This article aims to explore the development of what we define as “middle-ground” politics among the Palestinians in Israel. By middle ground, we mean the linkage between Palestine as an abstract notion and the concrete daily concerns of the Palestinians. The activities at demolished Palestinian villages and towns are one of the most salient manifestations of this middle ground. We argue that these activities create a new sense of group identity for many Palestinians and can be termed a re-Palestinization of places in Israel.

In a famous passage in his Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, E. W. Lane described the ceremonies commonly held to celebrate the circumcision of a young boy in 19th-century Cairo. Family and friends of the boy, his schoolteacher, the barber who performed the operation and his assistant, musicians, and other retainers all participated in a celebration of an overtly public character. Dressed in fancy clothes and feted with song and dance, the boy, aged five or six or slightly older, was paraded through the streets of his neighborhood, often on horseback, to his parents' house, where the operation was performed. Cups of coffee might be distributed to passersby while guests and relations were, of course, treated to a celebratory feast. Modes of celebration may have changed, but festivities surrounding the circumcision of a young boy are still common in the Muslim countries of the Near East.

During their rule in Egypt and Syria (1250–1517), the Mamluks showed a certain ambiguity in their attitude toward the sultanate including its rules of succession and the ruler's source of power. This ambiguity has led to a variety of opinions about the nature of the Mamluk Sultanate in scholarly works on Mamluk history. David Ayalon implies, in “The Circassians in the Mamluk Kingdom,” that the principle of heredity was recognized to various degrees in the Mamluk state, although it was weak during the Bahri period and altogether abandoned during the Circassian period. In “From Ayyubids to Mamluks,” Ayalon confirms that when the Mamluks came to power they had not “ever dreamt of creating a non-hereditary sultan's office” because most of the Bahri period was ruled by the Qalaʾunid dynasty. When nonhereditary rule came about, at least in the Bahri period, it was without any form of planning. In his “Mamluk Military Aristocracy: A Non-Hereditary Nobility,” Ayalon stresses that even during pre- and post-Qalaʾunid times the sultan's office was only nonhereditary to a certain extent and that “throughout the history of the Mamluk Sultanate there is not the slightest mention of the non-hereditary character of the sultan's office, or of the intention of turning it into such.”

‘History’, Ernest Toller once observed, ‘is the propaganda of the victors.’ Alas, it may often be so; but in the case of the Assyrian Affair of 1933 history has been decidedly the propaganda of the victims.

In the present political climate of Arab-Israeli relations, arguments are frequently brought forth by disputants on each side concerning what each regards as the fundamental relations between Muslims and Jews, not as political but as social communities. Muslims insist that Jews who have lived in their midst have always fared better than those living in Europe and that their opposition is not to Jews as a religious, but as a distinct political, grouping. Zionists, on the other hand, consider as humiliating the treatment Jews have received in the Muslim countries from which most of them have emigrated, and often regard the Muslims as fundamentally anti-Semitic despite the latter's protestations to the contrary. Fact and myth, particularly in the hands of each side's propagandists, have become inextricably tangled, and attempts to tease them apart often fall victim to accusations that the author is less interested in a judicious presentation of the data than in serving some private and ulterior motive. Indeed, since most of the Jews have either left their homes in the Arab nations or found their positions drastically altered by the present conflict, it has become almost impossible to study first-hand the ways in which Muslims conceive of and relate to the Jewish minorities living in their midst as part of that society and not just as an extension of the Israeli nation or the community of world Jewry.

This article analyzes the increased visibility and frequency of public weeping by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Building on the literature that conceptualizes populism as a particular political style, I argue that crying in public can be understood as a populist performative act of legitimation, serving to dramatize the basic components of the populist discourse. I also contend that the increased frequency of public weeping by Erdoğan relate to two major dilemmas that populists in power encounter. Both dilemmas stem from the growing discrepancy between populist rhetoric and practice, diminishing the credibility of the populist leader. Signaling emotional authenticity, Erdoğan’s tearfulness serves to communicate a message of closeness to the people and sustain the anti-elite rhetoric at a time when his political power and economic wealth increasingly set him apart from the politically and economically marginalized. It also attempts to justify authoritarian practices while sustaining the claim to rule in the name of popular power and mobilize constituents against the opposition.

During the final century of its existence, the Ottoman state, seeking to adapt and survive in a European-dominated world, launched a series of far-ranging reform programs touching nearly every aspect of Ottoman life. The financial basis of these programs rested on a predominantly agricultural economy characterized by Ottoman and foreign observers alike as backward and impoverished, yet possessing vast potential.Generally, these observers also agreed that Turkey's function in the industrializing world was to supply agricultural produce and raw materials. The expansion of Turkish agricultural production would not only help satisfy increasing European demand but also, by raising Ottoman revenues, both ensure the continuation of the Ottoman Empire and provide the additional funds required by the modernization efforts.

Speaking of comparative urbanization, Gideon Sjoberg noted that the Near East, the region in which cities first rose, has been understudied by urban sociologists. Few research projects have been realized on contemporary urbanization in the Arab World. This paper purports to examine recent trends of urbanization in the region; and their inter-relationship with the ‘modernization’ process.

Medieval Islamic architecture presents the scholar with a fascinating set of histo-riographical problems. Some are methodological; others are related to the nature of the sources, and they are shared by various other branches of research in medieval history such as urban history, topography, and the history of arts and crafts whose inquiries depend on the same sources. Still others are peculiar to the specific domain of architectural history. These last are the most challenging, for they require particular strategies that take into account the disparities in our knowledge of the two basic components needed to reconstruct the history of any architectural object: the physical remains and the contemporary documents related to them. There are three possible kinds of disparity: in the best cases, buildings that are still standing and in fairly good shape can be studied in light of relevant contemporary documents. In more difficult cases, the structures still exist, but supportive documents, written or otherwise, do not. Most difficult of all is when we have documents describing, or referring to, a structure or a group of structures for which we have no visible trace.

