Scholars have long noted, often with disapproval, the tardiness of the introduction of printing to the Muslim world, but the consequences of that introduction on the production, reproduction, and transmission of knowledge in Muslim societies are only now beginning to be understood. For instance, the numerous movements for modernist reform that arose in the Muslim world in the 19th century were all propagated through the medium of print, yet the connection between those movements and the availability of printing seldom has been investigated. This neglect is all the more surprising in view of the fact that historians of early modern Europe have long emphasized the signal role played by printing in Europe's transition to modernity. In her influential work, Elizabeth Eisenstein has written of a “printing revolution” unleashed by the invention and rapid dissemination of the technology in 15th-century Europe. There is, for Eisenstein, something inherent in the very nature of printing that revolutionizes the intellectual outlook of individuals and cultures with which it comes in contact. In a different vein, Benedict Anderson has pointed to the importance of “print capitalism” in creating a sense of shared community in the 19th century that made possible the rise of national ism in many parts of the world.

New evidence, culled from the Nablus advisory council (majlis al-shūrā) records and based on an actual Ottoman population count taken in December 1849, indicates that the city's population at that time numbered at least 20,000 people, more than twice the frequently cited figure of 8,000–9,000. This revision raises serious doubts about the veracity of hitherto commonly accepted population figures, most of them based on contemporary estimates by Western observers, for the various regions of Palestine during the first three-quarters of the 19th century. Moreover, when compared to available data for Nablus from the 16th and the late 19th centuries, it seems that the pattern of Nablus's demographic development differs from what the proponents of Ottoman decline and modernization theses have argued.2 Instead of decreasing during the so-called dark ages of Ottoman decline in the 17th and 18th centuries, Nablus's population increased significantly; and instead of growing robustly during the so-called period of modernization in the second half of the 19th century, it appears to have leveled off.

During their rule in Egypt and Syria (1250–1517), the Mamluks showed a certain ambiguity in their attitude toward the sultanate including its rules of succession and the ruler's source of power. This ambiguity has led to a variety of opinions about the nature of the Mamluk Sultanate in scholarly works on Mamluk history. David Ayalon implies, in “The Circassians in the Mamluk Kingdom,” that the principle of heredity was recognized to various degrees in the Mamluk state, although it was weak during the Bahri period and altogether abandoned during the Circassian period. In “From Ayyubids to Mamluks,” Ayalon confirms that when the Mamluks came to power they had not “ever dreamt of creating a non-hereditary sultan's office” because most of the Bahri period was ruled by the Qalaʾunid dynasty. When nonhereditary rule came about, at least in the Bahri period, it was without any form of planning. In his “Mamluk Military Aristocracy: A Non-Hereditary Nobility,” Ayalon stresses that even during pre- and post-Qalaʾunid times the sultan's office was only nonhereditary to a certain extent and that “throughout the history of the Mamluk Sultanate there is not the slightest mention of the non-hereditary character of the sultan's office, or of the intention of turning it into such.”

Kuwait has long been one of the most demographically self-conscious countries in the world. Since 1965, Kuwaitis have been a minority in their own country, outnumbered by migrants who had come there to find work and flee adversities elsewhere in the region. Between 1957 and 1985, Kuwait conducted a census at least once every five years. Even before its independence in 1961, Kuwait had constructed, and has since reworked, a complex set of policies and regulations for the control and management of migration, albeit with varying and often limited degrees of success.

The debate over the origins of early Arab nationalism in geographical Syria before World War I revolves around a twofold thesis presented two decades ago. Its first and most influential part advances a social explanation, maintaining that it was a traditional intra-Arab elite conflict: “those members of the Arab elite who had a vested interest in the Ottoman state were Ottomanists. Those who were without such a stake were Arabists.”

Those experienced in translating difficult philosophic texts from one language to another with some degree of literal and stylistic accuracy know well how demanding such a task is. When they strive in addition to represent the thought of the author rather than their own presuppositions about that thought, the task becomes all the more arduous. To avoid prejudging the author, they take the text as it appears, on its own terms, and try to make sense of what the author actually says. They do so because they start from the premise that the author in question knows what he or she wishes to communicate and they thus set as their goal understanding what the author intends.

A key characteristic of inter-Arab politics since World War II has been seemingly ever-shifting alliances. In attempting to explain patterns in Arab state behavior, Arab and Western analysts alike have generally attributed the sources of alignment decisions, implicitly or explicitly, to the personalities of the leaders or to ideological positions. Although such explanations may be intuitively appealing, the historical record is replete with examples that challenge such an analysis: Syria and Iraq's rapprochement in 1979, secular Syria and theocratic Iran's alliance during the Iran–Iraq War, and conservative Jordan's honeymoon with Iraq during the 1980s. These are only a few of the numerous, significant examples of alignments that suggest a rethinking of the bases of Arab interaction may be in order.

