A glance at a map shows what an important role the sea played in the vast empire of the Ottomans in the 18th century, linking as it did the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa that made up the Old World. The Ottoman Empire dominated not only the eastern Mediterranean but also the major part of the southern shore of the western Mediterranean, the Black Sea—a “Turkish lake” until the 1780s—the Red Sea, and part of the Arab/Persian Gulf.Geography gave the sea a decisive role in the trade that took place in the Ottoman Empire both internationally and domestically.

“Our present knowledge concerning the Arab city's past history is unsatisfactory,” remarked André Raymond in his Grandes villes arabes à l'époque ottomane.1 He went on to state that “the mediocrity of our information concerning the history of Arab cities is particularly noticeable for the modern period, that is, for the four Ottoman centuries.” Several explanations account for this insufficiency. First of all, “the absence of all statistical and numerical information about the urban population's social structure in relation to its dwelling conditions renders numerical and cartographical analysis difficult. As a result, specific descriptions concerning the geography of residential areas in relation to the different socioeconomic groups within a population and their dwellings is problematic.” Secondly, our knowledge concerning the better-off groups far overshadows that for the poorer levels of society: “We are only really well acquainted with the rich or middle-class dwellings in the Arab cities. In fact, it is only these types of dwellings for which urban archaeology provides a satisfactory sampling"2; archival documents usually concern only the most sumptuous and luxurious residences belonging to the highest urban real estate bracket. Finally, the study of Arab cities is obscured by several traditional ideas that affect all research in this field, particularly, the notion that traditional Islamic society was basically egalitarian and that therefore spatial segregation based upon socioeconomic criteria did not exist.

Between 1905 and 1911, Iranians were engaged in a protracted struggle over whether a constitutionalist regime would replace royal absolutism.1 Little in Iran's political culture before 1905 had hinted at this conflict before it broke out, and for the past thirty years historians have been seeking this genealogy for it. Most have searched among the papers of officials and diplomats, often examining unpublished or posthumously published manuscripts with little or no contemporary circulation, at least before the revolution,2 but we might get closer to its context if we look at what was going on outside the governmental elite. Here I will explore the growth of belief in representative government within an Iranian millenarian movement, the Bahai faith, in the last third of the 19th century, as an example of how the new ideas circulated that led to the conflict.3 Historians have noted a link between millenarianism and democratic or populist thought elsewhere, after all; for instance they have long recognized the importance of chiliastic ideas in e English Revolution of the 17th century. The republicanism of American dissidents and revolutionaries was also sometimes tinged with a civil millennialism. The Bahais of Iran, too, combined democratic rhetoric with millenarian imagery in the generation before the Constitutional Revolution.4

The 19 August 1991 coup attempt in Moscow and the subsequent collapse of the economy of the former Soviet Union has had its effects on Middle East studies. The seizure of Communist party property and bank accounts and the dispute between the Russian federal government and what remained of the centralized Soviet state structure still headed by President Gorbachev placed such distinguished centers for Middle East research as the Institutes for Oriental Studies in Moscow and St. Petersburg in serious financial jeopardy. Even before the coup attempt and the dissolution of the Communist party, continued full state funding was uncertain and the institutes were scrambling to establish joint publishing agreements with Western academic presses to ensure some infusion of hard currency against the plunging value of the ruble. Individual researchers began looking for translation work or other lucrative forms of moonlighting to supplement their insufficient salaries. And, of course, the content of Middle East studies has undergone a radical transformation. For the social scientists, such notions as “imperialism,” “socialist orientation,” and “international solidarity” have been swiftly abandoned and replaced with what experts now call “the new pragmatism,” which seeks to steer foreign policy away from engaged ideological alliances in the Middle East and towards bettering those state-to-state relations in the region that serve Russian national and economic interests.

