Preventing the development of an ethnic Kurdish cultural and political movement has been a priority of the Turkish state since the Kurdish-led Shaykh Said Rebellion of 1925.' Nevertheless, beginning around 1959 this effort was steadily if slowly undermined, and events of the past ten years suggest that it has indeed failed. Not only have Kurdish activists gained some measure of international recognition for themselves and for the concept of Kurdish ethnic rights,2 but promoting the notion of specifically Kurdish cultural rights has almost become a standard litany for a wide array of Turkish civic and state actors, from Islamist political parties to business organizations, human-rights groups, prime ministers, and mainstream newspaper columnists. Although the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its insurgency against Turkey have claimed a great deal of academic and popular attention, it is these diffuse but public re-considerations of minority rights taking place within legitimate Turkish institutions have contributed the most to the sense that past policies of coping with the “Kurdish reality” are ultimately unsustainable, and that it may be difficult, if not impossible, to return to the climate of earlier years, when discussions of ethnic difference were suppressed, limited to the private realm, or confined to the fringes of radical politics.

At the turn of the century the societies of the Near East provided materials for some of the most pressing anthropological and sociological issues of the day. W. Robertson Smith, Marcel Mauss, and Max Weber, to name only one representative of three national traditions, all devoted considerable attention to Semitic societies. Since that time, fewer sociologists and anthropologists have had a background in Semitic languages and literatures, and new materials from outside the classical and Semitic cultures have seemed to offer fresher, more challenging problems. In recent decades, Near Eastern societies have come to play a minor role in the development and discussion of anthropological problems. In general, only the tribal societies have maintained any prominence, and even these societies have only been test cases for a theory that was formulated by Evans-Pritchard for the Nuer of sub-Saharan Africa.

This article discusses how the Lebanese state has responded to displacement from Syria (2011–17), and how the resulting policy formulation processes and discourses have constructed the relationship between the hosting state and the refugee. It focuses especially on how this small state has negotiated its politics of reception and choice of policy tools amid dysfunctional institutions and political disputes. To this end, it uses the lens of Lebanon's model of sectarian power sharing to understand the polity's response to mass displacement. This process has been structured by the defining dynamics of the country's politics of sectarianism: slack governance, an elite fractured model, and a politics of dependence on external and domestic nonstate actors. The Lebanese model offers broader insights into types of coping mechanisms that emerge in the context of forced migration, notably when a formal refugee regime is absent. The article contends that states lacking a legal asylum framework and grappling with various governance hurdles are likely to draw on the repertoire of their political regime to deal with displacement.

This article examines the role gender plays in the pilgrimage rites in Mecca at the turn of this century. I argue, as a student of local cultures rather than a scholar of universalistic Islamic beliefs, that portions of the hajj at that time had a special significance for Arab Muslims in and near the Hijaz. Arab pilgrims served, ad dressed, and even dressed the Kaʿba like a bride. By ascribing feminine charac teristics to the Kaʿba, they temporarily transformed human gender roles and constructed an alternative model of gender that could be utilized when negotiating and renegotiating gender roles in everyday life.

This paper is a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Islamic ideology and female employment in Iran today. I examine the Islamic regime's ideology regarding women's roles (as well as the inconsistencies within it) and contrast it with women's employment patterns. I also compare the employment patterns today with those before the Revolution. The paper shows that much of the initial rhetoric discouraging female employment and attempting to impose an ideology of domesticity has not been successful. Although labor participation rates have declined for women, they have declined even more for men. The female share of the urban labor force has not altered, and government employment for women is actually higher today than it was before the Revolution. This paper suggests a discrepancy between ideological prescriptions and economic imperatives.

Although some contemporary Egyptian studies have broached aspects of the relationship between the Coptic Orthodox Church and the regime, few have examined developments in the political rapport between the two in the last decade. Important studies have touched on the relationship between the state and church during Nasser's regime, the Sadat years, and the early years of the Mubarak regime, up to the first half of the 1990s. However, there is a paucity of literature on the relationship between the Coptic church and the Egyptian state in the past ten years, a lacuna that this study addresses.

As a student of politics whose primary research interest is in women's political participation in Turkey, my engagement with the study of violence is through the lens of gender. In gender studies, “violence” is arguably the most important critical concept for the articulation of the personal as the political. Women's recognition that violence in their personal lives and intimate relationships needed to be problematized in the political realm and transformed through public debate was a revolutionary development. Bringing this recognition into the canon of political thought has been a major contribution of feminist theorists.

With the Islamist movement gaining momentum and recruits throughout the Near and Middle East and North Africa, it is vital that scholars and practitioners make an attempt to understand the objectives and strategies expressed by the groups within this movement. It is also imperative that we acknowledge that the Islamic resurgence is not a monolithic phenomenon, but is characterized by factions and voices that diverge on their approach to major themes such as the nature of society, the preferred relationship between Islamist activists and the political system, methodology for alleviating socioeconomic frustrations and spiritual laxity, and the temporal framework within which Islamist goals are to be achieved. The more “radical” or militant of these groups insist upon revolutionary change that is to be imposed on the masses and political system, whereas the more moderate groups, epitomized by the new Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, call for gradual change that is to be undertaken from within the political system and with the enlistment of the Muslim masses.

