Revolutions are by nature unpredictable and unsettling. That the wave of revolutions in North Africa and the Arab Middle East began so unexpectedly and spread with such speed, leading to the fall of the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, has added to the concern regarding the “new order” that is to come after the initial euphoria. From the outset, the fear has been that these revolutions will follow the same trajectory as Iran did in 1979—in other words, that they will marginalize those who launched the revolutions and provide the grounds for the rise to power of the most savvy, purposeful, and best organized of the opposition groups, namely, the Islamists. Yet when one considers the recent uprisings in the Arab world through the prism of Iran's experiences in 1979, the parallels are not so evident. Mindful of the variations and distinctions between each of the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, it would appear that in broad terms, and beyond superficial similarities, there is little in common between the events of Iran in 1979 and what has happened in the past year in the Arab world.

In the present climate of political and social change in North Africa, studying music offers exciting new possibilities for enhancing our understanding of the region. Scholars in ethnomusicology and related disciplines are conducting archival and ethnographic research on music, often integrating sound and video recordings, transcriptions, and musical and textual analysis into their studies. Their work highlights how music not only reflects cultural change but also predicts and creates it.

A central question of economic history since the 19th century has been why capitalist development (often identified with modern transformation) took place in western Europe and not in other parts of the world, notably, in China and Islamic lands, which experienced commercial expansion and the beginnings of industrial development. Diverging patterns of institutional change in the West and elsewhere, representing divergent responses to changing conditions of trade and production, have attracted historians’ attention especially at moments of dramatic institutional shifts such as those of the 19th century. These moments coincided with the establishment of the hegemony of one region over others. With respect to the Ottoman Empire, Islam and its institutional deficiencies—most notably, of its law—have been invoked as explanations for the region's inability to achieve modern economic development. Scholars have portrayed a pragmatist state culture as responsible for the empire's longevity, while the same scholars also held that culture responsible for impeding liberal market development by allowing intensive state intervention in the economy.

There is a stock argument on whether Iraq is an “artificial” creation of colonial power or a “real” entity with historical and psychological depth and identity. It is a futile question because all nation–states, in one form or another, are historical creations. The processes of their creation are diverse and lead to different outcomes in the degree of coherence and permanence. Our thinking on the subject has been highly influenced by the seminal concepts advanced by Benedict Anderson on the “imagining” of the nation, which is, in turn, underlined by the socioeconomic processes of modernity. The state, often superimposed from above, is a principal actor in this process. Educational systems, tied to qualifications and employment, for instance, are powerful means of enforcing a unified national language and, in turn, the medium of literacy, the press and media, and the means of imagining the nation. The state makes the nation, more or less successfully. The intelligentsia are the cadres of these processes. They and the state class, with which they overlap, are subject to the vagaries of political conflicts and struggles and, in the case of Middle Eastern states, to the repression and violence of the state and militant sectors of the population. In the case of Iraq these troublesome manifestations are particularly evident. The books under review are concerned with these processes and in particular with the role of the ideological cadres and institutions in their unfolding.

Because the methodology of historical research gives primary importance to the study of the context in which events occur, it is often seen as antithetical to theory. Theory implies an abstraction from the details of historical reality—it is constructed on the basis of stylized facts—and seems therefore incompatible with the historian's approach. The latter purports to interpret the raw facts in all their richness and complexity. Interpretation is needed not only because all the facts are not known with certainty but also because the manner in which their effects interact is often open to debate. In the eyes of most historians, however, the ambition to interpret the raw facts in all their richness and complexity excludes any recourse to the artifact of a model, on the grounds that it is always a simplified version of reality that adds an unnecessary second-order elaboration of the facts.

Revolutions are chaotic affairs. In February 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers declared victory, Iran's future seemed uncertain. After a long night of hostility and bloodshed, an eerie silence fell on Tehran, and in some corners fear supplanted exhilaration. Those of us who witnessed these historic events did not fully fathom what Islamic politics augured. Within weeks, on the occasion of International Women's Day, it became clear that women had become targets of the regime's cultural indoctrination. Other matters remained murky for months and would play out gradually in the first decade after the revolution.

Music, as sound, physically and figuratively transcends previously erected or conceptualized boundaries. Artists and listeners each have the ability to aurally extend their values into new spaces, where others hear them. Passions and ideas gain traction through a constant aural negotiation that exists within the music that individuals use to soundtrack their public and private lives. As argued by the contributors to this roundtable, music both resides within the larger societal and cultural constellations that surround it and helps to shape those dynamics in active ways. Music, as a loosely defined social practice, plays an important role in self-identification. Musical aesthetics provide an avenue through which listeners and performers place themselves within specific social groups. Al-āla and Andalusian genres typically associated with North African elite classes constitute one prominent example that is threaded throughout this roundtable. These social groups are rarely exclusive, however, and musical aesthetics provide a significant set of data through which scholars might read (or, perhaps better put, listen to) the dynamic nature of social institutions and the cultural formations that mold them.

