The rapid rise in the population of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century is well known. Ömer Lütfi Barkan long ago published a table showing that twelve important Ottoman cities grew from a combined population of 142,562 in 1520/1530 to a population of 271,494 in 1571/1580; likewise he has shown that the population of five major provinces in Anatolia grew 59.9 per cent in the same period, from 872,610 to 1,360,474. Fernand Braudel supports the thesis that there was a general 100 per cent population growth throughout the Mediterranean basin in the sixteenth century, and Barkan claims that growth at the Ottoman end of the Mediterranean was even more dynamic. However, there is still need for specialized studies of Ottoman population and its flux in the sixteenth century.

Between 1936 and 1939, the Egyptian Medical Association held a series of forums on birth control and the population problem; the first full-length book on Egypt's population problem was published; the first life tables for Egypt were calculated; a group of university professors organized under the rubric of the Happy Family Society to discuss the need for planned families; the first fatwa on birth control in the 20th century was issued by the mufti of Egypt, Shaykh Abd al-Majid Salim; and the Ministry of Social Affairs was created, part of its mandate being to study the population problem.

The sensational nature of the Iranian press in the 1940s has been largely understood in political terms. In September 1941, occupying Allied armies forced Reza Shah Pahlavi (1879–1944, r. 1925–41) into exile, ending his tyrannical “twenty years” and unleashing a variety of political forces which vied with each other for public support in the press.3 The presence of Allied censors notwithstanding, so the argument goes, the Iranian press was momentarily free from effective government censorship—though not from the recurring cycle of censorship that has dominated scholarly interest in the Iranian press.4 But a closer look at the often violent and sexual political discourse in the Iranian press raises questions less about Iran's political history than about its cultural and economic history. Why was the content of the press so graphic in the 1940s? What economic and cultural trends sustained such content once it had been provoked by political events? How much did the overt sexuality of political discourse confirm or modify notions of gender in Iranian culture?

For seven dramatic days in late November 1979, bloody street violence between state security forces and thousands of frustrated Shiites rocked the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Sparked by the Saudi regime's brutal repression of those peacefully celebrating Ashura—the annual mourning of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein—the fury resulted in an unknown number of dead and wounded. Among the destruction, demonstrators burned the British bank in Qatif as well as the offices of the Saudia National Airline. They destroyed state-owned vehicles, attacked police, raided the coast guard office in the village of al-Awamiyya, seized weapons from soldiers, and even occupied the old city in downtown Qatif, from which they held off the Saudi military for days. One report relates that a group even burned a toy store owned by a government official. Women as well as men marched in anger. The security forces, which included 20,000 Saudi National Guard, cordoned off the major roadways, particularly those in Qatif, Sayhat, and Safwa to localize the protest, control the flow of information, as well as to prevent nearby oil facilities from being destroyed. Reports swirled that soldiers fired on virtually any public gathering of people, including at least one funeral procession in Safwa, forcing the mourners to flee and abandon the corpse in the street. State and hospital officials refused to release other bodies from the morgue for burial until the uproar quieted, leveraging the dead as blackmail. The National Guard relied on the heavy firepower of helicopter gun ships for crowd control, turning the area into a deadly conflict zone characterized by terror, hostility, and fear.

Some strides have been taken to improve the status of women in Islam, but the weight of conservatism is still very strong. How strong it is may be gauged from the following illustration. In the introduction to his book published in 1926 describing the rise of trade unionism, Shaikh Tāhir al-Haddād, a pioneer of the trade union movement in Tunisia, interprets history in a fashion that comes very close to Marxism, although he rejects Marxist atheism and materialism. No opposition came to this work from the pen of an 'alim. But three years later, when he published Our Woman in the Sharî'a and in Society, arguing that the social status of woman in Muslim society was actually inferior to what Islamic teaching granted them and pleading for improvement in the social and legal positions of women, he was severely attacked by the conservatives, lost his job, and died a few years later, a forlorn man.

