My roundtable contribution inevitably starts with a critique of the field the scholarly utility of which we as contributors wish to defend. The study of the antique sciences (including the history of archaeology and heritage) still has marginal standing in science studies. So does the Middle East as a geographical region, which until recently enjoyed little scholarly interest in the field. The persistent Eurocentric research agenda of science studies has been questioned, however, with the recent call for a “global history of science.” This ambiguous term has triggered new methodological challenges, but it has also created new trenches.

Cultural heritage in the Middle East is under attack. Brutal civil wars and foreign interventions have inflicted tremendous direct and collateral damage on historic sites, monuments, and museums. The chaos has also facilitated the emergence of new identitarian politics wielded by groups operating outside the framework of the nation-state. Consequently, history and geography are being contested and reconfigured, while cultural heritage itself is being divided and reappropriated, and its ill-fated fragments captured by groups that do not recognize them as their own heritage, or as heritage at all, destroyed.

For the majority of Iranians who went through the Islamic Revolution of 1979 with high hopes, the “Spring of Freedom” (Bahar-i Azadi) never really bloomed except perhaps on the specially minted gold coins issued in March 1979 by the Provisional Government of Mahdi Bazargan. Revolutionary optimism quickly died out and gave way to a long winter of discontent. For the peoples of the Arab world who are presently witnessing an “Arab Spring,” the turn of events may be different. Though the current movement has yet to fully unfold, potentially taking months or even years, and though it is unrealistic to generalize about all Arab countries as if they were one monolithic unit, there are features that set today's movements apart from the 1979 Iranian Revolution as much as there are striking parallels.

Incomes and inequality in the Ottoman Empire can be estimated from the information recorded in tax registers called tahrir defterleri, arguably the most prized, heavily used, but still underutilized sources of Ottoman history. Although generations of prominent scholars have been fascinated by these registers and numerous historians have used them for a variety of regional and historical studies, their full potential has not been fully utilized in quantitative analysis of questions with a broader comparative dimension, wider geographic coverage, and larger historical significance.

Commenting on his novel Riḥlat Gandhī al-Ṣaghīr (The Journey of Little Gandhi), Elias Khoury has made two conflicting assertions. At a gathering held to discuss the book shortly after it was published, Khoury reaffirmed his political and ideological stance in relation to the war in Lebanon. While acknowledging that Gandhi, the protagonist, is a victim of violence and poverty, Khoury said that he regards war as a necessity, a passage to a higher and nobler aim:

I am not one of those who preach against violence, nor do I claim that I am against the war.

I have participated in the war, and I remain true to my original choice, and loyal to my comrades who died the death of martyrs. I refuse to go along with the popular “anti-war” fad. At the same time, I remain faithful to the truth and the goal for which we started the war: the creation of another more just and democratic society⃜ [U]nfortunately, we have not succeeded, but at least, it is our duty to tell the truth and… what actually happened.

Between 1905 and 1911, Iranians were engaged in a protracted struggle over whether a constitutionalist regime would replace royal absolutism.1 Little in Iran's political culture before 1905 had hinted at this conflict before it broke out, and for the past thirty years historians have been seeking this genealogy for it. Most have searched among the papers of officials and diplomats, often examining unpublished or posthumously published manuscripts with little or no contemporary circulation, at least before the revolution,2 but we might get closer to its context if we look at what was going on outside the governmental elite. Here I will explore the growth of belief in representative government within an Iranian millenarian movement, the Bahai faith, in the last third of the 19th century, as an example of how the new ideas circulated that led to the conflict.3 Historians have noted a link between millenarianism and democratic or populist thought elsewhere, after all; for instance they have long recognized the importance of chiliastic ideas in e English Revolution of the 17th century. The republicanism of American dissidents and revolutionaries was also sometimes tinged with a civil millennialism. The Bahais of Iran, too, combined democratic rhetoric with millenarian imagery in the generation before the Constitutional Revolution.4

The Sa⊂ūdī Civil War, which developed after the death of the Imām Faiṣal at al-Riyāḍ in A.H. 1282/A.D. 1865, and which was largely responsible for the debilitation and ultimate demise of the Second Sa⊂ūdī State, has received relatively little attention from either Sa⊂ūdī or Western historians. In neglecting this period, modern Sa⊂ūdī scholars may have been influenced by the consideration which led Wahhābī chroniclers of an earlier generation to provide only cursory treatment of the Civil War in their accounts of Najdī history; the decade between the Imām Faiṣal's death and the resolution of the conflict in 1293/1876, characterised as it was by persistent fraternal rivalry and displays unprincipled political opportunism, does not represent a particularly creditable episode in the history of the āl Sa⊂ūd.

