The first periodical in Egypt to focus on women as both subject and audience, Al-Fatat (The Young Woman, 1892), heralded the founding by women of many periodicals for women in Egypt. The women's press emerged in a time of intense public debate concerning putative intersections of systemic gender relations and gender ideology with anti-imperialist nationalism: what would constitute “national” strength sufficient to assert, or force, an independent existence based on claims to autonomous nation-state status?1Women writing in the women's press, as well as in the mainstream—or “malestream”—press, shaped the debate over how gender did and should inflect social organization and institutional change.2 Equally, male intellectuals and politicians participated in a rhetoric of persuasion, edification, and ambition. When women and men wrote treatises on what was called the “woman question” (qadi¯yat al-mar[ham]a), articles in the women's press challenged, debated, and refined the points of these treatises. Writers approached that fraught “question” from another direction, too, establishing a thriving industry of conduct literature that fed on translations of European works as well as original works by Egyptian and other Arab writers. Books on how to behave as a proper father, a good mother, a fine son or daughter, or a responsible schoolgoer went through numerous printings for a reading public prepared by various rhetorics of nationalism, theology, and reform to bring this debate into everyday life by following the guides for behavior that such literature—including essays in the women's press—supplied.3

“Money was the life blood of Najaf.” Thus observed the Shi[ayn]i author, [ayn]Ali Khaqani.1The story of the Oudh Bequest, which channeled more than 6 million rupees from the Shi[ayn]i kingdom of Awadh2in India to the two Shi[ayn]i shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala[ham] in Iraq during the second half of the 19th century is a fine example of Khaqani's assessment. These [ayn]Ataba¯t-i [ayn]a¯liya¯t (“sublime thresholds”) were the most important centers of learning in Shi[ayn]ism during the 19th century. For this reason, a study of the bequest provides important insights into the internal workings of a leading community of ulama during a period of change, as well as into the role of European players in the life of such communities.

Fadwa Tuqan, Assia Djebar, and Latifa al-Zayyat are three Arab women who are well known for their literary and artistic creativity, as well as for their political activism. Each has written at least one autobiographical work charting her struggles in the personal, political, and literary arenas, and each has chosen to express these struggles in terms of finding a voice that resists silence but also acknowledges that silence is a form of resistance.1 In writing their autobiographical works, these women are interested in creating not simply a female autobiographical tradition but, rather, a tradition that specifically does credit to their need to authorize their voices without posing as authorities from above, to write narratives that are simultaneously antiauthoritarian and authoritative, and to do so by speaking for and on behalf of others without appropriating them or subsuming them into their own agendas. Their autobiographical works are thus marked, and ultimately enriched, by tension, hesitation, and anxiety, particularly regarding their own power and authority as authors. This hesitation enables them to express collective sorrows and dreams in this seemingly most individualistic of genres.2

The sensational nature of the Iranian press in the 1940s has been largely understood in political terms. In September 1941, occupying Allied armies forced Reza Shah Pahlavi (1879–1944, r. 1925–41) into exile, ending his tyrannical “twenty years” and unleashing a variety of political forces which vied with each other for public support in the press.3 The presence of Allied censors notwithstanding, so the argument goes, the Iranian press was momentarily free from effective government censorship—though not from the recurring cycle of censorship that has dominated scholarly interest in the Iranian press.4 But a closer look at the often violent and sexual political discourse in the Iranian press raises questions less about Iran's political history than about its cultural and economic history. Why was the content of the press so graphic in the 1940s? What economic and cultural trends sustained such content once it had been provoked by political events? How much did the overt sexuality of political discourse confirm or modify notions of gender in Iranian culture?

The 19 August 1953 toppling of Muhammad Musaddiq's government in Iran was an important historical event from various perspectives, many of which are being discussed by Middle East observers to this date. First, it was the first covert post-World War II operation by the U.S. government, in cooperation with Britain, to topple the constitutional government of a sovereign nation. Operation AJAX, as the coup d'état came to be called by the CIA, was implemented at the height of the Cold War, and as such was accompanied by many familiar justifications. The most important of these were the improbability of any resolution to the oil-nationalization crisis between Iran and Britain as long as Musaddiq remained in power and the communist threat posed by the Tudeh Party of Iran and its Soviet sponsor.1 The long-term consequence of this intervention can partially explain the 1979 revolution in Iran and the ongoing crisis in Iran–U.S. relations.

