In the summer of 2015, the UN reported that there were more than 60 million refugees worldwide, making the current refugee crisis the largest in history. Though the refugee crisis is global, it has a particular regional and local geography that demands attention. As readers of IJMES undoubtedly know, this crisis has disproportionally affected people in the Middle East. Since the end of World War II, a majority of the world's refugees have originated from this region. Five years of war in Syria is the most recent cause of displacement, but the American-led Iraq War in 2003 and the displacement of Palestinians with the establishment of Israel in 1948 have produced tens of millions of refugees.

Khalil Sarkis (1842–1915) was an eminent figure in late Ottoman Beirut and an important contributor to the nahḍa, the Arab literary-cultural “awakening” that began in the latter part of the 19th century. Less known to Western scholarship than Butrus al-Bustani, Faris al-Shidyaq, or Jurji Zaydan, he is not usually regarded as a pillar of that awakening. He may not have been, but he certainly was an indispensable brick in its edifice. Born in 1842, when the most exciting changes were still in the future, Sarkis spent all his life in the service of his country's cultural betterment. He is mostly remembered for his newspaper, Lisan al-Hal, which was launched in 1877 and for many decades was one of the most credible Arabic organs. More than a journalist, however, Sarkis was a pioneering printer, a prolific publisher, and the author of nine books. In the last quarter of the 19th century he built one of Beirut's largest printing businesses, which turned out several journals, hundreds of books, and numerous publications. In the 19th-century Middle East, being a printer often meant being a publisher; Khalil Sarkis was both on a grand scale.

Routinely required to lend religious legitimacy to contentious state policies, al-Azhar's moral authority has been under pressure since its nationalization in 1961. This article outlines how Shaykh al-Azhar Ahmad al-Tayyib's recent alliance with President ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Sisi has, however, exposed al-Azhar's moral authority to unprecedented risks. This is for three reasons. First, the tactics used by al-Sisi's government to quell the Muslim Brotherhood have been more extreme than those used by previous regimes. Second, the al-Azhari establishment's defence of these violent tactics has been more unqualified than in the past. Third, current state-led reforms of al-Azhar's curriculum are more controversial than prior efforts along these lines. As I show, these recent developments are not a complete break from the past; rather, they are a natural outcome of incremental shifts that have been occurring within al-Azhar since its nationalization over fifty years ago.

Certain conditions of the contemporary period are bringing to the fore a shifting regional politics in which today's young people, the most numerous and educated generation in history, are recognized simultaneously as critical objects and agents of change. Youth in the Muslim Middle East are struggling to exert their youthfulness in the present and prepare for life transitions in the future in a context of ubiquitous neoliberal reforms, authoritarian regimes, and ongoing regional conflicts with no resolution in sight. At the same time, due to their sheer numbers and the meteoric spread of ever mutating youth-led cultures and movements via horizontal spaces made possible by the new media and information and communication technology (ICT), youth embody a force of cultural regeneration.

A boycott may be denned as ‘The refusal and incitement to refusal to have commercial or social dealings with offending groups or individuals’.1 More specifically, international economic boycotts are devices by which one or more states (or their citizens) attempt to inflict economic hardship upon a target nation. The method of coercion takes the form of a disruption of the target state's normal foreign trade and financial flows. In the vast majority of instances, the imposition of a boycott is a political act, designed to influence the practices and policies of the offending country, utilizing economic weapons as the coercive force. A boycott may be deemed successful if it attains the ends desired by its initiators. As a rule, economic sanctions must be effective (i.e. cause economic damage) in order to succeed; however, it is quite possible, indeed, often probable, that boycotts may be effective without being successful.

