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.

This article traces a conflict that erupted in the late 19th century between the Armenians and the Süryani. This conflict, I argue, precipitated nothing less than the creation of the Süryani community itself. The dispute began over the key to a closet in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but it quickly evolved. Soon, the Armenians and the Süryani were clashing over holy places all around Jerusalem. The dispute centered on an Ottoman administrative arrangement which had been institutionalized nearly 400 years earlier: yamaklık. The Ottoman investigators, however, were unfamiliar with this archaic arrangement and had to be reeducated as to its terms and its history. The Süryani and the Armenians offered divergent accounts. Where the Armenians furnished hard documentation, however, the Süryani could produce only claims to tradition and local practice. In this article I argue that, through this protracted conflict, the Süryani came to understand the importance of the documentary record in a post-Tanzimat Ottoman world. They thus turned to an alternative strategy that would conform to this documentary sensibility and render their community visible to the state: a series of petitions with thousands of Süryani signatures from around the Ottoman Empire.

The topic of Christians in the Middle East appears to be enjoying a growing vitality within Middle East studies. This is not to say that scholarship ignored the subject in the past, but it was rarely seen as an independent area of study. Works tended to focus on the historical origins, faith, and rites of the different churches within Eastern Christianity. Those that looked specifically at Christian communities tended to concentrate on their relations with other groups, especially in the context of a minority framework. Some interdisciplinary volumes such as those edited by Andrea Pacini and Anthony O'Mahony moved beyond this limited approach to cover a wider range of issues, but several of the contributions retained this descriptive tendency rather than relating directly to theoretical debates within different disciplines.

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.

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.

The attempt to estimate per capita income for Egypt from 1886/1887 to 1937, presented in this paper, is part of an effort to evaluate British colonial economic policyduring the period of the British occupation of Egypt. For such an evaluation national income estimates covering the whole period would be very helpful. National income estimates worth the name, however, go back only to 1935–1939, and for years earlier than the 1950s they are of very poor quality. Compared with so many other lessdeveloped countries, Egypt has relatively rich statistics extending backward to the decades before World War I; but they do not really suffice for building up a national income series from either the production or the expenditure side, and from the income side there is hardly any information. In this situation, which both development economists and economic historians know only too well, the problem is how to make maximal use of existing production and expenditure indicators in order to come out with some idea of what per capita income developments may have looked like. Apart from gauging per capita income in Egypt during half a century before World War II, the paper serves more generally to illustrate a methodology that may find application for other countries.

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.

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 traditional view of ʿUmāni history during the past two centuries is that the country was unified under the Āl Bū Saʿīd dynasty, which was based first in Rustāq and later, with the assumption of power by Ḥamad b. Saʿīd in 1785, in Masqaṭ. The supposed shift of the capital to Masqaṭ, the country's major port, was interpreted by Lorimer as a disruptive influence in ʿUmāni politics, whereas J. B. Kelly has depicted the move as representing a change in the basis of ruling power in ʿUmān from the land to the sea. This study takes exception to these two interpretations as well as to the general assumption that Masqaṭ was the capital of a unified ʿUmān. In 1785 Ḥamad b. SaḤīd Āl Bū Saʿīdī established an independent state in Masqaṭ in a move that enabled him to profit from trade with the interior of ʿUmān, which was dependent on Masqaṭ for imported foodstuffs, textiles, metals and other raw materials, while freeing him of the tribal opposition that has traditionally plagued any ruler in ʿUmān trying to control both the interior and entrepôt. Once established in Masquaṭ, Ḥ and his successors adopted an aggressive military and political policy in the Arabian Gulf (1785–1820) and then East Africa (1820–1829) which was designed to create a commercial empire centered on Masqaṭ. A fundamental principle of this policy was the avoidance of any unnecessay involvement in the affairs of ʿUmān, which was divided among various tribal leaders.

The literary activity of Ya'qûb Sanû' and the birth of popular Egyptian drama constitute an important phase in the growth of modern Arabic literature, particularly worthy of our attention because Sanû‘’s work was to a high degree representative of his nation's spirit and sentiment.

The chronicle of Rabbi Elijah Capsali (ca. 1483–1555), which concerns itself with the history of the Ottoman Empire, turns up as a subject for discussion from time to time. Capsali, rabbi of the Candia community in Crete, wrote the chronicle entitled Seder Eliyahu Zuta during the plague of the spring and summer of 1523. It is divided into four parts and 166 chapters and includes an introduction in which he explains the reasons for writing it and mentions his sources. As yet, however, the importance of this chronicle has not been sufficiently emphasized. The interpretation presented by Uriel Heyd at the Sixth Turkish History Congress held in Ankara in 1961. dealt with a number of aspects such as the sources of Capsali and Jewish references in the text, but only in their most general form. In this paper I examine the importance and limitations of the chronicle more thoroughly.

