This article is about social activism and its relationship to social development in the Middle East. It examines the myriad strategies that the region's urban grass-roots pursue to defend their rights and improve their lives in this neo-liberal age. Prior to the advent of the political–economic restructuring of the 1980s, most Middle Eastern countries were largely dominated by either nationalist-populist regimes (such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Turkey) or pro-Western rentier states (Iran, Arab Gulf states). Financed by oil or remittances, these largely authoritarian states pursued state-led development strategies, attaining remarkable (21% average annual) growth rates.1 Income from oil offered the rentier states the possibility of providing social services to many of their citizens, and the ideologically driven populist states dispensed significant benefits in education, health, employment, housing, and the like.2 For these post-colonial regimes, such provision of social welfare was necessary to build popularity among the peasants, workers, and middle strata at a time that these states were struggling against both the colonial powers and old internal ruling classes. The state acted as the moving force of economic and social development on behalf of the populace.

This special issue of IJMES co-edited by regular IJMES editor Juan R. I. Cole and by Editorial Board member Deniz Kandiyoti, is based on two conferences sponsored by the Social Science Research Council in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (27–29 October 1996) and Berkeley, California (24–25 November 1997). The conferences brought together Central Asian, Middle Eastern, South Asian, European, and U.S. scholars to deliberate on issues in nationalism and the colonial legacy (because of the different connotations of these words in Russian, the Tashkent conference was entitled “Nation-Building After Independence”). The Tashkent meeting was made possible through the financial support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Program on Peace and International Cooperation of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago. The editors are deeply grateful to the Uzbekistan government and to the University of World Economics and Diplomacy and its staff for their hospitality in Tashkent, and to our Central Asian and other colleagues who presented papers and shared insights. (Thanks also to the skillful simultaneous translators!) Cassandra Cavanaugh was also crucial to the local arrangements. I think all were keenly aware that a new relationship was being built, of which this special issue of IJMES is the first physical manifestation. We are also enormously indebted to Steven Heydemann, Near East program officer at the council, for his truly heroic efforts in finding support, getting permissions, and generally making the conferences we had only imagined actually happen. This issue of IJMES is dedicated to the memory of Anthony Hyman (d. 1999), whose last article is being published here posthumously. We are the poorer for having lost this valued colleague, who was very dedicated to Afghanistan, and it is fitting that his last publication be on that troubled land.

One of the most remarkable surveys of Islamic history and civilization remains Marshall G. S. Hodgson's The Venture of Islam, published posthumously in 1974.1 For an introductory text, it has some bad faults—notably, a very dense style. Moreover, it has inevitably fallen out of date at many points. For example, one may admire Hodgson for coming up with his own critique of modernization theory in volume 3, but modernization theory has fallen so completely before other critiques that we hardly need Hodgson any longer. However, Hodgson has had some permanent effects on the way scholars approach Islamic history. For example, we may not have adopted many of his neologisms, but he certainly has made us self-conscious when we use the traditional terminology. The mere mention of “Jamaעi-Sunni,” “Islamicate,” “Arabist bias,” and other special terms immediately alerts us to the dangers of some customary approaches to Islamic history.

The events of 1860 constitute a turning point in the modern history of Lebanon. In the space of a few weeks between the end of May and the middle of June, Maronite and Druze communities clashed in Mount Lebanon in a struggle to see which community would control, and define, a stretch of mountainous territory at the center of complicated Eastern Question politics.1 The Druzes carried the day. Every major Maronite town within reach of the Druzes was pillaged, its population either massacred or forced to flee. In July, Damascene Muslims rioted to protest deteriorating economic conditions, targeting and massacring several hundred of the city's Christian population. Although the reasons for the fighting in Mount Lebanon and the riot in Damascus were quite different, the Ottoman, local, and European reactions inevitably conflated both events.2 Following the restoration of order, the conflict of 1860 was the subject, effectively, of an Ottoman government mandate of silence—a desire to forget the events and proceed with administering the newly constituted Mutasarrifiyya of Mount Lebanon. At the same time, however, the sectarian violence prompted an outpouring of local memories that the Ottoman government could neither control nor suppress.

