This issue of IJMES opens with a special section on the Arab uprisings of 2011. For the first feature of the section, titled “Reflections: Middle East Studies at the Barricades,” we asked scholars from different disciplines to provide brief reflections on how the events might or should change scholarship on the region, or the questions that scholars ask. The contributors responded with a range of suggestions for future scholarship and a variety of critiques of past scholarship. We will not attempt to summarize these critiques here. Instead, we would like to play devil's (or scholar's) advocate, by pointing to a few ways in which past scholarship on the Middle East has produced insights for understanding the unfolding events.

We did not see them growing up. We did not think these jaded middle-class boys and girls would one day be resilient and hold their ground. We did not realize that they would be brave, supremely articulate, and driven by aspirations beyond our dreams. The whole thing started with the desperate act of self-immolation by a young Tunisian man. His death sparked a wave of rage against poverty, social exclusion, and corruption. Almost overnight, young men and women created spaces in squares, streets, and alleys where we could imagine new Arab countries. Enraged yet nonviolent, they used technology and the vocabulary of democracy to connect and mobilize ordinary Arab citizens of all walks of life and capture the attention of the world. In Egypt, Tahrir Square became the epicenter of the people's demands for bread, dignity, and social justice. Without leaders or a timetable, but with unconditional demands for immediate change, online activists provided us with physical and social grounds to imagine a new country. We all brought something to the square: blood, medicines, bandages, food, water, blankets, generators, diapers, mobile-phone chargers, garbage bags, wipes, and our own personal notes to the regime (and the world) written in bold letters. Mine just said: “Leave.”

Peaceful protests and demonstrations have swept through the Arab world, toppling rulers and advancing programs of radical change. Some enthusiasts for these movements have already proclaimed them a revolution. They predict a new Middle Eastern political and economic order. A new generation of young people—men and women, mainly in their twenties and thirties, using their skills in cyberspace communication and fueled by many frustrations—assembled vast numbers in peaceful protests that have thus far claimed many triumphs. They forced the departures of the long-standing dictators of Egypt and Tunisia and have demanded that the monarchs of Jordan, Morocco, and Bahrain reign rather than rule.

The recent revolutions and uprisings in the Middle East represent a rare historic opening for scholars, offering us nothing short of the opportunity to rethink the possibilities of history and our conceptions of “the political” itself. In so doing, we might be more open to the ways in which the empirical continually challenges us to rethink our conceptual models. Thus, while some immediately sought to categorize and co-opt the revolutions for their own purposes (Žižek's impassioned, albeit simplistic, “freedom is universal”), others listened closely to the voices on the ground in Tahrir and elsewhere. Now, if ever, is the time to critically reevaluate some of our theoretical models, our tenacious binaries (chiefly among them secularism versus Islamism) and our catch-all monolithic frameworks, such as “the military dictatorship,” “authoritarianism,” and even “neoliberalism.”

The three-week uprising in Egypt that ended with the removal of Husni Mubarak on February 11 happened to coincide with the section of my spring course syllabus on the Egyptian novel from Najib Mahfuz to Ahmed Alaidy. As was the case for many of my colleagues and their students, the rapid and awe-inspiring events unfolding daily before us pushed purely academic concerns to the margins of class discussion. This tidal wave of revolutionary politics erupting into the classroom forced me to the realization that my larger syllabus was not simply some neutral or systematic survey of half a century's worth of Arabic literature. I began to think about the largely invisible dystopic intellectual and historical paradigms through which modern Arabic literature is often framed, at least in the United States. The nahḍa/naksa narrative, which compelled many of us to read Arab cultural history of the 20th century as a story of brief “awakening” followed by irredeemable decline and corruption, is clearly no longer tenable in the wake of February 11. This same narrative underpinned the highly self-conscious postmodernism that began to emerge in Egypt in the 1990s and that reached its apogee a couple of decades later at the end of the 2000s, a postmodernism that was celebrated (though by no means universally) as the true beginning of literary modernity and the emancipation of the subject from the dead weight of a past ideological age.

