As one of the greatest and fastest-growing industries of our time, one with significant impacts upon societies and economies almost everywhere, tourism (mass travel for pleasure and recreation) merits serious historical study. In the Middle East and North Africa, the turning point in travel for trade, exploration, adventure, and religious inspiration to travel primarily for leisure occurred in Egypt and Syria/Palestine during the 1880s. Tourism, however, is not only intrinsically important. Its origins and development also shed light upon the great themes of Middle East history: (1) modernization (the introduction of Western techniques, methods and materials), and (2) colonial expansion and empire.

Before the Syrian civil war, Egyptians were the single largest migrant labor community in Jordan. Labor market pressures and changes to the Jordanian work permit system have resulted in the increasing vulnerability of Egyptian labor, who have been the primary labor force on Jordanian farms and construction sites since the late 1970s. Using new data from the 2015 Jordanian census, the 2010 and 2016 Jordan Labor Market Panel Survey, and field interviews conducted in Jordan from 2014 to 2018, I show that higher concentrations of Syrians at the subdistrict level are associated with higher rates of informal labor market participation for Egyptians. Furthermore, higher proportions of Syrians do not correlate with negative impacts on the formality or household wealth of Jordanian citizens, suggesting that Syrian labor does not directly compete with the Jordanian labor force. Given the importance of supporting host communities during refugee crises, this analysis sheds light on how mass forced migration affects other vulnerable segments of the migrant labor force in the Global South.

The dominance of fossil fuel economies in the Middle East with large Muslim majority populations has led to a recurring question about the role Islamic ethics might play in galvanizing action on climate change. However, the perceived clash of economic values versus environmental norms in Islam deserves more careful examination. This brief article considers the advent of the “Islamic Declaration on Climate Change” which was promulgated in 2015 and considers the tangible steps Muslim government leaders and civil society have taken on this matter. The tangible steps that are being considered with an action plan are discussed in the light of earlier environmental movements within Islam. A brief discussion of environmental norms within Islamic scriptures is also provided to give theological context to this narrative. The establishment of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) in the UAE as a treaty-based organization with United Nations affiliations is also considered. The environment can play an important peace-building role in the region as exemplified by organizations such as Eco-peace in Palestine, Israel, and Jordan. Based on the analysis of these developments, it is likely that Muslim countries will continue to play a more proactive role in addressing climate change than they are often given credit for in popular discourse.

A useful paradigm for studying Mediterranean and world history is the concept behind a course I teach, “The Mediterranean as a Borderland.” The paradigm of the borderland was generated by policymakers and social scientists studying the American Southwest and developed for the field of history by Oscar Martinez at the University of Arizona. Arizona is in the borderland, the region close to the border between the United States and Mexico where the influence of Mexico can be directly felt. There is of course an equivalent region on the other side in Mexico that is directly influenced by its proximity to the United States. These two regions together comprise the borderland, and they are in many ways more similar to each other than either is to the rest of the nation it belongs to. Unlike the border itself, which divides one country from another, the borderland is the area where the two societies meet and overlap. The Mediterranean Sea is often seen as a border between Christian and Muslim civilizations to the north and south. It can therefore be studied as a borderland, the region where the two overlap. Such a study highlights similarities, influences, and exchanges rather than differences and oppositions; it forms a necessary corrective to today’s emphasis on the “clash of civilizations.” This paper gives a historiography of the borderland paradigm and its application in the Mediterranean, and compares it with the closely related concept of the frontier.

In Recent Years, many discoveries in the history of Islamic mathematics have not been reported outside the specialist literature, even though they raise issues of interest to a larger audience. Thus, our aim in writing this survey is to provide to scholars of Islamic culture an account of the major themes and discoveries of the last decade of research on the history of mathematics in the Islamic world. However, the subject of mathematics comprised much more than what a modern mathematician might think of as belonging to mathematics, so our survey is an overview of what may best be called the “mathematical sciences” in Islam; that is, in addition to such topics as arithmetic, algebra, and geometry we will also be interested in mechanics, optics, and mathematical instruments.

