The council of ministers constitutes the single most important decision-making center in parliamentary systems. Commonly called the cabinet, this body, under the leadership of the prime minister, defines a general framework for governmental policy as well as the substance of policy on matters which affect large groups of citizens in society. Members of cabinets not only hold extensive decision-making powers but also enjoy access to substantial public resources which they can distribute.

An increased awareness of the activities of Orientalists has occurred in recent years due to the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism. However, as most students and scholars who study the East know, Said's work is only one of the more recent discussions of this subject. Others who have critiqued Orientalists and Orientalism include A. L. Tibawi and Abdallah Laroui, and, at an earlier time, Jamāl al-Dīn “al-Afghānī” and Muḥammad Abduh. Western Orientalists have even been engaged in evaluating the work of other Orientalists, and even critiquing the critics; for example, J.-J. Waardenburg, D. P. Little, and the participants in the recent Giorgio Levi Della Vida Biennal Conference.

The recent crisis in Turkey has been described primarily as a political crisis caused by an unworkable political system under attack from organized terrorism from both the right and the left. While this may be valid as an immediate cause, there are some structural and ideological contradictions in the Turkish economic system which must also be highlighted. These contradictions have evolved gradually over the last half century in the course of Turkey's efforts to achieve industrial and economic growth. They have been exacerbated in particular by a process of lopsided industrialization after 1960 which, as in most other developing countries, has resulted in increased poverty and unemployment while achieving overall growth rates of 6 percent or better.

Few Western students of the Arab world are as well known as the 19th-century British scholar Edward William Lane (1801–76). During his long career, Lane produced a number of highly influential works: An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), a translation of The Thousand and One Nights (1839–41), Selections from the Ḳur-án (1843), and the Arabic–English Lexicon (1863–93). The Arabic–English Lexicon remains a pre-eminent work of its kind, and Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians is still a basic text for both Arab and Western students. Through his published work, Lane contributed substantially to the prevailing Western picture of the Arab world.

New evidence, culled from the Nablus advisory council (majlis al-shūrā) records and based on an actual Ottoman population count taken in December 1849, indicates that the city's population at that time numbered at least 20,000 people, more than twice the frequently cited figure of 8,000–9,000. This revision raises serious doubts about the veracity of hitherto commonly accepted population figures, most of them based on contemporary estimates by Western observers, for the various regions of Palestine during the first three-quarters of the 19th century. Moreover, when compared to available data for Nablus from the 16th and the late 19th centuries, it seems that the pattern of Nablus's demographic development differs from what the proponents of Ottoman decline and modernization theses have argued.2 Instead of decreasing during the so-called dark ages of Ottoman decline in the 17th and 18th centuries, Nablus's population increased significantly; and instead of growing robustly during the so-called period of modernization in the second half of the 19th century, it appears to have leveled off.

Revolutions are by nature unpredictable and unsettling. That the wave of revolutions in North Africa and the Arab Middle East began so unexpectedly and spread with such speed, leading to the fall of the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, has added to the concern regarding the “new order” that is to come after the initial euphoria. From the outset, the fear has been that these revolutions will follow the same trajectory as Iran did in 1979—in other words, that they will marginalize those who launched the revolutions and provide the grounds for the rise to power of the most savvy, purposeful, and best organized of the opposition groups, namely, the Islamists. Yet when one considers the recent uprisings in the Arab world through the prism of Iran's experiences in 1979, the parallels are not so evident. Mindful of the variations and distinctions between each of the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, it would appear that in broad terms, and beyond superficial similarities, there is little in common between the events of Iran in 1979 and what has happened in the past year in the Arab world.

This essay analyzes the organizational culture(s) of Egyptian public-sector firms. I accomplish this through an ethnography of two state-owned textile companies in Alexandria. I describe the cultures of these organizations in terms of hierarchy, accountability, trust, and authority relations and assess the effects of these features on the quality of working life and overall efficiency.1 What is it like to work in these companies? How is authority exercised, and what is the nature of relations between superiors and subordinates? What impact, if any, do the cultures of these firms have on performance, efficiency, and productivity?

