One of the most complex questions in the study of the history of Arab nationalism is that of the relationship between Islam and nationalism in collective political identity. This complexity shows itself clearly in the specific case of the Palestinian national movement during the early Mandatory period, when the Islamic political sensibilities that historically had been central to the Ottoman Empire were thoroughly intertwined with Palestinian territorial nationalism and Pan-Arabism.1 It is not difficult to identify individual Palestinian activists who expressed their political identities at various times through any or all of these categories.2 Clearly, religious and nationalist bases of social and political identity are neither mutually exclusive nor unchanging over time. Concepts of identity, whether expressed through kinship relations, citizenship, or religious and national identity, are generated, chosen, and manipulated in specific historical circumstances. As Dale Eickelman explains, “These forms do not exist as objects that can be torn from social and cultural contexts by anthropologists for recording and classification into typologies.”3 One can therefore ask, Under what circumstances did Palestinian activists choose to express their political identity in terms of nationalism?

Crowds have always puzzled historians. As essentially anonymous and spontaneous movements, they often seem to possess a mysterious, irrational, and even primal quality. They can form suddenly and unpredictably, unite strangers behind an apparently common cause, move through the streets as if acting with a single will, and then unexpectedly melt away into the surrounding neighborhoods and markets from which they came. Explanations are not easy to find. Once the sound and fury have subsided and participants have left the streets, it is nearly impossible to trace identities or determine individual motives for joining demonstrations. This obscurity only deepens when one moves to the more distant past, as the number of records and firsthand accounts rapidly dwindles.

Psychologists attribute great significance to slips of the tongue. In such moments, the train of normal speech is interrupted by a word that seems to be out of context. Yet analysts say that this interruption actually betrays an inner truth hidden, consciously or not, behind the screen of “normal” speech. I suggest here that the 1931 Arab–Jewish transportation strike against the Mandatory government in Palestine can be seen as a historical slip of the tongue in the history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

This article focuses on one of the most striking ideas to come out of the radical Islamist movements of recent decades: the doctrine of jāhiliyya presented by the Egyptian activist Sayyid Qutb (1906–66) in his latest writings.

In late November 1957, the Hebrew and state-sponsored Arabic press in Israel printed a series of articles describing an extravagant “ceremony of reconciliation” held in the small and impoverished Palestinian border village of Kafr Qasim. The event was attended by more than 400 distinguished guests, including cabinet ministers, Knesset members from the ruling MAPAI party, military-government representatives, national trade-union officials, and “notables” from neighboring Arab villages. The idea behind the “sulḥa,” as its government-appointed organizers termed it (borrowing from the Arabic), was to heal the remaining wounds from the 29 October 1956 Israeli border-patrol massacre of forty-eight Palestinian Arab citizens, all but four of whom were residents of Kafr Qasim.1 The day of the ceremony, 20 November, marked exactly one year and three weeks since the first day of the Sinai war and the fateful evening when village day laborers returning home were lined up and summarily shot for unknowingly “violating” a curfew that had been announced only thirty minutes earlier.

War in the Balkans over the past decade and a half has inspired a plethora of scholarly, journalistic, and diplomatic publications, all of which have sought to capture the region's “chaotic” history. Unfortunately, much of this work assumes that conflict in the Balkans can be understood only along ethno-religious lines.1 This reductive line of argument has been particularly evident in the treatment of the Ottoman period in the Balkans' past, a period that extends back some 600 years.2 Consequentially, such work has distorted our understanding of Balkan societies both during and after the Ottoman Empire.

For years, religious violence and terrorism in Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt have splashed across the headlines and surged across the screen, announcing yet another round of senseless death and destruction. While Arabists and Islamicists attempt to pick their way carefully through the ideological and intellectual minefields to make sense of what is happening, the wider public generally disregards their insights and instead sticks to what it knows best: deeply ingrained prejudices and biases. Egyptian, Arab, Muslim—all are painted in a very unfavorable light. Even in Egypt, many bystanders show the same sorry prejudices. In the end, people simply blame the brutality on inexplicable backward religious ideas and then move on.

