Vote buying and vote selling are prominent features of electoral politics in Lebanon. This article investigates how vote trafficking works in Lebanese elections and examines how electoral rules and practices contribute to wide and lively vote markets. Using original survey data from the 2009 parliamentary elections, it studies vote selling with a list experiment, a question technique designed to elicit truthful answers to sensitive questions. The data show that over half of the Lebanese sold their votes in 2009. Moreover, once we come to grips with the sensitivity of the topic, the data show that members of all sectarian communities and political alliances sold their votes at similar rates.

Looking at the trajectories of people of Muslim origin in Egypt who express religious doubts, I argue in this article that doubt and nonreligiosity are not necessarily a child of a Christian genealogy of the secular and definitely not alien to Muslims. Instead, we have to understand them as an intimate moral discontent with the contemporary age of Islamic revival, even if their shape and some of their positive claims are borrowed from notions of Western origin and global currency—most notably, human rights and feminism. There are reasons and ways to become a nonbeliever in a society profoundly affected by a religious revival, and these reasons and ways can be telling about the nature of doubt and certainty in general. They also offer a perspective on the problematic of secularism that focuses on issues of belief and existential trust rather than governmentality and discursive power.

This article presents a microhistory of an early 20th-century Tunisian intellectual, Salih Suwaysi, within the context of cross-regional (Maghrib–Mashriq) literary and intellectual trends. Analyzing Suwaysi's use of the conventional literary genre of maqāmāt illustrates his deep understanding of the problems caused by France's occupation of Tunisia and highlights the significance of historical and contemporary urban space for the author. Revitalized during the nahḍa period, maqāmāt were employed by writers to address issues and problems facing contemporary society, in contrast to some of the earlier maqāmāt that focused on language and language structure more than on narrative content. Suwaysi followed his eastern Mediterranean, especially Egyptian, contemporaries in turning to this genre to convey his critical commentaries on social, religious, and political life under the French Protectorate in Tunisia.

The concept of al-walāʾ wa-l-barāʾ (loyalty to Islam, Muslims, and God and disavowal of everything else) has developed in various ways in Wahhabi discourse since the 19th century. This can partly be ascribed to the civil war that caused the collapse of the second Saudi state (1824–91) and the lessons that both quietist and radical Wahhabi scholars have drawn from that episode. In this article, I contend that Wahhabi contestations of al-walāʾ wa-l-barāʾ can be divided into two distinct trends—one social and the other political—and that both show the enduring legacy of the second Saudi state, which can still be discerned in Wahhabi scholarly writings on the subject of al-walāʾ wa-l-barāʾ today.

Professional attorneyship emerged in the Ottoman Empire in tandem with the consolidation of the Nizamiye (“regular”) court system during the late 19th century. This article analyzes the emergence of an Ottoman legal profession, emphasizing two developments. First, the Nizamiye courts advanced a formalist legal culture, exhibited, inter alia, by the expansion of legal procedure. Whereas the pre-19th century court of law was highly accessible to lay litigants, the proceduralization of court proceedings in the 19th century limited the legibility of the judicial experience to legal experts, rendering legal counseling almost indispensible in civil and criminal litigation. Second, the reformers made efforts to render state-granted legal license a sign of professional competence, presenting a formal distinction between the old “agents” (vekils), who lacked formal legal training, and the professional “trial attorneys” (dava vekils). In practice, however, lawyers of both categories had to adapt to the Nizamiye formalist culture.

This article explores the vitally important yet often neglected role of medicine and health care in the conduct of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). Using French, Swiss, and recently opened Algerian archival materials, it demonstrates how Algerian nationalists developed a health-service infrastructure that targeted the domestic and international arenas. It argues that they employed the powerful language of health and healing to legitimize their claims for national sovereignty and used medical organizations to win local support, obtain financial and material aid from abroad, and recast themselves as humanitarians to an increasingly sympathetic international audience. This research aims to situate Algerian efforts into a broader history of decolonization and humanitarianism and contributes to rethinking the process through which political claims were made at the end of empire.

This paper traces the emergence of folklore studies and ethnography in interwar Iran. It argues that these disciplines were part of larger nationalist projects of representing and speaking for the “masses.” The first part of the paper explores how and why a number of Iranian intellectuals engaged in folklore studies after a period of prolonged political activism in the first few decades of the 20th century. The second part of the paper examines cultural institutions established by the state, mainly in the late 1930s, in an attempt to appropriate and institutionalize folklore studies and ethnography for the purposes of nation building. These efforts were fraught with ambivalences because the “masses” were simultaneously praised as repositories of “authenticity” and looked down upon as a potential source of “backwardness.”

