European Orientalism of the 19th and 20th centuries has been the subject of a heated and vigorous debate ever since the publication of Edward Said's monograph. By contrast, the study of the early stages of academic and cultural Orientalism has been neglected. For the beginnings of Oriental studies in Europe one still largely relies on institutional histories and archival research, or even V. V. Barthold's 80-year-old study. The birth of academic Orientalism in the 17th century was occasioned by three major factors: a renewed interest in Islam, major advances in travel and exploration, and the emergence of modern approaches to science and education. Among important background developments were the decline of the perceived Arab threat followed by the rise of a very real Ottoman Turkish one, the geographical shift in hostilities from the European West to the East, and the realignment of European alliances and attitudes in the wake of the Protestant Reformation.

The 1876 constitution and its reinstitution in 1908 have been acknowledged as landmarks in the historiography of the late Ottoman Empire. The promulgation of a constitution signified a critical political transformation despite the brevity of the First Constitutional Period (1876–78). During the next three decades of Sultan Abdülhamid's autocratic rule, the ultimately successful struggle to restore the constitution against the Sultan's relentless resistance became central to the political life of the empire. In 1908, the Young Turk Revolution inaugurated a decade of social and political change, the Second Constitutional Period.

“Conquerors, my son, consider as true history only what they themselves have fabricated.” Thus remarked the old Arab headmaster to young Saeed on his return to Haifa in the summer of 1948 in Emile Habiby's tragicomic novel The Secret Life of Saʿid, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist. The headmaster spoke about the Israelis more in sorrow than in anger: “It is true they did demolish those villages … and did evict their inhabitants. But, my son, they are far more merciful than the conquerors our forefathers had years before”.

In writing the history of the Middle East there is one aspect that deserves special attention: the influence of the choice of source material on the writer's point of view. Does the choice of different types of sources—in our case Western as opposed to local sources—really dictate an altogether different view of the matter under discussion? Are all sources of equal value, or should we accord each of them a different place on the scale? In this article an attempt will be made to address this question through an examination of one particular topic—the history of women in 17th-century Jerusalem.

An outbreak of fighting in May 1994 put Yemen in the world's headlines when, from one point of view, the unity of Yemen proclaimed in May four years earlier was confirmed by force. One topic which straddles that period has been Islah, an Islamist party of unusual form. The present article explores the rhetorical axes that defined Islah. Briefly put, a supposedly “fundamentalist,” even “radical,” party, was in fact more a party of the establishment center. Its public identity, however, depends on terms and arguments that are centered elsewhere than Yemen, and they misrepresent, to many Yemenis as to others, what is happening. The problem is not resolved by such standard academic moves as avoiding “stereotypes” or sticking to “local terms.” The terms at issue are widely shared among Yemenis and foreigners alike.

Medieval Islamic architecture presents the scholar with a fascinating set of histo-riographical problems. Some are methodological; others are related to the nature of the sources, and they are shared by various other branches of research in medieval history such as urban history, topography, and the history of arts and crafts whose inquiries depend on the same sources. Still others are peculiar to the specific domain of architectural history. These last are the most challenging, for they require particular strategies that take into account the disparities in our knowledge of the two basic components needed to reconstruct the history of any architectural object: the physical remains and the contemporary documents related to them. There are three possible kinds of disparity: in the best cases, buildings that are still standing and in fairly good shape can be studied in light of relevant contemporary documents. In more difficult cases, the structures still exist, but supportive documents, written or otherwise, do not. Most difficult of all is when we have documents describing, or referring to, a structure or a group of structures for which we have no visible trace.

History is enamored of revolutions. This essay takes as its subject a revolution—the Young Turk Revolution of 1908—which overthrew one of the most enduring autocracies of early modern times. It concerns itself, however, with revolution of a specific kind, cartoon revolution: where images could take precedence over words; where the past, present, and future were created and imagined; where the celebration of new freedoms brought citizens into contact with menaces in the streets.

When the Arab world's authoritarian-populist/;etatist regimes first emerged, they were perceived by Marxist and modernization theorists alike as potentially forging the strong states needed by late developers to pursue national development. Three decades later, the conventional wisdom sees these states as obstacles to development and statism is in retreat. Even in Syria, where the Baʿth institutionalized statist ideology more effectively than elsewhere, economic liberalization has proved inescapable.

