Mehmed Emin âli Paşa (1815–1871), one of the leading Ottoman statesmen of the Tanzimat period, was the purported author of a political testament that was published in 1910, though said to have been written just before his death. When finally published, it was in French rather than in Turkish. The “Testament politique,” with the signature “Aali” at the end, appeared in two sections in successive issues of the Revue de Paris. In the same year it also appeared as a separate brochure.1 Its authenticity has, ever since, been a question. Discussions of the point have reached no satisfactory conclusion.2 Now that the papers in the Basbakanlīk Arsivi in Istanbul are available to research, there is opportunity for a new judgment. Several documents in the Yīldīz collection there pertain to Âli Pasa's political testament.

Why are humans fated to remember and forget? For Plato, it is because we are wounded by our memory of a previous existence, namely the Platonic “realm of ideas,” to which we forever long to return. In the social sciences, especially history and anthropology, burgeoning cross-disciplinary methodologies and approaches have emerged to study the ways in which humanity remembers and forgets; “cultural memory studies” and the “anthropology of memory” constitute a contemporary realm of ideas concerned with discursive contestations over memory and history. The books under review here, all of which relate to the study of collective memory in Lebanon or Israel/Palestine, have recourse to French theories, despite time lags due to delayed English translation. Foundational writers of a field loosely grouped under the rubric “memory studies” include French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, whose Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925) and posthumously published La mémoire collective (1950) both appeared in English in 1980, under confusingly similar titles. The English-language publication of Halbwachs’ corpus on the individual in relation to “collective memory” coincidentally corresponded with the American Psychiatric Association's 1980 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition, in which categories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) extended collective memory into collective traumatic memory, through the notion that “Post-traumatic disorder is fundamentally a disorder of memory.” Another seminal thinker in this field is Pierre Nora, especially the multivolume, multiauthored essays produced under his direction entitled Les Lieux de mémoire, which appeared in French between 1984 and 1992.

The manuscript tradition of the Zaydi branch of Shiʿism, which since the 9th century has been preserved primarily in Yemen, is nowadays dispersed over countless libraries in Yemen and the Middle East, Turkey, Europe, and the United States, of which only a fraction has been digitized and is available for open access. Its treasures came to the attention of scholars outside Yemen at a relatively late stage. Whereas the bulk of Arabic manuscripts nowadays housed in the libraries of Europe were acquired between the 17th and 19th centuries in centrally located cities and regions such as the Ottoman capital Istanbul, Syria and Palestine, and Egypt—all strongholds of Sunnism—the collections of Zaydi/Yemeni manuscripts were established only at the end of the 19th and first decades of the 20th century. Among the European explorers and merchants who collected manuscripts in South Arabia and later sold them to libraries in Europe was Eduard Glaser, who visited Yemen on four occasions between 1882 and 1894. After Glaser sold the manuscripts purchased during his first and second journey to the Königliche Bibliothek zu Berlin in 1884 and 1887, Wilhelm Ahlwardt made them the last acquisition to be included in his Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts, published between 1887 and 1899. The third Glaser collection was purchased in 1889 by the British Museum in London—with the exception of the Lane collection that was purchased in 1891 and 1893, it was the last acquisition to be included in Charles Rieu's Supplement to the Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts published in 1894. The fourth Glaser collection was sold in 1894 to the Kaiserlich-Königliche Hofbibliothek in Vienna, constituting the most important acquisition of Arabic manuscripts by the library at the time—unlike the Berlin and London Glaser collections, the Vienna Glaser manuscripts were never described in a published catalogue. An even larger collection of Zaydi/Yemeni manuscripts was brought together by the Italian merchant Giuseppe Caprotti during his sojourn in South Arabia from 1885 to 1919. Portions of the Caprotti collection now belong to the Bavarian State Library in Munich and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, while the majority of the collection is owned by the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. European libraries and increasingly US libraries have continuously purchased manuscripts of Yemeni provenance during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Academic diversity has been an important consideration in hiring processes within academia since the late 2010s. The term diversity encompasses race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, geographical representation, and political beliefs. There are three significant considerations during the hiring process. To put it simply: “equity is the promotion of fairness and justice for each individual that considers historical, social, systemic, and structural issues that impact experience and individual needs; diversity is a measure of representation within a community or population that includes identity, background, lived experience, culture, and many more; and inclusion is the creation of an environment where everyone shares a sense of belonging, is treated with respect, and is able to fully participate.”1

