Forced migration has come to be the defining feature of the contemporary Middle East, a region that is both the source of and host to some of the largest forcibly displaced populations in the world. In 2015, 65 percent of the world's 19.4 million refugees—including the 5.5 million Palestinian refugees—as well as 30 percent of the world's thirty-eight million internally displaced persons were in the Middle East, while one out of every four refugees worldwide was from Syria. Seeking security and stability, millions of people from the region are on the move within and across social spaces that are at once strange and familiar, and in which they themselves are familiar and strange to others. In 2015, Turkey became host to the world's largest refugee population of over two million, while Zaʿatari camp in Jordan has grown rapidly to become one of the world's largest camps since the Syrian civil war began. With 7.6 million people—or 35 percent of the population—internally displaced, Syria now has the highest number of internally displaced persons in the world. Iraq has produced multiple overlapping displacements, resulting in one of the largest refugee resettlement programs of the past decade. Thousands of Syrians, Libyans, and Iraqis have undertaken perilous journeys across the Mediterranean Sea to seek asylum in Europe and elsewhere. Palestinian refugees are now in a fourth generation of exile, making their plight the longest running unresolved refugee situation in the world.

Egypt was at the center of a wave of uprisings and revolutions that swept the region between 2011 and 2013, the common denominator of which was demands for a radical democratic alternative to authoritarian regimes variously formulated around social justice and political rights. While the Middle East was a major theater of these events, with Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen sharing the headlines, the processes that informed these uprisings were also deeply global. The year 2011 was a revolutionary year, maybe the last in history, when actors differently positioned in the neoliberal social landscape mobilized in different ways, from the Occupy Movement to the London riots. The demise, or better, defeat, of these movements has reverberated profoundly around the globe, highlighting the postdemocratic nature of governance in contemporary states. One of the effects of the rise of new authoritarianism across Europe and the United States is a palpable transformation in the asymmetry between outside observer and the local observed. Researchers now face a reshaping, in some ways a leveling, of differences between “us” and “them” and the distinct temporality used to underpin this asymmetry. Nothing could illustrate this better than the fact that as I write, Egypt's president ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Sisi is enjoying a warm welcome in the White House. The narrative is no longer framed through the worn-out trope of an Arab leader aspiring to modernize his country through pledging allegiance to the leader of the Free World in exchange for aid and armaments; now the man in the White House implicitly pledges to learn from the Arab dictator. Egypt is the pioneer; the United States is the relative latecomer to the Age of New Authoritarianism.

In this article we present a threefold argument—chronological, geographical, and sociocultural—in order to demonstrate that interest in the woman question and the lively, and at times charged, debate that it stimulated began in Greater Syria in the early nahḍa (awakening) period and persisted throughout, drawing into its orbit leading intellectuals as well as members of the general public and permeating even peripheral areas of Greater Syria. The study is based on an analysis of Hadiqat al-Akhbar, Al-Jinan, Al-Muqtataf, Thamarat al-Funun, and Al-Hilal, whose articles, editorials, regular columns, op-ed items, and readers' letters provide a sense of the breadth, richness, coherence, and continuity of the debate and its accompanying “community of discourse.” We conclude with a consideration of the ramifications of the argument on future understandings of the nahḍa as a sociocultural phenomenon and on the study of the place of women in modern Arab societies.

“I have heard, Salim,” said my master, “that you are a good dancer and singer. I wish you to show my guests what you can do!”

“At the heart of this topic is a puzzle (lughz),” my long-term friend and interlocutor Ahmad often said. I long thought Ahmad's interest in questions of disease at the intersection of psychiatry and Islam was only intellectual until I learned about one of his cousins’ past ailments. A skillful narrator, Ahmad had colorful ways of depicting that puzzle. “Imagine,” he once told me, “a young pious woman, a college student. Suddenly, she stops praying and studying, is morose, even aggressive sometimes. She locks herself in her room when she does not wander the streets, disappearing for hours. The family is worried, and they wonder: what is the problem?” Switching the tone from evocative to analytic, Ahmad continued: “In Egypt, when it comes to symptoms like seizures, hallucinations, and sudden behavioral changes, people use one of two main diagnoses: jinn possession (mass al-jinn) or mental illness (maraḍ nafsī). The young woman is either possessed or insane.” Ahmad's appeal to the imagination worked, as I came to think of Wittgenstein's famous duck-rabbit image that can alternatively be seen as a duck or a rabbit, with the duck's beak appearing as the rabbit's ears and vice versa.

The study of non-Muslims in Islamic societies has long been a robust subfield in the historiography of the medieval Middle East. But its literature has blind spots, a significant example of which concerns slavery as a constitutive institution of non-Muslim communities. Much recent scholarship on medieval non-Muslims has tended to privilege religious affiliation as an explanatory category of social experience, leaving other legal statuses and modes of identification—especially slavery—underanalyzed. This piece will survey this historiographical hole. It will then offer a brief analysis of some Abbasid-era Syriac Christian material in which slavery figures prominently, concubines and concubinage in particular. My goal is to provide an example of how attending to the place of slavery in non-Muslim communities facilitates a much-needed historiographical shift of focus from reified religious identities to the social practices, institutions, and hierarchies upon which those communities were built.

