Current debates about the status of middle east studies are informed by an assumption that separates ‘area studies’ from ‘global studies,’ and ‘area specialization’ from disciplinary or theoretical orientation. Arguing against such separation, I propose that a resort to comparative perspectives may help bridge the divide. To this end, I discuss imperatives and modalities of thinking comparatively in the context of the Middle East, and their implications for bringing other areas into comparative inquiries. Focusing on illustrations from Middle East social studies, I attempt to think through my own, albeit limited, experience of comparative research within the Middle East region.

Women's contribution to the building of the british empire has become by now undeniable. Standing at different vantagepoints, English women articulated, supported, and even innovated the colonial discourse. Though highly masculine in its ideological core, the Empire is far from being exclusively male in its rhetorical voice. Feminist postcolonial critics have shown British women's important participation in colonialism. McClintock, for example, claims that “white women were not the hapless onlookers of empire but were ambiguously complicit both as colonizers, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting” (6).

The cultural, physical, and socio-economic displacement of traditional Gulf societies has been strikingly portrayed by Abdelrahman Munif in his fictional account of the diaspora of a poor oasis community after the discovery of oil. Munif's oil city, seen through the eyes of this community, is a daunting and transient place of contrast and dual personality, a city whose historical memory has been swept away by the evils of modern technology and by neo-colonial forms of economic exploitation. Cities of Salt recounts the hidden tale of Gulf cities, a tale which, this article will argue, is too often neglected in urban studies on the region.

In the discussion that follows, I propose to inquire into some of the assumptions that may underlie the disciplinary paradigm of Middle Eastern, and particularly Iranian, studies, making this an interpretive essay on a neglected aspect of the field, rather than a research article as such. Nevertheless, I harbor hopes of stimulating discussion and bringing something of a fresh perspective to bear on a subject which, it is generally acknowledged, lies at the very edge of the Persianate tradition of religious innovation, and consequently at the margins of the academic efforts to understand and explain it: the life and legacy of the Iranian prophet-founder of the Bahā'í faith, Mirza Huseyn Ali “Bahā'u'llāh” (1817-92). The questions I will pose are in essence three: why is the religious innovation wrought by Bahā'u'llāh considered marginal by the majority of scholars of the Islamicate world? What does this attitude tell us about the conceptual boundaries within which these same scholars labor? And do these boundaries reflect the limits imposed by the evidence itself or do they reflect the limitations of the contemporary disciplinary paradigm?