Michal Biran fills an important gap in research on the 13th-century Mongol empire with her recent study of Qaidu (1236–1301), a great-grandson of Chinggis Khan and champion of the house of Ögödei. Characterizing Qaidu as a pragmatist, not an “ideological warrior” (p. 107), she challenges the conventional view that he was one of the quintessential defenders of nomadic values against the sedentarizing ethos of other Mongol rulers, and that he claimed the office of qa⊂an (supreme Mongol overlord). The work argues that his long struggle with Qubilai and his ruling career in Central Asia had two main goals: to restore to the Ögödeid ulus its rightful territory according to the original division of the empire by Chinggis and to secure the political and economic viability of that territory. It concludes that Qaidu did not aspire to become the qa⊂an but played a crucial role in the emergence of an independent Chaghadaid khanate in the early 14th century.

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in British rule in Palestine. Although invariably selective, recent scholarship has nevertheless attempted to deal with the administration of the Palestinian Mandate over its entire time span. These studies provide an opportunity to reconsider more generally some of the methodological problems posed by the writing of Mandatory history. There already exists for Palestine a large body of literature, one that has prompted several historiographic reviews identifying particular assumptions, preoccupations, and conceptual frameworks.1 They include the extent to which histories of Mandatory Palestine invariably reflect current thinking and are thus not solely concerned with the past; the reliance on official archives, particularly British and Israeli; and the tendency to concentrate on Zionism as the moving force behind developments during the Mandate period (thus committing a conspicuous act of retroactive determinism).

The period I have spent exploring tribal societies in Yemen's northernmost Saʿdah area spans—with interruptions—around fifteen years, and I can hardly imagine a more profound set of changes converging on and in one place. For an anthropologist, these changes are of a political, spatial, technological, and methodological nature, all of which are deeply intertwined.

Because the Seljuk throne managed to survive for sixty years after the establishment of the Mongol Protectorate in Seljuk Anatolia in 1243, there seems to have been no sudden upheaval in Anatolian society and its formal institutions. Nevertheless, a gradual, and at first rather inconspicuous, transformation took place which resulted in the shifting of centres of both power and the arts to western Anatolia in the centuries that followed. This paper addresses itself to the resulting alterations and innovations in architecture, especially with respect to the directions they gave to subsequent periods in Anatolian—Turkish architecture.

The transformations that created the classical period in Ottoman architecture began between approximately 1250 and 1450. As a result of these changes, Anatolia came to derive its models and inspiration no longer from Iran, but from the eastern Mediterranean whose traditions now gave the major direction to the following centuries in Anatolia.2 This shift in orientation was by no means sudden or radical, but rather it was the long-term result of a particular political situation. Nevertheless, a critical date in this evolutionary process seems to be around 1250, the time of the coming of the Mongols.

Trade is often discussed in an Islamic context with reference made to Muslim merchants. However, the significance of Islam in specific commercial circumstances is difficult to assess. Some historians label trade as “Muslim” because it was conducted by Muslims; others do so because the trade originated and/or concluded with the boundaries of an Islamic state. The label Muslim may also suggest networking, a process more familiar in relation to Armenians or Jews. We can ask if the operative principles of Muslim networks were at all the same as those for the minority groups.

Despite his importance, no substantial study has been devoted to the career of Abū 'l-'Abbās Ahmad b. Idrīs al-Hasanī al-'Arā'ishī al-Fāsī (d. 1837); most accounts of him appear by way of a preface to studies of his pupils. And yet through his teachings, pupils, and family, he was undoubtedly one of the key religious figures of the early 19th century Arab Muslim world. Indeed, his influence, direct and indirect, appears to have stretched from North Africa to Indonesia. Three of his pupils from his immediate circle established major brotherhoods, the Sanūsiyya, Khatmiyya, and Rāshidiyya, from which stemmed several other orders.

Iraqi women's struggle for equal rights has been shaped by similar circumstances and factors in both past and present. Since the founding of the Iraqi nation–state, ruling elites have repeatedly traded women's rights for building alliances with tribal and religious conservative forces in the interest of sustaining power. There was some progress in the areas of personal status and family law as well as women's access to education and the labor market throughout the years from the revolution of 1958 to the 1980s. Women's status declined dramatically during the 1990s due to intermittent wars, economic sanctions, repressive policies of the Baʿthist regime, and eroding state structures. Similar developments are notable since the toppling of that regime in 2003 at the hands of a US-led invasion. The selling rhetoric of liberating Iraqi women was quickly debunked when women's rights were de-prioritized and sacrificed for the sake of maintaining order and security, giving way for tribal and Islamist powers to control and discipline women. Iraqi women have been grappling with a new reality marked by a lack of security, an ethno-sectarian muḥāṣaṣa (quota-based) system, conflict, terrorist groups and militias, rampant corruption, the fragile rule of law, and the erosion of Iraqi institutions. All of these have allowed for the (re)emergence of different forms of patriarchies and masculinities, compounded by the empowerment of tribal and religious authorities, contributing to an increase in various forms of gender-based violence.

In 1925, the Turkish parliament commissioned a translation of the Qurʾan from Arabic to Turkish as well as a Turkish-language Qurʾanic commentary. This project is commonly misunderstood as an initiative engineered by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and linked to the radical institutional reforms of 1924: abolition of the Islamic caliphate, prohibition of the Sufi orders, and closure of the medreses. In fact, parliament's support of a Qurʾan translation was not a radical nationalist reform but an initiative supported and executed by devout intellectuals who opposed other facets of Islamic reform in the early years of the Turkish republic.

When I was in graduate school, in the 1980s, one frequently heard complaints about the comparatively unsophisticated nature of the historiography of the medieval Middle East. There was considerable envy of historians in fields like early modern European history, who pushed broader disciplinary limits and whose works were read not just for content but also for historiographical and theoretical inspiration. There were some in our own corner of the profession blazing new methodological trails—Clifford Geertz, for example, who, though not a historian, had much to say to historians, and whose books were read eagerly by historians, and not just in Middle Eastern history; or Fedwa Malti-Douglas, as much at home in feminist literary theory as in medieval Arabic literature. But many graduate students in Middle Eastern history felt a bit underrepresented on the cutting edge of historical thought and practice.

The first two articles in this issue, reflecting growing scholarly interest in the global era of decolonization in the two decades after World War II, track multilayered local, regional, and global forces that shaped particular historical shifts during these pivotal years. Cyrus Schayegh, in “1958 Reconsidered: State Formation and the Cold War in the Early Postcolonial Arab Middle East,” revisits the political crises that tore rapidly through the central Arab states in 1958, focusing on Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, all of which were “sandwiched between the unstable poles of the Arab state system, Iraq and Egypt.” While Schayegh concurs with previous scholarship that the convulsions of that year did not lead to the deep sociopolitical and ideological transformations in the region that many contemporaries either hoped or feared, he argues that they can now be read as marking a historical milestone of a different sort. In all three countries, the events of 1958 sparked immediate, dramatic, and persistent “state-formation surges,” particularly through the rapid implementation of development plans aimed at defusing both socioeconomic discontent and the political aspirations fueled by Nasirist Arab nationalism on one side and Arab communist movements on the other. Schayegh suggests that these state-formation surges in turn shaped similarities in the three countries’ subsequent historical development in spite of stark differences in their political systems of governance.