In 1924 the doors of the medreses of Turkey were ordered closed by the Grand National Assembly. The century-old movement to modernize and secularize Turkish education reached a crucial watershed with the abandonment of the traditional Islamic system of mektebs and medreses. The bifurcation which had characterized Ottoman education since the early nineteenth century and which had been reflected in the empire's educated élite could not be tolerated in the new, secular republic envisaged by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

In June 1669 the Safavid ruler Shah Sulayman dismissed his grand vizier Mirza Muhammad Mahdi and appointed Shaykh ʿAli Khan Zanganah as his successor. Shaykh ʿAli Khan served in the exalted function of grand vizier or iʿtimad aldawla for a full twenty years and in this period grew into perhaps the most remarkable administrator of Safavid times.

At the turn of the 20th century, agricultural experts in several countries assembled a new agro-scientific field: dryland farming. Their agricultural research practices concomitantly fashioned a new agro-ecological zone—the drylands—as the site of agronomic intervention. As part of this effort, American scientists worked in concert with colleagues in the emerging Zionist movement to investigate agricultural practices and crops in Palestine and neighboring regions, where nonirrigated or rainfed agriculture had long been practiced. In my larger manuscript project, I consider how the reorganization of rainfed farming as dryfarming is central to the history of both the Middle East and North America, where it was closely related to modern forms of power, sovereignty, and territoriality. I suggest that American interest in dryfarming science emerged out of a practical need to propel and sustain colonization of the Great Plains, but later became a joint effort of researchers from several emerging settler enterprises, including Australia, Canada, and the Zionist movement. In contrast to a naturally ocurring bioregion, I argue that the drylands spatiality was engineered through, rather than outside, the territorialization of modern power.

This article develops a concept of social brokerage to explain leftist–Sadrist cooperation during Iraq's 2015 protest movement. Conventional understanding holds that Iraq's secular-leftist civil trend and Shiʿi Islamist factions have been mutually isolated, and at times fierce antagonists, in Iraq's post-2003 politics. This view has been challenged by an emergent political alliance between a faction of the civil trend and the Shiʿi Islamist Sadrist movement. By comparing this alliance with the failure of another Shiʿi Islamist group, ʿAsaʾib Ahl al-Haq, to involve itself with and exploit the protest movement, this article isolates the conditions which determined the dynamics of leftist–Islamist interactions. Shifting the focus away from elite politics and structural-instrumental explanations favored by rational choice models, this article reveals a longer backstory of social and ideological interactions between less senior actors that transgressed leftist–Islamist social boundaries. From this context, potential brokers emerged, capable of skilfully mediating leftist–Sadrist interactions.

In discussing the intellectual and religious history of the modern Muslim world, the attention of both Western and Middle Eastern scholars has hitherto focused on those who were, directly or indirectly, heavily influenced by Western thought and practices. For Egypt, the center of Arab intellectual life, we have studies of at-Tahtawi, Abduh, Rida, Mustafa Kamil, Lutfi as-Sayyid, and those close to them; for Turkey studies of the Young Ottomans, the Young Turks, Zia Gökalp, and those influenced by Ataturk's Turkish nationalism; and for Iran of Malkum Khan, Afghani, various Babis, Al-e Ahmad, Shariati, and other Western-influenced thinkers. Naturally, there are large differences in the thought of those qualified here as Western-influenced; even the most traditional aiim usually reflects Western influence in a mediated way. The point is, however, that there has been little analysis of thinkers and leaders who appear to be primarily traditional, whether they be ulama educated entirely in madrasas and carrying out primarily traditional functions, or heads of Sufi orders operating mainly within their own traditions. This concentration by Western and Middle Eastern intellectuals on leaders who were able to a large degree secularized and Westernized has been based on certain generally unspoken assumptions about progress and development. The assumptions are that progress and development include Westernized, secularized educational systems and an increasingly Western lifestyle with a decreased role for both ulama and Sufis, whom it is not particularly important for one concentrating on trends with a viable future to study or understand. Even those who did study “traditionalist” movements such as the Egyptian Muslim Brethren tended to see them as a trend with no future.