Music is not only an art form defined by certain formal elements, such as rhythmic and melodic modes. It is also a cultural form that implies significant social interaction. Music naturally evokes deeply felt emotions and can touch upon important social identities, because it helps people to experience feelings and express insights into their own lives. Moreover, the fact that it is performed situates any given musical genre within a specific set of sociocultural frames. Unpacking the social, economic, and political contexts surrounding musical genres can deepen our understanding of larger processes at work. An obvious North African example is Rai music, whose explosion in popularity in the 1980s underscored very important social and economic transformations taking place in Algeria and among migrant Algerian communities in France.

In the midst of several research trips to Iran in the 1990s, I spent one year living and conducting exploratory research in Cairo. In Tehran, revolution seemed unfinished if not perpetual, yet in Egypt it was unimaginable. In spite of the entrenched support for the Leader and the political status quo, at this time Iran's reformist movement was robust. The policies of the Islamic Republic and consequences of the eight-year war with Iraq unleashed new social conditions that combined with established forces to push for women's rights, freedom of speech, independent civil associations, and exposing contradictions in the postrevolutionary order.

Over the past half century, the scholarly literature on Middle Eastern economic history has grown substantially. By mining the surviving records of states and towns, scholars steeped in the region's languages have produced detailed studies of waqfs, guilds, taxation, government expenditures, monetary trends, production, land use, charity, and court systems, among many other topics. In carrying out their work, Middle Eastern historians can now draw on abundant publications that describe economic life in particular places and periods.

Economic history is an underdeveloped discipline in Middle Eastern historiography. Within our field, economic history articles are not published often, and books on economic history are rare. It is true that certain topics have been better explored than others, as Maya Shatzmiller's contribution to this roundtable on medieval economic history shows. Previous scholarship on Ottoman economic history has focused on land tenure, fiscal practices and institutions, artisanal production and organization (almost exclusively in urban areas), economic and charitable functions of awqāf, and, especially for the 19th century, questions relevant to Ottoman incorporation into the capitalist world system. There also exist studies on urban and rural markets, regional and long-distance trade networks, and economic activities of specific individuals (primarily government officials and provincial notables), although these tend to be descriptive. But there are very limited numbers of studies on standards of living; levels, accumulation, and distribution of wealth; productivity in agricultural production and manufacture; demography (especially for the 17th and 18th centuries); credit relations and financial institutions; and economic development. As in the literature on medieval Islamic contexts, sophisticated quantitative research is particularly rare, which makes empirically based comparisons among different parts of the region and with other parts of the world very difficult.

The 1987 publication of Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspectives, the first anthology on the topic of women and music in the field of ethnomusicology, marked a critical turn in the scholarship. The ethnographic-focused essays on women's genres and roles in music in diverse societies around the world, including the Middle East, presented new analytical frameworks and research on authority, gender and access, and notions of power and performance. Today, research on the musical practices of women continues to expand in ethnomusicology and in fields such as anthropology. Many scholars now acknowledge the centrality of gender for locating “how society is in music and music is in society.” This is a particularly important approach for the Middle East and North Africa, where the undervaluing or silencing of women's musical practices and abilities had continued to dominate ethnomusicology. An important study to break from the paradigm was Virginia Danielson's 1997 monograph on Umm Kulthum. Danielson analyzes the development and the construction of a musical and a social “voice,” looking at what it means for this particular artist to both be the voice of and have a voice in colonial and postcolonial Egypt. In the discussion that follows I outline the academic trajectory of writings on women and music in Morocco, which I have divided into three distinct historical moments, each exemplifying different approaches to the subject matter: work by 20th-century French colonial scholars, by contemporary European and American scholars, and by contemporary Moroccan scholars.

Which Iranian uprising does the Arab Spring bring to mind? The Green Movement of 2009, which challenged the pillars of the Islamic Republic of Iran, or the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which brought the Islamic Republic to power?

During the last decade, the postcolonial approach has become influential in the humanities and the social sciences. Tracing its own historical origin to interaction with Western European modernity, it focuses on contemporary power inequality, which it intends to eliminate by demonstrating the connection between power and knowledge. Hence, this approach not only puts the present in conversation with the past but also poses power inequality as the analytical lens through which to approach states and societies. In the last decades, a number of scholars working on the Middle East have adopted the postcolonial approach. In this review essay, I initially discuss its application in the study of the region and then contextualize eight recent works within that framework.

The proliferation of technologies in use for popular music in Morocco points to cultural interactions beyond the most local or national influences that inform musical practices there. Examining the integration of technologies from outside Morocco—including musical instruments, recording media, and distribution systems—sheds light on negotiations of novelty and difference in contemporary Moroccan social and political life and thus on multiple facets of how late modernity has played out there. Among other broad areas of significance that musical practices help illuminate are the social and economic effects of colonial and postcolonial interactions, including the development of cash economies, globalized exchange, and cultural tourism; nationalist initiatives to define culture; and large-scale migration to Europe and elsewhere in recent decades, following a longer population shift in 20th-century Morocco from primarily rural locales to burgeoning urban centers.