The history of Oman is largely a story of competition, and often conflict, between two very different entities. This duality was even symbolized by the name of the country, “Sultanate of Muscat and Oman,” until 1970. The sultanate was formed from the fusion of the Batina coastal plain and its port cities, symbolically Muscat, and the interior of the country, Oman. During most periods in the recent history of the country, only the coast has been ruled by the sultan. Even before the institution of the sultanate emerged in the 18th century, however, the coast had usually been under separate, often foreign, rule. In the interior, the ideal head of government from very early times was that of an imam, even though the office often remained vacant. At many times during Omani history, of course, one part of the country or the other imposed its control and Oman was temporarily united, but the differences between the two sections of Omani society eventually split the country into two separate states again. Even within the last decade, one of the major problems in Oman's efforts to develop has been “the traditional antithesis between the sultan residing on the coast and the inwardly oriented tribes.”

In modern Iraq, processes of state formation and national integration have been consistently affected by a number of ethnic issues and concerns. This became particularly evident in the decade after the country became independent from British Mandatory control in 1932. First, in the immediate postcolonial period ethnicity became central to the development of Iraqi national and international politics. Second, ethnic specificity emerged as a major factor in the shaping of postcolonial Iraqi society, despite the continuous attempts at enforcing a new national identity on the part of a still fragile state. This article discusses the important role played by ethnicity during the first stages of Iraqi national development by focusing on the impact of conscription on the Yazidi Kurds of Jabal Sinjar.

Social scientists have studied small-scale manufacturers both on a theoretical and on a regional basis relative to their occupational prestige, values, way of life, and political affiliations. Lately, this topic has also been of interest to international lending institutions that have adopted policies that promote small-scale firms in less-developed countries. Part of the reason for the change in policy stems from the inefficient production of large-scale firms and their disappointing performance in reducing unemployment. Some of the studies have found small- scale firms to be more efficient in inputs. Small-scale firms are viewed as generating needed employment opportunities in countries that face pressures of fast-growing labor force populations.

In the analysis of the transition from low-income, rural-centered, capital-poor countries to modern, capital-rich, urbanized nations, small enterprises have received increasing attention in recent years. In rural areas, there is a belated recognition of the importance of nonfarm enterprises as supplementary sources of income and employment in village households. In towns and cities, there has been an explosion of interest in small producers, including but not limited to the so-called urban informal sector.

In viewing American relations with the middle East since the Second World War, scholars have focused on the more dramatic events: Israel's independence in 1948, the Suez affair of 1956, and the post-1967 amalgam of conflicts and diplomacies. This, however, has resulted in a dearth of research on the inter vening periods, particularly the first half of the 1960s, when admittedly American leaders were preoccupied with events and crises elsewhere. Yet this period witnessed a substantive transformation in the American-Israeli relationship, complemented by a revealing twist in American relations with the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Relying primarliy on recently declassified documents, this paper seeks to explain both the course of American realtions with Israel and Egypt, as well as the reasons for the Middle East's relegation to the sidelines by American foreign policy decisionmakers. More specifically, two developments require explanation: Israel's emergence as an acknowledged ally of the Unisted States and recipient of offensive weapons; and the determination of American decisionmakers to pursue closer realtions wiht Nasser's Egypt despite numerous conflicting interests.

A century after the Armenian Genocide and its ongoing denial by the Turkish state, there has emerged a notable and unprecedented interest in the Armenian past and present both in civil society discourse and scholarship in Turkey, accompanied by various reconciliation iniatives at the state and society levels. Observers have suggested that this increased engagement with Turkey's suppressed past is an outcome of its EU candidacy, the democratization reforms of the early 2000s, and the shockwave among liberal segments of Turkish society caused by the 2007 assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. I argue that this shortsighted analysis, which completely ignores the Kurdish movement's transformative challenge to Turkish denialism since the 1980s, echoes the key fallacy of present discussions of Turkey's engagement with its past: compartmentalization and disjunction of interlinked state crimes.

