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.

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

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.

One of the central issues in the study of urban politics today is the fact that many cities have become multicultural arenas. The liberal viewpoint stresses the potential of the city—unlike other spaces—to offer many and equal opportunities for all residents regardless of religion, gender, or ethnic affiliation, but the critical body of knowledge highlights the ways in which the city, although apparently released from the shackles of nation- and state-building projects, continues to reproduce existing power structures and is a stratifying place, maintaining patterns of discrimination, exclusion, and segregation. This tension between the city as an enabling space versus the city as a reinforcer of socionational stratification is at the center of this article.

The Ottomans, after a long period of peace that began in 1740, declared war on Russia in 1768, disputing territory essential to the continued existence of the empire: Moldavia, Wallachia, the Crimea, and Georgia. The war lasted until 1774, during which time the Ottomans proved that they no longer posed a military threat to Europe. The signing of the Küçük Kaynarca treaty of 1774, which granted Tatar independence in the Crimea, was the first instance of an Ottoman cession of a predominantly Muslim territory to a European power, and it provoked an internal crisis and long debate over the future of the empire. The Ottoman administration, especially the scribal bureaucracy, contributed a number of political advice manuals to the debate, which form the core of the following discussion. Four examples have been selected with the purpose of extending the analysis of Ottoman advice literature into the 18th century and testing the assumption of Ottoman inability to accommodate changing political realities.

Colonial state-building in Protectorate Morocco, particularly the total “pacification” of territory and infrastructural development carried out between 1907 and 1934, dramatically transformed the social and political context in which collective identity was imagined in Moroccan society. Prior scholarship has highlighted the struggle between colonial administrators and urban Arabophone nationalist elites over Arab and Berber ethnic classifications used by French officials to make Moroccan society legible in the wake of conquest. This study turns to the understudied question of how rural, tribal communities responded to state- and nation-building processes, drawing on a unique collection of Tamazight (Berber) poetry gathered in the Atlas Mountains to illuminate the multiple levels on which their sense of group identity was negotiated. While studies of identity in the interwar Arab world have concentrated on how Pan-Islamism, Pan-Arabism, and local nationalisms functioned in the Arab East, this article changes the angle of analysis, beginning instead at the margins of the Arab West to explore interactions between the consolidation of nation-sized political units and multivocal efforts to reframe the religious and ethnic parameters of communal solidarity during the colonial period.

It was Europeans who started in Egypt a historic preservationist movement for Arab (or Islamic) art.1 It was they who persuaded Khedive Tawfiq to decree, in December 1881, the founding of the Committee for the Conservation of Monuments of Arab Art (hereafter “the Comité,” the usual French designation). It was the European-dominated Comité that opened the Museum of Arab Art three years later, and it was an Englishman, K. A. C. Creswell, who established the Institute of Islamic Archaeology at the Egyptian (later Cairo) University. Why did the Europeans care? In 19th-century Europe, romanticism gave a strong impetus to writers and painters, scholars, and collectors to search for a lost past, the unusual, the exotic, the “Oriental.” This inquiry into the past, at home and abroad, was intimately bound up with Westerners' search for their own identities and with the triumph of the idea of the nation-state. Historic preservationists and museums selected, conserved, and displayed buildings and objects defined as valuable to their national heritages. Romanticism, in part a revolt against classical styles, also spurred a "Gothic revival movement and a fascination with various Oriental styles.

Historically, the development of modern banking has been an important component of economic change, but it has not always been so clear whether it has been a factor in the genesis of growth or a response to and a consequence of it. In the case of the Ottoman Empire, corporate banks—wholly or partly financed with Western capital—had established themselves in strength in Istanbul after the Crimean War, especially in the decade 1863–72 when no less than eight opened there. All, however, concentrated to varying degrees on meeting the financial needs of the government at a time when the Porte was borrowing almost continuously, both short-term and long-term, a fact that explains the eclipse of several of them around the time of the bankruptcy of 1875.

