The article explores the Zionist cultural economy in interwar Palestine, by studying the emergence of the field of consumption as an arena for political struggles among Jews and between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish nationalist movement employed dominant contemporary assumptions about economic nationalism in attempts to politicize the economy of British Palestine, including through campaigns advocating ethnonational separatism in consumption. Unlike other “buy local” movements around the world, these were not directed solely against imports; rather, they were often “buy Jewish” campaigns waged against the consumption of commodities produced by the rival ethnonational sector in Palestine. Using a variety of archival and media sources, the article tracks the development of Jewish separatist consumption campaigns in interwar Palestine, uncovering a gradual amplification of their ethnonational emphasis that paralleled the escalation of the Arab–Jewish conflict. The cultural mechanisms used to attribute ethnic qualities to objects and define them as either “Jewish” or “foreign” are analyzed with particular attention to the conceptual contradictions in the definitions of a Jewish product, which were shaped by economic conflicts and the diverse political conceptions of Jewish identity. The study of separatist consumption sheds new light on the “dual society” thesis, revealing the deep grip of separatist approaches across multiple layers of the Jewish middle class in the Yishuv.

In this article, I argue that commercial legislation promulgated and implemented in Egypt during the first half of the 19th century was one of several factors that diminished the effect of merchants’ social networks, reduced merchants’ identity to a purely professional dimension, and made profit dependent upon association with the state. The transformation of merchants’ social roles was not part of a natural evolution toward modernization and the specialized division of labor. Rather, it resulted from interactions between state-building endeavors, pressures from established merchants who sought to parry threats to their position while profiting from new business opportunities, and an influx of merchants from outside the Ottoman sultanate, who could draw neither on personal connections nor on knowledge of local markets but instead had to depend on the protection of the European consulates and the influence of the growing Egyptian state apparatus.

Political scientists, development specialists, and policymakers assume a central place for states and state action as they define problems and design solutions. They ascribe to the state dominance over all other social organizations, viewing it as pervasive and inevitably triumphant. Even scholars such as Joel Migdal, Timothy Mitchell, and James Scott, who focus on the boundaries of the state, portray the state as more organized, technologically savvy, and capable of extending its power than social counterparts, putting the latter on the defensive. Scholars and policymakers alike also have arrogated to the state the moral monopoly to pursue certain imperatives that other organizational forms can and do aspire to provide. These include providing security and protection from predation, allocating scarce resources, and arbitrating values and interests in society.

This article rethinks area studies through the diasporic histories of influential graduates of the Syrian Protestant College. My focus is on Philip Hitti and his ties with fellow alumni who migrated to the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Examining his first visit to Brazil in 1925, letter exchanges through the 1940s, and a second trip in 1951, I ask how Hitti and São Paulo-based alumni sought to establish an Arab studies program in Brazil. In borrowing a template for studying the Middle East, Hitti and colleagues imbued it with a widespread sentiment that Arab and Muslim legacies of the Iberian peninsula had shaped Portugal, and thus Brazil's historical and linguistic formation. They relocated a model of area studies but refitted its content. In revealing how the institution of area studies moved across and merged with varied sociocultural settings, these diasporic histories provincialize the U.S. model for knowing the Middle East.

The spring of 1894 was an important period for Constantinople's Armenian community. Two assassination attempts targeted the Armenian patriarch Khoren Ashekian, and the chairperson of the Armenian Political Assembly Maksudzade Simon Bey, respectively. In both cases, the assailants were partisans of the Hunchakian Party, an Armenian revolutionary organization established in 1887. Analyzing the reasons behind these two attacks, and the imperial context in which they took place, this article challenges aspects of mainstream Armenian and Turkish historiography on the Hamidian period. It argues that a critical look at these two attacks through a socio-economic paradigm rather than an ethno-political one provides a viable analytical framework for deconstructing the notion of the “Armenian millet” as an undifferentiated community. More generally, the article explores the role of violence in shaping intracommunal relationships in the early 1890s.

This article explores the performative politics of devotional soundscapes at Coptic Christian mūlid festivals. Echoing the state's reformist efforts in the 1990s to transform Muslim saint festivals into utilitarian spaces and their goers into “modern” Egyptian citizens, today the Coptic Church works to refashion these popular festivals from places of debauchery into morally productive spaces. Aided by affluent Cairene-based volunteers, church choirs travel from Cairo's poshest neighborhoods to these festivals to actively sing, disseminate, and teach popular religious songs (taratīl) in an effort to develop poorer Christian pilgrims into modern, pious, and more audible “citizens of heaven.” Through the analysis of one church choir's taratīl ministry at the mūlid, I illustrate how middle-class spiritual volunteers disrupt and, at times, reinscribe the Coptic Church's disciplinary efforts on the festival's poorer pilgrims, particularly as they look to modernize popular festivity into grounds of Christian ethical transformation.