The summer of 2015 will perhaps be remembered as a watershed moment in the annals of racism in the United States. What had been normalized for decades by the southern states and giant retailers in “postracist” America was institutionally delegitimized almost overnight. Upping the ante, the department store giant Macy's announced it will discontinue Donald Trump merchandise because of Trump's racist remarks. A mere half century after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in a perfect act of Foucauldian governmentality and market regulation from above, American business interests aggressively interfered in redefining the discursive and symbolic boundaries of the new mainstream normativity and truth in the United States. One can safely say that symbolic and actual denial of slavery and racist essentialism as normalized discourses in mainstream US culture and scholarship took another institutional blow, even though some reactionary book review here and there can still make its way into the mainstream, and even though defeating “dog whistle politics” is much more difficult than defeating outright racist symbols or speech.

Roughly around the end of the 7th century, a distinct genre of Islamic literature began to develop under the rubric fadāʾil (“virtues” or “excellences”) that praised the merits, for example, of reciting the Qurʾan, of the Companions of the Prophet, of performing religious duties such as hajj and jihad, and of sacred cities such as Jerusalem. The fadāʾil literature initially was a part of the burgeoning hadith corpus, and the fadāʾ-Qurʾ an traditions appear to be the oldest strand. A variant term for this type of tradition, especially with regard to the Companions of the Prophet, is manāqib (and less frequently, khasāʾ is). A survey of this kind of “praise” literature indicates that the terms manāqib and fadaāʾil could be used fairly interchangeably.

One of the most dramatic developments in the social structures of third-world societies in the post-World War II era has been the expanding role of the state. While the extent and precise form of the state's involvement in economic, political, and social activities has varied from place to place, the trend toward a more important role for the state has been pervasive and the basic pattern in which this role has expanded seems to have been repeated in nation after nation. As a result, a growing number of scholars have begun to speak of a generalized form of political/economic organization in the third world—state capitalism. They seem to agree on a number of characteristics of state capitalism at the descriptive/ empirical level.

The contrast between Muslim Istanbul and Anatolia in the late Ottoman years was based on the large-scale socioeconomic dichotomies that often set great traditional cities apart from their hinterlands. These differences were also felt in the rhythms of ordinary domestic life in the city. Istanbul was marked by a unique system of marriage and household formation, one that had cultural connections with the Anatolian hinterland, but that also resembled those found in other major centers in the Mediterranean basin. This pattern is not at all what it seems to have been to many Turks or to most European observers of Turkey in the 19th century.

This article reports an empirical investigation of the study of war and the military in Israel and offers some reflective thoughts on our findings. We explore the social and political conditions under which academic knowledge about “things military” in Israel has been, and is being, produced. By academic knowledge we mean the publicly available theories, methods, and findings produced in universities and research institutes. Concretely, we refer to the plethora of articles, books, and edited collections published over the past thirty years in the social sciences. We do not, however, deal with research in clinical psychology or psychiatry, or with strategic studies, international relations, and conventional military history, although these fields have been sources of a good deal of research in Israel. By “things military” we mean social and cultural concerns related to (and derived from) the armed forces, war, and provisions for “national security.” Thus, we are concerned with studies related to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as an institution that is characterized by certain professional and organizational features and that must constantly manage its relationship to a variety of social groups and representatives of the state. In a complementary manner, we refer to studies that explore the ways in which the state and society manage their relations with Israel's armed forces.

This article expands our understanding of state–society interactions in rural Algeria under French colonial rule, focusing specifically on villages in the eastern department of Constantine. I analyze previously unstudied administrative records, newspapers, petitions, and complaints to show how sanitary regulations and medical expertise came to shape relationships among villagers, local elites, and the colonial state from the early 20th century. Villagers responded to state-led medicalization by seeking the protection of medical doctors, not only from disease but also from the state itself. In particular, they sought to avoid heavy-handed treatment by qaʾids and local elites who applied disease control measures without appropriate medical knowledge. Furthermore, close examination of petitions sent during World War I suggests that hardships experienced by rural communities during the war accentuated nascent feelings of entitlement across demographic, ethnic, and religious communal boundaries toward state medical treatment.

