The Ottoman Empire, contrary to the stereotype, was a key player in global commerce until well into the nineteenth century. Customs registers (gümrük defterleri) compiled by the Ottoman administration provide abundant information on ships, seamen, merchants, goods, and prices. This article summarizes the history of Ottoman customs taxation, enumerates the various types of records that contain information on trade and customs dues, and surveys current scholarship on the customs registers. It also includes lists of customs registers found in the Maliyeden Müdevver collection of the Prime Minister's Ottoman Archive (Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi) and other collections also containing customs registers and related documents. The purpose is to stimulate further research into the Ottoman Empire's role in global interaction and exchange, a core topic in the growing field of world history.

In 1990, Vaclav Havel addressed a joint session of the United States Congress. It was a heady moment in many ways. Not only was his rise the product of stunning—and surprisingly peaceful—political change; not only was he a living symbol of principled political opposition and its force; Havel was also something extremely unusual: a true intellectual who had just entered the halls of power. And he quickly showed that in his visit to the halls of Congress. The new Czech president was not content to give a mere policy address or a string of bromides and platitudes. Instead he actually talked somewhat serious philosophy to the assembled legislators. Before doing so, he did at least promise, he said, to “limit myself to a single idea.” He called that idea “a great certainty.” What was it? “Consciousness precedes Being, not the other way around, as Marxists claim.”

This article addresses the early formation of Sunni “orthodoxy” through the prisms of historical memory and collective identity rather than those of theology, law, and formal political power.2 It does so by exploring the socio-political context in which the phrase luzūm al-jamāʿa3 (adhering to the community) was deployed during the late Umayyad/Marwanid (64/684–132/750) and early Abbasid (132/750–333/945) periods, primarily among the networks of hadith transmitters who circulated the idea during that period. The results of this analysis reveal that ideas central to Sunni conceptions of community first developed in Umayyad patronage structures and networks, before being adopted by the so-called “proto-Sunni” elite.

This article considers the legal institution of mahr in Islamic family law from three research perspectives in order to provide insights into the phenomenon's complexity, particularly with regard to current legal practices. In particular, emphasis is placed both on countries where family law is shaped by Islamic traditions (e.g., Morocco) and on countries whose legal traditions do not have a mahr counterpart (e.g., Germany). First, the social and economic function of dower will be described. As a special form of property transfer, mahr will be analyzed in its historical and present shape in theory and practice. Second, the legal conceptualization of mahr in the German legal context will be discussed. The example of Morocco serves to illustrate the changes with regard to mahr because of the process of incorporation of Islamic legal concepts into a national statutory law system. Given the Muslim diaspora, these insights are important contributions to the legal intepretation of mahr in a transnational context.

When it was founded in 2001, the current ruling party in Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (JDP), unequivocally declared its commitment to democracy and secularism (JDP 2014). Nevertheless, the party's implementation of reforms aimed at strengthening Turkey's democracy after coming to power in 2002 surprised many observers because the JDP's top leaders had been known Islamists. The speed and dedication with which the government introduced and implemented laws aimed at “European-style normalization” even impressed the EU, leading to the historic decision of 17 December 2004 to open negotiations with Turkey for full membership (Kirişҫi 2004). Such commitment seemed to be a rarity and therefore did not escape the attention of scholars either. It led to the publication of several academic works, four of which are the subject of this review essay.

Tinghir-Jerusalem is a documentary about exile and identity, with an unremarkable Moroccan village at its epicenter. Director, producer, and narrator Kamal Hachkar brings us along, quite literally, on a journey to explore his insecure sense of self while examining a broader narrative about the exodus to Israel of his natal town's Berber Jewish population. With a shared, idealized notion of “home,” Hachkar and his subjects explore what it means to exist liminally, in between both place and time.

Director Dan Shadur's parents, Avi and Nili, were part of a multitude of Israeli diplomats and businesspeople doing business in Iran before the Islamic Revolution of 1979. For many of these people, their years in Iran were the happiest moments of their lives. They enjoyed big apartments, substantial earning power, vacations in the mountains, royal dinners, and front-row seating at military parades. Of course, all of this was to disappear starting with the tumultuous period at the end of 1978.

These three books, written by sociologist Syed Farid Alatas and historian Allen James Fromherz, represent the continued academic fascination with the Muqaddimah, the work of the North African Arab Muslim historical theorist Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406). The Muqaddimah has been the subject of an entire library of articles and books since it was first published and translated in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. Written mainly by Westerners and Western-educated Middle Easterners, most of these publications have studied one or another aspect of Ibn Khaldun's dialectical model of tribal state formation, which constitutes the intellectual core of the Muqaddimah. Many authors of these works have also noticed and commented on the similarity of Ibn Khaldun's historical model to Western sociological theory. Relatively few scholars have written about Ibn Khaldun himself. Most but not all of these scholars agree that Ibn Khaldun was a brilliantly original intellectual, but many express different views about the genesis and nature of his ideas and their significance. Alatas and Fromherz provide two contrasting studies. Alatas's two books are closely related sequential studies, devoted to explaining Ibn Khaldun's model and relating it to the social sciences. Fromherz's work is biographical, although he also discusses Ibn Khaldun's theories. Both authors make significant contributions to the understanding of the man and his ideas, while also implicitly demonstrating why Ibn Khaldun and the Muqaddimah will continue to be subjects of research and controversy.

Malcolm H. Kerr's classic study The Arab Cold War appeared in print in a circuitous way, which can be traced using archival materials that have previously been inaccessible to scholars. More important, the primary analytical themes of the book continue to be fundamentally misrepresented, despite the frequent appropriation of the book's title by students of regional affairs in the wake of the 2010–11 uprisings.

The Voice of a Condor opens with Reverend Naim Ateek's humorous anecdote about Americans who are unaware that Christianity “was born” in Palestine and that there are, in fact, Christian Arabs. Even in academic circles, discussion of Palestinians tends to focus narrowly on the Muslim Palestinians in Israel and residents of the occupied territories or refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon. Christian Palestinians once comprised more than ten percent of the population, but their numbers have been declining in the Holy Lands for more than a century. Today, they represent less than two percent of the population.