Can a nation mobilizing for an extended armed conflict also construct and implement a national educational curriculum? This article explores the complex and crucial case of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as it sought to develop a national curriculum while in exile in Lebanon during the 1970s, prior to the inception of the Palestinian National Authority. Based on previously unexamined primary sources from PLO archives, I show how the PLO accomplished a high level of curriculum maturity despite considerable contextual and institutional challenges. The PLO mainstream embraced this curriculum as a political instrument of anticolonial and postdiasporic education suitable for regenerating a sense of community, fostering nation building, and increasing the PLO's political legitimacy. However, as can be expected in a colonial or diasporic setting, the process of educational transition remained uneven, fragile, and dependent on the PLO leadership's ability to navigate conflicts and negotiate arrangements with colonial power, host states, and international organizations.

The speed, spread, and democratic thrust of Arab revolutionary uprisings conjure up the revolutionary waves of 1848 and 1989 in Europe. Spearheaded by educated youth, the Arab uprisings have been brought to fruition by the masses of ordinary people (men, women, Muslims, and non-Muslims) who have mobilized at an astonishing scale against authoritarian regimes in pursuit of social justice, democratic governance, and dignity. If this broad observation is valid, then these social earthquakes are likely to unsettle some of the most enduring perspectives on the region. To begin with, they should undermine “Middle East exceptionalism,” with its culturalist focus informed by assumptions of “stagnant culture,” “fatalist Muslims,” and “unchangeable polity.” In political science, students of “regime stability” and the “authoritarian resiliency” of Arab states may have to reevaluate their conceptual premises. The analytical relevance of the concept of “rentier state” as the political basis of authoritarian stability might likewise need serious reformulation. The blatant cash handouts by some Arab Gulf states to “buy opposition” during the wave of protests in February and March 2011 do not seem to have worked.

Drawing on contemporary history and empirical research, this article revises traditional rentier state theory, which fails to account for the existence of Islamist movements in states accruing substantial outside wealth. Rentier state theory expects that citizens of such states will form opposition blocs only when their stake in rent income is threatened. Examining the development of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates in two archetypal rentier states, or super-rentiers, in the Gulf—Qatar and the United Arab Emirates—this article shows that ideology rather than rent motivated the formation of independent Islamist movements. This research helps to break the causal link established by rentier state theory between oil rents and lack of politically relevant Islamist organizations. We find that the presence of oil rents, instead of rendering Islamist complaint politically irrelevant, shapes the ways in which Islamist movements seek to influence government policies.

As an ambitious city aspiring to become a major contributor to and player in the global world, Dubai often tends to be endeared to and affected by grand-scale urbanism and skyscraper skylines. The recent practice of architecture in Dubai is replete with examples of architectural monuments and miraculous constructions. Whilst the architectural feats required to raise grand structures for global branding and economic strategy are noteworthy, many other facets of urbanism also warrant adulation and exploration. One example is the narrative of human-scale urbanism—the pedestrian-driven places that put people at the center of the town. Due to its human-scale nature and morphology, the quotidian landscape, more than other existing settings, such as those modeled on “bigness” and dispersion successfully narrates a clear story about the essence of everyday urbanism: the nexus between the physical and the social, and the architecture and everyday life of the city's urban spaces. Life and culture in the UAE have evolved drastically, but in old communities where the quotidian landscape is still palpable, it has stayed the same—simple, open to everyone, and full of animation and affection.

In 2002 the Cultural Center of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Beirut invited Mehdi Chamran to visit Lebanon. Chamran's late brother, Mustafa, was a member of an anti-Pahlavi opposition movement with bases in Lebanon from 1970 to 1979. During his visit, Chamran was to meet several Lebanese Shiءi personalities and to visit Shiءa-run institutions in South Lebanon, including institutions affiliated with the Lebanese Shiءi political party Amal (Afwaj al-Muqawama al-Lubnaniyya), which is headed by the current speaker of the Lebanese Parliament, Nabih Berri, in order to speak about his late brother. In fact, many of the Lebanese Shiءa attending the speech had personally known Mustafa. He had, after all, offered military training to many active in Lebanon's first Shiءi militia, which subsequently became the Amal movement. On February 15, at the Nabih Berri Cultural Complex (Mujammaʿ Nabih Berri al-Thaqafi), in Tallat al-Radar, a town near Nabatiyya, in South Lebanon, Chamran began a speech by reading passages from his brother's letters and notes from 1973 that described the political atmosphere in South Lebanon amid Israeli military attacks. Chamran went on to discuss the relationship between the Islamic Revolution and Lebanese Shiءa, emphasizing the theme of closeness and unity. For a moment, as he read these passages, Chamran implied that Iranian and Lebanese Shiءa had been moving back and forth for centuries between their respective countries and hence were what one scholar calls “distant relations.”

