For those who have, or once had it, power holds a strange fascination. For that very reason it waxes men inventive. It is almost invariably surrounded by ideologies of legitimacy, which adduce tradition, divine grace, or the law in order to support the establishment of those at the top. These ideologies are, strictly speaking, instruments of mystification; yet they are permissible weapons as long as they do not prevent the other side from returning them in kind.—Ralf Dahrendorf1

This essay is an attempt to reflect on the past and on possible futures of the historiography of Pahlavi Iran. At its root stands the observation that with the rise of the autocratic Pahlavi dynasty, the state began to cast a long shadow over the way journalists, intellectuals, and scholars saw modern Iran. Key actors—Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1921–41) and his bureaucratic elite, and Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1941–79) and his technocratic elite—produced an image of the state as a unit completely detached from society and omnipotent enough to be the ultimate reference point for all developments be they social, cultural, or economic.

A glance at a map shows what an important role the sea played in the vast empire of the Ottomans in the 18th century, linking as it did the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa that made up the Old World. The Ottoman Empire dominated not only the eastern Mediterranean but also the major part of the southern shore of the western Mediterranean, the Black Sea—a “Turkish lake” until the 1780s—the Red Sea, and part of the Arab/Persian Gulf.Geography gave the sea adecisive role in the trade that took place in the Ottoman Empire both internationally and domestically.

This article examines the figure of the misafir (guest) as it personifies the combined domains of everyday and institutional hospitality in Hatay, a contested border province annexed to Turkey from French Mandate Syria in 1939, and home today to over 400,000 displaced Syrians. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2012 in Hatay's administrative capital, Antakya, I focus on the perspectives of the region's bilingual (Turkish-Arabic) Jewish and Christian populations about the official misafir status of the first Syrian arrivals. I argue that the sudden transformation of Syrians from familial misafirs to governmental misafirs in the early days of the Syrian conflict ruptured the hierarchical domains of reciprocity that have historically shaped the cross-border relations between these communities. In this process, Antakya's religious minorities recognized and negotiated the limits of their own residence, difference, and citizenship in Turkey, and invoked the lived practices of hospitality that exist beside but also transcend ethnoreligious and national identities. By examining how historical articulations of religious and national difference along the Turkish–Syrian border are entwined with the figure of the misafir at the interpersonal level, this article contributes to debates on hospitality in scholarship on the Middle East and in migration literature.

My aim here is to revise a common view of the development of Sufi organizations and practices. Sufis have generally been contrasted with the ulema to suggest that Sufism and law were incompatible and even hostile to each other: the elaboration and guardianship of Islamic law (fiqh) was the concern of the ulema; the inner, experiential dimension of Islam the concern of Sufis. In their quest for knowledge of God (maʿrifa) Sufis often bypassed and at times even flouted the shariʿa, until reconciliation between law and Sufism became necessary and was effected by Ghazzali in the 11th century. This supposed reconciliation allowed the spread of Sufism and the development of Sufi institutions, including in the late 12th and 13th centuries the Sufi brotherhoods (ṭarīqas). Until then, Sufis had formed loose circles or groups that had no institutional structure or affiliation. In the 12th and 13th centuries, these groups crystallized and autonomous Sufi institutions and practices emerged. The Sufi brotherhoods spread Sufism until it became part of Muslim social and devotional life.

When we and several authors of the articles included here originally debated the idea of this special issue, our aim was to respond to what we perceived as a standstill that locks Middle Eastern queer studies into a premodern Eastern versus modern Western-oriented division. While the East is studied as a repository of tradition with an identifiable sexual and amorous nomenclature, the West is often presented as a fixed hegemonic structure distinct from the East, regardless of the long traditions of cultural exchange and the specific forms of translation and dialogue that take shape when the identities and models of desire associated with the West travel or are performed outside it or at its periphery. This division has generated a set of binaries pertaining to the applicability of terms (gay, lesbian, homosexual) and theoretical frameworks (queer theory) to Middle Eastern literary and cultural contexts. It is our belief that critical engagements with queer Arab and Iranian sexualities in literature and culture ought to situate current discussions in queer theory within debates and concerns arising from specific Middle Eastern social and political realities.

