The process of modernization in Morocco is dramatically symptomized by the decline of traditional authority. Postindependence politics have been in a state of permanent crisis, and the monarchy could only survive as any other political alternative promised imminent chaos. The abortive military coup of Skhirat in July 1971 was only another link in the chain of events that have perpetuated internal crisis. The army's massive interference in national politics was, however, a novelty. It had the effect of greatly accelerating the latent process of disintegration of traditional society and politics.

The historical formation, contemporary scope, and future dynamics of national identity remain important concerns in Egyptian scholarship. While many aspects of national identity and the forces that shape it in each generation have been analyzed, a more complete understanding of the results of these often antagonistic influences suffers from the lack of descriptive information.

Although some may assert that it is too early to assess the impact of Anwar al-Sadat's liberalization policies on the Egyptian economy, I believe there is enough evidence to measure the important trends that have arisen in their wake. And while the statistics and conclusions may be regarded as tentative, they delineate a picture.

“There is a smell of money around this place.” With this sentence J. R. Frickers, head of Mobil Oil in Egypt, gives us a feeling for the atmosphere that prevailed in Egypt in 1974. The oil price hike of December 23, 1973, created billions of-dollars in surplus funds for Saudi Arabia and the other Arab oil-producing states.

In his recent book on Orientalism Edward Said made it clear that the German relationship to the Orient has been different from that of the British or French. In Germany there was no sustained national interest in the Orient; the relationship was not “actual,” for it was almost exclusively “scholarly.” Said also argues, however, that Germany did have in common with other European nations a “kind of intellectual authority over the Orient” and that it, too, contributed to the Western invention of the term “Orientalism,” itself an act of dominance and superiority. In this point it seems that Said is correct, for the act of labeling not only suggests expertise but also exercises expressibility as a means of intellectual and cultural control. Yet recognition of the linguistic basis of authority and the power to dominate another culture with that authority is not new. German writers during the eighteenth century also felt that British and French dominance interfered with the development of the arts and sciences in their country. Indeed, Goethe recognized at least two forms of authority which shaped Oriental literature: one was the political forces within the Orient itself and the second one, a more subtle form of authority extrinsic to the Orient, was the scientific philology of Western culture which fostered a particular image of the Orient. That is, Goethe suggests in his critical writings on Oriental literature a departure from the norms of Western science and at the same time champions the need to understand the sociocultural forces at work in the Orient itself. Thus Goethe's critical writings in many ways anticipate Said's view that “Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed”.

The premier position of the Lāmiyyat al-'Arab among the poetry of al-shu'arā' al-Ta'alīk (the brigand-poets) of the Jāhiliyya is undeniable. Among scholars and philologists, both Arab and Orientalist, it has remained over the centuries the object of the most minute philological commentaries. Its Arab commentators number more than 20, among them the foremost names in classical Arabic literary scholarship: al-Mubarrad (d. 285/898), the doyen of the Basran school, whose commentary is said actually to have been taken from his Kufan archrival, Tha'lab (d. 291/904); the renowned poetic commentarist al-Tibrīzī (d. 502/1109); and the famed grammarian and Qur'anic commentator, al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1143). Its European popularity—a phenomenon that Blachére attributes to its appeal to the sensibilities of nineteenth-century Romanticism—dates to Sylvestre de Sacy's study and translation of 1826, followed by Rückert's German translation in his Hamāsa of 1846. In philological studies, of note are the more than 20 pages of his Beiträge that Nöldeke devotes to lexical matters and Jacob's extensive two-part Schanfará-Siudien.

One of the most critical aspects of the efforts of nineteenth-century Ottoman statesmen to save the Empire lay, without doubt, in the field of bureaucratic reform. Within this field, moreover, the plight of the declining, traditional Empire in an age of expanding European power obviously marked the development of an effective Foreign Ministry as a matter of particular necessity. Yet, the efforts made to create such a ministry proved that here, as so often in the history of reform and development, the very changes which were most needed tended, by a fateful irony, to be those most difficult to effect.

If the Islamic Community was founded to constitute the nucleus or model of the ‘good society’ on earth, why has it so manifestly failed to do so? This is the problem which haunts all thinking Muslims, confronting them with an insistent, nagging, exasperating demand to which self-respect requires an answer. The simple Muslim answer, which points to the ideal, says that it is ‘because we, the Community, have ceased to live now for many centuries in faithful obedience to the Sharî'a and in conscious striving to live up to its ethic’. Another mocking Western answer points to practice in the world of Islam: ‘because you Muslims did not learn to control your inward violences you were forced to submit to tyranny in political life and allowed your social institutions to be ravaged by lust and greed’. For the true Muslim, however, neither answer is satisfactory. To the Westerner he reacts with a natural surge of hot and outraged pride: ‘What kind of social ideals do you imagine your practice holds out to the world? We at least have nothing to learn from atheists, infidels, hypocrites and Hollywood’, he says. But when he contemplates the simple Muslim answer, he becomes aware that here too something is wrong. Only the most simplehearted believer can continue to take the entire Sharî'a system on trust, although there are many Muslims who want no change because the existing system suits their interests.

