What shape does Salafism take in Tunisia after the ban of the Salafi-Jihadi group Ansar al-Shari‘a and the wave of securitization carried out by national authorities? This article argues that a constraining legal context put Salafism's doctrinal rigidity in tension with its survival and ultimately prompted a residual current of Salafi actors to accommodate their stance toward Malikism, the prevalent school (madhhab) in the country. This adaptation is at odds with contemporary Salafism, which traditionally dismisses all four law schools (lā madhabiyya), rejects their blind imitation (taqlῑd), and claims the superiority of the Qur'an, hadith, and consensus of the salaf (pious predecessors) over jurisprudence (fiqh). To account for this puzzle, this article scrutinizes the historical development of Salafism and the evolution of its stance toward Malikism across three generational waves. It notably shows how religious securitization associated with the promotion of a “moderate” Islam pushed Salafi actors to redefine their ideology to preserve their preaching and teaching activities. We call Salafi-Malikism the outcome of this adaptive strategy. Drawing on the Tunisian case, we argue that, despite its purist claims, Salafism is not an immutable religious current, but can take different trajectories to survive in constraining environments.

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.

Kuwait is one of the gulf countries that has imported large numbers of temporary migrant workers over the last decade or so. The import of such workers was necessitated by the ambitious development plans that were made possible by the oil bonanza after 1973. Even prior to this influx, however, more than 70 percent of the labor force in Kuwait consisted of foreign workers. As the country has gone through economic and other changes, its goals concerning the magnitude and structure of the migrant worker population have undergone substantial revisions. These changes are reflected in such indicators as number of migrant workers; occupational and industrial distribution of the labor force; demographic, ethnic, and educational characteristics of this labor force; and related wage levels. An examination of the above changes is the objective of the present study.

During the last decade of the Pahlavi rule in Iran, rising oil income financed a very extensive development program in which both the state and the private sector accumulated huge amounts of wealth in real and financial capital. Having no direct access to the oil riches, the private sector accumulated much of its new wealth by direct and indirect subsidies from the government. Through various mechanisms, the state channeled resources to the private sector in an attempt to foster capitalist development of the country. While the strategy was successful insofar as it resulted in massive investment by the private sector, it was not without its ill side effects. This article is a study of the consequences, both intended and unintended, of one specific conduit for resource transfer—credit subsidy.

From its outset, Shiʿi Islam has been associated with Iraq. In 661 ʿAli ibn Abi Talib was assassinated in a mosque in Kufa. ʿAli's son Husayn, who laid claim to the caliphate, was killed with his companions in a battle that took place in the plain of Karbala in 680. Many of the twelve Shiʿi imams spent at least part of their lives there. The four most sacred Shiʿi shrine cities—Najaf, Karbala, Kazimayn, and Samarra—are in Iraq. Since the early stages of Islamic history, much of Shiʿi learning was centered in Hilla, Baghdad, Najaf, and Karbala. And, finally, Iraq was also once a territory ruled by Shiʿi dynasties, notably the Buyids (945–1055).

But all this by itself cannot explain how the Shiʿs came to form the majority of the population of modern Iraq. Although conversion from Sunnism to Shiʿism took place in Iraq throughout Shiʿi history, it was confined mainly to cities, where only a small fraction of the population lived. Occasionally, some Arab tribes were also converted to Shiʿism—for example, the Bani Sulama, the Tayy, and the Sudan in the marshes near Khuzistan during the Mushaʿshaʿ Arab Shiūi dynasty of the 15th to 16th centuries. Nonetheless, there is no evidence that would suggest that the Shiʿis were ever close to forming a majority of Iraq's population before the 19th or even the 20th century.

A number of writers on Egyptian Arab nationalism have maintained that this nationalism originated in religious motives, that it was initially exploited by the Palace and its allies and only then reluctantly adopted by the Wafd for primarily party purposes. In an essay entitled “Pan Arabism and British Policy” Kedourie links the initiation of an active pan-Arab policy to King Faruq and his “coadjutors and instruments” Ali Mahir and Abd al-Rahman Azzam, who in the late thirties “invented and propagated pan-Arabism as a policy for Egypt” and who “conceived the dream of an authoritarian Muslim state in Egypt embracing gradually all the Arabs and perhaps in the fullness of time all the Muslims.” He acknowledges that the Wafd and not the Palace entourage negotiated the Arab League but he attributes al-Nahhas's acquiesence to personal and party interests. “We do not yet know what convinced al-Nahhas that pan-Arabism was a paying policy,” he writes, “but no doubt the desire to please the King, to dish his opponents by adopting their policy, the dislike of Iraq's aggrandisement should Nuri al-Said's [Fertile Crescent unity] scheme be realized, the approval of the British, and visions of future grandeur had their part to play.” Egypt, he claims, had never manifested any interest in Arabism before the 1943–1945 negotiations leading to the Arab League.

