Eastern Christians and Christianity have been elided from Middle Eastern studies. The purpose of this roundtable is to bring their stories back into scholarly focus through the interventions of five scholars: Febe Armanios, Bernard Heyberger, Fiona McCallum, Paul Rowe, and Nelly van Doorn-Harder.

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, we aim to evaluate the records of executive branches of the Lebanese government that are involved in public social spending in terms of their ability to respond to need. Second, we attempt to uncover the criteria underlying the distribution of public social spending. The allocation of funds across sectors and administrative districts is evaluated according to a vector of the socioeconomic characteristics of each locality thought to be of relevance. We find that the association between need and spending is, at best, very loose. When we use the geographical distribution of spending and voting data from each locality to estimate each religious sect's share of public spending, we find a striking conformity between the sectarian composition of the population and each sect's estimated share of national public spending. The logic of the disbursement of public funds and the mechanism underlying the observed one-man one-dollar distribution rule—a rule with primacy over health, education, and infrastructure needs as well as imbalances across regions—is that distribution be balanced across sects.

Both portrait and landscape, historical scene and contemporary monument, and, ultimately, both engraving and photograph, this image contains the keys to a significant story from modern Armenian cultural history. In the years following World War I hundreds of Armenians immigrated to the United States, where through the creation of objects such as this picture, they reconstituted their community, emphasizing the longevity of their history, their unity as a minority culture, and their identity as a diaspora.

Teaching is never merely a technical, pedagogical issue. This is especially true of Arabic teaching in Israel. Two related factors have conditioned the evolution of Arabic instruction in Israel in various, often contradictory ways. One is the Zionist modernist project of inventing a Jewish nation by bracketing off Jews from gentiles and reconstituting them as a distinct Hebraic ethno-linguistic community. The other is the project of securing historic Palestine as an exclusive national homeland for this newly invented nation and the consequent ambivalence toward Arab existence in historic Palestine. Both make up what I term Zionist sectarianism, and their influence on Arabic pedagogy has been decisive and pervasive, yet contradictory and unpredictable, demonstrating that although practice is always political, it is never mechanically reducible to its political underpinnings.

To consider in what ways incorporating the emerging field of environmental history into studies of the Middle East challenges our views of the past and/or present, it is necessary first to take stock of our mainstream notions of the environment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and how we think it has changed over the last several thousand years. The most common received wisdom about the environment in the MENA is that it is an arid, marginal environment, in many places a wasteland degraded by overgrazing and deforestation for hundreds if not thousands of years. The local populations, especially nomads and small farmers, are frequently blamed for the alleged environmental ruin. Born in large part of Western imperialism in the region, this environmental imaginary of the MENA has been uncritically adopted by the majority of postindependence ruling elites as well as development agencies.

The greatest accomplishment of the past ten to twenty years of scholarship on Christian groups in Middle Eastern states is the way scholars have recognized the agency of a population long objectified in both academic and polemical circles. Christians have long been viewed as the object of other actors. For some, they were mere products of Muslim societies that imposed upon them the debatably restricted or protected status of ahl al-dhimma. For others, they were the appendages of external forces determined to use them as devices of their interests. The concerns of such external forces only contributed to Christians' portrayal as vehicles of imperialism. Although these tropes persist, over the last several years many scholars have begun to explore the ways in which Arab and other Middle Eastern Christians operate as subjects in their own right.

The books that are the subject of this review essay comprise three new contributions and one revised edition about a topic that has become paradigmatic in defining scholarly and political approaches to key areas of Middle Eastern history. It has shaped studies of the historical and ideological roots of Arab nationalism, the Arab–Israeli conflict, and the emergence and perseverance of authoritarian regimes in the modern Middle East. The ways that politicians, intellectuals, political movements, and the Arab public related to Nazism and Nazi anti-Semitism have been used to contest the legitimacy of 20th-century Arab political movements across the ideological spectrum. Historians have theorized about the involvement of individuals such as Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini in the crimes of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Adolf Eichmann; the roots of Arab nationalist doctrine in German Volk ideas; the mimicry of Nazism in organizations such as the Iraqi al-Futuwwa and Antun Saadeh's Syrian Social Nationalist Party; and Arab public sympathies for Nazi anti-Semitism dating from the 1930s or even earlier. Until recently, European and Anglo-American research on these topics—often based on a history of ideas approach—tended to take a natural affinity of Arabs toward Nazism for granted. More recent works have contextualized authoritarian and totalitarian trends in the Arab world within a broad political spectrum, choosing subaltern perspectives and privileging the analysis of local voices in the press over colonial archives and the voices of grand theoreticians. The works of Israel Gershoni have taken the lead in this emerging scholarship of Arab nationalism. This approach was also the common denominator of a research project on “Arab Encounters with National Socialism,” which the Berlin Center for Modern Oriental Studies (Zentrum Moderner Orient) hosted from 2000 to 2003. Its members included the author of this review and the authors of two of the books under review (Nordbruch and Wildangel). The project used indigenous Arabic sources, especially local newspapers, for a close scrutiny of Arab reactions to the challenge of Nazism in a period when Arabs, especially nationalists, perceived that quasicolonial regimes undermined the ostensibly democratic and liberal ethos of the British and French Mandate powers.