Professional attorneyship emerged in the Ottoman Empire in tandem with the consolidation of the Nizamiye (“regular”) court system during the late 19th century. This article analyzes the emergence of an Ottoman legal profession, emphasizing two developments. First, the Nizamiye courts advanced a formalist legal culture, exhibited, inter alia, by the expansion of legal procedure. Whereas the pre-19th century court of law was highly accessible to lay litigants, the proceduralization of court proceedings in the 19th century limited the legibility of the judicial experience to legal experts, rendering legal counseling almost indispensible in civil and criminal litigation. Second, the reformers made efforts to render state-granted legal license a sign of professional competence, presenting a formal distinction between the old “agents” (vekils), who lacked formal legal training, and the professional “trial attorneys” (dava vekils). In practice, however, lawyers of both categories had to adapt to the Nizamiye formalist culture.

The 19 August 1953 toppling of Muhammad Musaddiq's government in Iran was an important historical event from various perspectives, many of which are being discussed by Middle East observers to this date. First, it was the first covert post-World War II operation by the U.S. government, in cooperation with Britain, to topple the constitutional government of a sovereign nation. Operation AJAX, as the coup d'état came to be called by the CIA, was implemented at the height of the Cold War, and as such was accompanied by many familiar justifications. The most important of these were the improbability of any resolution to the oil-nationalization crisis between Iran and Britain as long as Musaddiq remained in power and the communist threat posed by the Tudeh Party of Iran and its Soviet sponsor.1 The long-term consequence of this intervention can partially explain the 1979 revolution in Iran and the ongoing crisis in Iran–U.S. relations.

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Assyrians—Syriac-speaking Middle Easterners belonging throughout the medieval period to either of the two branches of Eastern Christianity (Jacobite and Nestorian)—remained a little-known community scattered throughout Ottoman and Persian territory. The Assyrian community examined here was concentrated in Iranian Azerbaijan, mainly around the town of Urumiyah (Rizaiyah). Together with tribal Assyrians, who remained in their ancestral mountain villages on either side of the Perso-Ottoman border, Urumiyan Assyrians formed the nucleus of the Nestorian community until World War I. They were united by the same language, modern Eastern Syriac (henceforth referred to as Assyrian), and owed ecclesiastical allegiance to the Church of the East under the hereditary Patriarch, the Mar Shamūn.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the cities on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, Tunis, Alexandria, Beirut, Smyrna, and Istanbul among them, experienced an influx of foreign communities which, combined with an increase in the indigenous populations and new urban policies on the part of certain rulers, tended to disrupt customary patterns of urban relationships. Although the scholarship of recent years has provided a new awareness of the network of interrelationships which held together the segments of medieval Islamic urban society, studies on the nineteenth-century changes in those relationships as represented by the policies of Muhammad ῾Alī, Aḥmad Bey, and the Ottoman Tanzimat reformers, have tended to focus more on aspects of state and government than on cities as such. Yet cities, especially capital cities, reflect most intensely periods of social and institutional transition.

The Arab region is generally thought of as wealthy, being the recipient of a large income from oil. In reality, oil wealth is confined to a small minority of states and peoples; most of the region's population are poor.

This paper discusses the employment pattern and future problems of the six poorest countries of the Arab region: Syria, Jordan, Sudan, South Yemen (Peoples' Democratic Republic of Yemen), Egypt, and North Yemen (Yemen Arab Republic).

This study takes a critical perspective on the making of sectarian difference and Alevi precarity in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on our research from 2013 to 2016, we present an analysis of stories and conversations that took place amongst Alevi and Sunni focus group participants, primarily in Istanbul. These conversations illustrate how sectarian difference can be made in the relations between neighbors as differences become coded as sectarian and taken up within systems of power and domination. At the same time, our research also shows how, in the entangled relations between neighbors, questions of ethics and mutual responsibility arise, though these relations sometimes become uneasy or even unbearable. Finally, we show how the question of “knowing” difference is taken up within a power-laden discourse of sectarianism, one that is tied to the history of Alevis (and others) in Turkey while also extending well beyond this context.

Viewing an exhibition of civil war paintings in 1886, Lea Barakat wrote that her “country came to mind: the splendor of its ruins, the wonders of their form like the fortress of Baalbek, the ruins of Palmyra, and the scenes of Lebanon…” Native women should paint like this, she states, and “not leave a scene [of Lebanon] unpainted… They can decorate the rooms of their homes and sitting rooms with these pictures…” She concludes that “since the ladies of our country are smarter and more industrious in their handcrafts than [American] ladies,” they too can obtain a similar level of “wealth, honorable work, admiration of the masses, and praise for the virtue of their [arts and crafts]. This study is a prolegomenon to examining the topography of visual culture and modernity to which Barakat alludes. Rather than painting, this article focuses on photography produced by Arabs during the late Ottoman and early Mandate periods in Lebanon. Less concerned with using photographs to document social transformations, this study theorizes how production and deployment of the photographic image played a part in the conceptualization of a bourgeois individualist subjectivity in Lebanon, which is claimed not to exist in the Arab world.

