This article analyzes the Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World. I argue that the Arab Human Development Report 2005 works within a United Nations development framework that strengthens states and elites in relation to their populations. This strategy reinforces the logic of national, transnational, and feminist governmentalities. Little attention is given to oppositional movements as sources of development. The authors of the report are often caught in the contradictions of using it to make radical critiques of undemocratic Arab state regimes and repressive Western state policies. International measures such as the human development index and the “global women's rights” discourse used by the United Nations Development Programme and other organizations selectively authorize subjectivities, freedoms, and transformations and help to normalize and constitute a range of inequalities among women.

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Similarities between religion and nationalism are well known but not well understood. They can be explained by drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's sociological theory in order to consider symbolic interests and the strategies employed to advance them. In both religion and nationalism, the “strategy of the prophets” relies on charisma while the “strategy of the priests” relies on cultural capital. In 20th-century Egypt, nationalism permitted intellectuals whose cultural capital was mainly secular, such as Naguib Mahfouz, to become “priests of the nation” in order to compete with the ʿulamaʾ for prestige and influence. However, it severely limited their autonomy, particularly after Nasser took power and became a successful nationalist prophet. Mahfouz's novel Al-Karnak, which explores the fate of the Nasser regime's political prisoners and the effects of Egypt's 1967 military defeat, reflects this limitation. Under a nationalist regime, the film adaptation of the novel contributed to Mahfouz's heteronomy.

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.

In very rich rentier-states, such as Kuwait, citizens have a smaller immediate stake in the success of the nonoil economy than do citizens in nonrentier economies. This is because the nonoil sector does not pay much in the way of taxes, nor does it employ many citizens. For the most part, citizens work for the state or state-owned enterprises, and their paychecks are ultimately funded by oil revenues. Foreigners dominate private-sector employment. Kuwait's parliament—by far the strongest in the Gulf—reflects the interests of citizen employees of the state and is widely seen as an obstacle to private-sector growth. In the United Arab Emirates, by contrast, citizens have little political voice. Public policy instead reflects the interests of capitalists (especially ruling families) in the development of a diversified economy.

This article examines the prospect of urban multiculturalism in the Israeli city of Ashdod against the intricate metrics of modernism and ethnonationalism. This prospect is sometimes endorsed by the city's leaders, but at the same time it answers the logic of ethnonationalism that not only works toward cultivating a homogenous collective and homogenous space but also endorses Western and Eurocentric biases. This logic facilitates practices of social inclusion and exclusion both materially and symbolically. Furthermore, we argue that in Ashdod, ethnonationalism is intertwined with the logic of the market, encouraging social hierarchies and stratifications that carry the stamp of “ethnoclassism” along First and Third World dichotomies. Yet, these processes do not completely foreclose the prospect of multiculturalism, because they cannot completely forestall “bottom-up” forces that promote it either intentionally or inadvertently. The assessment of Ashdod as a potential site of urban multiculturalism becomes nuanced and intriguing as we take into account city planning that considers a modern vision of the city and ethnonational logic, on the one hand, and forces of bottom-up initiatives, on the other. All in all, the city fails the multicultural challenge if by this challenge we understand the establishment of institutional arrangements that guarantee the right to the city—or equal access to all benefits that the city may offer—while allowing residents to cultivate and maintain their cultural uniqueness.

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The Arab Human Development Report 2005, the fourth in a series that has received much acclaim and stirred much controversy, takes up the issue of women's development in the Arab world. Through a careful reading and analysis of sections of the report that address education and economic participation, this paper offers a critique of the human capabilities framework that frames this report. I highlight critical tensions between the claim that providing education is an essential element of expanding choices and the assumptions embedded in discussions about women and education regarding which choices are acceptable and/or desirable. These tensions point to the persistence of values derived from the mandates of global capital, albeit in the new language of neoliberal choice, revealing that ‘human development’ does not represent a significant departure from earlier conceptualizations of development. I draw on my ethnographic research in Jordan as one example to interrogate such assumptions and to shed light on the ambiguities built into the educational project for young women today.

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This article explores the creation and elaboration of certain ceremonials and court rituals in the Sultanate of Oman after the accession of Sultan Qaboos in 1970. It investigates the relationship between the development of these ceremonials and the perception of leadership and authority in the person of the sultan, as well as the development of a sentiment of common nationality. Its ethnographic underpinning is the most remote and marginal of Oman's people, the nomadic pastoral Harasiis tribe of central Oman. Whereas the creation of royal rituals was important for building a sense of national belonging even among this most cut off and distant of communities, these same ceremonies and created traditions developed lives of their own. Over time these rituals ossified sultanic courtly behavior, contributing little to the organic sense of Omani citizenship and eventually disillusioning some marginal groups.

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This article deals with the Sudanese–Ethiopian conflict (1885–89) from a Mahdist perspective, in the wider context of the European scramble for Africa. Focusing on Sudanese representations of Ethiopia as well as on the causes underlying the conflict, I confront a Mahdist chronicle of particular historiographical significance with a range of historical sources. Departing from a purely jihadist framework of analysis, I highlight various Mahdist conceptualizations of Christian Ethiopia as well as historical, political, military, and economic processes conducive to the outbreak of an armed confrontation between the two independent African states. I argue that the Sudanese ruling elite resorted to jihadist discourse as a legitimizing device rather than as an inflexible policy and examine more specific rhetoric instruments meant to justify Mahdist attitudes toward the Christian kingdom. Whereas prophetic visions were used to make the khalifa's Ethiopian policy acceptable to Mahdist eyes, the ambivalent legacy of early Muslim–Aksumite contacts was reactivated in the framework of a dialogue with the Ethiopian enemy.

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This essay offers a reinterpretation of the origins of Islamic printing as part of the new global technological and cultural exchanges of the early 19th century. With a special focus on Iranian printers, it reconstructs the interactions of the individual agents of this technological transfer with their European partners. In particular, it traces the emergence of cultural and technological “middlemen” in government employment who traveled to European cities to acquire printing. The “transculturalism” that these middlemen developed was a necessary qualification for success, and here their interaction with missionary organizations and their Arabic typographers proved crucial. They accessed the mass-produced, portable iron handpress, the global proliferation of which in the early 1800s linked pioneer Iranian as well as Indian and Egyptian printers to contemporary developments in England, New Zealand, and America. Islamic printing emerged as less a “late development” than part of the wider globalization of printing that accompanied the Industrial Revolution.

In 1925, the Turkish parliament commissioned a translation of the Qurʾan from Arabic to Turkish as well as a Turkish-language Qurʾanic commentary. This project is commonly misunderstood as an initiative engineered by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and linked to the radical institutional reforms of 1924: abolition of the Islamic caliphate, prohibition of the Sufi orders, and closure of the medreses. In fact, parliament's support of a Qurʾan translation was not a radical nationalist reform but an initiative supported and executed by devout intellectuals who opposed other facets of Islamic reform in the early years of the Turkish republic.

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