How can scholars of Sudan now write about the landmass still called “Sudan”? What do we mean when we use the word? How can the name, which denotes a whole, encompass the fragments that make up its official boundaries? For the last several years, events in Sudan have been changing more rapidly than we Sudanists can analyze them or than Sudanese themselves can process them. Now, in its truncated form, delineating national identity—always problematic in the past—becomes far more complex. Considering extant cultural flows of art, language, customs, and religion, the dividing lines are, at best, dubious. A number of events are transpiring at the moment of writing this brief essay that have changed and will continue to change the future of not just one country but now two. For example, nothing is resolved in Darfur (in western Sudan), with peace talks stalled, more violence being perpetrated by the northern central government and its proxies, guerilla groups proliferating and battling among themselves, and a probable link among some Darfur groups and South Sudan forces.

The purpose of this roundtable is to discuss the major methodological and theoretical challenges involved in economic research in the context of Middle Eastern/Islamic history. We asked scholars representing a diverse spectrum of training and specialization to reflect on the state of the field (or the sub-fields with which they are familiar) and to comment on its (their) strengths and shortcomings. The participants had the opportunity to read all papers and modify their own contributions accordingly. The result, we believe, is a focused and critical conversation that reflects the plurality of opinions and approaches in the field. Outside of conference panels and small-scale workshops, exclusively methodological and theoretical exchanges in Middle Eastern/Islamic economic history are rare. We hope that this forum will stimulate further conversation and research on the issues discussed here.

This article explores the role that Christianity played in the decolonization of Algeria and in particular how the complex relationship between Christianity and colonialism under French rule shaped the rhetoric and actions of Christians during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). Using the case of a 1957 trial in the military tribunal of Algiers in which twelve Europeans were charged with crimes ranging from distributing propaganda for the National Liberation Front to sheltering suspected communist and nationalist militants, I demonstrate how “Christian” rhetoric became one of the major means through which the conduct of the war and the defense of French Algeria were debated. While conservative defenders of French Algeria claimed that actions such as those of the Christians on trial led to the erasure of Christianity in North Africa, I argue that such actions and moral positions allowed for the continued presence of Christianity in Algeria after independence.

Since its political independence in 1956, Sudan has witnessed the rise of armed ethnic and regional protest movements that have resulted in great human suffering and the largest number of refugees and displaced peoples in Africa. These protest movements have challenged the legitimacy of the independent Sudanese state, led by Arabized and Islamized elites at the pinnacle of power, to extend and define citizenship rights and responsibilities. In Darfur, Southern Kordofan, and Blue Nile, these movements are not only currently demanding equal citizenship rights, but they are also demanding recognition of special rights including claims to land, autonomous government, and the maintenance of ethno-national identities. They are thus opening up a debate about what citizenship entails, particularly in a multicultural context; how the current state reconciles competing claims of citizenship; and what kinds of viable institutional mechanisms are required for an effective relationship between the state, its citizens, and local power structures.

This article examines the administration of Hacı Mustafa Pasha, the military governor of Belgrade from 1793 to 1801. His appointment to this strategically located post was at odds with the contemporary trend in Ottoman provincial politics. Unlike most high-ranking provincial officials at this time, especially in the Balkans, Mustafa Pasha was not among the wealthy and militarily powerful ayan (local notables) but rather a career bureaucrat. His tumultuous and ultimately tragic administration reveals that his appointment was part of the attempt by Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807) to recentralize provincial governance. This study also provides a sociopolitical portrait of Belgrade and the surrounding region during the 18th century, as well as a brief look at the dangerous alliance of ayan and the janissaries.

The division of Sudan into two countries on 9 July 2011 following the self-determination referendum of 9 January represents a rare development in Africa. Few examples exist of new state formations in the continent after the end of the colonial period. Answering the call of the IJMES editor to reflect on what this event will mean for our understanding of Sudan might take us in several directions. Let me use this opportunity to comment on two themes that have concerned me lately: the role of the state and the possibility that multiple national identities will evolve in North and South Sudan.

One may say that our field has had a respectable crop of scholars engaged in research and numerous important publications to its credit. Past investigations of the agricultural sector have included excellent coverage of taxation systems and tax rates, good coverage of cultivation methods and crops, not very thorough coverage of landholding patterns, and almost no studies of productivity rates. For the manufacturing sector we have very good coverage of manufacturing techniques and good coverage of labor organization and division of labor but little on the productivity rates of individual sectors such as textiles, on apprenticeship and wages for either skilled or unskilled labor, or on the relationship of wages to prices. We have important studies on both regional and long-distance trade and commerce, including on routes and trade-related institutions and on tools of trade such as credit and investment partnerships (qirād/commenda), and related studies regarding urbanization, exchange, and markets. The auxiliary fields of numismatics and archeology have yielded important studies on coinage and minting and on settlement patterns that are likely to improve our grasp of the economic history of the medieval Middle East. We also have at our disposal volumes of statistical data, collected from literary and documentary sources, on prices, wages, commodities, weights, measures, and coins. Several online projects scrutinizing data from primary sources, mainly papyri and Geniza documents, yield more figures, though mostly on the economic history of early Islamic societies. Among the lacunae are studies related to topics such as economic institutions, property rights, standards of living and inequality, GDP estimations, sector productivity, market integration, exogenous shocks, and economic growth.