Teaching is never merely a technical, pedagogical issue. This is especially true of Arabic teaching in Israel. Two related factors have conditioned the evolution of Arabic instruction in Israel in various, often contradictory ways. One is the Zionist modernist project of inventing a Jewish nation by bracketing off Jews from gentiles and reconstituting them as a distinct Hebraic ethno-linguistic community. The other is the project of securing historic Palestine as an exclusive national homeland for this newly invented nation and the consequent ambivalence toward Arab existence in historic Palestine. Both make up what I term Zionist sectarianism, and their influence on Arabic pedagogy has been decisive and pervasive, yet contradictory and unpredictable, demonstrating that although practice is always political, it is never mechanically reducible to its political underpinnings.

For over 350 years, Egypt was the largest province of the Ottoman Empire, which had captured it from the Mamluk sultanate in 1517. It is well known that the Ottomans retained key Mamluk usages, above all in subprovincial administration, and that a number of the defeated Mamluks who were willing to cooperate with the new regime were allowed to join the Ottoman administration. In consequence, a number of practices of the Mamluk sultanate survived the Ottoman conquest. Critical administrative offices such as those of pilgrimage commander (amīr al-ḥajj), treasurer (daftardār), and deliverer of the annual tribute to Istanbul (khaznadār) were analogous to offices of the Mamluk sultanate, and the grandees whom the Ottomans installed in these offices were analogous to the Mamluk amirs of the sultanate. Above all, the practice of recruiting boys and young men from the Caucasus as military slaves, or mamluks, and training them as soldiers in households geared to that purpose appears not only to have survived but to have flourished in Ottoman Egypt. By the time of Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798, in fact, the province's military elite was dominated by Caucasian, and above all Georgian, mamluks. In the face of such apparent similarities with the Mamluk sultanate, it is tempting to define the military society of Ottoman Egypt as a continuation or revival of the sultanate.

Over recent years, scholars and politicians have grown to recognize the increasing obsolescence of models and patterns applicable to the development crisis. This crisis affects both ‘liberal’ capitalist systems and state-controlled ‘socialist’ systems, and can be analyzed on two levels. On the theoretical level, the development crisis is one aspect of the crisis of paradigms in social sciences, especially in economics. New ways of thinking originate with the denial of all those dogmatic approaches which have flourished in the realm of economic development for the last three decades. However, we cannot be satisfied with a predominantly empirical investigation devoid of theoretically explicit background. On the empirical level, some sweeping situations emerge; development processes, either unpredicted by, or contradictory to theoretical forecasts have arisen.

The succession crisis and civil war that followed the death of Caliph Harun alRashid in 809 is a gloomy chapter in the history of the Abbasid caliphate in its prime that captured the attention of later medieval Muslim scholars. Their main challenge lay in trying to find an appropriate rationale for justifying the conflict between the caliph's sons, al-Amin and al-Maʾmun, and the fate of the community under a caliphate seized by force for the first time in the Abbasid era. The destruction wrought by the civil war on the capital, Baghdad, combined with the spread of factional strife to other provinces of the caliphate, presented an ethical and religious dilemma reminiscent to contemporaries of the early Islamic fitnas. Conscious of this parallel, the chronicler al-Tabari, writing a century later, devotes considerably more space to the years of the civil war than he does to the reigns of al-Rashid and al-Maʾmun that bracketed it.

Countries such as Iran and Turkey do not fit comfortably into the democratic and authoritarian categories. In these countries, elections are held regularly, and the will of the people is accepted as one source of sovereignty. At the same time, both constitutionally and in practice the elected officials have to share the exercise of political power with institutions that do not draw their power directly from the will of the people. In such systems, the judiciary has two important political functions. First, the judiciary acts as a politically insulated decision-maker through which the unelected head can exercise some degree of control over the actions of the elected head. Second, the judiciary's direct involvement in the political arena increases political tensions and legitimates the continuation of the two-headed system. In systems based on divided sovereignty, the tensions created by the judicialization of politics contribute to the stability of the regime.

