Feminist interest in the social origins and the emotional/psychological development of gender roles has led to a new theoretical debate on the critical importance of mothering. The feminist contribution in this area lies in the formulation of a successful theoretical synthesis of Marxist and psychoanalytic insights to explain the development of gendered roles and personalities in contemporary capitalist society. In contrast to conventional Freudian approaches, which posit the universality of the psychological/emotional processes by which the self is developed, the feminist critics emphasize the historically (and socially) specific nature of the family, mothering patterns, and the way such patterns influence the development of gendered personalities in the West.

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.

In his Interpreting the French Revolution, François Furet defines political sociability as the “specific mode of organizing the relations between citizens (or subjects) and power, as well as among citizens (or subjects) themselves in relation to power.” According to Furet, shifts from one form of political sociability to another can and do take place, particularly during periods of comprehensive economic, political, and social change. One such period preceded the events of 1789 when, as an unintended consequence of state building and economic development under the ancien régime, a democratic/horizontal political sociability increasingly replaced the hierarchic/ vertical political sociability that had previously ordered French society.

China is now becoming recognized as a nation with a significant Muslim population. With nearly 18 million Muslims (the recent 1990 census reported 17.9 million, with many Muslims still unaccounted for or refusing to register as members of the primarily Muslim nationalities), China ranks among the most populous Muslim nations. And, although its Muslim population is miniscule when compared with its total population (Muslims account for less than 2% of China's 1.1 billion), or insignificant when one looks at the vast Muslim populations in other Asian nations, such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, nevertheless, this article argues that the Muslims of China play an important role disproportionate to their numbers in influencing China's domestic and international politics.

On 29 September 1995, a notice in the leading Palestinian daily Al-Quds announced the following: “After Friday prayers an honorable procession composed of notables from the Bethlehem district and notables from the Hebron district proceeded to the Dīwān of Ahl al-Ḥalāʾiqa in the village of Shuyukh in order to complete the rites of tribal conciliation (ṣulḥ ʿashāʾirī) in the wake of a sad car accident.” Among the jāha, the procession of important dignitaries invited to participate by the family of the driver, was Colonel Abu Khalid al-Lahham, a former officer in the Palestinian Liberation Army and currently an adviser to President Yasir Arafat. Originally from Bethlehem, to which he has recently returned after years of exile, al-Lahham was designated to become the governor of the Bethlehem district in the Palestinian Authority (PA) after it extended its hold over the town in December, as stipulated by the Oslo B agreements of 28 September 1995.

I propose that careful reading of films and film coverage provides a new research avenue for scholars interested in the social and cultural history of the 1950s and the 1960s in Lebanon. Looking specifically at the manner in which George Nasser's 1957 film Ila Ayn? (Where To?) embraces and modifies the generic conventions of neorealist melodrama to articulate anxieties over the effects of emigration on Lebanon, this article explores the manner in which contemporaneous cultural critics used the film to, in turn, express their dismay at migration from Lebanon. Reading the film closely for the affects it contains and for those it produced in its readers, I argue that this technique, attendant to both sides of this dynamic, affords us new insights into the manner in which cinema produced during Lebanon's golden period interacted with and complicated the dominant cultural narratives of that era.

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.

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?

