This article examines the creation of the first privately-owned Muslim banks in the first half of the twentieth century and the legal debates they instigated among Muslim communities. Whether in Bosnia or India, these banks appeared suddenly in the years immediately before the First World War. They were envisioned as a way to free up Muslim capital for productive ends, and as the means to jumpstart a Muslim economic renaissance. Far from masking their interest transactions, the banks' founders and customers pointed to a range of Islamic legal rulings that justified interest levied on deposits and loans. These rulings varied from one geographic locale to the next, and were expressive of diverse Muslim institutional and legal histories. Yet in an age when the formerly diffuse discursive terrain around interest, usury, and the Islamic foundational sources was shifting towards a consensus that rejected any interest/usury distinction, some of these banks faced acute challenges, particularly in India. There, novel notions of interest-free Islamic economics were articulated from the interwar period, which rejected any form of Muslim interest-banking. In time, the earlier iteration of Muslim interest banking became overshadowed by the new paradigm of “Islamic banks” which purportedly eschewed all financial interest.

The study of Islamic movements has taken on a special relevance since the tragic events of 11 September 2001. More than ever, people inside and outside of academe are inquiring about the origins, motivations, and consequences of Islamic activism around the globe. The three books under review contribute to our understanding of Islamic activism in three countries: Algeria, Palestine/Israel, and Jordan. Camille al-Tawil's Al-Haraka addresses the rise of armed movements in Algeria since 1992 and their justification for violence, especially anti-civilian carnage, in the mid-1990s. Khaled Hroub's Hamas covers the origins, strategic orientation, and ideological evolution of one of the most controversial and militant Islamic movements in the Muslim world. Quintan Wiktorowicz's The Management of Islamic Activism sheds light on a moderate Islamic movement in the Middle East and the mechanisms of social control that foster such quiescent Islamism. These three works speak to the diverse nature of contemporary Islamic movements and the importance of political context in shaping Islamic strategic orientations. Each offers original empirical and theoretical insights that will surely enhance the discussion of Islamic activism in years to come.

Please open the PDF to view the article.

The globe is estimated to have 6 billion people today. The rapid increase of the human population has for decades been a common Western bogeyman. Now, at the turn of the millennium, the threat is brought out again. Today “the human time bomb” connotes uncontrolled fecundity in the Other, the non-Western or non-European. Demographic research shows that many countries in the Middle East and North Africa have among the highest rates of population growth in the contemporary world. Unlike Europe, where the nightmare of demographers and politicians is the aging and decreasing population, the Middle East still has a rapidly increasing and young population. Quite clearly, many politicians in the European Union are worried about the “uncontrollable overflow” of populations over its borders from the southern and eastern Mediterranean shores.

Before broaching the main topic of this study, there seem to me to be two general issues involving terms in the title which need to be addressed: The one concerns nomenclature, the other the question of genres. A certain vagueness colors most attempts at definition of the term “novella,” something which seems the result of both the way in which the term has developed and the considerable differences of opinion among critics. Thus the Oxford English Dictionary seems to reflect the relatively recent interest in the genre in the English-speaking world by not including the word at all in the main part of the dictionary and by defining it in the Supplement as “a short novel (as in the stories of Boccaccio's Decameron).” As Howard Nemerov points out, however, “the term ‘short novel’ is descriptive only in the way that the term ‘Middle Ages’ is descriptive—that is, not at all, except with regard to the territory on either side.” The index to the English translation of Todorov's Poetics of Prose lists: Novella, see Tale. Such entries as these do at least convey to us the notion that the novella operates somewhere along a fictional spectrum, the two poles of which are the novel and the short story, but that is all.

The arrival of Lashin1 on the Egyptian literary scene in the 1920s marked a turning point in the history of the short story: he was an outstandingly vigorous pioneer who developed the genre and brought its formative years to a close. His writings represent the culmination, in both form and content, of the work of previous writers and of his contemporaries. He was also the major figure of a versatile literary group, Jama⊂at al-Madrasa al Haditha (the Modern School), which played a decisive role in developing the Egyptian short story, extending its reading public, and shaping the characteristics of the new sensibility of that period. This group did not start as a proper literary school as the name implies, but rather as a gathering of enthusiastic young writers whose common dream of issuing a paper of their own, to express their views and publish their unconventional works, took almost a decade to be realised.

On 7 April 1971 Professor Roger LeTourneau died unexpectedly at Aix-en-Provence following routine surgery. A founding member of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, and a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Professor LeTourneau had for over a decade taken an active role in encouraging the development of Middle Eastern Studies in the United States, especially in the growth of his field of specialization, the history of North Africa. His influence, both personal and professional, and his contribution to scholarship were exceptional.

The colonial history of Tunisia has long been dictated by colonial sources that made the qaid (an official in charge of fiscal attributions), from the viewpoint of the capital city, a local notable and often a prevaricator. This study proposes to reconsider the relationship between government and regional power in the colonial context by drawing on the recent work of Ottoman studies about provincial elites. The article studies the fiscal reforms of the interwar period in a cereal-growing region of Tunisia, relying on sources in Arabic produced by the qaids, namely the administrative correspondence between local authorities, the prime minister, and colonial controllers. This article describes the role of qaids in the negotiation between national law and local specificities and finally highlights the role of decentralization and a local way of thinking about the state in the 1930s. It contributes to colonial history and the history of taxation by highlighting the territorial fractures in North Africa and the agency of local actors under the protectorate.

Please open the PDF to view the article.