Among the figures in the scholarly imagining of the post-colonial world, “the peasant” is a strange kind of presence. With this abstraction, a category of human being has become a field of expertise, the subject of his own scholarly journals, and the object of a distinct body of theory and description. “What are villagers in India, in Egypt, in Mexico really like?” the anthropologist George Foster asks, as he begins a brief history of the field. “For nearly fifty years anthropologists (by no means to the exclusion of others) have searched for answers [to this question] …. living with villagers in order to question them and to observe their behavior, describing their findings in books and articles.” At first they called their research the study of “folk” societies, Foster says, but after World War II scholars “came to realize that ‘peasant’ is a more appropriate term, and thus was born the new subfield of ‘peasant studies’.”

The rise and spread of Islamist political movements have been topics of focal concern for scholars and analysts in recent decades. Since Richard Mitchell's seminal work on the Muslim Brotherhood, a plethora of writers have analyzed the attributes of both Sunni and Shiʿa revivalist movements and the policies of Arab regimes and the West toward the Islamist phenomenon. Yet scant attention has been paid to the reactions generated within the larger Islamic community toward the Islamist groups and their militant offshoots. One such unnoticed source of reaction to political Islamism is the nebulous confraternity of Sufi orders (ṭuruq) whose mysticism and esoteric beliefs and practices have set them apart from the exoteric revivalism and political activism of the Islamist societies, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its many affiliates.

Economic historians have recently made great progress in studying the past by applying the tools and concepts of New Institutional Economics. A fundamental element of this achievement has been to go beyond the narrow confines of previous approaches. Whereas the application of narrow neoclassical economic analysis typically lacked an appreciation for the role of history and focused primarily on the efficiency properties of institutions, the new trend has been to integrate economic and historical approaches for richer and more comprehensive explanations of how and why history mattered. Similarly, whereas unsystematic historical approaches lacked sound theoretical bases and proceeded narrowly by focusing on how previous customs and traditions were responsible for the existence of an institution, the new approach has been also to examine the properties of the institution that ensured its survival.

In 1899 seventeen-year old Ahmad Lutfī al-Sayyid (1872–1963) nearly entered the Cairo School of Engineering instead of the School of Law.1 Had he done so, he might never have climbed to fame as a writer, educator, and cabinet minister. An occasional engineer did reach national prominence in Egypt during the first half of the twentieth century, but it was the lawyers who ran the show. Upon entering law school in the fall of 1889, Lutfī had as colleagues three future prime ministers (Ismā'īl Ṣidqī, 'Abd al-Khāliq Tharwat, and Muhammad Tawfīq Nasīm) as well as the enthusiastic nationalist Mu⋅⃛afā Kāmil.2 He had made a wise choice.

During the morning of December 8, 1942, a large group of university students paraded through the streets of Tehran to the parliament building on Baharistan Square to demand higher bread rations and prompt action on critical problems by an incompetent government and an inactive parliament. Spectators and organized groups from South Tehran added their numbers to the already large crowd. Police forces withdrew from the square and the demonstration became a riot. The crowd occupied the parliament building and moved toward the commercial district, smashing windows and signs and looting stores along the way. On the morning of December 9, students again instigated a march to the parliament building, but this time army troops firing machine guns met and dispersed them. Although city shops were closed on December 9, some reopened on December 10, and all reopened on December 11; normality had returned. The bread riot claimed over 20 people killed, 700 wounded, 150 arrested, and 150 stores sacked and burned.

The 1876 constitution and its reinstitution in 1908 have been acknowledged as landmarks in the historiography of the late Ottoman Empire. The promulgation of a constitution signified a critical political transformation despite the brevity of the First Constitutional Period (1876–78). During the next three decades of Sultan Abdülhamid's autocratic rule, the ultimately successful struggle to restore the constitution against the Sultan's relentless resistance became central to the political life of the empire. In 1908, the Young Turk Revolution inaugurated a decade of social and political change, the Second Constitutional Period.

Thus wrote Dr. Asher Goldstein in the Hebrew daily paper Haʾaretz (The Land) in 1935, lamenting the disregard for hygiene among Palestine's Jews. In Goldstein's text, hygiene is metonymic to Western progress, which the Jews were to bring with them to Palestine. Yet the Jews in this text occupy an ambivalent position: they are not only to bring the West to the “entire backward Orient” but also to themselves. A hygienic way of life, far from being a secured component in their cultural compendium, is presented as a goal yet to be achieved. Indeed, it constituted a project in which Dr. Goldstein—author of several hygiene manuals and editor of the health column in Haʾaretz—played an important role.