Although social-contract theorists differ on a number of points, they concur that human beings choose to form associations to promote their interests. An important corollary is that tension exists between the individual's inherent independence and freedom and the authority to which she or he must submit to achieve compliance with the goals of the contract. Occasionally, a theorist discusses God in the overall scheme of things, but the conception is deistic, so that the God who created the world does not intervene in its operation. For the rest, contractarian theories privilege natural law and natural rights, according to which the individual is treated as a social being who is fully rational, free, and independent. Fundamentally, three steps are taken in the process of making the social contract: (1) creating society; (2) creating the sovereign state; (3) discharging obligations and enjoying benefits.

The collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago engendered both hope and fear about the future of Islam in Uzbekistan (and Central Asia in general). Many Muslims from other countries hoped that, freed from the constraints of the Soviet regime, Uzbeks and other Central Asians would rediscover their religious traditions and rejoin the broader Muslim world.1 Other observers feared that Islam would emerge as a political force and threaten the security of the region.2 As the decade progressed and militant Islamist organizations appeared, fear tended to overshadow hope. The events of autumn 2001 in Afghanistan, when fighters belonging to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) played a prominent role alongside the Taliban, seemed to vindicate the darkest fears,3 and to justify the unremitting campaign that the regime of President Islom Karimov has waged against “religious extremism” since 1998.

From Paris in June 1928, Edmond Rabbath (1901–91) sent to Saעdallah al-Jabiri (1893–1947) his recently published L'évolution politique de la Syrie sous mandat. While the book is an early exploration of the legal underpinnings of the French Mandate, it is also the first nationalist history of Syria. Adopting a now familiar historiographical trope that the Ottoman past was a period of decadence and unjust alien rule, Rabbath organized recent episodes from the turbulent history of the Eastern Mediterranean since World War I, including Faysal's Arab kingdom, the Syrian Arab Congress, the rebellions of Salih al-עAlawi and Ibrahim Hananu, and the Great Syrian Revolt, into a linear narrative of an unfolding modern national consciousness.1 With a Preface by a prominent figure from pre-war Ottoman politics in the Levant, Shakib al-Arslan, the book outlined the logic in which much of inter-war Syrian opposition to French colonialism would be phrased:2 France must adhere to the letter and spirit of the League of Nations' mandate and emancipate the Syrians upon their achievement of national maturity. With some reservations, Rabbath argued that this maturity had already been attained.3

Around the mid-19th century, the cigarette, the latest fashion in tobacco consumption, gained popularity in Egypt, as it did globally and throughout the Ottoman Empire. Some fifty years later, the cigarette had become the predominant smoking preference in Egypt, and luxury Egyptian cigarettes were being exported around the world. Indeed, Egyptian and Turkish brands played a significant role in introducing cigarettes to different parts of the globe and thus in shaping world cigarette production. This article sets out to tell the fascinating story of the luxury Egyptian cigarette and uses this case to reflect on the development of modern markets in Egypt.

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.

This article addresses the impact of novel consumption practices on the shaping and negotiation of modern social identities in the late Ottoman Empire. These issues are placed within the context of the rapid social, economic, and cultural changes that occurred during the 19th century and the powerful, though ambivalent, influence of the West. A number of studies have examined the diverse and complex relations between the Ottoman Empire and European societies during this period, stressing the fundamental role of Western influence on the shaping of the late Ottoman society.1 Although most of these studies touch on issues of cultural change, it is my contention that this important field still needs to be studied in its own right.

