This article is based on the assumption that Ibn Ishaq (704–67) and al-Waqidi (747–823) were responsible for my main sources, the compilations entitled Kitāb sīrat rasūl Allāh and Kitāb al-maghāzī, respectively. Such an assumption is justifiable. To take Ibn Ishaq's Biography in the recension of Ibn Hisham (d. 834), we know that the Ziyad ibn ʿAbd Allah al-Bakkaʾi (d. 798) text used by Ibn Hisham was authorized by Ibn Ishaq himself, and indeed had been confirmed by the use of both samʾ and ʾarḍ techniques as a correct version. At the same time, Ismail K. Poonawala confirms that the redaction of Salama ibn al-Fadl (d. 807) compares closely with the text of Ibn Hisham, indicating that the text of Ibn Ishaq had probably been fixed: Salama's redaction was based on a papyrus manuscript of Ibn Ishaq transmitted by Muhammad ibn Humayd ibn Hayyan al-Razi, and was used by al-Tabari in his narration of the Prophet's life, which forms a part of his compilation Taʾrīkh al-rusul waʾl-mulūk. As for the text of al-Waqidi, evidence indicates that it had been established by al-Waqidi himself from beginning to end, for he not only prefaces his work with the names of his chief transmitters of tradition but also provides the basic chronology of all the events that are discussed in his work.

Islamicists have long been interested in the historiography of the sīra and maghāzī literature. Ibn Ishaq's Sīra has been fruitfully compared with al-Waqidi's Maghāzī, and both have been compared with sections in al-Bukhari's Ṣaḥīḥ or with other collections of hadith. It has often been observed that the materials constituting the Sīra of Ibn Ishaq or the Maghāzī of al-Waqidi—works which may for convenience, but only with reservations, be designated “historical”—are often the same as those preserved in collections of hadith such as al-Bukhari's. It has also been observed that what distinguish these materials from one another are essentially the former's narrative and chronological structures and the motives and methods governing these structures. John Wansbrough, who has compared these texts, postulates as well a “development from loosely structured narrative to concise exemplum & [which] illustrates perfectly the stylistic difference between Sīra and sunna, between the mythic and normative preoccupations (Geistesbeschäftigungen) of early Muslim literature.”

Western scholars have long studied Jewish and Christian influence in shaping early Islamic tradition, but almost none of them has considered Eve's transformation as a critical part of the “genesis” of an Islamic historical framework and the evolution of its gender categories. I trace the transformation of the wife of Adam from the revelation contained in the Qurʾan and note the abrupt and distinct changes wrought upon this Qurʾanic persona in post-Qurʾanic sources in the matters of menstruation and motherhood. The figure of Satan plays a pivotal role in both of these biological aspects of Eve's biography. Her function as the first woman serves to explain not just the physiology of all women, but also the essential aspects of character that allegedly make all females different from the normative male in biology and behavior. As a wife, Eve is tested and fails, but as a mother, she both fails and passes the test of satanic temptation. I argue that in her role as wife, she is depicted in post-Qurʾanic sources in accordance with pre-Islamic monotheist precedent. However, in Eve's role as mother—especially as the mother of the prophetic patriline that culminates in Muhammad—Muslim scholars distinguished the meaning and implications of her temptation as distinctly Islamic. Eve embodied a fusion of traditions, a continuity of monotheistic meanings about the feminine in the Middle East, as well as an identity that distinguished her as the first woman of a new, emerging Islamic faith.

Commenting on his novel Riḥlat Gandhī al-Ṣaghīr (The Journey of Little Gandhi), Elias Khoury has made two conflicting assertions. At a gathering held to discuss the book shortly after it was published, Khoury reaffirmed his political and ideological stance in relation to the war in Lebanon. While acknowledging that Gandhi, the protagonist, is a victim of violence and poverty, Khoury said that he regards war as a necessity, a passage to a higher and nobler aim:

I am not one of those who preach against violence, nor do I claim that I am against the war.

I have participated in the war, and I remain true to my original choice, and loyal to my comrades who died the death of martyrs. I refuse to go along with the popular “anti-war” fad. At the same time, I remain faithful to the truth and the goal for which we started the war: the creation of another more just and democratic society⃜ [U]nfortunately, we have not succeeded, but at least, it is our duty to tell the truth and… what actually happened.