This study undertakes an examination of Lebanese women's fiction over the past forty years or so. For many women, the urban environment is an escape from the restrictive traditional community that is closely aligned with a rural mentality. Many of these writers tend to see the city in stark contrast to the country, which, in their eyes represents restraining cultural values. If in some cases the city and the country are represented as real, tangible places, the majority of women tend to view them as “states of mind and feeling”1 or as representations. Some female writers see the city and the village in ontological opposition between repression and freedom, backwardness and progress, and past and present—or, as Raymond Williams refers to it, “of consciousness with ignorance; of vitality with routine; of the present and actual with the past or the lost.”2 Nevertheless, it is clear that in many cases the city incorporates and embraces both the traditional and modern patterns, because “an old order, a ‘traditional' society, keeps appearing, reappearing, at bewilderingly various dates.”3 Far from viewing themselves as alienated and degraded beings in the corrupt and hellish city4 or the modern wasteland, women see the nurturing city as a symbol of well-being, independence, and freedom from shackles. Indeed, they become so immersed in city life that, for some of them, there is “little reality in any other mode of life.”5 The city gives them the opportunity to escape the narrow confines of home, family, and stifling traditions that have relegated them to a corner and associated them with a nostalgic past. Accordingly, for many of them, the city has become, as Williams puts it, “the physical embodiment of a decisive modern consciousness,”6 a place consistently in flux and motion7 where women attempt to keep the ever-haunting past at bay and reveal a thrust for change and for experience and knowledge that they try to replenish in the city.

Reports emanating from Yemen as early as the 1920s indicated that local Jews were subjected to a unique statute, known in Jewish sources as the “Orphans' Decree.” This law obligated the Yemeni (Zaydi) state to take custody of dhimmi children who had been orphaned, usually of both parents, and to raise them as Muslims. The statute, anchored in 18th-century Zaydi legal interpretations and put into practice at the end of that century, has no parallel in other countries.1 S. D. Goitein suggests that the legal basis for this religious interpretation rested on the hadith: “Every person is born to the natural religion [Islam], and only his parents make a Jew or a Christian out of him” (Muhammad al-Bukhari 82, 3).2

Kuwait, a small city-state on the Persian–Arabian Gulf, has undergone massive political, economic, and social development throughout the 20th century. In spite of this, Kuwaiti rulers continue to cherish what is perhaps an impossible dream: that Kuwait can be simultaneously a “developed” country and a “traditional” tribally organized social formation run by an autocratic ruler. This dream is echoed in equally ambivalent pronouncements and policies regarding women, not only by representatives of the state but also by Kuwaiti citizens. Should Kuwaiti women stand side by side with men in public life as half of a modern society, or should they be secluded, subjected by, and submissive to the men in their lives as local “tradition” demands? In this essay I argue that these two ambivalences are linked. Democratization of Kuwaiti political life has proceeded in fits and starts that parallel the uneven progress of democratization of gender relations in Kuwait. Perhaps in consequence, the politics of both kinds of democratization have become more closely linked.

The era culminating in World War I saw a transition from multinational empires to nation-states. Large empires such as the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman searched for ways to cope with the decline of their political control, while peoples in these empires shifted their political loyalties to nation-states. The Ottoman Empire offers a favorable canvas for studying new nationalisms that resulted in many successful and unsuccessful attempts to form nation-states. As an example of successful attempts, Arab nationalism has received the attention that it deserves in the field of Middle Eastern studies.1 Students have engaged in many complex debates on different aspects of Arab nationalism, enjoying a wealth of hard data. Studies on Kurdish nationalism, however, are still in their infancy. Only a very few scholars have addressed the issue in a scholarly manner.2 We still have an inadequate understanding of the nature of early Kurdish nationalism and its consequences for the Middle East in general and Turkish studies in particular. Partly because of the subject's political sensitivity, many scholars shy away from it. However, a consideration of Kurdish nationalism as an example of unsuccessful attempts to form a nation-state can contribute greatly to the study of nationalism in the Middle East.

