In the decade and a half since economic liberalization began in Jordan, a little noticed but large-scale organizing trend has taken over the formal provision of social welfare, redefining the institutional conception of familial identity in the process. For over one third of the population, kin solidarities have been reorganized, formalized, and registered as nongovernmental organizations in an attempt to cope with the removal of basic social provisioning by the state. Although kinship clearly has been a major element in Jordan's history, the present phenomena alter traditional familial institutions, change kin lineages, and institutionalize the economic salience of family relations. In turn, the relationship of the populace to the state has changed, marginalizing previously regime-supporting groups and facilitating the implementation of economic neoliberalism without significant protest. Repackaged as charitable elements of civil society, these family associations are sanctioned and encouraged by the state and international community. Although they are not regime creations, family associations reinforce the Jordanian regime's efforts at political deliberalization. The new elites who head the organizations have been placated through indirect incorporation into the regime; they now wield significant economic power over fellow kin and have enhanced social status backed by the new group. Furthermore, the trend mainly consists of families without immediate ambitions of entering national politics. These are not the traditional elite families.

Travelers to Iran in the 19th century often decried the startling rate of infant mortality. Writing in 1856, Lady Mary Sheil, wife of the British envoy to Persia, Sir Justin Sheil, remarked that “the mortality among children is immense, owing to neglect, ignorance, and laziness.” Citing the Shah's French physician, Sheil continued: “Dr. Cloquet … expressed to me his conviction that not above three children in ten outlived their third year.” Sheil faulted the local culture of child rearing, including women as the traditional caretakers of children, for this deplorable condition. She described a society in which fairly affluent mothers apparently disliked nursing infants and one that purportedly allowed “nurses” to calm children with bits of opium. Nearly four decades later, the British official George Nathaniel Curzon documented other scenarios to explain the high mortality of women and children. Upon visiting Iran in 1892, Curzon cited a report by the Austrian physician Jakob Polak that one of the “main causes of the decline of population” in Iran was related to the “unfavourable position of women, including the facility of divorce, early marriage, and premature age, the length of the suckling period, and the thereby impaired fertility of the sex.” Other possible reasons for population decline included the “decay of sanitary police, and consequent greater ravages by typhus, dysentery, cholera, plague, and, more particularly, owing to the inadequacy of inoculation, by small-pox—the mortality of children in the second year of their age being very striking.” Though pinpointing different reasons for the prevalence of infant mortality, Sheil and Curzon recognized this issue as a consequential social problem facing 19th-century Iranian society.

Although spiritual realities do not find a place in the explanatory scheme of modern science, they nevertheless play a significant role in the everyday life of people. This article discusses the interrelationship between blood and spiritual genealogies among Sufi orders in the Muslim world in general and in the Nile Delta of Egypt in particular. Contrary to theories of geographic reductionism that highlight the geographical features of the Delta, this research sheds light on the impact of cultural and religious factors, such as regional Sufi orders and related saint cults, on the inhabitation and perpetuation of the local landscape. Moreover, compared with the rich scholarship of the grand Sufi orders and saints, studies that deal with local branches of dominant Sufi orders are sparse. The relationship between Sufi beliefs and practices in local contexts and in broader national or global (Muslim) worldviews is also considered.

