The Palestine Group was a loosely connected collection of young anti-Shah activists some of whom were arrested and tried publically in 1970 for the crime of acting against the Pahlavi monarchy and Iran's national security. Their plight became global, receiving support from anticolonial figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre. But while they played an important role in inspiring the revolutionary generation, in the historiography of the 1979 revolution and that of the global south, their story has been mostly forgotten. This article argues for remembering the Palestine Group by focusing on two facets of their prerevolutionary activism: the importance of a connection to the anti-imperial/colonial struggles that spread from “Asia to Africa”; and the centrality of maḥfilī politics (friendship circles) in addition to tashkīlātī (organizational) politics, which the historiography has traditionally emphasized. It demonstrates that as resistance shifted from maḥfil to tashkīlāt, it also shifted from a global struggle where Iran was one node out of many, to a nationalized struggle.

In this article, I argue that shifting development discourses have shaped the meaning and function of vakıfs (religious endowments) in Turkey since the establishment of the republic in 1923. I identify three periods defined by their distinctive development discourse, and show how each of these discourses made vakıfs into both an object and a site of development. In the etatist discourse of the 1930s, vakıfs were articulated as national treasures tasked with financing state-led economic development. With the shift to a mixed economy discourse in the 1960s, vakıfs were reconfigured as private philanthropic foundations expected to create a skilled labor force. The neoliberal development discourse of the 1980s transformed vakıfs into welfare organizations focused on poverty. This article shows that in all three of these periods, the relationship between state, Islam, economy, and society was articulated, legitimized, and consolidated with reference to a seemingly stagnant but in fact malleable institution inherited from the Ottoman Empire—the vakıf. I refer to this process as the “local production of development,” a conceptualization emphasizing how global discourses of development are formed and transformed at the local level.

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.

Foreign currency transactions have come under stringent controls in postrevolutionary Iran. This is a relapse into the prevailing conditions in the years preceding 1974, before the increase in oil revenues eliminated the foreign currency gap. Initially, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) imposed exchange controls to stop the postrevolutionary capital flight. Soon, however, exchange controls became an integral policy instrument of the government for rationing the existing supply of foreign currency in the face of a widening foreign exchange gap.

Know from where you come and where you are going. (Akavya Ben-Mahalalel, Avot, 3)

It has been argued that the difference between liberal democracies and theocratic, communist, or fascist states is not that liberal states promote different ideals of the good, but that they promote none. Whereas illiberal states regard it as a primary function of the state to prescribe the moral character of society, liberal states shun such attempts and allow freedom to citizens to develop their own conceptions. Liberals hold that governments cannot use as their justification for any action the fact that one person's plan of life is more or less worthy than that of another. Since many people believe in more than one objective “correct” set of values, every person should enjoy the freedom to arrive at her own conception of the good. By “conception of the good” is meant a more or less determinate scheme of ends that the doer aspires to carry out for their own sake as well as of attachments to other individuals and loyalties to various groups and associations. It involves a mixture of moral, philosophical, ideological, and religious notions, together with personal values that contain some picture of a worthy life.

Although the Western model of education has spread worldwide, traditional Islamic education continues to have a strong influence in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. This article seeks to determine the reason it remains such a vital part of village life in the commune of Bounaamane, located in Morocco's southern Souss valley. Why do so many children attend Qurʾanic schools, even though modern education is available? Because standard sociological methodologies, with their surveys and statistical analyses, were not viable in this social and cultural setting, I approached the problem by using ethnographic and case-study methods. I will first present an overview of traditional Qurʾanic education and then try to explain the low-enrollment rates in modern schools and the relative popularity of traditional Qurʿanic ones in terms of economic factors and culture. We can better understand the continuity of traditional Islamic education if we see it as being closely bound to the popular understanding of Islam. In this respect, the most important elements are the role of the Qurʾanic teacher in the community and the discipline and punishment involved in the course of Qurʾanic training that socialize children into the accepted Islamic code of conduct.

In February 1963, the government in Iran formed the Ministry of Economy—a pilot bureaucratic agency that was to oversee industrial transformation and generate growth. In 1969, after six years of unprecedented growth and significant industrialization,1 the political leadership withdrew its support for the ministry and broke down its autonomy. The fate of the ministry had little to do with its performance or promise in the economic arena. It was, rather, the political implications of the rise of an autonomous and competent bureaucratic agency, and the rationalization of industrial policy-making, that led the political leadership—and Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in particular—to end its support for this experiment.