October and November 1960 were two of the coldest months of the Cold War. Continuing tensions over Berlin and the nuclear balance were exacerbated by crises in Laos, Congo, and—for the first time—France's rebellious départements in Algeria. During Nikita Khrushchev's table-pounding visit to the United Nations, he embraced Belkacem Krim, the foreign minister of the Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne (GPRA). After mugging for the cameras at the Soviet estate in Glen Cove, New York, Khrushchev confirmed that this constituted de facto recognition of the provisional government and pledged all possible aid. Meanwhile, in Beijing, President Ferhat Abbas delivered the GPRA's first formal request for Chinese “volunteers.” U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked his National Security Council “whether such intervention would not mean war.” The council agreed that if communist regulars infiltrated Algeria, the United States would be bound by the North Atlantic Treaty to come to the aid of French President Charles de Gaulle and his beleaguered government. After six years of insurgency, Algeria appeared to be on the brink of becoming a Cold War battleground.1

This study aims to examine the way in which European writers of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries represented Ottoman government. The Ottoman Empire had a special place in European experience and thought. The Ottomans were geographically close to Western Europe, yet they were quite apart in culture and religion, a combination that triggered interest in Turkish affairs.1 Particularly important were political affairs. The Ottoman government inspired a variety of opinions among European travelers and thinkers. During the 18th century, the Ottomans lost their image as formidable and eventually ceased to provoke curiosity in the European public. They were no longer dreaded as the “public calamity”; nor were they greatly respected as the “most modern government” on earth. Rather, they were regarded as a dull and backward sort of people. From the 16th century to the 19th century, the European observers employed two similar, yet different, concepts to characterize the government of the Ottoman Empire. The concept of tyranny was widely used during the 16th and 17th centuries, whereas the concept of despotism was used to depict the regime of the Ottomans in the 18th century. The transition from the term “tyranny” to that of “despotism” in the 18th century indicates a radical change in the European images of the Ottoman Empire. Although both of these terms designate corrupt and perverse regimes in Western political thought, a distinction was made between tyranny and despotism, and it mattered crucially which term was applied to the Ottoman state. European observers of the empire gave special meanings to these key concepts over time. “Tyranny” allowed for both positive and negative features, whereas “despotism” had no redeeming features. Early modern Europeans emphasized both admirable and frightening aspects of Ottoman greatness. On the other hand, the concept of despotism was redefined as inherently Oriental in the 18th century and employed to depict the corruption and backwardness of the Ottoman government. This transformation was profoundly reflected in the beliefs of Europeans about the East. That is, 18th century thought on Ottoman politics contains a Eurocentric analysis of Oriental despotism that is absent from the discussions of Ottoman tyranny in earlier centuries.

From 1924 to 1928, authorities of the British Mandate in Transjordan expended considerable energy trying to prove that the extensive lands on the Transjordanian side of the Ghawr (Jordan River Valley) known as Ghawr Abi עUbayda were not waqf but mīrī lands, as several parties had claimed over the years.1 British authorities established both an investigative commission and a special court to rule on the question as part of their wider attempt to regulate land matters in the new Emirate of Transjordan. These legal remedies succeeded not because the British resorted to unilateral colonial fiat but because of their strict accordance with Ottoman law, to the detriment of local custom regarding land usage. By enforcing these laws through the decisions of the commission and the court, the British hoped to forestall the disposal of land for what they considered partisan political purposes, thus averting political unrest and a loss of revenue.

The literature on Jordan is awash in studies of the history, politics, and possible futures of the Hashemite family. In a polity so closely identified with its ruling dynasty, one would be surprised if this fixation did not prevail. More curious to the anthropologist is the extent to which the scholarly attention lavished on the Hashemites has centered on the rather obvious fact that they rule, but has given less concern to the fact that they rule as a family—that they express their dominance in a patriarchal rhetoric brimming with kinship metaphors, and that they preside over a body politic in which households and their influential heads are of far greater significance than electoral constituencies, public opinion, or (least of all) individual citizens and their rights. When King Hussein described his realm as “the big Jordanian family” (al-usra al-urduniyya al-kubra¯), he invoked an image of community (and authorized a style of political exchange) that made immediate sense to his subjects. In his final years of rule, Hussein artfully consolidated his role as national father figure. His heir, King Abdullah II, who was 37 years old when he inherited the throne in 1999, affects the “older brother” persona appropriate to his age. In announcing Hussein's death, Abdullah II relied heavily on the vocabulary of political kinship his father had standardized: “Hussein was a father, a brother, to each of you, the same as he was my father. . . . Today you are my brothers and sisters, and with you I find sympathy and condolences under God”1

The Price Revolution of the 16th century has been the subject of one of the most enduring debates in European historiography and, more recently, in the historiography of the world economy. That European prices, expressed in grams of silver, increased by more than 100 percent—and in some countries, by more than 200 percent—from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 17th century has been well established and broadly accepted. In countries that experienced currency debasements, overall inflation was proportionately higher, reaching, in some cases, 600 percent or more for the entire period.