The duality of nomad/sedentary or nomads/settlers—in Arabic badu/hadhar—is a classic feature of the social history of the Middle East. Related to this duality is the notion of tribe and its cultural ideology, tribalism. These are all concepts familiar to the students of the region, although increasingly, they are acquiring an antiquated character due to rapid urbanization and other forms of socioeconomic change. In the Arabian Peninsula, the dichotomy is still widely used. Whereas important research has been carried out over the years on the relationship between tribalism and nationalism in the Middle East, the persistence of this particular dichotomy in the Gulf has received little analytical attention. Many studies on the region speak of “bedouin” as groups, constituencies, or social or political actors, without clarifying what lies in the term and without asking by what criteria this category is defined or how it differs from other, non-bedouin categories. The association of bedouinism/tribalism with the Arabian Peninsula, “home of all the Arab tribes,” is so deeply anchored in the imagination of both inhabitants and outsiders that to speak of Arabian bedouin in the late 1990s to early 2000s hardly raised any eyebrows. On closer observation, however, one has to acknowledge the growing lack of consonance between the original lexical meaning of the term bedouin (pastoral nomads) and its derivative meaning (“country” as opposed to “city,” or “primitive” as opposed to “civilized”) and the category to which it is purported to apply. Both meanings beg the question of why the hadhar–badu dichotomy has such a central place in Kuwaiti popular discourse—Kuwait being for all purposes a city-state with hardly any country and where “the rural areas” is a euphemism for the sprawling suburbs around the capital city. At the same time, official history tells us that Kuwait was founded by bedouin who had fled drought and famine from Central Arabia in the first half of the 18th century. Under these circumstances, what does it take to qualify as a badu or to disqualify as a hadhar in present-day Kuwaiti society? There is one more thing: far from slipping into oblivion as a result of urbanization, the hadhar–badu dichotomy has made a noticeable comeback in popular discourse over the past two decades. This article seeks to explain the present popular concern in Kuwait with a dichotomy whose analytical, if not historical, validity has often been questioned. It explores the reasons why important symbolic barriers are being raised between hadhar and badu that contribute to turning them into mutually exclusive identities. Throughout history, hadhar and badu have always been porous categories and the distinction was never clear, regardless of what the ongoing discourse may claim. Even today, ascription and self-ascription of badu and hadhar identities are contextual rather than absolute; they are also contested, more often than not. The first task at hand is to clarify the meaning of hadhar and badu in Kuwait and their use at the turn of the millennium. The article, thus, begins by pinpointing the social groups that these categories encompass and by giving a brief description of each group's stereotypes of the other. Through the description of Kuwaiti social practices in relation to marriage and the use of surnames, and the exploration of the pervasive role of the state, I hope to show that social reality in Kuwait is a lot more complex than the discourse of polarization suggests. Finally, it is argued that, to explain the revival of the dichotomy, we need to understand the ongoing hadhar criticism of the badu as an expression of anti-immigration feelings, of the kind one commonly hears in societies where the state has pledged to take in charge the cradle to grave welfare of its citizens. A parallel with anti-immigration discourse in Western European welfare-state nations is drawn up as an argument against an exclusively historical–cultural interpretation of the phenomenon under study.

Islam is a universal religion and culture. Scholars who tend to focus on Islam in specific societies may overlook connections that, over the centuries, were important in shaping various Islamic intercultural dialogs. One case in point is the role of Ethiopia in the history of Islam. Although situated next door to the cradle of Islam, Ethiopia conveniently has been perceived by many Western historians of the Arab Middle East as an African “Christian island,” and as largely irrelevant. In practice, however, the Christian-dominated empire has remained meaningful to all Muslims from Islam's inception. It has also been the home of Islamic communities that maintained constant contact with the Middle East. Indeed, one of the side aspects of the resurgence of political Islam since the 1970s is the emergence in Lebanon of the “The Association of Islamic Philanthropic Projects” (Jamעiyyat al-Mashariע al-Khayriyya al-Islamiyya), better known as “The Ethiopians,” al-Ahbash. Its leader came to Beirut from Ethiopia with a rather flexible interpretation of Islam, which revolved around political coexistence with Christians. Al-Ahbash of Lebanon expanded to become arguably the leading factor in the local Sunni community. They opened branches on all continents and spread their interpretation of Islam to many Islamic as well as non-Islamic countries. This article is an attempt to relate some of the Middle Eastern–Ethiopian Islamic history as the background to an analysis of a significant issue on today's all-Islamic agenda. It aims to present the Ahbash history, beliefs, and rivalry with the Wahhabiyya beginning in the mid-1980s. It does so by addressing conceptual, political, and theological aspects, which had been developed against the background of Ethiopia as a land of Islamic–Christian dialogue, and their collision with respective aspects developed in the Wahhabi kingdom of the Saudis. The contemporary inner-Islamic, Ahbash-Wahhabiyya conceptual rivalry turned in the 1990s into a verbal war conducted in traditional ways, as well as by means of modern channels of Internet exchanges and polemics. Their debate goes to the heart of Islam's major dilemmas as it attracts attention and draws active participation from all over the world.

