Oil and dynastic rule have led to an idiosyncratic pattern of state formation in the Gulf, and in few parts of the state are the idiosyncrasies more pronounced than in the security sector. Oil income has allowed the ruling families of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to engineer a relatively soft, rent- and patronage-based authoritarianism characterized by multiple centers of power and huge institutional redundancies. Having constructed their police and military forces along these lines, their monarchical rule has become more resilient, but their armed forces also more hapless.

The readiness of army commanders in Egypt and Tunisia to counter the internal security agencies deployed by their own governments against civilian protestors in early 2011 proved decisive in bringing down presidents-for-life Husni Mubarak and Zayn al-ʿAbidin bin ʿAli. This brings into sharp relief questions about how to approach and assess the various coercive agencies of the state. Should we regard them as different branches of a single coercive apparatus, through which the state seeks to exercise a monopoly on the legitimate means of violence? Or should we see them as manifestations of more fragmented political institutions and social forces and consequently as performing distinct, and potentially divergent, functions in constantly evolving relation to each other?

Research on Middle East militaries is imbalanced. In recent decades, scholarly interest in Israel and Turkey has expanded, while the Arab states have more often than not been overlooked. In this essay, I suggest how to address the “gap” in the study of Arab militaries by drawing parallels with militaries in non-Arab states, which have received considerable attention.

This article concerns the dominant institution of religious authority within modern Usuli Twelver Shiʿi Islam: the marjaʿiyya. The most senior clerics serve as “sources of emulation” (marājiʿ al-taqlīd), informing the moral conduct of their lay “imitators” (muqallidūn). Despite the importance of this relationship, academic writing on what we call its “affective” qualities, especially from lay perspectives, is limited. We provide ethnographic data from anthropological research into Islamic medical ethics in Lebanon. Interviews in 2003 with infertile Shiʿi patients who were considering controversial assisted reproductive technologies revealed rare insights into which authorities they followed and in what numbers and how this relationship was experienced and drawn upon by those in need. We compare the very different relationships inspired by the two authorities most cited in our study: the late Beirut-based Ayatollah Fadlallah; and the Iranian Ayatollah Khaminaʾi, Hizbullah's patron. From his local base, Fadlallah offered a vivid and responsive persona of a qualitatively distinct type.

Recently, there have been many compelling new theories of the emergence of an “Islamic public sphere.” Few studies, however, have examined the role of literary writing in contributing to its emergence, even though such writing was critical to the intellectual elite's shift toward Islamic subjects in mid-20th century Egypt. In addition, little of this scholarship has examined the gendered nature of this public sphere in any depth, though gendered rights, roles, and responsibilities were among the most hotly contested debates in public discourses on religion. This article looks at how literary writing not only shaped particular interpretations of gendered relationships in Islam but also developed hermeneutical techniques for reinterpreting religious sources. It specifically examines the work of Egyptian literary scholar and Islamic thinker Bint al-Shatiʾ and how her writings helped define the nature of the family, gender relations, and the private sphere in Islamic public discourse.