Going back to the early beginnings of democracy in Jordan in the [1950s], the Jordanian people, particularly the youth and the activist forces, were very enthusiastic about political parties, despite the fact that the level of political awareness then was not as advanced as it is now. Conditions on the domestic, Pan-Arab, and international levels were encouraging. Pan-Arabism was on the rise. There were goals for the Arabs to achieve, and there was a consensus that it was feasible to achieve those goals. Political parties at that time had a vast popular base. They were large and effective due to the large-scale popular participation in these parties. The situation at present is the opposite. When political parties were born again, they looked as if they were parties in the stage of formation.

A columnist in a Turkish newspaper recently asked, “Will nothing really be the same again?”3 referring to the impact of the massive earthquake of 17 August 1999 on the Turkish psyche. The writer Murathan Mungan used a similar metaphor earlier in what seems today like a prophetic statement: “I think Turkey has really come to lean against the wall. There is nowhere to go; either the wall will crumble or it will be dismantled. If it crumbles, we will be crushed below, if it is dismantled maybe we will move to another space—or at least try to.”4

One of the most important lessons development agencies claim to have learned over the past decades is that the absence of local participation at various stages of project planning and implementation leads to what at best can be termed “inferior results.”1 The conclusion that community participation is necessary (if not sufficient) for project success has developed concomitantly with the belief in the halls of power that the state is not the ideal executor of a variety of tasks previously deemed its proper realm. Both of these changes in development thinking converged in practical terms beginning in the 1980s in the emergence of a greater stress on the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Not only were NGOs and other civil-society actors (including the private sector) seen as untainted by the rent-seeking behavior attributed to state bureaucracies; they were also seen as products of more local or community-based and -interested organizing, a critical vehicle for local participation that so many development projects had lacked. Some of this literature also regarded such institutions as the forerunners of and central to democratic transitions.2

This paper explores the utility of 19th- and 20th-century taxation and court records as tools for mapping the changing social topography of rural Morocco. Little serious work has been done with such records to date, and it is hoped that this paper will encourage more researchers to use this material.1 As a subset of the Moroccan official record, legal and tax records obviously have an epistemological character differing from that of private correspondence and even other administrative records. Yet in the post-modern era, it is obvious that this cannot be simply reduced to the official record providing us with truth while private correspondence is a mixture of fiction and possible truth. All sources need to be scrutinized both in the traditional ways of the historian and, more generally, as reflecting social forces conceived broadly.

This article attempts to make a contribution to the intellectual history of the early Turkish Republic through an examination of Kadro, a monthly journal of political, economic, and social ideas, which was published in Turkey between 1932 and 1934.1 The Kadro movement took its name from the journal Kadro; the journal aspired to fulfill two self-appointed tasks: to develop an ideological framework in which to interpret the Turkish revolution that had created the republican regime led by President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,2 and to suggest economic policies that, in accordance with this ideological framework, the regime should pursue in the future. Although Kadro clearly identified itself with the republican regime, and although its publication was sanctioned and encouraged by leaders of the Kemalist regime (the same political leadership that eventually forced Kadro to cease publication), it was not a simple emanation of the government or of the ruling Republican People's Party (RPP). Most of the journal's regular writers had “leftist” backgrounds that had, on occasion, brought them into collision with the republican authorities. Kadro's political loyalty to the regime was never in question, but within these limits, it exhibited a striking degree of intellectual independence.

Political Islam has gained heightened visibility in recent decades in Turkey. Large numbers of female students have begun to demonstrate their commitment by wearing the banned Islamic headdress on university campuses, and influential pro-Islamist TV channels have proliferated. This paper focuses on the Welfare (Refah) Party as the foremost institutional representative of political Islam in Turkey.