In the Middle East over the past half-century, three religious processes have grown together. One, the growth of fundamentalism, has received worldwide attention both by academics and journalists. The others, the bureaucratization of religion and the state co-optation of religion, of equal duration but no less importance, have received much less attention. The bureaucratization of religion focuses on the hierarchicalization of religious specialists and state co-optation of religion focuses on their neutralization as political opponents. Few commentators link the three processes. In Jordan, fundamentalism, the bureaucratization of religion (BOR), and state co-optation of religion (SCR) have become entwined sometimes in mutually supportive and sometimes in antagonistic relations. The following case study will describe and analyze the implications of this mutual entanglement for the relations of state and civil society and for the human beings simultaneously bureaucratized and “fundamentalized.”

[Fade in from commercial, sonorous male voice advertising the evening news.]

Once again a cinci hoca, once again a sexual harassing…

Recently in our country, this exorcizing of spirits, witchcraft, fortune-telling, and mediumship, which are all products of primitive, magical thought, have been spreading like an epidemic. For years, either knowingly or unknowingly, they have been given extensive advertisement in newspapers and on television stations that seek to increase their circulation with dramatic news.

—Dr. Orhan Öztürk, Cumhuriyet, 1997

College education, whatever its form, has always carried with it a consciousness of possibilities for women.In the Company of Educated Women, B. M. Solomon Iranian college campuses are highly guarded terrains. One enters the gated and walled campuses through security guard offices. Until recently, women's attire—hijāb—and makeup would be entirely checked by one of the khwāharān at these gates. Today, Iranian women nonchalantly pass through the gates, despite their heavily applied makeup and revealing hijāb—a sign of changing social order. Student identification cards allow them through the gates, whereas nonstudent visitors, such as myself, need the prior permission of an administrator to enter. The time of my entrance is recorded, a birth certificate or an identity card is withheld, and a slip is issued to be signed by the hosting administrator. I am instructed to “fix my hijāb” and then am allowed to enter the campus.

[It was a] mistaken belief that if 10,000 did so it would be recognized as an official religion. —A British statistical spokesman on the more than 390,000 people who listed their religion as “Jedi” on 2001 census forms

The fiction of the census is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one—and only one—extremely clear place. No fractions.

—Benedict Anderson

With socioeconomic liberalization and development, especially since 1980, Turkey has witnessed rapid changes in consumption patterns and fashion styles. Often one fad rapidly follows another, creatively combining symbols of the Ottoman era, foreign influences, and regional traditions. Kandiyoti argues that “[t]here is little doubt that class cultures in Turkey are increasingly being shaped and redefined through the medium of consumption.” Thus, consumption has emerged recently as a central concern and analytical tool in historical, anthropological, and sociological works on Ottoman and Turkish society. One trend focuses on the secular high-income class' “globalized” consumption patterns and lifestyle, especially as expressed through shopping patterns and the commoditization of symbols of Turkish secularism. Another, more prevalent, trend is more concerned with the upwardly mobile Islamists' attempt at articulating their newly gained economic status through consumption. A third directs attention to the history of consumption and “the everyday” to counter a previous emphasis on production and state politics in the Ottoman Empire.

In 1989, Jordan suspended marshal law, lifted media restrictions, expanded freedoms of association, and reintroduced parliamentary elections. Although these steps ushered in a dramatic, albeit limited, political opening, by 1997, many of these measures had been reversed. Indeed, today throughout most of the Middle East, the incipient democratization processes of the 1990s are labeled as “stalled” at best. However, as Jillian Schwedler states, these structural openings and closings do not provide the whole story of these Throughout the region, Islamists, liberals, leftists, and conservatives frequently sit together in opposition blocs and coordinate activities against the state—activities on which they did not cooperate a decade earlier—while remaining bitter rivals in other areas. The Higher Committee for the Coordination of National Opposition Parties (HCCNOP) in Jordan, founded in the mid-1990s in response to normalization efforts by Jordan with Israel, is one such example. A committee of thirteen opposition parties, it includes the Communist and Baءthist parties and the Muslim Brotherhood's Islamic Action Front (IAF). The IAF is very proud of its participation in the HCCNOP and claims that it is a democratic model for the Arab world. It points to the fact that it coordinates deals and “shakes hands” with secularists as evidence of the Party's moderation. The IAF's participation in the HCCNOP raises a variety of questions regarding the relationship between cooperation and democratization. What is the significance of cross-ideological cooperation for political liberalization and democratization? What are the conditions and mechanisms of cooperation? Finally, to what extent do Islamists moderate as a result of cooperation?

