The study of Arab nationalism, and indeed of all nationalisms, is beset with particular problems. One is the imprecision of the main concepts involved, starting with the definition of nation. Another is the confusion, inherent in the very word “nationalism,” between two quite different objects of study—nationalism as a movement, as a social and political force, and nationalism as an ideology. The first allows objective, historical analyses of how a particular movement arose and developed in such and such a country, of the social groups that supported and/or opposed it, and, not least, of how states have sought to define and utilize it. The second is an aspiration, an ideological and normative claim, one with a strong tendency to control public debate; it has an inherent tendency to distort the history of the supposed “nation.” The special claims nationalists make for their particular nation cause a third problem: although modern history has yielded hundreds of cases of nationalism, as movement and ideology, nationalism occasions analysis that is singular, treating the nation in question as unique and avoiding comparison.

Thus wrote Dr. Asher Goldstein in the Hebrew daily paper Haʾaretz (The Land) in 1935, lamenting the disregard for hygiene among Palestine's Jews. In Goldstein's text, hygiene is metonymic to Western progress, which the Jews were to bring with them to Palestine. Yet the Jews in this text occupy an ambivalent position: they are not only to bring the West to the “entire backward Orient” but also to themselves. A hygienic way of life, far from being a secured component in their cultural compendium, is presented as a goal yet to be achieved. Indeed, it constituted a project in which Dr. Goldstein—author of several hygiene manuals and editor of the health column in Haʾaretz—played an important role.

Not long ago, two safe generalizations could be made about the Gulf monarchies: ruling families dominated their politics, and oil dominated their economies. In recent years that has begun to change. In Kuwait the parliament challenges the political predominance of the ruling family. Meanwhile, Dubai and, increasingly, the other emirates of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have made real progress in diversifying their economies away from oil—at least until the recent economic crisis. Yet political liberalization and economic diversification have not gone hand in hand: Kuwait's economy remains dependent on oil, and the United Arab Emirates remains resolutely authoritarian. This is no accident. Kuwait's high level of political participation encourages its dependence on oil while the UAE's economic diversification requires a lack of political participation by citizens. The reasons for this are specific to the peculiar political economy of these labor markets: in these richest of rentier-states, there is little need for the class compromise between capitalists and workers on which capitalist democracy usually rests.

“Area studies” as a way of trying to understand human experience is undergoing a major transition. Questioning the connection between Middle East and African studies highlights important dimensions of the changing nature of area studies at the beginning of the 21st century.

The developmental process as it unfolds in Dubai has hardly been analyzed by academics. Most current knowledge about the country originates from media coverage, especially from news magazines and business literature. Recently a number of social science based but historically oriented academic publications have appeared. Only one study, however, has seriously sought to place Dubai in a broader developmental framework: Sampler and Eigner's From Sand to Silicon, published in 2003. Yet, by applying the so-called strategic trajectory model to the case of Dubai, they reduce their focus to the management side. Their aim is too narrow to provide an explanation of the overall development process in Dubai.

Historical scholarship on Arab nationalism has experienced a conceptual revolution over the last two decades. It is now widely accepted among historians that local identities and loyalties have been crucial components of nationalist thought and action from the very beginning; it is equally well established that the line between nationalism and various elements of Islam is much harder to draw than one might imagine. In addition, there is solid evidence that nationalism across the Arab world took shape, arguably as an unintended consequence, out of sustained interaction among conflicting elite and popular conceptions of political community. Moreover, it turns out to be important to differentiate Arab nationalism as a cluster of ideological principles from Pan-Arabism as a set of diplomatic practices that constituted a basic component of regional statecraft, initially at the time the Ottoman Empire found itself disintegrating and later on as the newly independent states of the Middle East and North Africa experimented with ways to get along simultaneously with one another and with outside powers.

Recently I completed an initial foray into the underutilized 1848 census of Egypt that was commissioned by Muhammad ʿAli in the last years of his long rule. This enormous unpublished document provides a fascinating bird's-eye view of Cairo in the middle of the 19th century, permitting one to snoop into thousands of households, great and small, in Egypt's greatest and largest city to see a population undergoing profound social transformation. Here we find ordinary Egyptians, each identified by gender, age, nationality, civil status, occupation, religion, and relationship to the head of the household, living in houses, tenements, wakalas (caravansaries/residential hotels), mosques, and slums in a fantastic maze of streets, alleys, and byways. Here may be located various nationalities that contributed to the city's rich tapestry: Turks, Armenians, Syrians, Nubians, Sudanese, and Maghribis; Christians as well as Muslims and Jews; merchants and artisans; and soldiers, servants, and slaves.

