Social scientists often consider feasts to be reflections of social structure. They assume that people living in community, sharing a common culture and participating in the same political framework, will also celebrate the same feasts. This may be superficially true. But a closer look at such feasts shows that the manner of their celebration varies a great deal between sectors of the community. Different positions in the social structure are reflected in the details of ritual, in the composition of the participants, in the nature of gifts, and in other aspects of the feasts. These distinctions are very evident in the circumcision feasts of the Negev Bedouin.

The subject of this communication is a relatively short but interesting passage in the ίστορίαι of the Athenian historian Laonicus Chalcocondyles, which deals with the administration and fiscal income of the Ottoman Empire in the reign of Muhammad II. The contents of this text were first utilized by von Hammer and most recently by Franz Babinger in his monumental history of the reign of Muhammad II, so it is obvious that in choosing this theme I am not presenting something completely new or unknown. Nevertheless, this material merits closer scrutiny than it has hitherto enjoyed, not only because of the scarcity of early sources on Ottoman fiscal history but because it will contribute to the ongoing evaluation of the historical worth of the toίστορίαι, and finally because it gives a view of the system to which the peoples of the empire were subject. A translation of the text is presented, followed by an analysis of the contents and a partial comparison with other sources.

This paper describes the political life of Jews in Tunisia and Morocco in the early 1970s. The findings reported are part of a comparative study of Jews in Tunisia and Morocco and Arabs in Israel.

In his provocative essay Knowledge and Politics, Harvard Law School professor Roberto Unger undertook what has since become a familiar critique of the contemporary social and political order. Beginning with the main postulates of Enlightenment epistemology, Unger contended that our acceptance of “liberal philosophy” has divided us, as moral beings, between the private world of value and desire and the public world of rules and reason. Since, moreover, reason functions as the medium of public (and ostensibly egalitarian) discourse, its inevitable exaltation over desire threatens, where it does not undermine, our sense of self and personality. Modern man, according to Unger, is inextricably ensconced between the irreconcilable poles of individuality and citizenship. From religious fundamentalism to Afro-centrism, from classical and radical feminism to multi-culturalism, modernity is evolving into an endless concatenation of reactions against the threat of domination that lurks beneath the demand to justify personal values and predilections through the impersonal language of reason, a medium over which some of us possess greater mastery than others, even if, as moderns (or perhaps post-moderns) we recognize that reason is not autonomous but can operate only in the interest of values already present.

Modern views on pre-Islamic poetry have not markedly advanced our understanding of the structure of the poem beyond the views of the critics of the first three centuries of Hijra. In fact, if anything, modern views are more rigidly formulated, show a greater tendency towards generalizations, and are far less perceptive, as well as being based on a degree of knowledge and familiarity with the poetry inferior to that of the early critics. Ibn Qutayba's famous passage which attempts a description of the process through which the poet developed his poem remains one of the most perceptive statements on the subject. He, at least, had the objectivity and modesty to attribute the view expressed in his passage to ba'd ahl al-adab (a person, or people, of knowledge in the field of language and poetry). Ibn Qutayba does not claim that the statement he quotes was based on an analysis of the properties of the corpus of the poetry. However, the most interesting aspect of this statement is that it interprets the structural properties of the poem in psychological terms. It does not label the process a conventional device imposed by the tradition and by the poets' lack of desire to break away from that tradition. The interpretation the statement offers is also functional, in that it asserts that the process of growth in the poem is not arbitrary and illogical but purposeful, conscious, and pertaining to the total structure of the poem. In this sense Ibn Qutayba's remark is also structural, because it considers the structure of the poem in relation to the structure of other poems in the tradition.

Since the famous tenth-century man of letters Abū Hayyān al-Tawĥīdī (Ca. 320/932–414/1023) named four specific contemporary writers as the authors of the otherwise anonymous encyclopedic work Rasā'il Ikhwān al-Safā', it became almost traditional for both medieval and modern scholars to accept his story as fact.

What can we gain by looking at maritime spaces? Does this enable us to work towards a global history of the Middle East that moves beyond at times arbitrary geographical and disciplinary borders? In this essay I argue that maritime spaces might be particularly suitable for exploring the boundaries of Middle East studies and their interconnection with global history. By implication, the study of Middle Eastern maritime connections might be especially well fitted to develop new and more complex global histories. To make this point, a specific and perhaps unusual maritime site in the Middle East will be assessed. The Suez Canal opened in 1869 and quickly turned into a major artery of traffic between Europe on the one side, and Asia, East Africa, and Australia on the other. More importantly for our purposes, it is located at the very heart of the Middle East, where Africa and Asia, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea (and with it the Indian Ocean world), and water and desert intersect.

