Libya enjoyed steadily rising oil revenues after 1960 and became a significant member of the world's trading community. By 1980, oil revenues were over US $20 bn and these enabled development spending to approach US $10 bn per year as well as permitting large allocations to consumption, defence, and international ventures. The sums involved in the three sectors cannot be defined precisely as defence spending, and the cost of such military campaigns as the 1981 intervention in Chad are not available. Whether such data were precisely known or not, the spending options were limited to these three sectors, and trade-offs had to be made between them when financial resources became constrained. The first two sectors, development and consumption, were of great interest to the population in general, while defence and international ventures were of interest to the leadership as well as having appeal to that special constituency which populated the military establishment of the country.

With the conclusion of World War I, the Armenian cause in the United States enjoyed a brief season of hope and vitality. American support was an offshoot of international sympathy for Armenian suffering and an unshakable sense of optimism. In a burst of national goodwill, the United States seemed intent on freeing the Armenians from centuries of persecution. Americans from the halls of Congress to the church pews of Mississippi joined together in the effort. They delivered speeches, wrote letters, exchanged ideas, and donated millions of dollars. Within less than a decade, however, the Armenian cause was irreparably splintered and largely forgotten.

For many historians, liberalization and modernization are parallel and complementary concepts. Any trend to liberalization is accepted by them as a pledge to modernization whereas any restrictive measure is seen as an expression of traditionalism. Scholars in Turkey and the West who have studied the history of Turkish modernization with such a pre-conceived approach have praised the Tanzimat (1839–76), the Young Ottoman (1876–78) and the Young Turk (1908–18) periods-as modernist while they have condemned Abdulhamid II's reign traditionalist, even backwardist.

The aim of the present essay is to explore some of the relations between the socioeconomic and political transformation which occurred in Syria during the eighteenth century and the development of a new view of the world and the self as it came to be expressed in the writings of several Arab historians at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Of particular interest in this context is the question of whether and when a clear departure from traditional patterns of society and thought can be discerned.

During the past several decades, deliberate attempts to move from a ‘traditional’ to a ‘modern’ form of society have been made in the Republic of Turkey, resulting in rapid change economically, socially, and even politicallyI. The effort to change from a predominantly agrarian economy, and the concomitant increases in urbanization and industrialization, have had a profound effect on several sections of the country and have, to a large extent, created a whole new structure of spatial organization and patterns. Nevertheless, most of Turkey has been only slightly affected by the modernization process, and remains unaltered by the progress of economic and social development. Although economic growth and capital expenditures for development have steadily increased, they have not been uniformly distributed throughout the Republic, resulting in distinct regional disparities and a socio-economic system with many dualisms in its structure2.

Zionist historiography of the Mandatory period accords a considerable place to the problem of land purchase and colonization. In the early 1930s, the Zionists feared that Britain would put restrictions on land purchase and that great difficulties would ensue from ordinances designed to protect the tenantcultivators in the event of eviction. The historian's eye has also been caught by the ambivalent position of the Arab national leadership which, while publicly demanding an end to Zionist expansion, privately continued to sell land to the Jews. But the literature hardly deals with the tenants themselves—the human center of the land debates and the subjects of considerable social interest in themselves.

In a recent book Michael Hudson referred to Lebanon as the “Precarious Republic.” The Lebanese Republic was said to be precarious because its citizens tended to identify more strongly with the ideologies of their various sects than with the state, because of the gulf separating the rich from the poor, and because of the growing restlessness of the latter. It was also said to be precarious because of growing disaffection of most segments of Lebanese society with most areas of government performance.

Heritage is a key site of politics in the Middle East. Recent episodes of the relentless destruction and construction of heritage in the region convey just how deeply intertwined it is with the making (and unmaking) of the postcolonial state. In Palestine/Israel, heritage has developed over a long history into an important site where both state power and resistance against it are produced, reshaped, and disseminated. A current proliferation of urban regeneration projects there is linked to the struggle against the ongoing occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands, as well as the incomplete, truncated emergence of a Palestinian state. Most of these heritage projects are carried out by semi- or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In this essay, I argue for the value of thinking about heritage in terms of government and state-making, or more precisely in terms of a Foucauldian understanding of governmentality, to reveal the kind of work it performs in Palestine and beyond. States govern also by heritage, and both states and the local communities they attempt to control mobilize the language of heritage for a variety of different purposes in a variety of different settings. What is distinctive about Palestine is the central role NGOs play in the institutionalization of a heritage field. In their work, they collapse the divide between mobilizing heritage to defend vulnerable communities and resist the encroachment of the (Israeli) state, and using heritage to develop institutions and help build the (Palestinian) state.

This article examines the relationship between state and society in the Ottoman Empire during the 17th and 18th centuries by examining concepts and practices of privacy. Fatwas of Ottoman jurists reveal certain principles ordering the division of urban areas into public and private spaces. The article explores their application during the rebuilding of Damascus after its devastation by an earthquake in 1759. Archival sources disclose the priorities that guided the state in reconstructing a ruined provincial capital: religious values; a concern for the inhabitants’ well-being; and, rather prominently, an intent to maintain a dichotomy between public and private. In this the Ottomans were different from their contemporary European counterparts, who often took advantage of major disasters to reshape relations between rulers and subjects. This divergence is demonstrated in this article by comparing post-1759 Damascus with London after the Great Fire of 1666 and Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake.

If, as Ghazâlî presumes, the fact of creation can serve as evidence of the existence of God, and if, as he attempts to show, creation is the only binding, reasoned proof of God's existence, Ghazâlî must, to fulfill his program of reconstructing the intellectual basis of Islam, somehow find arguments adequate to prove that creation did in fact take place. He must disprove what was in his time the still vital claim that the Universe had not come to be but had existed forever differing in no essential way from the world we know today.

