With socioeconomic liberalization and development, especially since 1980, Turkey has witnessed rapid changes in consumption patterns and fashion styles. Often one fad rapidly follows another, creatively combining symbols of the Ottoman era, foreign influences, and regional traditions. Kandiyoti argues that “[t]here is little doubt that class cultures in Turkey are increasingly being shaped and redefined through the medium of consumption.” Thus, consumption has emerged recently as a central concern and analytical tool in historical, anthropological, and sociological works on Ottoman and Turkish society. One trend focuses on the secular high-income class' “globalized” consumption patterns and lifestyle, especially as expressed through shopping patterns and the commoditization of symbols of Turkish secularism. Another, more prevalent, trend is more concerned with the upwardly mobile Islamists' attempt at articulating their newly gained economic status through consumption. A third directs attention to the history of consumption and “the everyday” to counter a previous emphasis on production and state politics in the Ottoman Empire.

Middle East militaries can be arrayed along a continuum from more to less involvement in national economies, albeit with a few outliers. At the maximum engagement end are Egypt and Iran. In both countries, as in Pakistan, one can reasonably refer to the existence of a “Military, Inc.” The Egyptian Ministry of Defense and its subordinate Ministry of Military Production preside over a sprawling economic empire that directly owns companies active in the industrial, agricultural, construction, telecommunications, and service sectors. The Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps presides over a similar economic empire that has particularly strong positions in the oil field service, construction, port operation, and media and telecommunications sectors. Both countries also have what might be described as parallel “officer economies.” These have come into existence as a result of officers, many of them retired, capitalizing on their regime connections by gaining ownership of privatized state-owned enterprises or by forming companies that thrive on state contracts. These two military economies are subject neither to the effective oversight of legislative or nonmilitary executive authority nor to the scrutiny of civil society, including the media. Both provide essential patronage resources to ensure the loyalty of their officer corps. And in both countries, military preparedness and overall capacities suffer as a result of preoccupation with the management of and benefits from military economies.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Iran was shaken by a series of serious upheavals caused by the Bābī movement. Although of short duration, these upheavals engulfed the entire country and had far-reaching effects in that they formed the first of a chain of events that led on the one hand, to the constitional movement in Iran, and on the other, to the establishment of the now world-wide Bahā'ī Faith.

The following study is aimed at describing social, political, and religious aspects of Mamluk society in the context of a political disturbance in Damascus in 1386. It is mainly based on historiographical and prosopographical evidence. Readers who are familiar with medieval Islamic chronicles and biographical dictionaries will know that these sources do not provide satisfactory answers to all the questions concerning the socio-political structure of Islamic societies as raised by modern scholarship. Nevertheless, the information collected in the course of our examination will permit us to draw conclusions concerning three major issues of Mamluk and Islamic history, respectively:

When commentators discuss the Israeli political system, they invariably single it out as the exception in a region otherwise lacking in democratic and representative regimes. Although political philosophers and theorists remind us that the test of de mocracy hinges on, among other things, the way a society treats its minorities and guarantees them civil and political rights in the face of majority opposition, the de bate over what constitutes justice, equality, and freedom is unlikely to be resolved in a discussion centered on abstract principles and their absolute meanings. It is one thing for a society to profess egalitarian values and another to measure the extent to which these values are perceived and experienced by those immediately affected by them. This does not mean that there are no universal standards of justice against which to measure performance of the law. Our point is that the experiential dimen sion of the law is equally relevant, for it mediates between the meaning of the law as derived from abstract principles and the way it is implemented in daily life.

Although contemporary Europeans often stated that the Ottoman government kept no population statistics, the Ottomans in fact often kept very detailed population records. The Ottoman ‘censuses’ recently used in scholarly research are only general summaries of population. More exact demographic research demands information on demographic structure, such as age, sex, and family affiliation. Since general ‘censuses’ are useless for such analysis, population registers (nüfus defterleri) must be used.

Michael W. Dols's posthumously published Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society (Oxford, 1992) is a magnum opus, a voluminous enterprise, and a piece of meticulous research that equals—if not surpasses—Dols's earlier work on plagues in medieval Islam. Dianne E. Immisch, Dols's long-time research assistant who took up the job of seeing the manuscript to the press, briefly points out in her Foreward the richness of topics dealt with in the book. Indeed, writing about madness in a particular society involves the history of medicine, law, and other subfields, but it is above all a study in the history of culture, certainly from the perspective of the present, when there is increased interest in the formation of categories of deviancy. The attitude of a society toward madness and its mad people is a crucial cultural topic—a “big issue,” as one reviewer has put it.2

The failure of social science expectations that several Arab states would democratize in the 1980s and 1990s forced a reappraisal. The belief that chronic fiscal crisis and waning popular support would lead regimes to loosen authoritarian controls and thus possibly lead to democratization proved disappointingly unfounded. Instead, regimes that launched liberalizations in the 1980s reversed or halted most political-reform components in the following decade. Given that rising oil and commodity prices since 2003 have eased budgetary constraints for many states (especially in the Gulf), the emerging pattern is political change and shifts under authoritarian regimes over time, not democratization. A number of recent works have responded by quantitatively and qualitatively assessing factors that account for regional imperviousness to democratization as well as change in different directions. The purpose of this essay is to contribute to these responses in two ways: one, conceptualizing important change in state–society relations short of democratization; and two, comparatively analyzing the cases of Jordan, Kuwait, and Syria to propose ways of explaining these outcomes.