For seven dramatic days in late November 1979, bloody street violence between state security forces and thousands of frustrated Shiites rocked the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Sparked by the Saudi regime's brutal repression of those peacefully celebrating Ashura—the annual mourning of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein—the fury resulted in an unknown number of dead and wounded. Among the destruction, demonstrators burned the British bank in Qatif as well as the offices of the Saudia National Airline. They destroyed state-owned vehicles, attacked police, raided the coast guard office in the village of al-Awamiyya, seized weapons from soldiers, and even occupied the old city in downtown Qatif, from which they held off the Saudi military for days. One report relates that a group even burned a toy store owned by a government official. Women as well as men marched in anger. The security forces, which included 20,000 Saudi National Guard, cordoned off the major roadways, particularly those in Qatif, Sayhat, and Safwa to localize the protest, control the flow of information, as well as to prevent nearby oil facilities from being destroyed. Reports swirled that soldiers fired on virtually any public gathering of people, including at least one funeral procession in Safwa, forcing the mourners to flee and abandon the corpse in the street. State and hospital officials refused to release other bodies from the morgue for burial until the uproar quieted, leveraging the dead as blackmail. The National Guard relied on the heavy firepower of helicopter gun ships for crowd control, turning the area into a deadly conflict zone characterized by terror, hostility, and fear.

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said considers the topos of the voyage North as one of the motifs in the “culture of resistance.” Traveling North is seen in this respect as a reversal of imperial and colonial history. When, for instance, Mustafa Saء ed in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North goes to England, his objective is to conquer—so he thinks—with his “penis” the country of his colonizer. The cultural encounter between Britain and the Arab–African nation of Sudan involves for Saءed a configuration of power in which the West is imagined as a woman to be raped in the same way colonial armies raped the virgin territories of the Orient and Africa.

The fact that fifteen of the nineteen terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 were Saudi citizens inevitably raised serious questions about the social conditions that have produced such violent personalities capable of the mass taking of innocent lives and devastating an entire city, if not a nation. Answers were quick to come by, as the U.S. media pointed to the Saudi culture. Charges were made that the youth were brainwashed by the most extremist school in Islam, namely, Wahhabism. The Saudi educational institutions were also blamed for promoting anti-Semitism, anti-Western attitudes, and intolerance of other religions. Saudi society was also condemned for having a corrupt and backward political system. Naturally, in this land of intolerance and authoritarianism, resorting to violence by its inhabitants became a foregone conclusion.

This article discusses a critical factor that has influenced Israel's politics, society, economy, and public discourse since this state's establishment in 1948, and particularly after the 1967 war: a highly informal but at the same time very potent “Security Network.” This Network has been critically involved in the political, social, economic, and cultural spheres, and its impact is felt in major and lesser issues. It is made up of actors who (a) are connected by informal, nonhierarchical ties; (b) share common values and perceptions regarding Israel's security and the ways to promote it; (c) have identical or similar individual and collective interests; and (d) are capable of joining hands to influence policymaking on different levels and in various spheres of the country's public life.

