Yitzhak Rabin left a complex and paradoxical legacy. The man who for decades embodied a national security policy based on forceful deterrence adopted, in the 1990s, a rhetoric of coexistence and cooperation. Rabin began to articulate positions identified with the Israeli left: that the Palestinians were at the heart of the Israeli–Arab conflict, and that the conflict was at least partly a product of “psychological walls” on both sides. Despite his traditionally hawkish views and staunch opposition to recognizing Yasir Arafat and the PLO, Rabin oversaw a reversal of policy toward Israel's former arch-enemy. Indeed, it was Rabin's stature as “Mr. Security” that made the Israeli–PLO Declaration of Principles possible. Unlike Shimon Peres, his rival for Labor Party leadership, Rabin's unrivaled role as an architect of national security policy and practice afforded him relative immunity to charges of excessive dovishness. Efraim Inbar, professor of politics at Bar-Ilan University, offers a lucid account of Rabin's contribution to Israeli security. Concluding that Rabin's approach to security was pragmatic, ad hoc, and without an overarching strategic vision (p. 169), Inbar nevertheless begins from the premise that for Rabin and other leaders of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), the anarchic environment of Middle Eastern politics conditions Israel's security needs. In this environment, governments consider international law and treaties unreliable, so “self-help” and deterrence are the sole path to security. For Rabin, “What has assured Israel's existence…is primarily Israel's comprehensive power, with military might as the decisive element” (p. 11).

No historical treatment of the first decade of the British occupation of Egypt overlooks the abortive mission of Sir Henry Drummond-Wolff to Cairo and Istanbul from 1885 to the spring of 1887. Most, however, fail to discuss the diverse political interests within Egypt itself, which, in one fashion or another, stood to be affected by the mission and its objectives. Consequently, an entire segment of the negotiations which led to the 22 May 1887 convention setting the conditions for withdrawal, including an original draft article covering the future status of the capitulatory and mixed court regime in Egypt, has all but disappeared from the record. The circumstances behind this forgotten article demonstrate in capsule form the degree to which the issue of judicial reform indirectly dominated London's Egyptian policy in stages from 1876 to the Montreux Convention on the capitulations concluded by Nahhas Pasha in 1937.

Psychologists attribute great significance to slips of the tongue. In such moments, the train of normal speech is interrupted by a word that seems to be out of context. Yet analysts say that this interruption actually betrays an inner truth hidden, consciously or not, behind the screen of “normal” speech. I suggest here that the 1931 Arab–Jewish transportation strike against the Mandatory government in Palestine can be seen as a historical slip of the tongue in the history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

For more than a decade, scholars and writers of various stripes have been revisiting the events surrounding the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948, whose outcome heavily shaped subsequent Middle East politics. Basing their work primarily on newly available Israeli, British, and American archival materials, they have shed considerable light and generated much heat regarding the origins, consequences, and degrees of responsibility for the events surrounding the birth of the State of Israel, the uprooting of two-thirds of the Palestinian Arab community, and the defeat of neighboring Arab armies.

Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa are only too familiar with the momentous changes set in motion by the events of World War I. Given the number of new states and political movements that emerged in the war's aftermath, it seems only fair to describe it as “the single most important political event in the history of the modern Middle East.” Elizabeth F. Thompson recently likened the war's impact on the Middle East to that of the Civil War in the United States. To be sure, the passing of a century hardly proved sufficient for coming to terms with the legacy of either war. In fact, analyses and discussions of World War I in the Middle East have remained highly politicized, in school curricula, in academia, and in popular culture and the arena of public memory. History and historical interpretations are always contested, of course, and there is little reason to believe that accounts of World War I in the Middle East and North Africa will become less so anytime soon.

The governorships of Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan Vakil al-Mulk (1859–68) and Murtaza Quli Khan Vakil al-Mulk II (1868–78) in Qajar Kirman were highlighted by an extensive building campaign which initiated a period of significant social and economic change in the province. This article explores the activities of local elites in managing their family estates in the context of this project through a careful analysis of provincial geographical and historical writings, Persian-language travelogues, and commentary by European administrators and travelers. Kirmani elites began investing in land and commercial agriculture on an unprecedented scale, accelerating Kirman's absorption into global economic patterns as a producer of raw materials like cotton, wool, and opium. An integrated political economy developed regionally through the expanding networks of elite households and their estates, reinforced by families combining landownership with administrative functions in rural areas. This process demonstrates the extent to which Iranians were active participants in transforming their communities in the context of the advance of global capitalism, with longstanding patterns of elite household competition playing an important role in mediating social and political change locally.

Research on Islamism needs to move closer to its object and to study that object more closely in its interaction with its environment. Despite great advances in recent years, academic literature on the topic still too often suffers from a double distancing: the researcher tends, first, to remain unnecessarily removed from Islamic movements as the object of study and, second, to study those movements at a distance from the society in which they grow and in which they compete for support.

Prior to 1964 the Iranian budgets were only a simple record of the receipts and expenditures of the central government. Such conventional administrative budgets were the results of the reforms of A.D. 1911 (21 Safar 1329 A.H.D.) when a Comprehensive Financial Law for the country was legislated. This law was modeled on the existing laws of France. The French laws were in turn based on the philosophy of government as conceived by the classical economists. These economists thought of the governments as an organization which protected the right of the individual to pursue his best interest without trespassing on the rights of others. Also, they advocated government non-intervention and non participation in economic activities.

Contemporary feminists have stressed the importance of women's networks in empowering women. In the Western context, professional networks, support groups, and the availability of role models are seen to provide a collective basis for the development of confidence and self-esteem as well as a potential base for political action. Feminist attention to the Middle East has uncovered patterns of interaction suggesting that there, too, women have found in feminine networks both the basis for power and the personal attributes that undergird social competence. Aswad, for example, describes the kabul, an upper-class formal visitation network in Turkey with distinct political overtones. Women exchange information that might be dismissed as gossip were it not for the fact that participants are from powerful land-owning families, and the discussions have impact well beyond the immediate setting.1

Has the time come for a free-trade agreement (FTA) between Egypt and the United States? According to the contributors to Building Bridges, an FTA is the logical next step in the Egypt–U.S. relationship. This policy-oriented volume explores the conditions under which the benefits of an FTA between the parties would be maximized. Although the contributors reach different conclusions regarding the optimal form of the Egypt–U.S. FTA, consensus is reached on one point: an FTA between Egypt and the United States will produce economic benefits for both nations.

During the winter and spring of 1990 Farghanachi Uzbek refugees from Afghanistan were the subjects of my ethnographic research in Karachi, Pakistan, where they form an unregistered community. The Farghanachi frequently play cassette tapes that explain the ongoing jihad in Afghanistan through stories about the Prophet Muhammad. Women and children use the tapes to accompany conversation and to facilitate discussion of Islam and martyrdom; occasionally they cry at the stories, which remind them of their own dead kin, the extraordinary circumstances of jihad, and their transformed lives. This paper draws conclusions about the ideal roles of women in jihad from a tape recorded in Baghlan province in northern Afghanistan. On the tape the exemplary behavior of a mother, wife, and daughter during the famous battle of Uhud that Muhammad and his followers fought against the Meccans is recounted. The infamous Hind the liver eater—who symbolizes the brutality and violence of female vengeance—is ultimately vanquished by these good women.

The surge in foreign direct investment (FDI)—investment with managerial control by the foreign investor, usually a multinational corporation—has been the major driver of globalization in the past two decades and the accelerator of economic development in many developing countries. It has, however, bypassed Turkey. By all relevant relative measures found in the United Nations' annual World Investment Report, Turkey has failed to attract much FDI.