Though a multidisciplinary field, Middle East studies has historically had little engagement with the theoretical and methodological contributions of the discipline of geography. In the wake of the Arab Spring, there was a turning point, as scholars of the region noted the importance of public space to the uprisings, thus sparking engaging debates about urban spatial politics. In fact, Middle East studies is not alone in its newfound affinity to geography; a shift to what many have called “the spatial turn” across the social sciences and humanities has put geography in the limelight. Geography is in fact the original “area” studies—geographers of the early 20th century saw the main rationale of their discipline as identifying and describing regions, and the region was the core geographical concept. The post–World War II area studies boom occurred much at the expense of the discipline; after Harvard University closed its geography program in 1948, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, Columbia University, and other Ivy League schools soon followed and Title VI essentially led to the closing of numerous other geography programs around the country—including Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. A growing sentiment within the ivory tower found the discipline too ambiguous and asserted that a university did not need geography to be a great institution.

Those experienced in translating difficult philosophic texts from one language to another with some degree of literal and stylistic accuracy know well how demanding such a task is. When they strive in addition to represent the thought of the author rather than their own presuppositions about that thought, the task becomes all the more arduous. To avoid prejudging the author, they take the text as it appears, on its own terms, and try to make sense of what the author actually says. They do so because they start from the premise that the author in question knows what he or she wishes to communicate and they thus set as their goal understanding what the author intends.

I.O. The work under consideration1 was originally a doctoral dissertation at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Department of Linguistics, under the supervision of the former head of that department, Professor Robert B. Lees, now at the University of Tel Aviv. The book deals with an interesting subject, to be sure. The basic theses and conclusions presented are worth considering and worth testing, though in my opinion they are wrong. The work as a whole is marred by typographic, stylistic and scholastic infelicities, the latter in the form of erroneous bibliographical citations, for the most part. First, I shall address myself to the main theme in terms of general linguistic theory, and Arabic linguistics and dialectology. Then I shall proceed to list some of the typographic, stylistic and scholastic infelicities, more to help the author should he revise the work than to inform the reader who would, of course, see them for himself.

International media outlets have covered the news of Syrian tribes since the beginning of the protest movement that erupted in the country in 2011. This started with the “Friday of Tribes,” when Syrian tribes participating in protests against the Syrian regime in the Syrian city of Dar‘a began chanting “faz‘a” (chanting for support), which meant that they were seeking solidarity from other tribes for defense against the regime's aggression. As the Syrian uprising turned into a civil war that involved many players, some media outlets focused on the scenes of tribal leaders pledging allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), or of others being summoned to Geneva, Switzerland, to hold talks with Western powers about the possibility of mobilizing against ISIS militants. One could only wonder exactly why tribal loyalties continued to play such a significant role in the everyday events of the Syrian civil war when many civil society advocates had argued that tribal affiliation in Syria had diminished.

With this book, Michael Herb makes a significant contribution to the debate on monarchism and its resiliency in the Middle East and North Africa. Relying on archival materials, a small number of interviews, and secondary literature, Herb compares the fortunes of twelve monarchies in the Middle East and North Africa and one monarchy in Afghanistan. By comparing the fate of eight successful monarchies with that of five failed monarchies, Herb seeks to understand which variable best accounts for the success of monarchical rule. A secondary task of the work is to evaluate the future of monarchical institutions in the Middle East and North Africa. Herb asks, “Is revolution—the destruction of these institutions—a necessary step toward political development in the region? Is it possible that political development can occur in the Middle East as it did in some places in Europe, through the adaptation and evolution of traditional institutions, rather than through their destruction?” (p. 256).

This article reconsiders military politics in Syria prior to the 1963 Baʿthi power grab in light of new sources. I undermine the presumptions that Baʿthi tactics of sectarian favoritism in the armed forces were unprecedented in post-independence Syria. I make the following arguments: first, attempts by the Sunni power elite to tame Syrian minorities were part of a broad sequence of events that spanned several regimes and informed politics in the Syrian officer corps; second, the various military strongmen who ruled Damascus intermittently from 1949 until 1963 distrusted minority officers and relied mainly on fellow Sunnis to exert control in the armed forces; and third, the combination of minority marginalization in Syrian politics and Sunni preferentialism inside the armed forces bred enmity and polarized sectarian relations in the officer corps.

For the discipline of Arabic literature in the United States, “theory” is a double entendre: promise, danger. Until the mid-1990s, U.S. Arabic literary studies was landlocked in Near Eastern language departments, whose “anti-theoretical” bent Magda Al-Nowaihi imputes to dependence on U.S. government and Gulf state support. Theory is “dangerous” to such funders, Al-Nowaihi maintains, because it traffics in “the relations between knowledge and power. . . . The result is a situation where European departments produce the theory, we provide the raw material.” “Theory” is what Arabic literature needs—to become a site and an agent of aesthetic-political critique—yet lacks because powers of state insulate its energies within microtextual hermeneutics. Uniquely empowered to translate Arabic literature from particularist “ghetto” to universalist (Euro-dominant) “center” through the abstracting medium of “theory,” then, “European departments” control Arabic literature's legitimization. What emerges is a curious chiasmus: “theory” is at once a danger to state power and a desideratum for Arabic literature, on the one hand, and a seat of institutional power within the U.S. humanities and a danger to Arabic literature, on the other.