One of the more interesting phenomena in Islamic religious history is the development of the schools of law. This phenomenon has seldom failed to arouse ourinterest, though it has consistently eluded our understanding. The difficulty in grasping the significance of the schools of law is evidenced by vacillation in translating the termmadhhab. This term was first translated as ‘sect,’ then as ‘rite’ or ‘school.’ But a Sunni madhhab could not be a sect, since the term ‘sect’ is applied to a dissenting religious body, one that is heretical in the eyes of other members within the same communion. That is not the case with the Sunni madhhabs, all of which are regarded equally as orthodox. Nor is the term ‘rite’ an adequate one, since it applies to a division of the Christian church as determined by liturgy; and, unlike a transfer from one rite to another in Christianity, a transfer requiring certain formalities, the transfer in Islam is made from one madhhab to another without any formalities whatsoever. The term ‘school,’ for lack of a better term, is the most acceptable; it is the one that offers the least difficulty.

Many Muslim feminists have argued that at the core of Islam lies a gender-neutral belief system that has been obscured by a centuries-long tradition of male-dominated interpretation. Although this gender-neutral system of belief had been almost entirely suppressed by the ruling Islamic discourses, according to Leila Ahmed, marginalized discourses such as Sufism and the antinomian Carmathians were able to preserve Islam's message of the ethical equality of men and women. Amina Wadud-Muhsin argues that the traditional verse-by-verse method of Qurʾanic exegesis, along with its domination by male practitioners, marginalized female experiences in understanding revelation. In her view, these two factors ultimately led to the suppression of the Qurʾan's message of gender equality. Fatima Mernissi, in The Veil and the Male Elite, instead argues that the religious scholars of Islam, because of their fear of subjectivity, were content with a purely empirical science of religion—a methodology that left the door wide open to the manipulation of revelation through interpretation. Unlike Ahmed, however, she recognizes that even within the dominant discourse of the Sunni scholars, not all spoke of women in the same monotonously misogynistic voice.

Traditionally renowned for their dislike of settling outside their own country, the Egyptians started to become active emigrants in the early sixties. In noting this fact we do not, of course, mean to imply that Egyptian emigration has never taken place. There are reports that quite a few peasants emigrated from Egypt to the Levant to escape from Muhammad 'Ali's tyranny in the nineteenth century, while more recently, several thousand Egyptians emigrated around the period of the First World War to Iraq, Turkey, Greece, and France.

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, we aim to evaluate the records of executive branches of the Lebanese government that are involved in public social spending in terms of their ability to respond to need. Second, we attempt to uncover the criteria underlying the distribution of public social spending. The allocation of funds across sectors and administrative districts is evaluated according to a vector of the socioeconomic characteristics of each locality thought to be of relevance. We find that the association between need and spending is, at best, very loose. When we use the geographical distribution of spending and voting data from each locality to estimate each religious sect's share of public spending, we find a striking conformity between the sectarian composition of the population and each sect's estimated share of national public spending. The logic of the disbursement of public funds and the mechanism underlying the observed one-man one-dollar distribution rule—a rule with primacy over health, education, and infrastructure needs as well as imbalances across regions—is that distribution be balanced across sects.

A famous definition of power reads: In studying political organization, we have to deal with the maintenance or establishment of social order … by the organized exercise of coercive authority through the use, or the possibility of use, of physical force.

The study of Middle Eastern women, past and present, poses a number of methodological problems, some common to Third World studies and others peculiar to the Middle East. Recent research and editorial experience lead me to some conclusions regarding research on Middle Eastern women, both historical and contemporary. The most obvious problem is that, as compared either with many other areas of Middle Eastern history or with numerous geographical areas of women's history, almost no serious scholarly historical work has been done.

Tensions between the regime and the army are a crucial component for the understanding of Fatimid history and, as will be shown, they had a mostly destabilizing impact on society and the economy. A host of factors shaped the relationship between the regime, the army, and society. Among these factors, the socio-military composition of the army was especially important. The composition of the army was partly an outcome of deliberate policies of the regime, partly a consequence of local conditions, and partly a reflection of wider Islamic practices. In the case of the Fatimids, the local conditions of Ifrīqiya (Tunisia) and Egypt and the military traditions of the deposed regimes of the Aghlabids and the Ikhshidids must be taken into consideration. Fatimid reliance on the Berbers of Kutāma was not much a matter of a choice; they were the first adherents of the Fatimids and had helped bring them to power in Ifrīqiya. However, from the earliest years of Fatimid rule the Aghlabid military traditions and local conditions were reflected in the composition of the Fatimid army and had an influence on Fatimid policies. Conditions in Egypt played a smaller role in shaping the Fatimid army. Certain elements of the defeated Egyptian army (the lkhshīdiyya and the Kāfūriyya) were incorporated into the Fatimid army while others were disbanded. The Fatimid drive into Palestine and Syria, whose ultimate goal was Baghdad, confronted the Fatimids with militarily superior armies built on the model of the Buyid-'Abbasid and the Byzantines.

The paper will draw the contours of the intellectual project of Mahdi ʿAmil (1936–87), a prominent Lebanese Marxist. It will start by relocating ʿAmil's work in the general problématique of the adaptation and adoption of theories in the periphery, looking at the process of translation he deploys in his construction of an “Arab Marxism.” After presenting his project, the paper will focus on its diachronic dimension, by presenting two developments that threatened ʿAmil's overarching project, namely, the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and the rise of a new register of critique in the 1980s, epitomized by the work of Edward Said. The paper will conclude with a discussion of the contemporary relevance of ʿAmil's work to the historiography of modern Arab political thought.