The sharifs of Hasanid descent, commonly referred to as the Banū Hasan, who ruled Mecca and its dependencies from the middle of the fourth century A.H./tenth century A.D. until the early twentieth century, can be divided into three major dynastic branches, each of which bears the name of the first of its members to attain the office of emir of Mecca. Thus, the first dynasty of the Hasanid sharifs of Mecca, known as the Jaʿfarids, was founded by Jaʿfar b. Muhammad b. al-Husayn al-Amīr, a descendant in the ninth generation of al-Hasan b. ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, in about the year 357/968, shortly before the conquest of Egypt for the Fatimids of North Africa by their general, Jawhar, in 358/969. Control of Mecca remained in the hands of the Jaʿfarids until the last representative of the line, Shukr b. Abī'l-Futūḥ, died without leaving a male heir in 453/ 1061.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries religion continued to play an obvious role in the Middle East. Among observers of that area the significance of the impact of religion on political development was consequently never minimized to the extent that it was among observers of political trends in the West. Western scholars interested in the Middle East, however, have tended to overrate the importance of the Muslim modernists with whom they felt a certain affinity. They also have accepted too uncritically the views of modernists concerning the lifelessness of traditional expressions of Islam. As a result, not until recently have we begun sufficiently to appreciate traditional Muslim religious leaders both for their impact on and for the diversity of their responses to modern political and intellectual currents. I believe that this diversity is not accidental but rather is susceptible to analysis and explanation. This essay demonstrates how four variables (historical circumstances, theological considerations, socioeconomic considerations, and governmental policies toward Muslim religious leaders) affected the political involvement of the Islamic ulama throughout the Middle East generally and in Tunisia particularly during the ‘liberal age’.

Virtually all underdeveloped countries suffer acute and sometimes debilitating geographical inequalities in the distribution of wealth and opportunity. These spatial inequities exist at all levels: between regions, between urban and rural areas, and between center and periphery. Some regional planners view such imbalances as essentially transitory and argue that with increasing economic development, wealth and opportunity will eventually spill over from growth centers and trickle down through the urban hierarchy to backward, less-developed areas.

Comparative studies of writing systems and script conversion tend to emphasize the extent of cultural re-orientation and the rapidity of implementation of Turkey's shift from the Arabic to the Roman script, but they rarely mention the period that led up to this change. As early as 1863, the Azeri playwright Ahunzade Mirza Fethali presented a proposal for a Latin orthography for Turkish, before the Cemiyet-i ilmiye-i Osmaniye (Ottoman Society of Science) in Istanbul. A second event in Ottoman script reform, though less well known than Ahunzade's proposal, was the adoption by many former members of the Cemiyet-i ilmiye-i Arnavudiye (Albanian Society of Science), in Istanbul, in 1879, of a Latin-based alphabet for Albanian. This “Stamboul Alphabet” was designed by Shemseddin Sami Bey and, unlike Ahunzade's proposal, was immediately acted upon and subsequently adopted by the new Albanian presses in Bucharest and Sofia, from which it spread through southern and central Albanian lands, all still under Ottoman rule.

One achievement of the philosophy represented by Ghazâlî is disentangling the creation argument for the existence of God from rival forms of design argument which allow or assume the eternity of the world. From its earliest expressions as an isolated insight which might easily be explained away as myth, the notion that the universe had been brought to be out of what is not was gradually tranformed under pressure of severe Aristottelian criticism into a precise concept, and the argument implicit in such a notion metamorphosed into an elegant and sophisticated demonstration. Backed up by the closely reasoned philosophy of being into which it was now integrated, the argument from creation might confidently hope to be proof against attack.

In antiquity and in the Middle Ages slavery played a significant role in the military, economic, political and social life of the Near East. Many studies have been made of these aspects of life, but little has been said in the context of Islam about the psychological bonds which, at least to some extent, characterize the relationship between slave or freedman and master. The institution of ‘mutual alliance’ also played an important part in Islamic history, and there were certain similarities between the relation of the ‘ally’ to the patron on the one hand, and of the freedman to the former master on the other. But it is the purpose of this discussion, in part, to point out some basic differences between the two relationships.

A key characteristic of inter-Arab politics since World War II has been seemingly ever-shifting alliances. In attempting to explain patterns in Arab state behavior, Arab and Western analysts alike have generally attributed the sources of alignment decisions, implicitly or explicitly, to the personalities of the leaders or to ideological positions. Although such explanations may be intuitively appealing, the historical record is replete with examples that challenge such an analysis: Syria and Iraq's rapprochement in 1979, secular Syria and theocratic Iran's alliance during the Iran–Iraq War, and conservative Jordan's honeymoon with Iraq during the 1980s. These are only a few of the numerous, significant examples of alignments that suggest a rethinking of the bases of Arab interaction may be in order.