On 13 July 2005, the Bursa edition of the Turkish daily Hürriyet announced the inauguration of a clock tower in the small Anatolian town of Çınarcık. The clock tower, which stands thirteen meters (roughly forty-three feet) tall, comprises a square-sectioned, white-colored, and fluted Classical column atop which a cube with four yellow-rimmed clock dials sits. Metal pennants, also colored white, project from the corners of the cube. Despite its questionable aesthetic qualities, the town's mayor, Murat Erdoğan, claims it “beautified” Çınarcık. Erdoğan further explains that Çınarcık had sorely needed a clock tower and that the city is happy to have finally built one.

This essay is an attempt to reflect on the past and on possible futures of the historiography of Pahlavi Iran. At its root stands the observation that with the rise of the autocratic Pahlavi dynasty, the state began to cast a long shadow over the way journalists, intellectuals, and scholars saw modern Iran. Key actors—Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1921–41) and his bureaucratic elite, and Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1941–79) and his technocratic elite—produced an image of the state as a unit completely detached from society and omnipotent enough to be the ultimate reference point for all developments be they social, cultural, or economic.

When I was preparing my PhD in 1993, the subject “Eastern Christians” or “Christians in the Islamic World” was almost nonexistent in the mass media or in scholarly works. In fact, I prepared my thesis not under the supervision of a specialist in the Middle East but rather under that of a specialist in European Catholicism during the early modern era.

As environmental history migrates to the Middle East there is natural excitement about new research methods such as molecular biology and soil science. But the Braudelian project of describing “man in his intimate relationship to the earth which bears and feeds him” may be complicated by echoes of the region's literary past.

Research on the Copts of Egypt has developed especially rapidly in new directions during the past twenty years. Having started as a corollary of Egyptology, it is advancing from the study of the early Christian centuries to include medieval, early modern, and contemporary Coptic Studies. Concurrently, Coptic issues are being inserted into studies of Egypt in general. Publications on the 19th century mostly ignored Copts, but they were given stereotypical cameo appearances in the prolific research on the profound transformations in 20th-century Egyptian society.

When in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and South African apartheid soon followed, it appeared even to political realists of the period that such systems, with their landscapes of walls and practices of separation, would rapidly be consigned to historical memory. In one of the great ironies of recent history, however, a new generation of such landscapes is proliferating in the wake of 1989, used by practitioners of power to promote systems of segregation and control movements of groups designated as threats by virtue of their representation as “other.” Reflecting collective psychologies of fear, these environments range from urban-based gated communities, where class prejudices against the poor and apprehension about crime coalesce in “fortified enclaves” within Cities of Walls, to borderlands between nation–states where hostility to immigrants and prejudices against ethnic others converge in creating what scholars describe as The Wall Around the West. Despite differences, these landscapes share a similar aim: they use built environments as defensive fortifications to preempt the circulation of people across territorial space based on class, religious, and ethnic divides. In this way, gated communities in São Paulo and Los Angeles, the walled borderlands of Melilla and Ceuta separating the European Union from Africa, and the walled border of Operation Gatekeeper separating the United States from Mexico, are broadly comparable.

The environmental history of the post-1500 Mediterranean (including the Middle East) has the potential to add significantly to our understanding of the history of the region. However, this is only if it is understood as a perspective (and not just a new specialization) that has the power to transform how we view familiar subjects. A ghettoized environmental history takes us nowhere nor do environmental histories that claim to explain everything. Let's take the role of pastoralism as one example of how an environmental perspective can reshape our understanding of the history of the modern Middle East.

Consider the data from the painstaking economic analysis of contemporary camel transport in Pakistan done by Alan Heston and several Pakistani associates in 1985 (see Table 1). It shows the typical annual costs and income in rupees of someone earning his livelihood by renting out a pack camel.

In Egypt, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, older, fragmented, and more localized forms of identity were replaced with new, alternative concepts of community, which for the first time had the capacity to collectively encompass the majority of Egyptians. The activism of Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908) and the populist message of the Watani Party began the process of defining and popularizing urban Egyptian nationalism. After Kamil's premature death in 1908, there was more of an “urgent need,” as described by Zachary Lockman, for “tapping into and mobilizing new domestic constituencies in order to build a more broadly based independence movement.” This article argues that the eventual mobilization of the Egyptian urban masses, and their “incorporation into the Egyptian nation,” was due in large part to the materialization of a variety of mass media catering to a growing national audience. To be more specific, I will examine early Egyptian nationalism through the lens of previously neglected audiovisual colloquial Egyptian sources. This, I argue, is crucial to any attempt at capturing the voice of “ordinary” Egyptians. Finally, the article documents the role of early colloquial Egyptian mass culture as a vehicle and forum through which, among other things, “hidden transcripts” of resistance and critiques of colonial and elite authority took place.

The study of Coptic history usually brings to mind gnostic texts, remote monastic enclaves, archeological ruins, conflicts with Byzantium, or a long-forgotten language. Until recently, a disproportionate focus on early Christianity has bound Copts to an ancient and seemingly timeless heritage, which explains the dearth of critical examinations on Coptic life from the Islamic conquests to the early modern period. In general, Coptic experiences after 641 have been overshadowed by other themes in Egyptian history writing, in particular political and military changes. Although the latter are as relevant for a better understanding of the Coptic past, they have been predominately examined from the perspective of the Muslim majority, exclusive of Coptic concerns, perspectives, and beliefs. Only in recent years has scholarship on Copts begun to expand. Scholars have drawn from fields such as papyrology, gender studies, art history, and law in pursuit of a more comprehensive historical narrative. We are increasingly encouraged to evaluate the Coptic experience not only as a missing cog in Egyptian historiography but also as one that complicates canonical studies of postconquest Egypt and enriches our understanding of Middle Eastern history in general.