This edition of the journal appears under my name and that of the new managing editor, Sara Pursley, but the articles ran the gauntlet of the review process under the watchful eyes of Judith E. Tucker and her able managing editor, Sylvia Whitman. I am enormously indebted to them for handing off the journal in such excellent shape, leaving us with detailed instructions and supplying a backlog of accepted articles to help cushion the landing of the journal at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The transition of the editorial office could not have been accomplished without the support of our provost, Chase Robinson, whom many of you know as a specialist in early Islamic history. Colleagues affiliated with the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center and the Programs in History at the Graduate Center and City College have welcomed the journal to its new home across the street from the Empire State Building.

As editor of IJMES from 2004 to 2009, I spent the last five years in the catbird seat of Middle East studies, where I had the privilege of reading well over 500 article submissions that flowed into the editorial office, some 100 of which were ultimately destined for publication. I characterize the experience as very gratifying on the whole; ours is a field that has attracted talented and skilled scholars who are doing some very creative work—this is not a change per se, although it can be argued that we have a new generation involved in increasingly more theoretically informed projects. Have there been other, more tangible, developments in the field as reflected in submissions to IJMES? I mention four trends I have spotted over time that may suggest some of the recent shifts—in region, topic, scope, and critical engagement—in research foci.

What has changed in the field of Middle East studies over the last five years, especially when perceived from the vantage point of the United States? Certainly a lot, due mostly to the reverberations of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the ensuing haphazard U.S. adventure first into Afghanistan and then Iraq in apparent search for the culprits, accompanied by a strong underlying interest in gaining access to oil and other natural resources, as well as sustaining world supremacy. Perhaps as a consequence of these developments, MESA membership escalated, especially among younger cohorts of Americans now interested in the culture and languages of the region, and studies of Middle East and Central Asia as well as Islamic studies once again increased in public significance. Yet the dark side of these developments was of course present once again in the—once again haphazard—associations often made in popular culture among Islam, the region, and terrorism: orientalism tended to rear its ugly head, as all of these were analyzed as the “other,” entirely distinct and separate from “us.”

Over the past five years, from volume 37, number 1 (February 2005) to volume 41, number 3 (August 2009), IJMES published thirty-seven articles that deal with politics in the contemporary Middle East, broadly understood. This is my count, of course, and others might add or drop some articles. I define contemporary as post World War II and have a relatively expansive definition of politics. My count does not include short features, only full articles.

In February 1939, the Syrian government received two documents from ʿulamaʾ protesting two decrees of the French High Commission that were intended to reform personal status law in Syria: decree 60/L.R. of 13 March 1936 and decree 146/L.R. of 18 November 1938. The first was a petition signed by Muslims from Homs to the Syrian prime minister (pictured); the second was a letter from the Damascus Association of ʿUlamaʾ to the Syrian interior minister.

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.

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 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.

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 historiography of Arab nationalism has tended to concentrate on the secular press from the Mashriq, especially the Cairo–Beirut axis, at the expense of the religious nationalist press and the non-Mashriqi one. There is often an assumption that reliance on the secular press from the Mashriq alone can provide a clear picture of Arab intellectual life and that a proper analysis of that thought can be confined to a few intellectual centers in the eastern Arab world. Although there has never been an explicit claim that such a focus is the end of the story, there have not been enough attempts to look beyond the Cairo–Beirut axis and beyond its secular press organs in search of a broader story of the depth and breadth of Arab nationalism. This article addresses this imbalance by examining an Arabist-Salafi press network that operated between Algeria, Tunisia, Zanzibar, and Egypt and involved members of two sectarian communities, Sunnis and Ibadis. This Arabist-Salafi press network created a public sphere of intellectual engagement in which Salafism and nationalism were interwoven, producing a nationalist discourse transgressing post World War I borders of identity and linking the three layers of nationalism—the territorial, the Pan-Arab, and the Pan-Islamic—together. These layers not only intersected but also legitimized one another.

Rapid population growth constitutes one of the most critical problems confronting many Middle Eastern and North African countries, placing incremental pressure on their finite water and other natural resources and challenging their abilities to grow sufficient food, accommodate school and university graduates with jobs, build adequate urban and rural infrastructures, contain rapid urbanization, and alleviate poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, and disease. More than one-third of the population is under the age of fifteen in a majority of countries and, thus, has yet to marry and reach reproductive age. As a result, in most places the number of women of childbearing age (fifteen to forty-nine) will more than double in the next thirty years. Because there are so many young people, by one estimate the region's economies would have to generate half as many additional jobs by 2010 as existed in 1996 to avoid an increase in already high unemployment rates, particularly among young adults. The growing bulge of unemployed young people has serious political ramifications for many Middle Eastern regimes, from Algeria to Saudi Arabia. These problems will likely get worse in the short term because of demographic momentum—the parents of the future have already been born.