Almost two decades ago, Michael Bonner, Mine Ener, and I organized the first in a series of MESA panels on the general theme of poverty and charity in Middle Eastern contexts. We came to the topic using different chronologies, sources, and approaches but identified a common field of interest in shared questions about how attitudes toward benevolence and poverty affected state and society formation: in early Islamic thought, in the Ottoman Empire of the 15th and 16th centuries, and in khedival Egypt. At that time, we could confidently state that there was very little work in the broad field of Middle East and Islamic studies that focused explicitly on the study of charity and poverty.

By all accounts, the population of enslaved Africans in Egypt increased in the 19th century compared to earlier times. An estimated 5,000 African slaves were imported annually during the 1840s and 1850s, and as few as 1,000 in 1860. However, during the cotton boom (1861–64), some 25,000 to 30,000 slaves were brought to Egypt each year to satisfy the demand for labor generated by the rapid expansion of cotton cultivation.

Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa in all disciplines can learn much about their favored topics of interest through the study of music and related cultural practices. However, professional and often personal limitations have precluded awareness of the rich potential that music offers for analyses of Middle Eastern and North African societies. Typically music and the performing arts have been the purview of specialists in ethnomusicology, anthropology of music, and performance studies. Music and other sonic phenomena have been routinely marginalized if not ignored by scholars in Middle East studies, who, to a surprising extent, have reproduced conservative Muslim opinion regarding music by leaving it out of their analyses. Even the majority of ethnographic texts on the region depict Middle Easterners as living in near silence. When scholars have explored the ways in which music and expressive culture might shed light on their areas of expertise, they have tended to apply the conceptual tools of their home disciplines to the study of music: hence we have the sociology and anthropology of music, the history and politics of music and performance, and so on. Music in these studies remains a (usually passive) expression of more fundamental forces, reproducing the marginal position that music, and the arts in general, typically enjoy in Western societies—at best serving as an analytic tool but too seldom understood as an agent itself.

Gulf cities are generally characterized by their extremely rapid development with resulting demographic increases and imbalances and accompanying environmental degradation. These cities are the flagships of emerging countries that are constructing their national identity while seeking to preserve their traditions and customs and conserve their environments. As they are importing cultural and educational brands, business, and marketing models, they are also creating new hybrid forms and a particular Gulf identity or Gulf urbanism. Until now, resources, technology, and capital have allowed expansion without limits—into the ocean with landfills and artificial islands, into the sky with tall buildings, and into the desert with Zero Energy Cities. Yet the future of nonrenewable energy sources is leading Gulf cities to look towards new postcarbon identities for their countries and improved sustainability and livability for their cities.

This paper introduces mukaddesatçılık as a Cold War ideological position that reconciles Turkish nationalism, religious conservatism, and Islamist revivalism. Mukaddesatçılık channels senses of disempowerment and alienation among people with Islamic and nationalistic sensibilities to a sense of ressentiment against the Turkish modernization process. The paper analyzes mukaddesatçılık's ideational and emotional components based on the writings of Necip Fazıl Kısakürek. In addition to being the name-father of the concept, Kısakürek was distinguished from other Islam-inspired conservative intellectuals by his appeal to popular mobilization around mukaddesatçı ideology through his eloquent and powerful speeches and poems. The paper argues that Kısakürek's mukaddesatçılık reconstructed Muslimness as the political identity of the popular masses, who are the supposed victims of the Turkish modernization process, to mobilize them against the so-called Western-minded modernizing elite. Mukaddesatçılık informs the current populist policies of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government that seek to maintain the divisive polarization between religious and secular identities.

How can scholars of Sudan now write about the landmass still called “Sudan”? What do we mean when we use the word? How can the name, which denotes a whole, encompass the fragments that make up its official boundaries? For the last several years, events in Sudan have been changing more rapidly than we Sudanists can analyze them or than Sudanese themselves can process them. Now, in its truncated form, delineating national identity—always problematic in the past—becomes far more complex. Considering extant cultural flows of art, language, customs, and religion, the dividing lines are, at best, dubious. A number of events are transpiring at the moment of writing this brief essay that have changed and will continue to change the future of not just one country but now two. For example, nothing is resolved in Darfur (in western Sudan), with peace talks stalled, more violence being perpetrated by the northern central government and its proxies, guerilla groups proliferating and battling among themselves, and a probable link among some Darfur groups and South Sudan forces.

Maritime history has grown exponentially in recent years. Seen as a remedy to the ideological straightjackets of nation-state and area studies paradigms associated with modernization theory, a methodological orientation towards the sea offers the historian the advantages of an interactive transnational approach, and places matters of the environment and material culture before stories of kings and battles. Crucially, it focuses on flows, routes, mobility, and exchange rather than fixed identities and linear trajectories.

“Area studies” as a way of trying to understand human experience is undergoing a major transition. Questioning the connection between Middle East and African studies highlights important dimensions of the changing nature of area studies at the beginning of the 21st century.

In 1970, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Research Center in Beirut published an Arabic translation of The Zionist Idea, an anthology of classic Zionist texts compiled originally by Arthur Hertzberg in 1959. This article compares how the two versions present the biographies and motivations of key Zionist ideologues. It suggests that, in contrast to Hertzberg, the PLO researchers tended to present Zionism, especially at its roots, as a Jewish religious movement. Attempting to discern what might lie behind this conception of Zionism, the article considers the significance of the religious backgrounds of the leadership of the PLO Research Center and of those involved in the translation project. It argues that the researchers’ concern about the status of Christians as a religious minority among Palestinians and other Arabs and certain deeply rooted Christian ideas about the nature of Judaism may help account for the particular view of Zionism that the Research Center developed in its—and in the PLO's—foundational years.