The very use of the term “Bakhtiyārī” with its implicit notion of sociopolitical unity has obscured the nature of the organization and relationships of these pastoral nomadic tribes.1 At the same time that observers of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran described the Bakhtiyārī as a unit, they could not explain the prevailing disunity that characterized tribal relationships. Major obstacles for analysis of this problem have been the office of the īlkhānī, paramount chief of all the Bakhtiyārī, and the domination of tribal history by the family of those eligible for this position, which has imposed a certain unity upon recent Bakhtiyārī history. The view that an īlkhānī had long ruled the Bakhtiyārī and that the tribes constituted a confederation has been accepted since the late nineteenth century. Yet the first īlkhānī, Husain Qulī Khan, was not appointed until 1867, and possibly only during his. tenure in office (d. 1882), and again during the Persian Revolution, have the Bakhtiyārī functioned as a true confederation. The significance of prevailing disunity under a temporary political and administrative unity goes beyond the history of the Bakhtiyārī and has important implications for an understanding of Iranian society and history itself.

This paper is the result of fieldwork carried out in Kalardasht, a mountainous region of the Caspian provinces. It has two interrelated purposes. First, it is offered as a contribution to the economic ethnography of Iran. Second, it examines the process of continuity and change in the economic structure of rural Iran. Changes in rural communities as a result of transitions in the broader society have attracted much attention in recent years. Here, a number of such economic changes are documented and analyzed for Kalardasht from 1977 to 1985.

At the outbreak of World War I, Lebanon was a part of the Ottoman Empire and comprised mainly the Mutasarrifîyah, or Independent Sanjaq, of Mount Lebanon and the Wilâyah, or province, of Beirut. Because of its position in international power politics, Lebanon was not under as strict Ottoman control as other provinces, with Mount Lebanon enjoying a considerable degree of local autonomy. Turkish involvement in the war, however, resulted in military occupation of Lebanon, which comprised part of the Fourth Army Command under Jamâl Pâsha, in prosecution of the war effort against the British in Egypt.

The need for social change has been recognized by most of the politically important forces in the Middle East today, but differences remain concerning its implementation. These differences are centered on the type of change and the rate at which it should take place. There are three basic social groups taking part in this conflict; the traditional elements of society, typified by organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, many of the ruling families, and large sections of the peasant population; the ‘modern’ man of the liberal era such as evolutionary–liberalist politicians, doctors, landowners, bureaucrats, merchants, and the like; and the ‘modern’ men of the era of technology (material-scientific) such as army officers, agronomists, planners and industrialists.

On the whole, King Hussein of the Hijaz, sharif of Mecca, has fared badly at the hands of British historians. To most of them he was an obstinate old man, so overambitious for himself, and so overconfident about his following in the Arab world, that he was a poor judge of his powers and unrealistic to a great extent. Examination of the papers in the British Public Record Office, in conjunction with his own letters and other sources, offers another image. It shows quite a different man – consistent in his beliefs and policy, stubborn about questions of principle, and wholly set on pursuing with dignity the rights that he reckoned the British to have promised to all Arabs ‘liberated’ from the yoke of the Turks.

The jurists who entered Turkish academia during the 1930s built the foundations of their discipline under a regime that became increasingly authoritarian as war drew closer. Like their peers in Italy and France, therefore, they had to produce coherent doctrines but also support the frequent use of exceptional emergency powers. How did they solve this contradiction? More importantly, what consequences did their solutions have for the use of emergency powers after the war? This article adopts a Deleuzian reading of two strategies with which Turkish jurists met that challenge, approaching their work not simply as theories about law but also as models for the role law should play in the articulation of public authority. Focusing on Ali Fuad Başgil and Sıddık Sami Onar, law professors at Istanbul University, I argue that although both professors supported the regime, only a situational doctrine of the kind Onar produced was capable of ensuring that jurists would have a place in the exercise of “exceptional” state powers after the 1950 transition to democracy.

Religious actors and religious language are not absent from the Arab revolutions, but a striking feature of these movements is that they depart from Islamist identity politics, which tended to portray the problems of the Arab world as the result of Muslims’ betrayal of their religious identity. Slogans referencing Islam are remarkably few, even in contexts like Egypt where Islamist movements are an important organized political force. Similar to many Islamist activists, the youth who initiated these movements are exasperated by growing economic inequalities. Unlike the former, however, they do not feel the need to frame this issue in religious terms, but rather mobilize universal notions such as democracy, freedom, justice, and equality. This is the case even in societies with sharp religious divides such as Bahrain, where the overwhelmingly Shiʿi demonstrators oppose a Sunni-dominated regime. Regardless of whether the uprisings will succeed in achieving a genuine regime change, new political movements are likely to emerge that focus on political freedom and the reduction of social inequalities rather than projects maintaining Islam as a solution. The question remains whether this trend simply went unnoticed by the majority of the scholarly community working on the Middle East or whether it is something that emerged in the dynamics of the uprisings themselves. Either way, the phenomenon must now be analyzed. Does it mean a decline of the Islamist ideology? Will it permit an empowerment of existing liberal political movements? Of trade unionism? What does it reveal about the integration of the Middle East within global political trends?