This article is based on the assumption that Ibn Ishaq (704–67) and al-Waqidi (747–823) were responsible for my main sources, the compilations entitled Kitāb sīrat rasūl Allāh and Kitāb al-maghāzī, respectively. Such an assumption is justifiable. To take Ibn Ishaq's Biography in the recension of Ibn Hisham (d. 834), we know that the Ziyad ibn ʿAbd Allah al-Bakkaʾi (d. 798) text used by Ibn Hisham was authorized by Ibn Ishaq himself, and indeed had been confirmed by the use of both samʾ and ʾarḍ techniques as a correct version. At the same time, Ismail K. Poonawala confirms that the redaction of Salama ibn al-Fadl (d. 807) compares closely with the text of Ibn Hisham, indicating that the text of Ibn Ishaq had probably been fixed: Salama's redaction was based on a papyrus manuscript of Ibn Ishaq transmitted by Muhammad ibn Humayd ibn Hayyan al-Razi, and was used by al-Tabari in his narration of the Prophet's life, which forms a part of his compilation Taʾrīkh al-rusul waʾl-mulūk. As for the text of al-Waqidi, evidence indicates that it had been established by al-Waqidi himself from beginning to end, for he not only prefaces his work with the names of his chief transmitters of tradition but also provides the basic chronology of all the events that are discussed in his work.

With the generalization of production for exchange in modern times and the corresponding expansion of monetary and commercial transactions, the issue of contractual freedom has become a major concern for Muslim jurists and legislators, instigating a reconsideration of the classical doctrines of Islamic law on the subject. Due partly to its religious character and partly to the historical circumstances presiding over its formation in the first three centuries of the Hijra, Islamic law does not permit freedom of contract. Broadly speaking, three kinds of considerations intervene to restrict freedom of contract in classical fiqh: (a) those arising from the prohibition of usury (ribā); (b) those delimiting the licit object of legal obligation (maḥall alʿaqd); and (c) those concerning the stipulations attached to the contract (shurūṭ). In the present article, I investigate the third category of restrictions and touch on usury and the licit object of obligation insofar as the latter affect shurūṭ (sing., sharṭ), namely the conditions attached to a contract.

In the early months of 1920 a group of leading Egyptians founded Bank Misr. Destined to be the major financial arm of an emerging Egyptian bourgeoisie and the hub of a far-flung industrial and commercial empire, Bank Misr was established amidst the revolutionary turmoil of Egypt in 1919 and 1920. It reflected the nationalist and antiforeign sentiments of these troubled years. Its architect, Tal'at Harb, epitomized many of these characteristics. An ardent Muslim and a defender of Arab-Islamic civilization against its Western and Eastern detractors, he was a dedicated nationalist and a critic of rapacious and exploitative European capitalism. Bank Misr was founded as a supremely Egyptian institution and an expression of nationalist aspirations. Its founders hoped that the Bank might facilitate the emergence of an independent Egyptian bourgeoisie. They also wanted to use its resources to establish new commercial, industrial, and financial companies separate from European capital and working exclusively for the economic well-being of Egypt. But many questions immediately emerged. Could an institution founded in the furor of the revolution and headed by an inexperienced staff even survive, let alone spearhead, far-reaching industrial and commercial changes in the Egyptian economy? What would be its relations with foreigners and especially foreign capital? What role would foreign experts play in the life of the Bank? The purpose of this essay is to investigate how the Bank dealt with these problems by looking at the evolving relationship of the Bank with foreign capital. Put simply it can be said that as the Bank evolved and matured, it began to modify many of its original nationalist, populist, and antiforeign sentiments. It was forced to form alliances with the same groups it had so vigorously denounced at its birt. A close observation of the relationship between Bank Misr and foreign capital should cast light on the effort to create an autonomous Egyptian bourgeoisie. It will show the problems inherent in this vision and the compromises that had to be made as difficulties arose. It will also demonstrate the power of European capitalism in Egypt and its capacity to come to terms with even the most vigorous nationalist organizations.

Despite entrenched views about tribes and tribalism as premodern phenomena, this form of social organization and identity is relevant today no less than in the past; in some cases, it is even more relevant. Even without exact statistics, one can safely assert that a large proportion of the Middle East's inhabitants belong to a tribe and adhere to tribal social norms and cultural values. Whereas tribe and tribalism in English have somewhat negative connotations—they refer to divisiveness, rivalries, sectarianism, and favoritism—in the Middle East the term tribe is used as a matter of fact, a part of reality. It has equivalents in the local languages (‘ashīra, qabīla, ṭā’ifa) and a long history, from the days before the emergence of Islam in the 7th century. It is a term used by local people, usually in a positive rather than a pejorative way; people are proud of their tribes and see them as building blocks of their societies.