Since the late 1970s, a voluminous body of scholarship has examined the socio-economic roots of Islamist politics. Much of this literature presents Islamist movements as angry responses to corrupt authoritarian regimes and broken moral economies in the post-oil boom era. In this view, Islam offers a culturally authentic alternative to a disinherited and disenfranchised generation.

The storming of the Mecca mosque by Juhayman al-ʿUtaybi and his fellow rebels in November 1979 represents one of the most spectacular events in the modern history of Saudi Arabia. Yet, it is one of the least understood. Even decades after the event, many important questions remain unanswered. Who were the rebels, and what did they want? Why and how did Juhayman's group come into existence? What happened with the rebels and their ideas after the Mecca events? This article seeks to shed light on the story and legacy of Juhayman al-ʿUtaybi with new information gathered from extensive fieldwork in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

An outbreak of fighting in May 1994 put Yemen in the world's headlines when, from one point of view, the unity of Yemen proclaimed in May four years earlier was confirmed by force. One topic which straddles that period has been Islah, an Islamist party of unusual form. The present article explores the rhetorical axes that defined Islah. Briefly put, a supposedly “fundamentalist,” even “radical,” party, was in fact more a party of the establishment center. Its public identity, however, depends on terms and arguments that are centered elsewhere than Yemen, and they misrepresent, to many Yemenis as to others, what is happening. The problem is not resolved by such standard academic moves as avoiding “stereotypes” or sticking to “local terms.” The terms at issue are widely shared among Yemenis and foreigners alike.

In spite of many competing views on peasants, their politics, and the state in 19th-century Egypt, the historiography contains certain striking continuities in its understanding of peasant–state political relations. Historians influenced by Marxism, modernization theory, and nationalism alike have usually seen state and peasantry as sharply distinct and conflicting. Peasants have often been depicted as locked in a struggle against the penetration of state agency into a previously autonomous rural domain. Whether seen as a force for benevolent modernization or for the predatory extraction of conscripts and taxes, the state has regularly been viewed as self-propelled and sui generis, reforming or invading the world of an either passive, silently subversive, or violently revolutionary peasantry. The figure of the tradition-bound, submissive, or apathetic peasant simply marks out a terrain for state agency, albeit an agency obstructed by peasant hostility, irrationality, or resentment. The silently subversive peasant, further, who uses James C. Scott's “weapons of the weak,” merely undermines in antagonistic and wordless fashion projects emanating from above. The revolutionary peasant, finally, becomes the self-generating locus of the nationalist or socialist modern and seeks the violent overthrow of the predatory state, transforming the latter into only the negative—albeit treacherous—terrain on which the positive historical agency of peasants and their allies can work. In short, the existing historiography, while varying the historical role, value, and meaning of peasant and state, preserves both as radically distinct, self-creating, and self-defining collective agents involved in zero-sum and often violent antagonism.

This quotation may be nothing more than a well-turned phrase by its author, Zaki al-Arsuzi. Nonetheless, it illustrates a dilemma that young men like him faced in the troubled years preceding Syrian independence: As French-educated young men, should they take their places as minor functionaries in the colonial machine and accept the promise of a comfortable and privileged life, or should they join the growing political and ideological struggle to found an independent, national statein Syria? Al-Arsuzi, who is venerated by the current regime in Damascus as the ideological father of Baʾthism, went on to answer this question by spending the next eight years in and out ofthe former Ottoman province of Alexandretta, working in support of the Arab-nationalist cause. Both his contemporary writings and later recollections of the period reveal a growing political consciousness and the formulation of a complex Arabism that was at odds with the dominant ideology emanating from the large cities of Syria. This ideology, as embodied by the National Bloc government in Damascus, was personality-based, hamstrung by European colonial interests, and unable to arouse any sustained political sensibility in the broader population; it centered its political legitimacy and parochial brand of nationalism on opposition to the French occupation. Al-Arsuzi and others, recognizing the weakness inherent in this form of nationalism, drew away from its leadership in the course of the 1930s and moved to create other, more radical and militant Pan-Arabist groups.

The Islamic shariʿa is central to Islam in the minds of most Muslims and non-Muslim scholars. In many ways, the centrality of the Islamic shariʿa has increased in recent decades. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—this centrality, the precise, even the general, role of the shariʿa in Islamic societies is the subject of contentious debate among Muslims. Outside of and underlying such debates are more subtle and rarely articulated differences about the meaning of the Islamic shariʿa. In this essay, I will put forward a general intellectual map for those varying meanings. More critically, I will suggest that important shifts in the meaning of the Islamic shariʿa have taken place in the Muslim world, and that these shifts are closely connected to the nature and viability of legal and educational institutions associated with the Islamic shariʿa in the past. As the Islamic shariʿa has become disconnected from these institutions, its meaning has changed in some fundamental ways. Most important, the shariʿa is approached less for its process than for its content. And because the shift in institutions and understanding has received much less attention from Muslims, widespread attempts to re-create older relationships (particularly involving the relationship between the Islamic shariʿa and the state) in fact involve a deepening rather than a counteracting of the transformation in the Islamic shariʿa.