The apparent fixity of the state has been produced by state-building projects, but also by the logic of state analysis that needs an object for its study. Encouraging critical reflection on the essentialism often associated with these processes, Pierre Bourdieu argued that these two aspects of “state formation” are contingently and epistemologically intertwined: “to endeavor to think the state is to take the risk of taking over (or being taken over by) the thought of the state.” Others, including Ellen Lust in her essay, have focused on state-making practices, and their symbolic and material effects that produce and reproduce the state as dominant idea and as ultimate institutional frame in a particular time and place. Taking this further, Kevin Dunn frames “‘the state’ as a discursively produced structural/structuring effect that relies on constant acts of performativity to call it into being.” It is this performative aspect of state making in all its variety that will be the focus here, echoing themes in the pieces by Lisa Anderson and Rabab El-Mahdi.

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.

During the final years of Ottoman rule and the three decades of British rule, Palestine witnessed the emergence of a community of professionally trained Palestinian Arab doctors. This study traces the evolution of the medical profession in Palestine against the background of the shifting cultural and symbolic capital of an expanding urban middle class and the educational possibilities that enabled this development. Palestinian Arab doctors are examined through a number of interconnected prisms: their activity in social, political, and professional regional networks, their modus operandi under British colonial rule, their response to Zionism and its accompanying influx of immigrant Jewish doctors, and their ability to mobilize collectively under a shared national vision.

This article examines the rise and fall of the Malhamé family at the court of Abdülhamit II. The point of departure is the flight and arrest of six Malhamé brothers and the accompanying outbursts of popular anger at them during the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. The analysis locates the historical conditions that made the Malhamé phenomenon possible in the interstices between Levantine society, late Ottoman bureaucracy, and European diplomacy and capitalist expansion. In order to bring into conversation the hitherto unconnected literatures on the Levant and the Ottoman state, the Malhamé story is framed in the analytical concept of transimperialism. This concept shares affinities with wider transnational studies. But it is also grounded in the specific political, economic, and social processes of the Levant—both within the Ottoman Empire and among it and its British, French, German, and Italian imperial rivals at the height of the “Eastern Question.”

In response to the outbreak of the Arab Revolt of 1936, a coterie of five prominent entrepreneurs and intellectuals in the Mandatory Jewish community formulated a capitalist binationalist resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This paper examines the genesis of and debate over the little-known Concord they proposed and compares it with better-known liberal and socialist binationalist plans. “The Five,” as they came to be known, were the only binationalists seeking to base political parity on economic integration. The occasion of their blueprint allows further exploration of the preconditions for an effective binationalist program, among them the structure of labor markets, political preferences of minorities and majorities in regard to sovereignty, and levels of mutual trust. Ultimately, binationalist resolutions of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict were precluded by the Labor Settlement Movement's separatist state-building strategy.

There is a stock argument on whether Iraq is an “artificial” creation of colonial power or a “real” entity with historical and psychological depth and identity. It is a futile question because all nation–states, in one form or another, are historical creations. The processes of their creation are diverse and lead to different outcomes in the degree of coherence and permanence. Our thinking on the subject has been highly influenced by the seminal concepts advanced by Benedict Anderson on the “imagining” of the nation, which is, in turn, underlined by the socioeconomic processes of modernity. The state, often superimposed from above, is a principal actor in this process. Educational systems, tied to qualifications and employment, for instance, are powerful means of enforcing a unified national language and, in turn, the medium of literacy, the press and media, and the means of imagining the nation. The state makes the nation, more or less successfully. The intelligentsia are the cadres of these processes. They and the state class, with which they overlap, are subject to the vagaries of political conflicts and struggles and, in the case of Middle Eastern states, to the repression and violence of the state and militant sectors of the population. In the case of Iraq these troublesome manifestations are particularly evident. The books under review are concerned with these processes and in particular with the role of the ideological cadres and institutions in their unfolding.

The Sudan came to know of Communism directly during the 1940s, through Egypt and Herbert Storey. Egyptian Communism had passed through two phases. The first phase was in the 1920s when, under Joseph Rosenthal and his Alexandria Group, it appeared first as a socialist movement and then as a Communist one proper. During this phase it made some impact on some of the Egyptian intelligentsia, a few trade unions, and a small number of workers. It also tried, though unsuccessfully, to join the Comintern so as to act as its official representative in this part of the world, thereby assuming for itself the role that organization had already entrusted to the Communist parties of the European colonial countries. However, the efforts of Egyptian Communism during this first stage received a mortal blow in the mid-1920s at the hands of Saʿd Zaghlūl, the leader of the Wafd party, when he began to see in the activities of the Communists a serious challenge to the hegemony of the Wafd in Egyptian politics.

This article examines the significant yet largely overlooked role of the Mzabis, a community from the northern edges of the Algerian desert, in Algerian and Tunisian anticolonialism and nationalism. In so doing, it pursues two aims: first, to shed light on the importance of Tunis to the politicization of the Mzabis in the 1920s and to their induction into local and regional anticolonial and national movements; and second, to highlight the tensions of subsuming regional identities into overarching national identities by focusing on Mzabi political activists’ negotiation of the relationship between the Mzab and Algeria as a national project. The article also explores the spectrum of political possibilities and alternatives envisioned by Mzabis as they participated in religious reform, anticolonial, and nationalist movements. This spectrum, I argue, conveys the fluid relationship between local, national, and regional identities, thus undermining teleological readings of national identity formation.

