During the last decade or so, educational institutions of developing countries have attracted the attention of social scientists as the prime movers of structural changes in such societies. Furthermore, among some of those who are concerned with economic development and growth, there has emerged a common belief that a major barrier to economic development, probably, is not so much the scarcity of physical resources and capital, but rather the lack of trained manpower owing to insufficient or mismanaged investment in education.

Commenting on his novel Riḥlat Gandhī al-Ṣaghīr (The Journey of Little Gandhi), Elias Khoury has made two conflicting assertions. At a gathering held to discuss the book shortly after it was published, Khoury reaffirmed his political and ideological stance in relation to the war in Lebanon. While acknowledging that Gandhi, the protagonist, is a victim of violence and poverty, Khoury said that he regards war as a necessity, a passage to a higher and nobler aim:

I am not one of those who preach against violence, nor do I claim that I am against the war.

I have participated in the war, and I remain true to my original choice, and loyal to my comrades who died the death of martyrs. I refuse to go along with the popular “anti-war” fad. At the same time, I remain faithful to the truth and the goal for which we started the war: the creation of another more just and democratic society⃜ [U]nfortunately, we have not succeeded, but at least, it is our duty to tell the truth and… what actually happened.

My interest in the religious lesson (dars) springs from field research on religious life in a Transjordanian village conducted intermittently over a period of thirty years, beginning in 1959 and culminating in a (1989) book on the Muslim preacher and the Islamic sermon (khuṭba). That book did not describe or analyze the dars, but it assumed that its content was distinctive and different from the khuṭba. It expounded practical rather than legal norms of behavior and provided useful information on day-to-day religious obligations, what constituted violations of mores, and the rituals of marriage, birth, and death, rather than conveying meaning through core images and metaphors. The assumption was that the sermon dealt mainly with messages of religious exhortation and the lesson dealt with the legal and ritual aspects of religion. I also assumed that the ethos of the dars allowed ritual freedom and a fair amount of give-and-take between preacher and audience, while the khuṭba was informed by an ethos of ritual order. In terms of rhetoric, I assumed that although the sermon often involved a “transformation of quality [imaginative] space” (the phrase is that of James Fernandez), the lesson did not. Finally, I assumed that the lesson emphasized the preacher's role as “home-town boy” (ibn al-balad) far more than the sermon did, as expressed, for instance, in its dependence on colloquial speech and minimal use of theological themes. The detailed description and analysis below has led me to reconsider these assumptions.

The Sa⊂ūdī Civil War, which developed after the death of the Imām Faiṣal at al-Riyāḍ in A.H. 1282/A.D. 1865, and which was largely responsible for the debilitation and ultimate demise of the Second Sa⊂ūdī State, has received relatively little attention from either Sa⊂ūdī or Western historians. In neglecting this period, modern Sa⊂ūdī scholars may have been influenced by the consideration which led Wahhābī chroniclers of an earlier generation to provide only cursory treatment of the Civil War in their accounts of Najdī history; the decade between the Imām Faiṣal's death and the resolution of the conflict in 1293/1876, characterised as it was by persistent fraternal rivalry and displays unprincipled political opportunism, does not represent a particularly creditable episode in the history of the āl Sa⊂ūd.

Analyzing the politics of the past in the context of the Armenian Genocide reveals an evolving interplay between international norms, official narratives, and broader discourses. This short essay explores three aspects of these interrelationships. First, I draw on my own research to highlight the ways in which changes in Turkey's narrative of the genocide—typically referred to in official discourse as sözde Ermeni sorunu (the so-called Armenian question), or more recently as 1915 olayları (the events of 1915)—have to some extent paralleled shifts in the meaning and salience of the norm against genocide. Second, I note key ways in which the Turkish state's official discourse has shaped public understandings—within and, to a lesser extent, outside Turkey—of the nature of the violence against Ottoman Armenians. Third, I suggest that in influencing public understandings of the relationship between this event and the concept of genocide, Turkey's official narrative has the potential to affect understandings of the meaning of genocide more generally.

Cultural heritage in the Middle East is under attack. Brutal civil wars and foreign interventions have inflicted tremendous direct and collateral damage on historic sites, monuments, and museums. The chaos has also facilitated the emergence of new identitarian politics wielded by groups operating outside the framework of the nation-state. Consequently, history and geography are being contested and reconfigured, while cultural heritage itself is being divided and reappropriated, and its ill-fated fragments captured by groups that do not recognize them as their own heritage, or as heritage at all, destroyed.

My roundtable contribution inevitably starts with a critique of the field the scholarly utility of which we as contributors wish to defend. The study of the antique sciences (including the history of archaeology and heritage) still has marginal standing in science studies. So does the Middle East as a geographical region, which until recently enjoyed little scholarly interest in the field. The persistent Eurocentric research agenda of science studies has been questioned, however, with the recent call for a “global history of science.” This ambiguous term has triggered new methodological challenges, but it has also created new trenches.