In recent Middle Eastern history, the experience of political exile has become a prevalent theme, as large numbers of Palestinians, Kurds, Iranians, and Afghans, among others, have sought refuge in various countries. Although the earlier numbers would pale in comparison with the present size of the Middle Eastern diaspora scattered around the globe, it was in the 19th century that the first noticeable groups of exiles from the Middle East began taking sanctuary in European countries, among other locations. Perhaps the best known of these exile communities were the Young Ottomans in France in the late 19th century.

A number of Arab countries have been exposed to structural adjustment programs. Under the guidance of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, these programs are aimed at making various kinds of Arab socialist and mixed-economy regimes more “market-friendly,” a policy that started in the 1950s and 1960s in countries like Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, and Egypt. Considering the mounting social tension that results from continuing population growth, urban agglomeration, and unemployment, it would be naive to expect—with Fukuyama—an “end of history” as most countries try to adopt market regimes and to strengthen civil society and parliamentary democracy. As Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) well knew, economic and social change is a never-ending process. In the search for viable and sustainable strategies it may be stimulating to consider the insights of this great scholar of the Arab world who wrote 600 years ago.

IBN KHALDUN'S SOCIAL SYSTEMS THEORY

Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis into an influential clan of South Arabian origin with substantial influence in Islamic Spain and, after the fall of Seville in 1248, in north-western Africa. He was exposed to the turmoils of his time. He held his first position in 1352 at the court at Tunis at the age of 20 and then went on to high political, administrative, diplomatic, and judicial posts in the service of various rulers in the Maghrib, Spain, and Egypt.

The revolutionary “spring of freedom” did not last long in the Iranian universities. The revolutionary movement had turned the universities into centers of political activity, where crowds gathered and rival political groups clashed. Control over the Tehran University soccer field for mass rallies became a sign of a political organization's power. On 11 February 1979, the first tank liberated from the Shah's army was driven to the campus of Tehran University; the Organization of the People's Mujahedin set up its headquarters in the Faculty of Sciences, and the Organization of People's Fadaʾian Guerrillas in the Faculty of Engineering. Between them, the university mosque became the headquarters for an “Imam's committee,” where fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds stored weapons captured from the Shah's artillery. When the universities reopened shortly after the February insurrection, similar divides were made within academic buildings of all universities. Various groups partitioned public areas, claimed various rooms, and even parceled out the walls for poster space. Life was as chaotic in the universities as it was outside. However, the difference was that while the Islamic Republic was gaining political hegemony in Iranian society, it was losing the ideological battle in the universities, where radical groups were recruiting and training student activists, many of whom were political organizers in factories, farms, and neighborhoods. The students and faculty who supported the Islamic regime constituted only a small minority.

With the Islamist movement gaining momentum and recruits throughout the Near and Middle East and North Africa, it is vital that scholars and practitioners make an attempt to understand the objectives and strategies expressed by the groups within this movement. It is also imperative that we acknowledge that the Islamic resurgence is not a monolithic phenomenon, but is characterized by factions and voices that diverge on their approach to major themes such as the nature of society, the preferred relationship between Islamist activists and the political system, methodology for alleviating socioeconomic frustrations and spiritual laxity, and the temporal framework within which Islamist goals are to be achieved. The more “radical” or militant of these groups insist upon revolutionary change that is to be imposed on the masses and political system, whereas the more moderate groups, epitomized by the new Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, call for gradual change that is to be undertaken from within the political system and with the enlistment of the Muslim masses.

For over 350 years, Egypt was the largest province of the Ottoman Empire, which had captured it from the Mamluk sultanate in 1517. It is well known that the Ottomans retained key Mamluk usages, above all in subprovincial administration, and that a number of the defeated Mamluks who were willing to cooperate with the new regime were allowed to join the Ottoman administration. In consequence, a number of practices of the Mamluk sultanate survived the Ottoman conquest. Critical administrative offices such as those of pilgrimage commander (amīr al-ḥajj), treasurer (daftardār), and deliverer of the annual tribute to Istanbul (khaznadār) were analogous to offices of the Mamluk sultanate, and the grandees whom the Ottomans installed in these offices were analogous to the Mamluk amirs of the sultanate. Above all, the practice of recruiting boys and young men from the Caucasus as military slaves, or mamluks, and training them as soldiers in households geared to that purpose appears not only to have survived but to have flourished in Ottoman Egypt. By the time of Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798, in fact, the province's military elite was dominated by Caucasian, and above all Georgian, mamluks. In the face of such apparent similarities with the Mamluk sultanate, it is tempting to define the military society of Ottoman Egypt as a continuation or revival of the sultanate.