Recently, there have been many compelling new theories of the emergence of an “Islamic public sphere.” Few studies, however, have examined the role of literary writing in contributing to its emergence, even though such writing was critical to the intellectual elite's shift toward Islamic subjects in mid-20th century Egypt. In addition, little of this scholarship has examined the gendered nature of this public sphere in any depth, though gendered rights, roles, and responsibilities were among the most hotly contested debates in public discourses on religion. This article looks at how literary writing not only shaped particular interpretations of gendered relationships in Islam but also developed hermeneutical techniques for reinterpreting religious sources. It specifically examines the work of Egyptian literary scholar and Islamic thinker Bint al-Shatiʾ and how her writings helped define the nature of the family, gender relations, and the private sphere in Islamic public discourse.

An important issue in considering violence at both the conceptual and empirical levels is the question of what counts as “violence” and how it is acknowledged. In many polities of the Middle East, including Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, there is no clear boundary between war and peace. Conflicts have lasted over a long period and even the project of securing a future in which the struggle for decolonization and political autonomy can be kept alive faces enormous hurdles as everyday life is corroded by betrayals, accusations, and the sheer exhaustion of keeping political energies from waning. Most acute observers of prolonged conflicts recognize the corrosive effects of these conflicts on everyday life. In this brief thought piece, I want to reflect on one aspect of the problem: that of the relation between sexual violence as an aspect of dramatic and spectacular violence—in wars (including modern ones), pogroms against ethnic or religious minorities, or episodes of lethal riots between sectarian groups—and everyday forms of sexual violence that could be both part of the public domain and constitutive of domestic intimacy. Said otherwise, I am interested in how experience of violence travels from one threshold of life to another.

Under the titular leadership of Ayatollah Khomaini, Iran is struggling to establish an Islamic republic. Such a system of government, based on an Islamic constitution and underpinned by Islamic laws which are “all-encompassing and complete,” is strongly believed by him and his followers to be the panacea for all the socioeconomic and political ills of Iran and, for that matter, the whole Islamic world.

The meaning and significance of accusations of heresy are difficult to ascertain, regardless of the religious setting or historical milieu in which they appear. Scholars studying medieval European religious history have described heresy as opposition to the Christian church's doctrinal authority, emphasizing that heretics were not only religious but also political dissenters. They questioned church doctrine per se, but also, perhaps more significantly, challenged the church's authority to determine doctrine. In early Islamic history, concepts of heresy and orthodoxy are somewhat more difficult to define. After the Rashidun, there was no dominant religious voice in the community. Instead, a variety of opposing parties struggled for the right to define doctrine. In such circumstances, there could be no orthodoxy, since none had sufficient moral authority or coercive power to impose their views to the exclusion of all others. Consequently, there could be no heresy either, because heretics are simply those whom the dominant religious authority deems to be outside the bounds of orthodoxy. Only after proponents of a particular set of views gained sufficient power to impose their views on others could heterodoxy become heresy.

The most important and undoubtedly the most fateful period in Ottoman history is the Young Turk or Union and Progress era in 1908–18. The final disintegration of the Ottoman empire, the rise of independent states in the Middle East, the intensification of conflicts over Macedonia, the full emergence of Turkish and Arab nationalisms, the start of the Muslim anti-imperialist mobilization through struggle in Libya in 1911, and other events of vital importance in the social and political history of the area occurred during the Young Turk era. It was a historical watershed which marked simultaneously the end of an imperial form of political organization in the Middle East and the beginning of a new political existence in the form of national states. The Young Turks affected profoundly the course of history among the peoples of the Middle East and the Balkans. Moreover the Young Turks were the first group in the Ottoman state to approach the social, political, and cultural transformation of their society in the spirit of modern politics. Yet the Young Turks remain the least studied and understood and the most distortedly portrayed power group in the history of the Balkans and the Middle East. Most of the existing works on the Young Turks, consisting mainly of memoirs, were written by their authors to credit themselves with political roles and achievements which did not always correspond to reality.

France's acquisition of Syria and Lebanon as mandated territory after the First World War has often been described as the result of war-time arrangements such as the Sykes–Picot Agreement and the MacMahon–Hussein Correspondence. In fact, however, the French claim to these parts of the old Ottoman Empire was recognized internationally even before the war erupted. The nineteenth century had witnessed the tremendous penetration of French religious influence into Syria and Lebanon through the establishment of clerical schools, hospitals, asylums and orphanages.

In the field of international relations, the 1979 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan has raised major issues concerning regional security and superpower relations. By introducing Soviet military forces in a traditionally nonaligned country, the Kremlin initiated a more aggressive pattern in its foreign policies. This occupation was the Soviet Union's first territorial expansion by direct use of military power since World War II.

Infanticide is known to have been a common means of birth control from early, apparently even prehistoric, times. In societies that lacked any precise knowledge of the fertilization process and consequently methods for its prevention, infanticide was used more frequently than other known methods of population limitation, such as abstention from intercourse and abortion. Infanticide was expected to serve several functions: “general reduction in population numbers (including twin removal), removal of defectives, elimination of social ‘illegitimates’ (i.e., offspring whose existence violated social group boundaries), response to loss of the nursing mother, control of dependency ratio, manipulation of sex ratio, and finally, use as a backstop to other methods when those fail”.

