In Algeria as in many other cases, experiences of exile and diaspora played a major role in the creation of nationalist politics in the 20th century; exile has also been a recurring literary figure in expressions of Algerian cultural politics since independence. This article examines a range of literary sources to consider the politics of language and culture in Algeria since the 1940s. It shows how identification with Arabism has enabled Algerians to articulate claims to community, solidarity, and sovereignty, first in a conception of national “salvation” against the colonial state and then as both a state-sponsored project of political legitimacy and an indication of the limits of that project. A sense of these limits can be gained by a brief consideration of the complexity of the country's sociolinguistic landscape and the often unorthodox creativity of its literary self-expression since independence.

The purpose of the paper is to give a broad outline of the policies and principal features of economic developments in the fifty-year period that has elapsed since the foundation of the Republic, with a view toward helping to evaluate future trends and policies, hopefully in the coming fifty years.

Muhammad Kurd 'Alī referred to his teacher and close friend, Sheikh Tāhir al-Jazā'irī, as the Muhammad 'Abduh of Syria. Kurd 'Alī, however, was not alone in remarking upon the impact that al-Jazā'irī had in Syria during the lete nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Albert Hourani also mentioned him in comparison to 'Abduh:

Ideas such as those of 'Abduh were “in the air” in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. We find similar groups of reformers in all the more advanced Muslim countries, and perhaps it is too simple to explain them in terms of the influence of al-Afghānī and 'Abduh. It could be said… that al-'Urwa al-wuthqa could only have had its influence because there were already little groups of Muslims thinking on the lines which made it popular… In Syria similar men can be found in all the great centers of Muslim learning… Among those whom were roughly contemporary with 'Abduh and had some contact with him, was Tāhir al-Jazāir'ī,… a writer on literary and linguistic subjects, he had a wider importance through his work for the establishment of modern schools and the preservations of ancient books.

Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, every Western student of the Near East, regardless of his or her position in the ensuing debate, has been forced to examine afresh the assumptions underlying even the most respected historical studies. As far as the first century of Islam is concerned, a significant contradiction emerges from such reexamination. Although the reliance of the Muslim conquerors on indigenous administrative classes, their continuation for some time of pre-Islamic coin tupes, and their acceptance of late antique material culture in general are commonly recognized, the conclusion ususally drawn from these facts is rather a curious one: that the Arabs, entirely lacking in experience of government and distinctive material culture, were forced to adopt the essentially alien practices taht prevalied in the conquered lands.

On 15 June 1826, after some fierce though brief fighting in the streets of Istanbul, Sultan Mahmud II effectively crushed the last serious Janissary uprising in the history of the Ottoman Empire. Two days later the five-centuries-old Janissary corps, which had long resisted change and modernization, was declared legally abolished. In its place there was to be organized a modern army called the Trained Victorious Muslim Troops (Muallem Asâkir-i Mansâre-yi Muhammadiye), or the Victorious (Mansûre) for short.

The Book of Dede Korkut is an early record of oral Turkic folktales in Anatolia, and as such, one of the mythic charters of Turkish nationalist ideology. The oldest versions of the Book of Dede Korkut consist of two manuscripts copied sometime during the 16th century. The twelve stories that are recorded in these manuscripts are believed to be derived from a cycle of stories and songs circulating among Turkic peoples living in northeastern Anatolia and northwestern Azerbaijan. According to Lewis (1974), an older substratum of these oral traditions dates to conflicts between the ancient Oghuz and their Turkish rivals in Central Asia (the Pecheneks and the Kipchaks), but this substratum has been clothed in references to the 14th-century campaigns of the Akkoyunlu Confederation of Turkic tribes against the Georgians, the Abkhaz, and the Greeks in Trebizond. Such stories and songs would have emerged no earlier than the beginning of the 13th century, andthe written versions that have reached us would have been composed no later than the beginning of the 15th century. By this time, the Turkic peoples in question had been in touch with Islamic civilization for seeral centuries, had come to call themselves "Turcoman" rather than "Oghuz," had close associations with sedentary and urbanized societies, and were participating in Islamized regimes that included nomads, farmers, and townsmen. Some had abandoned their nomadic way of life altogether.

The two main issues in Israel's foreign policy are relations with the Arab world and relations with the Great Powers, and there is extensive literature on both. But whereas the literature on relations with the Great Powers is marked by a broad consensus, the literature on relations with the Arab world is dominated by a deep and often acrimonious debate. A major landmark in the evolution of this debate was the emergence in the late 1980s of a school of “new,” or revisionist, Israeli historians. Among the members of this group were Simha Flapan, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, and the present author. We were called the “new historians” because we challenged the traditional Zionist narrative of the birth of Israel and of the first Arab–Israeli war. The momentous events that unfolded in 1948 were the main focus of the debate. Subsequent books by some of these authors extended the critique of Israel's policy in the conflict to the post-independence period. The debate between the “old” and the “new” historians has been going on for nearly two decades, and it is still going strong.

