In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process—the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD)—involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. Following an overview of the process and the key insights that emerged, we present summaries of the QTD Working Groups’ final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports—the full versions of which can be found in the Supplementary Materials—offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate—as understood by relevant research communities—to the forms of inquiry being assessed. We dedicate this Reflection to the memory of our coauthor and QTD working group leader Kendra Koivu.1

Analyses of the spread of the Arab uprisings have been dominated by three comparative angles. Single-country studies have emerged as the most common framework, often put to use in a second comparative approach of examining variation across cases. For example, studies explore which states have had major uprisings and which have not, which uprisings were peaceful and which were violent, and so on (Amar and Prashad 2013; Haddad, Bsheer, and Abu-Rish 2012; McMurray and Ufheil-Somers 2013; Sowers and Toensing 2013). A third approach explores comparisons with other waves of popular mobilization against authoritarian regimes, for example, in Europe during the mid-nineteenth century, Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, and so on (Patel, Bunce, and Wolchik 2013 Weyland 2012). These literatures investigate the complex processes of mobilization, revolution, and transition unfolding in parts of the Middle East since the outbreak of the uprisings in late 2010. From the literature on revolutions, for example, we know that a popularly based movement that brings about some change in political leadership does not necessarily lead to a regime change resulting in a fundamental overturning of an economic, political, or social system. From past cases we have learned that at least some old institutions and alliances almost always reemerge, and what form the new institution will take eventually is often unknown for several years—for example, think of the Iranian revolution, let alone the French revolution. As events in postrevolutionary Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen continue to unfold—and it is questionable whether those revolutions are even over—and as the bloody civil war in Syria continues, these insights provide us with useful tools for examining how institutions, processes, and power relations are changing—and how they are not.

The Middle East has been treated as exceptional in much of the scholarly literature. It was entirely absent from comparative studies of political transitions until the late 1990s, and even in the early 2000s some of the literature on resilient authoritarianism reproduced a narrative of a region seemingly immune to normal (that is, happening elsewhere) forces of political change. Following this trend, the politics and history of the region are routinely taught in region-specific courses, but they are far less frequently integrated into thematic courses except when the teacher is an area specialist. Unfortunately, the absence of Middle East cases from many broader courses reinforces popular conceptions of regional exceptionalism and deprives possibilities for comparative theorizing. Even worse, our years of teaching undergraduates have taught us that images of harems, pyramids, and desert warriors wielding sabers on camelback still shape many Americans' perceptions of the region. Obviously our classrooms challenge these images, but demand for specialized courses consistently exceeds capacity at a time when sensational images from the region saturate the news media. For those students who do not take or cannot gain a seat in those courses, images of harems, camels, and violence are likely to endure. Worse, the analytical implications of one-dimensional portrayals in political science have been grave, notably when the preoccupation with “culture” as a singular explanatory variable prejudices against exploring other influences on political practices and institutions.

Recent years have seen a surge of studies that examine the inclusion-moderation hypothesis with reference to political Islam: the idea that political groups and individuals may become more moderate as a result of their inclusion in pluralist political processes. Most of these interventions adopt one of three foci: (1) the behavioral moderation of groups; (2) the ideological moderation of groups; and (3) the ideological moderation of individuals. After a discussion of various definitions of moderate and radical, the concept of moderation, and the centrality of moderation to studies of democratization, the author examines the scholarship on political Islam that falls within each approach. She then examines several studies that raise questions about sequencing: how mechanisms linking inclusion and moderation are posited and how other approaches might better explain Islamist moderation. Finally, she offers a critical analysis of the behavior-ideology binary that animates many of these models and suggests some fruitful paths for future research.

Over the past two decades, scholars of the Middle East have produced an impressive body of scholarship that seeks to understand diverse groups and practices that are together called political Islam. Much of our work has drawn little attention outside of academia despite the obsession with Islam shared by policymakers and the general public. The many careful studies produced by academics and some journalists—typically based on extensive field research and use of primary sources in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian—have to contend with bestselling books that trade in fears about the irrational, West-hating Muslim fanatic. Unfortunately, serious scholarship on political Islam cannot ignore this terrain of stereotypes and fearmongering, as it dominates mainstream debates about Islam and the Middle East. But in responding to these discourses, we often allow them to dictate our analytic starting point, resulting in less theoretical innovation and empirical insight than might emerge if we moved beyond the focus on Islamist groups and whether most are moderate or radical. Indeed, we might do well to abandon altogether the idea that “political Islam” represents a tangible object of study.

Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq. By Eric Davis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 385p. $60.00 cloth, $27.50 paper.

What is the relationship between state power and historical memory? Eric Davis argues that the focus on overt state repression that has dominated studies of Iraq overlooks the state's use of historical memory as a mechanism of control. Employing a Gramscian model, he examines how successive Iraqi regimes have sought to use historical memory to claim legitimacy and authenticity and thus undermine political challengers. Yet these state-initiated projects remain incomplete, and Davis concludes that the political and social instability of Iraq is in large part due to “the inability of Iraqis to construct a viable model for political community” through a shared vision of historical memory (p. 2). His two main themes—the efforts of successive regimes to put historical memories to political use and the diverse ways in which the intelligentsia support or challenge these projects—are documented in impressive detail. After an introductory theoretical chapter, the argument unfolds largely in chronological fashion, beginning with the formation of the Iraqi intelligentsia and competing visions of modern Iraqi historical memory. The majority of the book is then devoted to a systematic examination of these themes from the early twentieth century through fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Professor Deborah J. Gerner, known to colleagues and friends as “Misty,” died on June 19, 2006, at her home in Vinland, Kansas, after a long struggle with cancer.

Field research on politics in the Middle East poses far less problems for Western female researchers than many Westerners assume. The questions most commonly asked of me by colleagues include whether anyone will speak to an American woman (yes), and whether I need to wear a veil (no, but see below). Female researchers do face many challenges, but most have less to do with gender than with examining sensitive political issues in highly repressive environments. Of those that do concern gender, many vary by degree rather than type from the issues faced by female scholars conducting field research elsewhere. I draw heavily on my own overwhelmingly positive experiences with ethnographic research in Jordan and Yemen—totaling more than four years over the past decade, including nearly a year of research conducted post-September 11—and those of many friends in outlining the following issues facing Western female political scientists conducting field research in the Middle East.I would like to thank Laryssa Chomiak, Janine Astrid Clark, Sam Fayyaz, and Lisa Wedeen for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article.