As elsewhere in the developing world, the Arabian peninsula has undergone sweeping changes since World War II, with the important difference that the process here has been blessed with unprecedented prosperity and not marred by economic difficulties. To say that the effects of modernization upon the local societies differ as a result from what can be observed in other countries would be to state the obvious. Yet, when it comes to understanding the position and status of contemporary women in the Arabian oil producing countries, prosperity and the particular circumstances around it are rarely considered as crucial variables. The women's situation often is evaluated, mainly if not exclusively, in light of the religious injunctions and traditional norms that govern the female condition in a Middle East that, by the same token, appears curiously monolithic and timeless. There seems to be an assumption that Arabian women are not part of the societies in which they live, and that, by virtue of some unique cultural principle, their condition remains unaffected by the vectors of change that have turned upside down all the other areas of life around them. Hence the general tendency to assess women's opportunities and constraints in terms of what the Qurʾan and Islamic tradition dictate, not in terms of secular and more immediate concerns they may share with the rest of the society. Aside from assuming a spurious dichotomy between the women and their societies, such an approach disregards the historical and material specificity of particular areas in the Muslim world. It also arbitrarily and a priori defines the character of the meeting between “Islamic tradition” and “modernity,” instead of leaving it open to empirical investigation.

It is indeed an interesting endeavor to investigate the impact of economic policies on social stratification. Doing so enables us to see to what extent economic policies bring changes in class structure in a society. We take the case of Syria to study its economic policies and their accompanying impact on the evolving pattern of the Syrian elite from the late 1950s to the early 1980s and then look at accompanying impact on class structure.

The two poles or aspects of this paper are (1) economic policies themselves and (2) their impact on class structure. The question that we are going to raise in the first pole is the following: what is the nature of the economic policies? This refers to land reforms, industrial and commercial reforms, and foreign trade controls.

In the following article, I present an account of the legacy of the famous saintly mystic Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili (d. 1258). The parameters of the study will be narrowed geographically to Tunis and thematically to prayer. Tunis played an important role in the formation of the saint's ṭariqa (mystical order or brotherhood, pi. ṭuruq), and the city today still has a branch of the brotherhood and a number of sacred sites. The theme of prayer as used here includes prayer texts and a wide variety of activity, from popular devotions to spiritual discipline. As will become clear, this is a central element in any discussion of the ṭariqa's organization, ritual, and literature. In addition to the brotherhood and the sites, there is a Tunisian edition of the only recordedcompositions of the saint, his prayers—known as aḥzāb (sing, ḥizb). This study will thus reflect the saint, his brotherhood, and the use of the aḥzāb as integrated elements of the living Shadhili legacy in Tunis. This presentation will go beyond the usual academic treatments of Sufism, which rarely enter the modern period and are concerned mostly with the larger Sufi treatises. I hope not only to bring to light the importance of some lesser known liturgical and ritual practices, but also to begin to appreciate the “lesser tradition,” as it were, of Sufi prayer texts.

Using Arabic, English, and French sources, and engaging Middle East and Cold War historians, this article makes a threefold argument. First, in United Arab Republic (UAR)–Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, the 1958–59 explosion of domestic and regional tensions triggered state-formation surges. Second, these formed one process, which made those states more alike, with state-led socioeconomic planning playing a key role. Third, that process partook of a global Third World trend intersecting with the early Cold War. I draw three conclusions. Although existing scholarly readings that the events of 1958–59 in the Arab Middle East formed a crisis but not an ideological or political watershed are correct, from the viewpoint of state formation this crisis was a milestone. Moreover, UAR–Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon had persisting affinities and shared regional positions—notably, the fact that all were sandwiched between the unstable poles of the Arab state system, Iraq and Egypt—that shaped their individual postindependence histories of state formation. Last, Washington's low-profile involvement in this state-formation surge illustrates how domestic sociopolitics and regional geopolitics—including the UAR's peaking popularity and influence in 1958–59—affected U.S. policy in the Cold War postcolonial world.