The Book of Dede Korkut is an early record of oral Turkic folktales in Anatolia, and as such, one of the mythic charters of Turkish nationalist ideology. The oldest versions of the Book of Dede Korkut consist of two manuscripts copied sometime during the 16th century. The twelve stories that are recorded in these manuscripts are believed to be derived from a cycle of stories and songs circulating among Turkic peoples living in northeastern Anatolia and northwestern Azerbaijan. According to Lewis (1974), an older substratum of these oral traditions dates to conflicts between the ancient Oghuz and their Turkish rivals in Central Asia (the Pecheneks and the Kipchaks), but this substratum has been clothed in references to the 14th-century campaigns of the Akkoyunlu Confederation of Turkic tribes against the Georgians, the Abkhaz, and the Greeks in Trebizond. Such stories and songs would have emerged no earlier than the beginning of the 13th century, andthe written versions that have reached us would have been composed no later than the beginning of the 15th century. By this time, the Turkic peoples in question had been in touch with Islamic civilization for seeral centuries, had come to call themselves "Turcoman" rather than "Oghuz," had close associations with sedentary and urbanized societies, and were participating in Islamized regimes that included nomads, farmers, and townsmen. Some had abandoned their nomadic way of life altogether.

According to its constitution and the ideology of the ruling Ba?th party, Syria is a socialist people's republic with a planned socialist economy. This does not mean, however, that there is no place for a private economic sector: agriculture is almost entirely private,1 as is small-scale industry, almost 90 percent of internal trade, most road transport, tourism, construction, and up to one-third of Syria's foreign trade. There is also a Syrian bourgeoisie apparently flourishing under the auspices of Syrian socialism. Since independence, however, the specific development of Syria's private sector has to a large extent been determined by political decisions, i.e., by decisions of those running state affairs.

Studies of economic activities among the urban poor in various parts of the world have found more variation in the so-called informal sector than they had expected. The urban poor had typically been thought of as a kind of “reserve army” for the formal sector, an underclass at the margins of survival. Even early work that recognized the links between the formal and informal sectors lumped them together as a single class that ranked below all the others. The tendency to regard workers in the informal sector as members of an underclass masked the tremendous variations among them and between informal sectors in different places.

By the first quarter of the 19th century, foreigners and Ottomans alike were keenly aware that the sovereignty of the house of Osman was rapidly eroding. Austrian and Russian armies threatened the empire from without; ethnic revolts and secession beset it from within. Its occasional allies Britain and France ate away at its autonomy through growing economic and political influence. The military threats were apparent, but the Porte was less alert to the dangers its relationships with the Western European powers held for Ottoman hegemony over the peoples of the Balkans and the Arab Middle East.1

The foundation of Abu ʿAbd Allah's movement was that which God Almighty had ordained concerning the victory of His friends' cause, the strengthening of His True Religion and the exaltation of His Word. Abu ʿAbd Allah al-Shiʿi was an Ismaʿili dāʿĪ and the architect of the Fatimid revolution in North Africa. Mobilizing support among the Kutama Berbers, he was able ultimately to overthrow the Aghlabid house and proclaim ʿAbd Allah as the Mahdi and first Fatimid imam in 909.1 Our primary source for Abu ʿAbd Allah's career is al-Qadi al-Nuʿman's Kitāb iftitāḥ al-daʿwa, completed in 957.2 As the official account of the Fatimid rise to power, it is an excellent source for understanding the ideology and propagands of the North African phase of the Fatimid daʿwa. Although the Iftitāḥ is not devoted explicitly to religious/theological questions in the manner of al-Qudi al-Nuʿ man's other writings, an attempt to establish the historical validity of the Fatimid claim to the imamate is implicit throughout the work.The Iftitah is a text of religious significance precisely because it is a historical account of God's action through His human agents to restore the original Islamic community of the Prophet and a righteous political order governed according to God's will, a theme not uncommon in medieval Islam and one to which we shall return later in our discussion. The Iftitah is thus a superb document for ascertaining the Fatimids' perceptions of themselves and how they wanted to appear to a literate audience. Marius Canard, Farhat Dachraoui, and Tilman Nagel have discussed these subjects thoroughly in several works dealing with the Fatimids' North African propaganda.3 My intent here is not to discuss the specific vocabulary of Abu cAbd Allah's daFwa anew, but rather the environment which Abu cAbd Allah proclaimed his "summons to the truth," an environment which enabled him, both by accident and by design, to pattern his career after that of the Prophet.