This article explores the complex interplay between masculinity and nationalism among Palestinians living in a refugee camp in Jordan. Youth masculinity in the camp is widely perceived in Jordan as an expression of either immoral behavior or unthinking radicalism, and as a symbol of cultural and political difference and the failure of camp dwellers to embrace assimilation. However, camp dwellers’ masculinities are not uniform. I argue that young men's ability to navigate and master diverse and sometimes contrasting registers of manhood enables them to reproduce a Palestinian national identity in exile while achieving socioeconomic integration in Jordan. In pursuing this argument, the article has two goals: to challenge popular stereotypes about Palestinian refugees in Jordan today; and to problematize the discursive mutual dependency between nationalism and hegemonic masculinity in the study of Palestinian masculinity.

The Islamic fundamentalist doctrine on riba states that the rate of interest is zero, a doctrine based upon the Quranic injunctions against it. The word ‘riba’ means ‘increase’ as interpreted by Imam Razi, which corresponds to the word ‘interest’ as defined by Webster's New World Dictionary. In both cases the increase refers to the amount beyond what is owed. Thus, the strictest interpretation that can be given to the word riba is that it means interest—an amount, or rate, due above the principal of a loan. The word riba, however, is commonly translated as usury which is defined by Webster's Dictionary as “an excessive or unlawfully high rate or amount of interest.” Thus, the fundamental aspect of the controversy about the doctrine of interest in Islam is whether the rate of interest is zero, in which case riba is interpreted to mean interest per se, or whether a positive rate of interest is permissible, in which case nba is interpreted to mean usury.

The Ilkhan Tegüder (r. 1282–84), who took the name Ahmad when he converted to Islam, is widely credited with having interrupted—for the duration of his brief reign—the Mamluk-Ilkhanid conflict which had continued unabated since the battle of 'Ayn Jalut (1260). He is also credited with sending two embassies to Qalawun (r. 1280–90), his Mamluk counterpart: the first in 1282 and the second at the end of 1284.

While to the casual observer Iraq appears to have been ruled by the same political elite since 1968, closer examination reveals that its leadership underwent important changes between 1968 and the mid-1980s. This article intends to show that even though the changes were very gradual, sometimes almost imperceptible, the accumulated effect over 18 years was considerable.

If the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 has produced unprecedented consequences for the internal policies of Middle Eastern regimes, this is not related to the upsurge of democratization that was supposed to spread like a contagion through the neighboring countries. Rather, it is due to the increased impact of the Shiʿi issue on the national political agendas of many Arab states. Following the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, many observers thus drew attention to the emergence of what they regarded as a Shiʿi “revival” in the Middle East—a perception that the military success of the Lebanese Hizbullah against Israel in the summer of 2006 seemed to confirm.

Afghanistan proceeded along the road of constitutional monarchy for a decade from 1963 to 1973 in the reign of King Muḥammad Ẓāhir (1933–1973) much as it had during the reign of King Amān Allāh (1919–1929). In the 1950s, parliamentary democracy was also practiced for a brief period. But these experiments failed, and the reigning monarchs were forced into exile in Italy. In 1973, Afghanistan was proclaimed a republic. This article examines why, in the last period, the constitutional system of government, as well as the well-established Afghan monarchy, collapsed.

Sunni radicalism surfaced before the Iranian Revolution of 1978. It arose out of conditions specific to Arab countries and the manner in which those faithful to the Suuna reacted to these conditions. In the quater century between the appeareance of the ideas of Sayyis Qutb, the father of Sunni radicalism, and the end of the 1970s, not only were the Sunni radical movements devoid of Iranian-Shi⊂i influence, but almost no reference was made in these movements to the fact that Iranian Islam was simultaneously undergoing a process of radicalization. A mixture of ignorance and apathy predominanted. The most one can find are several references to the organizational lessons of the Fidaciyan al-Islam, an Iranian phenomenon of the early 1950s; it seems that whatever inspiration the radical Sunni movements in Arab lands sought from the outside came from Sunni circles in India andPakistan.