In 929, the eighth Umayyad ruler of al-Andalus, ʿAbd al-Rahman III (r. 912–61) formally assumed the exclusive caliphal prerogatives of khuṭba and sikka. After nearly two centuries of independent Umayyad rule in the Iberian peninsula, ʿAbd al-Rahman III issued a circular to his governors directing them to address him forthwith as amīr al-muʾminīn, or Commander of the Faithful, and to ensure that the khuṭba, or Friday sermon, in every congregational mosque invoked his name with this designation. With this he reclaimed the Umayyad dynasty's rights to the caliphal title: “We have understood that to continue not to use this title, which is incumbent upon us, is to allow one of our rights to decay and a firm designation to become lost.” Later the same year, he established a mint in Cordoba and ordered the striking of gold dinars in his name (sikka), resuming the minting of gold coins in al-Andalus, which had been suspended since the overthrow of the Umayyad caliphate in Syria.

Over the past two decades, scholars of the Middle East have produced an impressive body of scholarship that seeks to understand diverse groups and practices that are together called political Islam. Much of our work has drawn little attention outside of academia despite the obsession with Islam shared by policymakers and the general public. The many careful studies produced by academics and some journalists—typically based on extensive field research and use of primary sources in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian—have to contend with bestselling books that trade in fears about the irrational, West-hating Muslim fanatic. Unfortunately, serious scholarship on political Islam cannot ignore this terrain of stereotypes and fearmongering, as it dominates mainstream debates about Islam and the Middle East. But in responding to these discourses, we often allow them to dictate our analytic starting point, resulting in less theoretical innovation and empirical insight than might emerge if we moved beyond the focus on Islamist groups and whether most are moderate or radical. Indeed, we might do well to abandon altogether the idea that “political Islam” represents a tangible object of study.

This article analyzes the sensationalized media coverage of a serial murder case during the Egyptian revolution of the early interwar era. Despite conflicting evidence, the media blamed the murders on two sisters from southern Egypt named Raya and Sakina. Through a close reading of Egyptian editorials and news reports, I argue that middle-class nationalists constructed Raya and Sakina as barbaric women who threatened to pull the nation back in time in order to legitimize their claim to power. Borrowing from Ann Stoler's analysis of the relationship between race and sexuality and Maria Lugones's concept of the modern/colonial gender system, this article maintains that race was as central to nationalist conceptions of female barbarism as gender, sexuality, and class. The enduring depiction of Raya and Sakina as the quintessential barbaric Egyptian women symbolizes the way in which the modern woman was constructed at the intersection of race and sexuality.

The period between the early 1930s and 1946 witnessed in Iran an intellectual phenomenon unique in the recent, history of that country. This phenomenon was embodied in the person of Ahmad Kasravî (1890–1946), one of the illustrious figures of Iran in the realms of scholarship and social reforms. Kasravî was a man of considerable and varied intellectual talents and great courage. His activities were spread over a very wide range.He became the center of many controversies, not the least important and widespread of which was that concerning classical Persian poetry. It is with this aspect of his work that the present series of papers is concerned.

One of the most complex questions in the study of the history of Arab nationalism is that of the relationship between Islam and nationalism in collective political identity. This complexity shows itself clearly in the specific case of the Palestinian national movement during the early Mandatory period, when the Islamic political sensibilities that historically had been central to the Ottoman Empire were thoroughly intertwined with Palestinian territorial nationalism and Pan-Arabism.1 It is not difficult to identify individual Palestinian activists who expressed their political identities at various times through any or all of these categories.2 Clearly, religious and nationalist bases of social and political identity are neither mutually exclusive nor unchanging over time. Concepts of identity, whether expressed through kinship relations, citizenship, or religious and national identity, are generated, chosen, and manipulated in specific historical circumstances. As Dale Eickelman explains, “These forms do not exist as objects that can be torn from social and cultural contexts by anthropologists for recording and classification into typologies.”3 One can therefore ask, Under what circumstances did Palestinian activists choose to express their political identity in terms of nationalism?