In 1990, Vaclav Havel addressed a joint session of the United States Congress. It was a heady moment in many ways. Not only was his rise the product of stunning—and surprisingly peaceful—political change; not only was he a living symbol of principled political opposition and its force; Havel was also something extremely unusual: a true intellectual who had just entered the halls of power. And he quickly showed that in his visit to the halls of Congress. The new Czech president was not content to give a mere policy address or a string of bromides and platitudes. Instead he actually talked somewhat serious philosophy to the assembled legislators. Before doing so, he did at least promise, he said, to “limit myself to a single idea.” He called that idea “a great certainty.” What was it? “Consciousness precedes Being, not the other way around, as Marxists claim.”

This article addresses the early formation of Sunni “orthodoxy” through the prisms of historical memory and collective identity rather than those of theology, law, and formal political power.2 It does so by exploring the socio-political context in which the phrase luzūm al-jamāʿa3 (adhering to the community) was deployed during the late Umayyad/Marwanid (64/684–132/750) and early Abbasid (132/750–333/945) periods, primarily among the networks of hadith transmitters who circulated the idea during that period. The results of this analysis reveal that ideas central to Sunni conceptions of community first developed in Umayyad patronage structures and networks, before being adopted by the so-called “proto-Sunni” elite.

Tinghir-Jerusalem is a documentary about exile and identity, with an unremarkable Moroccan village at its epicenter. Director, producer, and narrator Kamal Hachkar brings us along, quite literally, on a journey to explore his insecure sense of self while examining a broader narrative about the exodus to Israel of his natal town's Berber Jewish population. With a shared, idealized notion of “home,” Hachkar and his subjects explore what it means to exist liminally, in between both place and time.

Director Dan Shadur's parents, Avi and Nili, were part of a multitude of Israeli diplomats and businesspeople doing business in Iran before the Islamic Revolution of 1979. For many of these people, their years in Iran were the happiest moments of their lives. They enjoyed big apartments, substantial earning power, vacations in the mountains, royal dinners, and front-row seating at military parades. Of course, all of this was to disappear starting with the tumultuous period at the end of 1978.

Malcolm H. Kerr's classic study The Arab Cold War appeared in print in a circuitous way, which can be traced using archival materials that have previously been inaccessible to scholars. More important, the primary analytical themes of the book continue to be fundamentally misrepresented, despite the frequent appropriation of the book's title by students of regional affairs in the wake of the 2010–11 uprisings.