For the majority of Iranians who went through the Islamic Revolution of 1979 with high hopes, the “Spring of Freedom” (Bahar-i Azadi) never really bloomed except perhaps on the specially minted gold coins issued in March 1979 by the Provisional Government of Mahdi Bazargan. Revolutionary optimism quickly died out and gave way to a long winter of discontent. For the peoples of the Arab world who are presently witnessing an “Arab Spring,” the turn of events may be different. Though the current movement has yet to fully unfold, potentially taking months or even years, and though it is unrealistic to generalize about all Arab countries as if they were one monolithic unit, there are features that set today's movements apart from the 1979 Iranian Revolution as much as there are striking parallels.

This article examines the activism of Tunisian university students in the late 1960s. During the series of events surrounding the student protests of March 1968 at the University of Tunis, political activists across Tunisia and France forged communication networks or drew upon existing ones in order to further their political claims. The objectives of this article are to investigate the historical roots of these transnational networks in the colonial and postcolonial periods as well as to integrate Tunisia within the “global 1968.” Through an analysis of student protests and government reactions, I argue that ties with the former metropole shaped students’ demands and that a strictly national perspective of events is insufficient. In response to state repression, Tunisian activists shifted their struggle from global anti-imperialism toward the expansion of human rights on the national level. The networks proliferated over the course of 1968 and beyond as concrete realities shaped the direction of new claims.

Last spring, while Tunisians and Egyptians erupted in the most determined and optimistic political protest movements seen in two generations, southern Sudanese prepared to secede. And in July, after months of watching dramatic images from the demonstrators in Tahrir Square, the world was presented with pictures of a new country with a beautiful, colorful new flag, of thousands of people who had voted into existence the Republic of South Sudan. On Al-Jazeera, CNN, and BBC, interviews with southern Sudanese revealed the profound relief and freedom that these new citizens felt as they repeated the word “liberation” to describe their feelings in this heady moment of independence.

Until recently the discipline of economic history was concerned mostly with the Industrial Revolution and the period since. A large majority of the research and writing focused on Great Britain, western Europe, and the United States. There has been a striking change in the last three decades. Economic historians today are much more interested in the earlier periods: the early modern and medieval eras and even the ancient economies of the Old World. They have been gathering empirical materials and employing various theories to make sense of the evolution of these economies. Equally important, there has been a resurgence in the studies of developing regions of the world. Global economic history, focusing on all regions of the world and their interconnectedness since ancient times, is on its way to becoming a major field of study. Even the Industrial Revolution, the most central event of economic history, is being studied and reinterpreted today not as a British or even western European event but as a breakthrough resulting from many centuries of interaction between Europe and the rest of the world.

In the thirty-two years from 1979 to 2011 there have been numerous mass movements in Iran and several Arab countries that have overthrown or threatened rulers who seemed secure for several decades. By September 2011, the shah of Iran and the presidents of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya had been overthrown; of those, only the anti-Qaddafi revolt had outside (NATO) help. Major popular movements had also threatened the rulers of Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria. Iran had seen the massive Green Movement in 2009, aimed primarily at fraud in that year's presidential elections. Among the questions that emerge regarding these movements are the following: Why did they arise when they did? Why were they not predicted? How much influence did one or more of these movements have on the others? Why were some movements successful and others, thus far, not? Some of these questions will demand long study and analysis, which may not lead to a consensus. Here will be a preliminary brief discussion of a few of them, with stress on the question of influence.

Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa in all disciplines can learn much about their favored topics of interest through the study of music and related cultural practices. However, professional and often personal limitations have precluded awareness of the rich potential that music offers for analyses of Middle Eastern and North African societies. Typically music and the performing arts have been the purview of specialists in ethnomusicology, anthropology of music, and performance studies. Music and other sonic phenomena have been routinely marginalized if not ignored by scholars in Middle East studies, who, to a surprising extent, have reproduced conservative Muslim opinion regarding music by leaving it out of their analyses. Even the majority of ethnographic texts on the region depict Middle Easterners as living in near silence. When scholars have explored the ways in which music and expressive culture might shed light on their areas of expertise, they have tended to apply the conceptual tools of their home disciplines to the study of music: hence we have the sociology and anthropology of music, the history and politics of music and performance, and so on. Music in these studies remains a (usually passive) expression of more fundamental forces, reproducing the marginal position that music, and the arts in general, typically enjoy in Western societies—at best serving as an analytic tool but too seldom understood as an agent itself.