In the late 1950s and the 1960s, an Egyptian welfare state was developed to provide the economic basis of a new social contract between the Nasser regime and its key class allies. Its main beneficiaries were the men and women of both the middle class and the labor aristocracy, who were to staff and run its expanding state sector. For Egyptian women, who were scorned by the pre-1952 states, the new welfare state offered explicit commitment to public equality for women. It contributed to the development of state feminism as a legal, economic, and ideological strategy to introduce changes to Egyptian society and its gender relations. In its own turn, state feminism contributed to the political legitimacy of Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime and its progressive credentials.

On 9 November 1956, a poem in colloquial Arabic appeared in the month-old Cairo daily al-Masāʾ. The poet was an unknown named Hamid al-Atmas, a carpenter from the Delta city of Damanhur. Entitled “That's It, I'm Off to the Battlefield,” al-Atmas's poem celebrated the worker as soldier, for British and French troops had just landed in Port Said. The narrator states that he will put down his tools—as will many laborers and craftsmen—to go and fight. Following victory, he will return to his shākūsh (hammer) and mingār (plane). This, he stresses, is a people's struggle.1 The point is made no less subtly through the poet's choice of language: the narrator's diction is based on that of shop, home, and street.

In the 1980s, the Iranian economy assumed the burden of an eight-year war that resulted in considerable sacrifice and financial hardship for the Iranian people. Iran also bore the costs associated with the influx of a large number of refugees from neighboring countries. Its public sector was inefficient and its private sector reluctant; both suffered from uncertainty created by suddenly and rapidly changing economic policies. In such circumstances, implementation of the necessary macroeconomic and structural adjustments was a formidable task.

The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) was founded in 1602 and began its trading activities in Iran and the Gulf in 1623, when factories (trading stations) were established in Bandar Abbas and Isfahan, after a favorable commercial treaty had been concluded with Shah Abbas I. This was the beginning of a very profitable trade for the VOC, which throughout the 17th and in the beginning of the 18th century was Iran's most important foreign trading partner. VOC activities in Iran were not restricted to Bandar Abbas and Isfahan: the VOC also had a trading station in Kirman (1697–1739) for the collection of goat's wool, and in 1738 its sphere of activities was extended to Bushire.

Scholary works on Sufism have been almost entirely concerned with the classical textual tradition and have given scant attention to the contemporary practice of Sufism. Such Studies as have been done in Egypt inadequately reflect actual popular beliefs and practices by exhibiting tendencies either to interpret contemporary sufism in light of classical Sufism,to dismiss popular Sufism as a degradation of “true” Sufism,or to conclude, in light of the presentation of Sufism propagated by the Supreme Council of Sufi Orders, that there is nothing that distinguishes contemporary Sufism from any other branch of Islam.Contemporary Sufism must be studied as a complete system, not merely a degradation of another system. It developed from classical Sufism but is not identical with it, and offers a world view and rituals that distinguish it from other Islamic currents. The centrality of devotion to the Prophet and his family is one aspect of Egyptian Sufi religious life that distinguishes it from that of other Egyptian Muslims, and bears interesting parallels to Shicism, perhaps providing evidence for what Marshall Hodgson called "the moulding of Islam as a whole in a ShiStic direction."4 This article will document and analyze devotion to the Prophet and the ahl al-bayt and its associated beliefs in Egyptian Sufism, and compare them with their analogues in ShiSsrn.

One of the most important ways that the members of a society express their cultural preferences is through the names they select for their children. Whether it is made by the elder members of the extended family or the parents of the child, there is no doubt that the choice reveals something about the attitudes and values of the selectors through the name's origins and meaning.

In societies that enjoy a multilinguistic heritage, first names can be divided into categories according to their linguistic origins. This phenomenon is most visible in societies with long histories of encounters among various cultures. One such society is Iran, whose pre-Islamic Persian culture combined with the culture that was introduced by Muslim Arabs after they entered Iran on a religious crusade in the 7th century. While the Arab conquest did not cause the Persian language to be replaced by Arabic, its impact was nevertheless permanent in the thousands of Arabic words that entered into Persian along with the Arabic alphabet.

