This article examines the origin and legacy of the rebel group that stormed the great Mecca mosque in November 1979. Extensive fieldwork and new primary sources show that the rebels represented a radicalized faction of a large pietistic organization established in Medina in the mid–1960s under the name al–Jama a al–Salafiyya al–Muhtasiba (JSM). The rebel faction had broken with the mother organization in 1977 and developed into an apocalyptic sect under the leadership of Juhayman al–Utaybi, who spent two years as a fugitive in the desert before the attack. Although the rebellion was crushed, the early 1990s witnessed a resurgence of Juhayman's ideas in Saudi Arabia. The article argues that the JSM, the Mecca rebels, and their heirs represent a widely ignored undercurrent of Saudi Islamism. Pietistic and isolationist, this so–called rejectionist Islamism is intellectually and sociologically distinct from the two other strains of Saudi Islamism, namely, reformism and jihadism.

The effect of the coming of Islam on the condition of women has long been a subject of debate among scholars with divergent interests in the Muslim world, including Protestant missionaries, anthropologists, Muslim reformists, apologists, and feminists. The central question upon which this subject is focused has been couched in language of mutually exclusive extremes: Did Islam at its inception bring about an improvement in women's condition, or was Islam responsible for bringing about inequalities between men and women in Muslim societies? The purpose of this article is to suggest new directions for exploring the effect of Islam on women, to confront the inadequacy of the sources and methods that are presently brought to bear on the issues, and to introduce Christian sources to a debate that has been carried out within a self-contained Muslim-Arab context

United States diplomatic historians have traditionally claimed that American foreign-policy makers employed the Open-Door principle in the Middle East after World War I merely to defend American rights from the Allied efforts to achieve economic hegemony over Turkey and other parts of the old Ottoman Empire. However, William Appleman Williams — supported by the works of several younger scholars — has asserted that Woodrow Wilson used the, Open Door to promote American economic expansion. Williams maintains that the Open Door was not an ad hoc policy, fashioned simply to meet the immediate postwar challenge of the Allies — as the traditional historians have alleged. Nor was it British-inspired, idealistic policy that received only sporadic support during the twentieth century, as George F. Kennan has asserted. According to Williams, the Open Door was an American-designed tactic that diplomats used continuously throughout the first half of the twentieth century for the express purpose of promoting American expansion, with a view to creating an American economic empire, a process that resulted in the extension of American political and economic influence.

Islamicists have long been interested in the historiography of the sīra and maghāzī literature. Ibn Ishaq's Sīra has been fruitfully compared with al-Waqidi's Maghāzī, and both have been compared with sections in al-Bukhari's Ṣaḥīḥ or with other collections of hadith. It has often been observed that the materials constituting the Sīra of Ibn Ishaq or the Maghāzī of al-Waqidi—works which may for convenience, but only with reservations, be designated “historical”—are often the same as those preserved in collections of hadith such as al-Bukhari's. It has also been observed that what distinguish these materials from one another are essentially the former's narrative and chronological structures and the motives and methods governing these structures. John Wansbrough, who has compared these texts, postulates as well a “development from loosely structured narrative to concise exemplum & [which] illustrates perfectly the stylistic difference between Sīra and sunna, between the mythic and normative preoccupations (Geistesbeschäftigungen) of early Muslim literature.”

Consider the data from the painstaking economic analysis of contemporary camel transport in Pakistan done by Alan Heston and several Pakistani associates in 1985 (see Table 1). It shows the typical annual costs and income in rupees of someone earning his livelihood by renting out a pack camel.

The Arab Rebellion in Palestine began with sporadic outbursts of terrorism on April 19, 1936. The ensuing disorders and the Arab general strike that followed were in retaliation against the British refusal to grant three demands first put by the Arab leadership of Palestine to the Mandatory in November, 1935. The three demands were: (a) total cessation of Jewish immigration into Palestine; (b) prohibition of all sales of Arab land to Jews; and (c) the granting of independence to Palestine and the ending of the Mandate.

In The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen offers an interpretation of the biblical Good Samaritan according to which the Samaritan stops not because he recognizes the need of his neighbor, but because through the act of stopping he enters into a neighborly relation. Practice similarly helped to constitute neighborly relations for Yemeni activists who forged new solidarities through their experiences during the eleven-month uprising of 2011 and its aftermath. Yemeni activists across the political spectrum—from Marxists to Islamists to liberal constitutionalists—have remarked that late nights spent in the squares writing slogans, making posters, and preparing and serving meals fundamentally altered their sense of self in relation to differently situated others. Rather than articulating a single national(ist) project, however, many activists speak of solidarities made in difference, or what political philosopher Iris Marion Young described as “a relationship among separate and dissimilar actors who decide to stand together, for one another.” These solidarities resulted in new and concrete forms of activism, which the formal transitional process has severely undermined. The experiences of Yemeni activists stand as an important reminder to scholars to attend to the intersection of formal and informal in our analysis of the politics of the Arab uprisings.

