Egypt is a less developed country that made use of foreign capital to accelerate its rate of economic development and growth.

In 1960 Egypt embarked on long-term economic development planning. A Five-Year plan (1960–1965) was followed by a Seven-Year plan (1965–1972). In planning for economic development, Egyptian authorities relied heavily on foreign capital.

Persian poetry in the twentieth century is undergoing changes that would have been scarcely imaginable a century or even half a century ago. The dispute of ancients and moderns rages in Persian literary circles, and exponents of both traditional and modern styles are regarded as traitors by both sides. I should be foolhardy to join battle in this domestic struggle, and the purpose of this memoir is only that of setting on record the outlines of the life and poetical works of a poet generally regarded as the greatest Persia has seen for a long time.

Admission. Scholars wishing to work in the Archive should write directly to the director of the Department of Youth, Sports, and Cultural Affairs, Cyprus Turkish Federated State, Lefkoşa, Cyprus (for the present, at least, c/o Mersin 10, Turkey). They should define the nature of their proposed research clearly and precisely, although not so specifically as to limit their research; a brief statement regarding their academic background should be included. Limited photocopying and microfilming may be permitted by the director of the Archive. Photocopying is available at the Archive, although it is expensive by American standards. Microfilming is also available locally.

This article discusses the modalities through which religious and secular nongovernmental medical organizations frame their work in relation to their constituencies. It argues that their discourses exemplify a differentiated approach to social work that can be explained in the context of massive aid disbursed to the occupied Palestinian territories. To understand how the political economy of aid impacts the framing of socioreligious movements, this article focuses on a case study of health organizations operating in the Hebron district, where a mixed matrix of charitable organizations, Islamic institutions, and zakat committees work along secular nongovernmental organizations. In the past decade, there seems to have been a revival of charitable organizations, which may shed light on current political victories of the Islamic sector. If Islamic socioreligious movements have been successful in promoting discourses of common good that attract more popular support than secular organizations, it is precisely because such discourses are in open (and sometimes conscious) tension with liberal conceptions such as good governance, strong civil society, and democracy promotion that are relayed generally by secular and professionalized nongovernmental organizations

Due to the illegal movement of goods and people, the Khuzistan-Basra frontier, like many other borderlands in the region, represented a liminal space for border dwellers and the Iranian state. Although scholars have written about the migration that was endemic to the early nation-building period, the consequences of this movement in the latter half of the 20th century require further exploration. Well into the 1970s, Iranian migrants and border dwellers complicated citizenship, evinced by the Pahlavi monarchy's failure or refusal to offer them their rights. The Iranian archives prove that, decades into the nation-building project, local dynamics continued to exert tremendous influence on Iranians and even superseded national policies.

On 10 June 1738 Maria Qari wrote her Catholic Melkite bishop, Athnasius Dahhan, an emphatic letter rejecting the authority of the Melkite church to impose the Eastern rite Rule of Saint Basil upon her and her fellow ʿabidāt (devotees). She unequivocally states, “It is important that your Excellency knows once and for all that I will only adopt the Augustinian Rule with the Ordinances of Saint Francis de Sales. I will not become a nun under any other circumstances, for God has called me to be free from all that binds my spirit, and I will not accept any oversight [from the Melkite church] . . . Four Jesuit missionaries are in agreement with me on this point.” This is but one missive in a voluminous record of equally rancorous discourses that spanned the better part of two decades (1730–48) and entangled the ten Aleppan devotees, their Jesuit confessors and supporters, the Melkite Church, and the Vatican.

The loss of Palestine and the resulting dispersal of Palestinian refugees has had a profound impact on the development of Arabic literature. If independence and revolution in most Arab lands served to catapult poets and writers into new literary themes and forms, the psychological jolt of defeat combined with the sudden physical presence of refugees who could not help but witness that defeat helped decisively to move writers away from earlier romantic themes and flowery language in favor of themes and styles considered to be more realistic. The 1950s and 1960s in particular were times of concern for social realism, and among the educated class there was a growing impatience with art that did not treat the important changes that shook the Arabs at the time.

