This article analyzes interviews related to the 1916–19 Sharifian siege of Medina that were published in a collection on the city's history by Saudi Arabian historian Ahmad Murshid. These oral histories narrate how Fakhri Pasha (Turkish: Fahreddin), the Ottoman military commander stationed in Medina during the siege, expelled residents from their homes, strictly controlled the supply of food in the city, and managed military operations out of the Holy Mosque of the Prophet Muhammad. The article seeks to explore the perspective of ordinary civilians who experienced the siege, a perspective largely missing from the literature on the subject. The interviews are positioned here as a valuable historical source for understanding the impact of the siege on these individuals and on their families, communities, and identities. Their memories underscore the interviewees’ deep attachment to their city, as well as to their identity as madanīs and as legitimate narrators of Medina's history.

Since 2011, Arab states have faced unprecedented challenges to their territorial integrity. Movements in Kurdistan, southern Arabia, and Cyrenaica have all made unilateral bids to secure administrative and coercive control over territory. While some disavow secessionism, their agendas for separation clearly undermine their respective parent state, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. Added to this is the Islamic State (IS), intent on breaking all the borders of the region and establishing a new caliphate. It is easy to see the emergence and empowerment of these movements as steps in the crumbling of artificial colonially constructed states and the reassertion of more ancient and organic clan, sect, and tribal allegiances. Yet these movements represent less a reversion to primoridialism than a reassertion of claims to self-determination that had been overridden in the course of 20th-century state formation.

The proliferation of technologies in use for popular music in Morocco points to cultural interactions beyond the most local or national influences that inform musical practices there. Examining the integration of technologies from outside Morocco—including musical instruments, recording media, and distribution systems—sheds light on negotiations of novelty and difference in contemporary Moroccan social and political life and thus on multiple facets of how late modernity has played out there. Among other broad areas of significance that musical practices help illuminate are the social and economic effects of colonial and postcolonial interactions, including the development of cash economies, globalized exchange, and cultural tourism; nationalist initiatives to define culture; and large-scale migration to Europe and elsewhere in recent decades, following a longer population shift in 20th-century Morocco from primarily rural locales to burgeoning urban centers.

This article examines Americans' uses of the Ottoman-Turkish past to justify different approaches to “Third World” development. Such invocations exposed tensions within American liberalism and projected them onto Middle Eastern history. One interpretation criticized Tanzimat land reform to emphasize agrarian democracy as the impetus for the development process. Another, reflecting postwar liberals' predilection for elite authority, relegated democracy to the end of that process by embracing Kemalism as its model. The article concludes by arguing that Ottoman historians influenced the modernization paradigm as much as it did them. H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen transmitted Ottoman reform discourses to social scientists through Islamic Society and the West, which the authors based on reform-era writings at a time when archival research was just beginning to transform Ottoman studies. Cold War intellectuals and bureaucrats appropriated their Ottoman predecessors' temporal and spatial perspectives in the effort to manage Third World change

Contemporary and later Arabic texts provide much evidence that wayward conduct by elite young adult males was a source of considerable stress in early Abbasid cities. This brief essay turns on a question: to what extent is such conduct to be attributed to concubinage? I treat two sample texts, each describing untoward activity on the part of well-placed adult sons and its impact on the Abbasid body politic. Neither text, however, speaks to concubinage. What follows, then, is an argument from circumstantial evidence. Concubinage seems a most likely source, and so can reasonably be connected to the broader patterns of social disjunction of the first Abbasid period (roughly the mid-8th to mid-10th centuries).

