Notwithstanding five generations of legislators and administrators bent on westernizing the economies of the Ottoman Empire and of its successor states, Islamic patterns were so intimately woven into the fabric of community and society in the Levant that every aspect of economic endeavor beyond the area of daily contact with the West continued to be cast in the mold of the all-encompassing Sharî'a until after the Second World War.1 Nowhere was this clearer than in rural Palestine, where an economic organization framed in Islamic concepts, operating in Islamic terms, and embodying the problems and the promises of the Islamic view of doing business and carrying on production, withstood a century of confrontation with Western settlers, traders, and administrators and a quickly expanding implanted sector.

With the advent of the 20th century, Sufism found itself under increasing attack in many parts of the Muslim world. In previous centuries, mystical movements had played a prominent role in the struggle for the revival of Islam and occasionally, where governments were weak or nonexistent, also in actual resistance to European encroachment. In the wake of the increasing consolidation of the state and the spread of Western rationalism, however, Sufis came to be regarded as a major cause of the so-called decline of Islam and an obstacle to its adaptation. In the Arab world, this anti–Sufi feeling was generally associated with the Salafiyya trend. The Salafi call for a return to the example of the forefathers (al-salaf al-**sdotu**āli**hdotu**) amounted to a discrediting of latter-day tradition, which was described as cherishing mystical superstition as well as scholarly stagnation and political quietism. Under the burden of this critique, and as a response to the general expansion of education and literacy, Sufism has been forced to assimilate new ideas and to make room for a new form of organization; the populist Islamic association. These developments culminated in the establishment of the Society of the Muslim Brothers.

This paper analyzes Iraqi national narratives in the years from 1958 to 1961 to consider how innovative definitions of Arab nationalisms were affected by worldwide processes of decolonization. It demonstrates how Pan-Arabism was transformed in Qasimite Iraq because of its hybridization with Iraqi patriotism and, concurrently, how various elements of Arabist discourses were integrated into local and patriotic perceptions of Iraqi nationalism. Examining cultural idioms shared by Iraqi intellectuals belonging to different political groups, especially the communists and the Baʿthists, destabilizes a typology that assumes each ideological camp subscribed to a rigidly defined set of well-known historical narratives. The Pan-Arabists in this period often cultivated the notion that Arab nationalism did not entail an ethnic origin but rather the ability to adopt the Arabic language, as well as Arab history and culture, as a marker of one's national and cultural identity. The attempts to adapt Pan-Arab discourses to the specificities of the Iraqi milieu and to build coalitions with as many of the nation's groups as possible meant that the sectarian, anti-Shiʿi, and anti-Kurdish notions that colored Baʿthist discourses in later years were not as prominent in this period.

Shaykh al-Qusi is a charismatic spiritual leader in Cairo whose followers have been recording their dream visions and waking visions in a handwritten collection since 1997. Drawing on the shaykh's dream-inspired poetry and his followers' vision narratives, I describe the ways in which this community of believers understands the relationship between authorship and authority, as well as between imagination (al-khayamacr;l) and tradition. Dreams and visions do not circumvent idioms of the textual tradition, but in their narrative form they often mirror and reinscribe its genres. Some of the group's vision narratives emulate the face-to-face encounters of the hadith whereas others signify eruptions of a timeless truth from elsewhere, similar to the Quran. Through mirroring the sacred genres, dreams and visions bring believers closer to these texts. Just as dreams are understood through the tradition, the tradition is understood by some through dreams.

Students of Islamic history more or less agree that the Fātimid regime conducted what may be loosely termed a liberal economic policy, and that the rulers of tenth- to twelfth-century Egypt intervened in the Egyptian economy to a minimal degree. Goitein, maintaining that the Fātimid period “was one of relative tolerance and liberalism, if compared with the preceding and, in particular, the following periods,” also stresses the x201C;comparatively little interference by the [Fātimid] governments in the trade of their subjects.” Ashtor tells us that “a striking feature of the Fātimid regime was freedom of enterprise,” and that “ all sectors of economic life were free — crafts, industry and trade.” Staffa asserts that “the [Fātimid] government made no attempt to impose strict control over the economy.” It may be suspected that the notion of Fātimid “liberalism,” as opposed, say, to Ayyūbid or Mamluk “conservatism,” had helped some decades ago to mole the thesis (now generally discarded) that the origins of guilds and professional organizations in the Islamic Near East are to be sought in the Fātmid state.

