The current countries in the Middle East and North Africa were all formed, or transformed, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by processes of partitioning and territorialization propelled by European colonial expansion and local responses to those interventions. As the region’s political topography was remapped before and after the First World War, collective identities were activated, reimagined, and mobilized within and across these newly delineated units. From Northern Africa to the Iranian plateau, an array of nationalisms emerged over the course of this transformation, pairing notions of peoplehood and political sovereignty in new frameworks of identity. For the Middle East and North Africa, the related questions “what is a nation?” and “when is the nation?” are best answered by focusing on a third question: how has the nation (and nationalism) worked in the region over the past two centuries?

The period after Augustine saw no decline in catechesis. The writings associated with Quodvultdeus and several other anonymous sermons from North Africa in this period attest to the ongoing vibrancy of catechesis. In particular, these sermons highlight the way in which knowing God was understood in an apocalyptic age, when new threats from Vandal invasions and heretical resurgences destabilized many aspects of social life.

This chapter lays out the broad contours of the history of North African migrants to Ottoman Cairo from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It focuses its attention on both Ibadis and non-Ibadis from the Maghrib residing in Egypt to paint a picture of the world they inhabited. More precisely, it focuses on the Tulun district of the city of Cairo, where the Buffalo Agency was located. Ibadis and other Maghribis bought and sold property in the neighborhood, went shopping in its markets, prayed in its mosque, welcomed friends and family coming from their homeland, and said goodbye to those departing for other Ottoman cities such as Izmir, Istanbul, and Mecca. In drawing attention to these aspects of everyday life, the chapter sheds light on Ibadi and Maghribi communal identity, their remarkably expansive networks in the Mediterranean, their professional and religious lives as Ottomans, and their relationship to the Ottoman government as it changed over these centuries.

Shari’a jurisdiction among the Palestinian minority in Israel is one of long standing. Its goes back to the Ottoman millet system. However, in light of the geo-constitutional context of the state of Israel as a Jewish nation state, sustaining Shari’a jurisdiction was subjected to various policies emanating from state institutions as well as Palestinian internal organizations. To understand this reality, it is essential to understand not only the historical origins of this jurisdictional authority but the constitutional and political forces that define Israel of today.

The Lebanese family law system characterized by legal and judicial pluralism controls major aspects of a woman’s rights such as marital, child custody and social rights. While issues of personal status are exclusively left to religious courts and sectarian legislation, it is undeniable that women in Lebanon, are left at the whim of not only an entrenched religious establishment but also cultural norms of patriarchy. Historical practices of Islamic family law issues find little premise in shari’a but rather in the interpretation and implementation thereof. Thus, opening the door to activism and Islamic jurisprudential approach could bring change on religiously delicate issues. In pursuit of gender equality, efforts to reform laws and break the status quo have in certain instances proved successful, yet the transition to a secular personal status law system at the image of Lebanon’s progressive civil society, is far from being reached.

Achieving alterations in the status of women’s rights is a difficult long-term process around the world. A key area remains personal status or family law. Marriage, divorce, and child custody remain at the core of many women’s existence, and influence possibilities in education, employment, and politics as well. The Middle East is an area where personal status law is strongly based on religious practices in most countries. This book queries what is the status of family law in selected nations in the region affected by the Arab Spring 2010–-011. This book covers Muslim family law in the following countries: Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Iraq, ebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and Qatar. It does not appear that major change in personal status has occurred in most countries. This introduction first highlights changes that occurred during the Arab Spring especially in certain countries, and the status of women at that time. Then, it provides an overview of the chapters featured. The conclusion provides some lessons learned.

The question as to whether a genocide took place in nineteenth-century Algeria has always been deeply contentious in western academic scholarship. By contrast, it has tended to be accepted as a given in many Algerian accounts of the past, both as expressed in conversation and in published works. This divergence has arguably been grounded in the manner in which the prevailing means of framing and defining genocide varied wildly between these two literatures. Curiously, Algerian texts, even when they are 'popular' rather than 'academic' accounts lie closer to the spirit and terms of reference of the scholarly field of Genocide Studies. Looked at comparatively, the violence of imperial Algeria shares remarkable affinities with both the exterminatory impulses and outcomes of other settler colonies, as well as other instances of European incursions into the Arabo-Islamic world, especially in Algeria's north African neighbours Morocco and Tunisia, Mauritania and Libya. Lemkin's diagnostics of genocide certainly seem to map onto the organised system of massacres perpetrated in Algeria, the general desire to cause harm to 'recalcitrant' groups en masse, the belief in the merits of a Maghrebi tabula rasa, and the 'slow violence' of the destruction of groups, communities and identities.