Discovering the mechanisms that invested particular forms with meaning and created Islamic systems of signification is of major concern in the study of Islamic architecture. Although we know that these mechanisms exist, and that they produce meanings as complex as those of other cultural traditions, we do not yet know how they operate or even how they were manipulated at specific moments in response to particular aesthetic or practical needs. These mechanisms were most critical at the earliest stage of the Islamic architectural tradition, when forms were often taken over from a variety of contexts but transformed in ways that altered their cultural associations and re-created them as patently Islamic. This creative process is exemplified by that most Islamic—and problematic—architectural feature, the mihrab.

The Democratic Republic of the Sudan was among the first of nonsovereign territories in Africa to obtain its independence from European political control. Formerly under the joint sovereignty of Britain and Egypt it became independent on January 1, 1956. Since its declaration of independence, Sudan has experienced three major self-proclaimed revolutions, and the format of government has twice changed between parliamentary democracy and military regimes. As of this writing, the current government under General Jaʻafar el-Numayri has been in power longer than any of its predecessors. General Numayri's success in ending the sixteen-year-old civil war between north and south has bolstered his position as head of state. Consequently, this success and at least three other factors have induced the world to pay considerable attention to Sudan.

Fadwa Tuqan, Assia Djebar, and Latifa al-Zayyat are three Arab women who are well known for their literary and artistic creativity, as well as for their political activism. Each has written at least one autobiographical work charting her struggles in the personal, political, and literary arenas, and each has chosen to express these struggles in terms of finding a voice that resists silence but also acknowledges that silence is a form of resistance.1 In writing their autobiographical works, these women are interested in creating not simply a female autobiographical tradition but, rather, a tradition that specifically does credit to their need to authorize their voices without posing as authorities from above, to write narratives that are simultaneously antiauthoritarian and authoritative, and to do so by speaking for and on behalf of others without appropriating them or subsuming them into their own agendas. Their autobiographical works are thus marked, and ultimately enriched, by tension, hesitation, and anxiety, particularly regarding their own power and authority as authors. This hesitation enables them to express collective sorrows and dreams in this seemingly most individualistic of genres.2

The July 2006 Lebanon war was an important turning point for West African Lebanese. For the first time since their formation as a community, the Lebanese in Senegal organized a demonstration in Dakar displaying solidarity with Lebanon. This protest illuminates the dynamics between global forces and local responses. Hizbullah's effectiveness in winning the international public opinion of both Sunni and Shiʿi Muslims in the war against Israel led to a surge in Lebanese diaspora identification, even among communities who had not been similarly affected by previous Lebanese wars. By analyzing the role of a Lebanese shaykh in bringing religious rituals and a Lebanese national identity to the community in Senegal, this article explores how members of the community maintain political ties to Lebanon even when they have never visited the “homeland” and sheds new light on the relationship among religion, migration, and (trans)nationalism.

During those eventful days of early January 1979, after Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran had finally announced his intention to leave the country and the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini had made his return from exile contingent on the shah's departure, a hemistitch by Hafez, the 14th-century Persian poet, suddenly appeared next to an array of revolutionary slogans on display in the streets of Tehran: “Div cho birun ravad fereshteh dar āyad” (When the demon departs, the angel shall arrive). The basic binary oppositions of demon/angel and departure/arrival fit the realities of the situation the country had found itself in; a perfect correspondence had been made between the simple, single idea enshrined in the abstract language of a medieval poetic phrase and the intricate political posturing involved in a modern-day revolution in the making. Furthermore, the stark discourse of antagonism underlying the opposition had become as absolute, as uncompromising as the idea of a total revolution.

The aim of this essay is to analyse the rise and development of a new labour movement in Egypt between 1919 and 1939, the crucial interwar period. As the history of the movement was inextricably linked to the Wafd as well as to the competing political forces in Egypt at the time, I examine the extent to which the various political parties and personalities were able to hamper the development of an independent trade union movement during those years. I also discuss the factors which assisted or hindered, at times, the promulgation of labour laws, and view the achievements of the trade union movement (in different sub-periods) in terms of its success in satisfying the demands of workers, which were being opposed by those of the predominantly foreign local bourgeoisie.