The world is not flat, nor has it ever been, but empire's apologists have been claiming otherwise for a very long time. A full decade has passed since Thomas Friedman published his manifesto on behalf of neoliberal globalization. But if Friedman's reductionism and mangled metaphors still make him an easy target for critical scorn, his “brief history of the twenty-first century” offers a remarkably compact distillation of several key ideas that organize mainstream globalization discourse well beyond his fortified outpost on the op-ed page of The New York Times. The first is a presentist assertion that globalization is new, that a recent intensification of worldwide flows of capital, goods, information, and people represents a sharp rupture with the past. This historically dubious account of global connections in turn undergirds two further claims about the character of the transformations taking place in the current moment. Globalization, in Friedman's telling as in so many others, appears as a process of convergence, synchronization, and unification. And new technologies such as smart phones, laptops, and the Internet, themselves described as the unambiguous products of Western ingenuity, hold out the promise that this “flattening” of space will advance the spread not only of economic opportunity but also of liberal, secular values. Neither the forms of global connection and movement that Friedman purports to reveal nor his ways of writing about them, however, are as novel as his breathless exclamations would have us believe. It is these paired critical insights that provide the common thread between the five new histories of globalization and technology under consideration in this essay.

I first encountered the Indian Ocean on the shores of Makran. I thought I was at land's end, Asia's edge. The ocean hadn't entered my thoughts except as non plus ultra, an ending void. The map said Baluchistan, and I had come to find the Baluch. But I soon found Africans and Zikris, palm-frond huts and Omani passports, old soldiers (or mercenaries) from an overseas foreign legion and smugglers of whiskey, opium, and pharmaceuticals. Now China has built a port there; then, less than twenty years ago, they were still making dhows, subtle smuggling ships. Yet it was far from romantic. It was a rough and hard place where traders and fishers eked a marginal existence from the watery edge of a dust-powder desert. Karachi was thirty-six hours by bus then truck. But Pakistan was an abstract and suspect idea; locals talked more of Muscat. A year or two later, in the Tihama of Yemen, I watched as boatloads of Africans (refugees? job hunters? all men at any rate) ran ashore through the surf. My Arab colleagues, all from the highlands, said they arrived every day, and spoke ill of them. A while after that, in Muscat, I listened with curiosity to Arabic laced with Urdu (or was it Hindi, or Gujarati? They were just nouns, Wanderwörter: terms that travel). In Iran, it was different sounds of the ocean I heard when urban friends gave me tapes of bandarī, the music of the ports.

During the Balkan Wars (1912–13), the mobilization of the home front became significant for the belligerent states, which initiated propaganda activities demonizing their enemies and galvanizing the emotions of their publics. This paper explores one type of such mobilization efforts from above, atrocity propaganda, through which states sought to invoke hatred and mobilize public support for war by focusing on the atrocities (mezalim) that their coreligionists had suffered at the hands of enemies. Although the term “atrocity propaganda” has been used exclusively in the context of World War I in the historiography, the practice it describes was effectively utilized during the earlier Balkan Wars. In the Ottoman Empire, both state and civil initiatives played crucial roles in the making of atrocity propaganda, which was disseminated through intense coverage in the Turkish-language press. The imagery it employed shifted with the onset of the wars, becoming increasingly shocking. Atrocity propaganda contributed to the well-known radicalization of nationalism in the late Ottoman Empire.

Part 1, (IJMES, 14 [1982], 249–281) presented arguments in favor of the first of two major contentions in respect to the development of Egyptian Arab nationalism between the two world wars; namely, that a rigid dichotomization between an assumed Arab-Islamic orientation of the Palace and a secular-liberal, Egyptian orientation of the Wafd and other parties is false. In the preceding segment I tried to show that in the interwar period both the Wafd and the Palace began to develop Arab nationalist orientations, albeit cautiously, and in a manner that continued to subordinate Arab concerns to the national question more narrowly conceived. I was particularly interested in demonstrating that no new, activist pan-Arab policy could be attributed to the Palace in the late thirties. Part 2 elaborates upon these and other themes as it discusses my second major contention: