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Shaykh al-Qusi is a charismatic spiritual leader in Cairo whose followers have been recording their dream visions and waking visions in a handwritten collection since 1997. Drawing on the shaykh's dream-inspired poetry and his followers' vision narratives, I describe the ways in which this community of believers understands the relationship between authorship and authority, as well as between imagination (al-khayamacr;l) and tradition. Dreams and visions do not circumvent idioms of the textual tradition, but in their narrative form they often mirror and reinscribe its genres. Some of the group's vision narratives emulate the face-to-face encounters of the hadith whereas others signify eruptions of a timeless truth from elsewhere, similar to the Quran. Through mirroring the sacred genres, dreams and visions bring believers closer to these texts. Just as dreams are understood through the tradition, the tradition is understood by some through dreams.

The article offers a revisionist account of how the modern Saudi state emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Differing with structuralist “rentier-state” accounts, I contend that individual agency has been very important in shaping the Saudi bureaucracy as oil money gave unique, although temporary, autonomy to princely elites to organize the state around their personal interests. Emerging institutions functioned as power tokens, leading to a fragmented administrative setup in which ministries serve as “fiefdoms” and bureaucratic capacities vary strongly from one institution to another. Through state growth and the “locking in” of distributional commitments, the autonomy of princely elites to redesign the state has strongly declined over time, meaning that many early institutional decisions have permanently impacted the shape and capacities of today's Saudi state. Vis-agrave;-vis rentier theory, I demonstrate that regime autonomy is not constant over time and that the quality of institutions is historically contingent and not determined by oil, which merely enlarges the menu of institutional choices available to rentier-state elites.

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The Copto-Arabic Synaxarion entry for the repose of Abraham ibn Zurءah (975-78), sixty-second patriarch of the See of Alexandria, commemorates the miraculous moving of Muqattam Mountain (outside of Cairo) in response to a devastating challenge posed to Coptic Christians by Fatimid caliph Muءizz li-Din Allah (969-75). The challenge—move Muqattam Mountain or be persecuted—unfolds as an important representative narrative of Christian-Muslim relations in medieval Coptic literature. The Muqattam narrative maintains hope by veiling religious-political commentary in the cloak of a miraculous or “unthinkable” event. This type of narrativizing, as archetypically displayed in the Muqattam narrative, is an important way for Copts to critique their dhimmimacr; status and Islamic governance while simultaneously maintaining hope in their Coptic faith. Through a close reading of this narrative, I argue that the miracle story provides an empowering vision and sustains a triumphant representation of Coptic faith.

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Scholars interested in the variation of Third Wave democratization have utilized cross–regional frameworks in which a single outcome characterizes the Arab world: no democratization. A number of social scientists working on Arab cases have shifted the investigation away from why democratization failed to how authoritarianism endured and changed over the past two decades. This article joins these efforts by examining the importance of professional associations, which refers to professional representatives and private economic groups, and their relations with regimes and states. The paper examines how three nondemocratic Arab regimes in Jordan, Syria, and Kuwait weathered economic and political crises in the 1980s and 1990s through contested or coordinated relations with professional associations. Outcomes are explained by focusing on (1) the respective social bases of regimes and associations influencing state intervention in associational life and (2) how state intervention shaped the capacity of associations either to contest state policy or to coordinate toward implementation.

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This paper traces the significant role of Sufism in promoting Muslim—Christian dialogue at a time of growing friction and colonial encroachment. The widening gap in power and wealth between the Western and Muslim world from the 19th century onward heightened cultural animosity between the two but also evoked ecumenical efforts to diffuse this contention. One such effort was Islamic modernism, which promoted a liberal interpretation of scripture and advocated the establishment of an inclusive polity that would encompass women and religious minorities. Islamic modernism gained considerable attention in the research literature. By contrast, another important ecumenical discourse, based on Sufism, which emerged in the early 20th century and was joined by Muslims and European Christians alike, has remained largely unexplored in the literature. Cairo, Rome, and Paris constituted the geographical points of convergence of this discourse; the Sufi teachings of Ibn al-ءArabi (d. 1240) provided its ideological core. Most participants sought to position Sufi values as a cultural bridge between East and West, although political considerations were also involved. This paper shows that far from being anachronistic or detached from reality, as some of its vociferous critics charged, Sufism remained a vital tradition well into modern times. Moreover, it engendered a lively debate within Western intellectual circles over the role of spirituality in modern life.

