From the day in April 1946 when the last French soldiers left and Syrians were finally able to run their own affairs, their policies toward other Arabs have differed significantly, although decreasingly over the years, from the policies pursued by Egyptians. Within their country, Syrian legislators used to privilege Arab over non-Arab foreigners in various respects, including the investment of capital as well as the acquisition of citizenship and political rights, while fewer, if any, advantages of this sort were granted in Egypt Such differences in the treatment of noncitizen Arabs at home have been paralleled by different policies toward other Arab states. Unity schemes, a prominent feature in inter-Arab relations generally, are one key area where approaches diverged quantitatively as well as qualitatively and where favorable attitudes in Syria often contrasted with considerable reluctance on the Egyptian side.

A substantial number of social-psychological studies dealing with the Arab world purport to explain the ‘Arab basic personality’, or ‘the Arab mind’. The alleged purpose of these studies is to understand the ‘psychology of the Arabs’ the underlying motivations of their behavior, and the reasons for their underdevelopment. Most of these studies emphasize the use of projective analyses of the Arab personality on the basis of supposedly dominant childrearing practices. The personality pattern which emerges from this research includes characteristics such as free-floating hostility, rigidity, the lack of reality testing, and suspiciousness6 which are said to explain the nature of Arab political behavior.

In his studio in Beirut in 1929, the young artist Moustapha Farroukh (1901–57) envisioned a composition to change his society. He hoped his oil painting would incite broad support among his fellow Lebanese for a revolution in conventional gender relations and women's participation in the urban social order. He titled the picture The Two Prisoners and based it on a European convention for representing the East: the Nude odalisque (Figure 1). The resulting painting exemplifies the complex role Arab intellectuals of the early 20th century played in the formation of modern art and universal modernity. Leading artists in Mandate-era Beirut felt compelled to paint Nudes and display them as part of a culturing process they called tathqīf (disciplining or enculturing). To a large extent, tathqīf consisted of recategorizing norms for interaction and self-scrutiny. Joseph Massad has revealed that one crucial component of tathqīf was the repudiation of behaviors and desires associated with the Arab Past, such as male homosexuality. An equally important component was the cultivation of “modern,” “masculine” heterosexual eroticism and a dutiful feminine compliance associated with ḥadātha (novelty) and muʿāṣira (contemporaneity). This was accomplished through the use of a genre that was deliberately new and alien in both its material media and its impact on makers and viewers.

Until recently, the topic of charitable organizations seemed to have fallen in disgrace. Social scientists have given little attention to this sector of associational life. Instead, a great deal has been written on the issues of democratization through pressure groups or on the transformation of social movements into professional organizations while assessing the overall impact of development promoted by donors. Yet three signs point to the need for a better understanding of charitable organizations. First, new research studying Islamic activism through the lens of social-movement literature has offered innovative results. Second, studies on the impact of aid during the second intifada have revealed that charitable organizations as well as Islamic organizations offered a significant amount of emergency support, sometimes competing with professional nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Finally, the fact that Hamas, also known for running a vast network of charitable organizations, achieved such a significant political success in the 2005 municipal and 2006 legislative elections should invite social scientists to consider whether and how political momentum can also be obtained through activism in the charitable sector.

In the Ottoman system the population of the Empire was organized upon a confessional basis, not upon a territorial or linguistic one. It was composed of religious communities each of which had its own internal organization and was controlled by a religious hierarchy. Socially and culturally each community (millet) formed a separate entity, each kept apart from the other. There was no attempt to create uniformity. Consequently, no intercommunal solidarity or social integation evolved in Ottoman society.

Although spiritual realities do not find a place in the explanatory scheme of modern science, they nevertheless play a significant role in the everyday life of people. This article discusses the interrelationship between blood and spiritual genealogies among Sufi orders in the Muslim world in general and in the Nile Delta of Egypt in particular. Contrary to theories of geographic reductionism that highlight the geographical features of the Delta, this research sheds light on the impact of cultural and religious factors, such as regional Sufi orders and related saint cults, on the inhabitation and perpetuation of the local landscape. Moreover, compared with the rich scholarship of the grand Sufi orders and saints, studies that deal with local branches of dominant Sufi orders are sparse. The relationship between Sufi beliefs and practices in local contexts and in broader national or global (Muslim) worldviews is also considered.