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.

This article brings area studies approaches to Arabic novels into dialogue with world literature through a critical engagement with the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), commonly known as “the Arabic Booker.” This prize launches Arabic novels out of national fields and into a world marketplace whose reading practices have been shaped by the Anglophone postcolonial novel, canonized by the IPAF's mentor: the Booker Prize Foundation. Against this institutional backdrop, the article develops a scale-based method to revisit the intersection of postcolonial tropes and national epistemologies in two winning IPAF novels: Bahaʾ Taher's Wahat al-Ghurub (Sunset Oasis, 2007) and Saud Alsanousi's Saq al-Bambu (The Bamboo Stalk, 2013). By interrogating the literary and political work performed by comparative scale in these novels, the article argues that dominant applications of theoretical methods inherited from postcolonial studies fail to supply trenchant forms of critique for Arabic novels entering world literature. Bridging the methods and perspectives of area studies with those of comparative literature, this article develops new reading practices that are inflected through contemporary institutional settings for literature's circulation, translation, and canonization.

Until recently, most works dealing with nineteenth-century Iran have had special points of view which now are hopelessly out of date. Concerned only with aspects of nineteenth-century Iran, they have treated these subjects either in connection with literature or with the rivalry of the European imperialist powers. Whatever the merits of these works, they may be said to have outlived their main usefulness. The age of imperialism is gone; and though the classical Persian literature of a thousand years may well be immortal, its creative spirit is dust. In Iran, as elsewhere, modern men have drastically altered their political, historical, and literary views. We now need histories of other kinds. It is time to explore and to research. Too much which is published on Iranian history continues to be either shallow, narrow, cliché-littered imitations of the not-so-great historians of the past, or are official glorifications of Iran's present, not always consistent with the truth. The field requires a widely extended and earnest historical inquiry into the development of modern Iranian society through the exploration of its recent past. An investigation of the social structure of nineteenth-century Persia, for instance, is absolutely essential to an understanding of the behavior of the present-day Iranian bureaucracy, which is often inexplicable to the Western observer. When the Persia of the peasants, the mullâs and the mîrzâs, is brought into clear perspective behind the Iran of the National Iranian Oil Company and the Plan Organization, we shall be in a position to understand the complexities of the present Iranian administrative machinery and the broad spectrum of motivation of its maintenance men.

This essay is an attempt to read popular melodrama as a reflection of changing societal appreciations of sentimentality, romance, family relations, and, ultimately, political authority over the course of a tumultuous decade in Egyptian and Middle Eastern history, the 1960s. I focus my gaze upon two particular films that were in their day popular hits, one of them an unprecedented blockbuster, and that remain genre classics. Both feature popular screen icon ءAbd al-Halim Hafiz, the greatest vocalist of his generation, a recording and performing artist who came of age with the onset of the July 1952 Free Officers' revolution and was intimately associated with the Nasserist project. Both films treat generation gaps relating specifically to issues of dating and courtship—what might be called, in the context of their era, “free love.” Both are concerned with troubled relationships between a son and his disapproving, authoritarian father. Halim's father in both films is played by the same actor, ءImad Hamdi, and Halim's love interest—albeit in very different contexts—is played by the same ravishing starlet, Nadia Lutfi. Finally, both films turn upon a single powerful dramatic act of parental discipline, a slap (or series of slaps) delivered by an outraged patriarch across the cheek of a rebellious, yet ultimately dutiful, son.

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.

This study takes a critical perspective on the making of sectarian difference and Alevi precarity in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on our research from 2013 to 2016, we present an analysis of stories and conversations that took place amongst Alevi and Sunni focus group participants, primarily in Istanbul. These conversations illustrate how sectarian difference can be made in the relations between neighbors as differences become coded as sectarian and taken up within systems of power and domination. At the same time, our research also shows how, in the entangled relations between neighbors, questions of ethics and mutual responsibility arise, though these relations sometimes become uneasy or even unbearable. Finally, we show how the question of “knowing” difference is taken up within a power-laden discourse of sectarianism, one that is tied to the history of Alevis (and others) in Turkey while also extending well beyond this context.

Under the Bourguiba and Bin ʿAli regimes, the early 20th-century women's rights advocate Tahar Haddad (1899–1935) was a symbol of “state feminism.” Nationalist intellectuals traced the 1956 Personal Status Code to Haddad's work, and Bourguiba and Bin ʿAli claimed to “uphold” his ideals and “avenge” the persecution he suffered at the hands of the ʿulamaʾ at the Zaytuna mosque-university. Breaking with “old regime” narratives, this article studies Haddad as a reformist within Tunisia's religious establishment. Haddad's example challenges the idea that Islamic reformists “opened the door to” secularists in the Arab world. After independence, Haddad's ideas were not a starting point for Tunisia's presidents, but a reference point available to every actor in the political landscape.