On 29 October 1956 Israeli paratroopers landed deep inside the Sinai Desert, launching the second Arab-Israeli war and adding another level to the bloody edifice of Israel's relations with its neighbors. The Israeli leadership justified its decision to go to war by pointing to “the mini-war which the Arab rulers have waged against us for eight years.” Many scholars have accepted that version of the events, which seeks to connect the multitude of border incidents from 1949 to 1956 with the war in the latter year. Indeed, a central approach in the study of the period viewed the Sinai campaign as the inevitable consequence of the succession of violent events which occurred between Israel and its neighbors, Egypt in particular, beginning shortly after the 1948 war. Benny Morris, in fact, describes Israel's participation in the 1956 war as the direct continuation of the border clashes with Egypt, finding no regional connection in Israel's involvement. Similarly, Nadav Safran, Mordechai Bar-On, and Michael Oren have argued that the border clashes, the infiltrations, and the Israeli reprisals followed one another in a relentless sequence until the final explosion in October 1956. This approach draws a connection between two “types of security” which are a permanent component of the Israeli defense doctrine: “basic security” and “day-to-day security.” The latter incorporates operational activity, unrelated to preparations for war, which the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) constantly engages in during peacetime; whereas the former refers to a situation of total war for which the IDF has prepared itself. Conventionally, events falling within the domain of day-to-day security are considered the cause of the aggravation in relations between Israel and Egypt during the early 1950s; the Sinai campaign thus becomes the inevitable end of a process of deterioration engendered by the border clashes and incidents of the preceding eight years.

Political scientists have struggled to understand the unexpected 2011 mass mobilizations in the Middle East and North Africa as well as ensuing sociopolitical transformations. Functionalist and regime-centered approaches in particular have been unable to grasp dynamics of mobilization and change on the ground. I argue in this short essay that “state analysis from below” helps us to better understand the underlying causes of the 2011 uprisings, the dynamics of ensuing power struggles, and sociopolitical microstructures of political mobilization and demobilization.

It has become something of a commonplace to argue that music played an important role in the revolutionary upheavals that overthrew the Bin ʿAli regime in Tunisia and forced Husni Mubarak from power in Egypt. This recognition let the larger scholarly community—indeed, the world—in on a secret that a small group of MENA scholars have for decades been trying to share: it's not merely that music is society, as Jonathan Shannon argues in his contribution to this roundtable; it's society in “Real 3D,” at once a microcosm, mirror, and prism of “all the social forces and contradictions of culture, politics, and history.” As a mirror, music reflects society's contending forces back onto itself. Under the right conditions it also refracts them prismatically, acting as a filter and an amplifier that brings (and sometimes forces) subaltern sentiments into the public consciousness. Music, like other art forms, can help foster and sustain social and political change.

The struggle against gender-based violence in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region has witnessed some significant achievements since the late 1990s. A subject long excluded from public discourse in the region, it has now moved increasingly into the mainstream, compelling the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to take legal and practical measures against such practices as honor killings, female genital mutilation, and domestic violence. This article traces the sources of these shifts in the KRG's stance, looking especially at the role of transnational women's rights networks in the region. It highlights these networks’ successful strategy of binding their cause to the KRG's endeavor to legitimize and consolidate its contested sovereignty over the Kurdistan Region. In doing so, the paper addresses an underexplored subject in the literature on women's rights campaigns in the Kurdistan Region and contributes to the study of transnational advocacy as a source of normative change.

Since the 2012 sanctions that dis-embedded the Iranian economy from global markets, contraband commerce has become an explosive issue in Iran. Increasingly Iranians came to regard sanctions as enforced by both international powers and their own state officials, who criminalized certain kinds of cross-border trade, but not others. Although Iranian state actors distinguish between the trader—praised for contributing to the economy—and the traitor—denounced for undermining its integrity—what both unites and blurs the line between them is their shared struggle with a devaluing currency that some Iranians call nuclear. This article examines the “nuclear rial” by extending insights from anthropological scholarship on money to the study of sanctions to advance a dynamic understanding of currency. Studying Iranian trade in gold proves productive for understanding how people negotiate the effects of sanctions in an unevenly financialized world. At stake in the negotiations is a conditional articulation of monetary value that relies on contingent conversions between commodities and currencies and among currencies.