The speed, spread, and democratic thrust of Arab revolutionary uprisings conjure up the revolutionary waves of 1848 and 1989 in Europe. Spearheaded by educated youth, the Arab uprisings have been brought to fruition by the masses of ordinary people (men, women, Muslims, and non-Muslims) who have mobilized at an astonishing scale against authoritarian regimes in pursuit of social justice, democratic governance, and dignity. If this broad observation is valid, then these social earthquakes are likely to unsettle some of the most enduring perspectives on the region. To begin with, they should undermine “Middle East exceptionalism,” with its culturalist focus informed by assumptions of “stagnant culture,” “fatalist Muslims,” and “unchangeable polity.” In political science, students of “regime stability” and the “authoritarian resiliency” of Arab states may have to reevaluate their conceptual premises. The analytical relevance of the concept of “rentier state” as the political basis of authoritarian stability might likewise need serious reformulation. The blatant cash handouts by some Arab Gulf states to “buy opposition” during the wave of protests in February and March 2011 do not seem to have worked.

The year 2011 will forever be known as the year of mass protests for regime change and democratization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Opinions on causes and outcomes have focused on the role of young people, the demands of “the Arab street,” and the possible transition to a liberal, Islamist, or coalition type of governance. Middle East specialists have long been aware of the problems of authoritarian regimes, widening inequalities, high rates of youth unemployment, deteriorating infrastructure and public services, and rising prices attenuated only by subsidies. But something has been missing from recent discussions and analyses. Let us pose it in the form of a number of (socialist-feminist) questions. We have seen that “the Arab street” is not exclusively masculine, but what kind of democratic governance can women's rights groups expect? To what extent will Tunisian women shape the democratic transition and the building of new institutions? In Egypt, will an outcome be—to use a phrase coined by East European feminists in the early 1990s—a “male democracy”? How can a democratic transition benefit working women and the poor?

Scholars of the Middle East based in social science disciplines—especially my own, political science—are likely to feel a bit more welcome by their colleagues as a result of recent events in the Middle East. Not only will we be informative conversationalists in the hallways for a while because of our regional expertise, but also, far more profoundly, the sorts of things that political scientists study, from voting patterns to regime change, are suddenly interesting subjects in the region. This is not to say that Middle East elections were not studied in the past or that research on political change was not undertaken—far from it. But the questions posed, the terms used, and tools employed were often different from those more prevalent in the discipline. Political scientists focusing on the Middle East are therefore likely to find this a gratifying time, ripe with opportunities for comparative and cross-regional analysis. And those nonregional specialists whose interests lie in a wide variety of topics from voting behavior to revolutions may work harder to incorporate Middle Eastern cases into their own work.

Watching the uprisings unfold in the Middle East, as well as the opposition to them, leads me to appreciate the insights of social movement theory, which suggests that heterogeneous forces can unite in coalitions around super targets when political opportunities suddenly and serendipitously emerge. In this historic moment of change and resistance, will we see the unfolding institutional transformation of the state as it responds to a more participatory ethos, or will former regime stalwarts reconstitute themselves? Elected officials and new governance strategies will still confront serious distributional and economic challenges as states remain enmeshed in neoliberal policies. Political scientists are already studying constitutional change and debates about electoral design, party construction, and other institutional changes to democratize the polity, but we should also look to different transition models that seek to redress deep structural inequalities following decades of repression and rent seeking. Should principles of political or economic affirmative action be incorporated into new institutional designs of transitology?