The rise of Islamist groups in Egypt's polity and society is given force through the articulation of a set of competing yet inter-linked discourses that challenge the authority of the post-independence secular nationalist discourse and attempt to reconstitute the field of struggle and domination in religious terms. Concurrently, these discourses seek authoritative status over the scope of meanings related to questions of identity, history, and the place of Islam in the world. The interpretations and definitions elaborated in reference to these questions by radical Islamist forces (the jihad groups and other militant Islamist elements) are often seen to dominate the entire field of meaning. However, claims to authority over issues of government, morality, identity, and Islam's relationship to the West are also made in and through a discourse that can appropriately be labeled “conservative Islamist.” The discourse and political role of conservative Islamism are the subject of this article.

In late February of 1986, a week or two before the massive joint celebration of the 25th anniversary of Hassan II's accession to the Moroccan throne and the 10th of his launching of the Green March into the Sahara (the March actually took place in November of 1975, but it was ritually assimilated to Coronation Day for this milestone occasion), the municipal council of a small city in the east-central part of the country issued a decree. Henceforth, the color of all buildings in the city was to be beige: crème, in the French redaction, qehwi, in the Arabic. Paint could be obtained at designated outlets.

The scene opens with the camera zooming in on a small raised stage where a group of muṭribs (minstrel performers) are enacting a rūḥawzī piece. At stage left, a young man is singing a love song that describes the physical features of his beloved, Chihilgis. He is accompanied by an ensemble that plays rhythmic music (in 6/8 meter) on traditional Iranian instruments—the tunbak, the tār, and the kamānchih. Standing next to the singer is Chihilgis, performed by a crossed-dressed performer (zanpūsh) who sports a long wig and moves flirtatiously to the song, making coquettish gestures with the eyes, lips, and shoulders. Chihilgis then joins the dance center stage with the two other main characters: the protagonist, enacted by the black-faced performer Mubarak, who has a tambourine (dāyirih) in hand; and Haji, Chihilgis’ old father, who sports a white cotton beard. With variations based on the characters, the dance consists of typical muṭribī moves, including exaggerated wrist and hip rotations, facial gestures such as blinking, and sliding head movements. This musical segment is followed by a witty, humorous dialogue between Mubarak and Haji with sexual undertones.

Three basic forms of rebellion existed in Iran during the Safavid period. These were qazāq revolts, rebellions by urban notables, and peasant revolts against the Safavid state or local notables. All three types sprouted spontaneously in the fallow fields of Astarābād. While they existed in other regions of Iran as well, Astarābād was the only region where all three grew up independent of one another. By examining the separate courses of these rebellions a better dissection can be made of the three forms, how they affected one another, and how they grew up. Since Astarābād was also a border region near Central Asia, some of the many grievances that affected life in other parts of Iran came more clearly to the forefront, and a better picture can be obtained of the reactions evinced by various local populations to the burdensome loads of the Safavid state and the qizilbāsh tribal state systems.

Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi, the celebrated saint of Central Asia who lived most likely in the late 12th century, is perhaps best known as a Sufi shaykh and (no doubt erroneously) as a mystical poet; his shrine in the town now known as Turkistan, in southern Kazakhstan, has been an important religious center in Central Asia at least since the monumental mausoleum that still stands was built, by order of Timur, at the end of the 14th century. While Yasavi's shrine, owing to the predilections of Soviet scholarship, was extensively studied by architectural historians and archeologists, its role in social and religious history has received scant attention; at the same time, Ahmad Yasavi's legacy as a Sufi shaykh has itself been the subject of considerable misunderstanding, resulting from two related tendencies in past scholarship: to approach the Yasavi tradition as little more than a sideline to the historically dominant Naqshbandiyya, and to regard it as a phenomenon definable in “ethnic” terms, as limited to an exclusively Turkic environment. Even less well known in the West, however, is one aspect of Ahmad Yasavi's legacy that is of increasing significance in contemporary Central Asia, as the region's religious heritage is recovered and redefined in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse—namely, the distinctive familial communities that define themselves in terms of descent from Yasavi's family, and have historically claimed specific prerogatives associated with Yasavi's shrine.

The Egyptian economy has deteriorated since the early 1980s. In response to periods of economic crisis, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and actors within the Egyptian government have been pushing President Hosni Mubarak to reform the economic system. Similar, but less obvious, efforts at reform are found throughout Egyptian society; private organizations are providing services–education, job training, health care, and day care–in the face of governmental unwillingness or inability to make these services available as promised