As Islamist movements have gained strength across the Muslim world, their commitment to democratic means of achieving and exercising power has been repeatedly analyzed. The question of whether resort to violence to achieve its goals is inherent in the Islamist project (that what some Islamists understand as a divine mandate to implement shariעa ultimately sanctions the use of force against dissenters) or contingent (that the violent exclusion of Islamists from the political arena has driven them to arms, best expressed by François Burgat's contention that any Western political party could be turned into the Armed Islamic Group in weeks if it were subjected to the same repression Islamists had endured1) looms large in this debate. Where Islamist movements have not had the opportunity to participate in elections for political office, analysts willing to give these movements the benefit of the democratic doubt argue that their peaceful participation in the student body and syndicate elections that they have been allowed to contest proves their intention to respect the results of national-level elections.2 They also point to these groups' repeated public commitment to play by the rules of the electoral game.3 The fact that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan and members of the Islah Party in Yemen have successfully competed in not one but a series of parliamentary elections and evinced a tendency to wage their battles through parliament and the courts rather than by force suggests to many that the question of whether Islamists can ever be democrats has already been settled in the affirmative.

Focused on the contest over water management in Nazareth during the early years of Israeli statehood (1948–56), this article traces the negotiations that took place between Palestinian residents of Nazareth and Israeli state authorities. I argue that the struggle over this vital natural resource, in a region where it is in short supply was in some measure a matter of fulfilling practical needs, but it was also part of the process of negotiating citizenship. The story of Nazareth's water in the early Israeli period is thus a microcosm of the incorporation of Palestinians as undesired and marginalized citizens into a self-defined Jewish state. Challenging the Palestinian resistance/collaboration dichotomy and the notion of a monolithic Israeli state, I show how both Palestinian citizens and Israeli authorities adopted wide-ranging positions on water management and its broad political implications. Although Palestinian citizens were able to use the space made available through citizenship to further their collective interests, they were ultimately unable to overcome the exclusions inherent to a political system that maintained the dominance of a Jewish majority over a Palestinian minority.

Historians of the Middle East have used gender to explore a range of topics, from how crises around gendered practices have contributed to the construction of national identities to women's roles in nationalist movements. Whereas early gender histories focused on single nation-states, recent scholarship has turned to regional and transnational connections. Yet the international sphere, the domain of nation-states and nongovernmental organizations in relation to each other, has yet to be examined through the lens of gender. In this essay, I argue that doing so yields new insights into the relationship between the national and the international in the Middle East, and into the process of rights claiming in postcolonial nation-states. I make this argument through a discussion of the third session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW).

Little is more central to the study of the modern Middle East than religion. Amidst the differences between the Judaic and Islamic traditions, both are unified about the religious prohibition of swine as a source of food. This taboo is one of the more significant common markers of their ethnicity and religious code. Indeed, violations or poor adherence to the taboo can be considered as grave religious insults or cultural transgressions. In India, the meat of swine has been thrown on mosque steps and has provoked major intercommunal rioting. Even as one flies to the Middle East in modern, high-technology European airlines, the companies commonly inform all passengers that the meals contain no pork. In Spain, the ritual public slaughter of pigs, the matanza, has come to symbolize the resistance of Christians to the Muslim occupation. The matanza ritual has come to be a modern element in the formation of Spanish religious and cultural identity (Castaner 1988). Yet, the debate about the origins of this modern taboo is unresolved and still continues.

