Roughly around the end of the 7th century, a distinct genre of Islamic literature began to develop under the rubric fadāʾil (“virtues” or “excellences”) that praised the merits, for example, of reciting the Qurʾan, of the Companions of the Prophet, of performing religious duties such as hajj and jihad, and of sacred cities such as Jerusalem. The fadāʾil literature initially was a part of the burgeoning hadith corpus, and the fadāʾ-Qurʾ an traditions appear to be the oldest strand. A variant term for this type of tradition, especially with regard to the Companions of the Prophet, is manāqib (and less frequently, khasāʾ is). A survey of this kind of “praise” literature indicates that the terms manāqib and fadaāʾil could be used fairly interchangeably.

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.

The meaning and significance of accusations of heresy are difficult to ascertain, regardless of the religious setting or historical milieu in which they appear. Scholars studying medieval European religious history have described heresy as opposition to the Christian church's doctrinal authority, emphasizing that heretics were not only religious but also political dissenters. They questioned church doctrine per se, but also, perhaps more significantly, challenged the church's authority to determine doctrine. In early Islamic history, concepts of heresy and orthodoxy are somewhat more difficult to define. After the Rashidun, there was no dominant religious voice in the community. Instead, a variety of opposing parties struggled for the right to define doctrine. In such circumstances, there could be no orthodoxy, since none had sufficient moral authority or coercive power to impose their views to the exclusion of all others. Consequently, there could be no heresy either, because heretics are simply those whom the dominant religious authority deems to be outside the bounds of orthodoxy. Only after proponents of a particular set of views gained sufficient power to impose their views on others could heterodoxy become heresy.

It would not have been wrong to argue twenty years ago that a united Arab economy would most likely be represented by the economies of Algeria and Iraq. Such an economy would have been characterized as having a promising industrial base, a viable agriculture, and a wealth of oil and mineral resources. From today';s viewpoint, of course, choosing these two countries could not have been more unfortunate. Algeria is in a state of siege that is keeping its economy hostage to political-military considerations, and Iraq's economy, after two wars and an embargo, is in a state of meltdown, to say the least. As a result, today's unqualified image of the Arab economy in general is that of wasted oil wealth, poverty, and political instability.

In his provocative essay Knowledge and Politics, Harvard Law School professor Roberto Unger undertook what has since become a familiar critique of the contemporary social and political order. Beginning with the main postulates of Enlightenment epistemology, Unger contended that our acceptance of “liberal philosophy” has divided us, as moral beings, between the private world of value and desire and the public world of rules and reason. Since, moreover, reason functions as the medium of public (and ostensibly egalitarian) discourse, its inevitable exaltation over desire threatens, where it does not undermine, our sense of self and personality. Modern man, according to Unger, is inextricably ensconced between the irreconcilable poles of individuality and citizenship. From religious fundamentalism to Afro-centrism, from classical and radical feminism to multi-culturalism, modernity is evolving into an endless concatenation of reactions against the threat of domination that lurks beneath the demand to justify personal values and predilections through the impersonal language of reason, a medium over which some of us possess greater mastery than others, even if, as moderns (or perhaps post-moderns) we recognize that reason is not autonomous but can operate only in the interest of values already present.

The causes for the mahdi's revolt in Sudan have been fully studied by modern historians and point to economic, social, religious, and administrative short-comings of the sixty-year Turco-Egyptian domination there. As for the timing, one must look attwo factors that together had a decisive influence. First, Egypt's financial difficulties subjected it to increasing European control and, consequently, to the deposition of the Khedive Ismaʿcil in June 1879 and the appointment to the throne of his son Tawfiq, a puppet of the great European powers, thus damaging the prestige of Muhammad ʿAli's dynasty. Further, Cairo was preoccupied throughout 1880–82 by a confrontation between the government and the nationalist movement of the native Egyptian officers in the army, led by Ahmad ʿUrabi, resulting among other things in the lack of a clear policy as regards Sudan. Second, there was the resignation in January 1880 of Colonel Charles Gordon, the governor-general of Sudan, who enjoyed wide political and economic autonomy, and the appointment of Muhammad Raʿuf Pasha, who was subordinated directly to the government in Cairo, as his successor in Khartoum. While Gordon, who had an energetic, enterprising, and authoritative personality, left Sudan in the midst of reforms in almost all fields, Muhammad Raʾuf Pasha had a different nature altogether. He was a mild and gentle ruler whose authority was narrowed by Cairo, where the political state of affairs was turning into chaos.