The study of nationalism has been reinvigorated by the debates on the subject carried out in the 1980s and 1990s.1 Most authors on the subject can be divided into two camps; those who look at the material and objective conditions for the rise of nation-states as a social formation, and those who concentrate on how a national consciousness emerges. (In recent years, this division has ranged classical Marxists and modernization theorists on one side against postmodernists and subaltern theorists on the other). In considering this body of work, one can thus make a distinction similar to the one that E. P. Thompson famously elaborated (drawing on Marx) in labor history, differentiating between a class in itself and a class for itself, between a social class such as factory workers constituted by the objective facts of its material existence and a social grouping that is self-conscious about itself as a class so that it launches unions and labor parties. The former does not automatically or always result in the latter. We will discuss these theories in relationship to the Middle East and Central Asia and to the little theoretical work done on Middle Eastern nationalisms. Many authors speak as though “nationalism” is a unitary set of practices and beliefs that has a natural history, being born at a particular time and maturing into a long-term, fairly static phenomenon. Partha Chatterjee has shown, however, that the character of nationalism changes according to whether it is a metropolitan phenomenon or a colonial one. Implicit in his work, further, is that nationalism—or, at least, the making and conceiving of nationalism—continues in the post-colonial period, throwing up new forces and perspectives that challenge previous formulations of it.2 Most writers on the subject worry about how the culture of nationalism tends to create a positive image of the nation as homogeneous while defining itself against a hated and despised Other or set of Others, within and without.3 The debate over the peculiarities of the colonial legacy and its long-term impact on the colonized has constituted the central theme of post-colonial scholarship. Those involved in the two mainly disparate debates—on nationalism and on post-colonialism—need to address each other's concerns. To date, most discussions of the post-colonial condition have centered on South Asia, and it is our aim to open up this debate by considering the very different cases of the Middle East and Central Asia, the one having been subjected to capitalist colonialism, and the latter to czarist domination, followed by the Soviet experiment, with all the ambiguities it introduced in relations between metropole and periphery.

Recent contributions to the study of ethnic conflict, which attempt to explain why and under what circumstances members of ethnic groups, or communities,1 mobilize and engage in violence, include several works that are inspired by the “security dilemma”—a basic concept of the realist tradition of international theory.2 Barry Posen, for instance, argues that ethnic groups behave like sovereign states in the international system and are influenced by their proximity to other, similar groups in the same way that states are affected by their neighbors. Because security is the primary concern of these communities, each tries to enhance its security by strengthening its position. The actions the community takes, however, trigger the response of other groups, whose members intrinsically view it as offensive, regardless of its motives. A paradox thus emerges, as “what one does to enhance one's own security causes reactions that, in the end, can make one less secure.”3

Over the course of more than three decades, efforts to integrate theories of political economy with verbal culture have produced some of the most generative inquiries into the social meaning of discursive form. Beginning in the 1960s, sociolinguists developed what became known as the “ethnography of speaking,”1 with the aim of considering verbal skills and performance as aspects of a socioeconomic system whose resources are apportioned according to a hierarchical division of labor. Critical of the more formalist and universalist language paradigms of Leonard Bloomfield and Noam Chomsky, these theorists argued that speaking is a socially and culturally constructed activity that is meaningful precisely in its relationship to specific systems of material organization. By the 1970s, sociologists were extending these insights to broader political theory by proposing that linguistic competence be considered a form of “capital” that is distributed in “linguistic markets.”2 Through pioneering interdisciplinary efforts, inquiries into the competences of individual speakers gradually yielded to analyses of situated calculations that individuals make in exchange—calculations of quantities and kinds of return, of symbolic and economic capital, of alternative representations. Meaning was becoming as much a matter of value and power as it was an expression of relationships between, as Ferdinand de Saussure once proposed, a “sound pattern” and a “concept.”3 Indeed, in recent work in linguistic and cultural anthropology, studies of meaning have been linked even more intentionally to political economy by scholars who locate signs within social and material contexts. Words are things that circulate as signs through social, symbolic, and economic trajectories4 and are refracted through linguistic markets that are multiple and shifting.5 Building on earlier social anthropology, these studies suggest that, even within one tightly knit social community, exchange becomes meaningful only at the intersection of multiple systems of value.

