Upon arrival at the Qasr al-ʿAyni Hospital in Cairo in 1908, a woman from a village in Qena province in Upper Egypt related her harrowing medical saga. It began when she developed a urinary fistula (nāsur bawlī) due to prolonged labor (a urinary fistula causes urine to leak from the bladder into the vagina, resulting in deep discomfort and social ostracism of those afflicted). She had gone to a hospital in the city of Qena, capital of the province with the same name, but medical officers there sent her to Asyut. There, in the government hospital, she underwent three operations without success, whereupon doctors instructed her to go to Qasr al-ʿAyni Hospital in Cairo to see Dr. Nagib Mahfuz (1882–1974), who had developed a reputation for his surgical prowess in treating fistulas. The woman from Qena traveled by foot, begging along the way, until, exhausted, she reached the city of Minya, halfway between Asyut and Bani Suwayf. There she was sent once again to the government hospital, examined, and once again told to go to Qasr al-ʿAyni.

The “eshiret” (‘eşîret in the romanized Kurmanji Kurdish alphabet) is a highly variable and situated concept and social and political entity in Kurdistan, the homeland of ethnic Kurdish people. This essay is based on regular ethnographic fieldwork I have been conducting in part of Kurdistan, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. My first research stint was in the mid-1990s, and I was there most recently in 2016. During the early period of my research, I had a great deal of contact with people in nonurban settings for whom an eshiret may be an important social category and contributor to individual identity.

Ego-documents let us hear the voices of those who have been little heard in historiography. Such documents, especially when narrative in nature, provide insight into historical events and periods by illustrating how individuals—in correspondence with their own (in)actions, (in)decisions, and (mis)convictions as well as emotions, fears, aspirations, and frustrations—experienced and perceived these historical phenomena from a contemporary personal viewpoint. Since the revival of narrative historiography in the 1980s, partly in response to the Annales school, such documents have been increasingly recognized and employed as important historical sources. Nonetheless, the terminology for designating the generic nature and encompassing the diversity of such sources, as well as the methodology for historicizing them, remain under debate.

What does a casual confrontation in a rundown shack between a landlady and her factory-worker tenant tell us about the history of gender and class relations in modern Egypt? Could a lost watch in a red-light district in the middle of the Nile Delta complicate our understanding of the history of sexuality and urbanization? Can an unexpectedly intimate embrace on a sleeping mat illuminate a link in the history of class, gender, and urbanization in modern Egypt?

The continued use of the term “tribe” to describe groups with segmentary organization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has long been recognized as problematic, albeit without viable alternative English translations of the local terms: qabīla, ‘ashīra, sha‘b, ‘ilt, and others. Yet the equally problematic but enduring uncritical acceptance of genealogical classification of MENA's tribes leads to fundamental misunderstandings of the basic principles of tribal organization as well as the multiple roles of kinship in the region. This propensity is not only misleading but is loaded with social evolutionary assumptions about presumed “stages of development” that hinder scholarship on tribes and have a negative impact on international policy toward countries like Yemen with significant self-identified tribal populations. Key to this essay is the wide diversity and flexibility in the terminology applied to tribal segments and in the sizes of segments.

“Muslims were not the first in the Near East to interpret dreams. This type of divination had a long history, and Muslims were not ignorant of that history.” The interest of early Arab Islamic cultures in dreams can be proved by the vast literature on dreams and their interpretation as well as dream accounts written in diverse historical texts. The Ottoman Empire was no different in that it also shared this culture of dream interpretation and narration. Unlike past scholarship that ignored the significance of dreams, the number of studies addressing the subject has increased in the recent decades, thanks to the growing tendency of scholars to see dreams as potential sources for cultural history. However, as Peter Burke has stated, scholars and historians in particular must bear in mind the fact that “they do not have access to the dream itself but at best to a written record, modified by the preconscious or conscious mind in the course of recollection and writing.” Historians must be aware of the fact that dream accounts might be recorded by dreamers who recounted how they wanted to remember them. The “reality” of the dream, in a sense, may be distorted. However, dream accounts, distorted or not, can provide a ground for historical analysis because they may reveal the most intimate sentiments, aspirations, and anxieties of the dreamer. Such self-narratives can provide the historian with information necessary to map the mindset of a historical personage, because “such ‘secondary elaboration’ probably reveals the character and problems of the dreamer as clearly as the dream itself does.” This paper focuses on a sampling of dreams related in an 18th-century Ottoman self-narrative to provide insight into the life and mind of an Ottoman governor. I will try to demonstrate how the author of the narrative made meaning of those dreams and revealed his aspirations.