A number of the basic works on Iranian history have attempted to characterize seventeenth-century Iran as a whole, usually from a non-Marxist perspective. Vladimir Minorsky, for example, employs the term “tribal feudalism” to describe the pre-'Abbas I system, and speaks of the “great transformation” in the period to 1630 from tribal feudalism to “patrimonial absolutism.” These leads have been followed by Nikki Keddie, with “tribal feudalism”; Alessandro Bausani, with “pastoral nomadic feudalism”; and Amin Banani, with “patrimonial absolutism.” James Reid offers the term “uymaq system” (tribal state), while Hafez Farmayan notes the transition from Isma'ils “theocratic-feudal form of government” to 'Abbass “military and bureaucratic” centralized state. Marshall Hodgson's panoptic view of Islamic history provides the general term “agrarlanate citied society” and specific characterizations of Safavid Iran as heir to “military patronage state,” as a “bureaucratic absolutism” and as an “agrarian absolutism.” Each of these conceptualizations has its merits, not the least being that their authors include some of the most perceptive and empirically well-informed twentieth-century historians of Iran, Islam and the Middle East. While it is impossible to discuss their theoretical approaches in detail here, it should noted that the terminology tends to disclose two basic (if somewhat overlapping) orientations: (1) these are largely political conceptualizations—patrimonial absolutism, agrarian absolutism, theocratic feudalism, tribal state, military patronage state, and (2) a number of them suggest hybrid economic entities—tribal pastoral nomadic feudalism, agrarianate citied society. Without denying the interest of the first, primarily political approach to characterizing seventeenth-century Iran as a total system, it is the second set of terms—those of Minorsky, Bausani, Keddie and Hodgson—that is of particular significance for the present analysis, since each hints at the mixed economic bases of the Iranian social formation, to which we shall return after a look at the standard Marxist approaches.

This research paper provides an historical analysis of urbanization in Egypt and its relationships to her incorporation into the world capitalist economy during the last two centuries. My major concern is to discover more about the following issues: (1) the historical reasons for the structural disjunction of the peasant population from rural areas; and (2) the dynamics of rural–urban migration and the problem of overconcentration of population in a few major urban centers.

Islamic revivalism is often believed to be solely committed to the Islamization of society, viewing politics as merely an instrument in the struggle to realize its aim. The record of Islamic revivalist movements—as exemplified by one of the oldest and most influential of them, the Jamaʿat-i Islami, or Islamic party of Pakistan—however, brings this presumption into question. The nature of the linkage between Islamic revivalism as a particular interpretive reading of Islam and politics is more complicated than is generally believed. Political interests, albeit still within an Islamic framework, play a more important and central role in the unfolding of revivalism—even overriding the commitment to Islamization—than is often ac knowledged. Participation in the political process eschews a blind commitment to Islamization and encourages adherence to organizational interests, and as is evi dent in the case of Pakistan, to the democratic process, characteristics that are not usually associated with Islamic movements. The dynamics and pace of this pro cess are controlled by the struggles for power within an Islamic movement as well as vis-à-vis the state. It is through grappling with these struggles that the commit ment to Islamization is weighed against the need to adhere to organizational and political interests; this is the process that governs the development of Islamic re vivalism. Beyond this general assertion, the manner in which the struggle for power unfolds, the variables that influence it, and the nature of its impact on the development of revivalism need to be explored further.

The problem of “Middle East exceptionalism” is perhaps nowhere as apparent as in the study of Middle East politics, particularly its purported sectarian nature. Our understanding of Middle East politics suffers less from the lack of empirical data than the poverty of the conceptual and theoretical frameworks through which it is studied. Unlike other non-Western regions, the Middle East continues to be analyzed through a conceptual prism that has changed little since the collapse of colonial rule.

