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This article measures wealth levels and inequalities among the Muslim population of 18th-century Ottoman Kastamonu by utilizing information found in estate inventories (terekes). Also developed is a quantitative methodology that can predict the economic worth of specific noneconomic markers of social, religious, and gender identity, including honorific titles, religious epithets, and occupational markers. Our calculations indicate that inequality among different segments of the Muslim community was pronounced. Men from higher echelons of the military and religious establishments, as well as individuals who carried the epithet “pilgrim” (elhac), were significantly wealthier than the rest of the society. At the same time, economic disparities cut across career lines and title/epithet-based distinctions among legators. Finally, the regression analysis introduced in this article reveals that wealth transfers across generations may have contributed greatly to overall wealth levels.

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In 2005 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization accepted Lebanon's archaeological site of Nahr al-Kalb into its Memory of the World Programme, turning it from national heritage into a globally memorable text. I argue that it is not the content of the commemorative inscriptions but the mode of repeated commemoration that makes it possible to reinterpret potentially divisive markers of Lebanon's past into icons of national unity and a shared humanity. By focusing on the intersection of public monumentality, repetition, and the construction of community identity based on the logic of resemblance, I show that governmental elites at times of political transition need to make public interventions into the past to bolster their legitimacy, new commemorations are confined by rules and conventions of public memorializing, and the logic of resemblance inherent in commemorative processes can be used to convert a fragmented history into a memory of unity and strength

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This article is based on the assumption that in anthropology cultural and social organizational perspectives should be distinguished and refer to two analytically separate levels of reality, sometimes shed a different light on a single phenomenon, and have different analytical value. I demonstrate this by studying the notion of “honor” and its relation to the gender division of labor and to the status of women in northwest Tunisia, in the context of the “feminization” of agriculture. After showing the limitations of a cultural perspective that defines honor as a code—that is to say, a set of normative representations aimed at the regulation of (interpersonal) behavior—I propose an alternative, social organizational (or “groupal”) reading of honor, focused on the dynamics of the peasant household. I then test its analytical usefulness on the case at hand.

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The irruption of Persian-language blogging since 2001, known to its participants as Weblogistan, has been accompanied by enthusiastic claims that blogs are promoting previously nonexistent forms of expression in Iran. In the past few years, however, Iranian bloggers have faced increased scrutiny from Iranian authorities. This article explores what the political, offline consequences of online communication in Weblogistan tell us about the relationship among cyberspace, politics, and Islam in Iran. Drawing on archived blog entries, interviews, and Persian-language print media, we discuss the arrest of three bloggers in 2004 within the context of legal, religious, and cultural pressures exerted on Weblogistan. Revising McLuhan's “the medium is the message” by showing how local conditions affect the medium, we argue for a holistic understanding of Iranian blogging as (1) an emergent medium of communication (2) situated within a particular political context.

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The comprehensive attempt at school reform undertaken in Egypt in the 1870s is often depicted as part of a larger process of reform whereby “new” notions of education were irrevocably parting ways with the “old,” creating the outlines of a bifurcated system of education that pitted new modern/secular/government schools against traditional/religious/Islamic schools of Egypt's past. Far from a clean break or clear progression from old to new, however, writers, reformers, and bureaucrats of the time were actively negotiating a shifting educational landscape—one that did not see the path of educational reform necessarily diverging from older modes of teaching and learning. This examination of the era and Egypt's first educational journal, Rawdat al-Madaris (The Garden of the Schools), explores early tensions in the Egyptian educational system. While emphatically espousing an inclusive definition of knowledge (ʿilm), the budding Egyptian educational bureaucracy represented in Rawdat al-Madaris was simultaneously reinforcing certain institutional realities that would profoundly impact how, where, and ultimately at whose hands this knowledge would be imparted

During the late 19th century, British supremacy in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean basin increasingly brought the hajj under the surveillance and regulation of non-Muslim powers. With the development of steamship travel and the opening of the Suez Canal came rapid growth in the number of oceangoing pilgrims. Colonial authorities eventually identified the steamship-era hajj as both a conduit for the spread of epidemic diseases, such as cholera and plague, and a critical outlet for the growth of Pan-Islamic networks being forged among Indian dissidents, pilgrims, and the Ottoman Empire. As a result, the British and Ottoman empires engaged in a contestation of sacred space in which the stakes ranged from suzerainty over the Hijaz and the administration of the hajj to even larger questions of hegemony in the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and even dār al-Islām as a whole