There is a short answer to the question that has been posed to the participants in this roundtable. Tribes have a great deal of currency in modern Yemen because they provide an effective means to govern and protect local society. Tribalism is a deep pool of widely accepted customary practices in Yemen that people draw upon to provide security, manage agricultural resources (Yemen's tribespeople are mostly settled agriculturalists), and resolve local disputes.

A resolute modernist and socialist, Aziz Nesin (1915–95) was definitely an author of the republican period. Born Mehmet Nusret to poor parents, both migrants to Istanbul from the Black Sea coast, he adopted Nesin as his legal surname when surnames became obligatory in 1934. By the 1950s, his satirical short stories and plays had made him famous, but he faced political difficulties for much of his life; likely, it did not endear him to the authorities that he used his experiences with the police as inexhaustible material for his stories.

Under a pseudonym in December 2011, I published an article titled “al-Jaysh wa-l-Iqtisad fi Barr Misr” (The Army and the Economy in Egypt) in Jadaliyya. I wrote it after months of participating in numerous protests in Cairo against the government of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), which took power upon President Hosni Mubarak's abdication in February 2011, and of searching fervidly for the political sources that had allowed the military to prevail over civilian forces. In addition to the tanks and fighter jets, I found some of these sources hidden in a gigantic business empire that the military had clandestinely developed for years. In early 2012 the editor of an online edition of a widely read Egyptian newspaper, a revolutionary female journalist who would later be arrested and detained, invited me to write a series of articles on this business empire, this time using my real name. The first work in decades to be published on this taboo topic, this became the foundation for my later book-length study. As a scholar, this was my humble contribution to an ongoing revolution.

International media outlets have covered the news of Syrian tribes since the beginning of the protest movement that erupted in the country in 2011. This started with the “Friday of Tribes,” when Syrian tribes participating in protests against the Syrian regime in the Syrian city of Dar‘a began chanting “faz‘a” (chanting for support), which meant that they were seeking solidarity from other tribes for defense against the regime's aggression. As the Syrian uprising turned into a civil war that involved many players, some media outlets focused on the scenes of tribal leaders pledging allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), or of others being summoned to Geneva, Switzerland, to hold talks with Western powers about the possibility of mobilizing against ISIS militants. One could only wonder exactly why tribal loyalties continued to play such a significant role in the everyday events of the Syrian civil war when many civil society advocates had argued that tribal affiliation in Syria had diminished.

Literature on tribes in Iraq is scant and often falls prey to simplistic binary approaches to state-society relations. Scholars of legal pluralism provide tools to conceptualize interrelations between adjacent normative fields. Several legal specialists have talked about “a thin form of cooperation” between tribal “private orders” and the Iraqi state. By the same token, many scholars presuppose that the capacity of the tribes and the state to mediate and settle feuds covary in opposite directions and are correlated with the strength of state institutions (tribes step in to fill a vacuum during times of state weakness). However, careful examination of Iraqi penal legislation and its implementation in tribal areas invalidates this stereotypical paradigm. Already in her seminal 1973 article, Sally Moore drew the attention of scholars of legal pluralism to the idea that legal orders should be approached as partially discrete, overlapping social fields. The various arenas intersect and create meaning for each other.