When writing biographies of historical figures, narrative convention requires that concision and clarity be wrested from sources that are multiple and often confusing. In this article, I argue that multiple accounts of a person's life may be more than an accident arising from the way that information was compiled. Rather, such multiplicity renders exemplary figures adaptable to a wide variety of circumstances, making them even more useful as a focus of devotion and emulation. Examining multiple accounts of early Maliki scholar Sahnun b. Saʿ id (d. 854), including those of his travels in search of knowledge and of his suffering under the miḥna (trial) in Kairouan, I find that close attention to apparently contradictory evidence may not get us any closer to understanding the man himself, but it does offer us much information about the ways in which he was considered an exemplary individual.

The lines dividing history, ideology, and politics are thinly drawn. Researchers of Iraq have observed that over the years institutions and ideological movements, both inside the country and in the West, have “hijacked” the country's history. The Iraqi state's grand narratives have excluded competing histories from the days of Satiʿ al-Husri, the “father of Iraqi education,” who introduced Arab history into the curriculum in order to foster Arab nationalism, up to the massive project of rewriting Iraqi history under the Baʿth regime. Western interests, too, from the time of the British-backed monarchy until the present day, have influenced the writing of Iraqi history—utilizing it in a way that would justify their foreign policies.

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Djibouti's Markazi camp for refugees from Yemen between 2016 and 2018, this article examines the complex motivating factors that drove a subset of Yemenis to seek refuge in the Horn of Africa. Although the primary reason for their flight to the Horn of Africa was the ongoing war, a secondary but not inconsequential driver of many of these Yemeni refugees’ current displacement was their family histories of transnational migrations and interethnic marriages. This article argues that, for this group, it was their “mixed” (muwallad) Arab and African parentage and resulting alienation in Yemen that made their flight imaginable—and, in their view, imperative. Although “mixed motive migration” is not unusual, this example underscores how spatial and social (im)mobilities in Yemen and the Horn of Africa region have been co-constituted across generations. More importantly, it has critical implications for the recently adopted Global Compact on Refugees, which promotes (among other solutions) the “local integration” of refugees in their proximate host societies.

Afghanistan's Khalq leaders who seized power in April 1978 inherited a mixed legal system and a bifurcated legal elite. In theirn ideological commitment to revolutionary chanfe, the Marxist government sought to employ legal institutions to further far-reaching social and political aims. The ruling group intended to curb the power of local jurists and the authority of Islamic legal reasonin through secularizing administration of the law. These policies testified for many to the regime's underlying hostility toward religion, and its determination to displace autonomous provincial leadership, both motives for rebellion by tribal insurgents and Islamic nationalists in 1979. This essay, which was researched and written before the fall of the Daoud government, examines Afghanistan's legal cadres, their education, recruitment, and performance. The persistance of Islamic influences in these processes, along with the adoption of modern practices, should convey the depth of traditionalism in the nation and also the capacity of the Afghans to accommodate new concepts not hastily or callously imposed.

In May 1896 Lord Cromer, the British Agent and Consul-General in Egypt and that country's de facto ruler, received a “very numerously signed petition” from the coalheavers of Port Said. These workers, most of them migrants from Upper Egypt, were employed through labor contractors by several English and other foreign-owned companies to carry coal onto ships transiting the Suez Canal. The coalheavers complained of ill-treatment by the contractors (shuyuūkh), who “buy and sell us like slaves”, stealing part of their wages and forcing them to buy all they needed at stores owned by the contractors. Cromer acknowledged receipt of the petition in a letter to the coaling companies, commenting that the workers “seem to have some real grievances, notably in connection with the truck system”. Suggesting that the employers seek to avoid a strike, he expressed the opinion that the government “should deal with a strike at Port Said on the same lines as a strike in England, that is to say, that they should preserve order and not interfere to any serious extent between employers and labourers.”

Towards the end of World War II, when the French had regained control of the Levant, revived fears of Hashemite expansion in that area gripped the Free French. The Hashemite rulers of Iraq and Jordan were seen as subversive forces which were constantly attempting to destroy any French influence left in the Middle East, replacing independent states with Hashemite satellites. Eventually, if not counteracted, the whole Middle East would come under their control, and, as the British were behind them, the latter would have once again outmaneuvered their rivals.

The “Upheaval” (mahapach) of May 1977 brought to an end forty-four years of Labor hegemony in the international institutions of the Zionist movement and twenty-nine years of Labor dominance in the political institutions of the State of Israel. In the wake of the 1977 election, the Israel Labor Party found itself forced into the unfamiliar role of opposition–and with it the rural settlement movements associated with the party.