The issue of woman's proper role in society is a lively one in any country today, East or West. Perhaps in no other area has the rapidity of social and economic change touched the lives and values of the average person so deeply. In the Middle East this topic is particularly sensitive because one of the most frequent criticisms leveled at Islam by Western observers is that it degrades women. Male guardianship of women, forced marriages, polygamy, the seclusion of women, and the man's unilateral right of divorce are all, in Western eyes, indications of the inferior status of women in Muslim society and of the inferiority of Islam as a religious and cultural system. Furthermore, Westerners often see it as their duty, whether as mission or strategem, to assist the Muslim woman to liberate herself from these traditional bonds, and especially to remove her veil and educate her.

This article examines the activism of Tunisian university students in the late 1960s. During the series of events surrounding the student protests of March 1968 at the University of Tunis, political activists across Tunisia and France forged communication networks or drew upon existing ones in order to further their political claims. The objectives of this article are to investigate the historical roots of these transnational networks in the colonial and postcolonial periods as well as to integrate Tunisia within the “global 1968.” Through an analysis of student protests and government reactions, I argue that ties with the former metropole shaped students’ demands and that a strictly national perspective of events is insufficient. In response to state repression, Tunisian activists shifted their struggle from global anti-imperialism toward the expansion of human rights on the national level. The networks proliferated over the course of 1968 and beyond as concrete realities shaped the direction of new claims.

The duality of nomad/sedentary or nomads/settlers—in Arabic badu/hadhar—is a classic feature of the social history of the Middle East. Related to this duality is the notion of tribe and its cultural ideology, tribalism. These are all concepts familiar to the students of the region, although increasingly, they are acquiring an antiquated character due to rapid urbanization and other forms of socioeconomic change. In the Arabian Peninsula, the dichotomy is still widely used. Whereas important research has been carried out over the years on the relationship between tribalism and nationalism in the Middle East, the persistence of this particular dichotomy in the Gulf has received little analytical attention. Many studies on the region speak of “bedouin” as groups, constituencies, or social or political actors, without clarifying what lies in the term and without asking by what criteria this category is defined or how it differs from other, non-bedouin categories. The association of bedouinism/tribalism with the Arabian Peninsula, “home of all the Arab tribes,” is so deeply anchored in the imagination of both inhabitants and outsiders that to speak of Arabian bedouin in the late 1990s to early 2000s hardly raised any eyebrows. On closer observation, however, one has to acknowledge the growing lack of consonance between the original lexical meaning of the term bedouin (pastoral nomads) and its derivative meaning (“country” as opposed to “city,” or “primitive” as opposed to “civilized”) and the category to which it is purported to apply. Both meanings beg the question of why the hadhar–badu dichotomy has such a central place in Kuwaiti popular discourse—Kuwait being for all purposes a city-state with hardly any country and where “the rural areas” is a euphemism for the sprawling suburbs around the capital city. At the same time, official history tells us that Kuwait was founded by bedouin who had fled drought and famine from Central Arabia in the first half of the 18th century. Under these circumstances, what does it take to qualify as a badu or to disqualify as a hadhar in present-day Kuwaiti society? There is one more thing: far from slipping into oblivion as a result of urbanization, the hadhar–badu dichotomy has made a noticeable comeback in popular discourse over the past two decades. This article seeks to explain the present popular concern in Kuwait with a dichotomy whose analytical, if not historical, validity has often been questioned. It explores the reasons why important symbolic barriers are being raised between hadhar and badu that contribute to turning them into mutually exclusive identities. Throughout history, hadhar and badu have always been porous categories and the distinction was never clear, regardless of what the ongoing discourse may claim. Even today, ascription and self-ascription of badu and hadhar identities are contextual rather than absolute; they are also contested, more often than not. The first task at hand is to clarify the meaning of hadhar and badu in Kuwait and their use at the turn of the millennium. The article, thus, begins by pinpointing the social groups that these categories encompass and by giving a brief description of each group's stereotypes of the other. Through the description of Kuwaiti social practices in relation to marriage and the use of surnames, and the exploration of the pervasive role of the state, I hope to show that social reality in Kuwait is a lot more complex than the discourse of polarization suggests. Finally, it is argued that, to explain the revival of the dichotomy, we need to understand the ongoing hadhar criticism of the badu as an expression of anti-immigration feelings, of the kind one commonly hears in societies where the state has pledged to take in charge the cradle to grave welfare of its citizens. A parallel with anti-immigration discourse in Western European welfare-state nations is drawn up as an argument against an exclusively historical–cultural interpretation of the phenomenon under study.