On 19 March 1877, the first Ottoman parliament opened at Dolmabahçe Palace when Sultan Abdülhamit II crossed a velvet carpet to stand beside a golden throne. Seen later as the finale of the Tanzimat reform era, the parliament appeared to diplomatic observers as the strategy of former grand vizier Midhat Paşa. Midhat's constitutionalism was a plan for “reform, revival, and indeed survival” that included seeking allies against Russia and containing Russian influence in the Balkans. Abdülhamit listened as his secretary charged the new body: “The progress effected by civilised states, the security and wealth they enjoy, are the fruit of the participation of all in the enactment of laws and in the administration of public affairs.” Among the most urgent priorities was “the development of agriculture and industry, and the progress of civilisation and of public wealth.” Parliament later responded with a pledge to deliver the empire from its malaise, to “eliminate the last traces of abuses, the heritage of the regime of despotism.”

The most famous demand raised by protesters in the “Arab Spring” was “al-shaʿb/yurīd/isqāṭ al-niẓām” (the people/want /the fall of the regime). Three years later, little progress has been made—outside of Tunisia—in permanently replacing authoritarian regimes with the formal institutions of democracy. However, new forms of activism have emerged that increase citizens’ ability to directly combat pervasive social problems and to successfully pressure official institutions to alter policies. The evolution of activism against public sexual violence in post-Mubarak Egypt is a concrete example. Sexual harassment of women on the streets and in public transportation, widespread before the 25 January uprising, has likely since increased.1 Many women have been subjected to vicious sexual assault at political protests over the last three years. But activism against these threats has also expanded in ways unimaginable during the Mubarak era. Groups of male and female activists in their twenties and early thirties exhort bystanders on the streets to intervene when they witness harassment, and intervene themselves. Satellite TV programs have extensively covered public sexual violence, directly challenging officials for their failure to combat it while featuring the work of antiharassment and antiassault groups in a positive light. These new practices facilitated two concrete changes in the summer of 2014: amendments to the penal code on sexual harassment, and Cairo University's adoption of an antiharassment policy which was developed by feminist activists.

The aim of this article is to explore the distinctiveness of İzmirli İsmail Hakki (1869–1946) in the context of late Ottoman intellectual history and to suggest several implications of his thought on our understanding of debates on religion and modernization among Ottomans in the modern period. Studies on modern Islamic thought in the 19th and 20th centuries are mostly limited, especially in Western literature, to works dealing with a few well-known figures in the Arab world, such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh. However, a close investigation into several mostly neglected or yet uncovered thinkers of the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, can provide us with more interesting aspects of this period. The earlier interest of Istanbul ulama in modernization, their closer and more direct contact with Europeans, and the long historical experience of central Ottoman intelligentsia in similar reviving attempts are some of these aspects. This article aims to demonstrate that central Ottoman studies can make significant contributions to the current knowledge of the period, not only in political history, as has been the main focus so far, but also in religious and intellectual thought. It will show how a contact was established between modern European and Ottoman religious thought, in which ways the issue of modernization became an important topic in religious circles, and what kind of perceptions took place among them about its content and limits.

Since its political independence in 1956, Sudan has witnessed the rise of armed ethnic and regional protest movements that have resulted in great human suffering and the largest number of refugees and displaced peoples in Africa. These protest movements have challenged the legitimacy of the independent Sudanese state, led by Arabized and Islamized elites at the pinnacle of power, to extend and define citizenship rights and responsibilities. In Darfur, Southern Kordofan, and Blue Nile, these movements are not only currently demanding equal citizenship rights, but they are also demanding recognition of special rights including claims to land, autonomous government, and the maintenance of ethno-national identities. They are thus opening up a debate about what citizenship entails, particularly in a multicultural context; how the current state reconciles competing claims of citizenship; and what kinds of viable institutional mechanisms are required for an effective relationship between the state, its citizens, and local power structures.

The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia … The Internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The Internet is a threat to human civilization.

This article explores the responses of Sephardi Jews to two moments of heightened tension and politicized violence in the Ottoman Empire during the late 19th century—the massacres of Armenians in Istanbul in 1896 and the Greco–Ottoman War of 1897. It argues that many of the strategies of representation that Jewish elites employed during these moments speak to their ability and willingness to work within a framework of Islamic Ottomanism. Recognizing this pattern complicates scholarly assumptions about the relationship of religious minorities to the deployment of state religion in general and about the responses of non-Muslims to the Hamidian regime's mobilization of Islam more specifically. Identifying the pattern is not to celebrate it, however. Sephardi Jews' relationship with Islamic Ottomanism was in many cases deeply ambivalent. Finding themselves torn between civic and Islamic forms of imperial identification during this period, Ottoman Jews soon learned that both positions could entail uncomfortable choices and disturbing consequences.