Scholars have long noted that the Prophet Muhammad assumed increasing importance in Sufi thought and practice over the centuries. For Sufis, belief in Muhammad's perfection often went beyond the standard affirmation of his immunity from error, and sometimes went so far as the assertions of the Spanish Arab Qadi ʿIyad (d. 1149/50) that Muhammad had assumed all the qualities embodied in the Ninety-nine Beautiful Names of God. Belief in Muhammad as a primordial cosmic light of divine origin is documented as early as the 8th to 9th centuries, and reached its fullest exposition in the works of Ibn ʿArabi (1165-1240) and his successors. Popular devotion to the Prophet in the form of poetry in his honor and celebrations of his birthday is documented at least as early as the 13th century.

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.”

A vast literature has been produced since the 1980s on the emergence of Islamist movements in the Middle East. This literature offers different rationales for the emergence of new kinds of foes to the political regimes of the region. Filling the void left by the leftist opposition, the Islamist militants appeared around the 1970s as new political actors. They were expected neither by the state elites, which had initiated earlier modernizing political and social reforms, nor by political scientists who based their research on modernization-theory hypotheses. The former thought that their reform policies toward the religious institution would reinforce their control of the religious sphere, and the latter expected that secularization would accompany the modernization of society. The surprise brought by this new political phenomenon pushed observers to focus mainly on the Islamists and to overlook the role of the ulema, the specialists of the Islamic law, who were considered entirely submitted to the state.

The following study is aimed at describing social, political, and religious aspects of Mamluk society in the context of a political disturbance in Damascus in 1386. It is mainly based on historiographical and prosopographical evidence. Readers who are familiar with medieval Islamic chronicles and biographical dictionaries will know that these sources do not provide satisfactory answers to all the questions concerning the socio-political structure of Islamic societies as raised by modern scholarship. Nevertheless, the information collected in the course of our examination will permit us to draw conclusions concerning three major issues of Mamluk and Islamic history, respectively:

Diplomatic relations between Egypt and the USSR were established in August 1943. The motives behind the Egyptian government's decision to take this step have so far remained obscure. In fact, this subject has not yet been probed thoroughly or systematically and has not been given appropriate attention by either Soviet or Middle Eastern research. Studies dealing with Soviet-Egyptian relations or with Soviet policy toward the Middle East tend to allude only briefly to the establishment of diplomatic relations between Cairo and Moscow in 1943. The explanation for this lack of interest is probably the widespread belief among scholars that Soviet interests and political activity in the Middle East during the Stalinist period were marginal, focusing mainly on nurturing local communist parties. These studies have held that a full-fledged Middle Eastern policy crystallized gradually only after Stalin's death in March 1953.

The medieval Arabic cartography of Africa outlined a paradoxical continent of facts, myth, and mystery. Ever since the great geographers such as al-Idrisi, al-ʿUmari, al-Masʿudi, and Ibn Battuta traveled to and wrote about Africa, the map of Black Africa became a combination of mystical and empirical knowledge, the result of, in the words of Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias, “the interplay of the ideological and the cognitive.” These kinds of maps were very illustrative of certain classificatory categories in which Africans in general were known, and where cultural boundaries were drawn between more specific areas, such as Egypt and neighboring African kingdoms. Merchants and traders also contributed to the mapping of the frontier to Egypt's uppermost south, the vast territory known as bilāad al-sūdān.

Three years ago, the film Nasser 56 (1996), from Muhammad Fadil, a dramatic reenactment of the Suez crisis, set unprecedented attendance records in Egypt. Opening at the end of another disappointing year marked by a steady decline in studio film production and a dearth of high-quality offerings—and held back from public screening a full year by wavering government support—the film breathed new life into the movie industry and precipitated a national discussion about the legacy of Gamal Abdel Nasser. The film has come and gone from Cairo theaters (although screenings abroad continue), but Nasser 56 will remain a historic film. In dramatic fashion, it broke a long-accepted taboo against cinematic depiction of modern political leaders. It is also the first serious attempt at film biography by an Egyptian filmmaker in thirty years.

In 1933, the Urdu and Persian poet Muhammad Iqbal (1873–1938) became the first Muslim to worship in the mosque of Cordoba since its conversion into a cathedral after the Moors were expelled from Spain in 1492. Iqbal had gone to London as a delegate to the third roundtable conference on the political future of India. On his return, he was invited to lecture in Madrid by the Orientalist Asin Palacios, and took the opportunity to visit the monument. Dramatizing the symbolic significance of his visit to the mosque, Iqbal swooned upon entering and uttered verses that presumably came to be included in his celebrated Urdu poem “Masjid-i Qurtubah”. Some years before, in 1919, the Egyptian Arabic poet Ahmad Shawqi (1868–1932) ended his five-year exile in Spain with a similar visit to the Andalusian monuments, albeit with less dramatic fanfare. Nevertheless, Shawqi as well was accompanied by his muse. In the introduction to his own famous poem about Islamic Spain, the “Siniyyah”, Shawqi recounts how the embryonic verses of this poem came to him as he toured the mosque and the Alhambra of Granada.

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.”