Every Ramadan, when Egyptian TV shows enjoy their prime season, at least one series about Upper Egypt is produced and millions of viewers across the country get hooked on it. Those popular dramas usually include a southern hero who is a good-hearted yet poor young man, and his reluctant turn to crime to stand up against corruption and oppression. With romantic depictions of dark and handsome outlaws, the protagonists of these shows always win the deep sympathy of their fans as they rebel against unfortunate conditions and resist local officials, rich elites, and/or corrupt police officers. One of the most iconic and memorable shows, which came out in 1992, was titled Dhiʾab al-Jabal (Wolves of the Mountain, Fig. 1). It narrated the story of Badri, a young man from Qena province, who faced police injustice and escaped to the mountains on the west bank of the Nile River to hide, and then joined a gang of bandits. The honest and kind mountain fugitives aided him until he proved his innocence, reunited with his lost sister, and married his sweetheart. For many viewers across the country, Badri and other lawless idols embody the only glimpse of resistance they experience in their repressed lives—albeit virtually on a TV screen.

Upon arrival at the Qasr al-ʿAyni Hospital in Cairo in 1908, a woman from a village in Qena province in Upper Egypt related her harrowing medical saga. It began when she developed a urinary fistula (nāsur bawlī) due to prolonged labor (a urinary fistula causes urine to leak from the bladder into the vagina, resulting in deep discomfort and social ostracism of those afflicted). She had gone to a hospital in the city of Qena, capital of the province with the same name, but medical officers there sent her to Asyut. There, in the government hospital, she underwent three operations without success, whereupon doctors instructed her to go to Qasr al-ʿAyni Hospital in Cairo to see Dr. Nagib Mahfuz (1882–1974), who had developed a reputation for his surgical prowess in treating fistulas. The woman from Qena traveled by foot, begging along the way, until, exhausted, she reached the city of Minya, halfway between Asyut and Bani Suwayf. There she was sent once again to the government hospital, examined, and once again told to go to Qasr al-ʿAyni.

In his recent article, “Secularizing Anatolia Tick by Tick: Clock Towers in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic,” Mehmet Bengü Uluengin makes a significant contribution to our understanding of late Ottoman and early republican clock towers. Uluengin shows that Ottoman clock towers carried “complex and seemingly contradictory layering of meanings” (p. 31). These buildings were at times associated with Christianity and with European power but were also seen as modern extensions of the Islamic institution of the muvakkit (timekeeper) or as symbols of the Ottoman government and its modernizing project. The cultural meanings associated with clock towers were fluid, concludes Uluengin, and it was the context that determined the way clock towers were interpreted.

Extant studies of Iranian nationalism accentuate the self-aggrandizing side of Iranian modernity, mainly achieved through, and informing, a process of otherizing certain non-Persians/Iranians, particularly the Arabs. I argue that equally important to understanding Iranian modernity is its lesser recognized, shameful and self-demeaning face, as manifested through a simultaneous 19th-century discourse, which I call “self-deprecating modernity.” This was an often self-ridiculing and shame-inducing, sometimes satirical, discourse featuring an emotion-driven and self-Orientalizing framework that developed out of many mid-nineteenth-century Iranian modernists’ obsessions with Europe's gaze; with self-surveillance; and with the perceived humiliation of Iranians through the ridiculing laughter of Other (especially European) nations at Iran's and Iranians’ expense. To explore this discourse, I re-examine the works of three pre-constitutionalist thinkers and writers within the broader sociopolitical context of late Qajar Iran, surveying their perspectives on shame, embarrassment, and ridiculing laughter, and showing how they were significantly informed by, while also helping to form, self-deprecating modernity. Given the strong, self-colonizing presumptions of this discourse, I conclude the article with a stress on the importance of re-exploring collective self-critical practices in modern Iranian history, culture, and literature with an eye toward decolonizing self-criticism.

This article examines banditry, embezzlement, and other insider crimes along Egyptian railway lines during a period when British officials exerted centralized control over the Egyptian railway and financial austerity had a negative impact on the rail sector. By exploring the motives and tactics of railway crimes, I posit that criminals, by making claims on and use of the technology outside the purview of state regulations, expressed their heterogeneous desires to redistribute social wealth, repurpose the technological promise of modern railways, and confound intentions of colonial governance. Using new archival materials, this article utilizes a bottom-up approach to examine grassroots activism, everyday knowledge, informal networks, and the social mores and norms that criminals harnessed to discern infrastructural vulnerabilities and elude surveillance from the colonial state. Ultimately, I contend that criminal acts uncovered social crises otherwise hidden under the shadow of the exterior prosperity and stability of late 19th-century Egypt.