Incorporating descriptions and analyses of sound into Middle Eastern history offers a wealth of opportunity for enriching our understanding of the historical record. But sometimes we need to get back to the basics: the “five w's and one h” of sound studies, so to speak. In what follows I would like to run this simple exercise with radio in the Mandate-era Levant, in order to lay out the basic data and begin to reflect on how it might aid scholars in better understanding other aspects of life in this period. I will do this by first addressing some of these basic what, who, when, where, why, how questions, and then by examining one day's programming of the Palestine Broadcasting Service in 1937: the day immediately following the release of the Peel Commission Report. What can we learn from examining this day's programming?

Contemporary feminists have stressed the importance of women's networks in empowering women. In the Western context, professional networks, support groups, and the availability of role models are seen to provide a collective basis for the development of confidence and self-esteem as well as a potential base for political action. Feminist attention to the Middle East has uncovered patterns of interaction suggesting that there, too, women have found in feminine networks both the basis for power and the personal attributes that undergird social competence. Aswad, for example, describes the kabul, an upper-class formal visitation network in Turkey with distinct political overtones. Women exchange information that might be dismissed as gossip were it not for the fact that participants are from powerful land-owning families, and the discussions have impact well beyond the immediate setting.1

The Arab Human Development Report 2005, the fourth in a series that has received much acclaim and stirred much controversy, takes up the issue of women's development in the Arab world. Through a careful reading and analysis of sections of the report that address education and economic participation, this paper offers a critique of the human capabilities framework that frames this report. I highlight critical tensions between the claim that providing education is an essential element of expanding choices and the assumptions embedded in discussions about women and education regarding which choices are acceptable and/or desirable. These tensions point to the persistence of values derived from the mandates of global capital, albeit in the new language of neoliberal choice, revealing that ‘human development’ does not represent a significant departure from earlier conceptualizations of development. I draw on my ethnographic research in Jordan as one example to interrogate such assumptions and to shed light on the ambiguities built into the educational project for young women today.

Prior to 1964 the Iranian budgets were only a simple record of the receipts and expenditures of the central government. Such conventional administrative budgets were the results of the reforms of A.D. 1911 (21 Safar 1329 A.H.D.) when a Comprehensive Financial Law for the country was legislated. This law was modeled on the existing laws of France. The French laws were in turn based on the philosophy of government as conceived by the classical economists. These economists thought of the governments as an organization which protected the right of the individual to pursue his best interest without trespassing on the rights of others. Also, they advocated government non-intervention and non participation in economic activities.

This is how Ismaʿil bin ʿAbd al-Qadir, a Mahdist chronicler of late 19th-century Sudan, gave a broad Islamic significance to the defeat of Ethiopian armies by Mahdist forces at al-Qallabat in March 1889. Culminating in the death of Emperor Yohannes IV, the four-year confrontation between Mahdist Sudan and Christian Ethiopia (1885–89) had repercussions that transcended the local setting, reaching far into the intertwined history of Sudan, Ethiopia, and European imperialism in the Nile Valley and Red Sea regions.

This paper illustrates the heterogeneity of Islamic publics in early 20th-century Turkey by examining the life and thought of Ken'an Rifai, a Sufi shaykh and high-ranking bureaucrat in the Ottoman Ministry of Education. It argues that Shaykh Rifai endorsed state secularization reforms on religious grounds and shows how he reformulated Sufi Islam by imbricating Sufi ethics with other social imaginaries of the time through the lens of an upper-class bureaucrat. This paper contributes to Turkish studies by highlighting the previously overlooked role of elite Islamic groups who collaborated with the early republic. It also challenges the dominant paradigm of a binary opposition between the secular ruling elite and pious masses. Additionally, this paper offers insight into broader anthropological and historical Islamic studies by demonstrating the diverse ways Sufi traditions adapted to modern governance.