Today, the religion of Islam is most distinctly characterized by the emphasis it places on the transcendence of God.1 God's otherness (mukhālafa), it is said, is presupposed in Islamic thinking from the Qurءan.2 A review of the history of dogmatic development in Islam reveals, however, that during the formative period—that is, the period to about 9503—divine transcendence was only one alternative among several models attempting to explain God's unity. Indeed, it coexisted alongside its antithesis, “assimilation” (tashbīh), or as we term it, anthropomorphism.4 Muslim and Western scholars agree that, although the anthropomorphist model certainly existed—the various heresiographies attest to it—it existed only on the margins of Islam, in the extravagant fancies of a few deviant doctors.5 Thus, anthropomorphist ideas were relevant only marginally, if at all, to Islam's attempt at theological self-definition. Such, at least, is the current scholarly consensus. But how accurate is this reading of Islam's theological history?

On the night of 9–10 July 1980, several hundred active-duty and retired Iranian paratroopers made their way to the Nuzhih air-force base near the city of Hamadan to initiate a coup d'état against Iran's fledgling Islamic regime. The Iranian government had learned of the plot, and many of the paratroopers were arrested as they arrived at the base. Several hundred additional participants in the plot were arrested in the following days. Those arrested were soon put on trial, and many were executed. Fearing that other military personnel were linked to the plot or sympathized with it, the government carried out an extensive purge of the armed forces in the following months. Hundreds of other participants in the plot were never apprehended, however, and many continued to plot against the Islamic regime, though they never again posed a serious threat to it.

Iraq was formed as a modern state under a British Mandate in 1920. Its constituents were the Ottoman vilayets of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. As such, it was the product of two “colonial” administrations: first of the modernizing Ottoman state of the Tanzimat and the Young Turks' Constitution of 1908, then of the British Mandate.

Abu al-Thanaء Shihab al-Din al-Alusi (1802–54) was one of the most prominent ulama of mid-19th century Baghdad. In an era in which the Ottoman drive for modernization and centralization was changing the fabric of society and undermining the power and influence of the ulama class in large parts of the sultanate, al-Alusi was emerging as a powerful local alim, in terms of both his status as a scholar and his influence as a public figure. By the time of his death, the Alusis were becoming firmly established as a recognized ulama family, members of which would continue to play important roles in the intellectual and political life of Iraq and the Arab Mashriq. The grand Alusi, as Abu al-Thanaء al-Alusi was known, however, was, and still is, a controversial Muslim scholar whose intellectual genealogy and leanings seem to be difficult to categorize and too contradictory to pin down. Nothing illustrates the problematic of defining al-Alusi's intellectual and theological attitudes better, perhaps, than the way in which his two sons diverged. Whereas Nuעman Khayr al-Din al-Alusi (1836–99) became one of the most influential Salafi ulama in the late 19th century, his brother, Abdullah, was known as an alim with strong Sufi tendencies. Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi (1857–1924), the son of Abdullah, however, emerged as a highly regarded member of the growing Salafi circles of the major Arab urban centers in the beginning of the 20th century.

The wartime fate of the Ottoman Empire's Armenian minority continues to be controversial. The debate in the main revolves around the causes and nature of that fate. Some historians have alleged that what is involved is centrally organized mass murder—or, to use contemporary terminology, genocide. This school of thought maintains that the Ottoman authorities were waiting for a suitable opportunity to undertake the wholesale liquidation of the empire's Armenian population, and the outbreak of World War I provided that opportunity. The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, or Unionists), who controlled the Ottoman government, they argue further, did in fact undertake this liquidation under cover of the war.1 Others, however, dispute these assertions, especially that of genocidal intent. This group maintains that Armenian acts of disloyalty, subversion, and insurrection in wartime forced the central government to order, for purposes of relocation, the deportation of large sections of the Armenian population. According to this argument, apart from those who were killed in “intercommunal” clashes—that is, a “civil war”—the bulk of the Armenian losses resulted from the severe hardships associated with poorly administered measures of deportations, including exhaustion, sickness, starvation, and epidemics. In other words, this school of thought holds that the Ottoman Empire, in the throes of an existential war, had no choice but to protect itself by resorting to drastic methods; therefore, the tragic fate of the Armenians must be understood in the context of the dire conditions of World War I.2 These views are encapsulated in the formula that the noted Middle East historian Bernard Lewis has used—namely, the desperate conditions of “an embattled empire.”3

This article explores household formation among the Greek Orthodox population of a mixed village of Cappadocia inhabited by Muslims, as well. The village, Çukur, was located on the right bank of the river Kızılırmak, 49 kilometers north–northwest of Kayseri.1 I aim to show that complex forms of household formation were the main type of social organization and were especially durable over time, with a high average household membership. I attempt to clarify whether the predominance of extended households—which, as other studies have shown, is not that common in the Asian portion of the Ottoman Empire—was related to the Christian character of this section of the Çukur population, or whether the agricultural basis of the village economy played a more important role.