Oymak. Al. Boy. Cemaat. Taife. Aşiret. These are the terms Ottoman officials used in imperial orders (mühimme) to describe diverse human communities linked by their mobility and externality to village administration in Ottoman Anatolia between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1924, Turkish historian Ahmet Refik compiled Ottoman imperial orders concerning such communities into a volume he titled Anadolu'da Türk Aşiretleri, 966–1200 (Turkish Tribes in Anatolia, 1560–1786). His use of the term aşiret (tribe) in the title is striking, because this term was only used in 9% of the orders in his volume (23 out of 244 total). However, by the late nineteenth century and in Refik's early Republican context, aşiret had become the standard term for these rural, extra-village, mobile human communities, which he understood as similar enough to include in his painstaking effort of compilation.

To write a review essay about three books on what at first glance appear to be very divergent topics may seem like an impossible task. Samera Esmeir's book, Juridical Humanity, is an exploration of colonial law as it conscripted Egyptians into the grid of humanity; Judith Butler's Parting Ways is a critique of Zionism and state violence from a Jewish perspective; and Hussein Agrama's Questioning Secularism is about the paradoxical nature of secular power as manifest in modern Egypt. Despite this divergence, I found a rich thematic resonance between the three books that was unexpected and illuminating. All three books are deep meditations on the nature of law, its violent and performative character, even as they are also about a lot more. In what follows, I discuss the central themes of each book with a short rumination on their shared themes.

How do perceptions of not belonging inform economic life? For many young Omanis, the labor market is a site of contestation and a space of struggle. In this essay, I explore a neglected dimension of belonging in the Gulf—citizen labor—by looking at Omani millennials in the labor market. Despite holding legal citizenship, a sense of belonging remains elusive in much of the private sector. Many Omani young people perceive a tenuous economic citizenship, complicating narratives around belonging or not belonging in the Arabian Peninsula. I draw from lessons learned while researching my current book and exploring social relations and regulation of labor markets, and reflect on how the knowledge and theories produced concerning Gulf labor markets rarely engage with the citizens in them.

Defining digital humanities is tricky. Our scholarship has been intrinsically digital for quite a few decades already, as we rely more and more on electronic storage to save, word processors to write, bibliography managers to organize, databases to consult, digital libraries to search and read. Living in the digital world, however, does not make us all digital humanists—if these digital entities are taken away, we will have their analog prototypes to fall back on, and beyond a certain level of inconvenience, this will not affect the way most of us do our scholarship. The transition to digital humanities must begin somewhere at the point where our humanistic inquiry starts to rely on the machine as the matter of methodological exigency.

The study of Coptic history usually brings to mind gnostic texts, remote monastic enclaves, archeological ruins, conflicts with Byzantium, or a long-forgotten language. Until recently, a disproportionate focus on early Christianity has bound Copts to an ancient and seemingly timeless heritage, which explains the dearth of critical examinations on Coptic life from the Islamic conquests to the early modern period. In general, Coptic experiences after 641 have been overshadowed by other themes in Egyptian history writing, in particular political and military changes. Although the latter are as relevant for a better understanding of the Coptic past, they have been predominately examined from the perspective of the Muslim majority, exclusive of Coptic concerns, perspectives, and beliefs. Only in recent years has scholarship on Copts begun to expand. Scholars have drawn from fields such as papyrology, gender studies, art history, and law in pursuit of a more comprehensive historical narrative. We are increasingly encouraged to evaluate the Coptic experience not only as a missing cog in Egyptian historiography but also as one that complicates canonical studies of postconquest Egypt and enriches our understanding of Middle Eastern history in general.

By using the narrative approach and linking it to feminist research ethics and critical race methodology, this article seeks to understand how non-literacy and poverty hinder low-income women's access to justice and how these women experience the Moroccan state. The state here acts as an oppressive and marginalizing entity in women's lives, but also offers the potential for empowerment. This ethnographic study tells the stories of three victims of gender-based violence to demonstrate that the state needs to (1) set up an efficient and responsive infrastructure for those lacking know-how and money; (2) institute proper training of state agents for implementation of laws and to prevent them from acting on personal opinions and attitudes with regard to women's rights; and (3) strengthen procedures so that state agents can respond expeditiously to the needs and grievances of citizens.