The Middle East, as a geographical term, is generally used today to cover the area stretching from Morocco through Afghanistan, and is roughly equivalent to the area of the first wave of Muslim conquests plus Anatolia. It is a predominantly Muslim area with widespread semi-arid and desert conditions where agriculture is heavily dependent on irrigation and pastoral nomadism has been prevalent. With the twentieth-century rise of exclusive linguistic nationalisms, which have taken over many of the emotional overtones formerly concentrated on religious loyalties, it becomes increasingly doubtful that the Middle East is now much more than a geographical expression – covering an area whose inhabitants respond to very different loyalties and values. In Turkey since the days of Atatürk, the ruling and educated élites have gone out of their way to express their identification with Europe and the West and to turn their backs on their traditional Islamic heritage. A glorification of the ‘modern’ and populist elements in the ancient Turkish and Ottoman past has gone along with a downgrading of Arab and Persian cultural influences–indeed the latter are often seen as having corrupted the pure Turkish essence, which only re-emerged with Atatürk’s swepping cultural reforms. Similarly the Iranians are increasingly emulating the technocratic and rationalizing values of the capitalist West, and in the cultural sphere identify with the glorious civilization of pre-Islamic Iran. This identification goes along with a downgrading of Islam and particularly of the Arabs, which has characterized both radical nationalists like the late nineteenth-century Mîrzâ Âqâ Khân Kirmânî and the twentieth-century Ahmad Kasravâ1 and more conservative official nationalists such as the Pahlavi Shahs and their followers. The recent celebrations of the 2500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy, for example, were notable for their virtual exclusion of the Muslim ulama, though religious leaders of other religious were invited, and their lack of specifically Islamic references. In both Iran and Turkey, traditional Islam has become largely a class phenomenon, with the traditional religion followed by a majority of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie, but rejected or radically modified by the more educated classes. With the continued spread of Western-style secular education it may be expected that the numbers of people identifying with nationalism and with the West (or with the Communist rather than the Islamic East) will grow.

Kuwait today is 99 percent urbanized. Though hosting a substantial desert population in the past, Kuwait no longer contains any Bedouin who practice a nomadic or pastoral lifestyle. And yet the term badū remains in popular use in Kuwait to designate a group considered sociologically and culturally distinct from the ḥaḍar, or settled urbanites, which in Kuwait's context refers solely to descendants of the pre-oil townspeople. This article explores why these social designations still exist in Kuwait and analyzes the origins of the conflictual relationship between the two groups. I argue that the persistence of the ḥaḍar/badū dichotomy is an outcome of state-building strategies adopted in the early oil years, mainly linked to citizenship and housing policies, that contributed to fixing ḥaḍar and badū as not only socially distinct but also geographically bounded groups. These state policies implemented between the 1950s and 1980s fostered the political integration but social exclusion of the badū. The article examines the lived realities of these incoherent policies as one way of explaining how the badū shifted from being the rulers’ main loyalty base in the early oil decades to becoming their primary opposition today.

At the cultural heart of the intellectual awakening, or al-Nahḍa, that arose with Egypt's modernization movement in the 19th century was the endeavor to legitimize the innovations which came in the train of military, scientific, technical, and educational imports from the West. The vanguard of this movement, unlike that of the one taking place at the same time in Istanbul, came from leading religious shaykhs in the government's employ. It may seem remarkable that graduates and teachers of such a conservative religious institution as al-Azhar took the lead as spokesmen for change, particularly when models of this change came from the Christian West, the traditional antagonist of Islamdom for more than a millennium. It becomes less remarkable when we realize that there was no other possible source of intellectual leadership in Egypt. Egypt had no imperial state service with its own traditions of education as did the Ottomans. Thus, conservatively reared shaykhs and Azhar graduates were obliged to play the role that was filled in the Ottoman Empire by reforming grand viziers and their ambassadors to European capitals, who were often assisted by converts from the West seeking employment in the sultan's service—“secular” Muslims who were identified with the state and not the educated ulema. In Egypt, the reasoned voice advocating change came from the very custodians of conservative tradition. Accordingly, that voice would speak throughout the century with great caution, often tentatively and sometimes in contradictory ways.

Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the twin goals of centralizing state power and inscribing a uniform national identity on all citizens resulted in the proliferation of disciplinary practices that required changes in habits and everyday life as well as in the locus of faith, allegiance, and obedience. Nowhere were the repercussions felt as deeply as in the Kurdish regions, where the urge to create a new citizen sparked considerable resistance. This article suggests that alongside Kurdish nationalist movements, kinship networks and morality constituted an alternative reservoir of resistance to the new disciplinary practices that followed state building. By subverting state practices to make citizens legible, kinship networks, I argue, undermined the state's attempts to establish bureaucratic authority and create an exclusive identity.