The Turkish Republic was established in 1923 as an invention of the modernist– Westernist elites who sought a radical transformation of traditional Ottoman Islamic social, economic, and political structures after the three-year War of Independence (1919–22) against foreign occupation in Anatolia. The transformative modernist project of the Westernist elites took capitalism as the new economic basis of society; the nation-state and parliamentary democracy as its political structure; and secularization as its cultural process. Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu first used the term “Kemalism” on 28 June 1929 to refer to the new nation- and state-building ideology that defined the legitimate political vocabulary constituting the basic principles and values of the Turkish path to modernity.1 Then the term “Kemalism” was used in the mainstream histography of the Turkish Revolution to refer to a new political stand that interpreted the revolutionary practices that had taken place between 1923 and 1935 within the framework of the tradition of ideological positivism. It broadly implied a philosophical–political stand that was shaped by an adherence to the formal “six arrow” principles of the Turkish Revolution. Ali Kazancigil argued that Kemalist ideology was an amalgam of the ideas associated with laicism, nationalism, solidarist positivist political theory, and 19th-century scientism.2 The dominant trend in the histography of the Kemalist revolution saw it as a late-Enlightenment movement that had its roots in the secular-rationalist tradition of ideological positivism and characterized the politics of the era as a zero-sum game between secular-modernist Kemalists in action and religiously oriented anti-modernists in reaction. Yet both the progressive Kemalists and reactionary groups had heterogeneous structures and were composed of many groups formed around different philosophical–political understandings about the novelties brought about by the Turkish Revolution. This study, however, limits itself to the goal of illustrating the plurality of groups and approaches to the Turkish Revolution within the modernist–Kemalist ranks of which the neo-republican conservatives were an organic part. How alternative interpretations of the Turkish Revolution, including the neo-conservative one, became part of the Kemalist histography is an open-ended question that requires a comprehensive survey of the ideological and philosophical trends prevalent within the ranks of the modernist elites in the 1920s and 1930s.

“Nationalism in the Middle East, as has often been noted, is a gift of the West.”1 While concurring with G. E. Von Grunebaum's 1962 observation, Bernard Lewis added that “[t]he ever-fertile continent of Europe had, however, more than one example to offer to its neophytes and disciples.”2 Distinguishing Western European “patriotism” from German “nationalism,” Lewis observed: “Patriotism, most of us agree, is right and good—the love and loyalty that all of us owe to our country. Nationalism, on the other hand, is something rather alien and therefore rather suspect.”3 He keenly discerned that “the first stirrings of the new loyalty in the Middle East took the form of patriotism, not nationalism.”4 But in its later phases, the “new loyalty” took the shape of a nationalism characterized as “romantic, subjective, often illiberal and chauvinistic, contemptuous of legal loyalties, and neglectful of personal freedom.”5 Although these arguments are heavily rhetorical and ideological, Lewis was correct in identifying two distinct modalities of nationalist imagination. But these modalities had more to do with the tropes of nationalism than with an assumed European pedagogy. 6 An exploration of the competing tropes of national imagination allows for the decoupling of nationalism from a political etiology that constitutes Europe as the original home of modernity.7 While recognizing the mimetic or “modular” types of nationalism, 8 a tropological approach allows for the exploration of the inventive vernacular contents of nationalist imagination. Such an approach, according to Hayden White, “centers attention on the turns in a discourse: turns from one level of generalization to another, from one phase of a sequence to another, from a description to an analysis or the reverse, from a figure to a ground or from an event to its context, from the conventions of one genre to those of another within a single discourse, and so on.”9 In a tropological study of nationalism, the focus of inquiry shifts from a schizochronic historiography attending to the belated delivery of “a gift of the West” to the Rest to a decolonized and post-nationalist historiography that explores the contingent and novel deployments of territory, history, language, ethnicity, religion, and culture in the making of a serially continuous and homogeneous polity endowed with competing identities and characteristics.