Iran has experienced the rare phenomenon of having two pro-Soviet Communist parties simultaneously: the Hizb-i Tudah-i Iran (Party of the Iranian Masses), known as the Tudah; and the Firqah-i Dimukrat-i Azarbayjan (Democratic Party of Azarbayjan), or simply, the Firqah-i Dimukrat.

The seventh Abbasid caliph ʿAbd Allah al-Maʾmun (r. 813–833) was noted for the breadth of his intellectual horizons, and historians often associate him with the Golden Age of Islam. This image of glory is tarnished, however, by two particular actions that the caliph took: his declaration (in 827) of a doctrine asserting that the Qurʾan was created and his ordering of a miḥna an inquisition, that was designed to ensure acquiescence in this doctrine. The miḥna, an unprecedented event in the history of Islam, was begun by al-Maʾmun just four months before his sudden death in 833 and continued by his two immediate successors, al-Muʾtasim and al-Wathiq. It lasted some sixteen years until it was finally abolished by the tenth Abbasid caliph, al-Mutawakkil.

The concept of al-walāʾ wa-l-barāʾ (loyalty to Islam, Muslims, and God and disavowal of everything else) has developed in various ways in Wahhabi discourse since the 19th century. This can partly be ascribed to the civil war that caused the collapse of the second Saudi state (1824–91) and the lessons that both quietist and radical Wahhabi scholars have drawn from that episode. In this article, I contend that Wahhabi contestations of al-walāʾ wa-l-barāʾ can be divided into two distinct trends—one social and the other political—and that both show the enduring legacy of the second Saudi state, which can still be discerned in Wahhabi scholarly writings on the subject of al-walāʾ wa-l-barāʾ today.

Ceremony and elaborate protocols are commonly associated with kingship, authority, and power. The pageantry associated with the British monarchy in its public ceremonials, for example, is imbued with a sense of an ancient past. Yet, these traditions are recent inventions derived from the late Victorian period. Traditions, particularly Western practices, are often made up, choreographed, and then formally instituted in a matter of a few years, rapidly gaining a sense of permanence. Sometimes entirely new symbols and devices are invented to confirm gravitas and substance and to serve as rallying points for the new entity (e.g., Marianne, John Bull, or Uncle Sam).

Over the last fifteen years the Syrian Ba'th Party has succeeded-in a country previously known for weak governments and military coups-not only in entrenching a strong relatively stable system of single party rule, but also in launching its own variety of socialist and modernizing revolution. The explanation of this transformation in the nature of Syrian political life is one of the interesting problems of contemporary Syrian and Middle Eastern politics. What accounts for it? This essay will explore one approach to a partial explanation: a study of party recruitment and socialization practices.

For more than a decade, post-Islamism has been at the center of a major debate in French academia regarding the historical evolution of Islamism. The concept was put forth in the early 1990s as an attempt to apprehend the apparent crisis within many Islamic movements of the Middle East. In Iran, the increasingly authoritarian character of the Islamic republic, as well as the predominance of the mullahs' discretionary powers, seemed to undermine the credibility of the Islamist alternative. Elsewhere, as in Egypt and Algeria, the advent of an Islamic order never came to pass and appeared illusory. Islamists were unable to cope with the repression and the containment policies of secular states. Therefore, a number of French scholars argued that Islamism—that is, the holistic, populist, and often revolutionary ideology whose goal is the establishment of an Islamic state and the governance of all aspects of society according to Islamic principles—had reached a dead end. Ruhollah Khomeini, Sayyid Qutb, and Abu al-Ala al-Mawdudi were passé. An era of post-Islamism was dawning.

The continuing tensions between ethnic groups and nationalism of the dominant population since independence have attracted world attention to the fact that in the Middle East serious ethnic problems exist regardless of the strong integrative character of the Islamic religion and culture. For centuries Islam has had the effect of moderating if not, obliterating racial differences among the peoples of the Middle East. However, although race is not a social problem in Muslim countries, ethnic differences are.

The decade of the 1930s in Egypt has been subject to varying interpretations in recent scholarship. The publication of books on classical Islamic themes and figures by men who previously had advocated the adoption of Western scientific techniques and cultural values as essential to Egypt's modernization has been seen as indicative of an intellectual crisis which contributed to a more general conservative reaction from 1935 onwards. While analyses have varied as to the motivation and scope of this crisis, a dominant influence upon scholarly literature has been Nadav Safran's important study, Egypt in Search of Political Community, and his conclusion that ‘the intellectuals surrendered their previous bearing — rationalism and a Western cultural orientation — without being able to produce any viable Muslim-inspired alternative’. Given the importance of Safran's work and its relationship to the research presented here, we will discuss the period in question and, in particular, Taha Husayn and Muhammad Husayn Haykal, with specific references to Safran's general approach as well as to his treatment of the 1930s.