On 20 February 1957, a grim-faced Dwight D. Eisenhower told a national television audience that America would support United Nations sanctions unless Israel pulled out of Gaza and all other Egyptian territory seized during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Stunned by this diplomatic thunderbolt, the Israelis quickly agreed to withdraw their forces. Yet ten years later, when a preemptive war against the Arabs brought Israel not only Gaza but also Jordan's West Bank and Syria's Golan Heights, the United States acquiesced. For two decades, this reversal of U.S. policy has usually been regarded as the handiwork of one man—Lyndon B. Johnson. Observers as diverse as Edward Tivnan, Cheryl Rubenberg, and I. L. Kenen, for example, have contended that Washington's tilt toward Tel Aviv during the mid-1960s stemmed in large measure from deepening ties between the Johnson White House and what many have come to call “the Israel lobby.” Scholars such as Ethan Nadelmann and William Quandt, on the other hand, have downplayed Johnson's preoccupation with interest-group politics and emphasized instead his admiration for Israel's muscular doctrine of self-defense. Rare is the author who, like Donald Neff, has been able to capture the blend of domestic and diplomatic considerations that prompted Johnson to cement the special relationship with Israel. Rarer still is someone like Steven Spiegel, who has linked Johnson's pro-Israel policies to initiatives launched by his two predecessors in the Oval Office.

It is a well-known anachronism of historians to treat areas within the Ottoman Empire (Egypt, Syria) as if they had a meaningful existence of their own in the prenationalist period. There is no question that before the appearance of nationalism in the later part of the 19th century the major political community was Islam, whose actual political manifestation was the Ottoman state. It is assumed that as a consequence, no other form of collective identity could exist at the time. The received wisdom on this issue may be expressed by one study of Arab nationalism which claimed:“None of the [Arab] new states was commensurate with a political community. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Transjordan, Palestine—these names derived from geography or classical history.” Yet it is possible that the debate over these issues is not yet over. One is entitled, for example, to doubt whether we know enough in social psychology to determine that the human mind is so simple that it cannot accommodate multi-faceted phenomena such as double identity, both in terms of regional Egyptian nationalism, for example, and all-inclusive Arab identity. Dichotomization makes for sharper and more impressive arguments, but sometimes it can be pushed too far and thus rendered misleading. In line with this last consideration, the argument of this paper is that though the all-inclusive identity of Middle Eastern Muslims under the Ottomans was Islamic and Ottoman first, territorial identities existed beneath them and that these territorial communities are commensurate with the modern Middle Eastern states.

It is now a familiar theme in the literature on the emergence and development of the state in the Western world to refer to war and war preparation—in short, war making—as an important contributing factor to the development of the modern state. As Charles Tilly succinctly put it, “War made the state, and the state made war.” We know, however, little about the relation between war making and the development of the state in the contemporary Middle East. This is rather surprising considering the importance of war and war preparation in the history of many states in the region and the current wave of academic interest in the study of state formation in the Middle East. A review of the literature would show that war is usually integrated as a contingent factor, but not as a systematic process that can influence state development. For instance, accounts of state development in Egypt mention the impact ofthe 1956 and 1967 wars on the capacity of the state to intervene in the economy and society; yet until recently no one had systematically studied the impact of war preparation on state formation in Egypt.

In this paper we discussed socioeconomic inequality among ethnic communities in Iran. There were significant clues to the widening gap between Persian and non-Persian communities. That is, contrary to the existing theories, modernization and industrialization have not been accompanied with improvement in the distribution of the resources among ethnic communities; rather they have increased inequality. Thus, we looked into the particular nature of Iranian modernization for causes of interethnic inequality. Political centralization, domination of Persian language and culture, and centralization of early industrialization contributed much to the development of the interethnic inequality at early stage of the Iranian modernization. In the new area, the 1960s–1970s, the existing gap was further widened by centralized and urban-biased economic growth. This was possible only because of the government's unique access to the increasing oil revenues which were generated with very little help from the domestic means of production.

This article analyzes the exercise of state authority in Kurdish areas in the early Turkish Republic and discusses the state's ineffectiveness in dominating these areas. It argues that the mere existence of a highly ambitious social-engineering project, increased state presence in the region, and military power does not mean high levels of state capacity. Based on primary documents, this article discusses the problems of autonomy, coherence, and implementation that the Turkish state encountered in its nation-building project. It shows how the state's ideological rigidities and its shortage of resources and dedicated personnel undermined its capacity to control and shape the Kurdish areas. While the state attempted to regulate citizens’ private lives in Kurdish areas, the local society also tried to mold state employees in accordance with its own interests. A blurred boundary between the state and society was one of the unintended consequences of increased state presence in everyday life.