Whoever builds a mosque for God, even like the nest of a bird to lay her eggs, God will build for him an abode in paradise.1.

In 1774, the Mamluk shaykh al-balad Muhammad Bey Abu al-Dhahab began the construction of a large mosque-madrasa-takiyya in one of central Cairo's prime locations. The complex bearing the name of the donor lies within a rough triangle formed by the main gate of al-Azhar, the Khan al-Zarakisha, and the wikāla of the 16th-century Mamluk ruler Qansuh al-Ghawri and forms the most important part of Muhammad Bey's waqf. Extensive agricultural lands and urban properties were included in the waqf by the donor to support the personnel of the mosque, school, and rakiyya, to pay for the religious activities stipulated by the terms of the waqf, and for the upkeep of the buildings.

“Zein,” as friends and colleagues knew him, practiced an interpretive anthropology that, like the writing of history, is a craft in which the best work is realized only after long years of field experience, study, and the development of concepts and themes through teaching and writing. Zein's sudden death on 13 August 1979 at the age of 44 cut short his work just as it began to achieve its fullest form.

Zein's professional career was divided between two remarkably distinct periods. The first of these lasted for roughly the decade prior to 1966, during which he mastered the conventions of what might be called a standard, functionalist anthropology and applied them to ethnographic research in Egypt. The second period began in 1966 with his participation in the formative period of symbolic anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Deeply divided between opposing national, religious, and ethnic groups, contemporary Jerusalem is a paradigm of urban heterogeneity and dichotomous identities. The social divisions that split Jerusalem are many and deep; to list the more obvious lines of fragmentation, this small city of about a half-million persons includes Muslims, Christians, and Jews; secular and ultra-orthodox Jews; Palestinian refugees; peasants; and old established Jerusalemite families. Although Jerusalem's physical and social landscape is criss-crossed by multiple political and symbolic boundaries, there can be no doubt that the major fault line is between Israelis and Palestinians—or, to use the terms often employed by members of both groups, between Jews and Arabs. This results from Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967 and the forced imposition of Israeli sovereignty over the entire city. Israel holds political and legal control throughout Jerusalem, while the Palestinians, who consider themselves to be in a situation of illegal occupation, continue to be Jordanian citizens who are classified under Israeli law as ‘residents of Jerusalem’ (Romann & Weingrod 1991). As a consequence of this fundamental division, practically every feature of this Holy City—from urban space to everyday consumer products (such as milk, vegetables, bread, and cigarettes) and including buses, buildings, and even sounds and colors—is perceived and identified by members of both groups as either “Israeli” or “Palestinian.” These two basic group identities appear to be totally discrete and mutually exclusive.

The conventional wisdom regarding the cultivation of cash crops (such as opium) is based on the assumption that raising a cash crop implies a certain degree of development of the productive forces of the economy. Having reached that degree, it is argued, the economy is better able to release portions of its land and labour from the production of basic necessities, i.e., food crops, and allocate them to the production of crops which are not immediately and directly consumed, but rather are produced to be exchanged in the market. This approach presupposes a relatively well-developed market economy and the existence of a relatively efficient transport system, both being, among other preconditions, essential for the emergence and development of an economy based on exchange. The main objective of this paper is to show that this model, despite being applicable to the Western European economies at an earlier stage of their industrialization, does not necessarily explain the situation in Iran during 1850–1906 (the period under review). We further argue that the production of opium or other cash crops had little to do with the development of Iranian agriculture or the development of the productive forces in the economy as a whole.

Standing inside a t-wall factory in Erbil in the summer of 2021, I was struck by the fact that, nearly twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq, these military walls were still in production. T-walls are six-ton steel-reinforced, blast-proof concrete wall segments named for their upside-down t-shape (Fig. 1). They were introduced to Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s. Derivative of the Berlin wall's design, they are recognizable to those who have witnessed the Israeli separation wall, which is composed of thousands of t-walls lined up.