Shaykh Naʿim al-ʿArqsusi is one of Damascus's most popular Muslim scholars. A leading figure of a local Islamic movement called Jamaʿat Zayd (Zayd's Group), he is widely praised for his knowledge, modesty, and asceticism. Every week, this frail, short-bearded fifty-six-year-old attracts several thousand people to the huge concrete al-Iman mosque next to Baʿth party headquarters in the middle-class neighborhood of al-Mezraʿa.

The debut of Turkish-language translations of the Qurʾan in the newly founded Republic of Turkey sparked lively debates over whether Qurʾan translation was possible or desirable, who should engage in interpretation of the text, and what characteristics a Turkish-language rendering of the Qurʾan should have. Whereas the abolition of the Islamic caliphate, closure of the medreses, and prohibition of the Sufi orders have received considerable attention in histories of early republican Turkey, the state-sponsored translation of the Qurʾan into Turkish remains both neglected and misunderstood. Muhammad Rashid Rida, who was highly influential in shaping opinion in the Muslim world, portrayed the state-sponsored project as a long-term plot to displace the Arabic Qurʾan. Other accounts misrepresent the involvement of President Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) in the promotion of Qurʾan translation by anachronistically suggesting that he sparked the initiative and led a “campaign” in support of it. Mustafa Kemal had no hand in the composition of Turkish Qurʾan translations published in 1924, other than helping create the political context in which they could be published. Their composition began well before the foundation of the Turkish republic, and their inspiration emerged from the intellectual milieu of the late Ottoman public sphere.

In this article we present a threefold argument—chronological, geographical, and sociocultural—in order to demonstrate that interest in the woman question and the lively and at times charged debate that it stimulated began in Greater Syria in the early nahḍa (awakening) period and persisted throughout, drawing into its orbit leading intellectuals as well as members of the general public and permeating even peripheral areas of Greater Syria. We do so by examining the public reflection of this debate in the early nahḍa press, mainly privately published Beirut journals and newspapers.

Within a few years of 1820, Muslim-owned printing presses were established under state sponsorship in Iran, Egypt, and India, marking the true beginning of printing in the Islamic world. Printing projects had been initiated before this period—most famously by Ibrahim Müteferrika (1674–1745) in Istanbul—but these were isolated and unsustained ventures. None gathered the joint momentum of state support and technological transfer to compare with what emerged simultaneously in Tabriz, Cairo, and Lucknow. In attempting to understand the common processes behind this “triplet” birth of Muslim printing, this article reconstructs the small circle of individuals whose at times discordant projects collided in creating a sustainable Muslim print tradition in several distinct centers around 1820.

On 19 January 1839, the South Arabian port town of Aden was bombarded by ships of the Indian Navy and occupied by soldiers of the East India Company. It was the first British colonial acquisition of the Victorian period.

The prevailing perception within the academy, policy circles, and the media inside and outside Iran has been that the members of bazaars are a unified social class engaged in a symbiotic relationship with the political elite of the Islamic republic and the conservative faction in particular. This approach is largely built on the perspective that there is a historic predilection for bāzārīs and clerics to cooperate (“mosque–bazaar alliance”), and thus ideological compatibility and familial ties between the clergy and bāzārīs have continued and developed into an alliance under the current regime headed by segments of the clergy. For instance, one of the leading experts on 20th-century Iran, Nikki Keddie, comments that, despite Mohammad Khatami's reformist agenda, “the ruling elite, who represent an alliance between the commercial bazaar bourgeoisie and conservative clerics, resist giving up their economic privileges as they do their political ones.”

This study gives voice to three ways of becoming modern in the Turkish experience through a reading of the novels of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Oğuz Atay, and Orhan Pamuk. The first possibility, represented by the works of Tanpınar, is more conservative and defensive, concerned with preserving what is considered authentic culture. Anti-individualistic, it nonetheless attempts to appropriate Western culture and the change generated by its impact within “the traditional essence.” The second possibility, represented by the works of Atay, is open ended: it reaches beyond the limitations of the Turkish social-historical domain to create a new individual (and implicitly social) existence while remaining critical of Western “individuality.” The last possibility, represented by the works of Pamuk, expresses the dominant concept of “modernization” in Turkey, which equates modernization with Westernization. Individualization comes to mean replication of “Western individuality.”