It was Europeans who started in Egypt a historic preservationist movement for Arab (or Islamic) art.1 It was they who persuaded Khedive Tawfiq to decree, in December 1881, the founding of the Committee for the Conservation of Monuments of Arab Art (hereafter “the Comité,” the usual French designation). It was the European-dominated Comité that opened the Museum of Arab Art three years later, and it was an Englishman, K. A. C. Creswell, who established the Institute of Islamic Archaeology at the Egyptian (later Cairo) University. Why did the Europeans care? In 19th-century Europe, romanticism gave a strong impetus to writers and painters, scholars, and collectors to search for a lost past, the unusual, the exotic, the “Oriental.” This inquiry into the past, at home and abroad, was intimately bound up with Westerners' search for their own identities and with the triumph of the idea of the nation-state. Historic preservationists and museums selected, conserved, and displayed buildings and objects defined as valuable to their national heritages. Romanticism, in part a revolt against classical styles, also spurred a "Gothic revival movement and a fascination with various Oriental styles.

[Reza Khan] seemed to me a strong and fearless man who had his country's good at heart. —Sir Edmund Ironside, recalling late 1920 Reza… has never spoken for himself, nor… [his] Government… but only on behalf of his country… —Sir Percy Loraine, January 1922 He is secretive, suspicious and ignorant; he appears wholly unable to grasp the realities of the situation or to realise the force of the hostility he has aroused. —Harold Nicolson, September 1926 I fear we can do nothing to humanise this bloodthirsty lunatic. —Sir Robert Vansittart, December 1933 Born in obscurity about 1878 and soon orphaned, Reza Pahlavi enlisted at fifteen in a Russian-officered Cossack brigade. Rising through the ranks, he provided force for a February 1921 coup d'état, seizing power for journalist Sayyid Zia alDin Tabatabai. Reza Khan provided strength in the new government and rose from army commander to minister of war (April 1921) to prime minister (1923) and, after failing to make a republic in 1924, to the throne in 1925. As shah he ruled with increasingly arbitrary power until Britain and Russia deposed him in 1941. He died in exile in 1944.

From March until late April 1919 Egypt suffered one of the great peasant revolts of her history and of the 20th century.1 Contemporaries viewed it as having international importance because it was the result of thirty years of European domination, and its resolution would be likely to affect all Western colonial empires.2 For us, it marks the emergence of Egyptian liberalism and the construction of the modern state.3.

The insurrection began when four leaders of the Egyptian national movement were arrested on 9 March 1919. They were then exiled to Malta for insisting that the Egyptian delegation (wafd) to the Versailles Conference be recognized, so that it could demand that Egypt be accepted as an independent national state.

The study of revolutions now deals as much with states and structures as it does with revolutionaries and their ideologies, in contrast to an older school, which sought their origins in the accumulation of individual grievances. This latter approach inspired many studies of revolutionary “counter-elites,” comparing them in particular to the ruling elites. The new importance placed on structural factors for the genesis and success or failure of revolutions does not render these older studies irrelevant, but it should change the way we understand their results.Revolutionaries,Theda Skocpol argued, are above all would-be state builders, and their origins show as much. In France, Russia, and China they “precipitated out of the ranks of relatively highly educated groups oriented to state activities or employments …[a]and from among those who were somewhat marginal to the established classes and governing elites under the Old Regimes.” ' Studies of many other countries have also found that revolutionary leaders combine an unusually high level of education with a modest social status that blocks their ascent to power under the prevailing regime.2 Revolutionaries are also more likely to have a cosmopolitan or international orientation that inclines them to be critical of their own societies. This orientation at least partly derives from the high incidence of foreign education and travel among them. Higher education and foreign travel provide revolutionaries with links to "fields of power" in the state and the international system.3

The succession crisis and civil war that followed the death of Caliph Harun alRashid in 809 is a gloomy chapter in the history of the Abbasid caliphate in its prime that captured the attention of later medieval Muslim scholars. Their main challenge lay in trying to find an appropriate rationale for justifying the conflict between the caliph's sons, al-Amin and al-Maʾmun, and the fate of the community under a caliphate seized by force for the first time in the Abbasid era. The destruction wrought by the civil war on the capital, Baghdad, combined with the spread of factional strife to other provinces of the caliphate, presented an ethical and religious dilemma reminiscent to contemporaries of the early Islamic fitnas. Conscious of this parallel, the chronicler al-Tabari, writing a century later, devotes considerably more space to the years of the civil war than he does to the reigns of al-Rashid and al-Maʾmun that bracketed it.