The formative period of Imami Shiʿism from the mid-8th century to the mid-10th century remains obscure in many respects. This study is an attempt to organize the historical information about the period around a central problematic: the twin crisis of the nature of the Imamate and the succession to this office. The crisis of the Imamate and the efforts to resolve it serve as a focal point for constructing a conceptually coherent overview of these two formative centuries from a sociohistorical perspective. This perspective requires that the endeavors to create a stable system of authority in Imami Shiʿism be considered in the context of the social change and politics of the early ʿAbbasid era: ʿAlid–ʿAbbasid relations, massive conversion of the population of Iran to Islam, and the dialogue and competition between Shiʿism and other contemporary religious and intellectual trends and movements. Our approach suggests a new periodization of the early history of Imami Shiʿism.

“Are you going to behave like a factory girl?!” With this phrase, an 1880s peasant in Mount Lebanon not only admonished a daughter, but also encapsulated the social and economic transformations which were altering the notions of family and society, and the gender roles underlying both. Typically enough, these transformations came about between 1843 and 1914 as a result of the interaction between the local peasant economy and European capitalism. Modernization and dependency narratives of such an encounter follow the line of “tradition” versus “modernity,” with Europe ultimately dictating an inevitable outcome to its absolute benefit. Yet closer examination reveals the story in Mount Lebanon to be far more complicated. In particular, gender replaces this artificial bipolarity with a triangular struggle among peasant men, peasant women, and European capitalists. Furthermore, rather than being historical victims, women and men in Mount Lebanon—with intersecting and diverging interests—worked to contour the outcome of their encounter with Europe and to take control over their individual and collective lives. While the equation of power was most definitely in favor of European merchants and capitalists, the struggles of these peasants were not for naught. Rather, as I will argue in this paper, their travails made the outcome multifaceted and less predictable than European capitalists would have liked it to be.

The Lebanese war revealed man to me. It revealed to me that there was no end to evil. Man's capacity to suffer and cause suffering is endless too. War is the cloth which weaves relationships amongst men and nations. When I write, “From your absence comes the evening,” I express the anguish of losing my beloved. This anguish is similar to that caused by war. Fear and anguish provoked by war have also at their root jealousy, desire, ambition, money, success. What is specific about war is that it strips down man and shows him in his absolute nakedness.

When Rashīd al-Daʿīf (henceforth, plain text) expressed himself in this fashion in an interview in 1989, several of his novels and poems had already appeared in Beirut. His original voice had started to spread in the intellectual circles of Lebanon and abroad. Al-Daʿif's originality lies precisely in this stripping of human beings, feelings, and things down to absolute nakedness in the midst of a war that tore apart the artist'snation. He expresses himself in a language stripped to its bare essentials, as well, breaking away from the traditional Arabic mode, in which rhetoric and lyricism dominated.

In a famous passage in his Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, E. W. Lane described the ceremonies commonly held to celebrate the circumcision of a young boy in 19th-century Cairo. Family and friends of the boy, his schoolteacher, the barber who performed the operation and his assistant, musicians, and other retainers all participated in a celebration of an overtly public character. Dressed in fancy clothes and feted with song and dance, the boy, aged five or six or slightly older, was paraded through the streets of his neighborhood, often on horseback, to his parents' house, where the operation was performed. Cups of coffee might be distributed to passersby while guests and relations were, of course, treated to a celebratory feast. Modes of celebration may have changed, but festivities surrounding the circumcision of a young boy are still common in the Muslim countries of the Near East.

The rise of a vigorous and sometimes violent Islamist movement in Egypt over the last quarter century has attracted considerable attention from the media and scholars, as have the efforts to control it at the political and police level. Less attention has been given to those who have responded to this challenge at the level of ideological debate and in their writings sought to defend the essentials of the existing system on Islamic grounds. One of these is a prominent judge, Muhammad Saʿid al-ʿAshmawi. The purpose of this article is to present and examine some of his views and arguments.

