Autograph books (“memory books”) circulate among adolescent students, who fill their pages with dedications, memories, and wishes for the future. Although related genres like yearbooks and personal websites are replacing them, in East Jerusalem the tradition continues to evolve alongside newer media. In interviews with Palestinian women about the memories evoked by these keepsakes, I delve into the turbulent period of adolescence to explore such issues as friendship, romance, school, and home life. I treat autograph books as records of the changes that have occurred in Palestinian youth culture over the last fifty years and as catalysts for women's reflections about these changes.

In this article we present a threefold argument—chronological, geographical, and sociocultural—in order to demonstrate that interest in the woman question and the lively and at times charged debate that it stimulated began in Greater Syria in the early nahḍa (awakening) period and persisted throughout, drawing into its orbit leading intellectuals as well as members of the general public and permeating even peripheral areas of Greater Syria. We do so by examining the public reflection of this debate in the early nahḍa press, mainly privately published Beirut journals and newspapers.

This quote from a character in the 1974 novel Al-Karnak (Karnak Café) by Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) sums up the reaction of millions of people in Egypt and the Arab world to the June 1967 Arab–Israeli war. Why did this war shatter their worldviews? A military defeat may occur for purely military reasons, in this case the better preparation of Israeli troops. Why should it cast doubt on a whole way of life? The answer to this question lies in the social and cognitive structure of nationalism, which I examine in a moment of crisis, after the 1967 war, when it became necessary for nationalist intellectuals to debate issues that had previously been taken for granted. Al-Karnak, which was made into a highly profitable and controversial film, provides a good starting point for studying these debates. However, it is important to understand them as products of the nationalist project of which Mahfouz was a part. I first analyze the history of that project, explaining its raison d'être and its success by the 1960s.

European merchants and investors doing business in the Middle East during the long 19th century expected that commercial disputes in mixed cases would be conducted according to procedures and laws familiar to and accepted by them. In the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, mixed courts based on the French commercial code were established during that century. The Qajars, however, offered the foreign commercial community a different judicial institution: the local kārguzār (agent) and his majlis (court). By the beginning of the 20th century, thirty-six kārguzār offices operated in Iranian towns and harbors. Nevertheless, foreign (mainly British) merchants and their consuls complained bitterly that it was not an effective institution and that it clearly favored the local tujjār (big merchants). They claimed that these defects meant huge financial losses to them. The Qajars viewed this institution and its functioning differently. It served their policy of discouraging foreign penetration, and it contributed to the competitiveness of the Iranian tujjār in their struggle for commercial superiority.

The recent revolutions and uprisings in the Middle East represent a rare historic opening for scholars, offering us nothing short of the opportunity to rethink the possibilities of history and our conceptions of “the political” itself. In so doing, we might be more open to the ways in which the empirical continually challenges us to rethink our conceptual models. Thus, while some immediately sought to categorize and co-opt the revolutions for their own purposes (Žižek's impassioned, albeit simplistic, “freedom is universal”), others listened closely to the voices on the ground in Tahrir and elsewhere. Now, if ever, is the time to critically reevaluate some of our theoretical models, our tenacious binaries (chiefly among them secularism versus Islamism) and our catch-all monolithic frameworks, such as “the military dictatorship,” “authoritarianism,” and even “neoliberalism.”

More than twenty-five years ago, a small group of South Asianists challenged the bourgeois-nationalist and colonialist historiography of Indian nationalism. Based mostly in India and critical of “economistic” Marxism, they aimed to recover the occluded histories of what Antonio Gramsci calls “subaltern social groups” and to put into question the relations of power, subordination, and “inferior rank” more generally. The influence of subaltern studies quickly became international, inspiring research projects in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East.

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.

This study focuses on the nature of the Lebanese encounter with modernity in Lebanese fiction over the past forty years or so, a time of great ideological, political, and cultural upheavals. The first part traces the effect of modernity on works by Lebanese writers since the 1950s, a period of “revolutionary political and social change,” and of learning and cultural and social ferment. The second part of the study focuses on Rashid al-Daif's novel עAzizi al-Sayyed Kawabata. My choice of this particular novel is related to the fact that it is a representative work that underlines the impact of modernity on Lebanese individuals and society during and in the wake of the civil war. The novel raises questions about rationality, ideology, the individual self, and the relevance of these Western constructs to the local situation in Lebanon. The structure of the novel itself and the use of the epistolary and autobiographical modes of writing underscore the novel's obsession with modernity. Within this context, one could say that al-Daif's novel can be viewed as a complex work of fiction that encompasses different forms of modernity, the tensions between these modernities, and between modernity and authenticity.

