The historiography of Arab nationalism has tended to concentrate on the secular press from the Mashriq, especially the Cairo–Beirut axis, at the expense of the religious nationalist press and the non-Mashriqi one. There is often an assumption that reliance on the secular press from the Mashriq alone can provide a clear picture of Arab intellectual life and that a proper analysis of that thought can be confined to a few intellectual centers in the eastern Arab world. Although there has never been an explicit claim that such a focus is the end of the story, there have not been enough attempts to look beyond the Cairo–Beirut axis and beyond its secular press organs in search of a broader story of the depth and breadth of Arab nationalism. This article addresses this imbalance by examining an Arabist-Salafi press network that operated between Algeria, Tunisia, Zanzibar, and Egypt and involved members of two sectarian communities, Sunnis and Ibadis. This Arabist-Salafi press network created a public sphere of intellectual engagement in which Salafism and nationalism were interwoven, producing a nationalist discourse transgressing post World War I borders of identity and linking the three layers of nationalism—the territorial, the Pan-Arab, and the Pan-Islamic—together. These layers not only intersected but also legitimized one another.

Undeclared ambitions for the future notwithstanding, my current research profile is one that could qualify me as an “environmental historian” by only the most indulgent of standards. My contribution to this roundtable will thus be written less in the mode of a practicing researcher in the field and more from the perspective of a teacher (at a U.S. public land-grant university) currently in the process of trying to “environmentalize” two large survey courses in history.

The topic of Christians in the Middle East appears to be enjoying a growing vitality within Middle East studies. This is not to say that scholarship ignored the subject in the past, but it was rarely seen as an independent area of study. Works tended to focus on the historical origins, faith, and rites of the different churches within Eastern Christianity. Those that looked specifically at Christian communities tended to concentrate on their relations with other groups, especially in the context of a minority framework. Some interdisciplinary volumes such as those edited by Andrea Pacini and Anthony O'Mahony moved beyond this limited approach to cover a wider range of issues, but several of the contributions retained this descriptive tendency rather than relating directly to theoretical debates within different disciplines.

These books demonstrate in various ways the momentous progress achieved in the study of Sufism over the past three decades while pointing to lacunae and problems that remain. Until the 1970s, Western scholarship on Sufism was shaped by a set of paradigms that originated among orientalists, travelers, colonial officials, and modernist Muslims in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scholars privileged the mystical insights and poetry of great Sufi masters and championed personal and unmediated religious forms. Sufism's devotional and corporate aspects were unappreciated, as were the Sufi practitioners, especially ragged dervishes and worshippers at saints' tombs. It was common to separate such practitioners and practices from “genuine” mysticism through a schema of elite versus popular religion. A related paradigm of decline cast later Sufi practice as a corruption of the classical mystical tradition and a culprit in a wider decline of Muslim civilization, while yet another focused on the Sufi brotherhoods as networks of anticolonial Muslim activism and hence purveyors of “fanaticism.”

Rapid population growth constitutes one of the most critical problems confronting many Middle Eastern and North African countries, placing incremental pressure on their finite water and other natural resources and challenging their abilities to grow sufficient food, accommodate school and university graduates with jobs, build adequate urban and rural infrastructures, contain rapid urbanization, and alleviate poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, and disease. More than one-third of the population is under the age of fifteen in a majority of countries and, thus, has yet to marry and reach reproductive age. As a result, in most places the number of women of childbearing age (fifteen to forty-nine) will more than double in the next thirty years. Because there are so many young people, by one estimate the region's economies would have to generate half as many additional jobs by 2010 as existed in 1996 to avoid an increase in already high unemployment rates, particularly among young adults. The growing bulge of unemployed young people has serious political ramifications for many Middle Eastern regimes, from Algeria to Saudi Arabia. These problems will likely get worse in the short term because of demographic momentum—the parents of the future have already been born.

Historians of Europe often declare that Spain is “different.” This distinctiveness of the Iberian peninsula has many faces and is frequently seen as rooted in its Islamic past. In the field of Islamic history, too, al-Andalus is somewhat different. It has its own specialists, research traditions, controversies, and trends. One of the salient features of historical studies of al-Andalus as well as of its popular image is the great interest in its interreligious dimension. In 2002, María Rosa Menocal published The Ornament of the World, one of the rare books on Islamic history written by an academic that enjoyed and still enjoys a tremendous popularity among nonspecialist readers. The book surveys intersections of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian elite culture, mostly in Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin literature and in architecture, from the Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula in 711 to the fall of Granada in 1492. Menocal presents the religious diversity commonly referred to as convivencia as one of the defining features of Andalusi intellectual and artistic productivity. She also argues that the narrow-minded forces that brought about its end were external, pointing to the Almoravids and Almohads from North Africa and Christians from north of the peninsula as responsible. The book's subtitle, How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, conjures the community of Abrahamic faiths. It reflects the optimism of those who identify in Andalusi history a model for a constructive relationship between “Islam” and “the West” that in the age of the “war on terror” many are desperate to find.