This study focuses on the nature of the Lebanese encounter with modernity in Lebanese fiction over the past forty years or so, a time of great ideological, political, and cultural upheavals. The first part traces the effect of modernity on works by Lebanese writers since the 1950s, a period of “revolutionary political and social change,” and of learning and cultural and social ferment. The second part of the study focuses on Rashid al-Daif's novel עAzizi al-Sayyed Kawabata. My choice of this particular novel is related to the fact that it is a representative work that underlines the impact of modernity on Lebanese individuals and society during and in the wake of the civil war. The novel raises questions about rationality, ideology, the individual self, and the relevance of these Western constructs to the local situation in Lebanon. The structure of the novel itself and the use of the epistolary and autobiographical modes of writing underscore the novel's obsession with modernity. Within this context, one could say that al-Daif's novel can be viewed as a complex work of fiction that encompasses different forms of modernity, the tensions between these modernities, and between modernity and authenticity.

Despite the attention that scholars have lavished on Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima, the historiographical significance of that remarkable work is still not well understood. Scholars continue to discuss the Muqaddima largely within the context of Islamic historiography, even though most of them regard it as an anomaly that differs fundamentally from the works of other Muslim historians. In certain respects, the Muqaddima belongs to an Islamic historical tradition, that of al-Tabari and al-Masעudi. Yet, its dominant intellectual lineage is the rationalist thought that stretches from the Peripatetic philosophers, and especially from Aristotle (384–322 BCE), through such Greco–Islamic thinkers as al-Farabi (870–950 CE), Ibn Sina (980–1037 CE), and Ibn Rushd (1126–1198 CE) onward to European philosophical historians and sociologists of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It is precisely because Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406 CE) used the logical apparatus and materialist assumptions of this rationalist tradition as the conceptual basis for his new historical science that he can be characterized as the last Greek historian. He can be considered the first Annaliste historian because the same Greek philosophical heritage influenced both the sociologist Émile Durkheim, who wrote his Latin dissertation on Montesquieu (1689–1755 CE), and also Durkheim's student, Marc Bloch, the cofounder of the Annales School. This heritage is also visible in an attenuated form in Fernand Braudel's distinction between the longue durée and the history of events. Indeed, Ibn Khaldun developed what modern scholars would identify as a structuralist methodology, using classical logic to identify enduring socioeconomic realities underlying cultural phenomena and ephemeral events, what he describes as the “general conditions of regions, races and periods that constitute the historian's foundation.”

Little research has been done on the intellectual life of the Arab-Islamic world between the 15th and 19th centuries. This scholarly neglect almost certainly reflects the widespread assumption that intellectual life in the Arab-Islamic world entered a long period of stagnation or “sclerosis” after the 13th or 14th century. This state of affairs is often believed to have lasted until the 19th century, when European military and economic expansion awakened the Arab-Islamic world from its dogmatic slumber, and inaugurated a “reawakening” or “renaissance” (nahḍa). An influential statement of this view of intellectual life in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire before the 19th century is to be found in Gibb and Bowen's Islamic Society and the West. Although they noted that “the barrenness of the period has been greatly exaggerated,” they still stated that Arabic scholarly culture had degenerated, on the whole, into a rote, unquestioning acquisition of a narrow and religiously dominated field of knowledge. No “quickening breath had blown” on Arab-Islamic scholarship for centuries. Isolated even from Persian and Turkish influences, it was reduced to “living on its own past.”

In his landmark study of historiography in the Islamic world, Franz Rosenthal identified the biographical dictionary associated with a particular locality and prefaced by a topographical introduction as a characteristic form of “theological local historiography.” What Rosenthal described as the “theological” nature of these dictionaries relates to their origins in hadith scholarship, a field of religious studies devoted to preserving an accurate record of the sayings and actions of the Prophet and his Companions passed down orally through an unbroken and authentic chain of trustworthy transmitters. Thus, the original motivation for composing such works, the earliest extant example of which dates to the 9th century, was to catalogue hadith scholars who had lived in a city to facilitate the assessment of their plausibility as transmitters of particular traditions. Furthermore, as expressions of local pride, these dictionaries allowed Muslims to celebrate the contribution made in their town to the sustenance of the most authoritative body of knowledge, after the Quran, in Islam. Although by the 10th century these works began to include notables who embodied a city's political, literary, and economic claims to fame, the defining feature of the majority of the biographical entries remained the individual's engagement with the religious sciences, particularly hadith studies.