As a region with a long coastline by the Arabian Sea in northwestern India, Gujarat has historically been connected to the maritime rhythms of the Indian Ocean and inter-regional developments in north India and the Deccan. These connections—commercial, but also political, cultural, and intellectual—remain central to the history of Gujarat as an independent sultanate in the fifteenth century and during the time of Mughal control from the late sixteenth century.1 The circulation of Muslim scholars and intellectuals between the urban centers of Gujarat and cities of the Hijaz, Hadramawt, and Egypt, shaped the intellectual enterprise of several prominent scholars in Gujarat (and more broadly South Asia) who wrote in Arabic—from al-Damamini (d. 1424) and ‘Ali Muttaqi (d. 1567) to Shah Wajih al-Din ‘Alawi (d. 1590) and ‘Abd al-Qadir al-‘Aydarus (d.1628). While these scholars’ works have received attention from modern scholars to varying degrees, this essay emphasizes the importance of foregrounding the early modern oceanic context in order to recover the transregional social and scholarly ties central to the lives and oeuvre of these intellectuals. Recovering transregional oceanic connections in turn calls for greater engagement with scholarly writings produced in Arabic, a language that has remained peripheral to South Asian historiography.

Over the past decade, there have been increasing numbers of displaced scholars from the Middle East and Africa who have come under sustained pressures and threats from their governments; only a few of them have been able to relocate to European and North American academia through scholarships and grants.1 Even these temporary solutions for displaced scholars rarely result in sustainable institutional solidarity in the form of permanent teaching or professorial positions. The lack of institutional support, coupled with discriminatory and racialized immigration policies, pushes these few fortunate scholars to either accept exploitative conditions perpetuated by the neoliberal economy or leave academia altogether to support their families. These challenges, along with draconian economic sanctions and restrictions imposed by the US Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on citizens of countries such as Syria, Sudan, Iran, and Cuba are only a snapshot of what displaced scholars endure on a daily basis while trying to do research, care for their families, and compete with scholars with privileged citizenship status for shrinking opportunities in the academic job market.

This paper explores the concepts and norms of gender and sexuality in Ehmedê Xanî's 17th-century mathnawi poem Mem û Zîn, nowadays regarded as the Kurdish national epic. A reading of this poem with the aid of the conceptual tools of gender studies and the history of sexuality reveals how different its norms and concepts are not only from modern Kurdish ones, but also from those of classical Persian literature. Although the poem does not hint at any taboo concerning male love for beardless boys, it does display a remarkable asymmetry between male and female same-sex desire; it also displays distinct views of legitimate and transgressive sexuality. Thus, this poem encourages a more historicizing view of the gendered and sexual dimensions of modern (Kurdish and other) nationalism, and a greater attention for the distinct characteristics of vernacular literatures within the premodern ‘Persianate cosmopolitan.’

This paper asserts that in 1952 an entente was forged between the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Egyptian government that provided the church with concessions in return for its political allegiance to the regime. The period prior to 1952 also witnessed the Coptic church leadership forging alliances with regimes in power; however, its ability to represent Copts vis-à-vis the state was rivaled by other Coptic voices in civil society such as the Majlis al-Milli. From 1952 on, the inhibition of Copts' voices in civil society increased the church's political power, and it developed into the undisputed voice representing the Coptic community. The relationship between church and state in the past fifty years has been volatile, affected not only by the nature of the relationship between leaders of the church and state but also by the emergence of other important players within and outside these two entities. Strains characteristic of the period leading up to the temporary dissolution of the entente in the 1970s are becoming visible today in the church–state relationship. This paper suggests that the current entente between the church and the state is being stretched to its limit although it is not likely to be dissolved.

This article analyzes interviews related to the 1916–19 Sharifian siege of Medina that were published in a collection on the city's history by Saudi Arabian historian Ahmad Murshid. These oral histories narrate how Fakhri Pasha (Turkish: Fahreddin), the Ottoman military commander stationed in Medina during the siege, expelled residents from their homes, strictly controlled the supply of food in the city, and managed military operations out of the Holy Mosque of the Prophet Muhammad. The article seeks to explore the perspective of ordinary civilians who experienced the siege, a perspective largely missing from the literature on the subject. The interviews are positioned here as a valuable historical source for understanding the impact of the siege on these individuals and on their families, communities, and identities. Their memories underscore the interviewees’ deep attachment to their city, as well as to their identity as madanīs and as legitimate narrators of Medina's history.

The study of the Middle East is experiencing an explosion in the dimensions through which scholars study space. The five new books reviewed in this essay stand out for pushing the boundaries of how we conceptualize the production of space and mobilize it as a methodological intervention. Through remarkably sensitive ethnography, creative use of sources, and an array of vibrant theoretical and methodological tools, they expand upon an earlier pioneering literature that centered spatial analysis in the study of the Middle East. In this essay, I focus on three dimensions they have opened up: analyzing space in time; drawing connectivities across spaces; and reframing the agency of spatial tactics and the nonhuman.

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The study of Islamic movements has taken on a special relevance since the tragic events of 11 September 2001. More than ever, people inside and outside of academe are inquiring about the origins, motivations, and consequences of Islamic activism around the globe. The three books under review contribute to our understanding of Islamic activism in three countries: Algeria, Palestine/Israel, and Jordan. Camille al-Tawil's Al-Haraka addresses the rise of armed movements in Algeria since 1992 and their justification for violence, especially anti-civilian carnage, in the mid-1990s. Khaled Hroub's Hamas covers the origins, strategic orientation, and ideological evolution of one of the most controversial and militant Islamic movements in the Muslim world. Quintan Wiktorowicz's The Management of Islamic Activism sheds light on a moderate Islamic movement in the Middle East and the mechanisms of social control that foster such quiescent Islamism. These three works speak to the diverse nature of contemporary Islamic movements and the importance of political context in shaping Islamic strategic orientations. Each offers original empirical and theoretical insights that will surely enhance the discussion of Islamic activism in years to come.