In this issue, we inaugurate a new front section, Quick Studies. Our intention is to expand the academic mission and international breadth of the journal by opening its pages to discussion of ongoing research in the field of Middle East studies and by inviting reflections on some of the critical questions in our field today.

“I have heard, Salim,” said my master, “that you are a good dancer and singer. I wish you to show my guests what you can do!”

In the year 1150 (1737–38) the recorder of the Prophet's Meccan biography by Veysi Üskübi, may God's mercy be upon him, the humble and deficient Defter Kethüdasi Mehmet ibn Mustafa Efendi, was by an imperial order with the army of the Bosnian province at the battle of Özü. On the 14th day of the month of Rebiülevvel of that year, which was a Saturday, the large ammunition store situated in the citadel of the city fortress was hit by a spark of fire and in an instant the citadel was turned upside down, and inside the fortress and on its walls many men, women, and children perished flying into the air and [scattering] on the ground. After this, the next day, on Sunday, all that was left of the army of the aforementioned province, the governor of the abovementioned fortress, his Excellency the Honorable Vizier Yahya Paşa, his household, the people of four Rumeli sancaks, five Janissary regiments from the imperial headquarters, and all of the garrison forces and its inhabitants, together with women and children, by the will of God Almighty all [fell] prisoner to the Muscovite infidel, most of them with their heads uncovered and barefooted…

Long appreciated for its combination of lyric charm and mordant wit, Ibn Shuhayd al-Andalusi's (992–1035) Risalat al-tawabiʿ wa-l-zawabiʿ (Epistle of Attendant Jinn and Whirling Demons), as I have argued recently, also offers a sophisticated treatise on poetic influence and inspiration. Composed around 1013–17, the epistle consists of the young poet's highly ironic and parodic defense against accusations of plagiarism leveled by one Abu Bakr ibn Hazm. The epistle, as edited by Butrus al-Bustani, is divided into an introduction and four chapters on the attendant jinn of poets, the attendant jinn of writers (kuttāb), the jinn of critics, and animal jinn. These are held together by the conceit of a visit by Ibn Shuhayd, conducted by his own attendant jinni (“poetic muse”), Zuhayr, to the Valley of the Jinn. During what I have termed his “initiatory journey,” Ibn Shuhayd encounters and tests himself against his major poetic and literary influences, attends a literary majlis, and finally is asked to serve as judge for the poetry of a group of asses and mules (presumably the jinn of his contemporaries/competitors). The journey, however parodic and humorous, provides a revealing allegory of the poet–littérateur's struggles with his poetic and literary forebears, critics, and competitors on the one hand and his individual poetic “genius” on the other hand.

“The wife: I bet your friends envy you your domestic happiness!” Reprinted with permission of Mohammed Elchamaa.

This cartoon comes from a 1948 edition of the Egyptian periodical Akhir Saʿa. I happened across it in Cairo, as part of some exploratory research into the fate of the female image of the Egyptian nation-state that was so central to the 1919 revolution. In previous inquiries, I had noticed that “lady Egypt” or “mother Egypt” or “Egypt as a woman,” to use historian Beth Baron's expression, lost pride of place in popular periodicals as 1919 gave way to nominal independence and nation building. By the late 1920s, cartoon and caricature space was more frequently dedicated to men engaged in laying the foundations of new political, legal, and educational systems, as well as erecting the buildings that would house them. Throughout the 1930s, political caricatures also frequently lampooned prominent Egyptian men for their behavior in the institutions that they had been active in creating. In the popular press, the reified female figure of the Egyptian nation was all but usurped by the men who built the state (and who seemed determined to keep Egyptian women out of the body politic).

After the cease-fire, I visited villages and towns in South Lebanon that suffered terrible destruction during the July 2006 war and that were facing the challenge of reconstruction. When I arrived to the border town of Bint Jbeil, I saw bulldozers demolishing beautiful, old stone structures. I stopped to inquire why; who authorized such actions and on what bases? With these questions, I approached the workers, the Council of the South (the government agency in charge of damage assessment and rubble removal), local residents, and the municipality. The answers varied: the structures were too damaged to save, we needed to widen the street, to build a better building, to erase the scars of war, to get full compensation, and so forth.

People mentioned in court records tend to be anonymous, but Ja'far Pasha is known from several different sources: his biography in al-Muhibbi's Khulasat al-athar shows him to be a man of learning and a successful military leader Dutch East India Company records mention him as Ottoman pasha in Yemen from 1607 to 1616 and Egyptian historical sources place him in 1617 or 1618 as governor of Egypt, where he died of the plague which bears his name (fasl Ja'far). The above court case sheds light on Ja'far Pasha's economic dealings, indicating that he was doing business in Egypt years before being appointed governor.

This luster bowl, made by the Persian potter Abu Zayd in February–March 1204 (Jumada II 600), exemplifies the broad range of questions that can be raised by Islamic art. The first question is that of provenance. The bowl appeared on the art market in 2001, unknown and undocumented but in virtually perfect condition. A battery of tests supports its authenticity. Jonathan Bloom and I included it in the exhibition Cosmophilia: Islamic Art from the David Collection, Copenhagen, which we organized for the McMullen Museum, Boston College, and which was on view until 20 May 2007 at the Smart Museum, University of Chicago. However, we are in the dark about where the bowl has been in the eight centuries since it was made.

This table shows the employment of Jordanians across industrial, educational, and occupational groups as a percentage of total employment in 2003. Note that the three major industries (in order) are public administration/social services; trade, including hotels and restaurants; and manufacturing. Almost 50 percent of Jordanian workers had less than a secondary education, and almost 50 percent of all employees fell into three occupational groups: service, shop, and market sales; craft and related trades; and elementary occupations.