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.

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.

In 1887 or 1888, a small group of Syrian Isma'ilis journeyed to Bombay to visit Sultan Muhammad Shah, the third Aga Khan, and on their return to Syria recognized him as their Imam. Unexpectedly in consequence, little more than a decade later, the religious leader of that section of the Isma'ili sect in Syria and a number of his followers found themselves arrested and imprisoned, accused of treason and other crimes. Their trials before criminal courts in Damascus lasted, intermittently, from 1901 until 1906, and before those trials were concluded, more men of their faith had been similarly accused, imprisoned, and put on trail. The persecution of the Isma'ilis only ended, and even then not completely, with the Ottoman constitutional revolution of 1908.

Recent scholarship on the manuscript libraries of North Africa has substantially increased the amount of literature available for analysis of the formative period in Islamic law, particularly for the nascent Malikite school. Students of Islamic law are now in a position, for instance, to begin a re-assessment of the 9th century, the vital transition period between the ancient schools of the 7th and 8th centuries, and the establishment of the classical schools in the 10th and 11th centuries.1 Not only will these new texts make the process of establishment of the classical schools clearer, they will also provide a much stronger basis for the study of earlier centuries, throwing into question the canonical status that has been granted to early legal texts by Western and traditional Muslim scholars alike.

Ever since the Persian intelligentsia first discovered French literature in the 19th century, it has remained fascinated with its various genres: first with the writings of the Philosophe, then with the Romantics, the roman aventure, the realists, and, in the mid-20th century, with the existentialists and the thèâtre absurde. Moliere's comedies, in particular, were the subject of great interest and the source of many adaptations in the secularizing Iran of the Constitutional period (1905–19) and the Reza Shah era (1921–41). These comedies, often staged with the government's blessing in the newly built playhouses in Tehran and other major cities, had a great impact on the ethos of the growing urban middle classes, who viewed theater-going as a chic habit with a moral essence.

Britain's strategic interest in Mesopotamia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a consequence of her control over India. The valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates constitute a natural highway from Syria to the Persian Gulf, and thence to the Indian Ocean. Not until a relatively late stage in Imperial history, however, did Britain extend her formal protection to this region. In the nineteenth century successive British governments had refused to finance the establishment of either a Mesopotamian steamer service or railway line. Subsequently, they had first (1903) rejected participation in an international Baghdad railway scheme, and then (1914) sanctioned complete German control over the project as far as Basra. A small Indian force was despatched to the head of the Persian Gulf in October 1914, but the subsequent Mesopotamian campaign was ‘a haphazard affair from start to finish’ lacking political or military direction. Thus, the De Bunsen committee, which reported on Britain's desiderata in Asiatic Turkey in June 1915, had concluded that Ottoman “devolutionary control” over Mesopotamia was preferable to Indian annexation of any part of the region other than the Basra vilayet; that October, the War Cabinet experienced difficulty in deciding whether to sanction an advance on Baghdad. No proclamation of political interest in Mesopotamia was in fact made by a British government until the capture of the city in 1917. The immediate and local arguments impelling that operation have been fully investigated. By contrast, the strategic tradition that deprecated it has been relatively neglected. This paper proposes to survey the latter and to indicate the degree to which the extension of the Mesopotamian campaign contradicted previous British strategy toward the region.

Spain in the sixteenth century was far from presenting the racial and spiritual homogeneity that the Spanish monarchs from Ferdinand and Isabella had sought to attain. That uniformity was the common aspiration of Spanish society during this period cannot be denied, but this was an ideal that bore little relation to reality. Regardless of the efforts put forth by the forces of racial and religious purity, there existed in Spain throughout the sixteenth century both social dissidents and unassimilated classes whose survival was considered an affront to the Spanish government, church and people. The largest of these non-conformist groups was the Moriscos (converted Moslems), who were scattered about the country in their own communities, each with its distinctive features and problems. In Valencia and Aragon, for example, the Moriscos were a rural people gaining their subsistence from the land; in Castile, on the other hand, they were concentrated in the towns, where they lived a ghetto-like existence on the fringes of society. Large numbers of these urban Moriscos lived in Andalusia and especially in Seville, a town that became as a result of its monopoly of the Indies trade, the most famous and important city in Spain at that time. The size and cosmopolitan atmosphere of this ‘new Babylonia’, as it was called by the literary figures of the period, naturally attracted all kinds of dissident elements; it was, in the words of Cervantes, ‘the asylum of the poor and the refuge of the outcast’.