This is the last issue of the International Journal of Middle East Studies under my editorship. I want to express my thanks to the Middle East Studies Association for having entrusted me with its flagship for these past five years. It has been a great pleasure to work with the editorial board and book review editors, with authors and referees, to pursue the best academic writing on the region. I am especially grateful to editorial assistant Alissa Surges and to the graduate students who helped over the years with the journal in Ann Arbor—Josh Greenbaum, Najeeb Jan, Rob Haug, and Wesley Williams, among others. The International Institute, the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, and other departments and institutions at the University of Michigan supported the enterprise.

On 24 July 1660, a great conflagration broke out in Istanbul. An Ottoman writer conveys the horror of the event: “[t]housands of homes and households burned with fire. And in accordance with God's eternal will, God changed the distinguishing marks of night and day by making the very dark night luminous with flames bearing sparks, and darkening the light-filled day with black smoke and soot.” The fire began in a store that sold straw products outside the appropriately named Firewood Gate (Odun kapısı) west of Eminönü, and it devastated densely crowded neighborhoods consisting of wooden homes. The strong winds of Istanbul caused the fire to spread violently in all directions, despite the efforts of the deputy grand vizier (kaimmakam) and others who attempted the impossible task of holding it back with hooks, axes, and water carriers. Sultan Mehmed IV's boon companion and chronicler, Abdi Paşa, notes that the fire marched across the city like an invading army: the flames “split into divisions, and every single division, by the decree of God, spread to a different district.” The fire spread north, west, and to Unkapanı. According to Mehmed Halife, in Süleymaniye the spires of the four minarets of the great mosque burned like candles. The blaze reached Bayezid and then moved south and west to Davud Paşa, Kumkapı, and even as far west as Samatya. The flames did not spare the Hippodrome (At Meydanı) in the east or Mahmud Paşa and the markets at the center of the peninsula, either. Abdi Paşa estimated that the fire reduced 280,000 households to ashes as the city burned for exactly forty-nine hours. Two-thirds of Istanbul was destroyed in the conflagration, and as many as 40,000 people lost their lives. Although fire was a frequent occurrence in 17th-century Istanbul, this was the worst the city had ever experienced. Thousands died in the plague that followed the fire as rats feasted on unburied corpses and spread disease. Because three months prior to this fire a conflagration had broken out in the heart of the district of Galata, across the Golden Horn from Eminönü, much of the city lay in ruins in the summer of 1660.

The 11th-century Andalusian author Ibn Hazm, in his treatise on love entitled Tawq al-Hamama (Ring of the Dove), strikes on a vivid analogy for illustrating the nature of the self and its propensity for wrongdoing: “[t]he righteous man and woman are like a fire concealed within ashes that doesn't burn anyone nearby unless stirred, but the unrighteous are like a blazing fire that burns up everything.” This fire that must be kept tightly enclosed is the lower self, the inner repository of insatiable desire. To release the fire is to allow an immediate and untrammeled gratification of desire that would quickly consume the self and its surroundings. Ibn Hazm's analogy derives from the normative discourse pioneered more than two centuries earlier by Ibn al-Muqaffa (d. 757) and al-Jahiz (d. 868), who, drawing on a variety of sources, developed an account of moral self-integration consonant with the courtly culture of their time. Their account complements the contemporary courtly panegyric poetry, which depicted the caliph and other figures of authority as embodiments of the normative ideal, enjoying and conferring a utopian state of bliss. In the same period, the poet Abu Nuwas (d. c. 814) developed a body of wine poetry that parodies the ideal of self-integration in a way that reveals the symbolic operations at work within it. Abu Nuwas's wine poems take advantage of the apparent contradiction at the heart of normative discourse: the blissful condition of power and pleasure sought by the desiring self can be realized only through moral self-integration, which is the suppression of the desiring self. In other words, one must master one's insatiable desire by adhering to moral norms because this is precisely the way, ultimately, to gratify desire eternally and absolutely. The goal of self-integration, whether conceived of as an ideal psychic state, a utopian community, or a condition in the afterlife, is thus the same boundless conflagration of the sinner pictured by Ibn Hazm, except that it perfects the self instead of destroying it.

Historians of the Ottoman legal system agree that the basic precepts of Islamic law (the sharia) were, as a matter of principle, to apply fully to the Muslim inhabitants of the empire on all matters civil, personal, and marital. Customary law (örf or adet) was, in personal and civil matters, always subordinate to it. Public law imposed by the Ottoman political authority (kanun and örf-i sultani) was promulgated on the authority of the state and reflected, first and foremost, the priorities and values of the imperial system. Penal law was one other particular area where the Ottoman peculiarity in the implementation of the sharia found expression. The powers of the religious judge, the kadı, were extended to include some supervisory duties, such as the policing of guilds and the regulation and control of markets. Urban security was also placed under his authority, with officers to help implement his decisions. In penal or commercial matters, the law that was effectively put into practice might have been an amalgam of sharia, imperial fiat, and custom, the particular outcome being the result of the interplay of political and social forces.