For the majority of Iranians who went through the Islamic Revolution of 1979 with high hopes, the “Spring of Freedom” (Bahar-i Azadi) never really bloomed except perhaps on the specially minted gold coins issued in March 1979 by the Provisional Government of Mahdi Bazargan. Revolutionary optimism quickly died out and gave way to a long winter of discontent. For the peoples of the Arab world who are presently witnessing an “Arab Spring,” the turn of events may be different. Though the current movement has yet to fully unfold, potentially taking months or even years, and though it is unrealistic to generalize about all Arab countries as if they were one monolithic unit, there are features that set today's movements apart from the 1979 Iranian Revolution as much as there are striking parallels.

Texas A&M, a public land grant university in College Station, Texas, has a long history of engagement with the Bush family. These ties highlight the university's entanglement with US imperial enterprises, which extend into the Persian Gulf. George H. W. Bush's own explanation of why he decided to place his presidential library at the campus despite not attending Texas A&M focused on these connections: “Over the years, Aggies have provided great service to the Armed Forces of our country. Patriotism abounds at A&M.” Meanwhile, Qatar hosts the largest concentration of US troops abroad. The US military's Central Command is at Al Udeid Air Base, not far from the Education City complex that hosts TAMUQ and several branch campuses of American and other foreign universities. The students at these institutions are Qatari citizens, South Asian and Arab immigrants, and international students, primarily from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

This article analyzes the ideas of the Turkish sociologist and political activist Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) in order to reevaluate the secularization politics of the Young Turks. A close reading of Gökalp's publications on Islamic institutional reform challenges homogenizing modernist interpretations of late Ottoman reform in general. Gökalp's legacy has often been judged through a secularist-Islamist binary. This article suggests that Gökalp's approach to the problem of Islam and of religion more broadly within the modern state was more complex than generally argued. His understanding of concepts such as shariʿa, dīn, and the Islamic state was not yet subordinated to a secularist episteme that juxtaposes the religious and the secular. Rather, Gökalp strove for a social and political order in which religious norms and modern institutions complemented each other harmoniously.

This article analyzes in depth four main writings by the pioneering nahḍa intellectual Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi, who drew on classical kinds of adab to articulate new kinds of political subjectivities. He especially draws on the image of the body politic as a body with the king at its heart. But he reconfigures this image, instead placing the public, or the people, at the heart of politics, a “vanquishing sultan” that governs through public opinion. For al-Tahtawi, adab is a kind of virtuous comportment that governs self and soul and structures political relationships. In this, he does not diverge from classical conceptions of adab as righteous behavior organizing proper social and political relationships. But in his thought, disciplinary training in adab is crucial to the citizen-subject's capacity for self-rule, as he submits to the authority of his individual conscience, ensuring not only freedom, but also justice. These ideas have had lasting impact on Islamic thought, as they have been recycled for the political struggles of new generations.

The paper discusses the narratives of Jews from Mashhad, who were forced to convert to Islam in 1839. The community narrative as well as academic research is dominated by a modern understanding of religious identity and religious boundaries that fail to account for the diversity of practices among the community of converts, including multiple forms of religious belonging, and the switching of identities according to time and place. Based on historical sources and interviews with descendants from the Mashhadi community, the paper traces how a particular narrative of the history of the Jews from Mashhad prevailed and which significance this narrative entails for Mashhadi community and identity until today. While the Jews from Mashhad are a rather unique case among Iranian Jews–due to the long period in which they lived as converts–their pattern of memory building reflects a general trend among Jews from the Muslim world to assimilate to modern ideas of being Jewish.

Incomes and inequality in the Ottoman Empire can be estimated from the information recorded in tax registers called tahrir defterleri, arguably the most prized, heavily used, but still underutilized sources of Ottoman history. Although generations of prominent scholars have been fascinated by these registers and numerous historians have used them for a variety of regional and historical studies, their full potential has not been fully utilized in quantitative analysis of questions with a broader comparative dimension, wider geographic coverage, and larger historical significance.

This article examines the rise and fall of the Malhamé family at the court of Abdülhamit II. The point of departure is the flight and arrest of six Malhamé brothers and the accompanying outbursts of popular anger at them during the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. The analysis locates the historical conditions that made the Malhamé phenomenon possible in the interstices between Levantine society, late Ottoman bureaucracy, and European diplomacy and capitalist expansion. In order to bring into conversation the hitherto unconnected literatures on the Levant and the Ottoman state, the Malhamé story is framed in the analytical concept of transimperialism. This concept shares affinities with wider transnational studies. But it is also grounded in the specific political, economic, and social processes of the Levant—both within the Ottoman Empire and among it and its British, French, German, and Italian imperial rivals at the height of the “Eastern Question.”

