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.

Since the 1970s, the Salafi movement in Jordan has grown substantially. Today, Salafis are ubiquitous in every major city in the kingdom, and Salafi bookshops, lessons, and activities are common. The purpose of the movement is to institute religious behavior and practices that capture the purity of Islam, as understood by the salaf (early Companions of the Prophet). Salafis believe that because the salaf learned about Islam directly from the Prophet or those who knew him, they commanded a pure understanding of the religion. All decisions in life must therefore be based upon evidence from the Qur⊃an and sunna, as recorded in authentic sayings (had―iths) by the salaf. In instances where particular actions or behaviors were not sanctioned by the original sources of Islam, they are rejected as “not Muslim.” Those who strictly adhere to this religious understanding are considered Salafis.1

The Sudanese Mahdī has been pictured as a villain, as a hero, as a reactionary, as an anti-imperialist revolutionary, and in many other ways. The romance and excitement of the nineteenth-century Mahdiyya has inspired novels and movies, while the many faceted reality of the movement has caught the attention of a wide range of scholars in search of case studies of specific phenomena. In recent years the Mahdī has been used as an example of a ‘charismatic’ leader,1 the founder of a religionpolitical party in the ‘third world,’2 the leader of a millenarian revolt,3 an African rebel against alien rule,4 and a Semitic messiah in an African context. Many of these analyses are the constructive products of the changing situation in the world of contemporary historical studies. Each tends to reflect a broader analytical concern aroused by modern developments.

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.

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 existing literature on the denial of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 tends to concentrate on either the Turkish state's political practices or civil society's increasing openness to alternative readings of the event. I argue that both approaches reduce denialism to the political practices and defense mechanisms of Turkey by prioritizing the state as the sole agent of genocide denial. Although the state is indeed a dominant actor of denialism, to juxtapose state and society is to overlook the power that rests in the discourse itself and its pervasiveness across different—at times even competing—social and political settings.

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.

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.

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

Periods of cultural florescence seem to coincide with times of political decline far too regularly in the history of medieval Iran and Central Asia for the link between them to be merely incidental. One of the most outstanding examples is the period of the rule of the Turko-Mongol Timurid dynasty in the 9th/15th century, which has been dubbed a “Timurid renaissance” by Western scholars. Another is the period of the political domination of the Buyid dynasty of Dailamite origin in the 4th–5th/10th–11th centuries, which Adam Mez popularized as the “renaissance of Islam.” Still another is the period of the Muzaffarid, Jalayirid, Sarbadarid, and Kartid kingdoms which arose in the 8th/14th century after the fall of the Mongol Ilkhanid empire. Although the appropriateness of the term “renaissance” as applied to the Timurid case in particular has raised reservations among scholars, it does underscore the point that his period was characterized by an extraordinary surge of activity in all areas of cultural and intellectual endeavor, something already noted by its contemporaries.

The causes for the mahdi's revolt in Sudan have been fully studied by modern historians and point to economic, social, religious, and administrative short-comings of the sixty-year Turco-Egyptian domination there. As for the timing, one must look attwo factors that together had a decisive influence. First, Egypt's financial difficulties subjected it to increasing European control and, consequently, to the deposition of the Khedive Ismaʿcil in June 1879 and the appointment to the throne of his son Tawfiq, a puppet of the great European powers, thus damaging the prestige of Muhammad ʿAli's dynasty. Further, Cairo was preoccupied throughout 1880–82 by a confrontation between the government and the nationalist movement of the native Egyptian officers in the army, led by Ahmad ʿUrabi, resulting among other things in the lack of a clear policy as regards Sudan. Second, there was the resignation in January 1880 of Colonel Charles Gordon, the governor-general of Sudan, who enjoyed wide political and economic autonomy, and the appointment of Muhammad Raʿuf Pasha, who was subordinated directly to the government in Cairo, as his successor in Khartoum. While Gordon, who had an energetic, enterprising, and authoritative personality, left Sudan in the midst of reforms in almost all fields, Muhammad Raʾuf Pasha had a different nature altogether. He was a mild and gentle ruler whose authority was narrowed by Cairo, where the political state of affairs was turning into chaos.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The conquest of the Mamluk sultanate by the Ottoman Empire brought into confrontation two centers in the history of Islamic civilization. One, Asia Minor and southeast Europe, was the center of the Ottoman Empire. The other, Egypt, had been the core of the Mamluk sultanate for 2½ centuries (1250–1517). Both states were dominated by Turkish-speaking elites based on the institution of military slavery. In both cases this slave-recruited manpower was the backbone of the army, and, to a lesser extent, of the administration.

This article analyzes the microprocesses that imbue bread with meaning and the macropolitics that shape its subsidized provision. It begins by outlining bread's multiple forms of value and significance, some easily quantifiable, others not. It problematizes the predominant approach to studying moral economies before putting forth an alternative framework. Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork in Jordan, the following empirical sections examine the different ways in which bureaucrats, bakers, and ordinary citizens portray the government's universal subsidy of Arabic bread. I unpack the diverse opinions encountered in the field and discuss their links to the Hashemite regime's polyvalent legitimating discourse. The article then dissects the politics of provisions that contribute to the bread subsidy's paradoxical persistence. It concludes by considering the relationship between moral economies, opposition politics, and authoritarian power in the context of Jordan's ongoing food subsidy debate.

In the historiography of Egypt it has long been accepted that private ownership of land was introduced in the nineteenth century. This development in statute law has often been linked analytically to a process of “modernization.” Modernization theory posits a fundamental dichotomy between two ideal-type societies, the traditional and modern, which implies an equally sharp discontinuity between historical eras: before and after the beginning of modernization. In this view, traditional societies lack the potential for generating significant social change from within. Change results rather from the expansion of communications and diversification of technology worldwide from modern Europe and North America. In the process of modernization, traditional norms and structures break down in the host societies, and new, rational values and institutions emerge in their place. The development of Egypt's new land regime is usually considered one such change.

Nationalism insists on the uniqueness of each nation. So, too, does the study of nationalism. For example, Ernest Renan, a cheerleader of nationalism, used the imagery of each nation “hold[ing] one note in the concert of humanity.” Elie Kedourie, who abhorred the excesses of nationalism, similarly identified its essence as a commitment to “the excellence of diversity.” Whether focused on political borders or social solidarity, the concept of the nation necessarily marks insiders with a special status, distinct from all others.