Class analysis stands as one of the ancient and classic theoretical approaches to the study of politics and society. Stratification by class has been traditionally utilized by scholars and statesmen to explain patterns of political conflict and processes of social change. In modern American political science, however, this approach has yet to receive the attention and application that have marked traditional formal-legal and contemporary structural-functional analysis. The sharp reaction that developed against the former took the immediate shape of the group and elite approaches which to a large degree continue to displace or disguise class analysis.

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.

The year 1844–45 in Damascus province was a dry one, aggravated by a brutal winter frost. Reports of ruined crops and disputes over precious water sources reached the city, where as yet there was still enough to eat. But the city was by no means immune to the drought. It was felt in varying ways, like rising prices and, of all things, a shortage of leeches. Barbers could not get enough of them to meet medical needs, and their prices had risen sharply. So the barbers began smuggling them. An Ottoman market official (mültazim), on noticing that government leech sales for that month had dropped from 45,000 to 7,000, ordered police (tüfenkçi) to confiscate the creatures from barbershops and sold them himself for profit. Conflict between the official and barbers exploded, and each side made its way, as rural peasants and tax collectors had in the crisis, to the ultimate court of appeal in the province, the Majlis Shūrā al-Shām al-ʿAlī, or high advisory council for Damascus province.

The history of the Shi'i Muslims in the isles of Bahrain and the oases of Qatif and al-Hasa has been little studied despite the economic and political importance lent them by the large petroleum deposits in their region. The significance of this community has been further magnified by the rise in the Gulf region of Shi'i radicalism, as in the Iranian Revolution of 1978–1979 and the failed 1981 Shi'i coup attempt in Bahrain. The study of Shi'ism in the Gulf has advanced so little that even a basic chronology and overview of institutional developments are lacking for all but the most recent decades.

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.

On 4 August 2005 the Lebanese English-language paper the Daily Star reported that Lebanon's ancient inscriptions at Nahr al-Kalb had been accepted into the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO’s) collection of “worldwide rare documents” through its Memory of the World Programme. UNESCO established the Memory of the World Programme in 1992, after realizing that its World Heritage Programme, which seeks to protect historic landscapes and architectural landmarks, did not safeguard a category of less visible, yet equally important, documents of the past: texts. The Memory of the World Programme made the preservation of “documentary heritage [which] reflects the diversity of languages, peoples and cultures” its goal, hoping that its work would help prevent “collective amnesia.” An eight-member Lebanese national committee made up of cultural and political elites affiliated with Lebanon's Ministry of Culture and Lebanese University, the country's largest public university, submitted a unanimous proposal to UNESCO's International Advisory Committee (IAC) to include Nahr al-Kalb in its collection of “documentary heritage.” The IAC reviewed and accepted the proposal in June 2005, placing the inscriptions along the river of Nahr al-Kalb in the company of 156 other universally memorable texts from around the world.

In this article we examine accounts of self-identifying Iranian gay men. We draw on a range of evidentiary sources—interpretive, historical, online, and empirical—to generate critical and nuanced insights into the politics of recognition and representation that inform narrative accounts of the lived experiences of self-identified gay Iranian men, and the constitution of same-sex desire for these men under specific conditions of Iranian modernity. In response to critiques of existing gay internationalist and liberationist accounts of the Iranian gay male subject as a persecuted victim of the Islamic Republic of Iran's barbarism, we address interpretive questions of sexuality governance in transnational contexts. Specifically, we attend to human rights frameworks in weighing social justice and political claims made by and on behalf of sexual and gender minorities in such Global South contexts. In this sense, our article represents a critical engagement with the relevant literature on sexuality governance and the politics of same-sex desire for Iranian gay men that is informed by empirical analysis.

These words of an elderly Jewish man in Istanbul relate his memory of neighborhood life with Greeks, Armenians, and Muslims in the neighborhood of Kuzguncuk. In this place, there were no arguments between people of different religious backgrounds; Muslims shared “his” language, and he, as a Jew, knew Greek. As I examine his narrative for what it emphasizes and for the silences in between, I read Kuzguncuk as exceptional: describing an absence of argument in the past suggests that tension exists today; sharing multiple ethnic languages is understood now to be an old-fashioned rarity. His statement “Because we are Kuzguncuklu Jews, our Muslims over there loved us very much” suggests that in Kuzguncuk, he and his Muslim neighbors shared a common tie to place, a unique identity as Kuzguncuklu (of Kuzguncuk) that superseded any difference based on religion or ethnicity. As he describes a culture that remained from Ottoman times, his story illuminates indirectly the current Turkish national context that conditions the telling of his narrative.

One of the most resilient ideas introduced to the analysis of economic and political change under colonialism and imperialism is the “comprador” and, by extension, the “comprador bourgeoisie.” The comprador in essence embodies or internalizes the basic theoretical problem of the peripheral political economy: economic activity oriented primarily for the benefit of the other.1 By strict definition, compradors are native agents or partners of foreign investors who operate in some form in the local economy. However, in the theoretical context of assessing the possibilities for local industrial development, compradors represent forces that hinder change. As “agents of foreign imperialism,” they act “against the interest of the national economy.”2

Indigenously sponsored private schools appeared in many, if not most, countries which experienced a period of colonial rule. The instruction given in these schools was usually confined to the elementary level, and the language of instruction varied according to local circumstances. While these schools have been known under a variety of names, the designation that is perhaps most widely used is ‘free school’.

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.