Edmond Yafil was a key figure in the early 20th-century Algerian revival of Andalusi music, a high-prestige urban performance tradition linked to medieval Muslim Spain. Yafil's experiments with printing, transcription, audio recording, amateur associations, concert-hall performance, and new composition helped transform the production, consumption, and circulation of Andalusi music. Although Yafil was widely respected, his reputation was fraught with ambiguity during his lifetime and has remained so since. While not divorced from his position as a Jew in turn of the century Algiers, Yafil's ambiguity is best understood within the context of the complex Andalusi musical milieu of his day. This study of Yafil shows revival to have been a gloss for a partial but far-reaching shift in the social basis of Andalusi music making and calls for a broader rethinking of the familiar concept of revival in North Africa and the Middle East and beyond.

Western scholars have long studied Jewish and Christian influence in shaping early Islamic tradition, but almost none of them has considered Eve's transformation as a critical part of the “genesis” of an Islamic historical framework and the evolution of its gender categories. I trace the transformation of the wife of Adam from the revelation contained in the Qurʾan and note the abrupt and distinct changes wrought upon this Qurʾanic persona in post-Qurʾanic sources in the matters of menstruation and motherhood. The figure of Satan plays a pivotal role in both of these biological aspects of Eve's biography. Her function as the first woman serves to explain not just the physiology of all women, but also the essential aspects of character that allegedly make all females different from the normative male in biology and behavior. As a wife, Eve is tested and fails, but as a mother, she both fails and passes the test of satanic temptation. I argue that in her role as wife, she is depicted in post-Qurʾanic sources in accordance with pre-Islamic monotheist precedent. However, in Eve's role as mother—especially as the mother of the prophetic patriline that culminates in Muhammad—Muslim scholars distinguished the meaning and implications of her temptation as distinctly Islamic. Eve embodied a fusion of traditions, a continuity of monotheistic meanings about the feminine in the Middle East, as well as an identity that distinguished her as the first woman of a new, emerging Islamic faith.

The readiness of army commanders in Egypt and Tunisia to counter the internal security agencies deployed by their own governments against civilian protestors in early 2011 proved decisive in bringing down presidents-for-life Husni Mubarak and Zayn al-ʿAbidin bin ʿAli. This brings into sharp relief questions about how to approach and assess the various coercive agencies of the state. Should we regard them as different branches of a single coercive apparatus, through which the state seeks to exercise a monopoly on the legitimate means of violence? Or should we see them as manifestations of more fragmented political institutions and social forces and consequently as performing distinct, and potentially divergent, functions in constantly evolving relation to each other?

For several months after the September 2005 publication of twelve cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, the debate was largely confined to a Danish context. Early international protests of the cartoons were voiced by government officials in several countries, including Pakistan, Iran, and Egypt. However, until late December 2005, in what I will call phase one of the controversy, Danish Muslims fought a primarily domestic battle for some kind of recognition from the newspaper and the Danish government that the cartoons had hurt religious feelings. In October 2005 an ad hoc coalition of Danish Muslim organizations, with The Community of Islamic Faith (Det Islamiske Trossamfund) and its affiliated imams at the lead, tried to put pressure on the Danish government through ambassadors from Muslim countries posted in Denmark. The ambassadors' request for a meeting with the Danish prime minister was turned down, as were other attempts by Danish Muslims to raise claims with the government.

Mecca's existence depended primarily on its location near the most important trade route in western Arabia which linked the surplus-producing region of Yemen with Syria. The route branched near Ayla in the north to proceed to Gaza on the Mediterranean and also to Egypt. Another route branched near Mecca to proceed in a northeasterly direction toward al-Ubulla, Ḥīra, and eventually Sasanid Persia. The commercially advantageous location of Mecca was enhanced further by the Zamzam waterwell which made Mecca a convenient stop in the trade of antiquity. Also the concept of the ḥaram, the sacred area, and its center, the Ka⊂ba, made Mecca the object of pilgrimage during the sacred months, pilgrims/merchants traveled with security of life and property and went to Mecca to trade their commodities.