The spring of 1894 was an important period for Constantinople's Armenian community. Two assassination attempts targeted the Armenian patriarch Khoren Ashekian, and the chairperson of the Armenian Political Assembly Maksudzade Simon Bey, respectively. In both cases, the assailants were partisans of the Hunchakian Party, an Armenian revolutionary organization established in 1887. Analyzing the reasons behind these two attacks, and the imperial context in which they took place, this article challenges aspects of mainstream Armenian and Turkish historiography on the Hamidian period. It argues that a critical look at these two attacks through a socio-economic paradigm rather than an ethno-political one provides a viable analytical framework for deconstructing the notion of the “Armenian millet” as an undifferentiated community. More generally, the article explores the role of violence in shaping intracommunal relationships in the early 1890s.

During the final years of Ottoman rule and the three decades of British rule, Palestine witnessed the emergence of a community of professionally trained Palestinian Arab doctors. This study traces the evolution of the medical profession in Palestine against the background of the shifting cultural and symbolic capital of an expanding urban middle class and the educational possibilities that enabled this development. Palestinian Arab doctors are examined through a number of interconnected prisms: their activity in social, political, and professional regional networks, their modus operandi under British colonial rule, their response to Zionism and its accompanying influx of immigrant Jewish doctors, and their ability to mobilize collectively under a shared national vision.

The article explores the Zionist cultural economy in interwar Palestine, by studying the emergence of the field of consumption as an arena for political struggles among Jews and between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish nationalist movement employed dominant contemporary assumptions about economic nationalism in attempts to politicize the economy of British Palestine, including through campaigns advocating ethnonational separatism in consumption. Unlike other “buy local” movements around the world, these were not directed solely against imports; rather, they were often “buy Jewish” campaigns waged against the consumption of commodities produced by the rival ethnonational sector in Palestine. Using a variety of archival and media sources, the article tracks the development of Jewish separatist consumption campaigns in interwar Palestine, uncovering a gradual amplification of their ethnonational emphasis that paralleled the escalation of the Arab–Jewish conflict. The cultural mechanisms used to attribute ethnic qualities to objects and define them as either “Jewish” or “foreign” are analyzed with particular attention to the conceptual contradictions in the definitions of a Jewish product, which were shaped by economic conflicts and the diverse political conceptions of Jewish identity. The study of separatist consumption sheds new light on the “dual society” thesis, revealing the deep grip of separatist approaches across multiple layers of the Jewish middle class in the Yishuv.

The apparent fixity of the state has been produced by state-building projects, but also by the logic of state analysis that needs an object for its study. Encouraging critical reflection on the essentialism often associated with these processes, Pierre Bourdieu argued that these two aspects of “state formation” are contingently and epistemologically intertwined: “to endeavor to think the state is to take the risk of taking over (or being taken over by) the thought of the state.” Others, including Ellen Lust in her essay, have focused on state-making practices, and their symbolic and material effects that produce and reproduce the state as dominant idea and as ultimate institutional frame in a particular time and place. Taking this further, Kevin Dunn frames “‘the state’ as a discursively produced structural/structuring effect that relies on constant acts of performativity to call it into being.” It is this performative aspect of state making in all its variety that will be the focus here, echoing themes in the pieces by Lisa Anderson and Rabab El-Mahdi.

This article rethinks area studies through the diasporic histories of influential graduates of the Syrian Protestant College. My focus is on Philip Hitti and his ties with fellow alumni who migrated to the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Examining his first visit to Brazil in 1925, letter exchanges through the 1940s, and a second trip in 1951, I ask how Hitti and São Paulo-based alumni sought to establish an Arab studies program in Brazil. In borrowing a template for studying the Middle East, Hitti and colleagues imbued it with a widespread sentiment that Arab and Muslim legacies of the Iberian peninsula had shaped Portugal, and thus Brazil's historical and linguistic formation. They relocated a model of area studies but refitted its content. In revealing how the institution of area studies moved across and merged with varied sociocultural settings, these diasporic histories provincialize the U.S. model for knowing the Middle East.

Students of nineteenth-century Ottoman political history have concentrated on the central provinces of the Empire. Students of Arab political history of the same period have concentrated on anti-Ottoman nationalism centered in Cairo and Beirut. Relatively little work has yet been done to illuminate the nature of Ottoman government in the Arab provinces. The picture that is presented by Western travelers, Arab nationalists reminiscing about their youth, and diplomatic reports has been incomplete, biased against the Imperial government, and sometimes factually inaccurate.