The era culminating in World War I saw a transition from multinational empires to nation-states. Large empires such as the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman searched for ways to cope with the decline of their political control, while peoples in these empires shifted their political loyalties to nation-states. The Ottoman Empire offers a favorable canvas for studying new nationalisms that resulted in many successful and unsuccessful attempts to form nation-states. As an example of successful attempts, Arab nationalism has received the attention that it deserves in the field of Middle Eastern studies.1 Students have engaged in many complex debates on different aspects of Arab nationalism, enjoying a wealth of hard data. Studies on Kurdish nationalism, however, are still in their infancy. Only a very few scholars have addressed the issue in a scholarly manner.2 We still have an inadequate understanding of the nature of early Kurdish nationalism and its consequences for the Middle East in general and Turkish studies in particular. Partly because of the subject's political sensitivity, many scholars shy away from it. However, a consideration of Kurdish nationalism as an example of unsuccessful attempts to form a nation-state can contribute greatly to the study of nationalism in the Middle East.

This article's geographical focus is the Galilee, Israel's only region with a Palestinian Arab majority. Its sociological focus is the drive to Judaize this region, the mirror image of its de-Arabization, which I anchor in Israelis’ morbid fear of settler colonial reversal. Although direct legal discrimination—restriction of movement under a military government and exclusion from publicly administered land—was banned by the government and the High Court of Justice respectively, new modes of discrimination against Israel's Arab citizens have replaced the older forms. I demonstrate how policies that limit Arab middle-class citizens’ upwardly mobile migration into the Judaized spaces of communal settlements (or overlooks) and towns endure. I compare gatekeeping exercised by national-level indirect legal discrimination operating through the admission committees of communal settlements with the institutional discrimination practiced by municipalities of emerging mixed towns against new Arab residents’ public presence. Finally, I highlight the linkages between instances of Judaization across the Green Line, which make the unwinding of segregation, in all of its forms, that much harder.

The relationship between feminism and socialism in both the theoretical and practical realms has been marked with difficulty and “unhappiness.” Feminists have criticized leftists for their lack of attention to sexual domination, and many socialists, in turn, have looked at women's liberation movements as a bourgeois deviation or, worse yet, a conspiracy against the workers' struggle. In 19th-century social democratic movements in Europe, conflicts between feminist-socialist advocates of women's rights such as Clara Zetkin and “proletarian anti-feminism” among workers and communists were constant. Eventually, guided by the theoretical insights of a number of socialist leaders such as Bebel, Engels, and Zetkin, socialist parties of the First and Second Internationals came to realize that the cause of the women's movement was just and to accept autonomous women's organizations. The Third International, or Comintern, although it initially claimed to liberate women “not only on paper, but in reality, in actual fact,” treated the inequality of women as a secondary consideration. Focusing on production and labor conflict, the Comintern paid attention only to women's exploitation by capital to the extent that “by the end of the 1920s, any special emphasis on women's social subordination in communist propaganda or campaigning came to be regarded as a capitulation to bourgeois feminism.” Leftist women activists lost their organizational autonomy and had to work under the supervision of their national communist party.

Scholary works on Sufism have been almost entirely concerned with the classical textual tradition and have given scant attention to the contemporary practice of Sufism. Such Studies as have been done in Egypt inadequately reflect actual popular beliefs and practices by exhibiting tendencies either to interpret contemporary sufism in light of classical Sufism,to dismiss popular Sufism as a degradation of “true” Sufism,or to conclude, in light of the presentation of Sufism propagated by the Supreme Council of Sufi Orders, that there is nothing that distinguishes contemporary Sufism from any other branch of Islam.Contemporary Sufism must be studied as a complete system, not merely a degradation of another system. It developed from classical Sufism but is not identical with it, and offers a world view and rituals that distinguish it from other Islamic currents. The centrality of devotion to the Prophet and his family is one aspect of Egyptian Sufi religious life that distinguishes it from that of other Egyptian Muslims, and bears interesting parallels to Shicism, perhaps providing evidence for what Marshall Hodgson called "the moulding of Islam as a whole in a ShiStic direction."4 This article will document and analyze devotion to the Prophet and the ahl al-bayt and its associated beliefs in Egyptian Sufism, and compare them with their analogues in ShiSsrn.