This paper presents a macroeconomic model for a small developing oil-exporting economy: Kuwait. The model is a simultaneous system of difference equations. Historic effects of changes in revenues from oil exports on the country's economic conditions are simulated. The model is then used to forecast these conditions through 1990, and to test two fiscal policy alternatives under the assumption that revenues from Kuwait's oil exports will remain constant from 1986 to 1990. The following are key words: developing economies; oil-exporting economies; Middle East economies; Kuwait; Kuwait's economy; policy models; macroeconomic models; econometric models; macroeconometric models; forecasting models; and policy models.

In June 1959, Emperor Haile Sellassie of Ethiopia paid a visit to President Gamel Abdel Nasser of the United Arab Republic, during which the two leaders aired matters of acute strategic importance. Several issues, some touching the very heart of ancient Ethiopian–Egyptian relations, were in the stages of culmination. These included a bitter dispute over the Nile waters (some four-fifths of the water reaching Egypt originates in Ethiopia1), the emergence of an Arab-inspired Eritrean movement, Egyptian support of Somali irredentism, the Ethiopian alliance with Israel, the future of Pan-African diplomacy, and Soviet and American influences.2 Both leaders did their best to publicly ignore their conflicts. They were able to use a rich, though polarized, reservoir of mutual images in their speeches to emphasize the dimensions of old neighborliness and affinity.3 In a joint announcement issued during the farewell party of 28 June, they even underlined a common policy of non-alignment. Though they hinted at the issues mentioned earlier in all their public speeches, they refrained from referring to one culminating historical drama.4 On that very same day, in the main Coptic church of Cairo, the Egyptian Coptic Patriarch Kyrillos VI had ceremonially appointed the head of the Ethiopian church, Abuna Baselyos, as a patriarch in the presence of Haile Sellassie and Egyptian officials. In so doing, he declared the Orthodox Ethiopian church autocephalous, and for the first time since the early 4th century, the Ethiopian church had become independent of the Egyptian church.

A year and a half after the Iranian uprising in 2009, unprecedented popular uprisings in several Arab countries provided some of the most evocative moments of power meeting its opposite, in decisive and surprising ways. In a matter of weeks, powerful hereditary/republican regimes in the region, including in Tunisia and Egypt, crumbled under relentless pressure and opposition from highly mediated “street politics.” The uprising and revolts that shook Iran in the aftermath of the 2009 electoral coup, and the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt that toppled the governments in these countries in twenty-eight and eighteen days, respectively, had three significant similarities. First, the Arab revolutions, like the 2009 uprising in Iran, were, in the first place, revolts against dictatorship and in direct opposition to the ruling regimes. These uprisings, like many such movements against despotism, were also marked with demonstrations and the visible participation of young people. Second, all three happened at a time in which, unlike 1979 (the time of the Iranian Revolution), the world was not divided into two camps, but rather was confronted with US hegemony and globalization of financial capital. And finally, they all happened at a time when advances in communication technologies, and in particular the Internet, have allowed for a much faster circulation and dissemination of information—hence the constant association of these revolts with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and so forth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Music is not only an art form defined by certain formal elements, such as rhythmic and melodic modes. It is also a cultural form that implies significant social interaction. Music naturally evokes deeply felt emotions and can touch upon important social identities, because it helps people to experience feelings and express insights into their own lives. Moreover, the fact that it is performed situates any given musical genre within a specific set of sociocultural frames. Unpacking the social, economic, and political contexts surrounding musical genres can deepen our understanding of larger processes at work. An obvious North African example is Rai music, whose explosion in popularity in the 1980s underscored very important social and economic transformations taking place in Algeria and among migrant Algerian communities in France.

Watching the uprisings unfold in the Middle East, as well as the opposition to them, leads me to appreciate the insights of social movement theory, which suggests that heterogeneous forces can unite in coalitions around super targets when political opportunities suddenly and serendipitously emerge. In this historic moment of change and resistance, will we see the unfolding institutional transformation of the state as it responds to a more participatory ethos, or will former regime stalwarts reconstitute themselves? Elected officials and new governance strategies will still confront serious distributional and economic challenges as states remain enmeshed in neoliberal policies. Political scientists are already studying constitutional change and debates about electoral design, party construction, and other institutional changes to democratize the polity, but we should also look to different transition models that seek to redress deep structural inequalities following decades of repression and rent seeking. Should principles of political or economic affirmative action be incorporated into new institutional designs of transitology?

You do not have to wait long to find out what this book is all about. The Preface trumpets it as a veritable consumer's report on Middle East studies, ominously warning “let the buyer beware.” Martin Kramer comes out swinging and cuts his opponents very little slack over the next 130 pages.