The evolution of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the dynamics of the relationship between the Iranian state and society can be explored by examining the postrevolutionary regime's policies toward intellectuals, particularly as expressed in its regulation of cinema and book publication. This relationship—at least in the period from the early 1980s to the early 1990s—was complex and nuanced. Factionalism within the regime provided an opportunity for intellectuals to engage the state in a process of negotiation and protest, cooperation and defiance, in pushing the boundaries of permitted self-expression. The degree of their success depended in part on which faction controlled the government and its regulatory agencies during particular phases in the evolution of the postrevolutionary regime.

The period of the so-called Patriarchal Caliphs continues to be rich with questions which can be investigated only with material which often seems less than adequate. Among the more intriguing questions are those connected with the rôle of Kûfa and the emergence there of the political alignments with which representatives both of the early Umayyad caliphs and of the anti-caliph Ibn al-Zubary had later to deal, viz. the Khawârij, the Shi'a and the tribal ashrâf. The remarks in this article are intended to present a broad picture of conclusions reached in a more detailed study of the formation of these political alignments – conclusions which are based on evidence contained in the earliest Islamic historical sources available to us, notably those of al-Balâdhurî, al-Tabarî, Ibn Sa'd, Ibn A'tham al-Kûfî, Khalîfa b. Khayyât and Nasr b. Muzâhim al-Minqarî.

In this part,* the concept of honor among Black Sea Turks is compared with the concept of honor among clans (hamûla) of Levantine Arabs. The system of meaning among the Arabs is similar to that among the Black Sea Turks, but the cultural structuring of this system of meaning is different. First, the differences in cultural structuring are explained in detail. Then, the two contrasting structurings are shown to provide an understanding of a number of contrasts between the two societies with regard to ‘marriage’ and ‘affinal and maternal relationships.’

The growing strength of self-help literature in Egypt represents a new cultural expression of accommodation with capitalism, and markedly expands the mix of modern ideas and ethical practices rendered legitimate through association with tradition. The ideas and practices found in self-help, however, are anything but traditional. In its style and content, self-help expresses the values of individualism and neoliberal understandings of subjectivity. Informed by modern insights into the self and its formation, the genre blurs the boundary between psychology and religion, valorizing the process of self-exploration and self-fulfillment. The inherent message of self-help is not simply the glorification of the individual but, more pointedly, the sacralization of the self and subjective life choices—an interpretive trend that, in Egypt, simultaneously functionalizes Islam and fosters new understandings of what it means to be Muslim.

In the final decades of Ottoman rule, several waves of refugees from the Russian Empire's North Caucasus region immigrated to Transjordan, where they founded Amman and other agricultural villages. This article examines the economy of Amman in its formative years as a Circassian refugee settlement. By exploring connections between North Caucasian refugees, Syrian and Palestinian merchants, and Transjordanian urban and nomadic communities, this study posits refugees as drivers of economic expansion in the late Ottoman period. I argue that the settlement of North Caucasian refugees and their active participation in the real estate market in and around Amman contributed to the entrenchment of the post-1858 property regime in Ottoman Transjordan. Through a study of an upper-class Circassian household and its legal battles, this article also illustrates the rise of refugee elites who benefited from the commodification of land and the construction of state-sponsored infrastructure in the late Ottoman Levant.

Historians of Muslim societies have observed that, in principle, the strict application of the Islamic rules of inheritance would result in the progressive fragmentation of capital. Although technically correct, the observation fails to take into account the fact that the Islamic inheritance rules are but part of a larger and flexible Islamic inheritance system that also includes bequests, gifts inter vivos, family endowments, dowries, fictitious sales, and other modes for the devolution of property. This larger system has served Muslims, rich and poor, for over 1,400 years, although it operates differently in different places. The most important component of the Islamic inheritance system arguably has been the family endowment, known among the Malikis as ḥabs (popularly, habous) and elsewhere as waqf ahlī. This institution came into existence in the first Islamic century, in part because the Islamic inheritance rules proved too constraining, and soon became an integral component of the Islamic legal system. It allows a proprietor to transform immovable property such as a house or field into a perpetual endowment for one or more beneficiaries and subsequent generations of descendants; the property thereafter may not be bought, sold, or inherited. The founder designates the initial beneficiaries and defines the strategy according to which usufructory rights pass from one generation to the next. Thus, the founder may control the devolution ofendowment revenues for many generations after his or her death.