The relationship between feminism and socialism in both the theoretical and practical realms has been marked with difficulty and “unhappiness.” Feminists have criticized leftists for their lack of attention to sexual domination, and many socialists, in turn, have looked at women's liberation movements as a bourgeois deviation or, worse yet, a conspiracy against the workers' struggle. In 19th-century social democratic movements in Europe, conflicts between feminist-socialist advocates of women's rights such as Clara Zetkin and “proletarian anti-feminism” among workers and communists were constant. Eventually, guided by the theoretical insights of a number of socialist leaders such as Bebel, Engels, and Zetkin, socialist parties of the First and Second Internationals came to realize that the cause of the women's movement was just and to accept autonomous women's organizations. The Third International, or Comintern, although it initially claimed to liberate women “not only on paper, but in reality, in actual fact,” treated the inequality of women as a secondary consideration. Focusing on production and labor conflict, the Comintern paid attention only to women's exploitation by capital to the extent that “by the end of the 1920s, any special emphasis on women's social subordination in communist propaganda or campaigning came to be regarded as a capitulation to bourgeois feminism.” Leftist women activists lost their organizational autonomy and had to work under the supervision of their national communist party.

The number of studies on the status of women and their changing condition in recent times has increased internationally in the past decade, and this is bound to make the development of a comprehensive theoretical methodological framework for the study of women in particular regions or socioeconomic structures easier. In the Arab world, especially the oil-dependent Arabian Gulf states, a concern with the mechanisms of the socioeconomic and political structure of society and the dynamics of its rapid changes has also grown tremendously. A large number of scholars have provided field and theoretical studies on social change and development and its manifestations in the fields of women's studies, labor, education, and industrialization, among others. From this relatively large body of literature, most of it in Arabic, some consensus seems to have emerged. Since research is being done in all regions of the Arab world, from the Maghrib to the Gulf, both the heterogeneity of Arab society and some common denominators have emerged from it.

After almost five decades of industrialization—characterized, on the one hand, by considerable state intervention and, on the other, by protectionist import-substituting policies in domestic capital formation—in the early 1980s Turkey ostensibly entered a new era of export-led economic growth. Since 1960, the Turkish democracy has experienced a series of crises with astonishingly regular ten-year cycles of recurrence. The 1980 military intervention, however, brought about a radical attempt to restructure the economy, hardly comparable with the rather gradual changes in its recent economic history. Its ten years of experimentation with economic liberalization and structural adjustment provide us today with an adequate record to identify and discuss at least the salient features of this period by comparing the performance of the economy in different years.

Historically, the development of modern banking has been an important component of economic change, but it has not always been so clear whether it has been a factor in the genesis of growth or a response to and a consequence of it. In the case of the Ottoman Empire, corporate banks—wholly or partly financed with Western capital—had established themselves in strength in Istanbul after the Crimean War, especially in the decade 1863–72 when no less than eight opened there. All, however, concentrated to varying degrees on meeting the financial needs of the government at a time when the Porte was borrowing almost continuously, both short-term and long-term, a fact that explains the eclipse of several of them around the time of the bankruptcy of 1875.

Little is more central to the study of the modern Middle East than religion. Amidst the differences between the Judaic and Islamic traditions, both are unified about the religious prohibition of swine as a source of food. This taboo is one of the more significant common markers of their ethnicity and religious code. Indeed, violations or poor adherence to the taboo can be considered as grave religious insults or cultural transgressions. In India, the meat of swine has been thrown on mosque steps and has provoked major intercommunal rioting. Even as one flies to the Middle East in modern, high-technology European airlines, the companies commonly inform all passengers that the meals contain no pork. In Spain, the ritual public slaughter of pigs, the matanza, has come to symbolize the resistance of Christians to the Muslim occupation. The matanza ritual has come to be a modern element in the formation of Spanish religious and cultural identity (Castaner 1988). Yet, the debate about the origins of this modern taboo is unresolved and still continues.

My aim here is to revise a common view of the development of Sufi organizations and practices. Sufis have generally been contrasted with the ulema to suggest that Sufism and law were incompatible and even hostile to each other: the elaboration and guardianship of Islamic law (fiqh) was the concern of the ulema; the inner, experiential dimension of Islam the concern of Sufis. In their quest for knowledge of God (maʿrifa) Sufis often bypassed and at times even flouted the shariʿa, until reconciliation between law and Sufism became necessary and was effected by Ghazzali in the 11th century. This supposed reconciliation allowed the spread of Sufism and the development of Sufi institutions, including in the late 12th and 13th centuries the Sufi brotherhoods (ṭarīqas). Until then, Sufis had formed loose circles or groups that had no institutional structure or affiliation. In the 12th and 13th centuries, these groups crystallized and autonomous Sufi institutions and practices emerged. The Sufi brotherhoods spread Sufism until it became part of Muslim social and devotional life.