Within the last few years, “Kurdish cinema” has emerged as a unique discursive subject in Turkey. Subsequent to and in line with efforts to unify Kurdish cultural production in diaspora, Kurdish intellectuals have endeavored to define and frame the substance of Kurdish cinema as an orienting framework for the production and reception of films by and about Kurds. In this article, my argument is threefold. First, Kurdish cinema has emerged as a national cinema in transnational space. Second, like all media texts, Kurdish films are nationalized in discourse. Third, the communicative strategies used to nationalize Kurdish cinema must be viewed both in the context of the historical forces of Turkish nationalism and against a backdrop of contemporary politics in Turkey, specifically the Turkish government's discourses and policies related to the Kurds. The empirical data for this article derive from ethnographic research in Turkey and Europe conducted between 2009 and 2012.

Scholars have long noted that the Prophet Muhammad assumed increasing importance in Sufi thought and practice over the centuries. For Sufis, belief in Muhammad's perfection often went beyond the standard affirmation of his immunity from error, and sometimes went so far as the assertions of the Spanish Arab Qadi ʿIyad (d. 1149/50) that Muhammad had assumed all the qualities embodied in the Ninety-nine Beautiful Names of God. Belief in Muhammad as a primordial cosmic light of divine origin is documented as early as the 8th to 9th centuries, and reached its fullest exposition in the works of Ibn ʿArabi (1165-1240) and his successors. Popular devotion to the Prophet in the form of poetry in his honor and celebrations of his birthday is documented at least as early as the 13th century.

Historians of Europe often declare that Spain is “different.” This distinctiveness of the Iberian peninsula has many faces and is frequently seen as rooted in its Islamic past. In the field of Islamic history, too, al-Andalus is somewhat different. It has its own specialists, research traditions, controversies, and trends. One of the salient features of historical studies of al-Andalus as well as of its popular image is the great interest in its interreligious dimension. In 2002, María Rosa Menocal published The Ornament of the World, one of the rare books on Islamic history written by an academic that enjoyed and still enjoys a tremendous popularity among nonspecialist readers. The book surveys intersections of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian elite culture, mostly in Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin literature and in architecture, from the Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula in 711 to the fall of Granada in 1492. Menocal presents the religious diversity commonly referred to as convivencia as one of the defining features of Andalusi intellectual and artistic productivity. She also argues that the narrow-minded forces that brought about its end were external, pointing to the Almoravids and Almohads from North Africa and Christians from north of the peninsula as responsible. The book's subtitle, How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, conjures the community of Abrahamic faiths. It reflects the optimism of those who identify in Andalusi history a model for a constructive relationship between “Islam” and “the West” that in the age of the “war on terror” many are desperate to find.

By the first quarter of the 19th century, foreigners and Ottomans alike were keenly aware that the sovereignty of the house of Osman was rapidly eroding. Austrian and Russian armies threatened the empire from without; ethnic revolts and secession beset it from within. Its occasional allies Britain and France ate away at its autonomy through growing economic and political influence. The military threats were apparent, but the Porte was less alert to the dangers its relationships with the Western European powers held for Ottoman hegemony over the peoples of the Balkans and the Arab Middle East.1

Turkey's foreign policy and relations in the early Republican era, before and during World War II, has been subject to systematic and scholarly research, leading to numerous publications since the 1970s. Although no less significant than Britain, Germany, or the Soviet Union in shaping Turkish inter-war foreign policy and priorities, Italy does not seem to have received a similar degree of attention in this growing literature. Italy is usually treated in the works on Turkish foreign relations only as a threat that Turkey's foreign and strategic policy aimed to counter after 1934.

The protracted Turko-Armenian conflict, marked by intermittent massacres, was violently resolved during World War I. By governmental decree the bulk of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire was uprooted from its ancestral territories and was committed to a process of deportation that became a process of destruction. The provinces in the interior of Turkey with heavy concentrations of Armenians were thus completely denuded of their indigenous population.

Volumes have been produced regarding the instruments and dimensions of this destruction. The carnage was attested to by multitudes of Armenian survivors; by German, Swiss, and American missionaries; and by European and American consuls in the provinces and their ambassadors in Istanbul, the Ottoman capital. The testimony of Austrian and German officers of all ranks who fought in and directed that war alongside the Turks as political and military allies is even more striking.