In 1978 Barbara Pillsbury and I dedicated our coedited book, Muslim–Christian Conflicts: Economic, Political and Social Origins (Westview), with these words: “To those who struggle to demystify religion and to those who suffer and die because the struggle is yet unfinished.” Charles Issawi observes in his preface that the contributors to the volume tend to interpret the conflicts more in economic and political terms than in “religious” terms. In an effort to develop analytical tools, my introduction distinguishes between “religion/religious identity and consciousness” (as theology/theological consciousness) and “sect/sectarianism” (as social organization, relationships, dynamics/group identity, and consciousness). I argue that sectarianism is about how “differences” are constructed; because people can believe they are very different when they are not, the task of the scholar is to describe what differences do exist, how they emerged, and why people believe they are different. Differentiation is a process, I suggest, that operates through the everyday—through socialization, through family systems, and through various other aspects of social organization in both systematic and erratic or contradictory ways.

As explained by one of its founders, subaltern studies seeks to counteract histories written by elites, about elites, and for elites that ignore the majority of society. Through this examination, the urban poor, workers, and peasants of India, the original focus of attention, are agents in the formation of their subaltern consciousness: the “agency of change is located in the insurgent or the ‘subaltern.’”

As a member of the British academic community—an international relations professor who is deeply involved in Middle Eastern studies—I find it distressing that some of the most dismal aspects of the American academic environment are coming our way. Nowhere is this trend more pronounced than on the question of Israel. That country is, of course, no stranger to controversy, but the attack on the right of academics to criticize Israel is a relatively recent and a highly disturbing phenomenon.

Studies of Middle Eastern urbanism have traditionally been guided by a limited repertoire of tropes, many of which emphasize antiquity, confinement, and religiosity. Notions of the old city, the walled city, the casbah, the native quarter, and the medina, sometimes subsumed in the quintessential “Islamic city,” have all been part of Western scholarship's long-standing fascination with the region. Etched in emblematic “holy cities” like Jerusalem, Mecca, or Najaf, Middle Eastern urban space is heavily associated with the “sacred,” complete with mystical visions and assumptions of violent eschatologies and redemption.

The problem of “Middle East exceptionalism” is perhaps nowhere as apparent as in the study of Middle East politics, particularly its purported sectarian nature. Our understanding of Middle East politics suffers less from the lack of empirical data than the poverty of the conceptual and theoretical frameworks through which it is studied. Unlike other non-Western regions, the Middle East continues to be analyzed through a conceptual prism that has changed little since the collapse of colonial rule.

This paper introduces methods to estimate wealth levels and disparities among Muslim inhabitants of 18th-century Ottoman Kastamonu. Our sources in this pursuit are estate inventories of the deceased (sing. tereke) as recorded in Kastamonu court records (sicils), mainly in the first half of the 18th century (1712-60). By analyzing information provided by these sources through a variety of quantitative techniques, we measure levels of inequality among Muslims of Kastamonu and describe the relationship between economic privilege and social, political, religious, and occupational status as well as gender identity. Our work outlines the contours of economic stratification in 18th-century Kastamonu and reveals the relative positions of various social groups within this hierarchy.

These words of an elderly Jewish man in Istanbul relate his memory of neighborhood life with Greeks, Armenians, and Muslims in the neighborhood of Kuzguncuk. In this place, there were no arguments between people of different religious backgrounds; Muslims shared “his” language, and he, as a Jew, knew Greek. As I examine his narrative for what it emphasizes and for the silences in between, I read Kuzguncuk as exceptional: describing an absence of argument in the past suggests that tension exists today; sharing multiple ethnic languages is understood now to be an old-fashioned rarity. His statement “Because we are Kuzguncuklu Jews, our Muslims over there loved us very much” suggests that in Kuzguncuk, he and his Muslim neighbors shared a common tie to place, a unique identity as Kuzguncuklu (of Kuzguncuk) that superseded any difference based on religion or ethnicity. As he describes a culture that remained from Ottoman times, his story illuminates indirectly the current Turkish national context that conditions the telling of his narrative.

The notion of sectarianism can be useful in understanding the Middle East. As in India and Ireland, sectarian (or communal) identities have been crucial to the elaboration of modern politics in many parts of the region. Unlike India and Ireland today, however, the Middle East is subject to American domination. The result is that the study of Middle Eastern sectarianism is extraordinarily politicized. As scholars struggle to study sectarianism in such a climate, they need to recognize—and, ideally, find a way to move beyond—several problematic assumptions.

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.

The irruption of Persian-language blogging since 2001, known to its participants as Weblogistan, has been accompanied by enthusiastic claims that weblogs are promoting previously nonexistent forms of expression, thereby rupturing traditional Iranian social, cultural, religious, and political norms. The political scientist Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone juxtaposes Weblogistan against the conditions of theocratic rule as “a public social space that allows free expression of self outside the confines of the politically manipulated physical space.” In a 2005 book, which includes translated weblog postings, Nasrin Alavi takes this line of interpretation even further, asserting that by making “it possible for young Iranians to express themselves freely and anonymously,” Weblogistan “is nothing less than a revolution within the Revolution.”

Until recently, the topic of charitable organizations seemed to have fallen in disgrace. Social scientists have given little attention to this sector of associational life. Instead, a great deal has been written on the issues of democratization through pressure groups or on the transformation of social movements into professional organizations while assessing the overall impact of development promoted by donors. Yet three signs point to the need for a better understanding of charitable organizations. First, new research studying Islamic activism through the lens of social-movement literature has offered innovative results. Second, studies on the impact of aid during the second intifada have revealed that charitable organizations as well as Islamic organizations offered a significant amount of emergency support, sometimes competing with professional nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Finally, the fact that Hamas, also known for running a vast network of charitable organizations, achieved such a significant political success in the 2005 municipal and 2006 legislative elections should invite social scientists to consider whether and how political momentum can also be obtained through activism in the charitable sector.

