In his review of my book, Andrew Shryock asserts, “The interpretive key to Colonial Effects is located in its first paragraph,” in the preface, where I state that I am a “Palestinian Jordanian.” Indeed, this discovery—namely, that my national identity is the determining factor of my scholarship—is the interpretive key to Shryock's own grossly misrepresentative review. All his subsequent observations follow neatly in its footsteps.

In noting that Joseph Massad's identity as a Palestinian Jordanian should be central to any critical evaluation of Colonial Effects, I am taking seriously his claim that writing the book entailed, for him, a gradual “coming to terms” with this identity. I am also reapplying Massad's own interpretive method. “Throughout the book,” he tells us, “you will notice that I identify the geographic origins and the religious and ethnic backgrounds of people. This is done deliberately” (p. 16). Why? Because such specificity is needed to “interrogate” the claims people make about “Jordanian national identity and Jordanian national culture” (p. 16). I find it bizarre that Massad would cry “foul” when I conclude that his own (self-announced) “subject position” influenced his thinking on these topics.

The social–policy environment reflects the nature of state society relations and the content of citizenship in any given country. The present article situates analysis of the Turkish modernization experience in a historical overview of perspectives on poverty and social policy during the republican period. In surprising contrast to the emphasis placed on etatism as the defining feature of state society relations in Turkey, this overview shows that the responsibility for social assistance assigned to and assumed by the political authority has remained very limited throughout the period under study. Until the 1980s, when the country adopted an outward–looking, market–oriented development strategy, several mechanisms that were hardly compatible with the logic of either state redistribution or market exchange substituted for formal social–assistance measures. Today social–policy approaches are in a position to deal with pressures generated by market forces. The social–policy outlook of the current ruling party, which comes from an Islamic political tradition, at times appears to be more in conformity with basic trends observed through capitalist modernization in Europe than with those of both Kemalist authoritarianism and the multiparty period preceding the transition to an open–market economy.

This article examines the origin and legacy of the rebel group that stormed the great Mecca mosque in November 1979. Extensive fieldwork and new primary sources show that the rebels represented a radicalized faction of a large pietistic organization established in Medina in the mid–1960s under the name al–Jama a al–Salafiyya al–Muhtasiba (JSM). The rebel faction had broken with the mother organization in 1977 and developed into an apocalyptic sect under the leadership of Juhayman al–Utaybi, who spent two years as a fugitive in the desert before the attack. Although the rebellion was crushed, the early 1990s witnessed a resurgence of Juhayman's ideas in Saudi Arabia. The article argues that the JSM, the Mecca rebels, and their heirs represent a widely ignored undercurrent of Saudi Islamism. Pietistic and isolationist, this so–called rejectionist Islamism is intellectually and sociologically distinct from the two other strains of Saudi Islamism, namely, reformism and jihadism.

Scholars interested in the variation of Third Wave democratization have utilized cross–regional frameworks in which a single outcome characterizes the Arab world: no democratization. A number of social scientists working on Arab cases have shifted the investigation away from why democratization failed to how authoritarianism endured and changed over the past two decades. This article joins these efforts by examining the importance of professional associations, which refers to professional representatives and private economic groups, and their relations with regimes and states. The paper examines how three nondemocratic Arab regimes in Jordan, Syria, and Kuwait weathered economic and political crises in the 1980s and 1990s through contested or coordinated relations with professional associations. Outcomes are explained by focusing on (1) the respective social bases of regimes and associations influencing state intervention in associational life and (2) how state intervention shaped the capacity of associations either to contest state policy or to coordinate toward implementation.