Political modernization is a difficult concept to grapple with1. The traditional approach is to view the political systems of industrially developed Western countries as a model of, or sometimes even as a synonym for, a politically developed polity.

By the late seventeenth century, Algeria and Tunisia had established regimes that were largely independent of Ottoman sovereignty in almost every regard, although the Porte continued, in strictly legal terms, to exert minimal rights of sovereignty.

        Michel Le Gall1

But, let there be no mistake: the more a regency of Barbary has become fearsome to the Christian princes, the more the Sultan is its absolute master. He had only to utter a word to end an unjust war and fix even the terms for peace.

        Jean-Michel Venture de Paradis2

Separated by two centuries, these two quotations describe the role of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa in very different—indeed, contradictory—terms. On the one hand, Ottoman North Africa is depicted as a region where independent political entities emerged out of a century of Ottoman rule, ready as it were for the eventual emergence of nation-states in the 20th century. Venture de Paradis's earlier description, however, is devoid of the hindsight gained by our knowledge of the “end of the story.” It tells us that by the end of the 18th century, contrary to the contemporary accepted view of the remoteness of the Maghribi “regencies” from the imperial center in Istanbul, the three Ottoman provinces of North Africa were indeed an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, and the rulers of these provinces were obedient subjects of the Sublime Porte.

The twentieth-century Ibadi imamate of “inner” Oman (1913–1955) constituted one of the world's last theocracies. In a demise unique for the mid-twentieth century, it became assimilated into one of the world's last absolute monarchies. The 1955 shift from theocratic to dynastic rule met initially with the support, or at least the acquiescence, of most of the tribesmen and notables of the interior. This acquiescence at first appears surprising because the fundamentalist Islamic religious and political principles for which the imamate stood continued to be properly supported. One of these principles for Ibadis was that the imām, the spiritual and temporal leader of the Islamic community, should be the most qualified of available candidates and chosen by a consensus of the community's religious men of learning and notables, a notion markedly at contrast with the ascriptive one of dynastic rule. Conflict between these two forms of rule is basic to much of Islamic political history and to that of pre-1970 Oman in particular.

Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski provide a spirited defense of their book, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, which I critiqued in the November 1997 issue of IJMES. They explain their ideas on nationalism and how they purportedly applied them in the book, and conclude that I have misread “both modern nationalism and Egyptian history.” That remains to be seen. What is certain is that one cannot find in Redefining the Egyptian Nation the analysis of the thought of Benedict Anderson and Anthony D. Smith presented in their response (“Print Culture, Social Change, and the Process of Redefining Imagined Communities in Egypt,” present issue). Neither can one find in Imagined Communities the ideas and the stress on “nationalism as a cultural construct” that they attribute to Anderson. Gershoni and Jankowski now allege intentions and arguments for books whose texts do not contain what they ascribe to them. Their claims here for Redefining the Egyptian Nation appear to reflect the more extensive reading on nationalism which they did for their recent co-edited book Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East rather than a familiarity with the literature evidenced in the book under discussion, which was published four years ago.

In 1933, the Urdu and Persian poet Muhammad Iqbal (1873–1938) became the first Muslim to worship in the mosque of Cordoba since its conversion into a cathedral after the Moors were expelled from Spain in 1492. Iqbal had gone to London as a delegate to the third roundtable conference on the political future of India. On his return, he was invited to lecture in Madrid by the Orientalist Asin Palacios, and took the opportunity to visit the monument. Dramatizing the symbolic significance of his visit to the mosque, Iqbal swooned upon entering and uttered verses that presumably came to be included in his celebrated Urdu poem “Masjid-i Qurtubah”. Some years before, in 1919, the Egyptian Arabic poet Ahmad Shawqi (1868–1932) ended his five-year exile in Spain with a similar visit to the Andalusian monuments, albeit with less dramatic fanfare. Nevertheless, Shawqi as well was accompanied by his muse. In the introduction to his own famous poem about Islamic Spain, the “Siniyyah”, Shawqi recounts how the embryonic verses of this poem came to him as he toured the mosque and the Alhambra of Granada.