Prosopography, or collective biography, as this field of study is sometimes called by scholars dealing with periods later than Greek and Roman antiquity, is a relatively simple and unsophisticated research technique. Basically, it consists of assembling and comparing biographical data for all individuals belonging to a clearly circumscribed group of people. Frequently, but not necessarily, the individuals in question held public office of some kind. This technique recommends itself by the fact that it can be applied even to periods on which very little evidence is available, such as the Roman Republic But on a different level, prosopography can also contribute to our understanding of societies with a fairly rich documentation. Thus, quite a few items among the more recent literature cited by Lawrence Stone in his book on the causes of the seventeenth-century English revolution might be described at least in part upon prosopographical techniques. In the same vein, the research technique has been used by a number of scholars to shed some light upon the institutions and society of the Ottoman Empire.

As Libya is the smallest in population of the four Magẖreb countries, so Libyan Jewry was less numerous than those of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Jewish settlement in rural Tripolitania is quite old. A tombstone reportedly found near Tajura dating from the tenth century (Cazés 1890; Slouschz 1927: 11–12) and El-Bekri's eleventh century mention of the Jews of Jado in the Jebel Nefusa (El Bekri 1913: 25) are two of the earliest post-Islamic examples. The present discussion, however, focuses on the century before the mass migration of Tripolitanian Jewry to Israel, which began in 1949. At that time there were over 29,000 Jews living in Tripolitania (see Table 3), and somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 living in Cyrenaica.

‘If one seriously wanted to prepare the tribes for assimilation with France instead of reconstituting the government of Arabs by Arabs, would it not be wise to disorganize them, to multiply the little sheikhs and to replace the big leaders with French officers…?’ This candid question was asked by a French colon in 1847 shortly before the surrender of ‘Abd al-Qadir Ibn Mahi ad-Din, the most formidable Arab leader opposing the French establishment in Algeria. The question reflects the increasing impatience, self-confidence, and, one is forced to add, arrogance of the French colonialists. After many years of struggling against a largely indifferent French Chamber the colons had finally become a sizable and vociferous minority which could command a hearing in the halls of the Monarchie du Juillet.

It would not have been wrong to argue twenty years ago that a united Arab economy would most likely be represented by the economies of Algeria and Iraq. Such an economy would have been characterized as having a promising industrial base, a viable agriculture, and a wealth of oil and mineral resources. From today';s viewpoint, of course, choosing these two countries could not have been more unfortunate. Algeria is in a state of siege that is keeping its economy hostage to political-military considerations, and Iraq's economy, after two wars and an embargo, is in a state of meltdown, to say the least. As a result, today's unqualified image of the Arab economy in general is that of wasted oil wealth, poverty, and political instability.

In the early 17th century, the Shiʿi juristic tradition experienced the first coherent refutation of uṣūliyya, the ijtihādī rationalism used by the mujtahids, at the hands of Mulla Muhammad Amin Astarabadi (d. 1626–27). The latter rejected the efforts of leading Iraqi and Syrian jurists to apply ijtihād (rational legal inference), hadith categorization, and dirāya (scrutiny and stratification of accounts) in deriving Shiʿi law. The main studies on Astarabadi's akhbārī (traditionist) movement treat it as a reaction to the “influence” of Sunnism on the mujtahids or to their excessive “borrowings” from it, and stress the traditionists’ abhorrence of assimilating any aspect of Sunnism. Underlining the shortcomings of these explanations, this article presents Astarabadi's thought as a discursive development within the Shiʿi juristic tradition, which is part of the grand Islamic tradition. Astarabadi became skeptical of the mujtahids’ epistemology and methodology and was concerned that they jeopardized God's law and hence the believer's salvation. He protested the Safavid monarchs’ legitimation of uṣūlī legal authority, the latter's hierarchical features, and, ultimately, the sociopolitical domination of the ʿAmili mujtahids from Jabal ʿAmil in Syria (or modern-day South Lebanon), starting with al-Muhaqqiq al-Karaki (d. 1534).

This article explores the ways in which refugee and host experiences of displacement in Jordan between 2010 and 2013 were articulated in a socioeconomic register that coincided with, but was also independent of, both state biopower and historical cross-border regionalisms. I argue that this register became salient due to a shared understanding of everyday life as characterized by what I term hunger, a state of depredation where “people eat people” to attain their own well-being. In pursuing this argument, the article has two goals: to show how Iraqis and Jordanians negotiated the complexities of living together in hunger by censuring individuals—locals and foreigners, rich and poor—who contributed to producing hunger rather than to alleviating it, and by consciously resisting the corrosive effects of hunger on social relations; and, more generally, to challenge universalizing understandings of refugee experiences according to which local tensions between refugees and hosts are derivative of a globalized antiforeigner discourse.