The cultural heritage of any one nation constitutes its collective experience and memory. Passed down from generation to generation, it contains a multitude of institutions, beliefs, and values that continue to act on the minds of people and affect their behavior. As an expression of the national identity, it is usually very wary of sudden change and prefers undisturbed continuity, its legitimate aims being self-preservation and the very existence of the nation as a group. It has its own checks and balances to allow any dose of change when the need for such arises. By an intricate historical process, it develops its own principles of inclusion and exclusion so that any change accepted or any change rejected will not affect its capacity for continued life and growth, but will rather enhance it.

Events since 2011 replaced earlier discussions about authoritarian stability in the Middle East with new ones about the meaning of democracy and the nature of revolution. The experiences and debates of Egyptians in the last six years also raise important questions around citizenship and the nature of political community. Just as there have not always been nation-states, there have not always been feelings of membership, identification, and activity associated with them. Citizenship and political community are frequently discussed in relation to secularism and religion and relative to an argument that the affective claims of Islam are incompatible with the modern presumptively secular state. I argue, however, that the shoring up—or disintegration—of nationalism and citizenship are shaped by the imagination of everyday individuals and state elites.

Like much of the “developing world,” Syria experienced urban population growth at historically unprecedented rates in the 1950s. Such rapid urbanization, like all transformative historical phenomena, animates (and, to a certain extent, reifies) a host of dreams and anxieties in those who experience it. To get an inkling of how “Syrians”—as individuals, groups, or representatives of institutions—felt about these changes, one has to look beyond the ubiquitous and frequent pronouncements of intellectuals and government officials extolling the virtues of modernity and the liberating effects of science and technology.

Much of the scholarship on the history of Iranian cinema considers film spectatorship in the first three decades of the 20th century as a leisure practice with origins in royalist and elitist entertainment forms. However, a close reading of archival material from this era reveals that cinema's significance extended well beyond its role as a pastime, as it became engaged in the governance of the self and disciplinary strategies of the state in Iran's experience of modernity in the early 20th century. In this article, I reperiodize the history of cinema in Iran by demonstrating the entanglement of cinema in popular nationalist discourses on education prior to cinema's institutionalization in the 1930s. Drawing on newspaper articles, film announcements, official documents, and poems, I show how, despite the absence of a centralized cinema institution in the 1910s and early 1920s, cosmopolitan citizens in dialogue with global trends promoted cinema as a means for the governance of selfhood and moral edification in the service of national progress. With the appropriation of cinema by the Pahlavi state in the 1930s, cinema was used as a technique of governmentality that aimed to conduct the conduct of individuals and shape an Iranian civic society.

As environmental history migrates to the Middle East there is natural excitement about new research methods such as molecular biology and soil science. But the Braudelian project of describing “man in his intimate relationship to the earth which bears and feeds him” may be complicated by echoes of the region's literary past.

Stéphane Valter's book raises a legitimate question: how did the Baעthist regime of Syria (since 1963), and especially Hafiz al-Asad (from 1970 to 2000) succeed in remaining so long in power? Crude brutality, as documented by Middle East Watch (Syria Unmasked: The Suppression of Human Rights by the Asad Regime [1991]), was not enough. Neither were the threats and expectations of external wars, as Fred Lawson argues in Why Syria Goes to War (1996). Coercion had to be blended with some sort of legitimacy to explain the durability of a regime that could not be labeled totalitarian.

This article concerns the place of late Ottoman Jews in Palestine on the eve of the 1948 War. It focuses on Israel Ben-Zeʾev (Wolfensohn), a Jerusalem-born educator and Nahda intellectual who led a movement of self-identified “native” Jews, including both “Old Yishuv” Ashkenazim and Sephardim, to combat their marginalization by the Zionist institutions. I examine his lifetime struggle to advance the study of Arabic and “Arab Jews” (yahud ʿarab) under early Islam by creating institutions of knowledge production and educational programs modeled on those he knew from his early academic career in Cairo. It was in the context of these struggles that demands for separate political representation for native Jews and for a specialized field of Arab Jewish studies coalesced as part of a broader project of a shared Arab-Jewish cultural modernization. They culminated in 1948, when Ben-Zeʾev finally realized his Arabic library project, ironically using looted Palestinian books, only to see its destruction four years later by Zionist leaders and Hebrew University professors.

Melani McAlister, currently assistant professor of American studies at George Washington University, attempts a multi-faceted and multi-layered coherence between U.S. political activities and agendas figuring the Middle East, and U.S. popular-culture appropriations of specific histories, religions, and symbologies of the region over a fifty-five–year span. McAlister sets herself a daunting task to interweave popular culture, politics, history, and criticism:

In 1762, a ghost ship appeared off the Tunisian coast between Tabarka and Bizerte during the spring equinox, notorious for treacherous weather. According to a local chronicler: “Perceived in the distance was a ship with masts but no flag flying that approached the shore, then drew away. It was the month of April [1762] and unusually cold . . . the next morning, we saw the vessel veer toward land while a violent tempest raged.” Wrecked on the rocky shoreline, it funneled unimaginable wealth to pastoralists, villagers, and scavengers from far and wide. The ship proved to be without passengers or crew whose fate remains unknown until this day.

In Pensée 1, “Africa on My Mind,” Mervat Hatem questions the perceived wisdom of creating the African Studies Association (focused on sub-Saharan Africa) and the Middle East Studies Association a decade later, which “institutionalized the political bifurcation of the African continent into two academic fields.” The cleaving of Africa into separate and distinct parts—a North Africa/Middle East and a sub-Saharan Africa—rendered a great disservice to all Africans: it has fractured dialogue, research, and policy while preventing students and scholars of Africa from articulating a coherent understanding of the continent.

Cyrus Schayegh's “‘Seeing Like a State’: An Essay on the Historiography of Modern Iran” tries to show how historians of the Pahlavi era “have been gripped by the image of an omnipotent, completely autonomous state and how, each one . . . turned this image into what I call methodological statism” (p. 38). He discusses critically several works by historians and political scientists while mentioning more favorably a few works by anthropologists and sociologists and then indicates what he considers a better approach to Pahlavi history. Although I agree with some of his criticisms and am glad to see a serious discussion of historiography, I think he overstates the sins of historians and fails to distinguish between historians and political scientists, whose discipline leads them to emphasize the state.