My interest in the religious lesson (dars) springs from field research on religious life in a Transjordanian village conducted intermittently over a period of thirty years, beginning in 1959 and culminating in a (1989) book on the Muslim preacher and the Islamic sermon (khuṭba). That book did not describe or analyze the dars, but it assumed that its content was distinctive and different from the khuṭba. It expounded practical rather than legal norms of behavior and provided useful information on day-to-day religious obligations, what constituted violations of mores, and the rituals of marriage, birth, and death, rather than conveying meaning through core images and metaphors. The assumption was that the sermon dealt mainly with messages of religious exhortation and the lesson dealt with the legal and ritual aspects of religion. I also assumed that the ethos of the dars allowed ritual freedom and a fair amount of give-and-take between preacher and audience, while the khuṭba was informed by an ethos of ritual order. In terms of rhetoric, I assumed that although the sermon often involved a “transformation of quality [imaginative] space” (the phrase is that of James Fernandez), the lesson did not. Finally, I assumed that the lesson emphasized the preacher's role as “home-town boy” (ibn al-balad) far more than the sermon did, as expressed, for instance, in its dependence on colloquial speech and minimal use of theological themes. The detailed description and analysis below has led me to reconsider these assumptions.

During the last decade or so, educational institutions of developing countries have attracted the attention of social scientists as the prime movers of structural changes in such societies. Furthermore, among some of those who are concerned with economic development and growth, there has emerged a common belief that a major barrier to economic development, probably, is not so much the scarcity of physical resources and capital, but rather the lack of trained manpower owing to insufficient or mismanaged investment in education.

The paper discusses the narratives of Jews from Mashhad, who were forced to convert to Islam in 1839. The community narrative as well as academic research is dominated by a modern understanding of religious identity and religious boundaries that fail to account for the diversity of practices among the community of converts, including multiple forms of religious belonging, and the switching of identities according to time and place. Based on historical sources and interviews with descendants from the Mashhadi community, the paper traces how a particular narrative of the history of the Jews from Mashhad prevailed and which significance this narrative entails for Mashhadi community and identity until today. While the Jews from Mashhad are a rather unique case among Iranian Jews–due to the long period in which they lived as converts–their pattern of memory building reflects a general trend among Jews from the Muslim world to assimilate to modern ideas of being Jewish.

During the past two decades, historians of the last Ottoman centuries have produced ground-breaking research documenting the increasing economic interaction between Europe and the Middle East. Relying on information about the empire's trade with Europe, scholars have concluded that the 19th century was a time of transformation–in culture, in politics, and in economics. By thus calling our attention to changing circumstances, these historians, economists, art historians, and sociologists have outlined a general landscape of upheaval and change.1 Monographs on Ottoman cities, focusing on the effects of international trade on coastal areas, have begun to sketch in the epicenters of massive economic dislocation.2

Analyzing the politics of the past in the context of the Armenian Genocide reveals an evolving interplay between international norms, official narratives, and broader discourses. This short essay explores three aspects of these interrelationships. First, I draw on my own research to highlight the ways in which changes in Turkey's narrative of the genocide—typically referred to in official discourse as sözde Ermeni sorunu (the so-called Armenian question), or more recently as 1915 olayları (the events of 1915)—have to some extent paralleled shifts in the meaning and salience of the norm against genocide. Second, I note key ways in which the Turkish state's official discourse has shaped public understandings—within and, to a lesser extent, outside Turkey—of the nature of the violence against Ottoman Armenians. Third, I suggest that in influencing public understandings of the relationship between this event and the concept of genocide, Turkey's official narrative has the potential to affect understandings of the meaning of genocide more generally.

This article analyzes in depth four main writings by the pioneering nahḍa intellectual Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi, who drew on classical kinds of adab to articulate new kinds of political subjectivities. He especially draws on the image of the body politic as a body with the king at its heart. But he reconfigures this image, instead placing the public, or the people, at the heart of politics, a “vanquishing sultan” that governs through public opinion. For al-Tahtawi, adab is a kind of virtuous comportment that governs self and soul and structures political relationships. In this, he does not diverge from classical conceptions of adab as righteous behavior organizing proper social and political relationships. But in his thought, disciplinary training in adab is crucial to the citizen-subject's capacity for self-rule, as he submits to the authority of his individual conscience, ensuring not only freedom, but also justice. These ideas have had lasting impact on Islamic thought, as they have been recycled for the political struggles of new generations.