For the past seven years, Iran has been in the grip of a literary event. A novel, Bamdad-i khumar (The Morning After), written by a hitherto unknown woman, Fattanah Hajj Sayyidjavadi, (b. 1945), became an overnight best-seller and has so remained. From the start, the book has generated heated debates over its literary and socio-cultural merits. Most critics and readers have very strong opinions about the novel. One reader, another first-time writer, was so deeply angered by what she considered to be the novel's exaggerated female-centeredness and its unfairness to men that she decided to rewrite the novel through the voice of its male anti-hero.

The historiography of the past two decades of the demographic history of 16th- and 17th-century Ottoman Anatolia has seen diverse and often conflicting arguments among historians. Whether the Ottoman Empire witnessed “population pressure” in the 16th century, and whether this was followed in the 17th century by a serious “demographic crisis,” considered by some historians as a “catastrophe,” have constituted the central theme of the debate. The roots of these issues can be traced as far back as the early works of Ömer Lütfi Barkan in the 1940s and 1950s. It appears that the disagreements not only arose as a result of the different models of historical demography developed by diverse schools of thought, but that they also owed much to the highly disputed nature of the sources that provide the bulk of quantitative data for the demographic history of the Ottoman Empire.

The [Japanese] government, adorned with great intelligence and ideological firmness in progress, has implemented and promoted European [methods] of commerce and industry in its own country, and has turned the whole of Japan into a factory of progress, thanks to many [educational institutions]; it has attempted to secure and develop Japan's capacity for advancement by using means to serve the needs of the society such as benevolent institutions, railways, and in short, innumerable modes of civilization.

—Malumat, mouthpiece for Yıldız Palace, 1897

We should take note of Japan, this nation which has become rivals with the Great Powers in thirty to forty years. One should pay attention to that—that a nation not separating patriotic public spirit and the good of the homeland from its life is surely such that [though] sustaining wounds, setting out against any type of danger that threatens its existence, it certainly preserves its national independence. The Japanese successes of Port Arthur…are a product of this patriotic zeal.

—Şura-yı Ümmet, Ottoman newspaper, Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), 1904

While the despot of Turkey and the despot of Russia tremble and hide…it has come to pass in the Far East among this admirable people that, like the Turks, have been treated…as barbarians…[that] the Japanese tended to develop in all the Far East their material and moral influences, “to make themselves the guardians, otherwise the masters, of the yellow world.”…And that is how one has to see this vast intellectual and moral organization…. They whose civilization, achieved in half a century, has become superior to European civilization which has fallen into decay; they who do not have to reproach massacres, who do not have to gag any mouths out of which a liberal word came, who do not have to exile or suppress patriots…. Indeed, for our part, it is this “yellow” civilization that we wish to see universalized because it is the fruit of a principled, faithful and highly intelligent organization, because it is based on a conception of human destinies that excludes holy icons and false sentimentalities, because, above all, it is the daughter of a constitutional government which Ottoman patriots—all their efforts striving for this goal—will conclude by understanding the absolute necessity for the poor Turkish people that Hamidian terrorism be plunged into the mire.

—Mechveret Supplément Français, French organ of the CUP, 1905

In studies of resistance against European penetration prior to the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the Urabi movement takes the focus of attention. This may be warranted, given the scale, duration, and consequences of that movement. In the leading Western historiography of that period, however, the focus on the Urabi movement dominates historians' perspectives of another important movement, if shorter and less eventful, that took place in 1879. Unlike Urabi's case, the 1879 movement was dominated by groups of economic and political elites whose interests as large landholders and as partners in state administration were traditionally or customarily perpetuated by the existing social system. I will use the term “traditional elites” to distinguish those elites from other elite groups in Egypt who did not hold such a combined stake in the existing system. The traditional elites' movement aimed to defend material interests that were threatened by European encroachment on Egypt, as well as to negotiate a new distribution of power with both the khedive and European-dominated bodies that came to play a crucial role in the financial and political administration of Egypt after it entered a state of bankruptcy in 1876. In this article, I will refer to those bodies collectively as “European control.”

Whereas it is required by equity and justice that, in accordance with the principles of hygiene, the gaols in the governorate and the district capitals be clean and have access to so much fresh air that a person's health is not impaired, and whereas it has been noticed that some of these prisons do not satisfy these conditions, therefore the governors are instructed to conduct personally an examination and inspection of the prisons in their governorate, together with the chief engineer and the regional health officer.