Egypt was firmly ensconced by the early 1980s in the ranks of the Third World's more dependent, financially troubled economies. The country's total foreign debt, under $3 billion in 1973, had grown to 16 billion by 1979. In 1982–83, the external debt was estimated at $20 billion, with the servicing of medium and long-term obligations absorbing more than one-third of export earnings. The terms of trade were also moving against Egypt as its major exports lost value. A trade deficit, registered largely with EEC countries and the United States, stood at the equivalent of $4.7 billion in 1982–83.

The expansion of U.S. power across the Middle East has led to a convergence between what had previously been distinct historical fields. As U.S. foreign relations scholars turn their attention toward the Middle East and as Middle East historians address the implications of American imperialism, both groups have produced new research on the Cold War era. Since 2001, Rashid Khalidi, Juan R. I. Cole, and Ussama Makdisi have reexamined American foreign policy during the Cold War to understand the antecedents of current events. With the evolution of U.S. diplomatic history into a more cosmopolitan international history, its practitioners have consulted sources in regional languages. Recent scholarship has incorporated the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) into global narratives based on the themes of superpower rivalry, decolonization, and the struggle for development. While these global narratives help to counter regional exceptionalism, historians of the Cold War would also do well to read more Middle East historiography. The growing significance of American power for the MENA region calls for greater collaboration between the two fields on common interests that they have developed, at least so far, mostly in isolation.

The Kemalist leadership of early Republican Turkey attempted to transform the country's Muslim populace with a heavy emphasis on secularism, scientific rationalism, and nationalism. Several studies have examined the effects of this effort, or the “Turkish Revolution,” at the central and more recently provincial levels. This article uses first-hand accounts and statistical data to carry the analysis to the village level. It argues that the Kemalist reforms failed to reach rural Turkey, where more than 80 percent of the population lived. A comparison with sedentary Soviet Central Asia's rural transformation in the same period reveals ideology and the availability of resources as the underlying causes of this failure. Informed by a Marxist–Leninist emphasis on the necessity of transforming the “substructure” for revolutionary change, the Soviet state undermined existing authority structures in Central Asia's villages to facilitate the introduction of communist ideals among their Muslim inhabitants. Turkey's Kemalist leadership, on the other hand, preserved existing authority structures in villages and attempted to change culture first. However, they lacked and could not create the resources to implement this change.

In this thought piece, I use the recited Qurʾan as a case study for asking what it may mean to feel sound—and more specifically, “religious sound,” or sound in a religious context. A range of scholars, including myself, have asked related questions about what the recited Qurʾan sounds like, and why it may sound the way(s) it does. Here I consider the sound of the Qurʾan on the level of experience or nondiscursive meaning, asking what the recited Qurʾan feels like.

As neither the reviewer nor the author contacted me before reporting critically on my work during the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis, I appreciate IJMES's offer to state my position. Subsequently, I have been in touch with both James Goode and Ofira Seliktar. The latter told me 1. She made a decision not to conduct any interviews because interviewees are apt to offer self-serving or faulty memories and because she might face “threats.” 2. Although she felt sorry for the way I was treated in the book, she seemed to place greater blame on the academics advising the State Department who put forward the “reigning academic consensus” (New Left and moralpolitik) that captured Foreign Service minds (especially mine) and led to destructive policies. I'll bet that few Middle East Studies Association members realized they could have such power over policy-making.

During the Iraqi refugee crisis of 2007–10, international humanitarian organizations appeared for the first time in the Syrian domestic arena. These aid providers interpreted the position of Iraqi refugees in Syria according to a liberal conception of state–citizen relations that did not accord with the Syrian government's actual approach to Iraqis. Guided by this liberal frame, humanitarian organizations introduced biopolitical programs into the Syrian domestic context. Through new forms of population management, they solicited forms of behavior from Iraqis that were different from those required by Syrian state authorities. Drawing on the concept of biopower and using ethnographic material drawn from long-term research in Damascus in 2009–10, this article sheds light on an important political development in Syria shortly before the outbreak of social unrest and on the social changes that international humanitarian aid may transport.

In this paper we focus on the Republican Mosque in Derinkuyu, Turkey, a Greek Orthodox church built in 1859 and transformed into a mosque in 1949 that still exhibits many obviously Christian structural features not found in most such converted churches. We utilize the concept of religioscape, defined as the distribution in spaces through time of the physical manifestations of specific religious traditions and of the populations that build them, to analyze the historical transformations of the building, and show that this incongruity marks a specific stage in the long-term competitive sharing of space by the two religiously defined communities concerned. This shared but contested space is larger than that of the building or even the town of Derinkuyu. We argue that syncretism without sharing correlates with a lack of need to show dominance symbolically, since the community that had lost the sacred building had been displaced as a group, and was no longer present to be impressed or intimidated.

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.