In the late nineteenth century, when American boys were devouring the success stories of Horatio Alger and cultivating the prescribed virtues of thrift and industry in hopes of jumping from rags to riches overnight, boys on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean were dreaming similar dreams. The Christian boy of the Levant was particularly drawn to such success stories. His decision for a business career was not entirely of his own choosing, for as members of a Christian minority in a Muslim land his ancestors had long been excluded from the most prestigious official careers of the Ottoman Empire–the bureaucracy, the military, and the Muslim religious profession. Since these choice callings were reserved for Muslims, the dhimmî subjects of the Sultan had no choice but to concentrate their energies on banking and trading, shopkeeping and shipping. Making the best of the situation, the indigenous Christian of the Ottoman Empire threw himself into these business careers and sometimes amassed such a fortune that he came to occupy unofficial positions of considerable influence. Often his position as agent and protégé of a European shipping house gave him a decided advantage over Muslim merchants. Increasing the toehold given to it by the Capitulations agreements, Europe made its power increasingly felt in the Middle East during the nineteenth century, and the protégé of a European power could no longer be treated arbitrarily by Ottoman authorities.

This article focuses on the writings and literary networks of the Egyptian intellectual and activist Sayyid Qutb during the late 1940s. Scholars have tended to explain Qutb's political radicalization and joining of the Muslim Brotherhood during the subsequent decade via aspects of his personality or personal life, such as his quick temper, conservatism, or frustration over unfulfilled aspirations to become a writer. Drawing on three periodicals published respectively by leftist, Islamist, and independent aspiring writers, I instead place Qutb's criticism of political, economic, and cultural elites in the context of an emerging generation of critical intellectuals. By shedding light on intellectual cooperation between Qutb, Muslim Brothers, Marxists, and independent writers, this article challenges established scholarly narratives that locate the Islamist project outside the Egyptian intellectual field.

Students of nineteenth-century Ottoman political history have concentrated on the central provinces of the Empire. Students of Arab political history of the same period have concentrated on anti-Ottoman nationalism centered in Cairo and Beirut. Relatively little work has yet been done to illuminate the nature of Ottoman government in the Arab provinces. The picture that is presented by Western travelers, Arab nationalists reminiscing about their youth, and diplomatic reports has been incomplete, biased against the Imperial government, and sometimes factually inaccurate.

The oil price increases in the 1970s caused a transfer of wealth from importers to exporters and resulted in three major consequences. It led to a series of shocks in the economies of the industrial countries. It reduced further the slow pace of growth in the non-OPEC LDCs, and it distorted the sectoral growth in OPEC itself. Such unwarranted results have attracted the attention of both scholars and decision makers.

When World War I ended and the political map of the Middle East was redrawn, the ruler-straight borders separating the Fertile Crescent countries were not determined wholly in Europe, when the mandates were divided between Britain and France, as is commonly believed. The border between Syria and Iraq was determined between 1918 and 1920, when Iraqi officers serving in the Syrian army brought about the annexation of regions originally designated for British-occupied Iraq to Faysal 's Arab government in Syria.

This article, which draws largely from Arabica press sources from 1885 to 1900, seeks to sharpen our view of social attitudes reflected in the activities of local Freemasons in Egypt and Syria during the last decades of the Ottoman Empite. A number of earlier historians have attached considerable importance to pre- and post-1908 masonic orders and Ottoman politics. Too few, however, have tried to analyze ways in which essential social themes, some widely recognized as having importance across international and intercultural lines, were viewed through the perspective of late 19th-century Freemasonry. A first task in this introduction, therefore, will be to see how Masons in Europe and the Middle East viewed, or were presumed to view, a number of such social themes in general terms. We will then turn to one specific issue which clearly assumed more than passing importance as a propagandistic cause pursued by a small but influential group of Masons in Syria and Egypt over nearly two decades' time. We may tentatively suggest that the purpose of such endeavors was to encourage majority acceptance of the relevance and value of a cause espoused for the body politic as a whole, without necessary reference to its original, here clearly minority, proponents.

By resolution of the ruling Command Council on 19 March 1977, a new judicial organization known as the niyāba (formal name: al-niyāba al-'āmma) was introduced in the Yemen Arab Republic. Derived ultimately from a French model, the new institution has been provided with wide statutory powers, many of which are new to Yemen. Essentially, the niyāba is an agency of investigation and prosecution, with jurisdiction in criminal cases and other areas of “public” rights, It has responsibilities also in family law, especially in cases involving the dissolution of marriage and the protection of minors. In addition, the niyāba has authority over the “officials of judicial enforcement,” and it is charged with the oversight of jails. Although the niyāba's institutional ancestry is traceable to the French ministère public (or parquet), the transfer of the European institution to Yemeni soil was not direct, since Yemeni legislators modelled their niyāba on an Egyptian legal organ of the same name. The Egyptian niyāba was instituted in 1876 as a copy of the ministère public, but evolved considerably since its introduction there (Hill, 1979). The arrival of the niyāba in Yemen thus was mediated by an interval of one hundred years of development outside of France.