In the post-revolutionary decades, the Iranian economy has undergone significant transitions. This paper is a study of the changes in the pattern of occupational and labor stratification in the Iranian economy in these years. This is a sufficiently long time, permitting the identification of decisive structural shifts in the Iranian economy and its labor force. For the purpose of this study, we propose two periods in the post-revolutionary years. The first period comprises the years of fervent search for a populist Islamic utopia, which began with the 1979 revolution and came to an end by 1986, when the burden of the war with Iraq and the glut in the world oil market made the populist project practically defunct. The death of Ayatollah Khomeini in June 1989 marked the beginning of the second period, one that is characterized by a move toward “economic restructuring” à la the International Monetary Fund–World Bank, aiming for a general liberalization of economic activities, including foreign-exchange realignment, decontrolling of prices, reduction of subsidies, and privatization of nationalized enterprises.

Current discussions on the political developments in Turkey frequently frame the struggles between the military and religious parties as a war between secularism and Islam and draw out incommensurable differences between the two sides. Indeed, the military establishment, which casts itself as the guardian of the secular republic, succeeded in 1997 in having the Supreme Court ban the Welfare Party, the first openly religious party ever to form a government in the Turkish Republic. The generals justified this seemingly undemocratic move by claiming that that this party was trying to reinstate the sacred shari[ayin]a law.

Fiscal accounts are meant to show how much and where the government spends public funds or commits a country's resources to future payments. Information from government accounts is essential for evaluating government policies and programs in terms of their contribution to addressing social and economic needs and their impact on macro-economic performance. But there is a common problem in published fiscal data that must be addressed before they can be put to use: governments typically have some expenditures and debts that are not reflected in their official accounts. The extent of concealment varies across countries and activities, and the users of fiscal information need to be sensitive to the causes and consequences of such variation. Middle Eastern countries have their own share of hidden spending and liability, and some—such as Iran, Turkey, Morocco, Syria, and the Persian Gulf countries—stand out among nations in the scope and size of fiscal activities that they keep off their budgets. In this paper, we examine the case of Iran, where huge public funds are appropriated and redistributed outside the formal budget. The case is instructive because it shows the wide range and size of hidden government expenditures and commitments that affect the public. It also displays the dire consequences that lack of proper government accounting and reporting can bring to a country.

This article seeks to explain the generation, spread, and reproduction of post-secondary education in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank since the inception of this process in the 1950s and into the 1990s, with a focus on the period of Israeli military occupation. It is based on the findings, qualitative and quantitative, of extended socio-anthropological field research that was carried out in Dheisheh camp in the years 1992–95. The conceptual framework that instructed the research methodology and the interpretation of the findings sought to combine a political-economy approach, which accords centrality to the determinants of the “system” of power relationships—in this case, primarily those of the military-occupation regime—with an analysis of “human agency” or praxis, particularly the reorganization of the division of labor in the refugee family household over the years and generations. Accordingly, the article explores and traces the inter-relationships among (1) “system-imposed” barriers and obstacles to the acquisition of education by Dheisheh refugees and to their education-related job mobility; (2) family-based patterns of organization that developed around the education and employment opportunities of second- and third-generation refugees in the face of impeding structural conditions; (3) the long-range consequences of the resultant “education and labor process” for the transformation of socio-economic relationships within the family and the community.

The history of Turkistan in the second half of the 19th and the early 20th century has repeatedly attracted the attention of social scientists. It is widely recognized that the tendency of most Soviet authors was to consider this history under the rubric of “the progressive consequences of annexation to Russia,” at a time when the main historiographical trend was to investigate the history of revolutions, movements of the working class and peasants, riots among the people, and national-liberation movements. Under the same rubric, during a rather long period until the end of the 1980s, many problems of local Turkistan society were written about. As a result of this approach, some questions remained unasked—questions that challenged the officially mandated proposition that “despite tsarist colonialism, the annexation of non-Russian peoples to Russia was a progressive reality.” In particular, one of these questions has to do with the history of the state that governed the territory of Turkistan in the colonial and post-colonial periods.