Religious actors and religious language are not absent from the Arab revolutions, but a striking feature of these movements is that they depart from Islamist identity politics, which tended to portray the problems of the Arab world as the result of Muslims’ betrayal of their religious identity. Slogans referencing Islam are remarkably few, even in contexts like Egypt where Islamist movements are an important organized political force. Similar to many Islamist activists, the youth who initiated these movements are exasperated by growing economic inequalities. Unlike the former, however, they do not feel the need to frame this issue in religious terms, but rather mobilize universal notions such as democracy, freedom, justice, and equality. This is the case even in societies with sharp religious divides such as Bahrain, where the overwhelmingly Shiʿi demonstrators oppose a Sunni-dominated regime. Regardless of whether the uprisings will succeed in achieving a genuine regime change, new political movements are likely to emerge that focus on political freedom and the reduction of social inequalities rather than projects maintaining Islam as a solution. The question remains whether this trend simply went unnoticed by the majority of the scholarly community working on the Middle East or whether it is something that emerged in the dynamics of the uprisings themselves. Either way, the phenomenon must now be analyzed. Does it mean a decline of the Islamist ideology? Will it permit an empowerment of existing liberal political movements? Of trade unionism? What does it reveal about the integration of the Middle East within global political trends?

The uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) were primarily centered on profound economic grievances, which protestors addressed directly to state institutions, thereby making the grievances political. As a political scientist, I ask: under what conditions does economic protest transform into political demands? How and why did this happen in the MENA region, and why now? A deep exploration of authoritarian state institutions will be necessary to understand how a young generation that graduated from public educational institutions was unable to find economic opportunities and eventually lost all trust in an inefficient and corrupt state. Workers’ protests and resistance movements had started to organize in the decade before the uprisings and need to be studied as well.

Two key variables appear to have influenced the varying responses of national armies to the “Arab Spring.” The first is the manner and degree of the institutionalization of the military into authoritarian systems, and even into the few democratic or partially democratic polities, in the Middle East. No 1960s-vintage military regimes remain in the region: the various direct and indirect consequences of the oil price revolutions of the 1970s—including massive urbanization and a huge expansion of state bureaucracies and of the diversity and complexity of national economies—have seen to that. In the process, however, boundaries have blurred between the military, on the one side, and political elites, the economy, and social actors on the other. The second variable—which is partly a function of the first—is that many armies have had both inclusionary and exclusionary impacts at the same time, serving to co-opt, control, or intimidate various social sectors according to whether the latter are perceived as friendly or hostile within “threat profiles” held by state leaders, security officials, and, occasionally, wide swathes of society. The tension between inclusion and exclusion has been replicated in the social-welfare role of military employment, through which governments have shielded core constituencies from the worst impacts of deepening economic liberalization and privatization while growing numbers of their compatriots have experienced widening income disparities, declining living standards, and a descent to or below the poverty line. These trends are brought together most powerfully in the ground forces. They are not only the largest component by far of most militaries and the most affected by pressures on living standards and pensions but also the only ones that can be deployed effectively in the streets as a last resort to confront protesters. Whether armies support peaceful transition, revert to repression, or fragment will be key to their ability to maintain or develop professional, corporate identities. This ability will also be highly contingent on their readiness to accept readjustment of their institutionalization into state systems and on the manner and pace in which this is pursued by other actors. The outcome is not assured.

In the 2011 wave of popular uprisings shaking authoritarian rule in the Middle East, mass societal mobilizations have been the crucial factor. But institutional actors, especially armies, are also playing an active role. Armies in the region have generally had less and less involvement in formal interstate wars and consequently have played more of a role, willingly or not, in underpinning regimes. Recent events demonstrate two patterns: armies that have refused to play this role (Egypt, Tunisia) and armies that have been willing, at least for some time, to answer the regimes’ requests to engage in repression (Bahrain, Yemen, Syria) or even civil war (Libya). How can we account for the military's growing role in civil strife or civil peace?

The Arab world has experienced a large number of military presidencies since General Bakr Sidki's brief rule in Iraq in 1936. The phenomenon became of great significance beginning with Colonel Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir's presidency in Egypt in the early 1950s, which established a model for similar regimes in Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and, at least initially, Libya under the self-promoted Colonel Muʿammar al-Qadhafi. The president who exchanged his uniform for a suit; an authoritarian style of political management in the name of a revolution against an old, foreign-dominated order; and the legitimacy obtained from laudable achievements in the international and economic sphere: these were all part of al-Nasir's influence and legacy.