Know from where you come and where you are going. (Akavya Ben-Mahalalel, Avot, 3)

It has been argued that the difference between liberal democracies and theocratic, communist, or fascist states is not that liberal states promote different ideals of the good, but that they promote none. Whereas illiberal states regard it as a primary function of the state to prescribe the moral character of society, liberal states shun such attempts and allow freedom to citizens to develop their own conceptions. Liberals hold that governments cannot use as their justification for any action the fact that one person's plan of life is more or less worthy than that of another. Since many people believe in more than one objective “correct” set of values, every person should enjoy the freedom to arrive at her own conception of the good. By “conception of the good” is meant a more or less determinate scheme of ends that the doer aspires to carry out for their own sake as well as of attachments to other individuals and loyalties to various groups and associations. It involves a mixture of moral, philosophical, ideological, and religious notions, together with personal values that contain some picture of a worthy life.

On 30 June 1989, a military coup overthrew the democratically elected government of al-Sadiq al-Mahdi in Sudan and replaced it with a fundamentalist Muslim dictatorship headed by Colonel ʿUmar Hasan al-Bashir and adhering to the radical Islamic ideology of the National Islamic Front (NIF), under the leadership of Dr. Hasan al-Turabi. Since June 1881 when Muhammad Ahmad ibn ʿAbdallah declared that he was the expected mahdī, the religious-political scene of Sudan had been largely dominated by Mahdists and Khatmiyya adherents. Even under colonial rule, in the years 1899–1955, Mahdism continued to flourish despite the fact that the British rulers treated it with suspicion and preferred Sayyid ʿAli al-Mirghani, leader of the more docile Khatmiyya Sufi order. The defeat of the Mahdist Umma Party in the first general elections in 1953, by a coalition of secularists and Khatmiyya supporters was only a temporary setback. After Sudan became independent, in 1956, Mahdist supremacy was challenged both by the Khatmiyya and other groups, but its mass support among the Ansar, a political Islamic movement, enabled them to gain control, except during brief periods when so-called secularists governed independent Sudan. This happened in 1953–56 when the Khatmiyya joined forces with the intelligentsia, and again between October 1964 and March 1965 when the country was governed by a secular, transitional, nonelected government that was ousted from power as soon as the sects regained control. Secularism also thrived briefly under the military dictatorship of Jaʿfar al-Numayri between 1969 and 1977.

From the day in April 1946 when the last French soldiers left and Syrians were finally able to run their own affairs, their policies toward other Arabs have differed significantly, although decreasingly over the years, from the policies pursued by Egyptians. Within their country, Syrian legislators used to privilege Arab over non-Arab foreigners in various respects, including the investment of capital as well as the acquisition of citizenship and political rights, while fewer, if any, advantages of this sort were granted in Egypt Such differences in the treatment of noncitizen Arabs at home have been paralleled by different policies toward other Arab states. Unity schemes, a prominent feature in inter-Arab relations generally, are one key area where approaches diverged quantitatively as well as qualitatively and where favorable attitudes in Syria often contrasted with considerable reluctance on the Egyptian side.

During the past thirty years, the study of the family in European history has developed with a strong comparative emphasis. In contrast, the study of the family in Middle East history has hardly begun, even though the family is assumed to have had a major role in “the structuring of economic, political, and social relations,” as Judith Tucker has noted. This article takes up the theme of the family in the economic, political, and social context of 19th-century rural Egypt. Its purpose is, first of all, to explicate the prevailing joint household formation system in relation to the system of landholding, drawing upon fatwas and supporting evidence. Second, it argues that rural notable families in particular had a tendency to form large joint households and that this was related to the reproduction and enhancement of their economic and political status. Specifically, the maintenance of a joint household appears to have been a way of avoiding the fragmentation of land through inheritance. After the middle of the 19th century, when it appeared that the coherence and durability of the joint family household were threatened, the notables sought to strengthen it through legislation. Their involvement in the law reform process contradicts the progressive, linear model of social and legal change that is often applied in 19th-century Egyptian history.