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 2010, reflecting on her landmark 1986 article “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” Joan Scott wondered whether, since the original article's publication, the category of gender had “lost its critical edge.” She noted how it had often come to refer simply to the roles assigned to “women” and “men,” while those categories themselves were assumed to be determined by biological “sex” and thus stable and self-explanatory. In other words, the gender/sex binary persisted “despite a generation of scholarship aimed at deconstructing that opposition.” Scott proposed that gender as an analytical category continues to be useful today only if it is “taken as an invitation to think critically about how the meanings of sexed bodies are produced in relation to one another, how these meanings are deployed and changed.”

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.

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.

Afghanistan's 20th century has long been seen through an analytical dichotomy. One concentration of historical scholarship has sought to explain the fraught progress of Afghan nation-building in the 1910s and 1920s. A second has sought to explain the unraveling of the Afghan nation after 1979. Weighted toward the decades at either end of the century, this dichotomized field has been problematic in both chronological (and thereby processual) and methodological terms. On the level of chronology, the missing long mid-section (indeed, half) of the century between the framing coups of 1929 and 1979 has made it difficult to convincingly join together the two bodies of scholarship. Not only has the missing middle further cemented the division of scholarly labor but it also has made it more difficult to connect the history of the last quarter of the century to that of the first quarter (except as a story of parallels), rendering them discrete narratives of development, one ending and the other beginning with a coup. The problems are deeper than this, though, extending from questions of chronology and process to matters of method. For if in its focus on nationalism and nation-building the first-quarter scholarship is framed within the neat boundaries of national spaces and actors, then in its focus on the unraveling of the nation and its peoples through the consequences of Soviet intervention, the last-quarter scholarship elevates nonnational actors as the key agents of historical process.

About the great Russian orientalist, Vasilii Viadimirovich Barthold (1869–1930) much has been written, but, at the same time, not enough. Listed in an annotated bibliography of Barthold's works, compiled by I. Umniakov, published in 1976, are 141 titles of works about Barthold (up to 1976) not including reviews of individual works. Most are short biographical and bibliographical notices, but also included are about thirty works in Russian and other European languages containing a biography of Barthold and a characterization of his scholarly works. To this one can add nine obituaries written by distinguished orientalists, and prefaces to the volumes of his collected works that were published between 1963 and 1977. Some of the publications contain a general survey of Barthold's works; others are devoted to different groups of works (on islamology, archaeology, epigraphy, and others); but no one has given a detailed analyysis of Barthold's works as a whole. I do not pretend to carry out this task, but aim simply to point out some features of Barthold's works which seem to me especially characteristic and to pinpoint the place of this scholar in the history of Russian and international oriental studies.

Many Middle Eastern governments are seeking to liberalize their trade policies. There is a desire to abandon policies based on import substitution through protectionism, and instead concentrate on export promotion. Advisors from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) urge governments to be less interventionist, and to create an environment where the provate sector can have freer rein. It is hoped that private entrepreneurs can revitalize the economies, and play a major role in emport promotion. Egypt, for example, has had an open door policy since 1974 following the years of government intervention and control under Nasser. Syria has also liberalized its import regime, and would like to encourage private sector exports, and Ba'thist socialist ideology has been less emphasized in recent years.

This essay examines how administrative documents categorized the mamluks who served Ottoman governors of Tunis from the early 18th to the mid-19th century. The categorization of these state slaves-cum-servants illuminates three issues, namely, the relationships between Islamic states and societies, interactions between the Ottoman Empire and its provinces, and forms of military slavery around the globe. Seeing registers, letters, and historical chronicles as spaces of interaction allows us to break free from an a priori definition of mamluks. By exploring how slaves and servants contributed to defining themselves in administrative documents, I not only argue for a new understanding of the mamluk category, but also show that mamluks did not separate state and society. On the contrary, in the Tunisian case, mamluks connected the state to various imperial and provincial social forces.

For most of the last century, within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region youth have been addressed and engaged as a particular category of citizens. In this vein youth were viewed as important targets of nationalist projects and as critical national resources in an era of national development. In more recent years, however, the concern with youth has taken on a new tenor both within and outside the region. What had previously been a preoccupation about youth as the region's promise and progress has increasingly become one about youth as crisis and potential threat.

Although Dubai's economic development constitutes an important case, it has received hardly any academic coverage. This article explores the path taken by Dubai in its development, especially since 1990. Based on extensive fieldwork, I identify nine parameters that, through interaction, have contributed to the country's economic progress over the last two decades. I argue that the apparent developmental success of Dubai may be understood as the outcome of conscious policies conducted by a “late–late” developing state in order to “catch up” with the “developed world.” Even in a government-controlled and neopatrimonial economic environment, Dubai has created circumstances where the virtues of neoliberalism seem to coexist with state dirigism. Yet the country faces a challenge of sustainability. Certain of the Dubai's risks and vulnerabilities are unlikely to disappear in the short to medium term: the dependence on foreign workers, the asset bubbles in real estate, regional security problems, and issues related to political leadership.