Middle East militaries can be arrayed along a continuum from more to less involvement in national economies, albeit with a few outliers. At the maximum engagement end are Egypt and Iran. In both countries, as in Pakistan, one can reasonably refer to the existence of a “Military, Inc.” The Egyptian Ministry of Defense and its subordinate Ministry of Military Production preside over a sprawling economic empire that directly owns companies active in the industrial, agricultural, construction, telecommunications, and service sectors. The Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps presides over a similar economic empire that has particularly strong positions in the oil field service, construction, port operation, and media and telecommunications sectors. Both countries also have what might be described as parallel “officer economies.” These have come into existence as a result of officers, many of them retired, capitalizing on their regime connections by gaining ownership of privatized state-owned enterprises or by forming companies that thrive on state contracts. These two military economies are subject neither to the effective oversight of legislative or nonmilitary executive authority nor to the scrutiny of civil society, including the media. Both provide essential patronage resources to ensure the loyalty of their officer corps. And in both countries, military preparedness and overall capacities suffer as a result of preoccupation with the management of and benefits from military economies.

Oil and dynastic rule have led to an idiosyncratic pattern of state formation in the Gulf, and in few parts of the state are the idiosyncrasies more pronounced than in the security sector. Oil income has allowed the ruling families of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to engineer a relatively soft, rent- and patronage-based authoritarianism characterized by multiple centers of power and huge institutional redundancies. Having constructed their police and military forces along these lines, their monarchical rule has become more resilient, but their armed forces also more hapless.

The readiness of army commanders in Egypt and Tunisia to counter the internal security agencies deployed by their own governments against civilian protestors in early 2011 proved decisive in bringing down presidents-for-life Husni Mubarak and Zayn al-ʿAbidin bin ʿAli. This brings into sharp relief questions about how to approach and assess the various coercive agencies of the state. Should we regard them as different branches of a single coercive apparatus, through which the state seeks to exercise a monopoly on the legitimate means of violence? Or should we see them as manifestations of more fragmented political institutions and social forces and consequently as performing distinct, and potentially divergent, functions in constantly evolving relation to each other?

Research on Middle East militaries is imbalanced. In recent decades, scholarly interest in Israel and Turkey has expanded, while the Arab states have more often than not been overlooked. In this essay, I suggest how to address the “gap” in the study of Arab militaries by drawing parallels with militaries in non-Arab states, which have received considerable attention.

This article concerns the dominant institution of religious authority within modern Usuli Twelver Shiʿi Islam: the marjaʿiyya. The most senior clerics serve as “sources of emulation” (marājiʿ al-taqlīd), informing the moral conduct of their lay “imitators” (muqallidūn). Despite the importance of this relationship, academic writing on what we call its “affective” qualities, especially from lay perspectives, is limited. We provide ethnographic data from anthropological research into Islamic medical ethics in Lebanon. Interviews in 2003 with infertile Shiʿi patients who were considering controversial assisted reproductive technologies revealed rare insights into which authorities they followed and in what numbers and how this relationship was experienced and drawn upon by those in need. We compare the very different relationships inspired by the two authorities most cited in our study: the late Beirut-based Ayatollah Fadlallah; and the Iranian Ayatollah Khaminaʾi, Hizbullah's patron. From his local base, Fadlallah offered a vivid and responsive persona of a qualitatively distinct type.

Recently, there have been many compelling new theories of the emergence of an “Islamic public sphere.” Few studies, however, have examined the role of literary writing in contributing to its emergence, even though such writing was critical to the intellectual elite's shift toward Islamic subjects in mid-20th century Egypt. In addition, little of this scholarship has examined the gendered nature of this public sphere in any depth, though gendered rights, roles, and responsibilities were among the most hotly contested debates in public discourses on religion. This article looks at how literary writing not only shaped particular interpretations of gendered relationships in Islam but also developed hermeneutical techniques for reinterpreting religious sources. It specifically examines the work of Egyptian literary scholar and Islamic thinker Bint al-Shatiʾ and how her writings helped define the nature of the family, gender relations, and the private sphere in Islamic public discourse.