For centuries Muslims have asked whether the Qurʾan should be recited and memorized first and foremost, or whether one must prioritize understanding the meaning of its complex language. What is the best way to encounter God's Word? To explore this question, a women's Qurʾan lesson in a slum of Old Cairo illustrates modern Muslim anxieties over the place of discursive meaning in encounters with the Qurʾan. This article elaborates the concept of affirmation as an analytic to grasp how the women relate to the truth of revelation. Affirmation is a performative and discursive hermeneutic practice that deploys Qurʾanic citation, situates Qurʾanic concepts in daily life, and sutures the efficacy of Qurʾan education with correct language and with right action. Their lessons are indicative of reformist trends in Qurʾan education that open onto questions of meaning and understanding in relation to human interactions with divine speech.

The continued use of the term “tribe” to describe groups with segmentary organization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has long been recognized as problematic, albeit without viable alternative English translations of the local terms: qabīla, ‘ashīra, sha‘b, ‘ilt, and others. Yet the equally problematic but enduring uncritical acceptance of genealogical classification of MENA's tribes leads to fundamental misunderstandings of the basic principles of tribal organization as well as the multiple roles of kinship in the region. This propensity is not only misleading but is loaded with social evolutionary assumptions about presumed “stages of development” that hinder scholarship on tribes and have a negative impact on international policy toward countries like Yemen with significant self-identified tribal populations. Key to this essay is the wide diversity and flexibility in the terminology applied to tribal segments and in the sizes of segments.

The Arab Gulf remains a marginalized, even unfashionable, area of research in the Middle East academy. In spite of—or maybe because of—this marginality, the region offers an interesting vantage point for reflecting on the production of knowledge about geographic and cultural regions. The frame of knowledge production casts into relief discourses of “the city” in Middle East, and particularly Gulf, studies over the past decade.

Western scholarship is today at work ‘rediscovering’ the Egyptian archives. After a decade of relative absence, scholars have in the past few years converged on Cairo in ever growing numbers to mine the archival treasures hidden away in mosques, palaces, and old public buildings. Between 1968 and 1970 American scholars researched eight archive projects, Europeans several more; and in 1971–2 The American Research Center in Egypt administered 29 projects (a near threefold increase from the immediately preceding years), of which 18 proposed to use archival material1.

This paper explores the history of the alphabet revolutions in the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire, beginning in the 1860s and culminating with the new Turkish alphabet and the Soviet latinization movement in the 1920s. Unlike earlier works that have treated these movements separately, this article traces the origins of the alphabet revolutions to the 19th-century communications revolution, when the telegraph and movable metal type challenged the existing modes of knowledge production and imposed new epistemologies of writing on the Muslims in the Russo-Ottoman space. This article examines the media technologies of the era and the cross-imperial debates surrounding various alphabet proposals that predated latinization and suggests that the history of language reform in the Russo-Ottoman world be reevaluated as a product of a modernizing information age that eventually changed the entire linguistic landscape of Eurasia.

This article documents the ḥawākīr of Nazareth. Once widespread in the city, these traditional domestic gardens were integral to households of all economic backgrounds. They served as a space for work and socializing, constituted a center of collective (extended family) life, and provided a wide diversity of crops. However, in recent decades ḥawākīr have disappeared rapidly as new houses were built overtop them and residents’ tastes changed. Today people prefer gardens with green lawns and flowers. Intended strictly for recreation and ornament, this new kind of garden acts as a marker of privacy and economic success. We use ethnographic data to provide detailed descriptions of historical and contemporary examples of the traditional garden. The analysis dwells on the resonances between changing practices around and meanings of ḥawākīr and the changing character of the urban landscape, on the value of ḥawākīr as sites of attachment and identity, and on the potential of their revival to generate urban sustainability.