Until the seventeenth century of our era, the Islamicate society that was associated with the Islamic religion was the most expansive society in the Afro-Eurasian hemisphere and had the most influence on other societies. This was in part because of its central location, but also because in it were expressed effectively certain cultural pressures–cosmopolitan and egalitarian (and anti-traditional)– generated in the older and more central lands of this society.

In late November 1957, the Hebrew and state-sponsored Arabic press in Israel printed a series of articles describing an extravagant “ceremony of reconciliation” held in the small and impoverished Palestinian border village of Kafr Qasim. The event was attended by more than 400 distinguished guests, including cabinet ministers, Knesset members from the ruling MAPAI party, military-government representatives, national trade-union officials, and “notables” from neighboring Arab villages. The idea behind the “sulḥa,” as its government-appointed organizers termed it (borrowing from the Arabic), was to heal the remaining wounds from the 29 October 1956 Israeli border-patrol massacre of forty-eight Palestinian Arab citizens, all but four of whom were residents of Kafr Qasim.1 The day of the ceremony, 20 November, marked exactly one year and three weeks since the first day of the Sinai war and the fateful evening when village day laborers returning home were lined up and summarily shot for unknowingly “violating” a curfew that had been announced only thirty minutes earlier.

This article scrutinizes election district and inspection district reports written by the deputies of the Turkish single-party government and the role of these reports in state decision making. Underscoring social discontent and the fragile hegemony of the new regime—both of which motivated the republican elite to monitor state and party administrations and public opinion—the article argues that the practice of reporting was neither a project of social engineering nor a practice peculiar to the Turkish state but rather a requirement of a polity concerned with the opinion of its citizens. In the absence of direct political participation of the people in government, the reports mediated between the state and society. Contrary to conventional accounts of the single-party period, the article argues that the republican elite did not govern the country through top-down decrees but instead sought to ascertain public opinion and its own administrative defects so as to consolidate its fragile hegemony. Based on these findings, I propose that we redefine the early republican state as a flexible authoritarian regime that was not detached from the society.

Despite the attention that scholars have lavished on Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima, the historiographical significance of that remarkable work is still not well understood. Scholars continue to discuss the Muqaddima largely within the context of Islamic historiography, even though most of them regard it as an anomaly that differs fundamentally from the works of other Muslim historians. In certain respects, the Muqaddima belongs to an Islamic historical tradition, that of al-Tabari and al-Masעudi. Yet, its dominant intellectual lineage is the rationalist thought that stretches from the Peripatetic philosophers, and especially from Aristotle (384–322 BCE), through such Greco–Islamic thinkers as al-Farabi (870–950 CE), Ibn Sina (980–1037 CE), and Ibn Rushd (1126–1198 CE) onward to European philosophical historians and sociologists of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It is precisely because Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406 CE) used the logical apparatus and materialist assumptions of this rationalist tradition as the conceptual basis for his new historical science that he can be characterized as the last Greek historian. He can be considered the first Annaliste historian because the same Greek philosophical heritage influenced both the sociologist Émile Durkheim, who wrote his Latin dissertation on Montesquieu (1689–1755 CE), and also Durkheim's student, Marc Bloch, the cofounder of the Annales School. This heritage is also visible in an attenuated form in Fernand Braudel's distinction between the longue durée and the history of events. Indeed, Ibn Khaldun developed what modern scholars would identify as a structuralist methodology, using classical logic to identify enduring socioeconomic realities underlying cultural phenomena and ephemeral events, what he describes as the “general conditions of regions, races and periods that constitute the historian's foundation.”

French economic development under the July Monarchy led the class that most benefited by it, the bourgeoisie, to demand increased political power. It was in the interest of the new regime of 1852, whose establishment was made possible by the support of the bourgeoisie, to favor the investment of capital acquired by its supporters, and to find new outlets abroad for the goods produced at an ever growing rate by France's new factories.

Why did they kill us? We wanted our rights—bonus, wages, health benefits, why did they kill us? To be honest we all cried, I cried too. —Textile worker remembering June 1972