The past twenty years witnessed a dramatic transformation in Arabic literature studies in the United States. In the early 1990s, the field was still almost exclusively a satellite of area studies and largely bound by Orientalist historical and epistemological paradigms. Graduate students—even those wishing to focus entirely on modern literature—were trained to competence in the entire span of the Arabic literary tradition starting with pre-Islamic times, and secondary research languages were still rooted in the philological tradition of classical scholarship. The standard requirement was German, with Spanish as a distant second for those interested in Andalusia, but rarely French, say, or Italian or Russian. Other Middle Eastern languages were mainly conceived as primary-text languages rather than research languages. Philology, traditional literary history, and New Criticism formed the methodological boundaries of research. “Theory”—even when it purported to speak of the world outside Europe—was something that was generated by departments of English and comparative literature on the other side of campus, and crossings were rare and complicated in both the disciplinary and the institutional sense. Of course, one branch of “theory”—postcolonial studies—made its way into area studies much faster than the more eclectic offshoots of continental philosophy, for obvious reasons. From nationalism studies to subaltern studies, from Benedict Anderson to Gayatri Spivak, the wave of postcolonial critical theory that swept through U.S. academia in the 1980s and 1990s sparked an uprising in area studies at large and particularly in the literature disciplines. One of the first casualties of this uprising was the old historical paradigm itself: narratives of rise and fall, golden ages, and ages of decadence. Slowly but surely, scholars began to question the entire epistemological edifice through which Arabic literary history had been constructed by Orientalism. It was through the postcolonial theory of the 1980s that Arabic literature came to a broader rapprochement with poststructuralism: Foucault, Derrida, Ricoeur, Jameson, and White, to name a few of the major thinkers who began to transform the field in the late 1990s.

I have borrowed the term “frontier” from the late Professor Joseph Schacht for the Islamic marches where Islamic political power and Islam were once firmly entrenched. Unlike him I would apply this term also to the Islamic marches in Europe: Spain and Sicily. Division of Islamic lands into geographical categories “The Central Islamic Lands” and the “Further Islamic Lands,” has also been adopted in the recently published Cambridge History of Islam.

Direct consequences of pacification of the Yarahmadzai Baluch by the Iranian army in the campaigns of 1928–35 were the prohibition and cessation of raiding, imposition of Iranian military and civilian officials over the tribe, and limited access to previously unavailable labor and goods markets and to national government resources. Whatever the economic and psycho-cultural dislocations resulting from pacification, there was great structural continuity within the Yarahmadzai. There was no interference by the Iranian government, whose policy was external control through indirect rule, and who paid the Sardar (tribal chief) a substantial yearly stipend.

The history of Turkistan in the second half of the 19th and the early 20th century has repeatedly attracted the attention of social scientists. It is widely recognized that the tendency of most Soviet authors was to consider this history under the rubric of “the progressive consequences of annexation to Russia,” at a time when the main historiographical trend was to investigate the history of revolutions, movements of the working class and peasants, riots among the people, and national-liberation movements. Under the same rubric, during a rather long period until the end of the 1980s, many problems of local Turkistan society were written about. As a result of this approach, some questions remained unasked—questions that challenged the officially mandated proposition that “despite tsarist colonialism, the annexation of non-Russian peoples to Russia was a progressive reality.” In particular, one of these questions has to do with the history of the state that governed the territory of Turkistan in the colonial and post-colonial periods.

The study of manuscripts was traditionally the preserve of scholar-curators in research libraries who devoted their lives to the exhaustive study and description of collections that were often gathered from several sources. The expected result of their solitary labor was a printed catalog that might describe at most a few hundred manuscripts from a particular linguistic or religious culture. That model has been challenged by the advent of large-scale digital projects that aggregate thousands or even tens of thousands of manuscripts from multiple libraries in a single database or portal.

Pending a peaceful solution to the current war of liberation in Afghanistan, any consideration of alternative economic systems, as raised in some circles, must be based on the given structural conditions of the Afghan economy. Contrary to expectations by some, the basic structure of the economy in terms of size distribution of sectoral output is unlikely to change significantly despite any changes in the share of resources between the private and public sectors.