The seventh Abbasid caliph ʿAbd Allah al-Maʾmun (r. 813–833) was noted for the breadth of his intellectual horizons, and historians often associate him with the Golden Age of Islam. This image of glory is tarnished, however, by two particular actions that the caliph took: his declaration (in 827) of a doctrine asserting that the Qurʾan was created and his ordering of a miḥna an inquisition, that was designed to ensure acquiescence in this doctrine. The miḥna, an unprecedented event in the history of Islam, was begun by al-Maʾmun just four months before his sudden death in 833 and continued by his two immediate successors, al-Muʾtasim and al-Wathiq. It lasted some sixteen years until it was finally abolished by the tenth Abbasid caliph, al-Mutawakkil.

With the resumption of the search for an Arab–Israeli settlement, analysts have been debating the factors that have frustrated it for so many years. The fact that one Arab country, namely Egypt, concluded a peace treaty with Israel almost a decade and a half ago led some to reexamine that case to see what made it possible. The available literature on Egypt's disengagement from the Arab–Israeli conflict has been voluminous, as many policy makers and analysts in Egypt, Israel, the rest of the Arab world, and the United States published their accounts of this development. Despite many ideological and political differences among these writers, they all concluded that this foreign-policy shift represented a radical alteration of Arab policies toward Israel and that with Egypt out of the war equation, the regional balance of power had changed dramatically. Many of them also emphasized the centrality of President Sadat's role in explaining Egypt's exit from the conflict with Israel. One or another of Sadat's personal characteristics has been singled out by his admirers and critics alike as being the main factor behind the Egyptian foreign-policy shift. It is not that they considered other factors such as socioeconomic variables and regional or global structures irrelevant. They simply assessed them as not decisive in terms of their relative explanatory power.

From its outset, Shiʿi Islam has been associated with Iraq. In 661 ʿAli ibn Abi Talib was assassinated in a mosque in Kufa. ʿAli's son Husayn, who laid claim to the caliphate, was killed with his companions in a battle that took place in the plain of Karbala in 680. Many of the twelve Shiʿi imams spent at least part of their lives there. The four most sacred Shiʿi shrine cities—Najaf, Karbala, Kazimayn, and Samarra—are in Iraq. Since the early stages of Islamic history, much of Shiʿi learning was centered in Hilla, Baghdad, Najaf, and Karbala. And, finally, Iraq was also once a territory ruled by Shiʿi dynasties, notably the Buyids (945–1055).

But all this by itself cannot explain how the Shiʿs came to form the majority of the population of modern Iraq. Although conversion from Sunnism to Shiʿism took place in Iraq throughout Shiʿi history, it was confined mainly to cities, where only a small fraction of the population lived. Occasionally, some Arab tribes were also converted to Shiʿism—for example, the Bani Sulama, the Tayy, and the Sudan in the marshes near Khuzistan during the Mushaʿshaʿ Arab Shiūi dynasty of the 15th to 16th centuries. Nonetheless, there is no evidence that would suggest that the Shiʿis were ever close to forming a majority of Iraq's population before the 19th or even the 20th century.

The writings of the Egyptian novelist Najib Mahfuz (b. 1911) in the 1960s illustrate the new literary trends that were then emerging in Arabic fiction. Among his works, the volume of short stories, Dunyā Allāh (God's World, 1963), was the first and perhaps the most important collection within the corpus of his creative works. These short stories are striking for the themes they pursue and the poetic universe they depict, and they reveal in particular his and the Egyptian reaction to progress. In this essay only one of these short stories, “Zaʿbalāwī,” will be discussed. My aim is to show Mahfuz's adept manipulation of mythic themes together with specific Egyptian cultural and Islamic elements in his exploration of the dilemma modernity poses for Egyptian society. “Zaʿbalāwī” was published at the beginning of a new period in his creative development when Mahfuz had begun to pursue his concerns using new and innovative literary techniques.

In June 1669 the Safavid ruler Shah Sulayman dismissed his grand vizier Mirza Muhammad Mahdi and appointed Shaykh ʿAli Khan Zanganah as his successor. Shaykh ʿAli Khan served in the exalted function of grand vizier or iʿtimad aldawla for a full twenty years and in this period grew into perhaps the most remarkable administrator of Safavid times.

A principal belief of the Ahl-i Haqq, an esoteric sect centered in Iranian Kurdistan, is that the Divine Essence has successive manifestations in human form. The Ahl-i Haqq religious universe comprises two distinct yet interrelated worlds: the inner world (ʿālam-i bāṭin) and the outer world (ʿālam -i ẓāhir), each with its own order and its own rules. We as ordinary human beings are aware of the order of the outer world, but our life is governed by the rules of the inner world, where our ultimate destiny lies.