A great deal has been written on Israeli religious institutions, activities, and problems, but the treatment of the subject leaves much to be desired. Many studies focus primarily on a specific topic within the subject – the relationship between the polity and religion as reflected in institutional arrangements. But this problem is not coterminous with the subject as a whole. While the problem of relations between synagogue and state can be discussed as a formal constitutional problem, it cannot be understood sociologically, because it merely represents the tip of an iceberg, so to speak. The iceberg itself, still to be uncovered, consists of religious phenomena – the variegated activities of various groups whereby they relate to religious symbols. People engage in these activities in many ways, causing the emergence of various features of society, and the relationship between synagogue and state is only one of them. Another limitation of present writing on religion in Israel lies in the bias whereby the Israeli situation is often evaluated according to a model of separation of church and state of the American or French type. Many writers demonstrate impatience and lack of sympathy when discussing the religious establishment and the current role of religion in the Israeli state.

Writing in 1962 Stephen Neill listed twelve of what he regarded as “positive achievements of New Testament studies” over the past century.1 As an affirmation of progress in a notoriously difficult field of investigation, they make satisfying and even cheerful reading for the historian. Who was Jesus of Nazareth? What was his message? Why was he put to death? Why did his few followers become, in effect, the nucleus of the powerful and widespread community called Christianity? These were the enormously difficult questions that had begun to be posed in a critical-historical way in the mid-19th century, and some of the answers Bishop Neill discerned, though by no means final, represented ground gained and truths won. Neill's widely read book was revised in 1988, and though his optimism was here and there tempered by what had been said and thought in the twenty-five years since the first edition,2 there was still good reason to think that historians were by and large on the right track in pursuing what Albert Schweitzer described in 1906 as “the quest of the historical Jesus.”3

Like many other parts of the world, in the last two hundred years or so the Middle East has gone through a process of de-industrialization followed by reindustrialization.* The decline in handicrafts continued until well after the First World War. But by then another development was under way: the growth of a modern factory industry that started around the 1890s, gathered increasing momentum in the 1920s and 1930s, and since the Second World War has proceeded at a very rapid pace.

In the first half of the 1970s, Egypt turned away from the Soviet Union and initiated an economic open-door policy. Since then, the United States, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank have encouraged comprehensive reforms that would make Egypt an outward-looking market-oriented capitalist economy in which the private sector plays a dominant role. While the Egyptian economy had gone in that direction between 1974 and 1990, it had fallen far short of what they were looking for. In lengthy negotiations with the IMF, Egypt had, in spite of strong pressure, remained unwilling to implement many elements in this orthodox reform package. At the same time, most observers agreed that the government's own policies were not successful: living standards declined while the foreign debt grew rapidly, undermining the country's political independence. Analysts attributed this resistance to reform in the face of foreign pressure to a mix of domestic and foreign factors.

The sources for the Bahrî period are particularly rich for four significant problems of Mamluk history: (I) relations between the Mamluks and Mongols, especially as revealed by Mamluks who defected to the ÎlKhâns and Mongols who deserted to the Mamluks;1 (2) the role of Arab tribesmen, in particular the Âl-Fadl of Syria, in the Mamluk polity; (3) the role of the kuttâb in the Mamluk bureaucracy, particularly as exemplified by the infamous al-Nashû (d. A.H. 740/A.D. 1340) in the latter part of the reign of al-Malik al-Nâsir (693–741/1293–1341); (4) the role of the ‘Ulamâ’ in the dynamics of Mamluk politics, as illustrated by the career of Ibn Taymiyya, by all odds the most famous and in many ways the most important single figure in all of Mamluk history, both Bahrî and Circassian.