—Order of the Majlis al-Aḥkām, issued in 1849Majlis al-Aḥkām, Mahfaza 1, doc. 1/89, 16 Shaban 1265/13 June 1849, no. 451.

In July 1830, a French expeditionary force landed west of Algiers and rapidly captured the city using artillery bombardment. Although the eventual outcome of this event—the French colonization of Algeria—was not immediately evident, the force's arrival swiftly introduced a new dynamic to the political configurations and conflicts that subsequently developed: the encounter with modern Europe. As in the Islamic East, this manifested itself first in the military sphere, where reform appeared necessary to consolidate unstable domestic political structures and provide a measure of protection against European territorial expansion. Changing military practices then became part of a larger context of reform, engagement with Europe, and resistance to colonialism. This process first affected Algeria but rapidly spread into the neighboring Alawi sultanate of Morocco, where it defined relations between the state and society until the imposition of the French and Spanish protectorates in 1912.

On 19 March 1907, a doctor of the French government, Emile Mauchamp, was beaten to death by a Moroccan mob outside his clinic in the city of Marrakech. The French colonial lobby used this brutal murder to justify invading the Moroccan city of Oujda in 1907 and, eventually, to add Morocco to the colonial empire as a French protectorate in 1912. At Mauchamp's funeral, the minister of foreign affairs eulogized the doctor as a martyr to the barbarous Muslim hatred of civilization. In his (posthumous) study of Moroccan medical practice, La Sorcellerie au Maroc, Mauchamp wrote of Moroccan medicine as “sorcery” and the antithesis of rational science. However, Mauchamp's demise was neither an Islamic rejection of Western science nor an incidental death. Mauchamp's murder was a political event, an act of popular Moroccan defiance against Sultan Abd al-Aziz and anger at his impotence before the European powers. In the Moroccan political imagination, Mauchamp came to embody internal and external threats to the body politic and was made to suffer “many deaths”—for a crumbling Moroccan state, for foreign influence, and for social and economic crisis in Morocco.

Turkey's foreign policy and relations in the early Republican era, before and during World War II, has been subject to systematic and scholarly research, leading to numerous publications since the 1970s. Although no less significant than Britain, Germany, or the Soviet Union in shaping Turkish inter-war foreign policy and priorities, Italy does not seem to have received a similar degree of attention in this growing literature. Italy is usually treated in the works on Turkish foreign relations only as a threat that Turkey's foreign and strategic policy aimed to counter after 1934.

Historians have long recognized post-war Palestine as a society in a state of destabilization. Increasing tension between the population and the Palestine Mandatory government was reflected in political opposition and violence. This was accompanied by the growing role of the United States in the intensive debate on the future of relations between Arabs and Jews, as reflected in the decision in late 1945 to convene the Anglo-American Committee. The transition from a war economy to a period of reconstruction produced immense economic and social problems that added to increasing British debts, which was partly reflected in difficulties in absorbing former servicemen in to Palestine's economy and increasing unemployment of both Arabs and Jews. Destabilization was also made evident by increasing industrial unrest, focusing significantly on the state sector of the economy—the government bureaucracy, the railways, and the military camps. This post-war militancy was part of the economic and social impact of the war, the associated cycle of wartime labor strikes, and the increasing cooperation between Arab and Jewish workers in labor protest against the government.

Countries such as Iran and Turkey do not fit comfortably into the democratic and authoritarian categories. In these countries, elections are held regularly, and the will of the people is accepted as one source of sovereignty. At the same time, both constitutionally and in practice the elected officials have to share the exercise of political power with institutions that do not draw their power directly from the will of the people. In such systems, the judiciary has two important political functions. First, the judiciary acts as a politically insulated decision-maker through which the unelected head can exercise some degree of control over the actions of the elected head. Second, the judiciary's direct involvement in the political arena increases political tensions and legitimates the continuation of the two-headed system. In systems based on divided sovereignty, the tensions created by the judicialization of politics contribute to the stability of the regime.

In January 1952, the Egyptian monarchy, for the second time, banned a history book by Abd al-Rahman al-Rafii (1889–1966). Several months later, in the wake of the July Revolution, al-Rafii's status had changed dramatically. From his former position as an officially marginalized historian and politician he had become the editor of a daily newspaper, a member of the new constitutional committee, and the head of Egypt's bar association. He subsequently won several state prizes for his scholarly achievements. His books were reprinted and distributed widely. The president quoted him in his speeches. By the early 1960s, al-Rafii had become Egypt's most awarded and celebrated historian of the 20th century and was selected as Egypt's candidate for the Nobel Prize.