Considering geography's potential to inform research and teaching in Middle East studies, it is necessary to acknowledge that the discipline's full potential in the United States—despite many accomplishments in recent decades—is yet to be realized. In American higher education, this lack of engagement always seemed to me a consequence of at least four factors in both fields’ institutional and disciplinary histories. As a matter of self-examination, we should first acknowledge that regional orientations in geography (e.g., the Berkeley/Sauer school's emphasis on Latin America and its indigenous and agrarian landscapes) often overlooked the area, leaving engagement with the Middle East more to the efforts of individual scholars and students. Second, despite recent surges in geography's importance and institutional presence on many American campuses, for a variety of reasons (not all of which are agreed upon) there were several periods in the 20th century when geography departments were eliminated from many of those universities regarded as leaders in Middle East studies. Third, forces of inertia—institutional, fiscal, pedagogical (e.g., offerings of language classes, particularly at advanced levels), and mental—set in place by the first two factors are impossible to overstate and difficult to overcome. Fourth and finally, American notions of how to define geography are often tenuous; this is true not only within the general population but also among scholars of other disciplines, compelling recurrent rediscoveries of the discipline. As a consequence—and apart from the contributions of individual scholars—only in the past two decades has geography witnessed significant exchanges with Middle East studies beyond select areas of inquiry in the discipline (e.g., urban studies), and a regional specialty group for Middle East geography within the American Association of Geographers (known until recently as the Association of American Geographers) did not emerge until the late 1990s. In the following paragraphs, therefore, I introduce geography as a discipline for scholars of the Middle East. This introduction provides a useful starting point as I proceed to engage with one (sub)subfield of the discipline that features routinely in both academic and policy-making engagements with the Middle East and its study: geopolitics.

During the mandatory period following World War I Britain's attempts to implement the provisions of the Balfour Declaration and establish a ‘National Home’ for the Jews in Palestine encountered stubborn resistance from the local Arab population. As dissatisfaction mounted in the late 1930s, militant nationalists were able to mobilize popular support for the Arab cause and foster the growth of an opposition movement directed against the British. The most visible and significantleader of this movement was the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini.

In his extensive work on Iranian society and its problems, Aḥmad Kasravî (1890–1946), Iranian scholar, jurist, and social thinker, identified much of Classical Persian poetry as a major source of those problems. He discussed his views in a series of articles, in public lectures, and in two books dealing exclusively with the subject.1 In addition, he touched on the subject, in passages short and long, in many others of his hundreds of articles and dozens of monographs and books, published between 1934 and 1946, when he was assassinated.2

Anthropologists have devoted a good deal of attention recently to what they call ‘complex society’. This rather vague concept developed in contrast with ‘primitive’ or ‘simple’ society, the small-scale, isolated, local-oriented, non- literate grouping of like social parts which anthropologists made, or fancied, their primary object of study. This is Tonnies’ gemeinschaft, held together by Durkheim's ‘mechanical solidarity.’ ‘Complex society’ on the other hand, is more similar to Tonnies’ gesellschaft, bases to some degree upon Durkheim's ‘organic solidarity’; it has many differentiated parts, ingeniously interwoven into elaborate structures, with specializations and rankings and overlappings and other imaginative complications. More and more anthropologists found themselves, whatever their original intentions, involved in studies that were manifestly of ‘complex society.’ This was the result of two developments: One was the encapsulation of most ‘simple’ societies by colonial or national societies, and the concomitant engagement with government, economic markets, and development (or under development). This encapsulation was not something completely new that happened during the course of anthropological investigation, but something which had been going on and which anthropologists ‘discovered’ and began to devote attention to. The other development was the carrying of anthropological research to the areas of the ‘great civilizations’ in East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. In these areas, long-recorded histories, literate traditions, great states and empires, and sophisticated technologies belied the notion of ‘simple’ society, and raised embarrassing questions about classical anthropological methodology, ‘participant observation’ in a constricted area for one or two years.

When the Prophet Muhammad died on 7 June 632, the larger part of Arabia had already accepted Islam. In fact, Islam had created a solid Arab community that dominated Arabia and was ready to begin its amazing expansive movement in world history. The Arab conquests put an end to the Sassanid Empire and deprived the Byzantine Empire of its Asiatic dominions up to the Taurus and all its African possessions. Muslim troops crossed Gibraltar and subdued almost all the Iberian peninsula. In brief: with their conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries (634–751) the Arabs became the neighbors of the Franks and Byzantines on the other side of the Mediterranean. In Asia the subjection of Persia brought them into northern India and the Turkish vassal states of China in Central Asia.