Kedourie presents the fullest, most explicit, and baldest statement of this interpretation but it is found, or reflected, variously, in other well-known works, including Heyworth-Dunne's Religious and Political Trends in Modern Egypt in which it seems to have been first formulated, as well as Safran's Egypt in Search of Political Community and Mitchell's The Society of the Muslim Brothers

This article examines the extensive intellectual and social exchange that resulted from the Ottoman imperial incorporation of Arab lands in the 16th century. In the years immediately after the 1516–17 conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate that brought Egypt, Greater Syria, and the Hijaz under Ottoman rule, Turkish-speaking Ottomans from the central lands (Rumis) found that their political power was not matched by religious and cultural prestige. As the case of Damascus shows, scholarly gatherings called majālis (sing. majlis) were key spaces where this initial asymmetry was both acutely felt and gradually overcome. As arenas for discussion among scholars on the move, literary salons facilitated the circulation of books and ideas and the establishment of a shared intellectual tradition. As occasions where stories were told and history was made, they supported the formation of a common past. In informal gatherings and in the biographical dictionaries that described them, Rumis and Arabs came together to forge an empire-wide learned culture as binding as any political or administrative ingredient of the Ottoman imperial glue.

Oil and dynastic rule have led to an idiosyncratic pattern of state formation in the Gulf, and in few parts of the state are the idiosyncrasies more pronounced than in the security sector. Oil income has allowed the ruling families of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to engineer a relatively soft, rent- and patronage-based authoritarianism characterized by multiple centers of power and huge institutional redundancies. Having constructed their police and military forces along these lines, their monarchical rule has become more resilient, but their armed forces also more hapless.

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

Iran is entering the second decade of its ‘White Revolution’. The Shâh has set forth his own account of it,2 but the scholarly community has, as yet, made no serious attempt at analysing it.3 This omission is glaring regardless of justifications. It is, in fact, an omission which verges on scholarly neglect because, if there is any validity in the propositions of this study, better understanding of Iran's contemporary achievements and dilemmas would seem to require probing the very meaning of the ‘White Revolution’ by going beyond its official label and the adumbration of its programs. The purpose of this paper is to do exactly that. And toward that end it shall seek to utilize concepts of political development as suggested in particular by Professor Gabriel Almond. We prefer these concepts because they facilitate examination of the ‘White Revolution’ within the broad and fundamental framework of the major challenges of Western civilization to Iran.

“Are you going to behave like a factory girl?!” With this phrase, an 1880s peasant in Mount Lebanon not only admonished a daughter, but also encapsulated the social and economic transformations which were altering the notions of family and society, and the gender roles underlying both. Typically enough, these transformations came about between 1843 and 1914 as a result of the interaction between the local peasant economy and European capitalism. Modernization and dependency narratives of such an encounter follow the line of “tradition” versus “modernity,” with Europe ultimately dictating an inevitable outcome to its absolute benefit. Yet closer examination reveals the story in Mount Lebanon to be far more complicated. In particular, gender replaces this artificial bipolarity with a triangular struggle among peasant men, peasant women, and European capitalists. Furthermore, rather than being historical victims, women and men in Mount Lebanon—with intersecting and diverging interests—worked to contour the outcome of their encounter with Europe and to take control over their individual and collective lives. While the equation of power was most definitely in favor of European merchants and capitalists, the struggles of these peasants were not for naught. Rather, as I will argue in this paper, their travails made the outcome multifaceted and less predictable than European capitalists would have liked it to be.

The first quarter of the twentieth century contains a fascinating chapter of modern Iranian history. It was a period of the death agony of the Qājār state; a period of revolutionary upheaval, sociopolitical disorder and disintegration, and cultural and literary transformation, a moment both of joy and of sadness, achievement and failure, which, in an unusually clear way, illuminated the long distance between what there was, and what was desired to be. This period may be analysed in three parts: the first decade, which covers the period of the Persian Revolution; the second decade, which can be described as a period of interregnum, when, in the well-known phrase, power was lying in the streets waiting to be picked up; and the remaining five years which was a period of dual sovereignty, characterized by a ruthless struggle for political power.

Writers analyzing recent economic change among the Bedouin of South Sinai have not yet investigated institutions and events beyond the limits of their informants' memories. Marx, Perevolotsky, and Ben David refer, quite rightly, to the period following the Second World War as a time of economic change in Sinai. They note that in that period tribesmen tended to become unskilled laborers in new enterprises such as mining, road-building, and services, all generated by central governments that were then becoming exceedingly involved in Sinai. This trend, together with the growth of contraband in the 1940s and 1950s, modified traditional Bedouin economy by inducing a movement away from occupations based on the use of natural resources. A change in life-style followed, manifested primarily in a tendency to settle in villages such as El Milga and Abu Sileh near the Monastery of Saint Catharine, El Wad near El Tor, or Bir Zreir near Nweiba (see map).

In his final lecture, Freud and the Non-European, Edward Said drew our attention to a fundamental contribution of psychoanalysis to political life. Through a reading of Moses and Monotheism, Said showed how Freud's “unresolved sense of identity” is revealed by his desire that Moses be Egyptian. When Said finds Freud haunted by the trace of Egypt at the origin of Jewish identity, he locates a spectral effect of alterity in a text purporting to expose a norm of identity; instead of establishing the grounds of that norm, Said's Freud symptomatically exposes a desire to be other. This in turn inspires Said's hope that textual moments like this can become sites of affinity and relation that undo the certainties of enmity.

