Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi, the celebrated saint of Central Asia who lived most likely in the late 12th century, is perhaps best known as a Sufi shaykh and (no doubt erroneously) as a mystical poet; his shrine in the town now known as Turkistan, in southern Kazakhstan, has been an important religious center in Central Asia at least since the monumental mausoleum that still stands was built, by order of Timur, at the end of the 14th century. While Yasavi's shrine, owing to the predilections of Soviet scholarship, was extensively studied by architectural historians and archeologists, its role in social and religious history has received scant attention; at the same time, Ahmad Yasavi's legacy as a Sufi shaykh has itself been the subject of considerable misunderstanding, resulting from two related tendencies in past scholarship: to approach the Yasavi tradition as little more than a sideline to the historically dominant Naqshbandiyya, and to regard it as a phenomenon definable in “ethnic” terms, as limited to an exclusively Turkic environment. Even less well known in the West, however, is one aspect of Ahmad Yasavi's legacy that is of increasing significance in contemporary Central Asia, as the region's religious heritage is recovered and redefined in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse—namely, the distinctive familial communities that define themselves in terms of descent from Yasavi's family, and have historically claimed specific prerogatives associated with Yasavi's shrine.

In 1999, Sudan's Arabic periodical press observes its hundredth anniversary. A century before, and one year after the collapse of the Mahdist state (1881–98), the Britishdominated “Anglo-Egyptian“ regime (1898–1956) launched an official Arabic-English gazette. Four years later, Lebanese journalists founded the region's first independent Arabic newspaper, catering to an audience of Egyptians and Lebanese employed by the new government. These expatriates sparked an interest in journalism among educated Northern Sudanese men, who within a few years of the newspaper's debut were avidly subscribing and contributing to journals.

The 1930s are generally represented as a decade of crisis in Egypt's liberal experiment. In this conventional interpretation, a clear and acute expression of the crisis can be found in the intellectual discourse. The transition of Egyptian intellectuals to the large-scale production of Islamic literature (islāmiyyāt), books and texts dealing with classical Islamic themes and heroes, particularly biographies of the Prophet and al-Khulafā⊂ al-Rāshidün, is presented as “the crisis of orientation.” This intellectual crisis is depicted as a general abandonment of the Western modernist project by intellectuals who, until that time, had advocated a progressive, rational, and liberal orientation and had assumed that the adoption of European ideas, values, and practices en masse was essential for the modernization of Egypt and its formation into a modern nation-state. Now, in the early 1930s, by enthusiastically embracing Islamic themes, the intellectuals were carrying out a “complete retreat on all these fronts.”

In June 1937, David Ben-Gurion explained to one of the leaders of American Zionism why he thought it was right to divide Jerusalem: “England (and we) need control over the holy places—that is, the Old City. [But] ruling over Rehavia [a neighborhood in the city's western part] adds nothing [to Britain], whereas for the Jews, the millions of the Jews who do not know the difference between the Sharon and the [Jezre'el] Valley [or the difference between Rehavia and the Old City] … —the name Jerusalem means everything.”

An account already exists between us and the Arab world: the account of the compensation that accrues to the Arabs who left the territory of Israel and abandoned their property … The act that has now been perpetrated by the Kingdom of Iraq … forces us to link the two accounts … We will take into account the value of the Jewish property that has been frozen in Iraq when calculating the compensation that we have undertaken to pay the Arabs who abandoned property in Israel.

Preventing the development of an ethnic Kurdish cultural and political movement has been a priority of the Turkish state since the Kurdish-led Shaykh Said Rebellion of 1925.' Nevertheless, beginning around 1959 this effort was steadily if slowly undermined, and events of the past ten years suggest that it has indeed failed. Not only have Kurdish activists gained some measure of international recognition for themselves and for the concept of Kurdish ethnic rights,2 but promoting the notion of specifically Kurdish cultural rights has almost become a standard litany for a wide array of Turkish civic and state actors, from Islamist political parties to business organizations, human-rights groups, prime ministers, and mainstream newspaper columnists. Although the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its insurgency against Turkey have claimed a great deal of academic and popular attention, it is these diffuse but public re-considerations of minority rights taking place within legitimate Turkish institutions have contributed the most to the sense that past policies of coping with the “Kurdish reality” are ultimately unsustainable, and that it may be difficult, if not impossible, to return to the climate of earlier years, when discussions of ethnic difference were suppressed, limited to the private realm, or confined to the fringes of radical politics.