Do public policy debates between activists from different ideological camps in a nondemocratic and illiberal system bridge social divisions or deepen them? Focusing on three controversies regarding family law in Jordan, we argue that activist groups rarely talk to each other in public, and when they do, their discourses aim primarily at mobilizing support within their own camps rather than addressing each other's concerns. Through media analysis, discourse analysis, and in-depth field interviews, we find much polarization and few attempts to build bridges, but also limited though very suggestive exceptions. Those exceptions rely less on public and democratic mechanisms and more on entrepreneurial state actors working quietly, talking opportunistically to each side, and emerging as powerful institutional actors. Authoritarian states can provide sites of deliberation, but deliberation seems to lead to principled agreement beyond the platitudinous only when an institutional actor within the state takes the initiative to get involved.

This article analyzes different traditions of nocturnal conviviality in 18th-century Istanbul and demonstrates their importance for social, political, and cultural life. The main argument is that the palace used the night to demonstrate its power in spectacles of light and to cultivate personal relations within the elite, both of which were crucial for a patrimonial government based on face-to-face interaction. Yet, it was exactly the reliance on such interaction that marked the limits of the palace's hold of the night. With the neighborhood gaze blinded by darkness, communal policing lost much of its effectiveness, leaving nocturnal social life largely concealed from the eyes of the authorities. Nighttime therefore offered opportunities for illicit modes of socialization and, at times, for subversive political action.

The Saqaliba—a term that in medieval Arabic literature denoted the Slavic populations of central and eastern Europe (and possibly some of their neighbors)—offer a particularly insightful case study of the mechanisms of the early Islamic slave trade and the nature of the Muslim demand for slaves. What makes them such an ideal case study is their high visibility in texts produced in the Islamic world between the early 9th and early 11th centuries. Arab geographers and diplomats investigated their origins, while archaeological material, primarily hundreds of thousands of dirhams found in Scandinavia and the Slavic lands, contains traces of the trade in them. By combining these strands of evidence, we can build an exceptionally detailed image of slave trade systems that supplied Saqaliba to the Islamic markets, which, in turn, can be used to illustrate more general mechanisms governing the trade in and demand for slaves in the medieval Islamic world.

This article explores the way overland mobility was transformed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, during “the age of speed.” Beyond the already well-known caravan-to-car story, it argues that slow means of transportation such as caravans kept their own rationale and were instrumental in producing an economic geography that proved resilient in the face of the celebrated steam- or fuel-motorized means of accelerated mobility. Adopting the caravan traders and travelers’ vantage and foregrounding their life stories offer new insights on the way rail and automobility were experienced and adopted in the post-Ottoman Middle East. Such experiences cast a different light on the global rechanneling process affecting the circulation of persons and merchandise across the region during the interwar period. Exploring the resilience of caravans in an uneven age of speed does not only illuminate the transnational geographies underpinned by the overlapping networks of both slower and faster mobilities. It also helps to understand the many dimensions of their gradual albeit very uneven demise.

During the Cold War years following World War II, the U.S. government and international agencies such as the World Bank and FAO strongly advocated and pushed for land reform (distribution) in countries under U.S. influence. Examples of American-sponsored land reforms included the land-distribution programs in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, South Vietnam, Iran, the Philippines, and El Salvador. Land reform in practice consisted of giving the ownership of land to the cultivating tenants and sharecroppers. By giving land to the tenants, it was believed that a communist revolution or takeover could be avoided. The modern theoretical basis for land reform can be found in the writings of such Marxist scholars as Alain de Janvry, the non-Marxist writers Albert Berry and William Cline, and the World Bank economists Hans Binswanger and Miranda Elgins.1 Marxist writers had stressed the political aspects of “anti-feudal” reforms. Such reforms were said to promote political stability as well as strengthen capitalism. How the abrogation of private-property rights was supposed to “strengthen” capitalism was not really explained. Non-Marxist writers concentrated on increased efficiency and increased output that was expected from land redistribution. Berry and Cline showed that in labor-surplus underdeveloped dual economies with a bi-modal farm structure (where large commercial and small subsistence farms existed side by side), a land reform that redistributed land from large farms to small farms increased agricultural production and rural welfare, and brought about economic growth and development. In addition, land reform was seen to result in greater social equity (taking land from wealthy landowners and giving it to poor farmers). It was an article of faith among the proponents of land reform that “the hated class of absentee landlords” did not fulfill any useful socio-economic function, at least none that could not be performed equally well by some government agency. They also believed that sharecropping and tenancy did not fulfill any useful social and economic functions. It was implicitly assumed in the theoretical writings that the rights of a small number of individuals were to be sacrificed for the benefit of the many. In none of the theoretical literature was the possibility of expropriating a large number of individuals advocated or even considered.

In the broadest sense, the process of development involves improving the quality of human life. Although most people support the idea of improving human lives, the concept of development is notoriously difficult to define. In the poorer countries of the world, development generally requires increasing incomes. But it also involves other things, such as raising standards of health and nutrition, improving access to education, reducing poverty, and increasing the equality of resources. How is it possible to incorporate these, and other notions, into a workable definition of development that can be used to evaluate the recent record of development in Egypt?