And, if we wonder why the mythmaker resorts to myths when he has more sophisticated tools at hand, the answer is that, although he doubts whether his mythical argument can stand alone, he regards it as being more lucid and compelling than an argument from abstract principles.1

In the summer of 1555, by writ of Papal Bull, the ghetto of Rome came into being. Within less than half a decade, across the Mediterranean at the foot of the High Atlas Mountains, the Jews of Marrakesh met a fate not unlike that of their Italian co-religionists when they, too, were transferred to their own “city within a city.” Located where the Moroccan sultan's stables had previously stood, the new walled Jewish quarter of Marrakesh was in fact the second of its kind in Morocco, and like its predecessor in Fez it was called a mellah,2 a name that originally referred to the salty marsh area to which the Jews of the northern Moroccan capital had been transferred. The Roman ghetto had similarly appropriated its name from its predecessor, the Venetian foundry (getto or ghetto) where a policy of Jewish confinement was first put into official practice in Italy. The terms continued to follow parallel trajectories, moreover, with ghetto and mellah each coming to describe the generic Jewish quarter within its respective environment.

In contrast to what might be expected after the triumph of a colossal revolutionary process and the establishment of a state deriving its power mainly from a strong ideological drive, in Iran the development of socio-political thought did not end with the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Indeed, the post-revolutionary period has witnessed a proliferation of socio-political discourses articulated by groups and individuals inside and outside the country, notwithstanding censorship and attempts to control the flow of information by the government.1

This essay analyzes the organizational culture(s) of Egyptian public-sector firms. I accomplish this through an ethnography of two state-owned textile companies in Alexandria. I describe the cultures of these organizations in terms of hierarchy, accountability, trust, and authority relations and assess the effects of these features on the quality of working life and overall efficiency.1 What is it like to work in these companies? How is authority exercised, and what is the nature of relations between superiors and subordinates? What impact, if any, do the cultures of these firms have on performance, efficiency, and productivity?

This article reports an empirical investigation of the study of war and the military in Israel and offers some reflective thoughts on our findings. We explore the social and political conditions under which academic knowledge about “things military” in Israel has been, and is being, produced. By academic knowledge we mean the publicly available theories, methods, and findings produced in universities and research institutes. Concretely, we refer to the plethora of articles, books, and edited collections published over the past thirty years in the social sciences. We do not, however, deal with research in clinical psychology or psychiatry, or with strategic studies, international relations, and conventional military history, although these fields have been sources of a good deal of research in Israel. By “things military” we mean social and cultural concerns related to (and derived from) the armed forces, war, and provisions for “national security.” Thus, we are concerned with studies related to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as an institution that is characterized by certain professional and organizational features and that must constantly manage its relationship to a variety of social groups and representatives of the state. In a complementary manner, we refer to studies that explore the ways in which the state and society manage their relations with Israel's armed forces.

The concept of the “status quo”1 was introduced in 1852, when the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Mejid, in a futile attempt to avoid a war, issued a decree freezing the rights of worship and possession of the religious communities in the Holy Places of Christendom. The decree terminated the bloody rivalry between the Greek Orthodox patriarchate and the Roman Catholic church for predominance in the Christian sanctuaries and recognized the paramount rights of the Greek Orthodox church in the Holy Places affirmed since 1757.2 In 1853, the sultan issued another decree, which transferred the power of jurisdiction over the sanctuaries from the local officials in Palestine to the Sublime Porte. Subsequently, Article 62 of the Treaty of Berlin (1878) proclaimed the inviolability of the decree of 1852 and declared it the “Status Quo of the Holy Places.” The successive governments of Palestine, the British Mandate, and the State of Israel further maintained the regulations as set forth by the status quo of 1852.3

While contemporary Muslim countries are not exactly textbook democracies, the desire for (more) popular participation in the political decision-making process exists. With the current polarization of anything Western as bad and anything Islamic as good (one notices the opposite use of these adjectives by some Westerners), the odds are low that Western political systems will provide the vocabulary to articulate demands for popular participation. Many Muslims look to the concept of shūrā, which broadly means consultation, to address the problem. Shūrā is considered a truly Islamic principle because it is mentioned in the Qurءan, practiced by the Prophet Muhammad, and makes up part of classical Islamic thought. The Qurءanic and sunnaic references, however, are very general, and early Islamic history imbued the actual practice of consultation with the negative connotation of fitna, or civil unrest. Nevertheless, in the modern period, Muslim authors took renewed interest in the concept of shūrā to structure their political landscape.