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During the British Mandate period Zionist health organizations and professional groups made an extensive effort to educate the Jewish public in health and hygiene. This article analyzes the Hebrew popular-scientific discourse of hygiene. It looks at the inculcation of hygienic models of conduct as part of a project of modernization and Westernization. As the analysis demonstrates, Zionist identity was constructed as modern and Western in opposition to the Orient and Oriental ways of life. At the same time, “Occidental” and “Oriental” were unstable and sometimes ambivalent categories in the hygienic discourse. Not only the value of the categories sometimes differ (as Jews were depicted both as European settlers and as natives of the Orient), but also East European Jews appeared both as objects and as subjects of a “civilizing mission.” As a consequence, the construction of difference between European Jews and Orientals was not always grounded in different practices attributed to each of these groups but sometimes in the different value attached to the same practices when performed by members of different groups.

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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.

This study give voices to three possibilities of becoming modern in the Turkish experience through a reading of the novels of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Oğuz Atay, and Orhan Pamuk. The analysis of the novels invites rethinking, with an eye to gender relations, the terms “modernity” and “modern existence” as well as Paul Gilroy's inversion of the relationship between center and margin. In this framework, I explore the Turkish experience through the themes of “constituting one's self across the East--West duality” and “temporality.” Tanpınar's novel represents a conservative, anti-individualistic response to modernity concerned with reproducing the “authentic whole” in the face of Westernization. Pamuk's novels take the opposite stance; here becoming modern coincides with full replication of Western individuality. The works of Atay, in contrast, display a “truly modern” possibility—a critical, creative, and open-ended process of self-creation that leads subjects toward individual and social autonomy, although it remains unrealized.

The growth of private welfare in Syria since the 1990s and a parallel détente between the Baʿth regime and the Islamic trend have allowed an Islamic movement called Jamaʿat Zayd to gain an impressive hold on Damascus's charitable sector. Through a detailed, fieldwork-based analysis of this process, this article argues that the movement's success as a private welfare provider is the product rather than the cause of its large religious following. We also propose an empirically nuanced contribution to the debate on the current transformations of Arab authoritarian systems, questioning the regime's ability to effectively co-opt the Zayd movement. Whereas the development of private welfare is politically risk free when authoritarian leaders control the financial and symbolic resources needed to maintain it, it can also strengthen independent-minded groups when, as in Zayd's case, its funding stems from a large popular base that limits the possibilities of instrumentalization by the regime.

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