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This article examines Arab photography in Ottoman and Mandate Lebanon. It begins to explain how the photographic image naturalized the discourses of individualism, class identity, and nationalism that were germinated in the political economy and the organic intellectual culture of the late Ottoman Empire. Inspired less by Orientalist imagery or mimicry of the West than by specific ideological planks of capitalism and modernity, images produced by professionals Sabunji and the Kovas and such amateurs as Salim Abu Izz al-din and Marie Khazen instituted a new process of desiring capitalist production, accumulation, and commodity consumption in Lebanon. Photography reified the imago (the discursive imagined self) of the Lebanese bourgeois as a composite of private and public and sectarian and secular identities—but first and foremost as an individual. However, theWestern narrative that associates photography with the secularism of the bourgeois self finds its limits in the sectarian political economy and power sharing of Lebanon.

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This essay is an attempt to read popular melodrama as a reflection of changing societal appreciations of sentimentality, romance, family relations, and, ultimately, political power during the second decade of Nasserist rule in Egypt. The essay focuses on two film classics that bookend the 1960s—“family melodramas” starring singer ءAbd al-Halim Hafiz, the pop icon intimately associated with the Nasserist project. Each film turns upon a single dramatic act of parental discipline, a slap delivered by an outraged father across the cheek of a rebellious son. Released in 1962, still a time of heady optimism, al-Khataya raises troubling questions about paternity and social status yet resolves them in classic genre style. Abi fawq al-shagara, released in 1969, in the aftermath of the June 1967 “naksa” (setback), reflects a growing generation gap and suggests—if it does not quite deliver—a countercultural reading of patriarchal authority, as well as sexual and political liberation.

This article contributes to the history of Shiء Islam in Lebanon under the French Mandate by looking at Shiءi religious and cultural engagements with the problem of gender. In the first section, religious treatises written by ءulamaʿ in the context of a politicized “culture war” waged over the proposed reformation of ءAshuraʿ mourning practices during the 1920s and 1930s are analyzed to elucidate the relationship between idealised gender behavior and religious practice. In the second section the Shiءi modernist monthly journal al-ءIrfan is utilized to show how it advocated certain “proper” roles for men and women in an adequately pious Shiءi society. Finally, jokes and other materials published in al-ءIrfan are examined to demonstrate how multifaceted gender norms were in Shiءi Lebanon. These sources paint a rich historical portrait of Shiءi cultural politics by complicating conventional conceptualizations of Shiءi society under the Mandate and illustrating how Shiءi cultural identities have been produced and negotiated over time.

Ahmed Hilmi (1865–1914) was a prominent figure among the late Ottoman thinkers and writers who laid the foundations of intellectual life in modern Turkey. His oeuvre includes dozens of historical, philosophical, and political works, as well as novels and poems. The overtly modernist underpinnings of his works on the one hand, and his Sufi piety and firm rejection of materialism and positivism on the other hand, have earned him recognition as an early exponent of a kind of modernist, nonliteralist Islamic agenda that has been conspicuous in a variety of Turkish Islamic movements in recent decades. His untimely death, later attributed to a Freemason–Zionist conspiracy, added further to his mystique in some Islamic circles. Modernist yet deeply devout, Islamist yet uninterested in scripturalist paths of religious revival, Ahmed Hilmi stands out as a representative of an important intellectual trend that has often been overlooked in studies of the late Ottoman period.

This article examines the views and place of Izmirli Ismail Hakkı in late Ottoman thought. A prominent religious thinker, Hakkı took part in lively debates in Istanbul. He and other moderate religious thinkers were against the defenders of mere positivism in the process of modernization of Ottoman thought in the modern period. By focusing on Hakkı, the article aims to highlight the significance of central Ottoman scholars in modern Islamic thought and the debates of modernization. It pays special attention to Hakkı's attempt to reconstruct Islamic philosophical theology with a new kalam book and to his critical responses to 19th–century materialist thought, as well as to his opinions regarding other Ottoman reform projects.

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