When I told some of my colleagues and students that I wanted to address the question of democratization in Middle East politics at the annual meeting, I was not surprised at their reactions, which were mainly incredulous. If ever a topic were passé, surely it was this one. Not only was the experience of parliamentary democracy brief and unhappy, it also had ended by the middle 1950s. Furthermore, the liberal modernization paradigm that had underpinned earlier forecasts of democracy was itself largely discarded. In addition, my friends argued, how could I try to make a case for democratization when my own writing on Arab politics portrayed fragmented, disoriented societies and unstructured, insecure political environments in which the race between societal demands and state capabilities—no matter which side was “ahead”—could hardly be conducive to democracy. Skeptical colleagues from Egypt and other Arab countries also raised the troublesome question of academic and ideological ethnocentrism: should one even ask about prospects for democratization?

As in Europe, Islamic studies in the U.S. originated in the tradition of Orientalist scholarship and Christian theology, with its strong textual emphasis, but it has gradually expanded to overlap with Middle East area studies as well as a number of humanistic and social science disciplines, especially religious studies. Over the past several decades, and especially since 9/11, scholarly interest in Islamic studies has mushroomed. This interest is visible in the number of doctoral dissertations produced on Islam and Muslims over the past half-century. As a percentage of all dissertations in the Proquest Dissertations and Theses Database, Islamic studies themes grew from less than one percent prior to the late 1970s to three percent in the 1980s and 1990s, to over four percent since 2001 (see Figure l).

During the millennium which followed the introduction of mathematics and astronomy from Indian, Sasanian and Hellenistic sources to the vigorous cultural scene of Abbasid Iraq in the eighth and ninth centuries, Muslim scientists compiled a remarkably rich and varied corpus of literature relating to their subject. Some of this literature survives in the manuscript libraries of the Near East, Europe and the United States, and a very small number of scholars have turned their attention to a small fraction of this material during the past 200 years. Catalogs of varying quality exist for some of these libraries, but there are many important collections which are not yet cataloged at all. Valuable lists of authors, titles and available manuscripts have been prepared by H. Suter, C. Brockelmann, C. A. Storey and, most recently, by F. Sezgin.

The historic appearance of the social sciences as an intellectual activity seeking to be scientific is directly tied to the birth and development of industrialization in Europe and in other areas taken over by Europeans, notably North America. If one opens a treatise on sociology, for example, one sees that all the founding fathers of the discipline are men of European culture. It is true that in the last few years Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) had often been cited as one of the forerunners of scientific thought, but he is a forerunner, and not a founding father like Conte, Durkheim, Marx, etc. The principal preoccupations of these figures were obviously those of their society, which at that time was going through a phase of upheavels connected with industrialization. But with the colonial expansion, which is one of the principle concequences of that industrialization, the curiousity of European scholars in social sciences overflowed the limits of their own society; thus was born ethnography, ethnology, and later, anthropology.

The 2017 referendum marked a transition from an already incongruous parliamentary system to rampant presidentialism and created more conflicts rather than defusing them. Given the extraordinary conditions under which the referendum was held, and the limited time allowed for discussion of its possible ramifications, any effort to analyze the eve and aftermath of the referendum provoked more questions than answers. Why was the referendum held in 2017, although the governing party had advocated for a new constitution and transition to a presidential system since it came to power in 2002? What was the attitude of the voters towards the presidential system? How did popular support change or did it in fact change during the referendum campaign? The analysis of these questions presented here relies on extant research to inventory what we really know and do not know about the most recent Turkish referendum and why these unanswered questions might have critical consequences.

Fewer than fourth months after De Gaulle stood in Algiers and enigmatically declared “I have understood you,” he was once again in Algeria, now in the city of Constantine, where he unveiled a development plan that seemed to reaffirm his commitment to French Algeria. On 3 October 1958, amidst the ravages of war, De Gaulle proposed the Plan de Constantine, proclaiming that “all of Algeria must have her share in what modern civilization can and must bring to men.” The Plan de Constantine (hereafter “the Plan”) was an ambitious development program that intended to lessen the economic, social and political disparity between l’ Hexagone (metropolitan France) and French Algeria.

It is often assumed that as ‘orthodox’ Islam rejects music, Qur’anic recitation (tilawa) and the Call to Prayer (adhan) are its only acceptable melodic practices. By the same logic, the special music of Sufism is bracketed under the labels ‘heterodox,’ or else ‘popular,’ Islam. Both ‘orthodox’ and ‘Sufi’ practices are then categorically distinguished from the ‘secular’ world and its music. This erroneous ‘tripolar’ view of music and religion in Egypt can be ameliorated by considering the rich range of Islamic melodic practices performed there.