The Afgham economy is based on agriculture and it will continue to derive the major portion of its national income (output) from this sector in the foreseeable future. The potential for economic development, based on domestic resources, is also largely founded in agriculute.

Still prefaced in many commentaries as a taboo, the topic of the genocide in Turkey has ironically become a talking point de rigueur for anyone who is visible in the public sphere and who lays claims to an identity as an intellectual. “Anyone,” then, will momentarily serve as the working definition of the intellectual, for all intents and purposes, in this inquiry into the grammar among Turkish and Armenian intellectuals both within and outside Turkey. The litany of self-proclaimed firsts in addressing the topic of genocide in any given genre in Turkey is better understood in the light of Barthes' notion of the “inflexion” in myth. Such vocabulary of self-advertisement, of being a historic “first,” creates a curious hierarchy when it comes to the all-important topic of a foundational and denied genocide: it is not that the intellectual brings herself to the service of the topic, but that the topic serves up to the rejuvenation of the intellectual's prominence and controversial value in the public sphere. The emphasis is not on the quality, characteristics, or commitments of the works in question, but on the fact of the intellectual being a “first,” and thus, implicitly, a mythical figure above critical inquiry.

This article traces the ways that the Moroccan Police Journal, a state-produced periodical that first appeared in 1961, constructed and disseminated an aspirational identity for the Moroccan police, one that was radically distinct from the image of the brutal security forces of the Protectorate period. Unlike other state-produced periodicals in Morocco or the Middle East at the time, Police Journal included fictional short stories written in the form of a police procedural, a genre that places a real-world criminal detective in the center of a narrative depicting a believable police investigation into a puzzling crime. As this article shows, these stories are the first examples of police procedurals in the Arabic language. The article examines three stories from Police Journal, tracing how they projected a new professional institutional culture for the police in the era of independence and served as both didactic pieces for police readers and entertaining works of fiction for the literate public.

One of the first ways that many scholars of the Middle East encounter the region is precisely through the lens of “region” itself. Our ability to know the Middle East as a region today, we learn, is a complicated inheritance of imperialism, Orientalism, and Cold War area studies scholarship. To study the Middle East as the “Middle East,” in other words, is to be necessarily positioned within a contested and unequal field of knowledge, one whose contours are both historically and geographically specific. Much of the best research and teaching within Middle East studies continues to demonstrate that knowing about the region—and the world more broadly—is closely entwined with the politics of the region. The interdisciplinary spatial turn within Middle East studies has been and continues to be so fertile precisely because of that reflexivity.

Connecting the stories of human rights violations perpetrated by the Syrian regime against the children of Darʿa in March 2011 to decades of writings about political detention in Syria, this article argues that particular works of Syrian prison literature (adab al-sujūn) articulate a poetics of recognition that both reaffirms and challenges the foundational dependency on political recognition in human rights theory. By focusing on narrative scenes of recognition and misrecognition, I contend that these texts, much like the stories of the children of Darʿa, depict different forms of acute human vulnerability. In doing so, they offer a mode of sentimental education that evokes readers’ empathy and awareness of human suffering. Yet such texts also demonstrate, in allegorical form, how the foundational reliance on political recognition in human rights regimes can limit their efficacy.

In this paper I argue that representations of homosexuality in modern Arabic literature have tended to isolate it and contain its threat through a conceptual strai(gh)tjacket that I term “epistemic closure.” I begin by analyzing Saʿd Allah Wannus's play Tuqus al-Isharat wa-l-Tahawwulat as an essentialist paradigm of closure, where a language of interiority and essence identifies male homosexuality with passivity and femininity, subordinated a priori to a sexually and socially dominant masculinity. Then, I examine ʿAlaʾ al-Aswani's novel ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan as a constructionist example of the same closure, in which homosexuality is explained through a narrative of abnormal development that circumscribes its diffuse potential. Finally, I read Huda Barakat's Sayyidi wa-Habibi as a “queer” novel that links homosexuality to the continuum of male homosocial desire, thereby disrupting the normative distribution of center and margin and suggesting a way out of the epistemic closure imposed on homosexuality.

“Place matters,” geographers are fond of saying. And it seems this sentiment is more and more embraced by scholars in other disciplines. The current outpour of writing in Middle East studies that draws on geographic themes goes a long way toward showing how “spatial form can alter the future course of the very histories which have produced it.” At the same time, geography in Middle East studies is at risk of being provincialized over the long term, instead of taken seriously as a source for new approaches to studying the region. For the so-called spatial turn to endure, it must be transformed from a vague thematic concern to a more self-conscious analytical perspective, one that reveals the many competing visions and practices that constitute space. More reflection on the purposes, limits, and politics of thinking geographically in research on the Middle East is required.