In his essays on “Self-Expression” and “The Human Ideal” in the medieval Islamic world, the late Gustave E. von Grunebaum argued that both expressions and portrayals of individuality were a comparative rarity in the literature of pre-modern Islamic civilization.1 Von Grunebaum concluded from reviewing both autobiographical and biographical works written by Muslims that the social customs, religious values, and literary conventions of premodern Islamic society combined to discourage evocations or depictions of idiosyncratic personalities in favor of representations of impersonal stereotypes.

With much of the Arabian Peninsula characterized by hot and arid weather conditions during long summer seasons, residents are forced to rely on air conditioning to cool their surroundings. Before the construction of air conditioning infrastructures, many would leave the coast during the summer months to head to oases, such as Al Ain near Abu Dhabi, or live in tents in the desert to find relief from the heat. From the 1950s, European and American building practices shaped the region with little consideration of vernacular design elements or energy conservation. These building practices introduced air conditioning as a cooling method. For instance, the 1951 Report of Operations to the Saudi Arab Government by the Arabian American Oil Company explained how “automobiles, air conditioning units, sewing machines, washing machines, refrigerators, and many other modern conveniences are now readily available” in Al Hasa, a significant region for Aramco's operations on the east of Saudi Arabia. By 1952, workers residing in Aramco's camps could have air conditioning units installed in their rooms on a rental basis. Air conditioning technology reconfigured urban environments, altering the relationship between indoors and outdoors, and ultimately constituting what Jiat-Hwee Chang and Tim Winter term a “thermal modernity” that transforms how built forms are imagined and inhabited. The current widespread use of air conditioning in the region is therefore connected not only to high temperatures, but also to how air conditioning is singled out as the ultimate technical fix in confronting the climate. Other solutions to managing heat, such as improving insulation mechanisms for residences and office buildings, have been less pervasive.

Diglossia has been the subject of attention of many linguists and philologists dealing with Arabic for many decades. The term itself was coined by W. Marçais (1930) and was brought to the attention of general linguists and ethnologists (socio-linguists in particular) by Ferguson in 1959. Diglossia is also a well-known phenomenon in Modern Greek, Swiss German, and Haitian Creole. Fishman (1967) and Valdman (1968) deal with it in terms of methodology and theory. Kaye (1970, 1972a) deals with it in the light of modern linguistic theory and is restricted (not entirely though) to a discussion of Arabic. The monograph under review is an attempt to survey the diglossia situation using Classical Arabic and colloquial Iraqi (almost entirely Baghdadi) data. Much of the work can already be found in Altoma (1957, 1966).

Diplomatic historians of all persuasions agree that the Iranian Crisis of 1945–1946 played a considerable part in initiating the Cold War. For revisionist writers, the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that took place during these months resulted from American efforts to carve out a sphere of influence in the oil-producing areas of the Middle East. By the autumn of 1945, according to this view, U.S. firms had gained controlling interests in the consortia holding exclusive rights to work the extensive petroleum deposits located in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain; more importantly, Iranian officials were making repeated overtures to American concerns in an effort to counterbalance established British interests with more dynamic ones based in the United States. When the Red Army prevented the government in Tehran from suppressing separatist movements in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan in December 1945, the Truman Administration manipulated the Security Council of the United Nations into mandating a Soviet withdrawal from northern Iran.

International fairs—the “folk-festivals of capitalism”—have long been a favorite topic of historians studying quintessential phenomena of modernity such as the celebration of industrial productivity, the construction of national identities, and the valorization of bourgeois leisure and consumption in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. To date, however, such spectacles occurring in the modern Middle East remain largely unexamined. This article, an analysis of the discourse surrounding the first Damascus International Exposition in 1954, is conceived in part as a preliminary effort to redress this historiographic imbalance.

The question behind this article evolved from two separate observations. While the expansion of comparative and cross-regional research has been actively promoted by leading scholars of the Middle East (and was later encouraged by such bodies as the Middle East Studies Association and this journal), so has the incorporation of scholarly insights from area studies been urged by leading political scientists as a prerequisite for revitalizing all of the discipline's subfields and institutionally endorsed by the American Political Science Association. Viewed as interrelated, these observations prompted the question framing this text: if the aims of many Middle East scholars and institutions are compatible with the aims of many political scientists and their association, why have they remained largely parallel, as suggested by scholars within both fields?