Arab nationalism arose as an opposition movement in Ottoman Syria, Palestine, and Iraq around the turn of the century. It remained a minority movement until the Ottoman collapse in 1918, but after the Ottoman defeat it became the overwhelmingly dominant movement in these territories where, except for some Lebanese, all successful politicians were Arab nationalists during the interwar years. Just what Arab nationalism meant to its proponents at the time, however, has been difficult to determine. The period only dimly figures in studies of Arab nationalism. Full studies have been devoted to survivors from the past, Rashid Rida⊃ and Shakib Arsian, to Sati⊂ al-Husri (al-Husari), a relative newcomer whose greatest prominence was to be in the 1940s and 1950s, and to the Muslim Brothers, who arrived on the scene even later, whose influence was to lie in the future, and who, like Rida⊃, were not considered to be primarily Arab nationalists. Otherwise, hardly a scant handful of pre-World War II Arab nationalist writers, and these from the late 1930s, receive even casual mention.

Studies of Middle Eastern urbanism have traditionally been guided by a limited repertoire of tropes, many of which emphasize antiquity, confinement, and religiosity. Notions of the old city, the walled city, the casbah, the native quarter, and the medina, sometimes subsumed in the quintessential “Islamic city,” have all been part of Western scholarship's long-standing fascination with the region. Etched in emblematic “holy cities” like Jerusalem, Mecca, or Najaf, Middle Eastern urban space is heavily associated with the “sacred,” complete with mystical visions and assumptions of violent eschatologies and redemption.

Marx, the prophet of revolution, may no longer haunt conservative politicians, but Marx, the theorist of revolution, continues to both attract and arouse social scientists. In the words of one student of politics, the social sciences, especially political sociology, can be described as a ‘century-long dialogue with Karl Marx.’ And as one prominent historian of ideas has aptly stated, Marx can properly be called the midwife of twentieth-century social thought, ‘for in the process of discarding what they had found invalid in Marxism and explaining what aspects of it had proved helpful, the innovators of the late nineteenth century took their first steps towards constructing a more general theory of social reality.’ For example, Emile Durkheim developed the paradigm of ‘mechanical and organic solidarity’ to counter the theory of class struggle. Vilfred Pareto and Gaetano Mosca stressed the dichotomy between ruling elites and ruled masses to supplant the concept of socioeconomic classes. Robert Michels formulated the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ to warn that popular organizations, such as the Social Democratic Parties, would bring in not the era of democratic socialism but the autocracy of bureaucratic socialists.’ And Max Weber, of course, devoted much of his career to showing that the dynamics of class conflict should be studied concomitantly with the heavy weights of conservative ideologies, traditional religions, ethnic castes, and bureaucratic institutions.

The Declaration of Prsinciples signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in September 1993 marked a dramatic about-face in Israel's traditional policy toward the PLO and the Palestinian issue in general. This turn of events came as a surprise not only to journalists and commentators following day-to-day political events, but also to scholars engaged in the academic study of Israeli society. The prevailing notion among these scholars had been that the Israeli polity was suffering from what Horowitz and Lissak (1989) called “overburden” due to domestic debates over the disposition of the occupied territories. Thus, it was concluded, Israel was unable to launch bold policy initiatives to try to solve its deadlocked conflict with the Arabs.

Samad Behrangi (1939–1968), Jalāl Āl-e Ahmad (1923–1969), and ⊂Ali Shari⊂ati (1933–1977) were perhaps the three most influential lay Iranian intellectuals among dissatisfied, anti-regime Iranians during the 1960s and the 1970s. Each hailed from a different province of Iran: Behrangi from Azerbaijan, Āl-e Ahmad from Tehran, and Shari⊂ati from Khorasan. Each developed loyal followings during his lifetime. Each became a “martyr” to his devotees and developed a wider popularity after death than he had enjoyed in his lifetime. And each formulated an extensive societal critique fortifying, inspiring, and galvanizing adherents for the final assault on the shah's regime.