The three-week uprising in Egypt that ended with the removal of Husni Mubarak on February 11 happened to coincide with the section of my spring course syllabus on the Egyptian novel from Najib Mahfuz to Ahmed Alaidy. As was the case for many of my colleagues and their students, the rapid and awe-inspiring events unfolding daily before us pushed purely academic concerns to the margins of class discussion. This tidal wave of revolutionary politics erupting into the classroom forced me to the realization that my larger syllabus was not simply some neutral or systematic survey of half a century's worth of Arabic literature. I began to think about the largely invisible dystopic intellectual and historical paradigms through which modern Arabic literature is often framed, at least in the United States. The nahḍa/naksa narrative, which compelled many of us to read Arab cultural history of the 20th century as a story of brief “awakening” followed by irredeemable decline and corruption, is clearly no longer tenable in the wake of February 11. This same narrative underpinned the highly self-conscious postmodernism that began to emerge in Egypt in the 1990s and that reached its apogee a couple of decades later at the end of the 2000s, a postmodernism that was celebrated (though by no means universally) as the true beginning of literary modernity and the emancipation of the subject from the dead weight of a past ideological age.

Since at least the 1930s, Palestine has had a continuous role as a laboratory of counterinsurgency. During the British Mandate, Palestine saw a consolidation of the techniques of imperial policing and the development of a complex military-legal apparatus of control, from “security fences” and watchtowers to mass incarceration and collective punishment to emergency laws and administrative detention. Palestine has continued to be the setting for counterinsurgency military exercises, with Israel incorporating the British Mandate laws in its legal corpus and British military practice in its doctrines. Based on extensive primary research, this essay traces the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice and the legal apparatuses that uphold it and argues that both in the incorporation of British transmission of doctrine, law, and practice from Palestine, and in the Israeli military's deployment of new and transportable techniques of control, Palestine has been gradually transformed into a central node of military knowledge/power within a global matrix of counterinsurgency.

Popular perceptions frequently characterize militant Islamic groups such as Hamas as uncompromising, ideological movements trapped by rigid adherence to dogma. Such understandings view radical groups as irrationally beholden to strict religious doctrine, engendering fatalistic assessments of the possibility for peaceful political change. Against this general perspective, Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela offer a more nuanced view of Hamas (and implicitly of Islamist movements in general) as a strategic actor constrained by the realities of political context rather than doctrine. In a manner akin to rational-choice theory (though not explicitly recognized as such), they detail the strategic decisions of Hamas as it balances ideological and pragmatic imperatives to ensure the survival of the movement in a dynamic environment.

The aim of this essay is to explore the possibility, remote as it is or might be, of dramatists employing their trade and using their skill to transmit political messages. In Arabic culture, there is enough ground to suspect that such an endeavor is possible, forthe culture is known to have used the medium of drama to support religiopolitical ideas. I am referring to the well-known fact that the Shī'a sect of Islam, perhaps as early as the time of Yazīd (late A.D. seventh century) has been mourning the martyrdom of Husayn at Karbalā in dramalike fashion. We may well pause to contemplate the ultimate sociopolitical reason for the performance of this ancient Arabo-Islamic passion play.

In the two decades between 1953 and 1973 the rapidly growing industrialization of Iran has shifted to industry much of the former emphasis on agriculture. During the last five years of the period, the share of agriculture in the GNP declined from somewhat under 25 percent to i6 percent. Despite its decreasing part, agriculture in 1972/3 was still responsible for the largest portion of consumer expenditures, and agricultural products, notably such traditional items as carpets, dried fruit and nuts continued to rank next below oil as Iran's largest exports, and so were the second largest provider of the country's foreign exchange.

No historical treatment of the first decade of the British occupation of Egypt overlooks the abortive mission of Sir Henry Drummond-Wolff to Cairo and Istanbul from 1885 to the spring of 1887. Most, however, fail to discuss the diverse political interests within Egypt itself, which, in one fashion or another, stood to be affected by the mission and its objectives. Consequently, an entire segment of the negotiations which led to the 22 May 1887 convention setting the conditions for withdrawal, including an original draft article covering the future status of the capitulatory and mixed court regime in Egypt, has all but disappeared from the record. The circumstances behind this forgotten article demonstrate in capsule form the degree to which the issue of judicial reform indirectly dominated London's Egyptian policy in stages from 1876 to the Montreux Convention on the capitulations concluded by Nahhas Pasha in 1937.

For more than a decade, scholars and writers of various stripes have been revisiting the events surrounding the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948, whose outcome heavily shaped subsequent Middle East politics. Basing their work primarily on newly available Israeli, British, and American archival materials, they have shed considerable light and generated much heat regarding the origins, consequences, and degrees of responsibility for the events surrounding the birth of the State of Israel, the uprooting of two-thirds of the Palestinian Arab community, and the defeat of neighboring Arab armies.