Arabic Papyrology is relevant to more than the first three hundred years of Islamic Egypt. In its larger sense, papyrology is the use of documentary sources for the study of civilization. To limit the definition of Arabic papyrology by the medium on which documents are written would be to ignore the possibility of millenia-long historical investigation. Analysis of time-series of like documents—for example, marriage or sales contracts—without regard to the change from papyrus to paper, will permit the unprecedented study of a particular institution over time, as well as understanding of variations in language and formulary. Arabic papyrology, hence, presents us with the possibility of in-depth cross-cultural studies of institutions which lie at the very foundations of Middle Eastern civilization.

The Middle East is deconstructing—that is, the concept of a coherent geographic entity with the label “Middle East.” A Thematic Conversation on this subject began at the 2005 MESA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., and will conclude at the 2007 meeting in Montréal. These discussions grow out of efforts in the 1990s to rethink area studies globally, spurred by programs at the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council, among others. A variety of scholars have taken up these issues with regard to the Middle East specifically over the past decade, including the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which organized this Thematic Conversation.

Literature in Human Geography has given much attention to “encounters” and their impact on negotiating difference in everyday life. These studies, however, have focused solely on cities, while “other” spaces like refugee camps have received little attention to date. In this paper, I highlight the significance of “encounters” in camps by exposing three main types: the “refugee-refugee,” the “refugee-humanitarian,” and the “refugee-more-than-human” encounters. Using empirical examples from Zaatari camp in Jordan, I show that the “refugee-refugee” encounters cannot be fully understood without taking refugees’ culture, background, and urban identities into consideration. I also explain how the “refugee-humanitarian” encounters result in new types of behaviors and might harden the boundaries between both groups. And lastly, I demonstrate how the “refugee-more-than-human” encounters can inform us about refugees’ unique experiences with shelters, space, and materiality. Building on the examples given for each type, this article suggests that “encounters” have the ability to generate knowledge and learnings, which contributes to shaping the space of the camp by either enforcing boundaries between different groups and/or by allowing new and hybrid spatialities to emerge. This not only confirms that “encounters” are an important entry point in understanding the socio-spatial and material composition of refugee camps, but also that further studies in this regard are direly needed. It also suggests that architects and planners need to allow for the “new” to emerge as a result of these encounters and, therefore, to enable flexibility and adaptability within camps’ design and planning.

Recently Mary Louise Pratt suggested that we expunge the term ‘foreign’ as it applies to non-European languages and literature, and that we replace it with the term ‘modern,’ thereby “put[ting] an end to another lexical legacy of the Cold War.” I want to argue that, at least for the time being, replacing the term ‘foreign’ would be a dangerous masking, a denial of the realities of the encounters that, from my vantage point as an Arab and a professor of Arabic literature in the American academy, are still characterized by power inequalities, ignorance, and outright racism and hostility, encounters with ‘foreignness’ that must, at the very least, be apprehended as such.

Arabic literature is primarily taught in this country in departments of Middle or Near Eastern Studies. Almost everyone in the humanities today is aware of how institutional structures of limited funding and resources, the distinctions between tenured, non-tenured, and adjunct faculty, the politics of publication and advancement, and so on affect the production of the knowledge that our students and readers are exposed to. In the case of Area Studies departments the problems are more acute. It is not simply that the resources are less, the support from the administration weaker, and the prestige at the bottom of the academic food chain, all of which are true. It is also that, when it comes to Area Studies, it becomes almost impossible for the American academy to be an arena of opposition and contestation. Edward Said traced the history of Area Studies departments in Orientalism over twenty years ago, and exposed the ways in which the knowledge they produce has served the interests of some at the expense of others, and has functioned to consolidate a world order, ‘new’ or ‘old’ does not seem to make much difference, of a privileged few, and a disenfranchised majority.

This article briefly reviews the faults and merits of peacemaking efforts anchored in liberal ideologies. It further calls for a shift in strategy and outlines an approach that seeks transformation of conflicts through acknowledging the ways in which contrasting worldviews undergird and sustain the political conflict.

On May 22, 1966, the eve of the first Tunisian census since independence, President Habib Bourguiba expressed as follows the objectives and uses of this census:

The need for population data has undoubtedly provided an impetus for the collection of such data as well as for demographic research not only in Tunisia but also in other Middle Eastern countries. In recent years, an added impetus for demographic research has been the realization that, in some of these countries, population growth may be threatening social and economic development.