This chapter demonstrates the entrenchment of the dominant image of France as weak and poised to tip into revolution. Tensions with the State Department and between Secretary of State James Byrnes and President Harry Truman, the influence of Admiral William Leahy over the intelligence process, and Truman’s preference for military and current intelligence over more comprehensive analyses served to buttress alarmist assessments and legitimized a harder line, even as analysts in the nascent Central Intelligence Group began to question some of the more ominous reporting. In France, anti-communist elements encouraged American attention and aid by warning of secret communist plots involving weapons drops, arms caches, and covert preparations for insurrection, and they themselves as the resistance to these communist plots, willing to act once they received American assistance. Surprisingly, they also advocated for direct American intervention in French affairs, not only in shaping the electoral landscape but also in reestablishing military bases inside France. Meanwhile, other national intelligence services, in their exchanges with US intelligence, also sounded the alarm about communist activity in southern France and questioned the legitimacy and efficacy of the French government. These contacts only reinforced the American belief that France was a weak and unreliable ally.

This chapter shifts the view from the metropole to overseas France. It shows how French officials focused on restoring their empire in the immediate postwar era. The empire was crucial to France’s quest to regain its status as a Great Power; it was also a salve for domestic unrest. The empire provided raw materials and markets crucial to recovery; it also gave a struggling French government a luster of strength. Agitation in North Africa and Indochina threatened to undermine this enterprise. As in the metropole, French officials abroad sought to outmaneuver and delegitimize rivals who threatened their authority through their contacts with U.S. intelligence. They began to tie nationalist agitation in North Africa and Indochina to local communist action and PCF activity inside France. In North Africa, they also traced an apparent evolution in local communist rhetoric from criticism of nationalist activity, to collusion aiming for electoral gains, to support for independence by the end of 1945. And in Indochina, French officials employed the same methods used to discredit de Gaulle’s government in 1944 and 1945. In the months after the war, it also became a crucial component of the basic formula they used to influence American policy.

This chapter details the cracks in the consensus that began to emerge as tension boiled over in France with the expulsion of the PCF from the governing coalition and the communist-directed strikes that paralyzed the nation at the end of the year. Italian, Spanish and French intelligence, US embassy officials in Paris, U.S. military intelligence, and Central Intelligence Group current intelligence reports kept up the drumbeat, warning of growing anti-Americanism, communist power grabs and the PCF’s role in a larger, global communist conspiracy. Their analysis formed the core of the intelligence sent to President Truman and his senior advisors. However darkly uniform the analysis of the preceding year had been, some French officials, experts in the Office of Intelligence and Research (OIR) and a few mid-level analysts in the CIA expressed growing concern about the type and quality of intelligence. OIR analysts who complained that some CIA officials failed to account for French agency raised one of the most serious shortcomings of American analysis. Beyond their entreaties for American aid, French sources also played a role in the development of U.S. interference in France and its pro-colonial turn.

This chapter depicts France on the eve of Liberation as various factions jockeyed for legitimacy and rightful claim to lead France once Paris was free again. It reveals a debate within US government circles about the accuracy of the entrenched image of France at the onset of the Cold War as decadent and teetering toward revolution. In exchanges with the White House, State Department and military intelligence, right-leaning French sources, including familiar military, intelligence, political and industrial figures, bolstered this view. French contacts in the Resistance meanwhile shaped Office of Strategic Services analysis that France was a strong, worthy ally. Thus France became a contested idea with warring factions in both capitals, as well as the far reaches of the French empire, seeking to influence US policy.

The conclusion synthesizes and reflects upon the case studies and comparative and theoretical contributions in the book. The cases are organized around three categories: first, relatively conventional decentralization initiatives in which reforms were adopted to improve governance; second, contexts in which decentralization has been contemplated as a framework for self-determination for the region’s stateless communities; and finally, decentralization initiatives undertaken in the shadow of conflict and state fragmentation. This concluding chapter develops theoretical insights drawn from the rich terrain for qualitative comparison across these three contexts. It offers reflections on key characteristics of the shared regional context and a typology of factors driving decentralization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It argues that an important contribution of the volume lies in identifying a broader array of motivations for, and actors driving, decentralization than currently reflected in the scholarly literature and in parsing the implications for the institutional design of decentralized government. The chapter concludes by distilling patterns from the cases to identify distinct trajectories of decentralization that are evidenced in the MENA region and their entailments.

The chapter discusses contact-induced phenomena, the models used in linguistics to represent processes of diffusion, and the principles that govern them. It explains several cases of diffusion across language barriers, borrowing and substrate effects, dialect contact, and new-dialect formation.