The poet known as Bâkî (d. 1600), the “King of Poets” of Sultan Suleiman I (1520–66), is generally acknowledged as the leading figure of the so-called “classical age” of Ottoman poetry (roughly from the mid-15th to the beginning of the 17th century), while the poet known as Nâʾilî (d. 1666) was a pivotal figure in the break between this classical age and the “post-classical age,” roughly the early modern era extending from 1600 to 1800. On the broadest level this break was signaled by a change in the use of metaphorical language. This paper will contrast the treatment of one series of metaphors common in the lyric gazels within the divâns of both poets, although further examples could be found within other poetic genres, especially the panegyric kasîde. It will also attempt to interpret the significance of these metaphors in Nâʾilî's poetry and to demonstrate their distance from the usage of the classical Ottoman period, exemplified by Bâkî.

It would scarcely be an overstatement to say that the realism of the political demands of an ethnic group within a polity is largely determined first by size, both absolute and relative to other groups, and second by its geographical distribution. The current demands ranging from autonomy to independence by some Kurds in Turkey are no exception to the rule; hence their number and geographic pattern deserve careful study.

The closing decades of Ottoman rule in Palestine (the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries), a crucial period in the history of the area, have already received vast attention from scholars and other writers. They have used an abundance of source material, including documents belonging to individuals and institutions, consular reports, memoirs, travel books, and newspapers. But in contrast to earlier periods in Ottoman Palestine, very little has been done, as yet, to bring to light and utilize official Ottoman documents. This, of course, is absolutely necessary if the views and actions of the ruling power are to be described and analyzed, and—because the authorities must have had direct and reliable knowledge of the conditions of the land—if a more complete and balanced picture is to be drawn of the history of the country.

This quotation may be nothing more than a well-turned phrase by its author, Zaki al-Arsuzi. Nonetheless, it illustrates a dilemma that young men like him faced in the troubled years preceding Syrian independence: As French-educated young men, should they take their places as minor functionaries in the colonial machine and accept the promise of a comfortable and privileged life, or should they join the growing political and ideological struggle to found an independent, national statein Syria? Al-Arsuzi, who is venerated by the current regime in Damascus as the ideological father of Baʾthism, went on to answer this question by spending the next eight years in and out ofthe former Ottoman province of Alexandretta, working in support of the Arab-nationalist cause. Both his contemporary writings and later recollections of the period reveal a growing political consciousness and the formulation of a complex Arabism that was at odds with the dominant ideology emanating from the large cities of Syria. This ideology, as embodied by the National Bloc government in Damascus, was personality-based, hamstrung by European colonial interests, and unable to arouse any sustained political sensibility in the broader population; it centered its political legitimacy and parochial brand of nationalism on opposition to the French occupation. Al-Arsuzi and others, recognizing the weakness inherent in this form of nationalism, drew away from its leadership in the course of the 1930s and moved to create other, more radical and militant Pan-Arabist groups.

The rise and spread of Islamist political movements have been topics of focal concern for scholars and analysts in recent decades. Since Richard Mitchell's seminal work on the Muslim Brotherhood, a plethora of writers have analyzed the attributes of both Sunni and Shiʿa revivalist movements and the policies of Arab regimes and the West toward the Islamist phenomenon. Yet scant attention has been paid to the reactions generated within the larger Islamic community toward the Islamist groups and their militant offshoots. One such unnoticed source of reaction to political Islamism is the nebulous confraternity of Sufi orders (ṭuruq) whose mysticism and esoteric beliefs and practices have set them apart from the exoteric revivalism and political activism of the Islamist societies, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its many affiliates.

On 29 October 1956 Israeli paratroopers landed deep inside the Sinai Desert, launching the second Arab-Israeli war and adding another level to the bloody edifice of Israel's relations with its neighbors. The Israeli leadership justified its decision to go to war by pointing to “the mini-war which the Arab rulers have waged against us for eight years.” Many scholars have accepted that version of the events, which seeks to connect the multitude of border incidents from 1949 to 1956 with the war in the latter year. Indeed, a central approach in the study of the period viewed the Sinai campaign as the inevitable consequence of the succession of violent events which occurred between Israel and its neighbors, Egypt in particular, beginning shortly after the 1948 war. Benny Morris, in fact, describes Israel's participation in the 1956 war as the direct continuation of the border clashes with Egypt, finding no regional connection in Israel's involvement. Similarly, Nadav Safran, Mordechai Bar-On, and Michael Oren have argued that the border clashes, the infiltrations, and the Israeli reprisals followed one another in a relentless sequence until the final explosion in October 1956. This approach draws a connection between two “types of security” which are a permanent component of the Israeli defense doctrine: “basic security” and “day-to-day security.” The latter incorporates operational activity, unrelated to preparations for war, which the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) constantly engages in during peacetime; whereas the former refers to a situation of total war for which the IDF has prepared itself. Conventionally, events falling within the domain of day-to-day security are considered the cause of the aggravation in relations between Israel and Egypt during the early 1950s; the Sinai campaign thus becomes the inevitable end of a process of deterioration engendered by the border clashes and incidents of the preceding eight years.