Ceremony and elaborate protocols are commonly associated with kingship, authority, and power. The pageantry associated with the British monarchy in its public ceremonials, for example, is imbued with a sense of an ancient past. Yet, these traditions are recent inventions derived from the late Victorian period. Traditions, particularly Western practices, are often made up, choreographed, and then formally instituted in a matter of a few years, rapidly gaining a sense of permanence. Sometimes entirely new symbols and devices are invented to confirm gravitas and substance and to serve as rallying points for the new entity (e.g., Marianne, John Bull, or Uncle Sam).

Employing rhetoric all too familiar to Turks today, major metropolitan newspapers in Turkey in December 1952 and January 1953 raised the specter of widespread Islamic or religious “reaction” (irtica). Staunch defenders of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's policy of secularism, or laiklik, journalists in Istanbul and Ankara identified the existence of a “black press” (kara basın) manipulated by religious “reactionaries” (mürteci) determined to use print media to challenge the very secular foundations of the modern Turkish nation and to upset the established order. To prevent this, the time had come to prosecute vigorously both individuals and organizations that used newspapers or journals to exploit religion and promote obscurantist propaganda. Chief among these was not a metropolitan publication but, rather, an incendiary religious newspaper produced in the Black Sea city of Samsun—the very same city in which Mustafa Kemal had first set foot in 1919 in his efforts to lead what became the Turkish War of Independence. This black newspaper was Büyük Cihad, “The Great Struggle.”

In December 1977 an independent candidate named Mehdi Zana was elected mayor of Diyarbakır, one of the biggest cities in Turkey's southeastern region. His election was a striking event, upsetting the troika of class, party, and state that had maintained a tight hold over the local political apparatus in Diyarbakır since the 1940s. Unlike most prior mayors of Diyarbakır, Zana did not come from a prominent family of local notables but was a working-class tailor with a middle-school education. He was one of only two independent candidates who won electoral contests in Turkey's sixty-seven big-city races; his election therefore flew in the face of a national trend that favored candidates from the country's two main political parties. Zana was well known for his left-wing, Kurdist politics, and at the time of his election he already had spent several years in jail for his activism. In a system that suppressed collective expressions of Kurdish identity, he was thus a clear ideological interloper.

The Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World (AHDR 2005), published in Arabic with English and French translations, was launched at the end of 2006. With a title carefully crafted to avoid Western development buzzwords like “empowerment” and to signal the inclusion of all women living in the region, it is the third in a series of detailed studies meant to unpack the themes of the original overview report that garnered both acclaim and criticism when it was published in 2002. The other two topical reports examine what were billed as “deficits” in knowledge and in freedom. This one tackles what the original report framed as the third major obstacle to the flourishing of the Arab world: the deficit in gender equality.

This is how Ismaʿil bin ʿAbd al-Qadir, a Mahdist chronicler of late 19th-century Sudan, gave a broad Islamic significance to the defeat of Ethiopian armies by Mahdist forces at al-Qallabat in March 1889. Culminating in the death of Emperor Yohannes IV, the four-year confrontation between Mahdist Sudan and Christian Ethiopia (1885–89) had repercussions that transcended the local setting, reaching far into the intertwined history of Sudan, Ethiopia, and European imperialism in the Nile Valley and Red Sea regions.

This quote from a character in the 1974 novel Al-Karnak (Karnak Café) by Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) sums up the reaction of millions of people in Egypt and the Arab world to the June 1967 Arab–Israeli war. Why did this war shatter their worldviews? A military defeat may occur for purely military reasons, in this case the better preparation of Israeli troops. Why should it cast doubt on a whole way of life? The answer to this question lies in the social and cognitive structure of nationalism, which I examine in a moment of crisis, after the 1967 war, when it became necessary for nationalist intellectuals to debate issues that had previously been taken for granted. Al-Karnak, which was made into a highly profitable and controversial film, provides a good starting point for studying these debates. However, it is important to understand them as products of the nationalist project of which Mahfouz was a part. I first analyze the history of that project, explaining its raison d'être and its success by the 1960s.