Studies of economic activities among the urban poor in various parts of the world have found more variation in the so-called informal sector than they had expected. The urban poor had typically been thought of as a kind of “reserve army” for the formal sector, an underclass at the margins of survival. Even early work that recognized the links between the formal and informal sectors lumped them together as a single class that ranked below all the others. The tendency to regard workers in the informal sector as members of an underclass masked the tremendous variations among them and between informal sectors in different places.

The historiography of the Sanusiyya, if one can apply such a term to the literary crop of roughly a century dealing with this North African tarīqa (pl. turuq, Sufi brotherhood), falls into three distinct categories. The earliest writings appeared in the 1880s, thirty years after the tariqa had taken root in Cyrenaica (then the Ottoman province of Benghazi). The works of French authors such as Charmes, Rinn, Duveyrier, Le Chatelier, and co-authors Depont and Coppolani were all marked by the concerns of the French colonial and protectorate authorities in Algeria and Tunisia. According to Duveyrier, a Saharan explorer of repute and the crudest exponent of this group's views, not only were the Sanusis a band of fanatics given to murdering innocent missionaries and explorers, but they were also in the vanguard of the turuq inspired by the Pan-Islamic rhetoric of the Ottoman sultan and aligned against French colonialism in Muslim North Africa. Only this combination of factors could account for the pervasive and determined resistance to French policies in the region. Along with the Sanusiyya, Duveyrier singled out for attack a North African sheikh and confidant of the Ottoman sultan, Muhammad Zafir al-Madani. Charmes, Rinn, Le Chatelier, and Depont and Coppolani, while less vitriolic in their tone, certainly had the same general approach. The analysis of this “Algerian school” was dismissed at the turn of the century by two eminent Orientalists, Christiaan Snouck Hugronje and Carl Heinrich Becker.3 A generation later, European fears of the turuq diminished in the wake of World War I, as new ideologies and forces came to dominate a transformed Pan-Islamism. This notwithstanding, some of the suppositions of the early French authors were adopted by later scholars and have since been quoted and requoted.

As far as I am concerned I remember that the first elements of Arab consciousness began to filter into my mind as a student in secondary schools, wherfrom I went out with my fellow schoolboys on strike on December 2nd [sic] of every year as a protest against the Balfour declaration whereby England gave the Jews a national home usurped unjustlu from its legal owners.

Anthropological interest in the concept of “class” and in the constellation of related concepts such as class consciousness and class conflict has increased in recent years as part of the upsurge of interest in ideas drawn from the Marxist tradition to analyze and interpret societies that anthropologists have conventionally been interested in. Yet much of this research and thinking has focused on the relevance of the different modes of production for an understanding of cultural history or, more recently, on analyses derived from dependency theory suggesting a global application of the notions of class and class conflict. Both these approaches neglect the usefulness of notions of class derived from the Marxist tradition for providing frameworks for the gathering of anthropological field data or for its analysis. It is true that work in cultural ecology and economic anthropology has frequently had a materialist bias, but it has rarely gone beyond an emphasis on the links of causality running from material factors to the superstructure to a test of the concepts of the Marxist tradition as a model increasing our understanding of the ebb and flow of human life. Even rarer has been the use of anthropological field data to evaluate and refine the concepts themselves.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were a number of armed attempts by people in the Arab world, and particularly in the Maghrib countries, to resist European penetration and colonialism. Historians have made considerable efforts to categorize these attempts as being either examples of ‘primary’ resistance or of ‘modern nationalist’ resistance, a distinction based largely on the presence or absence in the movement concerned of an ideological content making reference to the various Islamic reform movements or to European-style nationalism. Thus Edmund Burke can write of the rebellion in the Moroccan countryside around Fez in 1911, which finally ushered in the French and Spanish Protectorates: “One looks in vain, for example, for evidence of the influence of reformism, Pan-Islam or Islamic modernism upon the movement.”

We are thrilled to present this special issue on “Queer Affects,” which explores a range of topics and analytical approaches that have rarely appeared in the pages of IJMES but reflect vital emerging discussions in diverse subfields of Middle East studies. That so many contributors hail from literary disciplines, which have tended to be underrepresented in the journal, also makes this a landmark issue for us. We thank guest editors Hanadi Al-Samman and Tarek El-Ariss for proposing the special issue, gathering the original collection of manuscript submissions, and introducing the final group of six articles we present here, all of which have gone through the standard IJMES peer review process. We also acknowledge the anonymous reviewers, some of whom read more than one article for this issue, for their perceptive evaluations. We are grateful to Huda Lufti for permitting us to use a photograph of her artwork, “Lipstick and Moustache (2010),” as this issue's cover art.