Using both Ottoman Turkish and Arabic archival materials, this article narrates the history of irrigation in Fayyum during the first half of the 18th century. Its environmental perspective shows how a shared reliance on natural resource management bound together extremely rural regions of the Ottoman Empire like Fayyum with centers of power in Istanbul and Cairo. It seeks to make two historiographical interventions. First, its focus on irrigation reveals how the center–periphery model of early modern empires fails to capture the complexity of relationships that rural regions of the Ottoman Empire maintained with other provinces and towns both in the empire and beyond. Water in Fayyum grew food that forged connections of commodity movement with areas of the Mediterranean and Red Seas. Second, through an examination of such intraimperial and transregional ties, this article argues that Egyptian peasants held much of the power in these relationships.

Drawing on a range of recent studies and original sources, this article calls for a revision of the usual paradigm of disease in Ottoman history by applying a more interdisciplinary approach and new insights from environmental history. The historiography of disease in the Middle East developed from the late 1970s to the early 1990s envisioned a steady mortality from inevitable cycles of bubonic plague supposedly accepted with pious resignation by Ottoman Muslims. Focusing on the period from circa 1500 to 1800, the article advances three arguments. First, Ottoman Muslims sometimes did take action to escape or contain epidemics. Second, the region actually suffered from a variety of other infections that together had an equal or greater impact than bubonic plague. Third, shifting political, social, and environmental conditions—especially Little Ice Age climate fluctuations and population movements during the 17th century—played a major role in disease mortality and Ottoman demography.

These words, which were written by the unnamed editor of the book Duʿat la Qudat (Preachers Not Judges), summarize the Society of the Muslim Brothers' (Jamʿiyya al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin) prison discourse in the late 1960s. The writer claims that once the organization became aware that radical ideas had surfaced in its midst, it objected to these ideas, even as it lived through the very context of their germination, namely Gamal Abdel Nasser's prisons.

The [Japanese] government, adorned with great intelligence and ideological firmness in progress, has implemented and promoted European [methods] of commerce and industry in its own country, and has turned the whole of Japan into a factory of progress, thanks to many [educational institutions]; it has attempted to secure and develop Japan's capacity for advancement by using means to serve the needs of the society such as benevolent institutions, railways, and in short, innumerable modes of civilization.

—Malumat, mouthpiece for Yıldız Palace, 1897

We should take note of Japan, this nation which has become rivals with the Great Powers in thirty to forty years. One should pay attention to that—that a nation not separating patriotic public spirit and the good of the homeland from its life is surely such that [though] sustaining wounds, setting out against any type of danger that threatens its existence, it certainly preserves its national independence. The Japanese successes of Port Arthur…are a product of this patriotic zeal.

—Şura-yı Ümmet, Ottoman newspaper, Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), 1904

While the despot of Turkey and the despot of Russia tremble and hide…it has come to pass in the Far East among this admirable people that, like the Turks, have been treated…as barbarians…[that] the Japanese tended to develop in all the Far East their material and moral influences, “to make themselves the guardians, otherwise the masters, of the yellow world.”…And that is how one has to see this vast intellectual and moral organization…. They whose civilization, achieved in half a century, has become superior to European civilization which has fallen into decay; they who do not have to reproach massacres, who do not have to gag any mouths out of which a liberal word came, who do not have to exile or suppress patriots…. Indeed, for our part, it is this “yellow” civilization that we wish to see universalized because it is the fruit of a principled, faithful and highly intelligent organization, because it is based on a conception of human destinies that excludes holy icons and false sentimentalities, because, above all, it is the daughter of a constitutional government which Ottoman patriots—all their efforts striving for this goal—will conclude by understanding the absolute necessity for the poor Turkish people that Hamidian terrorism be plunged into the mire.