The growing gap in power and wealth between the West and the Muslim world from the end of the 18th century onward has engendered periodic demands for the rejuvenation of Islamic thought as a prerequisite for rehabilitating the status of the Muslim community. In Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, this quest for reform was led by Muslim modernists and Salafis (advocates of a return to ancestral piety and practice) in the late 19th century. Inter alia, these reformists opposed the gatekeepers of Islamic tradition—the establishment ʿulamaء as well as the popular Sufi orders or fraternities (ṭuruq). The Sufi orders were portrayed by their reformist adversaries as at best irrelevant to social change and at worst as responsible for the backwardness of Muslim society. Criticism of customs and ceremonies in popular Islam, especially the cult of saints—denounced as a deviation from Islam—also had nationalist overtones: these rituals were attacked for fostering national passivity and a detachment from reality, in addition to eliciting ridicule by foreigners. Religious reform was thus interwoven with the quest for national pride and power.

In late 2015, approximately 2,000 Syrian asylum seekers made their way into Norway via the Arctic passage from Russia. What ensued are “global moments,” breakthrough events that have reshaped lives and futures for both the refugees and those who aided them, and it is the latter group on which this article focuses. As refugees began arriving in Arctic Norway, Refugees Welcome to the Arctic, an ad hoc grassroots organization, was formed to assist them. This group of ordinary people, most of them with no previous humanitarian experience, took action in defiance of Norwegian government policies, and providing food became the focus of their efforts. Refugees Welcome to the Arctic members often described being motived to act by their own traumatic memories of the region's experience of World War II, a time of deprivation and brutality suffered at the hands of the retreating German army. Food, as an enactment of compassion, is shown to be a powerful means through which people connect in very personal, concrete ways to the humanitarian enterprise.

This article reconsiders Turkey's 1928 alphabet reform by shifting the focus from the state to the social experiences of alphabet change. Rather than assuming an obedient and indifferent public silently following the decrees of an authoritarian and repressive regime, it explores the actual processes, institutions, and lived experiences of the alphabet reform by drawing on a variety of sources, including unpublished archival evidence and personal narratives collected through oral interviews. It draws attention to the multiplicity of experiences of learning to read and write (the new letters) as well as to the persistence of the Ottoman script; it also examines the variety of ways that state authorities dealt with this persistence. The analysis of this particular reformist measure has implications for understanding social change and the emergence of a nationalist culture in the early republican period as well as state–society relations and the nature of the Kemalist state.

Scholars working on Jewish communities in the Middle East are in the midst of an important historiographical moment, in which the major categories, historical narratives, and key assumptions within the field are undergoing radical changes. A cluster of books and articles written by scholars trained in history, anthropology, and area studies departments, and published in Middle East studies rather than Jewish studies book series and journals, suggests that the study of Middle Eastern Jewish communities in the American academy is undergoing a change which might be termed “the Middle Eastern turn.” For such scholars, the history of Jews in Muslim lands, as modern subjects and citizens, is typified by a multiplicity of categories related to their identities—Ottoman, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Arab-Jewish, and local-patriotic—which they explore by looking at the political organizations and social and cultural institutions that enabled the integration of modern Jews into new imperial and national frameworks. This new scholarly wave is transnational, as it illustrates the importance of Jewish networks and Jewish languages in the Middle East, and likewise seeks to draw comparisons between Jews and other transregional and religious minorities, such as Armenians and Greek Orthodox Christians. It is interdisciplinary, as it attempts to incorporate the insights of sociologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars. Finally, it is postcolonial, in its critiques of national elites, national narratives, and nationalist histories. These new accounts uncover how processes which affected the entire Middle East, like Ottoman and Egyptian reform politics and the rise of nation-states, shaped modern Jewish lives.

The idea that theology is either irrelevant to artistic production or “a baleful influence” on its history has recently been critically explored by Jeffrey Hamburger, in relation to medieval Christian art. Engaging the perennial problem of moving between immaterial concepts, normative texts, and material things, Hamburger's observations resonate with the long shadow cast by the Bilderverbot, the prohibition of images often assumed to characterize Islamic and Jewish cultures, on the modern reception of Islamic art.