On 10 June 1738 Maria Qari wrote her Catholic Melkite bishop, Athnasius Dahhan, an emphatic letter rejecting the authority of the Melkite church to impose the Eastern rite Rule of Saint Basil upon her and her fellow ʿabidāt (devotees). She unequivocally states, “It is important that your Excellency knows once and for all that I will only adopt the Augustinian Rule with the Ordinances of Saint Francis de Sales. I will not become a nun under any other circumstances, for God has called me to be free from all that binds my spirit, and I will not accept any oversight [from the Melkite church] . . . Four Jesuit missionaries are in agreement with me on this point.” This is but one missive in a voluminous record of equally rancorous discourses that spanned the better part of two decades (1730–48) and entangled the ten Aleppan devotees, their Jesuit confessors and supporters, the Melkite Church, and the Vatican.

Khalil Sarkis (1842–1915) was an eminent figure in late Ottoman Beirut and an important contributor to the nahḍa, the Arab literary-cultural “awakening” that began in the latter part of the 19th century. Less known to Western scholarship than Butrus al-Bustani, Faris al-Shidyaq, or Jurji Zaydan, he is not usually regarded as a pillar of that awakening. He may not have been, but he certainly was an indispensable brick in its edifice. Born in 1842, when the most exciting changes were still in the future, Sarkis spent all his life in the service of his country's cultural betterment. He is mostly remembered for his newspaper, Lisan al-Hal, which was launched in 1877 and for many decades was one of the most credible Arabic organs. More than a journalist, however, Sarkis was a pioneering printer, a prolific publisher, and the author of nine books. In the last quarter of the 19th century he built one of Beirut's largest printing businesses, which turned out several journals, hundreds of books, and numerous publications. In the 19th-century Middle East, being a printer often meant being a publisher; Khalil Sarkis was both on a grand scale.

Held since 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest is an annual event traditionally dedicated to the eternal themes of love, peace, and harmony. Yet Israelis asked to pick a song for the 2007 contest in Helsinki paid little heed to these themes. Instead, they settled for “Push the Button,” a controversial number by an Israeli punk group called Teapacks; the song is generally understood as a description of life under the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran with its “crazy rulers.” Meanwhile, an Israeli fashion house (Dan Cassidy) commissioned a series of photos at a construction site in southern Tel Aviv that showed a topless model lying in a pit. The project was designed as a warning against the “holocaust” that would follow Iran's possible nuclear attack on Israel; the pit, as the project's creative director explained, represented “the mass grave of complacent Tel Aviv residents.”

In August 1915, in the midst of World War I, a young Muslim resident of Jerusalem wrote the following in his diary:

The lines dividing history, ideology, and politics are thinly drawn. Researchers of Iraq have observed that over the years institutions and ideological movements, both inside the country and in the West, have “hijacked” the country's history. The Iraqi state's grand narratives have excluded competing histories from the days of Satiʿ al-Husri, the “father of Iraqi education,” who introduced Arab history into the curriculum in order to foster Arab nationalism, up to the massive project of rewriting Iraqi history under the Baʿth regime. Western interests, too, from the time of the British-backed monarchy until the present day, have influenced the writing of Iraqi history—utilizing it in a way that would justify their foreign policies.

On 19 March 1877, the first Ottoman parliament opened at Dolmabahçe Palace when Sultan Abdülhamit II crossed a velvet carpet to stand beside a golden throne. Seen later as the finale of the Tanzimat reform era, the parliament appeared to diplomatic observers as the strategy of former grand vizier Midhat Paşa. Midhat's constitutionalism was a plan for “reform, revival, and indeed survival” that included seeking allies against Russia and containing Russian influence in the Balkans. Abdülhamit listened as his secretary charged the new body: “The progress effected by civilised states, the security and wealth they enjoy, are the fruit of the participation of all in the enactment of laws and in the administration of public affairs.” Among the most urgent priorities was “the development of agriculture and industry, and the progress of civilisation and of public wealth.” Parliament later responded with a pledge to deliver the empire from its malaise, to “eliminate the last traces of abuses, the heritage of the regime of despotism.”

For contemporary Istanbulites, a trip south, across the Sea of Marmara, poses nothing exceptional or treacherous. The southern shore is often a day-trip destination for those seeking to relax or sightsee in the port towns of Yalova or Çanakkale. The Marmara's southern coast is also a stop on the road to warmer, more comfortable climes farther south, such as the holiday resorts of Kuşadası or Foça. The region stands in sharp contrast to the farthest reaches of eastern Anatolia, such as Van, Diyarbakir, or Mardin, where an insurgency by Kurdish guerrillas continues to claim lives.

From the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, the forces unleashed by the age of European imperialism and its rapid encroachment on dār al-Islām increasingly brought the hajj under the scrutiny and regulation of non-Muslim powers. The driving force behind these dramatic changes in administration of the hajj was the expansion of the British Empire. As Britain's power in the Indian subcontinent grew, so too did its maritime supremacy throughout the Indian Ocean basin. Looking to secure its access to India, ward off its European competitors, and expand its commercial interests in southwestern Arabia, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Aden, Britain's role in the region was intensified by the transit opportunities that emerged with the development of regular steamship routes between the Mediterranean and India from the 1830s to the 1860s and the eventual opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. With the exponential growth of maritime traffic that accompanied these technological advances came a similarly dramatic rise in the oceangoing pilgrim traffic from and through British India. Owing to this expansion in the number of seaborne pilgrims, the hajj soon came to be recognized as the primary conduit for the globalization of epidemic diseases, such as cholera and plague.