Undeclared ambitions for the future notwithstanding, my current research profile is one that could qualify me as an “environmental historian” by only the most indulgent of standards. My contribution to this roundtable will thus be written less in the mode of a practicing researcher in the field and more from the perspective of a teacher (at a U.S. public land-grant university) currently in the process of trying to “environmentalize” two large survey courses in history.

Defining the role of women in Islamic society has been an issue for debate in post-revolutionary Iran, particularly in light of recent rulings affecting women. This is not merely a theoretical debate but a crisis situation where some women who participated in the revolution alongside men now find themselves in a peculiarly difficult position in relation to society and the current government. Ali shariati (d. 1977), through his publihsed works and transcribed lectures during the 1960s and 1970s, has had a tremendous impact on the direction of this debate. Completely rejecting the role of women in both western and traditional societies, Shariati offers a third alternative: the figure of Fatima, daughter of the Prophet Mohammad and wife of Ali, the first Imam of the Shi'is as the personification of women's role.

After losing control of the capital Sanaa to Yemen's northern Houthi movement, which is aligned with forces loyal to the former president ʿAli ʿAbd Allah Salih, current Yemeni President ʿAbd Rabbu Mansur Hadi turned to Saudi Arabia for help. In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and its coalition of nine states began a bombing campaign in Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world. Prior to the conflict, Yemen was already 90-percent dependent on imported food and had been battling a severe water deficit. A twenty-eight-month-long siege of its civilian population has left the country in a situation that some humanitarian groups deem to be worse than the crisis in Syria. The media has barely covered Yemen's catastrophic crisis, partially because of overt censorship by the Saudi kingdom and a shielding of its systemic violations of international law by powerful allies including the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. These countries are clearly more concerned with billion-dollar arms deals with the kingdom than with putting an end to what has been described as the worst food crisis since the establishment of the United Nations.

Charles D. Smith's review essay on our book Redefining the Egyptian Nation in the October 1997 issue of IJMES undertakes a critical analysis of the work. Simultaneously, it raises broader questions about the relevance of some of the insights of theoreticians of nationalism, particularly Benedict Anderson, to the case of Egyptian nationalism. The essay's attempt to evaluate the utility of recent theoretical writing on nationalism for the study of the Middle East is a worthwhile endeavor. However, we believe that the essay's analysis of the book itself is based on a familiarity with only a small selection of the sources relevant to understanding Egyptian nationalism, and that it provides a misleading interpretation of the contents of the work. We also feel that its observations about nationalist theory sometimes misconstrue our use of the same, and in general underestimate the importance of recent theoretical work on nationalism for the study of Egypt and the Middle East.

On 8 April 1980, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr was executed. His execution arousedno criticism from the West against the Iraqi regime, however, because Sadr had openly supported the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime in Iran and because the West was distracted by the turbulence in Iran that followed the revolution. Governments both in the West and in the region were concerned that the Iranian revolution would be “exported,” and they set about eliminating that threat. When Ayatollah Khomeini called upon Muslims in Iraq to follow the example of the Iranian people and rise up against the corrupt secular Baʿthist socialist regime, they interpreted it as the first step in the spread of Islamic radicalism that would eventually lead to the destablization of the whole region.

One way that social scientists categorize and describe political regimes is to analyze the nature of the executive branch of government, particularly the makeup of cabinets. The assumption is that the structure of the cabinet and the class background, and the educational or occupational training of ministers reflect the nature of the regime. Those at the top of the state may represent certain groups in society or be particularly responsive to the demands of the social groups from which they come. Background characteristics may also be a good indicator of the style of rule. Education, training, age, occupational career, all indicate how decision-makers think, how they organize to approach problems, how they issue orders and use subordinates. The institutional background of ministers may reflect the importance of various institutions in society, for the connection of institutions through individuals at the top of the state may be a good indication of which specialized constituencies must be consulted, which command power and which control political, economic, and social resources.