The revolutionary “spring of freedom” did not last long in the Iranian universities. The revolutionary movement had turned the universities into centers of political activity, where crowds gathered and rival political groups clashed. Control over the Tehran University soccer field for mass rallies became a sign of a political organization's power. On 11 February 1979, the first tank liberated from the Shah's army was driven to the campus of Tehran University; the Organization of the People's Mujahedin set up its headquarters in the Faculty of Sciences, and the Organization of People's Fadaʾian Guerrillas in the Faculty of Engineering. Between them, the university mosque became the headquarters for an “Imam's committee,” where fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds stored weapons captured from the Shah's artillery. When the universities reopened shortly after the February insurrection, similar divides were made within academic buildings of all universities. Various groups partitioned public areas, claimed various rooms, and even parceled out the walls for poster space. Life was as chaotic in the universities as it was outside. However, the difference was that while the Islamic Republic was gaining political hegemony in Iranian society, it was losing the ideological battle in the universities, where radical groups were recruiting and training student activists, many of whom were political organizers in factories, farms, and neighborhoods. The students and faculty who supported the Islamic regime constituted only a small minority.

The “new Arab woman” of the early 20th century has received much recent scholarly attention. According to the middle- and upper-class ideal, this woman was expected to strengthen the nation by efficiently managing her household, educating her children, and contributing to social causes. Yet, we cannot fully understand the “new Arab woman” without studying the domestic workers who allowed this class to exist. Domestic workers carried out much of the physical labor that let their mistresses pursue new standards of domesticity, social engagement, and participation in nationalist organizations. This article examines relationships between Arab housewives and female domestic workers in British Mandate Palestine (1920–1948) through an analysis of domestic reform articles and memoirs. Arab domestic reformers argued that elite housewives, in order to become truly modern women, had to treat maids with greater respect and adjust to the major socioeconomic changes that peasants were experiencing, yet still maintain a clear hierarchy in the home. Palestinian memoirists, meanwhile, often imagine their pre-1948 homes as a site of Palestinian national solidarity. Their memories of intimate relationships that developed between elite families and peasant maids have crucially shaped nationalist narratives that celebrate the Palestinian peasantry.

The term “secularization” is used to qualify that manner of change which occurred in the Islamic system of civil law from 1451 to 1926. It refers to the processes that caused gradual revision and/or change in Islamic Ottoman and Turkish civil law and connotes a departure from the orthodox tenets prescribed by Islamic law. This departure is a process that may create gradual or abrupt change. Also that which in retrospect is classified as a change may not at the outset be classified as such. Specifically, this change may begin in the form of supplementation and continue in this manner without the process taking the form of major change. On the other hand there may be total change within the structure undergoing these experiences. This structure, which is the subject of discussion, is the Islamic Ottoman and Turkish civil law. The secularization process in this case represents: (1) supplementation, (2) reform (Tanzimat and the Mecelle), (3) change (abrogation of the capitulatory system), (4) complete secular change in civil law (adoption of the Swiss Civil Code).

Established in 1920, al-Nadi al-Homsi in São Paulo, Brazil was a young men's club devoted to Syrian patriotic activism and culture in the American mahjar (diaspora). Founded by a transnational network of intellectuals from Homs, the fraternity committed itself to what it saw as a crucial aspect of Syrian national independence under Amir Faysal: the development of a political middle class and a masculine patriotic culture. Al-Nadi al-Homsi directed this project at Syrian youth, opening orphanages, libraries, and schools in both Syria and in Brazil. In these spaces, men and boys congregated to celebrate a polite male culture centered on secular philanthropy, popular education, and corporeal discipline through sports. This article argues that during the 1920s and 1930s, al-Nadi al-Homsi's politics of benevolence was part of a larger social milieu that drew analogies between strong Syrian minds and bodies and a sovereign, independent Syrian homeland.

When the Ottoman Parliament was first elected and organized in 1876–8, surprised Europeans tended to assume that this institution was a direct result of European example and European pressure. Indeed, from that day to the present, it has been assumed that this was, in fact, the first Ottoman parliament, the first Ottoman effort at representative government, and the first experiment at involving the subjects of the Sultan in the process of rule, traditionally restricted only to members of his Ruling Class. Yet in fact this Parliament was the culmination of a century-long process of change which had been taking place in the Ottoman body politic since the early years of Sultan Selim III (1789–1807). It might well be argued that if the Parliament of 1876–8 was a failure, it was because of the failure of those who constructed it to rely sufficiently on this previous experience in representative government and legislation instead of simply imitating the European example. The representative legislative and executive institutions developed by the nineteenth century Ottoman reformers on the provincial and local levels will be discussed in a separate study. It is the object of this article to describe the same development in the central Ottoman government during the period of the Tanzimat (1839–76), to provide additional background for subsequent studies of the fate of Ottoman constitutionalism in the years which followed.