First of all, may I say how warmly I welcome this opportunity to express something of what I owe to French masters, colleagues, and friends. Half a century ago, when I first became concerned with the history of the Middle East as a young instructor at the American University of Beirut, I might have found it more difficult to say this. France itself was unknown to me at that time. I looked at it mainly as the rather unsuccessful ruler of the country where I was living and working, and to which I was bound by ancestral ties. My attitude may have expressed something of the Arab nationalist sentiment of most of my colleagues and students at the American University, and also something of the tradition of Anglo-French rivalry in the Levant.

The year 1948 marks the beginning of al-ghurba (exile or diaspora) and al-nakba (disaster or calamity), words intensely resonant in the Palestinian lexicon. After this decisive date, one can affix “pre-” or “post-” as markers of an apocalyptic moment. In this cultural and political orbit, a new spatial world took shape. Violently crafted and maintained borders that locked Palestinians in and kept them out became features of quotidian life. In 1948, through a combination of expulsion and flight, around 750,000 Palestinians became refugees in neighboring Arab countries. About 100,000 Palestinians remained in their homeland. The core issue, however, is not conditions of departure but denial of an internationally recognized right of return, as elaborated in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.

The events of 1860 constitute a turning point in the modern history of Lebanon. In the space of a few weeks between the end of May and the middle of June, Maronite and Druze communities clashed in Mount Lebanon in a struggle to see which community would control, and define, a stretch of mountainous territory at the center of complicated Eastern Question politics.1 The Druzes carried the day. Every major Maronite town within reach of the Druzes was pillaged, its population either massacred or forced to flee. In July, Damascene Muslims rioted to protest deteriorating economic conditions, targeting and massacring several hundred of the city's Christian population. Although the reasons for the fighting in Mount Lebanon and the riot in Damascus were quite different, the Ottoman, local, and European reactions inevitably conflated both events.2 Following the restoration of order, the conflict of 1860 was the subject, effectively, of an Ottoman government mandate of silence—a desire to forget the events and proceed with administering the newly constituted Mutasarrifiyya of Mount Lebanon. At the same time, however, the sectarian violence prompted an outpouring of local memories that the Ottoman government could neither control nor suppress.

The mass migration from rural areas to larger cities in the Third World and the rapid social changes entailed by this transformation have attracted the attention of social and political scientists since the 1950s. The problematic issue of the “integration” of rural migrants into the urban society and the changes this transformation has brought about have long been among the most studied questions. Yet they still call for more research to increase our understanding of the phenomenon, particularly in our era, which is witnessing radical shifts from earlier times in terms of social, economic, and technological characteristics. The question of “integration to what?” becomes important in political and practical terms. In the 1950s, when mass migration to cities started, the answer to this question seemed quite clear. The cities were the places of the modernizing elites, especially in the case of Ankara, the capital of the modern Turkish Republic. As in other Third World countries, the modernizing bureaucratic and military elites of the early republic, who had assumed the role of transforming the society into a modern, Western one, regarded the city as an effective means for the acculturation of its inhabitants to modern–Western values and ways of life. The modernization theory, which maintains a dichotomy between rural and urban, supported this idea.

In the massive contemporary literature that has come to be known as “Islamic economics,”1 the claim is repeatedly made that an Islamic economic system would achieve a greater degree of economic justice than existing capitalist and socialist systems. An Islamic system, it is said, would be free, on the one hand, of the exploitation and severe inequalities that characterize capitalism, and on the other, of the class struggles and intolerable restrictions that are the hallmarks of socialism.2

Nearly one-third of Turkey's official preaching workforce are women. Their numbers have risen considerably over the past two decades, fueled by an unforeseen feminization of higher religious education as well as the Directorate of Religious Affairs’ attempts to redress its historical gender imbalances. Created in the early Turkish Republic, the Directorate is also historically embedded in (re)defining the appropriate domains and formations of religion, and the female preachers it now employs navigate people's potent fears rooted in memories of this fraught past. In the various neighborhoods of Istanbul, these preachers attempt to overcome conservative Muslims’ cautious ambivalence toward the interpretative and disciplinary powers of a secular state as well as assertive secularists’ discomfort and suspicion over increasingly visible manifestations of religiosity. Thus, the activities of state-sponsored female preachers are inescapably intertwined with the contestation of religious domains and authority in the secular Republic of Turkey and demonstrate an intricate interplay between the politics of religion, gender, and secularism in contemporary Turkish society.