Colleagues with whom I spoke about this piece had one of two responses: “Why do you want to feed the flames of cliché and prejudice about violence in the Middle East?” and “Surely, there has been no theorization of violence in the Middle East.” Regarding the first response, I agree that thinking about violence in the Middle East can be a fraught enterprise. This is because a hysterical mainstream narrative locates the sources of violence in or emanating from the region in Islam(ism) or attributes it to some half-baked but remarkably persistent cultural explanations (tribalism, ancient hatreds, cycles of violence, etc.) which uncomfortably echo the racism of an earlier scholarly era. But enough innovative works have emerged on violence that we can move—at least in our scholarly conversations—beyond this terrain of prejudice and paranoia.

Approximately three-quarters of a century passed between the rise, in 1501, of the Safavid state of Iran under Shah Ismail I and the coming to power of his grandson Ismail II in 1576. The first Ismail had decreed that the Ithna-ʿashari Shiʿi form of Islam and the Jaʿfarī system of law be formally established in the country. When the victorious founder of the new dynasty entered Tabriz, he ordered that the phrase containing the name of Imam ʿAli (the true successor to the Prophet Muhammad according to the Twelver Shiʿi belief) be included in the call to prayer chanted from the minarets of the mosques. Shiʿism was consolidated, especially during the long reign of the intervening monarch, Shah Tahmasb (1524–76), thanks in part to the activities of a powerful mujtahid, ʿAli ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAli al-Karaki (d. 1534). However, according to the majority of the contemporary Safavid sources, when Ismail II came to power, he seems to have had second thoughts about Shiʿism and to have exhibited a proclivity for Sunnism. The Sunni ideas of Ismail II may have been fostered by another politicoreligious figure, a certain Mirza Makhdum Sharifi. The inclination Ismail II had toward Sunnism resulted in a curious episode that is recounted by Safavid historians in detail and in various versions.

Anthony D. Smith has argued that the idea of the “nation-state” conflates two historical and ideological processes that, even with Western European history serving as the paradigm, were often distinct. Nor was there any uniform evolution in these processes from one stage to the other. For Smith this has meant that “Eastern Europe and the Third World have all been trying to imitate a rather singular model whose ethnic homogeneity, like its parliamentary institutions, simply cannot be transplanted. They have been pursuing a Western mirage … [where] even in the West, the much soughtafter marriage of state and ethnie has not turned out to be all that happy and enduring.” Smith assumes that true nations are based on ethnie, meaning a shared memory of culture, language, and history identified with specific territory stretching into the past that creates both a bond within the group, the precursor to nationhood, and a sense of distinction against other such groups. Here he opposes those whom he calls the “modernists,” who may argue with one another about what constitutes nationalism but agree that it reflects the development of nationhood in the modern era and is not an inevitable extension of ancient historical and cultural bonds.

Together with those centuries of the Ottoman empire's florescence, the age of the independent Mamlûks(648–922/1250–1517)ranks as one of the best-documented periods of medieval Islamic history. Not only is its historical writing proper of an amazing bulk and richness, but the Mamlûk period produced encyclopedic compilations covering almost every branch of the Islamic sciences. In particular, there arose a flourishing minor genre of manuals of financial and secretarial practice, reflecting on the one hand the economic and commercial richness of the Mamlûk lands, and on the other the importance of the Mamlûk chancery and its truly international sphere of operations

In recent decades, most historians have begun to shy away from the once predominant idea of post-16th-century decrepitude in the Ottoman Empire1 and come to recognize the remarkable resilience and recuperative ability of the Ottoman imperial structure even into its final century.2 Against the gathering momentum of this trend of reinterpretation, it is, ironically, chiefly the Ottomanist specialists themselves who have shown the greatest resistance. The “experts,” as a consequence of their quite proper immersion in indigenous sources, are better exposed to and, hence, more likely to become ecmeshed in the culturally determined value system of the subject of their study. This article is an attempt to identify some of the sources that contributed to the formulation of the decline topos and related topoi.

From Morocco to Iraq, Arab polities and economies appear to be liberalizing. The holding of comparatively free elections, easing of media censorship, and invigoration of associational activity have accompanied relaxation of political control by single parties. Economic liberalization has paralleled these political changes. Privatization, currency devaluations and partial flotations, rejuvenation of capital markets, reductions of subsidies on basic consumer goods, and other elements of economic liberalization packages have been adopted in varying degrees in the political economies of the Arab republics and, to a lesser extent, in the Arab monarchies.

The study of Ottoman history must move out of Istanbul and into the provinces and, in so doing, it must come to grips with the derebeys, local rulers of Anatolia whose independence contributed to the weakness of Ottoman government in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The derebeys of Cilicia are of special interest because they were the last to succumb to the expanding control of the nineteenth-century reformers. The purpose of this article is to examine the nature and extent of the power of these autocrats and to see why they were able to continue in defiance of the Porte until 1865.