The two photographs I am examining, which are taken from a series involving some sixty married couples from across Tunisia and over three generations (covering the period from the 1940s to the 1990s), concern the second generation of couples—those marrying in the 1960s and 1970s, when the marriage photo became a significant element in family practice. These portraits reveal new patterns of behavior, testifying to the impact of (1) discussions about a woman's right to choose her spouse that took place after the promulgation of the Personal Status Code in 1956, (2) mixed-gender education, and (3) campaigns denouncing the negative effects on new couples of expensive marriage ceremonies.

Under Ottoman rule, the relations between native Arabs and Jews in Palestine were based on understanding and respect, as was the case between Muslims and Christians. Shared enrolment of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian students in the same schools—either the Jewish Alliance Israelite schools (established in 1882) or in the nizamiyya, the Ottoman public schools first established by the Turkish law of 1869—promoted mutual understanding for a small elite. In contrast, the British Mandate policy in education played a major role in reshaping national, regional, and class and gender identities. It was through education that two separate national entities were developed, the urban/rural division was deepened, class boundaries were rendered unbridgable, and gender identities were molded to suit the British model.

There are forty single-member districts in Bahrain. If a candidate wins a majority of the total votes cast in the district in the first round, he or she is elected. If no candidate receives a majority, the top two vote-getters compete in a runoff election one week later. Political parties are banned, but political “associations” act as parties, supporting lists of candidates, coordinating campaign activity, and publishing platforms. Districts are configured to overrepresent the Sunni minority.

Ever since the great wave of European overseas colonization in the late 19th century, the notion of “imperialism” and the promotion of imperial projects has been a highly political one. Use of the term has been prompted for specific historical reasons and, usually, in response to debates which have arisen as a result of particular acts of imperial expansion. On some occasions, and generally when debates have been particularly intense, it has also encouraged the development of general theories designed to explain not just the drive for empire but also the dynamics of a world system in which an unequal distribution of economic and military power leads some nations to create empires based on the domination and control of others.

I consider it nontrivial that IJMES invites reflection on the question, “What is private in the Middle East?” without positioning “private” against “public.” Conceptually, a private–public polarity refers to a division of space that has become reified into a heuristic paradigm used to describe gendered social and cultural activities.

The short answer to the question as posed is, Yes, of course, 9/11 changed the field of Middle East studies. However, the next question we need to ask is, In what ways have the events of 9/11 (and all that they set in motion, in the United States and internationally, including the U.S. invasion of Iraq) actually affected our work as scholars, students, teachers, resource specialists, and so forth, whose primary focus is the Middle East and/or the Muslim world, as well as the institutions, networks, and field(s) with which we are engaged? Space limitations allow me to offer only a few brief thoughts.

The most obvious answer to this question would be to underline the huge impact of the Internet on research on the Middle East: the speed with which material is circulated among colleagues, reviewers, and editors; the increasing availability of documents and materials; the ease of access to scholarly work through online databases; the availability of scholarly forums (such as H-Net) for exchanging information and views; and a long list of other benefits. My own correspondence with a publisher and some journal editors in the past few months is a case in point: a seven-month strike declared by postal and other public-sector workers to protest the Palestinian Authority's nonpayment of salaries stopped all mail services to and from the occupied territories. Without the Internet (and private mail carriers) I certainly could not have published what I did manage to publish in these turbulent times. There are more substantive implications of Internet developments for scholars of the Middle East, and I would like to focus on two of them in the short space allowed here.

Given limits of time and space, I offer here an appraisal of what I see to be an important new trend: a number of scholars across disciplines and generations have taken what we have learned from the era of deconstructionist cultural analysis in the past twenty-five years and inaugurated an era of “reconstruction.” Some have moved beyond the “cultural turn” to consider how cultural forms of power interact with other forms of power—social, economic, political. They are finding new answers to the question, “How did colonialism matter?” Others have taken the next step, to reconstruct a new language of historical analysis free from Eurocentric assumptions of difference and superiority.

My thoughts on the Internet were recently jogged by an experience with a slightly older medium, namely, satellite television. In late March 2007 I attended the Third Annual Al-Jazeera Forum, in Doha. Notwithstanding the attendance of a few academics like me, the forum was largely a networking opportunity for professional journalists, just as MESA is for professional Middle East studies academics. However, unlike MESA, forum presenters, as well as the audience, were handpicked. Even the expenses of the attendees were subsidized (my hotel bill was paid by al-Jazeera). This inevitably made the event an exercise in open self-promotion for al-Jazeera.

Although it may be too early to determine whether the events of 9/11 will significantly transform key questions and analytic approaches driving research and teaching in the field of Middle East studies (MES), we can say with certainty that 9/11 has dramatically affected the political and institutional environments within which this research and teaching takes place in the United States. Thus, “impact” or “change” must be evaluated across three distinct yet interrelated arenas: (1) the quotidian environment in which scholars, teachers, and students conduct their activities; (2) the varied institutional architectures through which research and teaching on the Middle East are undertaken inside and outside the university; and (3) the long-term intellectual history of the field.

The most glaring aspect of America's failure at democratizing Iraq has been policymakers' inability to take local political culture and values into consideration. Democracy was understood to consist of such trappings as a well-drafted constitution, regular elections, and a vociferous parliament; it seems no thought was given to the influence of tribal affinities and networks or the implications of sectarian identity on politics. Constitutions, elections, and parliaments are important elements in democratic systems, but they do not in and of themselves lessen autocratic rule, as can be witnessed in many Middle Eastern countries. Something else in terms of political practice must exist for autocracy and despotism to be blunted. I argue here that attention should be given to private forms of political engagement that are rooted in tribal and Islamic norms and practices.