult to define. In the poorer countries of the world, development generally requires increasing incomes. But it also involves other things, such as raising standards of health and nutrition, improving access to education, reducing poverty, and increasing the equality of resources. How is it possible to incorporate these, and other notions, into a workable definition of development that can be used to evaluate the recent record of development in Egypt?

The expected renewal of peace negotiations between Syria and Israel is likely to bring up again an issue that has been the central component of territorial conflict between the two since 1948: sovereignty in what were, between 1949 and 1967, three demilitarized zones (DMZs) declared on the Israeli side of the Syrian–Israeli frontier. The DMZs, the regime that maintained them, and the significance they had for Syrian–Israeli relations have been studied at some length.1 This article contributes an analysis of the history and implications of one of the three DMZs from the point of view of those for whom the zone was and still is a homeland—the Kirad bedouin moiety, who are now displaced and dispossessed.

In the 19th century, Europe had a tangible impact on the Arab East. During this period, Arabic-speaking regions were brought into intimate contact with the West, both through military intrusion (e.g., the French in 1798–1801 and the British in Egypt in 1882), and institutional penetration (e.g., the founding of Western-style schools and higher-education institutions in the Levant in the 1800s by Christian missionaries such as the Syrian Protestant College in 1866, now the American University of Beirut, and [the Jesuit] St. Joseph University, also in Beirut, in 1874). This overpowering European encroachment on the Arab East in the 19th century resulted in cultural and linguistic identity crises. Muhammad ⊂Ali, who ruled Egypt from 1805 until 1848, dispatched groups of students to Western countries such as Italy, Austria, and France to study at their universities and technical institutions. At home, he established schools with Western-language instruction, and sponsored translations of scientific works initially into Turkish, and later into Arabic, from Italian and French, thus making available new disciplines such as various branches of engineering, military science, and agriculture. In 1822, he established a printing press in the Bulaq section of Cairo.1 From then on, Arabicized versions of European terms such as “theater” (tiy―atru), “journal” (jurn―al), “the post” (al-busta), and “politics” (al-bulit―iq―a) signaled the arrival of Western institutions and technology in Arabic-speaking regions, and such terms were adopted by writers in their writings. The cultural, political, military, and technological challenges that resulted from the European contact with the Arab East, and the institutional changes that accompanied them, proved to be a crucial turning point in the development of the Arabic language, particularly its lexicon. However, interest in language matters was central to the Arab renaissance (Nahda) of the 19th century. Arab writers; intellectuals; and translators such Rifa⊂a Rafi⊂ al-Tahtawi (1801/2–73), (Ahmad) Faris al-Shidyaq (1801/04?–87), Nasif al-Yaziji (1800–71), and Butrus al-Bustani (1819–83), among others, debated Arabic linguistic issues in terms of their own literary and linguistic heritage. These and other authors discussed the “internal” needs of Arabic, not only issues of translating the culture of the Western societies. They wrote grammars and compiled other literary textbooks to facilitate the teaching of Arabic and to overcome difficulties of learning the language associated with older, traditional ways of language teaching and to raise awareness of the literary tradition of Arabs. These intellectuals also engaged in the preparation of glossaries and dictionaries appropriate to the needs of their societies.2

This book addresses an increasingly salient but still under-studied subject: the relationship between Arab states seeking to maintain and expand political hegemony over their populations and minority communities struggling to maintain their identities in the face of this centralizing and homogenizing thrust. Coming as it does at a time when the shifting balance between states and civil societies continues to dominate both the politics of the Arab world and the intellectual agenda of its students, this volume is a welcome addition to the literature on the region.

The earliest period of Islamic thought has emerged as a major focus of contemporary scholarship during the past few decades, with a variety of techniques—ranging from historical documentation and historiographical analysis to narrative reconstruction and source criticism—being applied to comprehend more accurately the ideas and events that fueled the rise of Muslim societies in the Middle East. Suliman Bashear has made a fascinating addition to the writing that has emerged from this scholarly quest to configure the Middle Eastern Muslim past. The book under review probes available early Arabic literature, largely on its own terms and occasionally in relation to later Arabic writings, to determine the great complexity of Arab, Muslim, and Arab–Muslim views about themselves and about members of other communities during and shortly after the 7th century. Bashear's work also endeavors to trace how such views changed over the next few centuries. At the same time, however, the book is difficult to appreciate fully. Each chapter involves mainly the analysis of a series of hadith (and, to a lesser extent, tafsir and akhbar) linked together by general themes, with little contextual framework or broader discussion of the issues' significance. As a result, the considerable erudition and informative detail that permeates this book provide disparate nuggets of knowledge that, when taken together, fall short of providing the reader with a clear overall notion of how and why the earliest Muslims perceived themselves and others in particular ways.

This paper proposes that domestic political conflict presents opportunities for positive change with long-term effects despite the “inherent plausibility” of its harmfulness. This position is tested using examples of Arab bread riots in the context of the wave of Arab democratizations over the past twenty years. Although generally guided and controlled, Arab political liberalizations (especially those of Sudan, Algeria, and Jordan) have their roots in pressure from below. Elsewhere (as in Tunisia and Egypt), similar pressure has helped consolidate—or, at least, place—political reform on the agenda of de-legitimized ruling elites. Democracy and democratization in the Arab Middle East have almost invariably meant a trend toward “parliamentarization” and “electoralization,” without yet presaging polyarchal rule. Between 1985 and 1996, the Arab world has experienced more than twenty pluralist or multiparty parliamentary elections, twice the number that took place in the entire preceding period since the early 1960s, when many Arab countries won independence from colonial rule. A focus on the khubz-iste (the quietist bread seeker who abandons quietism as soon as his livelihood is threatened by the state) and the hitiste (the quietist unemployed who becomes active in bread protests) provides a new perspective on democratization processes in Arab societies.

Yasin Dutton makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the juristic activity in early Islam. His book produces a systematic and thorough study of the methodologies and legal techniques of Malik's Muwatta⊃, and in so doing, it sheds important light on the origins of Islamic law. Dutton carefully documents Malik's reliance on the Qur⊃an and the ⊂amal (practice) of the people of Medina in formulating early Islamic legal doctrines. In this context, Dutton challenges much of Western scholarship, which tended to minimize the role of the Qur⊃an and the Prophetic sunna in the development of early Islamic jurisprudence. The Qur⊃an, sunna, and ⊂amal, Dutton argues, formed integral components of early Medinian juristic discourses. Importantly, Dutton calls for a more sophisticated understanding of the concept of ⊂amal. He distinguishes between sunna and ⊂amal and between sunna and hadith. Sunna, Dutton contends, consists of the collective inherited precedent of the Prophet. In many ways, it is the Qur⊃anic precedent as well as the interpretations and ijtih―ad of the Prophet as remembered, in a general sense, by the early Muslim community. ⊂Amal, on the other hand, is the Qur⊃an and sunna in action as well as the interpretations and ijtih―ad of the companions, successors, and successors of the successors. Therefore, in a sense, Dutton argues that all ⊂amal includes the sunna, but not all sunna includes ⊂amal.