At the cultural heart of the intellectual awakening, or al-Nahḍa, that arose with Egypt's modernization movement in the 19th century was the endeavor to legitimize the innovations which came in the train of military, scientific, technical, and educational imports from the West. The vanguard of this movement, unlike that of the one taking place at the same time in Istanbul, came from leading religious shaykhs in the government's employ. It may seem remarkable that graduates and teachers of such a conservative religious institution as al-Azhar took the lead as spokesmen for change, particularly when models of this change came from the Christian West, the traditional antagonist of Islamdom for more than a millennium. It becomes less remarkable when we realize that there was no other possible source of intellectual leadership in Egypt. Egypt had no imperial state service with its own traditions of education as did the Ottomans. Thus, conservatively reared shaykhs and Azhar graduates were obliged to play the role that was filled in the Ottoman Empire by reforming grand viziers and their ambassadors to European capitals, who were often assisted by converts from the West seeking employment in the sultan's service—“secular” Muslims who were identified with the state and not the educated ulema. In Egypt, the reasoned voice advocating change came from the very custodians of conservative tradition. Accordingly, that voice would speak throughout the century with great caution, often tentatively and sometimes in contradictory ways.

Few Western students of the Arab world are as well known as the 19th-century British scholar Edward William Lane (1801–76). During his long career, Lane produced a number of highly influential works: An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), a translation of The Thousand and One Nights (1839–41), Selections from the Ḳur-án (1843), and the Arabic–English Lexicon (1863–93). The Arabic–English Lexicon remains a pre-eminent work of its kind, and Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians is still a basic text for both Arab and Western students. Through his published work, Lane contributed substantially to the prevailing Western picture of the Arab world.

Against a historical background marked by “the most radical secular revolution of any state in the Muslim world,” the Turkish state over the past decade has faced an Islamic fundamentalist challenge to its secular basis. The Turkish version of radical Islam, like that elsewhere in the Middle East, has asserted itself effectively in all aspects and at all levels of society, making a stark contrast between the sixty years of the republic and the period since 1980. It is not surprising, therefore, that the causes for the emergence of Islamic political radicalism, its nature, and its possible effects on the system have aroused scholarly interest.

By order of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) a new school was opened in Istanbul in October 1892 to provide an Ottoman education for the sons of leading tribal notables. The Aşiret Mekteb-i Hümayun, or Imperial School for Tribes, was a five-year boarding school that admitted boys between twelve and sixteen years old. The school has been rightly interpreted as part of a broader policy pursued by Abdülhamid II of integrating the Arab provinces more closely to the Imperial center. However, the school, which reached beyond the Arab provinces to recruit eastern Anatolian Kurds, was essentially an experiment in social engineering which sought to foster an allegiance to the Ottoman state within one of the most alienated segments of its society: the empire's tribes. On the precedent of urban notables whose sons were educated in Istanbul, obtained government offices, and became Ottoman loyalists, Abdülhamid II and his advisers aimed to create a similar body of intermediaries between the state and its tribes. The experiment ran for fifteen years before the Aşiret Mektebi was closed in 1907; yet in that time the school sent waves of graduates on to higher education in special sections of the civil and military academies and thence to government office in the provinces. In all, the tribal education system represents one of the more ambitious Ottoman initiatives to integrate its tribal communities into the political life of the state.

The Declaration of Prsinciples signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in September 1993 marked a dramatic about-face in Israel's traditional policy toward the PLO and the Palestinian issue in general. This turn of events came as a surprise not only to journalists and commentators following day-to-day political events, but also to scholars engaged in the academic study of Israeli society. The prevailing notion among these scholars had been that the Israeli polity was suffering from what Horowitz and Lissak (1989) called “overburden” due to domestic debates over the disposition of the occupied territories. Thus, it was concluded, Israel was unable to launch bold policy initiatives to try to solve its deadlocked conflict with the Arabs.