The emergence of feminist thought in Egypt at the turn of the last century has often been remarked upon, but there has been little rigorous analysis of its social context and background. As keen an observer as Gabriel Baer has ventured to write that in nineteenth-century Egypt “evidently the traditional structure of the family and the status of women did not undergo any change at all.” On the face of it, however, it seems highly unlikely that the expansion of the urban and rural middle classes, the emergence of private property, the period of state capitalism, and the onset of colonial rule could have left women unaffected.

The history of political change in Libya during the nineteenth century has been obscured by subsequent events in the Middle East and North Africa. A relatively unimportant province of the Ottoman Empire, it went to the least important European colonial power in the region – Italy – and the Italian tenure destroyed much of the legacy of Ottoman reform. Even contemporary observers in the nineteenth century usually viewed the province through a prism whose primary focus was elsewhere, leaving distorted and partial accounts of the changes wrought by the Ottoman administration. This lacuna in the literature has hindered comprehensive assessment of the Ottoman reform period and, perhaps as seriously, distorted interpretation of Libya's subsequent political history.

In this article, I explore how the rapid commercialism and commodification of Turkish premier league football has affected the activities of a particular fan group, Çarşı, for the club Beşiktaş, one of Turkey's oldest teams. I look at how elements of the commodification of football have been harnessed and mediated by Çarşı to make ethical and political statements and convey an anarcho-socialist message. These processes, I argue, are driven by the possibilities opened up by rapid social and technological development. The shift to searching for identity among the forums and video websites of the internet, rather than on the terraces of Beşiktaş, is profoundly altering how fans construct their allegiance to the fan group and the club. This process, it will be shown, is not so much liberating supporters from the requirements of fandom as it is generating new conventions and processes to which Çarşı members must adhere.

Shaykh Naʿim al-ʿArqsusi is one of Damascus's most popular Muslim scholars. A leading figure of a local Islamic movement called Jamaʿat Zayd (Zayd's Group), he is widely praised for his knowledge, modesty, and asceticism. Every week, this frail, short-bearded fifty-six-year-old attracts several thousand people to the huge concrete al-Iman mosque next to Baʿth party headquarters in the middle-class neighborhood of al-Mezraʿa.

The historiography of Arab nationalism has tended to concentrate on the secular press from the Mashriq, especially the Cairo–Beirut axis, at the expense of the religious nationalist press and the non-Mashriqi one. There is often an assumption that reliance on the secular press from the Mashriq alone can provide a clear picture of Arab intellectual life and that a proper analysis of that thought can be confined to a few intellectual centers in the eastern Arab world. Although there has never been an explicit claim that such a focus is the end of the story, there have not been enough attempts to look beyond the Cairo–Beirut axis and beyond its secular press organs in search of a broader story of the depth and breadth of Arab nationalism. This article addresses this imbalance by examining an Arabist-Salafi press network that operated between Algeria, Tunisia, Zanzibar, and Egypt and involved members of two sectarian communities, Sunnis and Ibadis. This Arabist-Salafi press network created a public sphere of intellectual engagement in which Salafism and nationalism were interwoven, producing a nationalist discourse transgressing post World War I borders of identity and linking the three layers of nationalism—the territorial, the Pan-Arab, and the Pan-Islamic—together. These layers not only intersected but also legitimized one another.

From March until late April 1919 Egypt suffered one of the great peasant revolts of her history and of the 20th century.1 Contemporaries viewed it as having international importance because it was the result of thirty years of European domination, and its resolution would be likely to affect all Western colonial empires.2 For us, it marks the emergence of Egyptian liberalism and the construction of the modern state.3.

The insurrection began when four leaders of the Egyptian national movement were arrested on 9 March 1919. They were then exiled to Malta for insisting that the Egyptian delegation (wafd) to the Versailles Conference be recognized, so that it could demand that Egypt be accepted as an independent national state.