Şerif Mardin, the preeminent Turkish social scientist of his generation who left a deep mark on the study of Ottoman and Turkish society, passed away on 6 September 2017 in Istanbul.

Outside the disciplines of communication and cultural studies, scholarly interest in television programming, especially scripted entertainment, has been overshadowed by attention to digital media, reality TV, and smart phone connectivity. A 2017 University of Maryland conference offered a reconsideration of popular Middle East-produced television dramas and their surprising impacts on national and transnational politics and culture. As conference papers showed, social and historical themes resonated in unexpected ways inside and outside national borders, with state authorities responding, not just with the usual censoring, but with investment in social and historical dramas of their own.

In July of 2006, I published an article in the journal Eighteenth Century Studies that I trust none of you ever read. Why should you? Eighteenth-Century Studies is not a venerable site for the study of the Middle East or Islam. However, it was the journal where I first considered a question in early American history that has since gained some currency in contemporary American political discourse. The question: “Could a Muslim be president?”

A primary concern of this project is to integrate the discussion of gender and gender subjectivities in the discussion of the overall dynamics of revolutions including the conditions that led to them, the understanding of their different actors, and their agendas for change. Another focuses on understanding the way revolutions and the crises of modernity to which they responded influenced the production of gender subjectivities and contributed, in turn, to the development of working subjects who were also private actors shaped by technologies of the self that helped them deal with complex tensions and dilemmas.

Historians confront numerous difficulties while doing research on Central Asia, particularly concerning the contemporary period. Historical developments in the relations between Iran and Central Asia, especially following the rise of the Soviet Union, have led to the creation of high walls separating Iran from those countries, and have made research and information exchange impossible. Historical sources for this period are scarce and inaccessible, and researchers cannot easily access the little that exists in the form of manuscripts kept in the archives of Iranian libraries. Moreover, the writers of the Qajar period have dealt with only a very small sample of the events that took place in that part of the world, and then mostly with those occurring along the Iranian borders. Thus, they reveal little about developments inside Transoxiana.

This essay considers the contribution of Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout's Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents to global art history. In particular, the essay addresses the archival turn, the challenges of language and translations in the publication of primary sources, and the continued need to challenge Eurocentric views of and approaches to global modernism. This includes considering how Modern Art and the Arab World's contributions aim to upend Western preconceptions about modern art from the “Arab world,” and demonstrating how such publications can serve as sources for critical evaluations and reconsiderations of the history of global modernism in general.

Students of Middle East Studies in this country will, for generations to come, continue to sing the praises of the dean of American Arabists and Islamicists, who passed away last Christmas Eve. For there is hardly a scholar of the Middle East in this country whose academic career or intellectual development has not been directly or indirectly influenced by him, his students, or his many publications. There is hardly a center of Middle East studies in this country that has not followed the tradition for these studies which he established at Princeton University. In a real sense he was the father of these studies in America. Small wonder that his students and colleagues—following the medieval Islamic tradition in designating the head of an intellectual school—lovingly called him “al-Shaykh.”

It is, perhaps, not very useful to generalize about the “climate” for research in Morocco, which quite obviously varies according to the type of research to be undertaken, and the general situation in the country or in the government agency with which the researcher may wish to work. What can be said is that no topic is a priori off-limits, and that, for the time being at least, the visiting scholar probably has a better chance to conduct his research successfully in Morocco than in most of the other Arab countries.

A consideration of the contemporary musical soundscape in Syria provides unique insights into how Syrians of multiple classes and generations discriminate between critical points in their own past, who they perceive they are today, and how they might think about their future. This review, based on fieldwork in Syria conducted between 1997 and 2001, suggests that people in Syria can use music to negotiate the following complex issues: 1) the struggle between an identity rooted in the modern nation-state of Syria and one rooted in the more traditional concept of ‘Bilad al-Sham’ (roughly ‘the lands governed from Damascus,’ a region that included all of modern Lebanon, as well as portions of Turkey, Palestine, and Jordan); 2) the struggle between a Syrian identity and an Arab identity; and 3) the maintenance of a strongly Arab and necessarily anti-Western canon.

In the summer of 2002, more Americans – 1.3 million – heard the music of Central Asia in just a few days than in the entire previous history of the United States. Some 370,000 of them picked up the extensive, well-documented guidebook to the 36th annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which broke all attendance records. As they traipsed through the humid haze of the Washington Mall, staggering into the sun baked tents to see crafts and hear music, this crowd was in a good mood. Kids asked to see the Bactrian camels, who, like their handlers, were Texans. People crowded the sprawling crafts exhibits to watch artisans, then jammed the sales pavilions to scoop up gifts and albums, also at unprecedented levels. The surging spectators jammed the tents for most of the shows on the two days I was there. The reception was rousing. The organizers had brought not just “classic” performers, but contemporary musicians, like the Kazakh rock band Roksonaki. The small stock of their CDs sold out on the first day, and their performances regularly received standing ovations.

This report summarizes the results of a survey of Kansas high school teachers of World History conducted in the Spring of 1972. Though the data were gathered in the state of Kansas, the textbooks used in the World History course are “national” in the sense that (1) the authors are not local or even regional and (2) the books are widely used in various parts of the country.

In Recent Years and on several occasions Eugen Wirth (1977; 1983a; 1983b), probably the leading German geographer on the Near and Middle East, has given critical evaluations and assessments of German geography related to the Near and Middle East. One of his findings, published in a volume by the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), on the state of art of research in the Federal Republic of Germany reads as follows: “Thus one may possibly say that the geographical Middle East research of the Federal Republic of Germany in terms of number and breadth, as well as in terms of contents and depth of its publications, may be considered internationally leading” (Wirth 1983a; translated by E. E.).

Leaders of Arab art institutions are negotiating new grounds for the arts with new money, new audiences, and—in the case of the Gulf countries—also new locations. They are playing a key role in devising alternate strategies to reach audiences and create civic dialogue through the arts, while negotiating economic, political, and artistic concerns that are helping to shape future cultural policies in the region. This paper explores the institutionalization of Arab art practices in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and the United Arab Emirates, and the relationship of these arts organizations to their audiences. The reasons for selecting these four countries is that compared to other Arab countries, they have a large number of individual art initiatives, as well as new and diverse types of institutions. Each country has a specific context in which the art organizations were established and function. However, the focus of this paper is the relationship of the art institutions to their audiences and the strategies they use to encourage discourse on art and its content in the public sphere. The paper is based on discussions with twenty-one art professionals who represent almost all leading art institutions in the Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The last fifteen years have witnessed rapid growth in the number of students studying Arabic and of programs concerned with the teaching of the language. This is directly attributable to the awakened interest in the United States in the Middle East in general, and the Arab world in particular, as a result of the entry of the U.S. in World War II and its emergence as a global power with strategic, economical, and political interests in the area. This is not to say that the teaching of Arabic is a new phenomenon in the U.S. As an indespensible tool of Orientalistic scholarship, Arabic was taught for many years in a few institutions which offered programs in Oriental and Semitic Studies.