This article examines the administration of Hacı Mustafa Pasha, the military governor of Belgrade from 1793 to 1801. His appointment to this strategically located post was at odds with the contemporary trend in Ottoman provincial politics. Unlike most high-ranking provincial officials at this time, especially in the Balkans, Mustafa Pasha was not among the wealthy and militarily powerful ayan (local notables) but rather a career bureaucrat. His tumultuous and ultimately tragic administration reveals that his appointment was part of the attempt by Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807) to recentralize provincial governance. This study also provides a sociopolitical portrait of Belgrade and the surrounding region during the 18th century, as well as a brief look at the dangerous alliance of ayan and the janissaries.

The region of Mascara, Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century is an attractive terrain for one seeking to combine anthropology and history in a North African setting. It was from this milieu that the 'amīr ‘Abd al-Qādir had emerged to lead resistance to the French in the 1830s and’ 40s. And the region abounded in that quintessentially Maghribin social type best known to the Western world as “marabouts,” but known in local parlance as 'awlād sayyid. These were the descendants of walīs, saintly men whose mortal remains are sheltered by the qubbas, or small, white-washed domed shrines one sees throughout North Africa. The two subjects are closely linked, for the 'amīr himself came from a prominent 'awlād sayyid family, as did many of his most important followers.

The term “grammar” is ambiguous. This essay explores the meanings of the term in general and concentrates on its relevance to Modem Hebrew. The gap between the lexical meanings and the speakers' knowledge of grammaticality is demonstrated as being a result of the close linkage between Biblical Hebrew grammar and Modem Hebrew norms.

One of the central issues in the debate on the transformative impact of European economic expansion on agricultural structures in the Ottoman Empire concerns the formation of large agricultural estates. It has been argued that the growing demand for raw materials on the world market fostered efforts at the integration of small landholdings into larger units of production and an increasing commercialization of agricultural produce. This commercializaiton coincided with a tendency toward crop specializaiton and a regional differentitation between the rural areas.

If historians of the Middle East have turned their attention to the environment rather later than those in other subfields, a recent crop of books indicates that a new generation of scholars has spent much productive time considering environmental histories of other geographies. The books reviewed in this essay stand out for their insistence on examining Middle Eastern environments as both ecological facts and representational spaces. Taken in concert, they indicate the vibrancy of environmental history in the field. Moreover, their careful attention to methodology and creative use of sources opens up spaces for new investigations of politics, culture, and religion as mediated through environmental management and representation. Following on the recent work of Diana K. Davis, Edmund Burke III, and others, these historians have marshaled environmental, climatological, epidemiological, biological, and geological data for historical argument. Thus, the resulting works situate themselves deeply within their respective historiographic narratives, yet also interrupt, redelineate, and unsettle those narrative assumptions. At its best, the so-called “environmental turn” in the history of the Middle East represents not an intellectual fashion, but rather a major methodological shift that involves a reframing of our understanding of the formation of the field.

Economic growth in underdeveloped countries, including Jordan, is associated with substantial social change. According to the theory of social deviance, underdeveloped societies are characterized by a traditional distribution of labor where customs and values greatly influence the manners of economic performance. These customs and values shape attitudes of people toward work in general, and the issue of participation of women in the labor force in particular.

With the reinstatement of the parliament in 1908, the Ottoman state faced new challenges connected to citizenship. As a policy to finally make citizens equal in rights as well as duties, military conscription figured prominently in this new context. For the first time in Ottoman history, the empire's non-Muslims began to be drafted en masse. This article explores meanings of imperial citizenship and equality through the lens of debates over the conscription of Greek Ottomans, the largest non-Muslim population of the Ottoman Empire. In contrast to the widespread suggestion of the Turkish nationalist historiography on these matters, Greek Ottomans and other non-Muslim populations enthusiastically supported the military service in principle. But amidst this general agreement was a tremendous array of views on what conscription ought to look like in practice. The issue came to center on whether Greek Ottomans should have separate battalions in the army. All units would eventually come to be religiously integrated, but the conscription debates in the Ottoman parliament as well as in the Turkish and Greek language press reveal some of the crucial fissures of an empire as various actors were attempting to navigate between a unified citizenship and a diverse population.