Analysis of the late unreformed state of those offices of the Sublime Porte out of which the Ottoman Foreign Ministry was to develop makes clear, as we have shown in an earlier article,1 that the possibilities for reform of the traditional bureaucracy were generally limited by two sets of determinants. One set, readily perceptible at what might be termed a macrohistorical level, consists of those largely exogenous forces which dominated the entire later history of the empire.2 In contrast, the other set derives from the legacy of the old bureaucracy itself. Determinants of this class can be identified only by close examination of that legacy, which in turn had been shaped by the nature of the traditional state, as well as by those patterns of social organization and economic outlook which over the centuries had characterized Ottoman society in general.

In writing the history of the Middle East there is one aspect that deserves special attention: the influence of the choice of source material on the writer's point of view. Does the choice of different types of sources—in our case Western as opposed to local sources—really dictate an altogether different view of the matter under discussion? Are all sources of equal value, or should we accord each of them a different place on the scale? In this article an attempt will be made to address this question through an examination of one particular topic—the history of women in 17th-century Jerusalem.

The article is a case study of work organization at the Services d'Egypte of the Suez Canal Company from the outbreak of World War II to the company's nationalization in 1956. In this multinational and multicultural workplace, organizational hierarchies and division of labor were traditionally defined according to “national” identities, while maintaining a strict segregation between européens and indigènes, to use the company's terminology. Starting in the 1930s, the company faced new measures of economic nationalism imposed by the Egyptian government, including required quotas of Egyptian personnel. These measures progressively redefined the political boundaries of the company's action in the management of its workforce. Using unpublished archival documents from the company's personnel files, this article analyzes the processes of feminization and Egyptianization of the company's office workers during World War II and the 1950s. The process was driven by a precise organizational strategy, based on both “racial” and “gender” criteria, which aimed to redefine the company's internal hierarchies and to keep management and decision making in the hands of the “Europeans,” while complying with the terms of the conventions of 1937 and 1949 that regulated the relationship between the company and the Egyptian government.

This article analyzes how Saudi Shiʿi historians have adapted tools associated with nationalism to create distinct historical narratives for the Shiʿa of Eastern Arabia. State-sponsored narratives have either left out Shiʿi Muslims or cast them as unbelievers and alien to the Saudi body politic. In contrast, historical narratives written by Shiʿi authors emphasize the Shiʿa's long history of sedentarization, their cultural heritage, and their struggles against foreign occupation. The article is based on fieldwork in Saudi Arabia and a close reading of hundreds of articles and books on local history published mainly since the 1980s. Through the Saudi Shiʿi case, I show that “identity entrpreneurs,” or activists who create, politicize, and profit from identities to further political aims, understand local historiography to be crucial to their overall projects.

War in the Balkans over the past decade and a half has inspired a plethora of scholarly, journalistic, and diplomatic publications, all of which have sought to capture the region's “chaotic” history. Unfortunately, much of this work assumes that conflict in the Balkans can be understood only along ethno-religious lines.1 This reductive line of argument has been particularly evident in the treatment of the Ottoman period in the Balkans' past, a period that extends back some 600 years.2 Consequentially, such work has distorted our understanding of Balkan societies both during and after the Ottoman Empire.

Traveling from al-Minya, Egypt, north to Cairo by train in the mid-1980s, an observer could not help but notice the large numbers of women and children working in the lush agricultural plots adjacent to the railroad tracks. In fact, throughout the northern Sa⊂id and the Delta, too, women seemed to have taken over the fields. Furthermore, upon arriving at the Agriculture Ministry in Giza, a listener frequently overheard remarks referring to the “alarming” rise in the feminization of Egyptian agriculture. Yet Egyptian farm women have always lent a hand to agricultural production. So what, in recent years, has generated such a large-scale “invasion” of women into men's jobs? Particularly in light of the strict segregation of women from men, and their seclusion in the privacy of the home, what has brought about this public display of women?

Two frameworks of interpretation of history and society have long struggled with each other in the West and in the Islamic world: one is the modernization theory of the American type, aligned at times with the older orientalism, the other is some form of political economy. In the 1970s, the theory of political economy made a belated arrival in American intellectual life and still has scarcely the prestige it has in France, Germany, Italy, or the Islamic countries.

The thought-provoking roundtable on “theorizing violence” in the November 2013 issue of IJMES paid much attention to different manifestations of physical violence. This is the type of violence that as early as 1969 Johan Galtung, one of the founders of the field of peace studies, termed direct violence, distinguishing it from other forms of violence, to which I will refer below. Direct violence, Galtung noted, is related to “somatic incapacitation, or deprivation of health, alone (with killing as the extreme form), at the hands of an actor who intends this to be the consequence.” According to Galtung, direct violence is physically manifested, it is related to a discernible event, and it has to involve a perpetrator and a purpose.