In post-2009 Iran, not only is space gendered for a variety of reasons ranging from customs to state intervention, but also public space has become less accessible and secluded for security purposes. To securitize the state or replace a sense of trust with that of suspicion, states blend the gendering of space with the architecture of seclusion. In the United States, for instance, the separation of males and females in the prison industrial complex includes seclusion of bodies and often subjects gender-nonconforming people, immigrants, and those with HIV to disproportionate levels of physical danger. In Iran, architectural adjustments with the aim of seclusion have significantly increased since the 2009 protests. In Tehran, for instance, shisha shops in the mountains, which used to be common sites of leisure, are randomly raided by security forces. As a result, participating in such spaces means having to hide in the back areas to engage in an activity that not too long ago was legal. It follows that the combination of gendering and seclusion of space disrupts the formation of organic relationships and generates real, falsely stimulated, and contested intimacies. How we approach intimacies in this complicated situation determines in important ways the impact that this new spatial scheme will have on our research agenda, analysis, and perhaps even safety.

This article traces the emergence of the early afternoon ẓuhr prayer as a key project of subject formation during the second half of the Anwar al-Sadat period (1976–81). Drawing on three Islamic magazines of differing ideological orientation (Muslim Brotherhood-Islamist, Salafi-Islamist, and state-sponsored), all containing letters to the editor and fatwa requests, it charts contestation among religious elites and the reception of their programmatic visions. Specifically, the article explores the performance of this daily prayer as a hybrid practice that disrupted the temporal and spatial claims of a state-sponsored bureaucratic order to produce national subjects within public schools and bureaucratic institutions, even as it reproduced the state's emphasis on temporal precision and social order. Based on these texts, this article challenges previous scholarly narratives that place Islamist projects of subject formation on the fringes of secularism and previous studies of Islamist mobilization that posit a separate social universe of Islamist activism.

In Egyptian popular history and culture, Qasim Amin is often referred to the “father of feminism” or the “liberator of women.” However, this was not always the case. Upon his death in 1908, a different legacy emerged in many early eulogies, speeches, biographical sketches, and commemorations of Amin's life. In this early framing of Amin's legacy, his two most famous books were celebrated in ways that minimized the “woman question” while highlighting other aspects of his reforms and work. This allowed Amin's 1908 contemporaries to overlook the divisiveness of his earlier positions in favor of a new sort of fraternal solidarity—one that served the interests of certain political and intellectual male elites. For many of these writers—with a few notable exceptions—Amin was a quintessential reformer and thinker whose interest in the status of women was important insofar as it spoke to the ethos of his intellectual and political projects, not what it could do for women.

Two years after naming himself a Black Man as opposed to an American in his 1964 expression of alienation from mainstream, white U.S. society, Muhammad Ali announced, “I ain't got no quarrel with the Viet Cong.” In doing so, he powerfully linked his racialized status in the United States to his unwillingness to fight a war against other similarly racialized, marginalized, and disempowered people. He thus embraced a message of Third World solidarity as a First World resident with a similarly subaltern status in “his own” country. The second epigraph shows Ali's effort to articulate his sense of belonging within the United States, thus pushing at the limits of both his “Black” and “American” identities. The two epigraphs demonstrate the contradiction in the way in which African Americans can be identified as both “Black” and “American” in the United States, here in statements by one of Black America's most iconic public figures. This paradox of African American identity will be explored in this article in relation to two Arabic literary texts: Adonis's “Qabr min ajl New York” (“A Grave for New York”) and Radwa Ashour's al-Rihla:ayyam taliba misriyya fi amrika (The Journey: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Student in America), both of which are particularly concerned with Black Americans and firmly rooted in the tradition of commitment literature, which sees them as brothers and sisters in solidarity with Third World struggles.

Over the past half century, the scholarly literature on Middle Eastern economic history has grown substantially. By mining the surviving records of states and towns, scholars steeped in the region's languages have produced detailed studies of waqfs, guilds, taxation, government expenditures, monetary trends, production, land use, charity, and court systems, among many other topics. In carrying out their work, Middle Eastern historians can now draw on abundant publications that describe economic life in particular places and periods.

Scarcity of information can present a difficulty for writing a biography. Abundance of information can do the same. As perspectives multiply, a subject sometimes becomes clearer; other times it becomes complicated. In Islamic studies, for example, the more sources that are uncovered on central historical figures such as the Prophet Muhammad, al-Hasan al-Basri, and al-Ghazzali, the more scholars are in dispute over their biographies. Yet historical figures of the second degree—those individuals whose biography has not yet attracted a separate study but who are studied for their role in larger questions—are often portrayed with deceptive simplicity. Scholars tend to stick to the most coherent and simple biography and move on to the question at hand. Such coherence and simplicity, however, often is not found in the sources.

And, if we wonder why the mythmaker resorts to myths when he has more sophisticated tools at hand, the answer is that, although he doubts whether his mythical argument can stand alone, he regards it as being more lucid and compelling than an argument from abstract principles.1

Le grand commentaire du Coran de l'Imam Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī pose un problème. Dans la notice que Ibn Abī Usybi'a (m. en 1270 A.D.) consacre à un personnage qui mourut Grand Qādī de Damas en 637/1239–40 et qui se nommait Shams al-Dīn Ahmad b. al-Khalīl b. Sa'āda al-Khuwayyī al-Shāfi'i, on lit que, parmi les oeuvres de ce dernier, figure un complement du “Commentaire du fils du Prédicateur de Rayy”. Il s'agit ici du grand commentaire de Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī dont le père était bien connu sous ce titre, ses dons de prédicateur (khatīb) l'ayant rendu célèbre en son temps.