—Mechveret Supplément Français, French organ of the CUP, 1905

This article lays groundwork for a more systematic history of the Ottoman gendarmerie (jandarma), here with special emphasis on the men in the corps and their working conditions. The gendarmerie, which before 1879 reform the Ottomans called asakir-i zabtiye, was a provincial paramilitary police organization established by bureaucrats of the Tanzimat state during the 1840s on an ad hoc basis. This force later acquired a more uniform and centralized character, becoming the empire's principal internal security organization. Through this paramilitary police institution, 19th-century Ottoman bureaucrats aimed to extend their authority into the provinces, which at that time could be described as only marginally under Ottoman sovereignty according to contemporary definitions of the term. From the late 18th century on, extending state sovereignty to recognized territorial boundaries emerged as a vital need for most European states as well as the Ottoman Empire. Along with other modern military and civil institutions and modern administrative practices, introducing various types of paramilitary provincial police forces enabled governments in Europe to enhance and extend their authority over territories in which it had been limited. The gendarmerie thus emerged in both Europe and in the Ottoman Empire as integral to modern state formation and its technologies of government. Although acknowledging the Pan-European context of the gendarmerie's emergence and its theoretical ramifications, the present article is concerned more with the Ottoman context within which this police corps was established, evolved, and took on a uniquely Ottoman form.

On the occasion of the fifteenth century of the hijra, many scholarly publications will deal with various aspects of Islamic history, among which is the contribution of the Arabo-Muslim culture to Western civilisation. Philosophical and scientific contributions have already been discussed many times. The legacy of Islam in the field of international law has, however, not yet been studied at length.

In the 1980s, the Iranian economy assumed the burden of an eight-year war that resulted in considerable sacrifice and financial hardship for the Iranian people. Iran also bore the costs associated with the influx of a large number of refugees from neighboring countries. Its public sector was inefficient and its private sector reluctant; both suffered from uncertainty created by suddenly and rapidly changing economic policies. In such circumstances, implementation of the necessary macroeconomic and structural adjustments was a formidable task.

[Fade in from commercial, sonorous male voice advertising the evening news.]

Once again a cinci hoca, once again a sexual harassing…

Recently in our country, this exorcizing of spirits, witchcraft, fortune-telling, and mediumship, which are all products of primitive, magical thought, have been spreading like an epidemic. For years, either knowingly or unknowingly, they have been given extensive advertisement in newspapers and on television stations that seek to increase their circulation with dramatic news.

—Dr. Orhan Öztürk, Cumhuriyet, 1997

This article examines the historical development of Arab–Palestinian soccer under the British Mandate, and then afterward under the State of Israel. It strives to explain why the Arab sporting grandstands—particularly those of soccer—did not become a site for the construction and expression of Palestinian national pride in Israel.

A single photograph taken during the Constitutional Revolution portrays the nature of that historical event better than most of the accounts purporting to explain the Revolution in terms of the ideological impact of the West. It is a picture of some fourteen-thousand artisans and shopkeepers (pīshivarān), dressed in their traditional attire, taking sanctuary (bast) in the garden of the British Legation in Tehran and demanding mashrūīyat (constitutional rule). At first sight the picture is perplexing; it stands at odds with the present studies of the Revolution: How could a “modern,” or a “national bourgeois” revolution have been brought about by a social class who appeared—and indeed were—traditional in every sense of the word?

As a result of the oil price shocks, the 1979 revolution, and the eight-year war with Iraq, fundamental changes have taken place in Iran's foreign exchange position as well as in its exchange rate policy. The viable data over the period 1979–1980 to 1988–1989 clearly show that, despite the revolutionary rhetoric, very little has been done to reduce the country's dependence on oil exports as a source of foreign exchange and government revenues. Instead, in the face of falling oil revenues and the country's increasing international isolation, coupled with the regime's unwillingness to incur foreign debt, the government has adopted a severe ‘import compression’ policy through selective tariffs and quotas, strict control of private and government imports by means of import licenses, and the imposition of foreign exchange allocations on government agencies. The result has been an ever-rising premium on the U.S. dollar in the ‘black’ market, a highly overvalued official exchange rate, a substantial increase in rent-seeking activities at the expense of production, a severe misallocation of resources, and loss of output and industrial capacity.