This paper introduces methods to estimate wealth levels and disparities amongMuslim inhabitants of 18th-century Ottoman Kastamonu. Our sources in thispursuit are estate inventories of the deceased (sing. tereke) as recorded in Kastamonu court records (sicils), mainly in the first half of the 18thcentury (1712-60). By analyzing information provided by these sources through avariety of quantitative techniques, we measure levels of inequality amongMuslims of Kastamonu and describe the relationship between economic privilegeand social, political, religious, and occupational status as well as genderidentity. Our work outlines the contours of economic stratification in18th-century Kastamonu and reveals the relative positions of various socialgroups within this hierarchy.

Through ethnographic and archival research conducted in Istanbul and Izmir, this article examines the dynamics and regulation of charitable giving in contemporary Turkey. The article is based on interviews I conducted with the volunteers, employees, and aid recipients of three civil society organizations that rely on charitable giving to fund their projects, which center on helping the poor and providing aid during and after wars and other disasters. I document how religious ideals of anonymous charitable giving for the sake of giving, without expectation of return, are closely intertwined with anxiety over finding a worthy charitable association and recipient. In doing so, I focus on vakıf as both a concept and a practice that gives meaning to charitable giving in Turkey. The increasing desire to document, define, and categorize the deserving poor as a way to justify the intent to give and to receive goes against the anonymity and immediacy of giving, thus riddling intent with ethical contradictions. I argue that attention needs to be paid to the intent, practice, and various forms of giving, and not just to the effects and outcomes of charity.

The term effendiyya (singular: effendi) appears in many articles and books on the social and political history of the Middle East between the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. Many authors have made use of this term, but very few have paused to discuss its meaning. At least one important scholar, however, raised doubts about its usefulness.

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.

Amid all the attention that Iranian politics has received since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, local politics has been almost totally neglected. This neglect vitiates our understanding of contemporary Iran, as it is at the local level that state policies are carried out, contested, reshaped, resisted, or revised. Beginning with the centralizing state-building of Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1926–41), Tehran increasingly dominated Iran's politics, commercial activities, and cultural life, and most of the country's Westernized elites lived in the capital. The 1979 revolution was to some extent a populist revolt against this Westernized elite, and among the new rulers those whose social and family roots are outside Tehran abound. Among the common people, “the experience of participation in mass political activity … undermined the feeling of political abjection,” while the new rulers have attempted, not always successfully, to lessen the gap not only between rich and poor, but also between rich and poor provinces. The new prominence of provincials in national life has gone hand in hand with a greater recognition of Iran's ethnic and linguistic diversity, while at the same time the sense of common participation in the revolution and the Iran–Iraq War has knitted people of different ethnic backgrounds more closely together.

A prominent feature of the literature on Islamic law is the absence of reference to concrete cases. The preference given to oral testimony over written evidence by the ulema may have been one of the reasons for this neglect. But a more crucial factor can be traced back to the conceptual apparatus of the researchers who made use of the blurred notion of “traditional” society. As obedience to norms in such societies was supposedly automatic, the researchers could legitimately focus on ideals instead of the complexities of concrete behavior.

Subsidies are a widespread economic practice in most developing countries and in centrally planned economies such as those of Eastern Europe. In the United States and Western Europe, they are generally associated with price support for producers, especially in agriculture. In the less-developed countries (LDCs), subsidies usually support consumers. When extended to producers, the benefit is passed on to consumers through official price controls. The question is whether such price support is the best means available to meet the basic needs strategy of development.

Subsidies in LDCs often begin as measures to help the poor, but they usually expand beyond the target population and constitute by and large a wage supplement for almost all salaried workers.

The question whether modern or “modernizing” societies tend to become similar has been a focus of great preoccupation among scholars—historians, sociologists, or political scientists—who, since the early fifties, have been concerned with the analysis of the contemporary scene, of processes of so-called modernization and development. Most of the studies of modernization in general and of convergence of industrial societies in particular, which developed in the fifties up to the mid-sixties, have stressed that the more modern or developed different societies become, the more similar will they become in their basic, central, institutional aspects, and the less the importance of traditional elements within them.

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.