In their love for sports, Egyptians are no different from people in other parts of the world. They follow closely their favorite local teams in national-cup competitions, the careers of those stars who have taken their games to professional clubs in Europe, and, of course, the fortunes of their national teams in international competition. Success, such as Egypt's victory in the 2008 Africa Cup of Nations can draw millions into the streets of Cairo and Alexandria in celebration. Losses can result in full-scale political investigations launched by President Hosni Mubarak.

Nationalization was a fatal mistake and so was privatization. Both had the same adverse effect on industrial production. . . . The state could have achieved control over production by undertaking new investments without touching existing private entities. . . . The original size even of a company as large as Mahalla Spinning and Weaving Co. was only 10–12% of its subsequent size as a public sector company. . . . As Minister of Industry, I suffered the consequences of indiscriminate nationalization by having to spend disproportionate time on production issues of small industrial units. . . .

Autograph books (“memory books”) circulate among adolescent students, who fill their pages with dedications, memories, and wishes for the future. Although related genres like yearbooks and personal websites are replacing them, in East Jerusalem the tradition continues to evolve alongside newer media. In interviews with Palestinian women about the memories evoked by these keepsakes, I delve into the turbulent period of adolescence to explore such issues as friendship, romance, school, and home life. I treat autograph books as records of the changes that have occurred in Palestinian youth culture over the last fifty years and as catalysts for women's reflections about these changes.

With this issue, I say a bittersweet goodbye to my life as IJMES editor. It has been a privilege to serve the Middle East studies community and to enjoy a front-row seat on the accomplishments and dynamism of our field. IJMES has long been an inclusive journal; scholars of different disciplines, origins, ranks, and theoretical persuasions submit their work. I have enjoyed reading it all and have been much encouraged by the originality, erudition, and overall quality of scholarship in our field. At a time when information, analysis, and understanding of the Middle East have been in short supply in many dimensions of public discourse, most scholars in our field have not wavered in their commitment to the high standards and intellectual honesty that must inform scholarly endeavors if they are to merit the name.

Like much of the “developing world,” Syria experienced urban population growth at historically unprecedented rates in the 1950s. Such rapid urbanization, like all transformative historical phenomena, animates (and, to a certain extent, reifies) a host of dreams and anxieties in those who experience it. To get an inkling of how “Syrians”—as individuals, groups, or representatives of institutions—felt about these changes, one has to look beyond the ubiquitous and frequent pronouncements of intellectuals and government officials extolling the virtues of modernity and the liberating effects of science and technology.

From a float decorated as their ibis-headed Egyptian namesake, tarboosh-topped members of the Krewe of Thoth toss trinkets to happy throngs along St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. The occasion is Mardi Gras—not a day but a season in this legendary American city. Along with Thoth parade the krewes (social clubs) of Babylon, Isis, and Cleopatra, among others, the last group winding through Algiers, the second-oldest neighborhood in New Orleans, on the west bank of the Mississippi across from the French Quarter.

Do purple designer kufiyas spell the end of Palestine solidarity?

Kufiyas, especially multicolored ones, started becoming fashionable U.S. urban hipster wear around 2005. They are so trendy, in fact, that W's Meggan Crum called the restyled kufiya featured in French designer Nicholas Ghesquière's fall 2007 Balenciaga fashion line, and worn by Brazilian supermodel Flavia de Oliveira, one of “Fall 2007's Top Ten Accessories.” Meanwhile, over the last couple of years, kufiyas of all colors have been spotted on such celebrities as Mary-Kate Olsen, Kirsten Dunst, Cameron Diaz, Colin Farrell, David Beckham, Justin Timberlake, and even John McCain's daughter Meghan. In spring 2007, Urban Outfitters marketed the kufiya, in several colors, as an “anti-war woven scarf” until protests prompted the cancellation of the line—but not the sale of the item. It is available in the winter 2008 catalog, described now as a “houndstooth scarf.”

Political speeches and even policy analysis from Washington, Ottawa, and the capitals of Europe about promoting democratization have tended in the past two decades toward generalities and platitudes. This research asks what Western and international agencies actually do on the ground in the Middle East to foment democracy. Taking my inspiration from the sociologist Albert Hirschman, who decades ago observed that projects are “privileged particles” of socio-economic development assistance, I have collected well over 1,200 examples. This summary table illustrates the aggregate finding that most projects cluster around electoral representation, legal or judicial development, and support for liberal elements of civil society—and that they are mostly about collecting or distributing information or supporting institutions to do this work.

Population surveys and census records, in addition to providing valuable human statistical information, have enormous potential to act as luminary tools for identity construction and conceptualization. How governmental agencies identify a population can also provide insights into a regime's motives, rationale, and ideology. The tables presented here are taken from the annual prison survey conducted by the Ottoman Prison Administration from 1912 to 1918 and shed light on the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) or CUP's conceptualizations of difference. CUP was the main ruling organization in the Ottoman Empire during this period.

During the period from 1900 to 1950, the production and deployment of photographic images of the Egyptian child by Egyptian adults played a role in nationalism, a role as yet unstudied by historians of Egypt or of photography. The studio portrait selected here represents the commonly produced genre of photographs that showed Egyptian children as technologically capable and possessing Western symbols of progress. This picture of two girls and one boy surrounding an adult man's bike—whose wheels are larger than the smallest child and on whose seat seems to be placed the decorative vase of flowers in the backdrop—suggests that the children are present in the living room not to ride the bike but rather to show off their possession of a modern means of transportation (and perhaps to learn about it from the books resting on the bike's rear rack).

By all accounts, the population of enslaved Africans in Egypt increased in the 19th century compared to earlier times. An estimated 5,000 African slaves were imported annually during the 1840s and 1850s, and as few as 1,000 in 1860. However, during the cotton boom (1861–64), some 25,000 to 30,000 slaves were brought to Egypt each year to satisfy the demand for labor generated by the rapid expansion of cotton cultivation.

For years, I struggled with the presentation of the category of “Middle East” to my students at Howard University, a historically black college. Like many of their professors, my students did not consider North Africa to be part of Africa. The reason was simple: the study of the continent was bifurcated between two fields, African and Middle East studies. African studies focused on sub-Saharan Africa; North Africa was the purview of Middle East studies.

In December 2008, the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) released its thirteenth annual report on offsets in the U.S. defense trade. This chart displays numbers for the BIS category Middle East/Africa, taken from these reports beginning in 1993. Offsets are a variety of industrial and commercial incentives that defense firms provide to foreign governments to facilitate purchases, from coproduction of particular weapons systems to overseas investment. They have become such big business in the Middle East that a system has evolved to allow defense contractors to bank and trade offset credits like any other investment. Unlike ordinary investments, however, offsets represent transfers of substantial resources to authoritarian governments under conditions of near total unaccountability. Because offsets are usually a percentage of the overall contract value, regimes that spend more on weapons get more in offsets.

Certain conditions of the contemporary period are bringing to the fore a shifting regional politics in which today's young people, the most numerous and educated generation in history, are recognized simultaneously as critical objects and agents of change. Youth in the Muslim Middle East are struggling to exert their youthfulness in the present and prepare for life transitions in the future in a context of ubiquitous neoliberal reforms, authoritarian regimes, and ongoing regional conflicts with no resolution in sight. At the same time, due to their sheer numbers and the meteoric spread of ever mutating youth-led cultures and movements via horizontal spaces made possible by the new media and information and communication technology (ICT), youth embody a force of cultural regeneration.

The “origins problem” has loomed large in the historiography of nationalism in the Arab Middle East and for good reason: it is constitutive and representative of other issues surrounding the problem of nationalism. George Antonius published the first iteration of what might be termed the “standard [origins] narrative” in 1938. Since that time, the narrative has undergone a number of revisions, the most notable of which are by C. Ernest Dawn, Philip S. Khoury, and Rashid Khalidi, among others.

One of the oldest extant documents in Islamic history records a set of deeds executed by Muhammad after his migration (hijra) in 622 from Mecca to Yathrib, subsequently known as “the City [madīna] of the Prophet.” Marking the beginning of the Islamic era, the document comprising the deeds has been the subject of well over a century of modern scholarship and is commonly called the “Constitution of Medina”—with some justification, although the first modern scholar who studied it at the end of the 19th century, Julius Wellhausen, more accurately described it as the “municipal charter” (Gemeindeordnung) of Medina. In 1889, Wellhausen highlighted the text's antiquity, which has been acknowledged by even the most skeptical of contemporary “source-critical” scholars, Patricia Crone, who thinks that, in Ibn Ishaq's Sira, “it sticks out like a piece of solid rock in an accumulation of rubble.”

Arab nationalism has received the attention of a fairly large number of scholars since its inception at the turn of the 20th century. It did not receive its first full treatment, however, until 1938, when George Antonius published The Arab Awakening. This book set the tone for much that was to follow—as statements of confirmation, elaboration, or refutation.

For most of the last century, within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region youth have been addressed and engaged as a particular category of citizens. In this vein youth were viewed as important targets of nationalist projects and as critical national resources in an era of national development. In more recent years, however, the concern with youth has taken on a new tenor both within and outside the region. What had previously been a preoccupation about youth as the region's promise and progress has increasingly become one about youth as crisis and potential threat.

In Pensée 1, “Africa on My Mind,” Mervat Hatem questions the perceived wisdom of creating the African Studies Association (focused on sub-Saharan Africa) and the Middle East Studies Association a decade later, which “institutionalized the political bifurcation of the African continent into two academic fields.” The cleaving of Africa into separate and distinct parts—a North Africa/Middle East and a sub-Saharan Africa—rendered a great disservice to all Africans: it has fractured dialogue, research, and policy while preventing students and scholars of Africa from articulating a coherent understanding of the continent.